Growing My Own

I’m growing heroes this year, each with vim

And rectitude.  Too proud to wear their masks

Or call themselves The Spanielled Cavaliers,

They will be known by what they do: The Lute,

My Sugar Beet, The Man from Polymath.

Muscles are nothing, candyland.  Their feats

Are vitamins and tiny nebulae

And comfort for the shopworn.  And the seeds,

Like starfish in a cup of broth, their shapes

Superfluous to what they will become,

Wait till it rains.  Wait till the worms have made

Them room to move.  Once they have sprung their shoots,

Who know if you can bear to watch them work

Or how many widows lay an extra place.

Pastoral Care

 

Rough winds on premises to let,

And summer’s lease is triple net.

The cuckold goldsmith in the sun

Makes melting pots of everyone,

While Amaryllis in the shade

Regrets the choices she has made.

Her bowered beau regrets no more

The nights he spent in days of yore.

Though Amaryllis shine too hot,

He will be spent when she is not,

Which, he suspects, the flock has known

Since they were fleeced, then left alone.

And greener pastures beckon.  Soon,

She will exclaim, this prick of noon

Will feel his autumn felix frost.

Then she is warm and he is lost

In fields of blasted corn and clover,

Rough winds at hand, and summer over.

No, Hope, Not Me

 

No Hope, No Hoopla: this is Low-Key Hell,

Where Glum’s the Word, the cocktail hour comes,

But the town is dry, the duck who guards the gate

Has three heads, as he ought, and devils are made

Of cooking oil and pink asbestos fluff.

There’s no spare change. There is no change at all,

Only the psalms of praise for other folks,

The ones who did not care enough to fight

For White After Labor Day or Rules Against

Perpetuities for everyone.

It isn’t fair, which, really, is the point.

Storyville

 

     This first appeared in Staple.

Just once? Upon a hundred million times
he woke and learned to speak and knocked her up
and watched her die and ran away and hid.

Each branch of this bears twigs, and each twig flowers.
The children live. The wife runs off. She finds
a man who loves her less and turns her out
to bus the tables of a mining town.

He makes a million - somethings. Dollars. Pails.
He trades the cow for beans. He plants the beans
and learns he loved her more than provender.
But it's too late. She's dead. Or wiping tables.
Or on her way to Jacksonville, where God
has called her to be Sister Angeline.

In one small blossom he is deaf and dumb
and sees his town in black and white reversed.
He finds her anyway. They stay. They live
ever after, just off Sueño Street.

When Lions Come

 

This appeared in Orbis.

When lions come to the door to drag you out
into the street, they won’t want elegy
or meditations on the Elder Breughel.
It’s commonsense and die with them: plain speech
is what they have time for. They’re not chimpanzees.

In camps, if you make it there, interrogation
occurs in prose, in real time, not in feet.
Elephants can do prosody; lions think
elephants have gone soft, wasting their gifts
on rumination, wallowing, and tusks.

Under the klieg lights lions want the truth.
They won’t even tell you, Soon you can go home.
Maybe they eye a haunch and hum a little.
Confess the truth and change for death: that’s all
the deal they offer, all they need to know—

lions don’t hope. They are. No note is sent
advising your next of kin you have been laid
with wildebeests and zebras in the pit
where herbivores accrue, praying, say lions,
they could be lions next. Not bloody likely.

Independence & Resolution

 

            for Douglas Wilson

Listen, he said, the sound of flies

Above the riffle, that bodes well.

The old man sat, in sad surmise,

And thought of revolution. Hell,

He told us, when the world was new

And we ran guns and gerunds sang,

I watched the mountains turning blue.

Ecclesiastics never rang,

And girls were disappointed I

Moved them along. Now I can hope

That when my grey habiliments die,

The Queen will wear a dab of crêpe.

The music of satiety,

Which has no wings and does not grow

In memory, plays endlessly

And only strikes the notes we know.

Chains They Forged In Life

 

The poems no one heard of populate

This verbosphere, invisible and bleak,

Dottering incoherently in dry

And crumby cupboards, turning bedsheets gray

On sleepovers, making little girls pale,

Afraid that they have accidentally bled.

Elegiac, embarrassed, and full of tropes

Disparaged by Seleucian kings, they tell

Stories of unrequited jealousy

Engraved on stone with sponges, vetted by

The underappreciated and the fat

Recipients of Golden Books and schmaltz.

A few are goodbye letters, never signed.

A few are tax returns, unaudited.

Some lisp. Some swoon. Some have these wild ideas

About the immanence of outer space.

They drool. They belch. Complain. Complain. Complain.

They like a mirror, write they backwards verse.

Walking Home in the Dark

 

    This appeared in Life & Legend.  I have changed it a bit since then.

Some nights I can't get home before the dark.

I can't quite make it. Some nights I brave the streets,

And I'm afraid. Who isn't? There are ex-

Acquaintances, role models, and the police

In every hole, the shadows of themselves

Awaiting the day when hair loss is reversed.

Arise, I tell them, and I say, Not now,

But after I've passed and left you where you were.

I hear them rustle in the deep-down beds,

Less than they were, more than they ever will be,

Until the day when fallen arches rise

And all their triumphs, mute so many years

Still in the gladstone bags they kept close by,

Rise to the surface, fried by benignant sun.

Things In Bloom

 

The peckerwoods are blossoming—this heat

Is perfect for them, clears their rosy limbs,

A scent of gravy with a hint of lime,

Creaking with all the weight of special sauce.

Me, I just can't transport a whole lot more

Compressed into this stringy frame, a touch

Of spirit in a wealth of this-and-that.

I'm thinking chastely of a new frontier,

Out where the rumpus rooms are naugahyde,

With attic vases all the way downstairs,

Where Indians bear cobras in their packs,

And landsmen dance the shabbos hully-gully.

It's just a myth, a brackish aspiration.

I'll choogle to the fridge, but nothing more.

Next year the Thousand Islands and a hope

At long last I can be consumed with relish.

Adam's Rib House

 

Leaving a lot to be filled in, it took

Less space than a person ought. The garden floor

Was filled with hippopotamus and mice,

With rhododendrons and Rhode Island Reds—

The irony of which is clear, even to me—

So maybe it was good that it was spare.

He did okay without it, anyway;

And she built quite a suite of space around it:

Organs to make the windpipe sound, a gut

Deep enough for a cello; and her loins—

Well, he needed no instruction as to those,

Which seemed a little strange, when he reflected.

It served, the rib did. In his view it made

The Venus de Milo look like cottage cheese.

They had no seasons, so there was no fall.

They made a paradise and called it peace.

And Adam never wished he had a dog,

Not more than once or twice. And so did she.

They Call It Rain

 

What with the locusts and the twirling spray,

It hasn't been the best of days. Old blood

Pumps through the holes and sewers of the town.

Oh, that is what I'm smelling, people say,

But what they mean is, Holy shit. I'm leaving

The final days behind and going now.

Those purple hazes may not be the best,

However sonorous, for telling time,

Of which we have unlimited supplies,

Not each of us, of course, or one by one,

Just lots of foggy, vulgar chunks of loss.

And locust shells, lying around like bones.

Mortal Lovers

 

Year on years, pages and pages, 

I have soaked myself in sages.
You who come here, the unwary,
longing to complete your knowledge
in the ventriloquil college,
pause, perhaps, but do not tarry.

All these parti-colored bindings
bind the heart in all its windings;
flecks of red on green and blue,
all they are , all they stand for,
saturate the heart with candor.
They are what you turn into.

Daphne, who, however stately,
could not be the god who lately
ran her down amid the clover,
Daphne’s lovely, green, and shady,
but had rather been a lady
with a flawed, a mortal lover.

The Post Is Never Dead

 

Antipathy dropped by last night, the heat

Escaping through his bowler hat, a brush

Mustache above the toothy grin, cravat

In old-school colors, much askew. He stood

Half again as wide as tall. So it seemed.

He hadn’t a sweet sound to make. A few

Blasts of opprobrium and then all gone.

I sprayed air freshener and lit an old

Pumpkin-scented candle, then I returned

To sweeping up the letters I had dropped,

Overseas mail, the most of them, from times

I promised I would not forget, though some

Contained an odd surprise I’d overlooked.

And now, spent by Antipathy, I found

A rhythm I was better off without.

I Rose For Emily

 

Urgent to divest—

Oppression and undressed —

Afforded scant relief

By grocery belief —

To bed—too soon—and met

Specimens of regret —

Leaves like colored labels —

Descending on our tables.

Housebroken

 

The houseplant leaves the room. It twirls a leaf

Around the door to see who's coming. Green

The grass outside the window. What it's seen

Of vegetation grown and come to grief

At mowers' hands is not to be believed.

The ficus argues, "Leave a leaf deceived.

No one who's known is better off." But Phil-

Odendron needs to know. He snakes the hall,

Heads for the door. He gets there by the fall.

The frost has stolen all the chlorophyll;

He dies upon the jamb, cold and enlightened.

The leaves lie blown in stacks, then wet, then whitened.

I feel a moral coming on. The sun

Will give us back our green. Out of the mire

Come kudzu with the energy of fire

And clover till the field is overrun.

There will be philodendron by the dozens

In music rooms. But not him. Just his cousins.

Men are like fish, you say. There'll always be

Another in a minute. I have no

Idea, but, Filly, if you let me go,

There will be more, but never more of me.

The dying plants are rich in latter plants;

But Philodendron gets no second chance.

The Sight of Snow

 

The fat squirrels have surrendered.

Nuts, I say: they had no other course.

The chickadees complain until they’re hoarse.

I feel for them as though they had been rendered,

Or would if I were nature’s friend;

But I’ve made other, safer plans for fall.

I shall not be at home when ill winds call.

Spring is the goal here; winter is the end.

The trees are sure they will awake.

The frozen grass has done it all before.

Clematis clings to hopes there will be more.

But they're all botany. There's no mistake.

No cyclic show for me; but, oh,

I think of warmth and someone whom I knew,

Someone who spoke in cadences, as you

Burst with excitement at the sight of snow.

Now About Those Crusades

 

At first I thought I should work "hauberk" in

and "Holy Sepulcher" or maybe "paynim."

But as I tried, they grew less glittery,

less Coeur-de-Lionish, being as they were

mere bloodstained souvenirs, like pigges bones.

Instead I told the Stations of the Cross

of Peter the Hermit, who made Europe shift

eastwards, and who today, on 16th St.,

would be a menace to himself and others,

thus thorazined and forcibly confined.

With such tools is the course of Empire shot.

And all those little paynim nippers who

neglected to be born as French Provincials

may hope a Savior comes to save them, too.

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.