Unidentified Fallen Object

 

That light from underneath the wendy house?

Aliens praying for our human souls,

Which they use to recover old upholstery,

To plug the cracks in alien patios,

Through which they plunge for hundreds of alien miles,

And end up salting mines. They keep a light

On day and night, hoping they will be saved

From shopworn fates by spiritual human stuff.

I don’t know if that ever happens, though.

Our lawn is littered with the crinkled husks

Of something other, something not like us

In flannel shirts and wool sweat socks, and hats

Stamped Alma Mater, Stabat Mater. Pray,

You aliens. I wish you all the best.

Mystical Truths of Astronomical Illumination

Who can believe the luminous moon

Is lit by the sun? Here? In the dark?

Science is not some kids’ cartoon,

Where falling anvils leave no mark

On trees who are singing in the park;

And the dish runs away with the spoon.

It glows because it’s happy, bright

With sweat and pleasure from within.

It romances the earth at night,

Wolf-whistles at the frabjous sight

Of you in bed, and shines with sin

At second hand. You light the sky;

The moon absorbs. What science knows

Ends at the treetops. Wonder why

At night, between the breast and thigh,

Your silver duvet glows and glows?

Plot Points

 

It wouldn’t take me long to build

A monument—to stuff, then gild

A cassowary or a grub,

To stain a fence and plant a shrub,

Install umbrellas all around,

Stick Latin mottoes in the ground,

And plat the place with a snazzy name.

Of course you would have died of shame.

Much better to lie in the dark,

Pretending night is a private park,

Charming the mob away, who knew

Nothing of me and less of you.

Catching the Ferry

 

Last night the Truth Ferry

Put in as I slept

And left a verse in bed

And took the dime I'd left.

It wasn't printed neatly

And neither fine nor fair.

I read it only when

No one else could hear.

This is the way the worm—

I wonder how it ends.

Bangs and pine and dirt

And pale segmented friends,

Perhaps. I am afraid

I can't write in my sleep.

I cannot hear the sound

Of what is taking shape

In dark rooms growing darker,

Quiet, humid, dumb.

To every boy and girl

At night a truth will come.

Changeling

    This appeared in Staple. 

If it isn't the roof, the plumbing's goes,

Or the showerhead, or the parakeet. Like that.

Sometimes the years of dry, furnace-forced air

will shrink the floorboards. What was glossy, grays.

Sometimes the one you turn to isn't there

in the bed; or perhaps she is, but gone

to ghost, and you can never be alone

more than you are right then, which is enough, thanks.

They told you nothing stays, claimed, as you found,

that change is what there is. But this is less.

Everything leaves, but not entirely:

the bird's cry from the elm tree high above

the dust of rooftrees laid down many moons

rouses the form whom you still try to hold.

All Tales Come True

 

 Is this one of those historical moments—

The Siege of Stalingrad or Johnny Van-

Der Meer's 2nd?  Decades hence, a hundred,

Two thousand years, will people say, Her linen

Shift fit like May between the spring and summer?

No one can tell what Helen did in bed

To make her Paris spring.  The men who lay us

End to end in expensive cardboard jars

Know squat.  They can't wait to be shoveled ash.

You pivot on the spike heels Dr Jekyll

Says women shouldn't wear—poor torque-sprung backs.

Your hair fans a like a runway breeze was blowing.

The men besieged behind their shattered walls

Drop their boiled leather, wave their horseplume hats, 

And scatter condoms from those famous heights.

Imperial Lives, Late

 

I dream of people I don’t like. Not when

I knew them, not now. Unforgiving, like

An emperor, pensioning off delators.

My dreams delate. They say, I am the one.

A pot of lampreys and a plot of ground

For anyone who didn’t see my face

Remembering. That girl. That test. That time

Nothing went right, and I was told a tale.

A ribbon and a farmhouse. A fast horse.

A purple shirt, imperial, for you,

If you don’t know me and you never did.

GAA

 

Never since that one night have I attended

A party as a mushroom—not that I'm

Too proud to be a fungus, though the absence

Of chlorophyll and the proud necessity

Of feeding on, what shall we say? defunct

Organic matters doesn't suggest ballrooms.

It's more that we are only flora once,

Some roses, spinach some, we soon outgrow

Our vegetable natures. Aged between

An ugly plant and lesser carnivore,

I fared better than most. And when I saw

The lamp and found my motor skills, I yet,

In the way of a vermiform appendix,

Concealed a mushroom nature. Though by night

They come and go, by day, if you can pick

The right one, they afford a minor garnish.

Permafrost

A foot of snow descended on the house,

All fall at once and we pretended joy

At such a purty fluffiness, and broke

Our backs and shovel blades, and prayed that spring,

Spring would arrive, but not because of us,

The snow grows grass and lubricates the bulbs

Stripped from their husks it promised and delivered.

Summer, which disbelieves in snow, will swear

Sweat is the moisture agriculture named,

But summer lies, and winter lasts: within

The master bedroom wall a cache of snow

Waits and concedes no melting, never melts.

Anecdote

 

So Auden married Erika, der Mann's
Daughter, because that's what a bugger does,
Which doesn't seem to have disturbed the plans
Of anyone, except the beast that was.

Nice story. Famous names. The gentile touch
Of charity, and no Mann shared his beds.
Just don't believe that we believe too much
Of what such great men portage in their heads

From Alpha to Omega. There were those
Abandoned, which was not the fault of verse;
A little more, perhaps, a debt that prose
Has not repaid; but when the starving curse,

They do not mention villanelles or myth
Or those who aimed intentions, one by one,
At celebrated, artificial kith
And never felt contrition from a son.

Happy Trails

 

Edgier, maybe.  Nevertheless, I am

King of the Cowboys, Lord of the Saving Grace,

The Prince of Pizza, OMG Duke of Earl.

And late to my own funeral, if what

I see is what there is, reality

A cognomen for disappointment, cheese

Spritzed from a spray can, Gandalf with a sawn

Lady in half, too grey to sing the blues.

Birthdays!  I tell me.  Birthdays!   Let them bring

Adoration and single malt and straw

Spun from gold on an old potholder frame.

Maybe I'll let them stay to pay the bills

For Gro-Lights that can't remember when to stop.

King of the Cowboys, closing down the range.

Land Lubbers

 

The worms are tapping out. The grass

Has taken all it can, but rain

Perseveres. Down the asphalt main

The cars sail onwards. No one has

Observed the like before, they say.

They have. But that was yesterday,

And rain evaporates. Our dreams

Will not hold water. When we dove,

We suffocated, and we throve

Beached. We are landlocked, and, it seems,

We get along quite swimmingly

Once, quite deserted, all at sea.

A Lack of Resolution

 

There enters January from the left,

A grinning rush of sudden death. I say,

Says January, You know that’s not true.

I kill the pine-bore beetles, and I spread

The grass with green—potentially. I turn

Away. I have no time for this. I’ve made

Friends with the spring. It promised me a shoot,

A pistil, and the grounds to make them work.

January wears cold around its lungs,

A heart of hoar, the frost that doesn’t care

Who freezes whom. It has its ice on you,

Its arabesques of cars out of control,

Its night where streetlights groan about the dark.

Somewhere the exiled cupids fletch their arrows.

What Was Unmoved

 Winter was all it took

To right the summer’s wrong.

It started with a song.

It ended in a book.

Neither could ever say

All that the snow explained

Or why the day it rained,

Geometry washed away.

What was unmoved was ice.

The song of summer failed.

The song the book retailed

Would never again suffice.

Tales Out of School

 

Happily ever after, says the wolf,
Picking his teeth with Granny’s rib; the Prince
Is thinking he should let the zygal float
Against the oobal, now a muttonchop
Graces the front of his pink currency.

From hard-boiled eggs and crumbly cheese and pears
A girl can make a picnic, but a myth
Requires meat, not osiers; the bird
Who doles elusive clues is never served
Fajita-style. Granny works best for that,
Digesting in her aged, sinewy way,
Her juices turned to lupine sentience
And thigh muscle and slaver. When we grow
Old ourselves and have grandchildren to tell
The soothing psalms of bedtime, we shall lie
And say, The woodsman split the wolf in twain,
And Granny tumbled out and smoothed her dress
And baked a cake and spread the counterpane.
The child will sleep. We too shall check the yard
For prints. And listen for the wolf. Aha.

The Promised Ants

 

In the Kingdom of the Blind the one-armed man

Got strangled by a python. In the dirt

The ants formed marching bands and bit the dust,

Then spat it out. The songs the flicker sang

Were all percussion, made my chimney ring,

And sounded like a salesman on the phone.

The ghosts don’t bother me. When we play bridge,

I am the dummy, and we all fall down,

Each time a little slower, till we rise

Like half a loaf. And half of me recalls

That we were promised ants, and it was kept.

The locusts don’t come round much any more;

But one-armed men keep showing up to ask

If I would deign to donate to the blind.

Oh, Pancho

         —Cisco, you are loco in the head

Cisco hath murdered sleep, the sheriff said;

But Pancho told him when the deed was done,

They were eating tortillas somewhere else,

In Mesa Verde, which was dun and bare.

Your hands are scarlet, said the deputy,

Incarnadined or something. Pancho said,

The tumbleweeds tell all you need to know.

Cisco brushed grit off his embroidery,

Adjusted his somebrero, and pursued

The banker's daughter, calling to his fate,

It is the east, and I am someone's son.

The sheriff was not all that mollified.

As usual, they had to flee the town,

Eat tepid victuals in a desert night,

And top their frijoles with unsummoned stars.

Lid & Latch

 

Inside the damp, torn box a bit of fluff—

Bright hair by Donne. Might be a web. Or lint.
We won't find out today. All lost, grave stuff
Waits for last things. This box, though, packs a hint
Of all the rest: we lie against the grain.
We take up too much time and too much rain

For bone to carry breath. His new, clean shape
Will grieve the man who lived for gasp and catch,
Who free of taint, not bent to bare his nape,
Will climb back in, pull down both lid and latch,
And while his thoughts last, think of sweat. In pain
He saw the light and left it. Bring the rain.

True Confession

 

Entschuuldigung, she said, which was a lie,

Excuses absent, and not wanting one,

Impenetrable of motive and as stumm

As onyx.  Not a tear or comely dab.

Just Tell me what you want, and I'll decline,

A heavenly bosom heaveless.  One supposed

That angels felt this way when sinners pled

Post-mortem for relief, their ichor still

A differentiation from the dead,

Though God had mercy, theoretically.

Me a culprit?  Well, I guess I am,

But DNA's a bitch, and time will toll.

Native Americans Seize Parkway

 

Last night contemplative smokers and the lean

Jogger's rasp; this dawn, woodsmoke and boombox

Chants. I'll take Manhattan, the Bronx, Denver,

And some great plains, they sing. TV trucks. Ralph

The CU Buffalo has come to cheer.

We own these trees, this mani-pedi parkway

Ours. From light rain the grass, the grass is coming.

Perhaps these are the 12 Lost Tribes, their Moses,

A landbridge-walking chief, whom 40 years

Hardly sufficed, whose Canaan=Kansas.

The satellite feed sends this to Inuits

And Iroquois alike. We are inspired,

A spokes-dude says, by Prague and Zapatista,

By black & white together. We shall fight

No more forever, sure, but WrestleMania,

The cage match, the strap match, proscenium-

Free drama: they go on today, tomorrow. You

Pay per view, you take your choice. Oh, we,

We can do drama or we can sit still.

We watch at night, and our night watches back.

The neighbors seem confused. They try to do

The business of their neighborhood, which local

News zooms in on. These people vote here, pay

Beads for their land, send trinkets to their sons.

We all are out on porches now. We watch.