Garden Plot

PHYLLIS
Come, leave your tools, those blades and hoses.
There have been daisies, will be roses,
Whether you feed and clip and spray.
Sufficient flowers strew the day
In which we laugh, while overhead
The sun approves when clouds are bred;
Gather you hoses: now I stay.
Tomorrow I may be away.

CORYDON
You will be gone, like every she
Of every plant and every me.
Each flower fades; no flower cares,
Caught by the frost and unawares
That frost took Mom and Pop and Sis,
Took first that neighbor, then plucked this,
And will take you. As well you know.
If you must leave, well, all must go.
I shall come later. Come I will.
A garden grows where we keep still.

PHYLL.
You unappreciating drone.
If I be gone, and you alone,
I’ll find a mate who strokes and clucks.
Your hand is empty. When it plucks
A rose, the rose dissolves. The dew
Runs by your fingertips. Me too.

CORY.
Alone God made the gardener first,
His rising state, and not his worst.
I’ve been alone with these before,
Not less with you. Not any more.
If you push on, then I must turn
The water on. My roses burn.

PHYLL.
O little man, you spray too much.
Kid gauntlets on, you lose your touch.
Plants love like us; earth claims us all:
Rise with the spring, in autumn, fall.
You’ll make a fine mulch, fat and pure:
But love comes late, and death is sure.
Come straight inside: be quick, be bent.

CORY.
The roses speak: I hear the scent;
And I shall come before I go.

PHYLL.
How sweet the prick

CORY.
When roses blow.

Sonnet

Across the bay there must be people washing
And cleaning bathroom grout and drinking tea.
There must be pastors painstakingly crushing
Hormonal eloquence; but I can't see
Through all that fog and curvature. Despite
Long reading in patristic poetry,
I'd rather they were stomping on their fate
Than knitting bills and purling dirt. Like me.

Let them smash windows. Let them all eat cake
And fart like camels. Let them swive like heroes.
I've had as much of me as I can take,
The careful serrying of ones and zeros.
Let them dance jigs. Let them curvette and break
Upon their shores like Abelards. And Neros.

Manifest Destiny

So difficult, the stones keep changing sides,
And the path gets lost, ambitious, but confused.
Like immigrants in flannel shirts. In Texas.
Once knowing where it was, it was The Way
To Grandma’s House or Candyland or Memphis,
A Middle Kingdom where the blues were born.
It took them to the library; it led
A dick to be a mayor, sometimes birds
In talking trees; and it was Far from Home.
Now, it declares for tessellated mud.

Around each other, kids in pjs, dark
Where light should be, all damp instead of cocoa.
They miss their path. They were supposed to be
Mapquested to a city on the hill,
Where brioche stands and wiener carts and sweet
Ravioli salesmen advertised life.
This is more like the Chiller Double Thriller,
Without the ads for English, She Is Simple.
This is a nightlight, cold, with extra teeth.
Not every little boy can be a prince.
Not every waitress wants to marry up.

The 7th Avenue Historic District

Up and down the street,

Committing daily errands,
Jogging, biking, joking,
My proximate gerunds.

The neighbors. They look busy.
So much ado to do.
I sit out front and read
Of romance and virtù.

But stay when I am placed.
I do not jog or joke.
Deflecting passion's flame,
I do not burn. I smoke.

Of that they disapprove,
Although they never say so.
They move along. I sit,
Half like them, and I stay so.

Shangri-La

If you’ve observed the IT ants prepare

Their toolkits, then it’s time to take a hike.

The summits where the spectacled bear holds forth

On Can’t & Kant, where wild bees value most

Black honey, jelly royals, and labor laws,

They’re good. Caves for a cloister, that might work;

But there, above the clouds, there are no gods,

No nymphs whose every kiss is percocet.

You’re on your own. The bear says, If you can,

You must. (He speaks in German, but you get

His drift. Where there are flowers, we must fail.)

His spirit leaves no footprints in the stream.

Against the Wall

All that remains, the beasts having declined,
Is chum and chow, the wrinkles on one's feet
Smoothed by contraction, the lively little girls
Gone blonde from red, then white from blonde, at last
Telling lies of yore and splendiferous
Kindergarten snacks. It was a bad time.
We ate our ration cards. We had for sex
A kind of contempt. I saw a skeleton
Banging another up against the wall
And was not tempted. When our hetman sought
My vote for alderman, I told him, Once
I rode a horse across an undulate
And singing field, which he wrote down as Yes.

Before the Prologue

They rode on palfreys or on mules. He said,

It’s April. When it’s April …showers. None
Impelled, he let them fall asleep, to prompt
Them further, with a look at cherry trees
And battlements and rivers full of geese.
Remember March? he asked. It was so dry–
So how dry was it? asked a tubby priest,
Greatly indulged. Not quite the point. He thought
About the robin on a hawthorn branch,
Its breast as red as Christes blood, now dried
And efficacious only by a hymn.
He had no hymns, the diplomat, but stories
Flowed out by art arterial and blessed.

Good Cheer & Local Color

There’s been an incident at 5^th and 6^th

And 73^rd and 58^th and Elm.

I see dead people everywhere, except

On S. Lipan and Penny Lane and Stout.

I don’t know why. Rellenos on the wind,

The sound of magic flutes, the frail red duff,

Oranges and lemons: still the bones pile up

Just above Congress Park, on Ruby Hill,

And where the Carpet Warehouse has been closed.

Come home tonight. I found some bottles of

Whatever could be bottled up. Not these,

However emptied out the scuffed-up rooms,

Annoyed to be anonymous. Here come

The incidents of Christmas Past passant.

Speckled Stuff

appeared in Lyre, Lyre.

God likes speckled stuff, says the manly man.
He must have since he made so much. The straight
And simple are pulverized by the weight
Of odd and complex. There must be a plan,
And not a manly plan--something divine
Or outré, which means both. A freckled chick,
Violets wrapped around a mossy stick,
Villages built where earthquakes draw the line:
The quirky and the deadly and the spotted.
Whole romans fleuves have dammed themselves upon
Civilizations where the men are gone,
The dogs abducted, and the bookstores rotted.
He loves it all, the hoorah where the gleaming
Stipples on the bright stainless steel are steaming.

Second Thoughts

This is a very old poem. It's the title poem from my second collection, which was accepted, once upon a time, by a publisher who went out of business immediately thereafter and was never heard from again. It appeared in Whiskey Island.


If only I had gone to school in Boston,
flown east instead of west. If only I
had studied medicine instead of English,
dressed for the day in tie and stethoscope, 
if only I had let myself be drafted
and seen the bodies stacked up at Pleiku,
if only this, if only that, if I
had let that first pregnancy go to term,

today I should be sitting in a room
like this, my head not clear, my hand alert
to what it holds, and I should hear the cardinal
calling the late June morning to observe
that he's already up, and I'd be thinking

if only I had gone to school in Denver,
flown west instead of east, if only I
had been a novelist and not a doctor,
then I should say, hearing the sparrows chirp,

it would be all the same, even if I
had gone to school at Cambridge, learned to say
"shed-ule," and come to like my lager warm,
till, feeling a sudden numbness in my shoulder,
I'd wonder how it would have been if I
had only gone to school in California.

Pursued by a Duck

Edge of the edge, the ducks explore

Duckitude.  They don’t know it, though.

They nibble at the sludgy shore

While we call names and say we grow

L’homme qui criat canard.  That sedge

Is served them there so we can chime,

We should admit that.  If they cadge

A breadcrumb, panic.  A loup in time,

The ground subsides, the ducks retreat

Like Muscovy.  Here, let us count.

One duck, two ducks: this life is sweet,

When wild in just the right amount.

Orpheus Condescending

Obstacles notwithstanding, I

Have brought back home Eurydice.
She sleeps too much and likes to wear
Aloe vera in her hair,
Cartoon t-shirts, flip-flops. Dis
Does not prepare dead hearts for this
Welter of chores. Feel here. Touch that.
Phantasmagoria’s where she’s at,
A little vague, a little faint.
Death sneezed and then returned a saint.
Restored to life, she feels the lack,
And hides her hands behind her back.

How Many Going to St Ives?

I left my Muse behind, by accident,

In Fountain, where the air smelled like a sheep
Had sold his birthright for a mess of wool.
Retraced my steps, I did, but someone else
Had knocked her off her pins, her legs a sore
Temptation to a certain sort of man,
And she went with, the trollop, keen to be
A siren singing and a whistle blown.
I am reduced. My songs sound like the sea
Might sound in Fountain, where the land denies
There is a sea, where shepherds say that guy
Lashed to the mast heard what there never was,
A song in silence, hoping he would win
Her heart, who never had a head for love.

Apollo in a Bowler

Maybe he rolls 297. Maybe

He knows perfection is for men. He breaks
A branch off Daphne, drops it in a pond,
Dammed if he does. He leaves his tie askew
And burns Morocco on the morning drive.
Champagne explodes because he smiles, but she
Is rotting from the inside, laurel leaves
Losing their lustre, borne on Boreas,
One landing on his hat, as though it were
A ribbon for a boulevardier, a trophy
Won at a county fair from mortal rubes.

Doing Oxford

And if we do not know of what we speak,
that is not an impediment: the place
looks wise enough to make us wise.  All souls
turn towards knowledge like a plant to light,
so in the books which have beset this place
must be enough of all we need to know
to make us dons and fellows, odd and solemn.
We need subscribe to none of thirty-nine.
We need not trust to bachelorhood.  The names
are only metaphors: we shan't repent
of what we were, yet still be what we want.
Magdalene is the chapel, not the college.

Homage to a Master

Seventy years of exercise
in prosody and discipline.
A dollar and a quarter buys
Selected Poems, which within
are two lyrics he wrote, we know,
in baffled ignorance and delight,
more than forty years ago
and both in the same night.

A Poem Unrequited

The mice knew first, the crickets and the small

Wrens, who muted their music in respect.

The Bigguns had no reason to expect

A coming, first or second, so they all

Went to the circus, laundry, or the mall,

To buy some smoke detectors could detect.

And then they bought a family to protect.

The beetles sang, We shan't shut up till Fall.

Somewhere the news was posted.  In a paper

Of general circulation, someone read:

Death shall have no dominion, being dead;

But he was only someone, not a shaper

Of big opinion.  Big opinion heard

Interruption and said, Shut up that bird.

On the Lam

Less, as he travelled down the broken map
To where the creases made the names a mess,
Than he remembered, still some fun, the dogs
A decorative nuisance, shifty signs
Ambiguous in all respects save mileage,
And roadside stands with contraband for sale.
He bought a stolen hat made in the Bronx
By emigrants and wore it for the wolves
Who counted campers, praying for the lame.

Where he would go from here, his dapper car,
Less suitable in every state, would say.
He hoped for string bikinis and the tang
Of salted sand. Tonight he'd settle for
A hero high on rye and pay-per-view,
A six pack of a beer nobody drinks,
Still in its plastic semiotic sling,
And wind that made the cheap storm windows creak.

Plus Jell-O With Tiny Marshmallows

Better unnamed: the carnival of dark

Imaginary emperies, the rose
Unpurchased for the girl unasked, the night
You drove poor Dixie to the Greyhound lot
At 19th Street and Larimer, her ghost
A fraction of the spirits she possessed.

Nothing articulate can be recalled.
Faces go fuzzy when you concentrate.
Better to go down in a haze beneath
The Magic 8-Ball’s promises, behind,
Year after year, and only gaining ground,
Mortgages and the Mastercard, as room

Service arrives. It’s better you don’t know
The name of the town, whose Really Super 8
Desk clerk said The Golden Corral was good,
70 kinds of salad, so you can’t say
How your Unfinished Symphony will resolve,
Even if everyone else already guessed.

Dead Grandpa Chats Up Hosea's Wife in Heaven

Sabbath in Heaven. Again. Unlike Old Nick,
Grandpa may not walk up and down the earth,
smelling a harvest ergot has betrayed
or breathing the salt spray off an inland street.
He look for Hosea's wife for old time's sake.

"'Harlot,' I hate. King James's idea. A strumpet
Is what I was. You'd never know it now,
all sackcloth bustier and Eau d'Ash. No, I wasn't
no Pen-e-lope, stuck in the Spindle room,
fending off suitors for a minor profit."

Under the Tree of Life Old Nick unwinds,
his coils gone drab by sinful repetition.
Vice palls, as Virtue, novelty the need
of fallen natures. God says, "Nihilo,"
when asked, "What's new?" He took you back, says Gramps.

Hosea's wife is sure that she was wronged,
round heels in a square bed. It isn't fair.
"I know," she says. "I'd show you what I know,
but will has been redeemed and cannot form
the wish to sell you half-and-half." "I wish,"
says Grandpa. Old Nick, thinking fruit, recalls
how badly people do theology.