When Dis Is Done

 

Nobody thinks about Persephone

That much, though here she is, a normal girl,
Stolen away and raped in Hell by Hades,
Betrayed by fruit, although her mother is
The goddess of breakfast cereal and toast,
Dazed, dim, and bleeding in a sooty place
Even the iron heroes couldn't stomach.
6 months off for good behavior, and 6
Back, was the best deal even Zeus could cut,
And you tell me you have no time to think
Of Proserpine (you see, even the name
Is changing), and the innocent's allowed
A line and a half of Milton, which is more,
My dear, than you and I are due for Hell,
And we were not that innocent, besides.

The Woods Within

 

In woods within the city

The woods pretend to be

More than merely pretty

And decorously twee.

We have an owl and chipmunks

And squirrels and a fox

And almost massive tree trunks.

Mocha Man's two blocks

Away. Falafel King

And Conoco sustain

The needs of those who bring

Both brunch and hope, if rain

Muddies not the footpath

and wetteth not their feet.

The titmice, in mild wrath,

Fall silent, lest they meet

The programmers, the lawyers,

The botanists in clogs,

and eco-tested warriors

With large and tubby dogs.

Bobs and Jimmies

         This appeared in Lyric.

The streets our fathers played in they describe

Over and over, looking out at air

Peopled with places we've been told were theirs,

Home to some far-fetched prehistoric tribe

Of Normans, Bobs, and Jimmies. These are now

Grandsires to a clan who do not hear.

No streetcars run down Skinker. I see how

Amid my life my life could disappear.

Dead Grandpa Shops at Walmart at 4 a.m.

 

Nail clippers, maybe, no more aftershave.

No shiny trainers, sextet of latte cups.

A groundcloth sounds quite nice, and wind-up toys

To fill the void with clackety-clacks and beeps;

But who to wind them up? The waitress said--

Next plot but one--Here, let me freshen that.

Disarming, but without real consequence.

Clean underwear, in case of accident,

Would please The Inner Mom, but accidents

Happen to others now, and he has leaked

And spilled his substance on Aisle 17.

His sepsis seeps away, and all his toys.

The Wells of Time

 

This will transport you to the elder times,

Fire like slabs of meat and smells so strong
They pound the air in dactyls. In a pinch
You can recite your “Please, Sir, send me home,”
There where the heart is, but no wolverines
Or kettles of boiling grease or water nymphs.
What would you give to have your teeth decay
Authentically, to wear a powdered wig,
To spread your plot with nightsoil, or to fetch
A fair price on the open market? Home
Is what you looked like when you were a boy;
But now you’re not. Now you could almost stay
Old as the hills when hills were young, and you
Were cold and muddy. Please, Sir, send me home.

That’s Rory For You

The bugs have their names, too. This one is Rory.

His life was hard and brief. No winged glory Surmounts its end; a splintered carapace Hangs in no hall. He found it no disgrace To die of snow and never tell his story, Nor knew he had a point. And that was Rory.

Nothing of the Kine: An Idyll

 

Horrors, the lazy currents seem to spell

Saxon-ish imprecations on the pond.
Pathetic in their fallacies, the frogs
Croak in distaste; the serried midges form
An arrow pointing at the horrid words,
The word made wet, a stranger in their mist.
If words could kill, we all would die, the cow
Observes beyond her fence. She has been told
All cows eat grass. I don't know if that's true,
She tells her stablemate, but why take chances?
I wager it is so, and so I eat.
Grass is its own reward. The shrieking pond
Is turtle-proud, but in a world of woe,
We keep to beaten ways, as best we can,
And distance ourselves from the shellfish sort,
The gravitas-less insects, and the fowl;
But, oh, how the amphibious betray
Lack of commitment. Low, she says. We're born,
And no one knows a single thing thereafter.

The Tempest

 

The air is full of music, but the isle

Gets bad reception. Under every rock
Scamper the grubs that were somebody else--
Will be again. The Ghost of Christmas Past
Or The Nobel Prizewinner for the Blues.
Thrones go unoccupied, but fires set
At twilight smell of camphor, and great moths
Sing little liebestods while sailing in.
The stars are green. True love never runs smooth,
But walks at a brisk pace. The wind blows warm
Across the bay, where seals on plaster rocks
Snore gently, dreaming dreams of fish. The eyes
Of magi close as well. The roads are waxed:
Young lovers slip away, concealed by mist
Imported just for them. It rains and rains.
It rains and rains, and ships capsize, the crews
Borne to the shore on water wings. They find
The aborigines, diaphanous
In raindrops, dancing pas de deux, de trois,
Wrapped round themselves and singing, Liberty.

The House the Hoarder Had

It’s 90 in the shade. The hawthorn shares

Its leaves, its thorns, botanical debris,

And squirrels and does it all ungrudgingly,

All without affect. If it thinks, it thinks

Of roots and where they’re headed, of the nice

Vitreous clay pipe a little to the south,

Not of the hoarder and the house she had

Across the street. Tornadoes would have loved it.

The ambience was right, the floor a blitz

Of concrete, mud, and glass. It showed no shame

And more shade, even, than the hawthorn tree;

And shades await, if all the tales are true,

Across the tracks from piles of beauty books,

Tampon boxes, milk of magnesia sweet

As locust shells, and bags of dried-up pens.

The hawthorn leaves are planning for October. 

Do Not Touch: Display Only

The lintel of my door declares

Timor mortis conturbat me,

But only for display. Inside,

The folks are busy brewing tea

And snacking on what Christmas left

Behind—dry turkey sandwiches

And lebkuchen. Eggnog is not

A morning-after sort of thing.

Today's the day we roll our eyes

And smirk, superior, then betray,

And throw the calendar away.

Remembering Eden

         this appeared in Staple

It isn't that the oranges tasted better

or that the dust that fell across the shafts

of morning sun were something more than dirt.

We're made of motes here too, and here the sky

changes for eve, changes for morning. Though

the grass was growing when the sword was sheathed,

we are not missing all of Paradise.

I've told the story now so many times

I don't think I remember how it happened,

when I woke up with that stitch in my side

and she alongside. It still makes a good story.

What I do remember is how we made

the lamb eat avocados. Who would think

a sheep could pull a face? So here I am,

Father of Man, and dignified by years,

a tale in my possession no one else

could match but she, who is herself the tale,

and all I have to tell are anecdotes.

What stays when the emotion drains away

is this moment and that, the lamb, a bath,

Abel's first laugh, when he saw his first chicken.

The New Roadmap

 

I lived here once.  I know

which streets went where. I ran

where this lane starts to go

to the left, where it began

to carry another name.

So I am not impressed

by maps. It's not the same,

your sketch. I think you messed

up my reality.

Where's Archer? Appleton?

The dogleg at du Pres?

I know now what you've done,

you've gone to see what's there.

You stood on my home ground

as is. That wasn't fair;

taking a look around

alters the memory.

It warps the past. It preys

on what we say we see,

It relocates what stays

to houses, then to maps,

till we avert our eyes,

as though all routes collapse

below misfigured skies.

U Before I

 

To you a letter. How about q,

Always followed by u, as I

Follow the mark for hay and Hensa?

Too oblique, I know. I know it

Follows, not p to o, but where

We all align, in tidied rows,

Where there are diphthongs we can share,

On monuments a line or less.

O, I say, O. But no one gapes.

They keep, instead, their final shapes.

12 lines. Or several hundred more.

And never again what came before.

Graved For Me

Around the corner, where I cannot see,
I see you waiting, haute couture in verse,
Lines I cannot remember on your face,
Deep, but not embellished, and a bright
Hyperbole of allusion in your eyes.
Around the corner.   Where I cannot see.

What Was In My Pockets Last Night When I Undressed

 

My keys, a pocketknife, the Pietà,

A handkerchief, a poopkit, and a friend

Of Héloïse, who said that Abelard

Was boring, but intense—no mix for men.

And 32¢.  Too little to apprise

A grateful nation of my whereabouts,

A paltriness made for a piggybank;

But I was out of pigs, apparently,

And when I dropped my pants, nobody cared

Enough to hang them up, preserve the crease

For sales meetings, in case there was a need

For Pietàs or handkerchiefs or knives.

Song

When thin recruits come pushing up   

   And sun spreads through the soil
And puddles in the footprints gleam
   And shake like hopkins-foil
And dreams of leaving lift the hands
   Of boys with homespun hope,
Then boundless scope and fluid shape
   Of green and possible escape
   Make the blossoms boil;

And color is the consequence,
   The road a second sky.
The tethered and the tedious,
   Exasperated by
Their dun and tan and beige and sand,
   Begin to feel obscurely hurt.
   Spring thrives by root and dirt.

Not Conversion

 

One of the elderberries of the tribe,

Domitable, but tart. What I expected—

No, never mind. Not more or less and less,

Less saucy than a pilgrim berry. Drop

The bogs. They are not coming back. The old

Berries are what we call a souvenir,

The madeleine of fruit trees, for the loss,

The least instructive, dispersal of the juice,

The streetwise remnant abandoning the street,

Forswearing home and all that garden truck,

The radish and the relish on the vine,

The creepers and the hoe, the rake and rose.

The First Hotel

The first hotel

Where the angels did stay

Was a Holiday Inn

On South Broadway.

They brought their own myrrh.

They brought their own gold.

The frankincense was

The stories they told.

They phoned out for shepherds,

They prayed for an ox.

It’s a Wonderful Life,

They watched on the box,

But the straw in the manger

Projected a blaze

They could see from their room.

And it burned days and days.

They never got close.

They sang from afar.

And they spent all their myrrh

On drinks at the bar,

Till their halos dispersed

Like the peal of a bell,

And the stories flowed out

From the First of Noel.

Jenny Kissed Me

 

What of that? I'm not alone,
Tasting rose and bubble gum.
Years and boys, there must be some.
Some I hate, some unknown,
Time has made them dry and dumb.

Under clocks and amber trees,
What they think of in their years,
Ever Jenny, never nears.
All who did their best to please,
Kissed and captured, cold and tears,

Distant smiling, fresh and close,
These are flushed as any flower.
Real and given to the hour,
Jenny kissed me. No one knows
Jenny distant. All that power.

from Days of Our Lives

 13

At the hoity-toity entrance to the George
Cinq, a grand guy, looking George his own
self, opens the door, and bows me inside,
past Ms Deneuve or Ms Bardot or someone,
a U-Drive sabled hooker, as it happens.
The desk sneers at my jeans and cowboy boots,
just as he ought, unmottled by abuse
in perfect idiomatic French. He waves
a boy over--this creaking, spavined geezer
buttoned up like an organ-grinder's monkey.
He barely lifts my beat-up leather gladstone.
The concierge scowls, but blushes as I pass,
Bardot attentive to the suite assigned.
I hear this on the Middle Fork of the Salmon,

14
the yarning boatman bitching that his degree
in fluvial geomorphology
wasn't worth a sou in Paris, grinning
that he'd said, "sou." Explaining to a dude
that this entire valley had been dug
as part of a WPA project by
starving painters and that the river flowed
under the ocean, hooking up with China,
he said that the worst was, when she finished up
and smoothed her francs into her reticule,
she wanted to discuss her pension plan
and whether ECUs would appreciate
against the yen. Them Frogs, he said, and spat
his plug against the current, steering right.

Burritos Before Bed

Damned by the first and undressed by the next,

Preferred by neither, settled for by both,

This may not be true love. But then who is?

Juliet is dead and hadn’t yet begun

To grasp Home Ec nor rallied over pep:

It’s Die or Dulcinea for the rest;

And blanketed by down at two a.m.,

I don't know which is worse, I who have watched

The best and brightest looking somewhere else.

We are what we have overlooked, neglected,

Misprisions of vanity. At two

They all seem just the same, no rapprochement,

Walking reproaches, fuzzy and opaque.

I doubt that I am falling back asleep.

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.