The Pastorale

 

This appeared in Angle. I have altered it slightly since then.

Down by the river the trout are laying bets

Per croquet hoop. They swear like Fielding fish--

Damme this and Bloody that. They're old ones

With cheeks that frogs would eat. Here unafraid,

They list to port and pass it to the left

And praise the neighbors' sheep and curse the day

Electric lights infested county skies.

Crooks, not hooks, still in the adverse flow,

They praise monogamy, but that's a joke

Told when women go the separate way

Appropriate. They do not fear the fly,

A thumb upon their scales, or lemon sauce.

These are the myths told small fry. They are men.

Cherry Blossoms

 

Focus, they say, and Bof'us, someone laughs;

But crocus is what they mean, and inching through

A yard like iron, just before the daffs,

They make a spring. The spring remembers you

Under the cherry, blossoms in your hair

And dress too small to make a handkerchief.

It's you, and you are never ever there.

Some jocund flowers beggar all belief.

Let summer burn them down. Let the sweet grass

Give itself up to desiccate and dirt.

All memories decay, and cherries pass.

Bof'us, they say, and laugh until they hurt.

The ice is melting, all that broken glass

A spring in motion and the past inert.

That Old Black Magic

 

Ants, they may whisper, but they’re hoping for
Something preposterous, something more the size
Of Cincinnati, something which can catch
A mortgage in mid-air and snap its neck.
They may say shadows, even in the dark,
But what they mean are little men with knives,
Carving their names in the venetian blinds,
Altering light. Dressed up they may exude
The confidence of snipers, but they wear
An amulet of frog hair on each wrist,
Boasting that they walked miles to cure DTs.
Under the bed the suitcase is packed, the tag
Tied with a chain cased in a plastic sleeve,
Directing it to To Whom It May Concern.

It Doesn't Scan

 

On the east coast of that unheated isle

A tribe of girls survives whose creed consists

Chiefly of singing Happy Fathers' Day

To someone else's father. No males found,

Which makes their culture something of a glitch.

Essentially they beat their boys and float

Young women out to sea at menstruation.

They mate with wind. We do not understand.

The central islanders claim their descent

From great Odysseus. Their Bronze Age rites

Are pure enough to justify their claim,

They know so many chanties about axe-

Hacked thews of sailors; but they haven’t heard

Of boats, making their worship of wet gods

Ironical and plausible and high

Fun for the Left Coast credit-carding clans

Who hold their wives in common, but who keep

Their cowries to themselves. The wives have heard

Reports of the East Coast; though misinformed,

They yearn to ship their kids to school back there.

Solstice Song

 

1 Angels think of little of consequences

on mornings like this, cold like steel thawing.

Singing chorales so old they sound avant-

us to mortal tympani, they rejoice

all over my clean walk. If snow could sing,

it would sing like this, crooning in low brass.

2 The Wise Men travelled in 3s. Stooges, too,

and Blind Mice. Whereas, the Angels keep watch

in companies, recruit the clergy, old

old women whose grandsons went up in flames,

and pods, squads, prides, and bright congregations.

We are well cared for in our ignorance.

3 You write from the Berkshires that all is well,

your husband having found a new wife, more

than 1/3 his age, and your sleep unmarred

by magic realism. An Angel, dressed

as a weather vane, surmounts your peaked roof

and chortles. Alleluia. All is Clear.

4 Through these white nights we trail crimson roses,

Ariadne's string. The Angels retrieve

them, smell them, watch them fade, flowers bestowed

on cheek and breast, but temporarily.

Our sin was not forever, but will do.

Steel gives way. And snow, caught by the great spruce.

Yo, Muse

 

Either because you're visiting

other, meritless versifiers

or because you’re trapped in a holding

pattern on your quills, I haven’t heard

much from you lately. The lamp’s been on,

my study casement has been unlatched;

but you’ve been off, I guess, teaching gaunt

refugees new names for old sorrows

or at Oxbridge again, haunting quads,

looking for lost honors. The floor’s swept

here, cushions plumped, and the bedskirts tucked

up. Warm milk, thick port, cheesy biscuits,

all are handy, but the oak bookshelves

are warping, and the old bindings crack

in this backwater clime. As for you,

my pretty, what else have I to do

but wait for a slot to open up

in your grey kidskin Life At A Glance?

A Poem for the Girls Writing All Those Poems

 

So you picture yourself

in a cream satin t-shirt

writing a poem about

you writing a poem about

your cream satin t-shirt,

how when he breaks in

on you writing a poem about

writing a poem about

your cream satin t-shirt,

he’ll be so excited

about you so excited

about writing a poem

about him so excited,

he’ll shred the damn t-shirt,

sweep you and your poem

right off your futon

and someone will publish

your poem because it is

true as a t-shirt,

besides which, the paper

is cream, like the t-shirt.

And, smooth as it is,

the poem you’re writing

about writing a poem,

who needs the boy?

Or if he shows up,

while you’re still in your t-shirt,

all cream and all satin,

who needs the poem?

News of the World

 This appeared in Candelabrum.

Mr Paul Riley of Decatur writes

to say strange doings have invested his

quiet suburban neighborhood, Sea Views.

Middle to upper-middle class, he says

Sea Views is, mostly ranch-style homes, two-car

garages, lots of grass, and too few trees.

Mostly professionals, says Mr Riley,

chiropodists and CPAs, their kids

and lives no different than yours, he says—

which doesn't make them good, only familiar.

Well, we say that; to tell the truth, he didn't.

Fourteen police calls in the last two months,

all for the same offense, if that it is:

a misshaped man running across the rooftops

in tarry night, clomping over the shingles,

those blue asbestos ones, heavy of foot,

but featly nonetheless, and leaping far

to span the voids between the houses, too

broad of a space for any man to jump.

Det. Abercrombie says he has

no clues, no evidence, no damage done—

not even a crime exactly, just an upset:

a man, if man he be, where none belongs.

Det. Abercrombie doesn't like them,

anomalies in Sea Views, when the whole

point of a Sea View is to get away

from aberrations, which are doing well

and thriving, thank you, in the bigger city,

if that is what Decatur is, and, no,

Det. Abercrombie didn't say that.

So, if you have some information bearing

on running rooftop gargoyles in the States,

(we'll rain in gold on you for photographs),

call us no charge, 1-800-BIG NEWS.

And, Mr Riley, please, sir, keep in touch.

3. The Lines Are Drawn

 The third of "3 for the Trees"

The line is as if drawn there on the ground,

the trees above, the grass and house below,

as though by nature planned to be a sound

demarcator of how far we should go:

here you may live, here visit, though it's true

our living room expands some every year.

A little firewood, a yule or two,

a few more of the sentries disappear.

The deer, of course, were gone last century,

and now the stove has claimed the elder oak.

Perhaps the odd, covert raccoon can see

the vestige of it going up in smoke.

It isn't that we hate what isn't ours,

and no one here needs to bring in a crop.

It's just the way we tell off ancient powers

who dared advise us where we ought to stop.

2. Finally Today

 The second of "Three for the Trees."

Finally today the trees

shook off their leaves to go it bare.

They'd had enough remembering.

There will be cold, and they prepare,

attentive to the nth degrees,

by shucking off the last of spring.

In brazen shapes of disregard

they rustle and they flinch, but stay.

Their gift is doing what is hard

as well as they do anything.

1. Apple & Oak

 The first of three poems, collectively "Three for the Trees."

The apple trees stay close together, far

as possible from the oak trees which look down

upon those wind-spun blossoms. Though they are

communicants in pollen, though renown

would greet oak/apples, if they only could,

they won't. Unheeding acorns, apples grow

a little sour, while the oaks make wood

from dirt, then slowly leave the dirt below.

They draw no moral, neither leave. They sieve

the same brown air and replicate their kind,

but do not share, they do not change. They give

no sense they have each other much in mind.

What apple does for oak tree is not clear.

From rooms across the way, though, people frame

them in one scene, glad that they stand so near,

one sight, one kind, called by a common name.

The Dead On Arrival

 

The number of the dead in Pasadena

Exceeds the grasp of man. Who would believe

You couldn't fit another body in

Another hole, the green so green, a sponge

Extended to its fullest? And the dead

Continued to arrive. From Ypsilanti,

Louisa, Chillicothe, and Gig Harbor,

The dead, the poor, the affluent, the dead

Came rolling in like breakers, but the shore

Declined their cold attentions. Thank you, no,

The living said, and didn't say much more,

The declinations, courteous, ignored.

So many, light, and losing heft, their last

Ride a return. Where was that ticket home?

The Desuetude of Mr James

 

Wry Mr James commits enormities

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.

Here It Is

 

Here is a list of what I can't remember—

I'm kidding, of course. No, wait. Here is a list.

What time it was. How old I was. Who came

And what she brought. The capital of Chi.

The publication dates of What's-His-Name

And when I hit him. All the horses' men.

Pringles & Funyuns. All the rabbi's girls.

The Queen of Hearts and Blackjack Mulligan.



To few of these have I been reconciled.

I shall not steal your money, and your wife

Is safe if I'm awake. A coral reef,

Teeming with spirits, angelfish and clowns—

Did I see that, or was it someone's book,

Lost in the fires of '71, the last

Post just before the world grew up and left,

The bitter end of something bittersweet? 

Over Land

 

What is the sound of Puget in the fall?

It seems to be an owl who doesn’t show

What or when or why or where. Below

His wings no squeak escapes the wood. The call

Of the meek, the gently terrified, the bland

Seed-swallowers, is wishful in the dark:

That they had never occupied the land,

But joined the doves escaping from the ark

To anywhere. None of the toothsome tots

Asks for a story. Tell me nothing more,

They say. We already have lots and lots

To share. Pray with us to the predator.

The owl is looking at the looming shore

And pivots towards a land of limbs and knots.

Changing the Sheets

 

There is a part of me that can’t explain

Why I don’t see you when I make the bed

A better place. Unoccupied, of course,

By armies of the night and model men

Who pose in airbrushed attitudes, but me,

I lurk there, looking down, on rumpled quilts

And foolscap sheets, when percale would have done.

A foreword and an afterward, but you

Escape the text of time, the asterisk

I loved, for which the bottom of the page

Could not suffice. Erasure. Foot notes. Grace.

A sequel which the star declined to make.

Old Kings and Things

Ignominy thwarts both

King Cyrus and his cook,
Whose name was Xx3.
I know, I know, you took

King Cyrus 101
And learned him in detail.
You had him for your tea.
You bought his socks on sale.

His bedpan holds your soup.
His cook is dust and hair
And someone’s sidewalk salt
And someone’s Dutch au pair.

Your Cyrus is an art.
His cook is a disguise.
It rains their blood and bones,
And slaves fall from the skies,

And children in their beds
Cwtch up to ancient kings.
Old dogs on counterpanes

Bark at transparent things.

The Levellers

 

They clobbered the delphiniums and turned

Them underground. They made the sedum pay

For blooming late and changeably--One Plant,

One Hue, they chanted as they beat them up

And down. We named the battered garden Mud,

The sit-in by the sundial, while the birds

Enjoyed the spoils of spoliation, Worms

For Everyone. And everyone a Worm.

They came back in the spring with bitter breath

And threw their rotten carrots at the gnomes,

The real ones, elder statesmen, not ceramic

Cutiepies. They pissed on the fallen leaves.

And they looked hungry, empty hearted, spent,

As though their gods just really hadn’t cared.

Meanwhile, On The Coast

         O heilige St florian verschon mein Haus, zund andre an

Maybe it's not exactly candlelight.

Stars are lights, too, and burning yews, and yours,

Fire consumes. Light kills a little bit.

Darkness is cool. It grows, They say, and Time

Chooses the side of nothing. Figures. Got

Nothing? Invest it. Darkness futures pay

Dividends, if some more of what you have

Is what you want. Or burn a little light.

See clearly what is going on for now.

Wood burns because it's meant to, full of ash,

The forest made of fire-stuff. The streams

Are water-soluble, the hills are hard

To fathom. Which old Greek said fire starts

Your day, your every day, your morning toast?

When wind smells like end of days, your house

Is green belt in potentia, the song

The sky is singing, Burn your baby, burn.

This appeared in Pens on Fire.

Jeopardy!

     Millard Fillmore

Fame is fleeting. A bubble. A male duck.
What is that green head, shining in the sun,
doing here on this inland parking lot,
carrying on like some deaf alto, crying
as mournfully as Thomas Wolfe in flight
and waddling to boot? Oh, ghost, come back,
be lost again. What is obscurity?

    Babe Ruth

The summer you remembered me you ate
candy bars like—like candy, sure. Oh, Henry.
We lay on that bed in that apartment maybe
714 times. When you
came up long on your period, you left
to take a walk. I am not waiting now.
I think that you aren't coming back. Who walked
and struck out more than any other player?

    The Venus de Milo

It was a dark and stormy night. We fell
back along the line. We walked. Some wept.
Jesus wept. The tracers lit up the dark.
I thought of you. I thought. I didn’t know
the name of the man on either side or if
they thought of beauty when they wet themselves.
Oak Park, Illinois is extremely distant.
And clean, too. What is A Farewell to Arms?

    The Daily Double/The Dead Sea

You can’t sink if you try. You have your own
specific gravity. Padlock and chain
will float like plastic tub toys, but, the smell
will certainly remind you, you are here,
awake and fettered, not because you are
rectitude personified and beloved.
What will occur on Resurrection Day?

    Browning

An alary formation, sounds of which
barely achieve us groundlings. Straight due north,
the last person who saw you said you were
headed. He told me, leaning on his rake,
trying to tidy up the harm he’d done
the grass, which only wanted to grow longer.
Point of view is everything. The absent
decline to state theirs. Have them, though. What is
a good idea before you cook your goose?

    Final Jeopardy/Julius Caesar

Eppie can be affectionate. Or not.
Tone of voice makes its contribution. Mal
grand, petit; but mal afflicts us all,
the seizure of the mind. The child is old
enough to have its own child now, if child
was there when you reached there and built Dun Roamin’.
The noblest roaming of them all, but we
who drew our cloaks over our heads and died
forever in one morning needed no
umpire to announce if we’d been fair
or brutish. Who, to poets’ betterment,
died at the hands of friends and made a name
synonymous with dynasty? Et tu?