But no tote bags

I am considering a pledge drive for RHEpoems.blogspot.com. The goal would be to raise readers, not money.  Perhaps I could raise some minor Cavalier poets, although they're probably afflicted with I'll Read One of Yours, If You'll Read One of Mine Syndrome, and theirs are all about ale and girdles.

Ideal for Ferns

Last time I went out on the town they didn’t

Just rent my room or box my books downstairs,
Pamper a pauper’s feet with my worn socks,
Or give my parka to a banker’s brat.
They sold my dog. They shot my desk. They dialed
My radio to Sister Carmen Todd,
The Bride of Pop. My mom declared me dead.
“He’s dead,” she said. “I do declare.” They made
My car a planter: somehow, they observed,
A hatchback is ideal for ferns. They mist
The ferns. They painted my pine bedstead white
And hung some Jesus where I used to sleep.
His eyes will track you if you try to rest
There now, but no one will. They mist their ferns.
The air must turn the color of balloons.

Not Far Behind

Spring on the horizon, the nightbird says.

I’m here, you know, not going anywhere.
It’s in the offing, spring is. Blackwing says,
We’re here for the duration. Longtemps is
Our middle name. Now bring the car around.
We’ll soon fill it with primroses and peepers.
We feed when you’re asleep, the jetblack says,
And never seem to get enough to eat.

When you just can't get enough

You know, if my posts here don't suffice to fill you up, you can find more of me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/richard.epstein.3) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/rhepstein1), even, rather more infrequently, on Ello (https://ello.co/rhepstein).  But if you are pressed for time (or not all that interested), it's the poems which really matter.

Security at an Exhibition

We stand where we are stood, assigned to fill

A vacuum till the posh begetters come.
Trust us for that. The portraits say their names,
Whereas our labels are not blessed with art
Or opulence. From pockets we spill keys
And gummi bears and Zippos from the war,
Absent the ruffs and velvet hats. Our skies
Are free of putti, pennies in a jar
Betray no pudgy burgher here. We stare,
But are not scanned. We are the dragons now,
Extant beyond the borders of the frame;
And look at this one, gilt and dark and grime:
The demigods are falling from the trees
Like caterpillars, waiting for the change.

The Good Die Young

The good die young. Will you not try

To be good temporarily?

Epstein's Constant

This also appeared in Orbis.

I’ll call this Epstein’s Constant.  It implies

the angle of the vision from the man.

It imports paraendrocrinology

into aesthetics via sense of touch.

It makes all macroeconomics just.

By Epstein’s Constant all girls understand

all boys, and boys occasionally know

something about one girl, if they apply

themselves.  And Epstein’s Constant.  When you view

the stars through Epstein’s Constant on clear nights,

Magellan’s Cloud will match both Decalogue

And the Decameron in tone and luster,

measured against whatever scale you like.

It never changes. (I said it was constant.)

It knows no history and yet applies

To what your mother told your father you

told your teacher.  Although it will not bend,

applied to love it usually finds

the path most sinuous between two points.

Dead Grandpa, He Dead

from The Complete Dead Grandpa

Goose, gander, ducat, duchess, dead dead dead,
and nothing you can say will bring me back,
nor cumulo-nimbus fleece floating atone
for birthday candles blown or naked gifts
on disco-lit parquet. Dead. Dead is croaked,
frogs on a spit, Achilles in the pit,
and ordinary Me blue in the face,
a little while at least. The high-toned art,
allusive and annoying, leaves me cold.
I'd rather be a butcher in Portales
than talked about in Paradise, where odes
are picayune accomplices of dirt.

And Beets and Pickled Okra

The pantry is a cool and cedar-lined

Room in the basement where we keep the jars
We do not need right now, but someday might.
(It hasn’t happened yet, but who can tell.)
Preserves, we call them, as if that would keep
Them biohazard-free. I think they wait
For evolution. In the night I hope
To be preserved, but I know better now,
Awake. To be a boy of 17,
A damson plum with paraffin on top
To save me from my nature—-string beans grow
Pale in their darkened room: they will not turn
To tap dancers or unicyclists if
They do not break their seals. Though tubers chant
The virtues of sequestered, reddened roots,
They do not grow, and if they did, they’d drown.

Raising Expectations

Given some rope, they've torn the statues down

To piss on legendary heads, the groins
Bedecked in amaryllis and ablaze.
(Who would have guessed that amaryllis burns,
And colorfully?) The shoppers fill their carts
With freebies. (Who'd have guessed they wanted phones
Far more than sandwiches?) The songs they sing
Are short on lyric wordplay, long on scat.
We made no plans to emigrate, but have
Our havens in the hinterlands, where treats
Are plastic shoes on Sundays, where delight
Is puddings made of pigs and doughty men
Pray to the forest just because it's there.
(Who knew that gods had green cards or that wolves
Wanted our wives for bon-bons in the smoke?)

Travelling Exhibition

appeared in The Shit Creek Review

Room by room they packed up the museum.
They filled the armored suits with porcelain,
The urns with lesser urns. They wrapped the busts
In bubble paper, squeezing now and then
Mini-explosions, just for fun, like Queen
Victoria's little wars. The paintings posed
A problem. Smaller ones in plastic sacks,
That would just do; but 19th-century
Gigantists--lacking room enough and twine,
Necessity made them inverts, hauled them out,
Hoping for fair and fine. It took a while.
The Judgement of Solomon, a red and gold
Simeon Smythe, took 12 old men to tote,
Curators with post-docs and 3 rosettes
Amongst them. When they propped the painting back
Against the mini-van to rest, it glowed.
A minion in the right foreground held out
A scimitar, prepared to bisect babes
On the command. One of the old men said,
Where is a minion where you really need one?
They left a head of Nero on the roof.
It sneered and skittered as they took the turn.

On the Border

The river flowed with blood and sparkling water,
side by side and travelling fast, unmixed.
On the far bank, lilies and pink petunias;

on mine, roses the size and hue of mothballs.
Hot here, cool showed off there.  Grasses waist high
bobbed and rebounded under a light breeze.

There, a sign the Unforgiven could read:
IF YOU'D BEEN GOOD, YOU'D ALREADY BE HERE.
I read; like my compatriots, I laughed.

The dust administered a shock.  I bled
and laughed no more.  Heaven constructs its own
retaliatory tools.  Nobody asked

me to repent, too late, too late.  I tried
to break my fast, but could not prise apart
the breadfruit package issued me.  When Might

combines with Milk, the bad, the weak, the blamed
had better fast.  Unhoped.  All Hell is still.
Nowhere, we are not going Anywhere.

A Greek Tragedy

Chorus announces: See how all is made

Proper and tidy-like. The gods abhor
Disorder. It's at tit-for-tat they stand
Up, and the stars are symbols on a vest
Of justice. Be amazed and be content.

The Elderly Man protests: It isn't so.
The baby rabbits die before they blink,
And fatty deposits in the blood of queens,
Glamorous, doomed, gone to the mattresses,
Knock them as dead as crones. Don't talk to me.

Chorus replies: All righty, then. We won't.

Why me? Why here?

Every day at least a couple readers arrive here via something called claritywritingexperts.com, the exceptionally dull website of a UK-based service, which, for a fee, will teach you how to be a ghostwriter, copywriter, etc.  (Picture mock frisson of horror.)  Although I can find on it no hint as to how people are referred from there to here, I guess I ought to say thanks.

Thanks.

In Time of Plague

This appeared in Lyric.

This morning there were microbes on my walk,
Said Alex, and I swept, then scrubbed. I smell
Invasion, which is not repelled by talk.
He power-washed his porch. I wished him well.

Affliction has no limits. In the trees
Bats plot the overthrow of priest and peasant.
The grass is crowded with bug-born disease:
Ants march, and they will not make conquest pleasant.

I wash my hands of this. And that. The soap
Is dirty now, though Alex claims a cure:
One quart ammonia, sublimated hope,
A heart that’s tainted, latex gloves too pure

For dirt’s adhesion. Listen to the song
Of angry grackles: armies in the sky
Will drop their worms upon us before long,
Then move into the rumpus room and die.

You Can't Change the Past Because It's Already Happened

This plank is now a plank for good, no, not

A tree. This wormhole is a parasite
Egressing, not a door through sap and time.
I never kissed her. I can’t climb a tree
Parquet out at 13 Hibiscus Drive,
Hidden Valley RanchoLand, 2nd Stage.
I never jumped her bones. This little chip,
Ready to cast a splinter, will not burst
Into untidy nests this spring. Its roots
Have been recalled. No reset for her touch
Or faith in promises. The bark cannot
Be squeezed from sarsaparilla. In my time
A tree fell, and I heard it. I was there.

Readership

Reposted from 2009.  Not much has changed.  FB has helped a bit because I can point people here --  ☞ This way to the Egress.    But if you look for comments, you still won't find them.  It remains true that most of my visitors are accidentals: they Googled "What is Dead Wabbit," and were offered this.

I: But people not named Epstein do too read here, at least occasionally.

Other: They don't, you know. Well, there are a couple regular nutters, I admit that, but only a very few, and they're all elderly shut-ins who talk  energetically to their cats and their hand-tinted portraits of the Queen Mum.

I: There are others, I'm almost certain. You can tell by looking at the map of the most recent "visitors."

Other: Oh, yes--you mean the folks who arrive here by Googling "poems about friction," "poems about recently deceased grandfather," "manifest destiny poem," "short blank verse poem," and "what does elegy in country churchyard mean." They are accidentals; they don't mean to be here, and they don't stay. Have you noticed that when Katy and Rebecca and Trish put up posts, they are pounded by replies? And where are your equivalents then?

I: But they're all...well, they aren't like me in some critical respects.

Other: You were going to say, "They're girls," weren't you?

I: No. Not me. Not ever. They're bright and talented and interesting writers.

Other: Oh, so that's how they differ from you.

I: Never mind. You win. I lose. It's all true. This is the blogging equivalent of vanity pressing your books, the Blogspot version of the Vantage Press. But it's a harmless outlet for my excess energies. Who knows what I might be doing, were it not for this.

Other: Spraying funereal distiches on the underpass, standing on the corner with a hand-lettered sign, "Villanelles for food. God Bless." That sort of thing?

I: No doubt. No doubt at all.

Other: And the last time you had any "excess energies," The Temptations and The Four Tops were in the Top 10.

I: Dayenu. I concede. Let me get back to being obscure.

Other: Who?

Safe

The first snowdrops are showing.
Carol loved them dearly,
Under all that snowing.
Carol marked them yearly,
Said when they'd appear,
"Through another season, safe another year."

Petronius Arbiter

A blackboard in his living room, a black
Thesaurus on a little, dirty rug,
And he asleep, a Laz-Y-Boy reclined,
Declined, perhaps, as so so many more--
Busts and the battered stragglers of the 10th
Battalion in the wood above Saint-Just,
Horns and the heads who used to wear them out,
Nuns and rabbinic doctors with a plague
Of middlesex intelligence: declined.
Baseball season upon him, though, he stirs,
Changes the channel, sits up straight, and prays
That umpires will be pure, dispassionate,
And equal to the call, the sons of men
Watched by their daughters, much less than they were.

Kindergarten In Hell

That's the mess. When the brass bell rings,
You find a seat. There's prayers and things,
And then you eat. It tastes like crap.
And then there's prayers. And then you nap.
And then comes story time. You hear
Isaac and Ishmael. The mere
Mention of Lucifer gets you spanked.
You do some chores, for which you're thanked
In homilies--Elisha's bears,
Perhaps. Confession. And then prayers.