Catching the Ferry

 

Last night the Truth Ferry

Put in as I slept

And left a verse in bed

And took the dime I'd left.

It wasn't printed neatly

And neither fine nor fair.

I read it only when

No one else could hear.

This is the way the worm—

I wonder how it ends.

Bangs and pine and dirt

And pale segmented friends,

Perhaps. I am afraid

I can't write in my sleep.

I cannot hear the sound

Of what is taking shape

In dark rooms growing darker,

Quiet, humid, dumb.

To every boy and girl

At night a truth will come.

Changeling

    This appeared in Staple. 

If it isn't the roof, the plumbing's goes,

Or the showerhead, or the parakeet. Like that.

Sometimes the years of dry, furnace-forced air

will shrink the floorboards. What was glossy, grays.

Sometimes the one you turn to isn't there

in the bed; or perhaps she is, but gone

to ghost, and you can never be alone

more than you are right then, which is enough, thanks.

They told you nothing stays, claimed, as you found,

that change is what there is. But this is less.

Everything leaves, but not entirely:

the bird's cry from the elm tree high above

the dust of rooftrees laid down many moons

rouses the form whom you still try to hold.

All Tales Come True

 

 Is this one of those historical moments—

The Siege of Stalingrad or Johnny Van-

Der Meer's 2nd?  Decades hence, a hundred,

Two thousand years, will people say, Her linen

Shift fit like May between the spring and summer?

No one can tell what Helen did in bed

To make her Paris spring.  The men who lay us

End to end in expensive cardboard jars

Know squat.  They can't wait to be shoveled ash.

You pivot on the spike heels Dr Jekyll

Says women shouldn't wear—poor torque-sprung backs.

Your hair fans a like a runway breeze was blowing.

The men besieged behind their shattered walls

Drop their boiled leather, wave their horseplume hats, 

And scatter condoms from those famous heights.

Imperial Lives, Late

 

I dream of people I don’t like. Not when

I knew them, not now. Unforgiving, like

An emperor, pensioning off delators.

My dreams delate. They say, I am the one.

A pot of lampreys and a plot of ground

For anyone who didn’t see my face

Remembering. That girl. That test. That time

Nothing went right, and I was told a tale.

A ribbon and a farmhouse. A fast horse.

A purple shirt, imperial, for you,

If you don’t know me and you never did.

GAA

 

Never since that one night have I attended

A party as a mushroom—not that I'm

Too proud to be a fungus, though the absence

Of chlorophyll and the proud necessity

Of feeding on, what shall we say? defunct

Organic matters doesn't suggest ballrooms.

It's more that we are only flora once,

Some roses, spinach some, we soon outgrow

Our vegetable natures. Aged between

An ugly plant and lesser carnivore,

I fared better than most. And when I saw

The lamp and found my motor skills, I yet,

In the way of a vermiform appendix,

Concealed a mushroom nature. Though by night

They come and go, by day, if you can pick

The right one, they afford a minor garnish.

Permafrost

A foot of snow descended on the house,

All fall at once and we pretended joy

At such a purty fluffiness, and broke

Our backs and shovel blades, and prayed that spring,

Spring would arrive, but not because of us,

The snow grows grass and lubricates the bulbs

Stripped from their husks it promised and delivered.

Summer, which disbelieves in snow, will swear

Sweat is the moisture agriculture named,

But summer lies, and winter lasts: within

The master bedroom wall a cache of snow

Waits and concedes no melting, never melts.

Anecdote

 

So Auden married Erika, der Mann's
Daughter, because that's what a bugger does,
Which doesn't seem to have disturbed the plans
Of anyone, except the beast that was.

Nice story. Famous names. The gentile touch
Of charity, and no Mann shared his beds.
Just don't believe that we believe too much
Of what such great men portage in their heads

From Alpha to Omega. There were those
Abandoned, which was not the fault of verse;
A little more, perhaps, a debt that prose
Has not repaid; but when the starving curse,

They do not mention villanelles or myth
Or those who aimed intentions, one by one,
At celebrated, artificial kith
And never felt contrition from a son.

Happy Trails

 

Edgier, maybe.  Nevertheless, I am

King of the Cowboys, Lord of the Saving Grace,

The Prince of Pizza, OMG Duke of Earl.

And late to my own funeral, if what

I see is what there is, reality

A cognomen for disappointment, cheese

Spritzed from a spray can, Gandalf with a sawn

Lady in half, too grey to sing the blues.

Birthdays!  I tell me.  Birthdays!   Let them bring

Adoration and single malt and straw

Spun from gold on an old potholder frame.

Maybe I'll let them stay to pay the bills

For Gro-Lights that can't remember when to stop.

King of the Cowboys, closing down the range.

Land Lubbers

 

The worms are tapping out. The grass

Has taken all it can, but rain

Perseveres. Down the asphalt main

The cars sail onwards. No one has

Observed the like before, they say.

They have. But that was yesterday,

And rain evaporates. Our dreams

Will not hold water. When we dove,

We suffocated, and we throve

Beached. We are landlocked, and, it seems,

We get along quite swimmingly

Once, quite deserted, all at sea.

A Lack of Resolution

 

There enters January from the left,

A grinning rush of sudden death. I say,

Says January, You know that’s not true.

I kill the pine-bore beetles, and I spread

The grass with green—potentially. I turn

Away. I have no time for this. I’ve made

Friends with the spring. It promised me a shoot,

A pistil, and the grounds to make them work.

January wears cold around its lungs,

A heart of hoar, the frost that doesn’t care

Who freezes whom. It has its ice on you,

Its arabesques of cars out of control,

Its night where streetlights groan about the dark.

Somewhere the exiled cupids fletch their arrows.

What Was Unmoved

 Winter was all it took

To right the summer’s wrong.

It started with a song.

It ended in a book.

Neither could ever say

All that the snow explained

Or why the day it rained,

Geometry washed away.

What was unmoved was ice.

The song of summer failed.

The song the book retailed

Would never again suffice.

Tales Out of School

 

Happily ever after, says the wolf,
Picking his teeth with Granny’s rib; the Prince
Is thinking he should let the zygal float
Against the oobal, now a muttonchop
Graces the front of his pink currency.

From hard-boiled eggs and crumbly cheese and pears
A girl can make a picnic, but a myth
Requires meat, not osiers; the bird
Who doles elusive clues is never served
Fajita-style. Granny works best for that,
Digesting in her aged, sinewy way,
Her juices turned to lupine sentience
And thigh muscle and slaver. When we grow
Old ourselves and have grandchildren to tell
The soothing psalms of bedtime, we shall lie
And say, The woodsman split the wolf in twain,
And Granny tumbled out and smoothed her dress
And baked a cake and spread the counterpane.
The child will sleep. We too shall check the yard
For prints. And listen for the wolf. Aha.

The Promised Ants

 

In the Kingdom of the Blind the one-armed man

Got strangled by a python. In the dirt

The ants formed marching bands and bit the dust,

Then spat it out. The songs the flicker sang

Were all percussion, made my chimney ring,

And sounded like a salesman on the phone.

The ghosts don’t bother me. When we play bridge,

I am the dummy, and we all fall down,

Each time a little slower, till we rise

Like half a loaf. And half of me recalls

That we were promised ants, and it was kept.

The locusts don’t come round much any more;

But one-armed men keep showing up to ask

If I would deign to donate to the blind.

Oh, Pancho

         —Cisco, you are loco in the head

Cisco hath murdered sleep, the sheriff said;

But Pancho told him when the deed was done,

They were eating tortillas somewhere else,

In Mesa Verde, which was dun and bare.

Your hands are scarlet, said the deputy,

Incarnadined or something. Pancho said,

The tumbleweeds tell all you need to know.

Cisco brushed grit off his embroidery,

Adjusted his somebrero, and pursued

The banker's daughter, calling to his fate,

It is the east, and I am someone's son.

The sheriff was not all that mollified.

As usual, they had to flee the town,

Eat tepid victuals in a desert night,

And top their frijoles with unsummoned stars.

Lid & Latch

 

Inside the damp, torn box a bit of fluff—

Bright hair by Donne. Might be a web. Or lint.
We won't find out today. All lost, grave stuff
Waits for last things. This box, though, packs a hint
Of all the rest: we lie against the grain.
We take up too much time and too much rain

For bone to carry breath. His new, clean shape
Will grieve the man who lived for gasp and catch,
Who free of taint, not bent to bare his nape,
Will climb back in, pull down both lid and latch,
And while his thoughts last, think of sweat. In pain
He saw the light and left it. Bring the rain.

True Confession

 

Entschuuldigung, she said, which was a lie,

Excuses absent, and not wanting one,

Impenetrable of motive and as stumm

As onyx.  Not a tear or comely dab.

Just Tell me what you want, and I'll decline,

A heavenly bosom heaveless.  One supposed

That angels felt this way when sinners pled

Post-mortem for relief, their ichor still

A differentiation from the dead,

Though God had mercy, theoretically.

Me a culprit?  Well, I guess I am,

But DNA's a bitch, and time will toll.

Native Americans Seize Parkway

 

Last night contemplative smokers and the lean

Jogger's rasp; this dawn, woodsmoke and boombox

Chants. I'll take Manhattan, the Bronx, Denver,

And some great plains, they sing. TV trucks. Ralph

The CU Buffalo has come to cheer.

We own these trees, this mani-pedi parkway

Ours. From light rain the grass, the grass is coming.

Perhaps these are the 12 Lost Tribes, their Moses,

A landbridge-walking chief, whom 40 years

Hardly sufficed, whose Canaan=Kansas.

The satellite feed sends this to Inuits

And Iroquois alike. We are inspired,

A spokes-dude says, by Prague and Zapatista,

By black & white together. We shall fight

No more forever, sure, but WrestleMania,

The cage match, the strap match, proscenium-

Free drama: they go on today, tomorrow. You

Pay per view, you take your choice. Oh, we,

We can do drama or we can sit still.

We watch at night, and our night watches back.

The neighbors seem confused. They try to do

The business of their neighborhood, which local

News zooms in on. These people vote here, pay

Beads for their land, send trinkets to their sons.

We all are out on porches now. We watch.

Erosion

 

        This, from Epigrams, appeared in Lyric.


Although they only gum the piers,

when they have gummed sufficient years,

the waves will melt the wood away.

The shore was once out in the bay.

Remember when you loved me more

than we had time or language for?

A Deep Breath

 

          This is an old, old poem

Just so you know, the car is packed.

The boxes for the poor and sick

I’ve set out front. Unbric-a-bracked,

The rooms feel foreign. Take your pick

Of where you’d like to squat. We’re left.

We’ve saved one leaf from every tree.

As we gain years, as they lose heft,

They’ll smell of dry mnemosyne.

We’ll hold that breath. The house, the yard,

Oh, they were ours, and now they’re not.

It’s hard at first, and it stays hard,

Not to forget those who forgot.

A Sentimental Christmas Poem

A mystery play is why

We say again this year,
And me a Jew and dry
As ash on toast, Good cheer
And peace on earth. And stuff.
And, no, it’s not enough.

I never met an elf.
I fed a reindeer corn—
He picked it up himself,
In truth. When you were born,
Redemption might have been
Avowed, pomaceous sin

Cancelled. But maybe not.
The land of snow and ice,
Marprelate and marplot,
Is far from paradise.
We murder to dissect,
Said Wordsworth once. I checked.

And nevertheless we are
Together on our grounds,
Pretending yonder star
In ancient flaming Zounds!
Promises you to me.
And here we are, we three,

Wholly a family,
An hour now or two.
This is the trinity
Available to a Jew:
For this an angel came
And vouched no greater claim.

Odysseus Transported

 

        for Dr swan

I am Ulysses.  I reject this form

they gave me at Admissions.  I have no

local address.  I do not care to show

Proof of Insurance.  Driven by a storm

to castellated strangers is the norm

for me, but no immortal set aglow

a light like this, half green.  Nothing could grow

on ground so square, so cold, innkeeper warm.

A smell of medicine, a sea of white.

I am Ulysses, ill but not deceived.

I am accustomed not to be believed.

I shall recite this on the bloody night

I send them here, their women sorely grieved

to lose their heroes in this sickly light.

Theory of Summer

 

Upon the tip, the cherry; on the branch;

the bird; under the tree, the dog. Still life

persists: the branches of the taller tree

wave in the superheated breeze, a frieze

only so tall, motion above stasis.

We notice me, still standing at the window,

observer of the unobserved, observed

by you in your detachment. Words, you say,

not things, as though I could not be a thing

because we know a word for me. The bird,

who is a flicker, as it happens, hops

closer, the cherry dips, the dog explodes—

I say she is a shepherd—and the still

structure collapses, except that you are reading

words, not noise. Your head, your head's a noun,

and I have made me up to tell to you,

whom I made up to hear. And the bird, too.

I think the dog is real. I'll look her up.

At The VFW Hall

 

Odysseus can't make it. He sent me

As his replacement. Less wily though I am

And unaccustomed to pacific life,

I'll try to say a few words. As you know,

The VFW has done much good

To men in greaves. In many other states

We are the only counselors can bear

Those who in their privies can hear their bowels

Hectored with fear and stress. To those who drink

Their bowls uncut with water, we dispense

Advice and unguents. The Friends of Nestor,

One of our byblows, offer anecdotes

To aid insomniacs. And men who wear

Envenomed shirts and arrows through their pecs,

Who look like fretted porpentines, and weep

When they attempt a sacrifice, attend

Domestic Violence: Making Hearth a Home

And are the calmer for it. I myself,

Mistaking sheep for Trojans, thrice have tried

To join my comrades in their dreamless sleep.

I may be somewhat medicated now;

But in your faces I perceive contempt,

Who never once felt Ares twist your guts,

Or raped a captive, playing she was Helen.

Superior to poontang, I expect,

You nancy stay-at-homes, you gormless helots—

Where are your scars? Show me your hands. Which one

Of you lay bleeding on a bloody field

And cursed your mom for opening her legs?

The roar of Scamander, rising from his bed,

Wiping the plain away with us, the shape

Of what he swept away, I hear in rain.

Let the son of Laertes make his own speech

Next time. We brought some color slides. My friend

Diomedes will show them to you now.

All Sorts of Things

 

    This appeared in Candelabrum, a long, long time ago.

Jane had decided late on Anglo-Saxon.
She drove away to Rochester, to live
with her new friend, and did, until she drove
into a bridge abutment. So I saw
her not again. I never saw the friend.

There must be at least a story there, what happened,
that sounds like a story; but it's missing something.
It wasn't organized; it just occurred.
Where was she going? Does her mother think
she meant to do it? What was this new girlfriend,

and why is it she wasn't in the car?
These are the sorts of things nobody knows,
except for the ones who get to make it up.
So to Jane's mother maybe it makes sense.
And maybe to the friend. And maybe not.

Men of Letters

 

The Post Office is gated, guarded, barred.

Each citizen may bring a single page

To be reviewed, then stamped, if shapely in

Calligraphy and spelling. Homonyms

Are disapproved, ambiguous, like frocks

On sailors or hard rain on sunny days.

Postcards were okay last week. This week, though,

Implying other places, they are less

Bland, so the young and paleolithic old,

Who don’t know what they're doing or are done,

Attempt them, but with bogus names and towns.

Postage expensive, paper products rare,

Ink, it turns out, is nothing more than mud

Thinned to the point of near transparency.

Return addresses? SASEs? No.

Corporal punishment, defunct, this spring

Envelopes crime: the grave, the good, the gone

Cannot petition. Sign language alone

Conveys too little of their superscript.

Rumors of nibs cannot be verified,

And cartridges descend on public squares.

Transformations

 

        This appeared in The Flea.

This is the bark which used to be

A functioning face. You see the stream?

A nymphet breathing.  Things who seem

Alive are, mostly, differently.

What if your hand were once a rock,

Your friends narcissi, your heart a clock?

No, wait. that doesn't count, the beat

Mechanical, no fur, no bone,

No pollen making the chime repeat.

What if you were left all alone,

Never a maple, never a creek,

The lone indigenous antique?

Love your armchair. Sleep with your bed.

Praise the sky for distance. Or wait.

You may be someone else instead,

Son of the streetlight, child of the late

God who transformed your mom to coal

And burned her breast to warm his soul.

Unruly Breaks The Day

 

Peep-peep, chook-chook,

The briddes rebuke

And take short wing.

They scold and sing.

It’s what they’ve donne

For sheep and sonne;

It’s what they do

For gods and ewe,

Fodder and pun.

The briddes review,

Chook-chook, peep-peep,

Who wins, who won.

1 Samuel

 

In panel 1 the little boy

Reloads his sling; a lion waits,

The upper right. (What pastures grew

Was Saul’s domain.) By panel 2

The boy is wearing lion skin.

His flock is grazing, happy ewe

And lamb. It seems they know a king

Is just as handy with a sling

As with a concubine. In 3

Goliath says he’s sure to win

The olive grove and local bar.

His sword is twinkling like a star.

Now panel 4, all gravitas,

He lies there like a toppled tree.

The little boy accepts applause

And God’s unique, contingent laws,

Effective when appropriate,

Though given young, remembered late,

And best when proven by a stone,

A hundred psalms, and a golden throne.

Inside Of Moab, It's Too Dark To Read

 

Outside of Moab, they’re replacing Time

With sidewalks. Rolling either way, they pass

Monuments, which will never now occur,

First heart attack which ended with a kiss.

In Kingman they are stocking all the bars

With Mexican beer and tulgey wood, in Page

Nothing but churches and the refugees

From Old California missions and next spring,

The spring after that, and pools in desert towns.

Nothing sets like a sidewalk laid on Time,

Fossilized bugs and palm prints. Over in Brush,

The Mayor declared that Time was just a myth,

Some immigrant’s invention. He pronounced

Chicken-fried steak the plat du jour; he drank

A Nehi Orange, and Time just washed away,

Like fiddlers on a flood plain in the rain.

Two Traditional Exercises

 

1. The Same, Only Different

Roses bloom today, and then
Tomorrow roses bloom again.
Cut the grass, then rest: you find
New grass with roses intertwined.
Grass must be great, and roses strong,
To bloom and flourish, thriving long
After the gardener, planted, made
Under the grass, a thinning shade.
Yes, that rose is rose is rose;
Every blade of grass that grows
Is Grass. When you have tilled your plot,
Girls will be, though you are not,
Some with that shape, some with her name,
Some fit for love. Just not the same.

2. First & Last

Dead the first is pretty dead.
You'll be pretty, dead a while.
You watch the service with a smile,
It seems so quaint. The dead, you say,
Must have enjoyed their hymns today.
That ought to help them get ahead,
First through the gate, well on their way,
Or not so well. She's mighty dead,
You said this time. Some time, instead,
Of her, it will be me. Your style
Is going live. You mean to stay.
Dead the last is pretty dead.

Classical Gas

 

Diana does not care to know
What makes an apple blossom grow
As long as apples still are sweet
And she has more than one to eat.

Adonis does not mean to learn
What makes Diana blaze and burn.
She looks at him as though he were
An apple peeled, and just for her.

They are, they vow, as they were meant,
As satisfied as ignorant.
Their teeth are good, their fruit is firm.
Whence comes the rot, who made the worm,

And why Adonis looks when he
Sees peaches on Niobe's tree,
They mustn't ask, not till the day
Their frightened fences run away,

Until their blood runs dry, and sun
Does not shine down on everyone.
They haven't that much time to kill,
They say. But, oh, they will. They will.

Now What?

 

A little late for art,
a little weak for song,
I try my best to write,
and still it comes out wrong.

I looked within my heart,
I ate a peck of dirt.
I asked for extra light
and never shaved my shirt.

For every ancient blight
I found acoustic cure,
then shared it. Every part
of me was sound and sure;

but now it's late, and night
concludes a damaged age.
I guess I ought to start
to fill this empty page.

The Golden Corral

 

Mercurial Mercutio sits down,

His periodic table piled

With goods. The psalms and protocols

Have been concluded, vast

Salad bars looted, even the grill

Of his dreams expired, scrubbed and lapsed

Into the arms of sticky buns.

Ice cream, he says, and asks for more.

Nothing forthcoming. What if this

Is sold as is, a scruffy tail,

The end of plot and narrative—

Just some of this and a bit of that,

A chapel stew, a pot of mess,

And love a scant gratuity?

The World Lacks A Regular Scansion

 

Mr Keats, he dead. And Mr Marlowe.

I get the two mixed up. One had TB,

The other lost an eye, but did not write

To urns or psyches. Neither lasted long.

Marlowe, at least, he got to tell a tale

About a heart at dusk. Crepuscular.

Keats worked at CVS or some such place.

Apothecaries have their place, prescribe

And fade to black. I think they hail from Porlock.

Coitus interruptus. Some such thing.