Astronomy: An Introduction

What if the stars are singing like the bats,

Too high a song to hear, but full of clues,

Like whodunit and why I dream of girls

Too good for me, I never even met?

Maybe it’s all the same, and what they say

Who say such things, one nation, full of bonds

And stock responses, they who never saw,

Though bangled to the max, a stellar mouse

Absconding with your name and your address,

Home to a star part gas and all white flame.

The Butterfly Project

 

A butterfly just robbed a bank.  At once

The effects are felt in Cleveland, and the jars

Of homemade pickles aging in my fridge

Advertise the consequences.  Good luck

That I was weeding frontally at the time.

Deforestation?  Maybe, but the choice

Is stash the butterflies in solitude.

Frappe´ their nectar.  Give them leafy bunks.

But do not risk Tibet on keeping straight

Your sofa cushions or the coffee mugs.

Wednesday: Theme and Variations

      This first appeared in The Chimaera.

Wednesday

Among these sparrows, frogs, and chickadees,

Finally warmed by sun instead of steam,

Too early for the shift to certainties,

Pentameter to prose, maybe I dream

Of sex and violets. Perhaps I know

What scientists on salary forecast:

This Thursday, patchy fog and early snow.

Their spring comes early, but it does not last

Forever. So I’m told. No season does

Which lies beneath the dirt today. Tomorrow

The violets will be the spring that was.

They lend me verse. Whatever else I borrow,

I offer back, as though I had a choice.

First day of spring, this is my winter voice.

Whensday

Dr Dee and his chicks, that brood who read

Fire and numbers, every comet signed,

What good are they? Their sun is not a head

Of state. Mere shape lives only in the mind,

In digs where violence dwells, sex of a kind,

Like ringing changes on these lilybells.

He knew his time, he told his time. And then?

I heard the answer. Like the heart, it tells

The count. It told the weather, but not when.

I take my time. It will be small and soon.

He only heard the pitch of notes that men

Are built to hear. I think I heard that tune

Performing here. The feeder and the grass

Bear the refrain: “A lass, my love, a lass.”

Wedsday

Nobody claims that flowers are untrue

Because they claim their pollen from the wind.

Imagine being proffered this excuse--

“It was the zephyr did it. I’m unskinned,

I’m virgin as a stone.” Of course you are.

The hyacinths immaculately flower.

They took their color from a passing star

While you were sleeping: some ungodly hour

When spring believed that nobody was watching.

Tulips push through. The grass begins to sweat.

Troo-loo the song the songbirds have been hatching:

Tra-la the song they urge us to forget.

Trust is a cycle. If we do the same,

We get it back. And no one knows its name.

Wendsday

A pilgrimage, spring having sprung, we go

The places we go every day, to see

What sun has done to change the world we know:

It starts from scratch, except for me and thee.

We are now what we have been, more and less,

Parts shed, augmented, by and large forgotten.

We can still flower—there is that, God bless--

So fertile we, so much to work with, rotten

Right to the corps. They call these zephyrs. Feel

Commotion in the ground? No? I don’t either.

From this point forward, nothing much is real—

No pilgrims, Aprille, smalle foweles neither.

Spring forward. Fall back. Either way we stand

Right where we are, not sky, not wholly land.

A Tide In Their Affairs

 

I checked the tub for tides. The ducky rode
Bravely as ever, jake a duck as Drake.
Clearly the surface, clear of Spaniards, sent
A message to all pirates, blackguards: Make
Your bones in other bathrooms, the abode
Of breeds without the law. They pitch a tent
On bathmats, oilcloth, on a naked floor.
I scuppered them. Here you will find no more

Than Ivory, almost completely pure.
The tub was calm. And yet the drain was waiting
To suck and spiral all that came away.
Calm is a fury, still anticipating
The quack of terror. What poor ducks endure
To save the surface, even for a day.

Ripe For Recruitment

 

Under the bridges, then, where can be found

Men lost, bootless, unready hands on fire
And hair they use as lockpicks. Or The Last
Piazza, where the contract killers meet
Their lawyers, to insert a venue clause
And limits on assignability.
Down by the tracks, it's far too popular,
Crowded with scads of housewife-realtors
Who need time off for Botox and mojitos.
The Polo Club will take an application,
But not call back. And Kitty's 24
Prefers you dazed, emetic but aroused.
Or there's the crossroads. Sandwiches and smokes
Purchase apparent assent. Fruition is
Another matter: these are not the deans
Of Mayhem College; often they forget
Objectives, falling asleep on wiry doormats
Stamped with cardinals and black-capped chickadees,
Right at their victim's feet. Such tasseled shoes.
Nothing says loving like a drunken bum
Sprawled at the doorstep, hunting knife in hand,
Asking, if kicked, for dollar bills and beer.
Try beneath bridges. Covered in newsprint there,
Soldiers with stories, drumheads fast asleep,
Forage for excess, settle for skinny sweets.

Bardolatry

 

There at the Federal Courthouse they love Shakespeare.

They quote him often, and they quote him wrong.

“The quality of mercy is not stained,”

A PD said. “This kingdom is no horse,”

A prosecutor pled. “In every hamlet

They know the great clichés.” I have an itch

To stand and rectify, but I do not,

Suspecting that the local lockup holds

Good friends to friends of bards. The judge looks down,

His lifetime tenure harbored in his gut,

And quotes, “Victims have died. Why, even worms

May have their day and turn. But not for love.”

It’s hard to argue with a thought like that.

I don’t know any worms who disagree.

Decomposition

 

Scraping away their sod, you find--

The time-intoxicated dirt,
Rich in polysyllabic orts
And nutrients, like red roe deer
And tallow chandlers--roots and bones.
We have those here. Around a shrew's
Skull you can see the withy threads
Of something growing somewhere else.
Our soil is fed by little songs
Of composition: Here lies one
Whose name was never writ at all,
Genius and species, gone to seed.

Civis Romanus Sum

 

            This appeared in Plainsongs.

The immigration man will let you through
Because you’re white and smell okay, but not
So Customs, who keeps profiles on a lot
Of funny types, including some like you.
You will feel funny, if he wants you to.
You’ll act as though your Henry James were hot.
That biro is suspicious. You forgot
All that old stuff, which looks like something new

When undeclared. So make a speech: I deal
In artifacts of the mind. I’m odd. I write
At painful and eccentric times of night.
I smuggle into books a way to feel.
I bear impediments of no appeal.
I am a citizen. I transport light.

Where Autumn Succeeds

Alder by day, by night the sort of wood

Rubs up against the awning in your sleep,
Good for nothing, except to take up space
Otherwise occupied by fungal gnomes
And fey minutiae sharing golden worms,
It has its dignity. Comets announce
A change of almanacs, a column more
For bloggers who keep track. While children sleep,
Meteors fall on empty fields, supplant
The local germs and breed a race of clear
Benign progenitors of etiquette.
This drops a couple leaves and calls it quits.

The genealogy of accidents
Is difficult: we trace a tangled tree
Back past a pleasant baron, out for larks,
Who never gave a by-blow any name,
And what do we know, who only wedlock know?
The leaf exchanges its petiole for dirt
And is what fed its fruit, itself its self.
Meanwhile, the awning, all percussionist,
Sends a princess her pizzicato dreams
Of ponies, pirates, chaste droits du seigneur,
Exploding firebirds, and the unborn.

Dawn Over Trees

 

        from These Denver Odes

Dawn over trees, over roofs

over jogging dogs, toting their own leashes.

Dawn over coeds in too few clothes

for the chill.

Dawn departs quickly,  Affairs

called to conclusion, sunlight's gold coercion,

coffee perked, forecast scanned, all the scores

doublechecked.

I have immotile longings,

the dying semen announces to the sheets.

I have it in me to be no one,

to make new

none. Percale covers it all.

Dawn is gone.  Late runners occupy highways,

their bunched lovers'-knots trained to forget.

Dreams of flesh.

The Books of the Dead

     for Stuart James

Jesus, Stuart, look
What we have come to, thick
And tired, brought to book,
Brought to ground, and sick
With authors. I had read
Every single one—
Recited them in bed
And taught them to my son.
Now they look away.
It’s just as they had said,
They never meant to stay.
Jesus, they’re all dead.

Yard Work

 

The columbine grow everywhere. The bees

Pursue this with an appetite which bugs
Their eyes out, and the honey goes to feed
Those other bees, so they can churn the blue
Delphinium across the sculpted yard.
Sweetness and flight, the noblest of the bees’
Intrinsic obligations, comb-schooled: hives
Are where you have a duty, not a name;
And yet you bleed for the angelica,
Honeysuckle, and, late, the rose of sharon.
Flight in a buzz and whirr of obligation
Bring the columbine on, unto the fourth
And fortieth generation; and the queen
Invites you with the fittest floral set,
Even when brown and yellow do not go
With pink or with the silence of mid-June.

Alliteration in My Mother's Milk

         This appeared in Angle.

In fall the flowers fail. The faeries fly

To Boca Raton and the Winter Wings Buffet,

The Bottomless Shrimp Bowl, Boundless Salad Bar,

The Seminal Seminole Margarita +,

And flash floods in your dreams. The flowers pray

To be dismembered in your orisons,

A Home of Unsaved Sepals in the Hills,

A past of pollen all their future now.

No cherry pie. No Anna Baptist Bread,

Dunked in The Living Chocolate Wonderfall.

No Date Night Date Nut Pudding in the spring.

The faeries book their seats for further south.

Aere Perennius

 

If they commingle when we die

The dust you make, the dust that I
produce, maybe the dog’s, and that
clump of leafmeal, perhaps a scat
and clippings, in a year or two,
who’s going to know which dust was you?
Most glorious of all who share
the stage tonight, of every stare
the subject and the hope, to claim
more of your birthright than a name,
it cannot be. You are a weed,
a metatarsal, or a seed
on fallow ground. Not more. Unless
they shroud you in the golden dress
that sheathes you now, there is no place
which will preserve your present grace
to an agnostic, future age.
They might, of course, peruse this page.
How cheap is that, and how unfair,
if you are no-, this everywhere?
Patience does not reward the dead.
It pays them off in print instead.

The Vulgar From The Streets

        for HC

Such hieroglyphs are easy. This one says,
CATES IN THE MORNING and that swirly one,
NO PAIN, NO PAIN, today the practical
Feast-day of St Bartokomous, who wrote
God is most perfect, this His indigence,
And gaped in satisfaction, doubtlessly.
Over the air conditioner man hath sprayed,
HARM TO A WISE MAN IN HIS BROTHER’S FIELD.
Prefects prefer straight-shooters, schooled in plain
Annunciation, all lean and clean in tone.
The pink one pricked above the mansard reads,
DRAGONS FORGET THEIR EGGS. Who claims they don’t?
They disbelieve in swords, even in dark
And ribald festivals of patriots.
St Evelyn said, This ghetto is my stage
And squashed his inner pupa. He was mad,
This wight who wrote beside the padlocked door,
THE WORLD IS COMING TO THIS STAGE. STAY TUNED.

Le Bistro Petit Mal

 

You know the one about the whore,

The wooden teeth, and Sully's goat?
I heard it just last night, a corps
Of lawyers, rich of scotch and throat,
Enjoying themselves. The nachos went
Well with their ties. We got and spent.

Like Wordsworth, but they didn't laugh,
And I was showing off, besides.
They sliced the hired help in half
And left them for the cleansing tides,

But with a good tip. I split so they
Could do me, too, if they'd a mind.
Heroes at rest. The gods at play.
Some nymphs abandoned. Daphne pined.

Platonic History

 

The Land of Lu, or Mu, was washed away

Embarrassed by an iron-hungry surf.

In gaudy triremes rowed by engineers

The government attempted to re-boot;

But Greenland intervened and Newfoundland

And all the loansharks rising from the sea,

Shaking their cowrie shells, their scuba gear,

Promising retribution had occurred.

Debacle and disaster. Turned away

From Silverado and Leander's Gate,

The governors, their Chicken o' the Sea

Exhausted, floated, while the trade winds spent

Our heritage and blew the whole thing up.

The Worms & I

 

They do not come to see me in this hole,

My buds and bloods. Perhaps they share the shame

And largesse of disaster. Who would bruit

His kin's confinement in an earthly cone,

Tapered for retribution? All the worms

Are laughing, mind you: they don't see the sense

Of wider welkins; blue just makes them blush.

My Uncle Thad threw rubbish on my head,

The Daily Mirror wrapped around a bun.

Perhaps he meant to plump me. Kindness comes

In kits, to be assembled as you like it.

Aunt Alice led him off, her voice the twin

Of heavy rain on mud. There is no bed,

No sleep, no sanitation, whereat worms

Stand up and cheer for everyone but birds.

I pray for commutation, they for dirt.

Reading Yeats For Greats

Imagine that it’s been
A century since Yeats.
Imagine, and conclude
How meaningless are dates.
All of time gone by,
And not a second passed
For you who saw him first
And you who read him last.

He stepped outside to say
A line or two. It was
Out of time and place,
But no one cared because
No one had built a wall,
Nobody tore one down.
Beautiful women merged
There in Lissome Town.

When you are given away
Another century hence,
Your comely wisdom combined
Worth a couple pence,
The women still will walk,
And rebels stop and stare,
Nothing much to say.
Helen will not care.

Talking Pictures

 

His spurs would jingle when he brushed his teeth

Or dusted. When he bent down to remove
Clean silver from the dishwasher, his hat
Would hit the floor, 10 gallons all at once.

He drilled the Jack of Spades clean through the eye
At 20 paces. Right handed. He left
A slew of weepy dance-hall girls behind,
Their garters disarranged, their fishnets full.

The rustlers swung from greasy cottonwoods
Or, planted upside down in alkali,
Displayed their soleless boots to noon. Though cured,
They went unclaimed, black villains, black and blue.

The Chirikawa called him Brother Love,
Notorious as they were for irony
And tropes of understatement and reserve.
He hailed them from a distance, clad in white

With crimson trim. The dry-goods store in Fort
Pauperis did his dry cleaning for free.
(He'd saved them from the Crippled Kings last fall
At 2:30 on Main St., dentist time.)

Sunday a.m.s he offered himself brunch--
Chicken satay and crepes and papadoms.
He rubbed his boots with neats'-foot oil and planned
Retirement along the Jemez Springs,

Where no one asked for favors, no one died,
Except in winter, firewater brought
Dreams of the schoolmarm larnin' little boys
How Cicero betrayed himself for fear

And sent out letters wetted by a slave.
(Additional Effects, he called them.) Spring
Fell late on Jemez, cutthroats coming home,
Packed to the gills with stories of the snow.

The Age of Heroes

 

Unrolled, the ball of twine will reach from here

To Sunday next, maybe a little past,
As strong as faith, and supple. Place such string
In hands like yours, you could subvert a world
Of passageways. The monster has to smell
Both us and exit. That’s a lot to ask
Of demi-men and semi-livestock, see?
Somewhere along the way it will sense grass
Or wind on open water, then forget
Its murderous intentions. Clover makes
It sleepy; birdsong, and it drops its guard.
You, with a chunk of rope, a .44,
And proper shoes, could be back home for tea.

And then what? When the monster has been foiled,
The maiden slaked and handed back to dad
To foist her by-blow on a little prince,
The whitecaps braved, the Welcome Home endured,
All speeches, leis, and fatty bullock thighs,
We’ll frame your twine and hang it where Aunt Vi,
The Tutor, and your nubile cousin Daph
Can hardly miss it. What then? There are new
Monsters, of course, but, really, they’re not much
But bags of bone and teeth: blood is a bore,
Philately in person, so to speak.

Virgil & the Bees

 

appeared in Angelic Dynamo

we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax;
thus furnishing mankind with two of the noblest things, which
are sweetness and light.
--Swift

A flat gray stone absolved of dung and schmutz,
Warmed by the sun and near, not in, a grove,
Proximate to a meadow, not to sheep,
Unthinking sweaters on the hoof, at hand
Running water for sound effect: then sit,
And you will find the bees. Theirs is a mind
Unfit for your accommodating self.
Like physicists, they are absorbed by thoughts
Too pure and rarefied for you. They work,
The autumn ever coming, honey from
The dandelion, and excrete a light
So fine it makes divine commedias
A piece of cake, a holiday of dusk.
He listens: you can see him move his lips,
No buzz, no hum. Hexameters like glass,
The shape of cells, coincidentally—
They were invented to store wisdom, wax,
And pollen effluents. Thus you have flowers,
He thinks, stung by the notion Dido walks
Amidst gray flowers she can never touch.

When Nighthood Was In Flotsam

 

The staff has snapped; the flag has been misplaced.

The Coconino County Bar & Grill

Breaks both its windows, locks the doors, and posts,

Send me a kiss by wire. Bourbon flows

Through the arroyos. Canteens burst with beer.

The news does not report. Tequila leaks

Upstream. The fish are dying for a drink.

No, sir, my realism is not an art,

Says Jenny Wren, the brickbat in my pie,

The neon in her undies, my patootie.

She shines from both sides now. The Bar & Grill

Has set cane chairs out on the promenade

And pointed them with seashell, which it sells

By the seashore, if only it were there.

About Mucking

 

Roses do not dissuade

The fall, no petal stayed

For what it has displayed.

The leaves, believing dying

Superior to trying,

Prefer the dun drab lying

Of mulch that they have made.

A Way, A While

 

When winter came, they were not ready. No
One is. And though they'd seen it all before,
They never thought of winter any more.
That time had gone, and no one heard it go.
What did they have? A leaf or two to show

Succeeding generations, who would smile
And think how quaint the Old Ones were, who never
Took off their clothes or painted something clever
Or died for love or died for peace, whose style
Was okay in its time, away, a while.

Loaves & Fishes

 

Abacus to zygote: this is just what

The god has ordered. Feed the multitude
On infinite combinations from a rude
Inception. C begins with Cookie, not
A tiddly crowd, made crummy with the bread
Recently risen. Read what we have read,

And you can bake your own. A dictionary
Portends all saints every witness each,
Erects more ladders than a man can carry,
And will not learn. We accidentally teach.
Mud is in our middle, and right before,
Mattress, the word that you were looking for.

I have one in my pocket, glad and good
Together. What I've spelled, I've understood.

The Men Who Would Be Kings

 

We were a caravan, the score of us,
Camels and dogs and rugs. We infidels,
We passed for what we were, a flea-brained bunch
Determined to be wise, and if we failed,
Experienced at least. We heard that the sands
Turned ruby when they were wet, but they were dry.
Advised that the womenfolk were glorious
Beyond appraisal, we saw only men,
And they saw us and were not over pleased.
Far, far too many stars for urbanites:
We missed our meals and thought that we were brave.

Perhaps we were. A little foolishness
Is necessary for the gentle born.
Four of us returned, we four who returned,
We held our tongues and spent a year or two
Deciding what was dream and what was not.
It all was dream, the four of us conclude
And watch TV and nod our grizzled heads,
And some of them were probably attached.

Manon

 Dear Abbé:

    We are pent up in our loft,
Too stippled to sing, too poor to buy new clothes,
Ladies and gentlemen, too sick to beg.
We tell each other stories. I'll be quiet,
She'll be at peace, and when the fairy says,
A plugged sou for your thoughts, then mum's the word.
Orchids could never change our little love.
Once she is dead, I'll be a notary
And practice barratry; when I am dead,
She'll move to customer service for the mob.
Someday, God willing, there will be crème brûlée,
Amoxicillin, and some warmer clothes.
Till then they hum, who do not know the words.

Their Widened Apertures

 

Girls in dresses on bicycles with baskets,

Streamers from the handlebars. A wet April
In a dry year, and they pedal warily
To market, to market, to buy like a lamb
Their new décor, more than observers deserve.

Higgledy, they head home here and there, thither,
If that may be permitted, stilled by the eyes,
The boys’ widened apertures, the precursors
And post-. Into the sun with them, pink streamers
Streaming, spring girls the headstones of the winter,
The corpus of the fall, where they wend, ridden.

Treasure Islands

The frontons bet on sonnets, good

To the last foot, unlike Lord B
Or LJS, whose syncope
Turned flesh and blood to strap and wood.

Each foot expands the club, the start
Of each sestet a lucky act.
The shape is bowing, hunched with tact,
By present pulse and present art

Betrayed in novel ways. At last
She is a rose and he a stag
Or he the hunk who freed the hag
Into her dewy, virgin past.

The Hellespont swum, Ben Gunn goes bang.
I sing the song my masters sang.

With These Beans

The conqueror of conquerors, the suave

Rapier, the diligent seabee, fat
Alcades, and persnickety CFOs.
I lack downtrodden populace, but those
Are everywhere, a litter at the curb,
Ripe for the patting. Grow No Paving Stones
Will be the motto of my beans. If tanks
Are what I offer, they can chant, You're Welcome
Between siestas and the native pulque,
A cardinal in each town to lead the cheers.

My fighter planes write Phantom on the sky,
While street urchins must reason out the weeds.
Salt beans, they'll grow with tears. A few will do.
A palace and a harp, a grand vizier,
A minstrel and a harem of the few,
The proud, the pink, the hopelessly obliged.
Let them grow pancakes out there in the sticks,
Aged fathers trying to tell the tales
Which make young people strong. They won't regret:
There never was a time to call Before.

The Well-Read Man

         This appeared in Poetry Bus.

Teach me no more. I know enough.
Of Dis and that and other stuff
Found on these pages no one's read
But dead descendants of the dead,
I've made myself a treasure hoard,
Dust like an asthma of the word.
Ceres does not search for me.
She does not call and cannot see
I bear seeds, too, and I should plant
Green fields in volume; but I can't.
The shelves are brown; the air is sere,
No months there and twelve months here.

Goodbye to Poetry Month, And About Time, Too

They asked for something simple.

They asked for something plain--

Something about a flower girl,

Something about the rain.

I really don't do simple.

I really don't do clear.

That's not what these eyes look at.

That's not what I can hear.

Obfuscatory nonsense,

Effete and out of touch,

They told me, and I thanked them.

I thanked them very much

And offered them a sonnet,

Recondite and blue.

They said they didn't like it,

Not that it was untrue.

Rex Anglorum, P.I.

 

1.

First the canary died, and then the light.

There was no heat, but it was June, okay?

He didn't need hot water any day,

But Mrs Hornet fetched the severed head

UPS had delivered overnight:

Then Rex believe coincidence was dead;

And he thought deeply and went back to bed.

When he was roused, he put that scum away,

In theory. Still, he knew just who had done it.

He took some DNA and made them run it.

The lights resumed. The boiler flamed. (The bird,

Too bad.) He thought that he might buy a hound

To save the villeins who had gone to ground,

Who’d share his common cause without a word.

2.

The type was set in Baskerville, the hair

A blonde’s – Cinnamon Smoke. He knew his stuff.

The ash a Turkish pre-war brand of snuff,

Now unobtainable, from God knows where.

His trenchcoat buckled, Rex went out to share

Info with the outwitted perp. Enough.

Dim Sum, the sign. So many are undone,

So few for whom a sleuth will do the trick.

Some muscle, maybe, or some patter, slick

As Wildroot Cream Oil. Never, though, the one,

The permanent moll, the sempiternal pick.

Rex pats his pocket; there the trusty gun

Mollifies the most strident of the senses--

A picayune per diem. Plus expenses.

Desk-Waller

 

When I awoke, you weren’t so great,

Not hell on toast, not fixed as fate,
Less than high sentence, more than fair,
Too cute to cry, too young to care.
You weren’t all that. I saw that some,
Of little fame, were twice as dumb,
Stuck out as far, and rode as fast,
And had no skills, and had no past,
And were both free and kind. They came
Before I called; they knew my name
And were available right now.
I didn’t want them anyhow.
The heart is hard, concealed and stark,
And whores in alleys after dark.

A Ballad for Willie

 

My name is William Butler Yeats.

When young, I spoke to faeries
and sang of ponds and leprechauns
and lips red-ripe as cherries.

Now my glass is cold and cracked,
my verse a fine steel wire.
The faeries all have been served with writs
and flung out in the mire,

shot down at the Post Office door,
blown up by the IRA:
a city man in a country house,
I'll make myself a play;

taut for my Maud and statesmanlike,
I perne me in a gyre.
I'll bear it all for drama's sake
and set this house on fire.

Brasso & Marble Cleaner

 I write this with a steel dip pen,

terribly old fashioned,

They wrote like this—remember when?—

painful and impassioned.

I don't.  They wrote on close stool walls

and phone kiosks and cardboard.

On creaking slats of cattle stalls.

At Metro State.  At Harvard.

They wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote

of lost wills and abortions.

At epic length.  By train.  By rote.

In whopping festal portions.

The pigs ate most.  The silverfish

six-stepped across the rest.

Frau Bluebird, fluttery and swish,

and very red of breast,

has carried off a stave or two

in rapid, darting trips

and mumbled them into a glue

and long dependent strips.

As Every Schoolboy Knows

 

        Everyone knows that Plato

        in the tenth book of his

        Republic, proposed to banish

        poets from his ideal State

            —Sven Birkerts

It goes to show

what everyone knows.

Well below

The practical city

of laundered prose,

the tired and tatty

poets conspire

in solitude.

They set afire

pipe and cable,

They send up lewd

reworkings of fable

through manhole covers.

They mail out letters

petitioning lovers

to abandon their betters.

Everyone knows

they had to move on.

We heard in prose

the poets are gone.

His Secret Notes

 

In Book VII of The Secret Notes

of Constantine Colossus

he summarizes what he's learned

from his 4 o'clocks with kings and queens,

from his morganatic wife

who sold their son to sausage men,

from his large collection of poniards

jewelled and venomed, and long use

of gnostic texts and lemon inks.

Life is short and wonky-ish, he says,

our felicity at all times

frail. Roses fade, but grass persists.

Love is ephemeral, plutocrats,

like the beggarman, must sleep.

Still, gold ain't all that shabby.

My edition of The Secret Notes

is dented, as though I weren't

the first who threw it at the wall.

My Republic

 

This one was in Plainsongs, a long time ago.

To my republic immigrants arrive
with no fanfare of paperwork; they come,
and right away they ask to be left alone.
They want to go where yeoman farmers live
and beekeepers and Latinists. Old maids
give them each maps and send them on their ways,
unstamped, unnumbered, all unphotographed.

In my republic each one makes a stop
at gift shops which sell baseball gloves and bats
with which they make their own ways to the dark
sinuous backroads of the heartland states,
thence to disperse to dry or forest places.
No one keeps count. No one’s allowed to do so.
You’ll hear them playing catch in summer’s dusk,

trying to learn to act like you and me,
even the ones who exit tropic climes
in oddball togs woven from unknown bolls.
If not at first, then soon. They must be just,
like us, and just a trickle, which is why
they all play ball, a sort of crowd control,
the only one allowed in my republic,
short on theologians, long on shortstops.