Called Upon by the Professor

  

I was paying bills when Professor H.,

dressed in his salt-and-pepper tweeds, appeared

and clucked, too long a victim of catarrh

and clerical miscues. The wrong iota,

sense goes awry, the statement gets misfiled.

He raised a saturnine brow. “O loveliest

of trees,” he said and decrescendoed. No

spot of ink stained where he’d stood, no scent

of laurel filled the august empty air.

I turned myself to text and death, his two

permanent acquisitions. In the heat

the cherry blossoms fluttered, though no breeze

rattled my papers. Unhappiness, he said,

is best unspoken. Sweet are the uses of

pomposity. Pains and chains and silence.

The Sight of Snow

  

The fat squirrels have surrendered.

Nuts, I say: they had no other course.

The chickadees complain until they’re hoarse.

I feel for them as though they had been rendered,

Or would if I were nature’s friend;

But I’ve made other, safer plans for fall.

I shall not be at home when ill winds call.

Spring is the goal here; winter is the end.

The trees are sure they will awake.

The frozen grass has done it all before.

Clematis clings to hopes there will be more.

But they're all botany. There's no mistake.

No cyclic show for me; but, oh,

I think of warmth and someone whom I knew,

Someone who spoke in cadences, as you

Burst with excitement at the sight of snow.

The Arc of History

  

Phoebus in his coat and tie

Caught the barista’s wandering eye,

And all was won, and love was done,

And love produced an errant son.

And all the world was hot and dry.

A shepherd in a foundered field

Found him a maid and made her yield.

A golden age, by golden rule,

Began its rain, and it was cool,

Its prior mystery concealed.

They called it fable, called it lore,

The days of rain, the age of ore.

And all of those who came behind

Said it been by love designed,

And they were what had been in store.

The Desuetude of Mr James

Wry Mr James commits enomities

Of style with style. This late in life he knows

Embonpoint is a structural device,

The close that makes the man--his buttons need

Jumbo's dexterity to finish off.

He calls his flowers flowers: that's enough

For floribundant similarity;

But caution comes in shades, like purple light

Climbing a red-brick garden wall at dusk;

And he sees every tint, Adamic man

Mounting a stair which knows no period,

Only a pause, a lamp lit at each landing.

The Midnight Train

 

A lantern on a lanyard on the last

Train out of town to Anywhere at All,

Which happens to be east of Little Jugs,

Gives more illumination than you’d think.

A carrot and a stick and several shoes

Piled on the platform where the caboose becomes

Thin air; and you, you weren’t expecting that.

The elegance of emptiness does not

Include a carrot or a pair of heels,

But Anywhere at All will be amused.

A milliner’s, a pool hall, and a new

Patisserie, in case the gentry come.

A Church of Holy Holiness, a cow

Walking the streets, and then, of course, a bank.

Life can be fruitful, Anywhere at All

Instructs its children, who are dreaming of

A better world, offered in Somewhere Else,

To those catching the midnight train, which leaves

Tomorrow afternoon at 6:15.

Meet the Beetles

 

When I was young, there was abundant time,

The local trees insatiable, the bugs

Bigger than classmates. I remember names

Were things, as permanent as furniture.

Now I am not. Sequoias come and go,

And monuments are jittery. I see

What I have seen. I tell a bug, I knew

Your family. I made a Science Fair.

He is not much impressed, and he is dead

Or playing dead. And April's grass is green.

The Pisan Pantos

  

The rain distorts my make-up, blue
The color of my hair and eyes.
(My nose is red, my heart is green.)
A scenist has prepared the skies
Ingeniously. I’ve come into
My own here--Look! A human bean,

A roly-poly in a cage,
The Widow Twankey on her walk,
Wishing the weeds would grow so high,
I could ascend my private stalk
And put all heathen in a rage.
This dragonfly my private eye:

He boos and hisses, laughs and cheers
As I perform the buck-and-wing,
Magic to find the state a spine,
Alchemy in chansons I sing.
I hope the ingenue appears
To change my homemade ink to wine,

To animate imagined books,
A smell of candy from the crowd.
This fence is higher than my art.
The roly-poly laughs so loud,
Guards come a-runnng, Demos looks,
And here is where my poems start.

The Daisies Mown

  

from These Denver Odes

The daisies mown will blow again.
The moon pines not, nor is dismayed,
rejuvenating without pain;
once man into his grave is laid,

he is no more a man. His dust
may someday form some form instead.
It won't be he. The new moon must
return; but man, when dead, is dead.

So you, figured like Helen, bright
of eye, Celinda, will not see
how good you look, made up for night,
to be illumed like Semele.

The Expatriate

 

For extra credit he remembered much

That wasn’t worth remembering, forgot
The kinship he had promised to except
From discharge, and demurred at growing up.
It made him charming, like a short-term loan,
Lots of interest there, so he changed his name
To Amaryllis-in-the-Shade and wept,
Or said he did, at auld acquaintances.
The Times that try men’s souls, he did not read,
Other than archived, knew that butterflies
Were thinner on the ground than yesteryear,
But worms more frequent. Mr Lowly Worm,
There was a name for next week, if he made
Next week as Amaryllis-in-the-Shade.

Populist Politics

  

This is the country where a commandant

Discovered persiflage and flavored it,

Enlisted Cherokees for crowd control,

Good local color, founded an orphanage,

And called it Huxley on the Hill of Beans.

A modernizer, they say now, who stored

The name of every voter in a barn

Shaped like the Trianon, then burned it down

To prove he was sincere. From the insurance

He bought a trotter and a Brahma bull

With erysipelas and crooked horns.

They wouldn't get it on. He claimed a spread

Deeper in Texas than he ever went,

Who spent his twilight out on old Cape Cod,

A victim of the Zeitgeist and detente,

An advocate for antinomians.

I Love It When She Talked Like That

  

I threw the golden apples all at once.

I might have hit her once or twice, but mostly

They landed where I meant them to. She stopped

And picked one up, glistening like the sun

On cutlery.  The apple looked good, too.

You think I’m Eve, she said, and passionfruit

A golden bauble wrapped around a core

Of propagation and distraction? Run,

You fleet-foot son of Adam. I got far

Enough to watch her curve around the curve

The highway made, the fruit of all my labor,

Some knowledge maybe—Good, Better, and Gone.

A Little Delivered

  

Nothing more gorgeous than her gardening,

Which needs no barge or poop, just steer manure

And leafmeal crumble. Mulch is promised us,

Not always promptly. What we grow takes time,

Then flowers in the night. Conservators

Have failed their catalogues; Linneans weep,

Knowing somehow they've given it no name.

Ignis fatuus, some pink scholar said,

But he cared more about the Amazon,

One-breasted warbler, clear cut first, then mute.

She works the soil, not knowing if the fruits

Will see her, call her by her name, or care.

Wolves & Avalanches

 After the wolves and avalanche subsided,

After some man was found encased in ice,

A quill clasped in his hand, a bowler hat,

Crown up, between his legs, there wasn’t much

To do but lay new shingles on the roof.

The goats were glad the wolves were gone, the dogs

Looked sheepish, and the bowler hat was blessed

By Father Tom, the light of rectitude.

We thought, though, that the corpse might be a poet,

One speechless as a Popsicle, and stiff

As Abelard’s one poem would have been,

An Orpheus of footless harmonies.

He wasn’t, it seems. The only one we had,

One Paul Verlaine, was eaten by a bear.

Not even the local Rambo made it good

By blood vengeance, monosyllabic death,

Or dada verse aboard a drunken sleigh.

As for the wolves, perhaps they have moved on—

No verse, no point, so late their country seat.

Good Morning, Betws-y-Coed

  

Here is the world on fire,
Sun or flames at morning,
Roofs ignited dawning,
Cries in bedrooms, smoke
At short-order breakfast windows.
Pity the children, widows,
The crippled aunts with one hand free,
And the anxious dogs barking, Liar! Liar!
And the diving ducks breaking the lake.
All the new men aflame,
Nothing the sun will see
Set them aboil and aburn.
Look, from laburnum and briar
Smoke is getting away,
And the sun clears the jacketed hills,
And the wild aunts concluding their tea
Pray for rain and cull their banished yards.

The railway is escaping.
The broken chapel rooftop, sleeping
Doves enough for level spirits,
Shines as good as gold.
Water is on the move.
The aunts are dressing, according to their merits,
And the roadway coils into the wood,
At least as good as gold and old
Enough for kestrels born to love
A tamed town, a tired, to remove
The sun with drapes and scrub the singing floor.
You hear, the slam of every door,
And the aunts march, visiting the cold.

The Complete Henriad

 This appeared in Angle.

Henry has disappeared, a man who mowed,

Unleaved the gutters, recovered falling trim,

Unturned no stone, and left no hole behind.

Everything takes his place, whose clothes were grit

And grass, and there is sun enough for all.

Hence scant despair.  The Henriad is made

Curtal; the solo myth of sorts is saved

And spent on robins, maybe, and the brown

Spinners who walked out of his new-trimmed bush,

Patient and outraged, made to start again.

The past has passed.  They spin a yarn so fine,

Henry may be inside, in visible

Distress.  He's moved.  Or Henry is just gone.

I Thought of Mr Pickwick

  

Just then the phone rang. It was Tiny Tim,

Tiptoeing through the snowdrops for a goose

The size of Uncle Scrooge. He had a heart

As big as individual distress

In every house and hovel. He had news

Of trials and sponging houses, and his dad

Had totted up the reckoning at last.

I thought of Mr Pickwick, who redeemed

A condominium in Venice Beach,

Where all the sunny blondes were wearing smiles

For Michaelmas. He beamed benignantly.

Remember Mr Fezziwig? he asked.

His claret was to die for, and he sent

Jacktars around the globe and back again.

He died in chains and stalks the streets at night.

Or A Tufted Titmouse

  

Let's hear it for the frenzied fritillaries.

They flit, yes, I am sure they do, but look—

Their wings make boys in Paraguay run backwards

And girls at St Lestrade grow maidenheads.

Have you no hope of following? Well, no,

Not with that punim, marked with freckled dust

Of sweet and sweaty apocalypse; but I

Shall soon arrive, accomplishment no go

And expectation up for sale, reduced

To realistic, pure disapparation.

So grab my hand, descend to Pluto's cave,

Where slopes are slick and trees have been conjoined

And mica and basalt are felonies.

There we shall break our fast. We'll beg to stay

Trunked and taut and parallel forever.

A Southern California Houseguest

  

A part of the appalling grounds was laid

With pergolas, gazebos, and a brick

Pagoda. He saw statuary, thick

With aureolas, wee-wees, and flamingos.

He saw a plaster herd of rampant dingoes,

A Virgin Mary, and a gold-dust maid,

Who turned out to be real. At least she spoke.

"'The dingoes ate my baby," you were thinking,.

And "Is she live or astral? She's not blinking.'

I know you were." All true, he had to say.

"Oh, and are your breasts real, by the way?'"

That, too. Too true. Her pleasaunce made him choke.

The hurt, which he had put aside, as lent

And oft repaid, was rhythmic as a psalm.

All he had saved, he thought it had been spent.

And there she stood, beneath a plastic palm.

Congress Is Happier Than Your Hand

 

1.

It isn’t death, whatever princes say,
Not when I dreamed of sandwiches, and kites
Fell on us all, like panicked meteors,
Leaving us naked at the first alarm.
These sheets don’t wind. These covers aren’t for keeps.

2.
Conceive of dirt as history, says Prince.
If you don’t dust, you’re worth a Ph.D.
In Native Studies: who you were Way Back,
Who was the Who before you were, and who
Taught grease stains how to kiss my lady’s hand.
It isn’t Alexander in a bung,
Not necessarily, but someone’s some
Distance away now, never regretful, made
A building block, like calcium or beets.
Don’t sweep: it might be love. It might be sense
Of history in Bag Type H, sucked up.

3.
We are not quite immune. This ham was once
A pig among his peers, a Gadarene,
Alliteration challenged, equaller;
And now a sandwich of most perfect gist,
Chap-fallen, cheesy. We shall all be toast.
If better not to be done, then pourquoi
Are pillows only broad enough for heads
Solus and undistinguished in the dark,
Though full of these dramatic congresses
With faces blurred? You know it isn’t death.

Devolvus Still

 

Devolvus, underground, preserves,

By lying still, his fraying nerves.
Yet in the sun, his brother walks
Above, and steels himself with talks
And chatter, as if they were kids
And wonted. And no mom forbids
One’s shoes inside or singing loud
Or hamming it up to please the crowd
Of featured hangers-on. If he
Should wish to lie there quietly,
Devolvus doesn’t say or swear,
Since he has time to spill and share,
By wit, by verve, by joie-de-not.
What was that punchline? All forgot.