Family Matters

What do you say to Ishmael,

The spurned child, the second best—

Sorry, lad, but your mom was just

A handmaiden, a tweeny like,

And Sarah was godawful pissed?

Father a race, why don't you? That

Would show him, Father of his kind.

They made it to Vienna, but

It's couches there, not ottomans.

One each. Don't pus. And Isaac, he

Got to be a major moral bit:

The proof of how you love someone

Is where you'll put the knife when told.

That ram was someone's Ishmael,

A woolly spot of sacrifice.

How many times did Isaac ask

His dad to have a catch, you think?

When cards arrived for Ishmael—

Birthday, Christmas, 4th of July—

Mom tore them up and threw them out.

Ishmael gathered up the bits.

Under Groby Great-Tree

 

This appeared in Iambs & Trochees.

This is the anodyne. It dogs
The hand that bit you. Reigning frogs
fall upwards, then, and abdicate.
This is the awkward watch, the late
piecemeal of time your father handed
off, before the day demanded
help, before the poison took.
Listen. Babbles. On Groby Brook
the paper boats all have departed:
sodden, sank, too heavy hearted
to arrive. The guests have begun
to wander off, and one by one
they seek release in solitude,
but not in love, nor meat, nor crude
imaginings of quick relief.
There is no pain beyond belief.
In Groby House, on unmade beds,
the servants set down weary heads,
and slowly the predicted dark
begins to cover Groby Park.

French 102

 

La plume de ma taunt,

In epigrams, is what I want.

Regime Change

 

Grandmothers throw themselves into the street,
Caterwauling, burning their ancient caches
Of diaries and grosgrain lingerie.
No more to hope for, now that loss has come,
Unpacked in the great room, fixed itself a snack,
And cut the landline. Tell the tailor no:
Alteration belongs to yesterday.

The authorized watchers do not want to watch.
Where younger pain explodes, this just hangs on,
Nor all that long. The actuarials
Identify themselves and confiscate
Running shoes of the stationary kind,
The keening widows and the flattened fraus
Not vigorous enough for knitted sleeves.
The grandmothers grow smaller, they retreat,
Much larger women on their wedding days.
Their children now have dewlaps. Here come vans
As big as percherons. The women grip
Their sorrow and will not be dragged away.
By morning they will be a little field
Of husk and hull, a compost now assoiled.

Hit or Myth

 

He flew it higher than you might have thought,

Beyond the reach of Sense or Cymbeline,

Headed for higher office, like the Earl

Of Eyrie or the Alderman of All.

Beyond reproach he flew it, though unmanned,

And woman, too, if only she would listen,

However first impressionable that.

I can't make headway here. A ducal debt

Is nomenclatural and nothing more,

And yet he flew it higher than you thought

He could, a prince among the aspirants.

Fate and fatuity are oh so close,

Wax wings and a ball of twine at either end.

On The road To Little Pacification

 

By stage, the journey, shorter than you think,
Consumes with interest the time. Those heads
You pass, for instance, stuck on rusted pikes,
The burning martyrs praising their foul judge,
Half-naked women selling anathemas--
Where is the like in leisure, safely sound,
Petting the family dog or boiling grits?
It takes a trip like this to fill the mind.

We stop at The Remorseless Inn for brunch,
One price fits all, relieve ourselves, then wash,
And head for the Humble Counties, home of black
Kine and those hunting dogs bred out of wolves.
Consulting our horoscopes, we do not pause;
Our journey has the urgency of faith
Beset by trimmers, little men, and gray
Ecclesiastics. Soon it starts to rain,
Thus mud prevails. We are above such things.

Thatch is espied, then woodcocks, and the tang
Of peasants burning wintergreen: they keep
Their spirits up, sure, broadcasting the fate
Of unbelievers in a weal of woe.
We have arrived, credentialed, to be kissed
And flattered, and we order each a grog,
A sandwich, and a leg of wench. Ah, home.
Someday it will be home. The savages.

When Birds Divorce

 

When wrens divorce, the children fly.

Young tits from broken nests decry
The wounded tree, the severed song,
That feathered fate who hopped along
A bobbing branch, while in the park
A lone and separated lark
Complains to the under-birded blue
That there is nothing more to do
Than lean on a pelicanic thorn
And end with song this garish morn.
Or so the ornithologist
Explained. Perhaps a point was missed.
I caught the gossipy detail,
Who’d been distracted by her pale
Brow and her raven hair, a thing
Reminiscent of a wing.
So scientists construct a plot
That shows themselves where they would not.

Please Read The Prospectus Carefully

 

Congratulations, you've won Paradise.

Don't sweat the taxes, though with a prize like this

You'll get the salesmen and the beggar saints,

The clansmen and the classmates and the shame

That everyone else is licensed to contend

With sin, the petty and the deadly, all

The fallout of an autumn day at home.

But you, you will be here, in Paradise,

With 40,000 gourmet restaurants,

Emerald beaches, one-string harps who play

The Goldberg Variations. You have won

Eternities of room service and sea

Turtles to ferry drinks. (You have the time.)

The waste is heavenly, because there are

Malebolges of malcontents, their misery

Palpable as an egg, grit in their eyes,

Their tears a resin thicker than shaved ice,

And lupus. And the starving tots. Disease

Went AWL, but not so memory,

That vague disquietude, something like gas.

Read the fine print. Sign on the dotty line.

And tell your friends. Oh, tell them twice. We're waiting.

The Boston Swans

I vaguely recollect that there are swans

somewhere famous in Boston, somewhere Lowell

might think them his, a bird grant from the Crown.

He might discuss with Dr Holmes at night,

after the port passed by too many times,

how Zeus had managed Leda. This would pass

for smut among the philocrats, I swan.

“Under a spreading chestnut tree,” they’d laugh.

“Beg pardon?” said the emissary from

the Court of St James. “A longfellow joke,” Lowell said.

“Uh-huh,” said Robert, many years away,

trying to fit both skunk and sour cream

into his recollections of a swan

whose loins devolved a war it could not stop.

The Boston pops have brought their kids to hear

Napoleonic cannon foddering.

They hum as they tuck cobs back in their hampers,

decorously wrapped. Here Ted Williams hit

.400, which was nothing, if you count

percentages left lying in the snow

so Bonaparte could win the Triple Crown,

ambitions learned from Alexander, who

differed from Plato as to Homer’s hit.

Home and away, it all came down to swans.

—In memoriam Paula Tatarunis

This Augurs Well

 

Insensate sensei, say

Something in woodsy pulp,

Suited for cookie dough,

Something you hope will help

The plausible prophesy.

While we are young enough

To clean our plates, predict

Whatever will plot a graph

Good sense would interdict.

I'll study hard. I swear.

No fingers crossed? No fair.

What Do The Old Men Say?

 

What do they mean, who say
The world has gone awry?
The trees leave every day.
I saw them in July,

As green as the heart of man.
I see men stiffly clad,
Colored in gray and tan,
Calling our summer bad

For insufficient shade,
Damning our leaves as small,
Making their wrath a blade,
Hurrying us to fall.

If only our lives were sad,
If we saw that we had
Outlasted our summer stay,
They'd happily love us all
And tidy us away.

Weight Watchers

 

Let them eat cake.

Their teeth will break.

Let them eat bread.

They still will be dead.

They might not eat.

Their dust will be sweet.

Just ask the germs

Inside the worms.

Craftsmen

 

The general says, This is caviare,

Nor am I out of it. Inside the shed

The power tools warm to themselves. They drill

And flatten on the notion that the meek

Outnumber nails and must be driven home,

A smell of revolution in the air,

Like cuts that will not clot, like missing men

Who families have given up and watch

Ice-skating shows in April. It is June.

We have a chance, the general opines,

If taken at the tide, and he retreats.

The skater falls. She bounces up, her sequins

Prisms on a revolving stage of light.

A mitre saw is humming in the shed.

The Shores of Light

               This appeared in Angle.

When on the tepid shore

Of the great and greasy lake,
We greet each other, which
Weapon will you take?

Reproach is never failing,
Forgiveness always new.
I fear the most no light
Dawning between us two,

No pain of recognition,
Nor shock grown frail and old;
But bitter light extinguished,
Unspecified and cold.

When Dis Is Done

 

Nobody thinks about Persephone

That much, though here she is, a normal girl,
Stolen away and raped in Hell by Hades,
Betrayed by fruit, although her mother is
The goddess of breakfast cereal and toast,
Dazed, dim, and bleeding in a sooty place
Even the iron heroes couldn't stomach.
6 months off for good behavior, and 6
Back, was the best deal even Zeus could cut,
And you tell me you have no time to think
Of Proserpine (you see, even the name
Is changing), and the innocent's allowed
A line and a half of Milton, which is more,
My dear, than you and I are due for Hell,
And we were not that innocent, besides.

The Woods Within

 

In woods within the city

The woods pretend to be

More than merely pretty

And decorously twee.

We have an owl and chipmunks

And squirrels and a fox

And almost massive tree trunks.

Mocha Man's two blocks

Away. Falafel King

And Conoco sustain

The needs of those who bring

Both brunch and hope, if rain

Muddies not the footpath

and wetteth not their feet.

The titmice, in mild wrath,

Fall silent, lest they meet

The programmers, the lawyers,

The botanists in clogs,

and eco-tested warriors

With large and tubby dogs.

Bobs and Jimmies

         This appeared in Lyric.

The streets our fathers played in they describe

Over and over, looking out at air

Peopled with places we've been told were theirs,

Home to some far-fetched prehistoric tribe

Of Normans, Bobs, and Jimmies. These are now

Grandsires to a clan who do not hear.

No streetcars run down Skinker. I see how

Amid my life my life could disappear.

Dead Grandpa Shops at Walmart at 4 a.m.

 

Nail clippers, maybe, no more aftershave.

No shiny trainers, sextet of latte cups.

A groundcloth sounds quite nice, and wind-up toys

To fill the void with clackety-clacks and beeps;

But who to wind them up? The waitress said--

Next plot but one--Here, let me freshen that.

Disarming, but without real consequence.

Clean underwear, in case of accident,

Would please The Inner Mom, but accidents

Happen to others now, and he has leaked

And spilled his substance on Aisle 17.

His sepsis seeps away, and all his toys.

The Wells of Time

 

This will transport you to the elder times,

Fire like slabs of meat and smells so strong
They pound the air in dactyls. In a pinch
You can recite your “Please, Sir, send me home,”
There where the heart is, but no wolverines
Or kettles of boiling grease or water nymphs.
What would you give to have your teeth decay
Authentically, to wear a powdered wig,
To spread your plot with nightsoil, or to fetch
A fair price on the open market? Home
Is what you looked like when you were a boy;
But now you’re not. Now you could almost stay
Old as the hills when hills were young, and you
Were cold and muddy. Please, Sir, send me home.

That’s Rory For You

The bugs have their names, too. This one is Rory.

His life was hard and brief. No winged glory Surmounts its end; a splintered carapace Hangs in no hall. He found it no disgrace To die of snow and never tell his story, Nor knew he had a point. And that was Rory.