Wordcarving

Education

2009-04-22T13:13:00.001-04:00

If you should give a man a match,
you warm him for perhaps a day;
but give that man a stake
and give him that same match,
he’ll warm us all for the rest of his life.

Zelly. Four.

2008-07-09T19:15:00.002-04:00

Have A Nice Day, Poldy

2008-06-16T03:32:00.001-04:00

Notes

2008-06-16T02:56:00.004-04:00

Subject 3348 Day 1

Subject escorted to Interrogation Unit
by standard Intake Unit escort squad,
locomoting under own power.
Full shackle set. Appears healthy,
approximately thirty years old.
States he’s been in custody one day,
doesn’t know why he’s been arrested.
Manner slightly apprehensive, wary.
Relaxes a bit with leg shackles removed.
Seated posture is erect, alert, tense.
Subject states he is innocent of any crime.
English is fairly good. Middle class?
States he does not know Informant 12,
or why anyone would report his name
to authorities. Claims to be a student.
Denies any connection to insurgency.
Tone superior and dismissive of interrogator.
Claims no knowledge of explosives
or military ordnance. States professors
will vouch for his status at university.
Subject makes and sustains eye contact.
Application, at force 2, from rear,
of the Command Directory unseats subject,
elicits a flow of speech in unknown language.
Reseated, subject is silent, self-contained.
Manner suggests subject is trained to resist
interrogation. Subject remains silent
when asked what he thinks of the occupation
by Provisional Authority Forces. Asked
again, subject remains silent, smiles.
Directory applied, force 3.
Subject has no visible marks,
but right index finger bent to unusual
angle, probably owing to his fall.
Finger straightened by interrogator,
seems normal. Subject still denies
any connection with insurgency.
Asked why he was at his place of arrest,
subject states he was walking home from school
because his family car had been destroyed
by Provisional Authority troops
and the bus he normally took wasn’t running.
Asked where his books were, if any,
subject states his briefcase was taken away
from him at the scene of his arrest.
Arrest report makes no mention
of any confiscated packages.
Subject tenses when interrogator
picks up Command Directory,
but provides no additional commentary.
Preliminary conclusions: subject appears
trained to resist interrogation, provides
minimal answers, probably deceptive.
Involvement with insurgency seems probable.
Recommend return to Intake Unit
for standard disorientation regimen.
Return to Interrogation Unit tomorrow.

Subject 3348 Day 2

Subject escorted to Interrogation Unit,
standard escort. Full shackle set.
Subject appears exhausted, sleep-deprived,
but otherwise healthy, without injuries.
Subject informed that he will only be made
more comfortable if we can rely
on his truthful answers and full cooperation.
Subject states he’s ready to cooperate.
Asked what he was doing at the scene of his arrest
subject repeats he was walking home from school.
Phrasing is exactly the same as yesterday,
indicating a planned, deceptive response.
Informed that no records for him exist
at the university, subject states
there must be some mistake, that he has been
a postgraduate fellow in Sunni poetry
for more than two years. Subject adds
that he has no interest in and has never
participated in local politics
or for that matter ethnic politics.
Asked why no records exist,
subject repeats there must be some mistake.
Subject denies involvement with insurgency
without being asked. Says he is innocent.
Asked what he is innocent of, subject
replies “Whatever you think I did.”
Asked if he is playing games with us,
subject states he never plays games,
that he is quite serious, but thinks he’s going mad,
that the whole world must be going mad.
Subject refuses to make eye contact.
Application of Command Directory,
force 3. Subject lies on floor,
feigning unconsciousness. Asked if he was trying
to steal a nap subject finally states
he has no idea what happened at all.
Told to reseat himself, subject complies,
but slowly. Subject stares down at his hands.
Asked if he frequently has nosebleeds,
subject at last replies in the negative.
Subject thanks interrogator when
interrogator wipes subject’s face.
Subject denies being smart when asked.
Asked again why he was at the scene
of his arrest, subject sticks to his story,
again using identical words and phrasing.
Asked if he is familiar with the term
“Baghdad Jackknife,” subject
denies knowledge, but displays clear
signs of apprehension, fear, dread.
Informed that he would be finding out about
the technique unless he tells the truth,
subject states that he is telling the truth,
that he doesn’t know what any of this is about,
that he only wants to continue with his studies.
Command Directory. Force 3 plus.
Subject makes no attempt to get up.
Advised to be seated, subject does not reply.
Placed in his seat, subject immediately
allows himself to slide back to the floor.
Warned that he won’t be made comfortable
unless we have his full cooperation,
subject still makes no reply. Placed
back in his chair, subject says nothing,
stares fixedly at the far wall,
a known method of resisting interrogation.
Recommend return to Intake
to complete course of preconditioning.

Subject 3348 Day 3

Subject 3348
failed to appear at Interrogation Unit.
Intake Unit reports subject expired
time uncertain previous night.
Intake Unit monitors discovered
subject unresponsive on midnight rounds.
Unspecified pre-existing
condition. This concludes investigation
of Subject 3348.

Prospectus

2008-05-31T20:26:00.001-04:00

They’ll let you down, people will,
even those who never should,
the ones you trust the most, until
they measure out the wormwood.

They’ll break your heart, break the shards,
grind the detritus to dust;
they’ll leave you nothing but your scars,
but you’ll go on, because you must.

Inch by bitter inch, you’ll heal.
Dawn will break; you’ll smile a smile
tempered by your long ordeal.
This may, however, take awhile.

Then they’ll have another go,
which won’t be easier, of course,
nor will it help you much to know
that each succeeding wound is worse.

But put away your violin.
Just remember all this pain
when it’s you bares the bodkin,
as you will. It’s preordained:

family, loves, friendships die,
without exception, each and all;
our quintessential human ties
are ticked out by time’s pawl,

as if betrayal, conflict, change,
neglect, and error wouldn’t doom
the frail connections we arrange
to help us gallop to the tomb.

No, you can’t slow the pace;
nor is there anything to do
except to stare it in the face,
live as though it weren’t true.

Happy Birthday, Bob

2008-05-24T05:40:00.001-04:00

The Thinking Life

2008-04-13T05:17:00.002-04:00

For Tom it all began, as trouble may,
at school, or on the corner near school.
Although he’d never been one to disobey,
one morning Tom defiled the rule:

he let a thought crackle through his head.
It ravished him. Out of that small spark
a small sunrise flared and spread
in one mad moment from the dark,

sent a blue flood of kilowatts
through his every synapse, a holy light
his naïve neurons never quite forgot.
He shambled off to class, confused, contrite,

frightened by its elemental power,
vowed he’d never yield to sin again.
Right. That resolve cost him an hour
before he was back at it, sizzling his brain

without the slightest sense of doing wrong,
glad to tempt the devil in his lair.
But, all considered, Tommy got along
surprisingly well; no one seemed to care

about his secret vice, no one saw
sign or symptom; no one even looked.
Glassy eyes and all, slack jawed,
he fit in. But Tom knew he was hooked.

Strung out. Forever transformed,
the innocent boy he’d been forever gone,
washed away, a matchstick in a storm.
At what point he’d crossed the Rubicon

he didn’t know, just that he’d left behind
the straight life for haunted libraries,
smuggling musty books home to find
clues to metastasizing mysteries.

He tried to stop. A hundred times he tried.
He married, found himself a job, bought
a new television, double-wide,
but Tom remained a prisoner of thought.

And one day his boss called him in,
wearing the look that bosses sometimes wear.
“I like you, Tom. Don’t know where to begin.
You may think it’s none of our affair,

“but let me assure you it certainly is. We know.
You’ve been thinking, Tom. On our time,
playing holy hell with the status-quo.
You’ll have to do it on your own dime.”

Shocked, Tom did. How could he not?
Thinking on the job was serious,
and they had him dead to rights; he’d been caught
with a smoking premise, a red hypothesis.

What to do? First, you tell your wife,
which promised to be no fun at all,
then you try to straighten out your life,
maybe find a therapist to call.

That evening, in television glow,
he broached the subject. “Honey, I’ve been thinking—”
She flinched. “Did you really think I didn’t know?
Every night you sit there with your stinking

“thoughts and you think you have to tell me? Now?”
She threw her hands up to hide her tears.
“Did you ever stop to think about your vows?”
He stood. “For the love of Christ. I’m out of here.”

Tom slammed the door, jumped in the car,
gunned it toward the nearest library,
thinking and driving, yes, but it wasn’t far.
He’d done it a hundred times successfully.

But this time was apparently the charm.
He was sitting at a light, lost,
of course, in thought, doing no one harm,
waiting for pedestrians to cross,

when someone rapped the glass at his ear.
A woman. Tom ran the window down.
“It’s not going to get any greener, Dear,
no matter how often it goes around.”

She smiled in sadness more than fun.
“Having a little thinky-poo, then,
are we? Someone needs a meeting, Son.
I’m on my way to one. You’ll fit right in.”

Why he followed her he never knew.
Who can fathom miracles like these?
Tom trailed that thoughtful woman to
a room full of thought’s refugees.

“My name is, um, Tom. I think.”
“Hi, Tom,” some scattered voices said.
“It started out as just a little kink,
but now I can’t control my own head.”

“Tell it Tom, just let it all go blank.”
He saw some smiles, but heard no laughter.
It took a year, but Tom became a plank,
and they all lived happily ever after.

Educated Frogs

2008-04-08T18:27:00.001-04:00

Two frogs were swimming in a pot.
One asked “Is it only me,
or is this water getting hot?”

“Same as ever, actually,”
said the second, a devout,
“Don’t you trust the powers that be?”

“I must confess a certain doubt,”
said the first, who’d read some law,
“Something’s fishy hereabouts.”

Teacher came. Neither saw.
“Most surprising, is it not?
So what conclusions can we draw?”

Fishing

2008-04-04T03:30:00.002-04:00

If you give a man a fish
you will have fed him for a day;
teach that man to fish,
he’ll pack his gear, drive away.

Lines On Queues

2008-04-01T01:01:00.003-04:00

Circumstances favor us or not,
it makes no difference how we view them.
We stand in queues all day, no matter what;
we spend our whole lives getting through them.

PO, market, bank, Security,
inescapable, the severable heads
of some mythological monstrosity
whose divine assignment is to bore us dead.

But there’s something nautical about
Passport Control, the blue changeless shift
of a glaring, bureaucratic sea of doubt
where we are left in our tiny boats to drift,

lost mariners, becalmed in queues
that lead only to the ends of new ones,
graying slowly as cretaceous clerks refuse
our slack yellow sheets, send us for blue ones.

Finally, our documents accepted and approved,
we simply fall up from the shrinking fleet
on wings too exquisitely tuned to move,
our leaden commerce with the world complete.

Peregrine

2008-03-26T00:13:00.003-04:00

Driving home in icy dark,
he flew his silver gray Tercel
through the wilds of Echo Park.

Helming starship Cutty Sark,
he navigated rather well,
driving home in icy dark.

By day, the evidence was stark:
his tracks were straight and parallel
through the wilds of Echo Park.

Two old oaks are shy some bark,
but it’s impossible to tell,
driving home in icy dark
through the wilds of Echo Park.

Zitgeist

2008-03-12T15:21:00.004-04:00

“Vacuuos exercet aera morsus.”
Ovid, Met., VII, 788-789

This morning,
getting ready to shave, I
noticed another pimple starting on my
nose.

I’d felt it
moments before, in the shower (the
usual uh-oh), but I thought
little

of it
until I looked into that small
angry, unblinking eye (I.)
Then

I felt
sad, yet resigned: yes.
Resigned, and a little sad, is what
I felt.

If anything
else happens to me, I will write,
tell you my feelings about it, all the
details.

But
you must understand that that
will be how I will be feeling then,
about that.

Now, I’m
feeling a little sad,
and a little resigned,
about this.

Yes.

Worst Case Scenario

2008-03-08T09:13:00.003-05:00

The first few fairies caused no great alarm,
but every modern news purveyor knows
that circulation rarely suffers harm
from an inch or two of prudent, purple prose,

so stories ran, and multiplied like bugs,
then photographs of widowed lovers crying,
and back among the girdles and the rugs
the standard news that Africa was dying.

Everyone agreed, it was a shame,
but no one doubted NIH could cure it,
and even if the answer never came
the general population could endure it,

so no one thought about it much until
the rich and famous started going down.
And if hemophiliacs were looking ill
as vigilantes burned them out of town,

that was shocking, but the real surprise
was seeing justice finally done, pipers paid:
the insignificant others dropped like flies,
but only perverts had to be afraid.

Like junkies, who anyway were always sick
although supplies were at historic levels,
and rented darlings, and naturally their tricks,
and no one thought to interrupt the revels.

Johns, in fact, were paying with our lives.
Their covert operations were discovered:
not only did they implicate their wives,
but their wives’ boyfriends’ other lovers.

And if the fourth estate began to evidence
a genuine, if muted, new concern,
still the righteous saw diviner sense:
they’d always known you marry or you burn,

and for straying from the narrow path
the freaks deserved exactly what they got;
some were even thankful for the holy wrath,
until they found the funny purple spots.

Somehow everybody seemed to get it.
Most were never sure exactly where.
There were precious few who’d take a bet it
wasn’t something floating in the air.

The dead began to gather in the streets,
as the dead will do when they get their way,
and HAZMATS came to cover them with sheets
that said “Inspected by the FDA.”

But at last the population was reduced
to those few who seemed to be immune;
they found each other, married, reproduced,
whistling the latest catchy Darwin tune.

Spring Comes To Oak Park

2008-03-05T20:08:00.001-05:00

In the

rhubarb patch

by my garage

the snow flows slowly

into the good black ground,

leaves behind the pink pudgy

arm of some little some-

body’s little doll,

open-handed,

fingers splayed,

waving.

Launch

2008-02-28T09:16:00.002-05:00

I’m watching
another splendid
London morning
transform
imperceptibly
into another
afternoon
of layered, mildly
contrasting
blue greys,
companionable,
made moreso
as crows fret
the tree behind
the little brick
opposite
my window perch
on Crystal Palace
Road, braying,
beaks poised
into freshening
wind. Rain
gathers itself
for a long, cold
night. Let it.
Let it paint
the street in light,
send the crows
to grutch in more
expedient shelter.
I have only
these hours
left, to watch,
to point my face
into the wind,
before morning
comes and I
must fly away.

Parting

2008-02-17T03:13:00.002-05:00

I saw them on the platform,
a mother and her son;
he was in his uniform,
she in blue homespun.

We were crowded close enough
that I couldn’t help but hear;
he was acting cool and tough,
but she could see his fear.

“I know you’ll be a righteous man,
and do the things you must.
It’s all in Heaven’s perfect plan,
the only plan we trust.”

“War is hell; we’ve heard it said,
and it’s very likely true;
but you’ll get accustomed to the dead
after one or two.”

“The sooner you get on with it
the sooner we’ll be done.
It won’t be easy, I admit,
but try to have some fun.”

“Splash their bodies in the street,
paint the walls with brains;
don’t stop until their blood completely
stops the city drains.”

“String their guts across the sand
to ripen in the sun,
and keep your Bible close at hand,
your Bible and your gun.”

“And don’t forget the children, Dear;
a couple every day;
they’re little heathen eyes and ears,
don’t let them get away.”

“Free the ground of Christendom
from the moon and scimitar.
Spread the word of Jesus from
Kirkuk to Kandahar.”

“When all of them are belly up
and victory’s in sight,
we’ll kill a pig and raise a cup
and celebrate all night.”

“I love you, Ma,” the soldier said,
a glisten in his eye,
“I love you, too, so go ahead.
Goodbye, my boy, Goodbye.”

This Be The Reverse

2008-02-13T02:41:00.004-05:00

They’re fucked up, your girls and boys.
No use denying it; it’s true.
At first they only broke their toys,
now they’re bent on breaking you.

It never should have come to this;
the schools, the teams, the ballet classes,
the never failing goodnight kiss;
all that for these jackasses?

We ourselves were raised by clods
who’d barely made it from the cave;
but we contrived to beat the odds:
we took our lumps, and we forgave.

We scrapped the wrong our parents did.
We set ourselves to building trust;
now our trusting, rotten kids
are all fucked up. But not by us.

Science points to peers, milieu,
while parents largely get ignored,
so as you bid your kids adieu,
don’t feel guilty. Lock the door.

Dreams

2008-02-08T07:56:00.001-05:00

So. Did life turn out
anything like you thought?
No, it seldom does.
Whatever the dream was,
we all seem to get caught
in the usual roundabouts.

Not that it isn’t better,
sometimes, if we do.
Youthful dreams are mad,
sometimes, as Mom and Dad
insist, and Sweetie too,
so when the fateful letter

comes and we must read,
know our lives have veered
away from us, we find
an alternate design,
some adequate career,
the things we think we need.

But would it kill your Honey
to wait a little while?
Will the bank collapse without
another burned-out
clerk to lose their files?
Other people’s money

is joy to spend, but no
fun to copy out,
and living, on the whole,
is better with a soul
than existence is without.
Money comes and goes,

but dreams are all we’ve got,
all we truly own,
even unfulfilled.
Daughters, sons, build
your dreams of native stone,
and plant forget-me-nots.

Winter Morning

2008-02-06T15:55:00.000-05:00

A mockingbird
flashes into
the iced fractals
of dogwood,
clings, alert,
flashes away.
The dogwood
quivers within
its glass armor,
waits.

A Painful Case

2008-02-02T10:49:00.000-05:00

Jim lived a life where things made sense.
The things he did, the things he saw
conformed to rules of evidence;
he was a Master of the Law
of the unintended consequence.

It served him well, one would think.
Our Jim made fortunes by deceit,
by playing legal tiddlywinks
for the better felons on the street;
if conscience quibbled, there was drink.

It never did. He loved the scam.
He’d watch his clients skip away
from their appointments with the slam
with cockeyed pride that made him say
“I lie, therefore I am.”

Were they guilty? Goodness, yes.
Did it matter? Not to Jim:
they paid him well for his success
at mesmerising every dim
jury with his ferrety finesse.

Then Vinnie Spoons ran amok.
Lacking the requisite retainer,
he engaged Jimmy with a Glock;
the case was truly a no-brainer:
he shot the phone, shot the clock,

shot Jim, leaving more
loopholes than the law allows.
Sometimes Justice kicks the door
and has its way in the bawdyhouse
we choose to call a world. Encore.

A Hope In Hell

2008-01-27T19:42:00.000-05:00

Were there Hell, and were it built
with graded rings of measured fire
precisely tuned to sinners’ guilt,
surely there would be a gyre

just for those who trot about
with Jesus on their bloodless lips,
who tell the poor to do without,
the mad to get a proper grip,

who wish the ill and crippled well,
pose their own prosperity
as proof that virtue pays. Hell?
A snowball’s chance. But we’ll see.

Note

2008-01-22T07:53:00.000-05:00

Enclosed please find one
perfect snowflake, which fell
this morning on my sleeve button,
framing its six-fold dihedral

symmetry in a circle of brass.
Recalling your love of the hexagram,
I couldn’t let perfection pass,
ran for envelope and stamp.

I’m counting on the general chill
to see it to you before it thaws;
not that I really think it will,
but it was lovely while it was.

Winter

2008-01-17T08:36:00.001-05:00

Another one.
Is it some godly judgment
we endure by cycles?

A yearly ritual
of guilt or expiation?
No. It just gets cold.

The axis leans away,
heat flow is oblique,
blocked somewhat.

A few more old ones die.
We lean into our fires,
glad of them.

An Old Man's Thoughts At Night

2008-01-11T08:36:00.000-05:00

It must be the fever, which
for days has plucked my nerves
like fiddle strings, tuning me up
for a concert I don’t want to hear.
I’m not well. My mind is going.
The ghosts make too much noise.
Not that I mind them. I don’t, really;
they’re friendly enough, even jovial,
farmers, who Bruegeled this place
together without square corner
or plumb jamb; they must be shocked
to see it still standing here,
though now additions hold it up.
In any case, they seem content.
One of them, who seems to be
the patriarch, judging by
his bird’s nest beard and the torn
hammer loop in his overalls,
has picked me for his special friend.
He follows me from room to room,
his purpose not exactly clear.
He has a sense of humor, though.
When we meet on the stairs he cuts
a little caper, a quick shuffle,
grins like a goat, invites me to dance,
the dead grandfather of mirth.
At first I was a bit put out,
but now I just ignore him, walk
right through him without a word,
without a look, just as if
he weren’t really there at all.
But the little girl upstairs is quite
another thing, with wide, appraising
Great Depression eyes, wearing
a dress sewn from flour sacking,
clutching a tattered ragdoll
with button eyes bigger than hers,
eyes they both seem to use.
Influenza took her in ‘33.
I’m sleeping in her room, I think,
which must be why I wake to find
them standing there, sober, mute,
at the foot of the bed, studying me
like sputum on a glass slide,
wondering, I suppose, why
I still live. I don’t know
what to tell her about that,
what excuses would suffice.
I confess she unsettled me at first,
but I’m accustomed to her now,
even that spooky doll; I’d miss them
were they gone, all of them.
Now it’s really just the music
has me out on a limb,
a constant crescendo and diminuendo
of high, keening minor chords,
the swell and sigh of almost silence,
like a fitful autumn wind
across a dusty violin.
The music, if it is music,
seems to call, to intimate
that things are really not so bad
over there, all considered,
not so dead as one would think.
Just one big happy family;
rosin up for the Devil’s Trill.
All welcome to the ball.
I find I’m terrified at such
a meddlesome eternity,
fussily embroidered with
such insinuating music,
or, God forbid, the witless joy
of cloth-eared angels perched
forever on their cotton fluff,
swiping harp glissandi through
the bright, endless afternoon
of paradise. Truly, a hell
more than worthy of the name.
No. Death is kinder than that.
Death is only a beautiful quiet,
a silence so profound we forget
to listen to the winnowing wind,
the world’s flat, persistent prattle,
its busy contradictions, ghosts.

Sorry

2008-01-04T01:53:00.000-05:00

Ghastly flu. Back soon, I hope.

Metaphysics

2007-12-14T07:23:00.000-05:00

A warm December rain relieves
the unattended silent night,
in the withered garden weaves
its carpet of reflected light.
All our distant instruments
describe a wilderness of sky,
another desert testament,
a lunar hermit’s arctic cry.
Yet night is shivering on the lawns,
splashed in scintillating shards,
as light older than the sun
relaxes with us in our yards.

The stars we follow never seem
to take us where we want to go;
our camels start for Bethlehem,
deliver us to Buffalo,
in which inclement weather we
discover just enough to stay,
as rumors of nativity
are lost behind the frozen gray,
and winter travel’s such a danger
that we settle to await the thaw,
and stumble on a little stranger
lying in the golden straw.

Morning Poem

2007-12-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

Winter’s
here. Ice
drapes the eaves,
splits dawn
into pale pink
diamonds
spilled across
the windowsill.
Squirrels
stutter across
new snow, leave
complicated tracks.
Oh, why have you
left me so
cold and alone?

Earthenware

2007-12-06T23:38:00.000-05:00

It’s pleasant here among the dead,
here beneath the ancient trees
that drift and whisper overhead,
to stroll the polished privacies,

these aisles and avenues to which
the sleepers never thought to come;
young or old, poor or rich,
all our roads meander home.

I love the weather-blackened smiles
of pensive angels, the ghost of mirth
at those who come to reconcile
Forever with the rooted earth,

but I come for dates and names,
to see the slow erosion cull
chiseled edges, as earth reclaims
her stone for proper burial.

“AMANDA,” a small one says, in rose,
a participle unadorned:
“Beloved,” her curls and calicos
are here for centuries to mourn.

Down the hill, another one,
chipped out and carved by hand,
with a horseshoe nail: “INFENT SON.”
To see it is to understand.

It’s why we came, no? It’s clear
that not a single thing will stay
for very long, our works, our fears,
our very stones will melt away.

All we make our mountains of
is chips, shards of earthenware.
Nothing will be left but love,
as insubstantial as the air.

My Uncle

2007-12-03T22:03:00.000-05:00

Joe used to
say, Kid, live
fast, die young,
and have a
beautiful
corpse, which I
knew he’d got
from some old
movie full
of black and
white bookies,
broads and bars,
but that's what
he always
used to say,
and he did,
except for
the last part,
about which
the less said
the better,
but, as he
also used
to like to
say, two out
of three ain’t
too bad.

More Lies

2007-11-30T08:39:00.001-05:00

We couldn’t live without them, lies,
could we? It’s difficult to see
how we’d meet each other’s eyes.
Our lives are lies disguised by v.

Do Aunties really have to know
the strict proportions of their derrieres?
Can’t we let our bosses glow
at how we tremble, how we care?

Of course they don’t. Of course we can.
This is life, not Sunday school;
if Daddy isn’t Superman,
to tell him so is merely cruel.

And if your war is going wrong,
why get the people all upset?
Just sing a patriotic song.
The dead won’t tell. The dead forget.

Paul

2007-11-26T06:38:00.000-05:00

When the music ends I think to change the station,
but sit in a flood of Spanish from which I pick
a word here, phrase there, finally
submerged in the bewildering velocity,
ten again, riding, watching your thick
wrists nudge the wheel, fingers quick
with silver levered from your oiled machine
to Puerto Rican voyagers on Riverside.
At lights you turn and make your toothpick
bounce to “Ach du Lieber Augustine,”
the one whose bus I wait all week to ride.
Thirty years you drove, well or sick,
your iron horses. You were immortal. There was
no zero in my young arithmetic.

But zero is, and finally Christmastime
was the last stop. Sleep, deep and dreamless,
descended on a long day of rain;
you folded into silent night, humane
and bitter passage, unheralded, unless
the angels sang somewhere to give you rest.
If so, I didn’t hear it, and I drove all night
to see you in your glossed mahogany.
But it wasn’t you, the satined, overdressed
cadaver, mummy under muted lights
which yet betrayed the wooden forgery
by earth inherited, by clergy blessed.
We put a good man in the ground.
We told each other it was for the best.

We packed your things away that afternoon.
The top drawer fell to me: a silver chain
on which two broken pocket watches hung;
two old Hohners, G, one sprung;
a squat Sir Walter Raleigh’s which contained
your last few years of slugs and foreign change;
a safety razor, three-piece, brass, Gillette;
a new Norelco dusted with your hair;
two vials for Parkinson’s and two for pain;
some collar stays; a sleeve of cigarettes.
I smoked, thought: This is it? Here
one day, the next a box of stuff?
You whispered, framed in regimental gear:
“The Ritz it ain’t, Kiddo. But enough’s enough.”

An Announcement

2007-11-16T07:01:00.001-05:00

I'm happy--and a bit incredulous--to announce that Opening Chapter will publish a book of my poems in the new year. Details are sketchy right now, but I'll let you know more when things clarify. Meanwhile, I can only say thanks to those who made it happen. You know who you are, and--fair warning--so will everyone else when the thing comes out.

Tools of the Trade

2007-11-13T07:31:00.001-05:00

I notice, putting pen to paper,
the absence of a line behind
the chased bill of my trusty Shaeffer.
There comes a certain peace of mind
to find the line I tried to write
has dried to powder overnight.

Less to cancel, less to think,
less misgiving and mistaking,
less for postage, less for ink,
less back and head and belly aching.
I’ll print a whole empty book,
buy myself a Meisterstuck.

Shenandoah

2007-11-12T14:06:00.000-05:00

Knowing

2007-11-09T18:02:00.001-05:00

We were young once, and knew
everything there was to know;
if life was shifty, we were true,
if we were callow, we could grow.

And grow we did, until we knew
a ghost of what we used to know;
but life was shifty, that was true,
we’d seen it in the video.

And more and more of what we knew
conflicts with what we think we know,
and now nothing rings as true
as what we knew a life ago.

Kid, watch it. Don’t be too
quick to doubt the things you know;
most of it is wrong, it’s true,
and the rest simply isn’t so,

but if you haven’t got a clue
that’s at least a place to start;
the needled rose will point you true,
the compass gimbaled in your heart.

Fall

2007-11-07T10:59:00.000-05:00

Dream

2007-11-05T12:06:00.000-05:00

The woman runs in a grove of firs,
red warmups a contained flame
along the plotted corridors,
face a mask neither tame
nor wild, a static ecstasy.
Beyond the needled hush lies
a meadow with an oak tree;
a square white house justifies
the thin, deciduous, autumn light.
A tire swing gathers the sun,
leaves caught on its inner bight,
where her eyes fix as she runs, runs.

Something in her progress might
suggest pursuers or pursuit,
but not the barest hint of flight;
only an air of resolute
abstraction, cool, suffering
suffused with eagerness, disdain
for what the next strides will bring,
as if pain or the end of pain
were waiting just beyond the rows,
as if grief or the end of grief
might wait in the swing, the meadow,
be caught in the veins of a spun leaf.

Visit

2007-11-03T08:53:00.001-04:00

What if, one
sun soaked, most particular afternoon,
that treacherous forsythia there
should shrug from its complaisant splendor
into flame? Should flare and thunder
with Immense authority
your name?

Insist (from
the safety of your belly, face in the grass)
upon current and immaculate credentials:
who but demons wheedle in
incendiary shrubbery?
This protocol observed,
lose your shoes.

Ask Him,
(your most mollifying modulations)
what on earth could bring Him to your
(His) humble and unworthy garden.
Say something nice about His light,
the diamond edge of His cast shadows.
He likes that.

Beg His
forgiveness for the rucksack of sin you dragged
into the world by your belly. Show Him the scar.
Then, scorched pure by His
consuming grace, be just: do not
omit to thank Him for His
mysterious ways.

It may now
be proper to most obligingly inquire
what He might require of His servant
(you.) No frivolous visitor,
Good Landlord, He never comes
without His itemized agenda.
He’ll tell you.

Be sure
that to His purpose you are the optimum instrument.
You might be asked to build some small apocalypse,
or become the vessel of transmission
for some entirely new disease.
True, it may only be time to
clean the ovens.

No matter what,
accede. You can’t outrun His awful will.
The only possible alternative
is to cast yourself forthwith at the heart
of His redeeming fire, dare Him
to spit you out alive: turn
the hose on Him.

Whitetails

2007-11-01T04:42:00.000-04:00

Three does, at the corner
where the arclit
hexagon had stopped them
far beyond their tracks
to puzzle some meaning
from the hieroglyphs,
watch me scrape along
the pavement with my face
turned toward the moon.

So still are they,
hidden in the brilliant
copper camouflage
of municipal light, so
acutely do they mime
the transparency
of the air surrounding them
that I only see them as
I step off the curb.

I freeze, but before I can ask
what they could possibly want
from our metallic streets,
our steel trees that sing
with the rain, commanding
YIELD, or CAUTION, or STOP,
there is suddenly just a riffle
of hooves on warm asphalt
fading into the air.

Spirits

2007-10-28T03:36:00.000-04:00

The veil between the worlds is wearing thin.
As October hobbles to its chilly close,
the spirits slip their summer discipline
to haunt our porches in their parent’s clothes.

Monsters jostle demons in the streets,
the walking dead are jolly as they rot;
it’s difficult to say, of those we treat,
who might be whom, and who may not.

But soon enough November falls in place,
with a question no one ever asks:
what kind of creatures would we face
if grownups finally put away their masks?

Happy Birthday, Dyl and Syl

2007-10-27T10:16:00.000-04:00

Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Sylvia Plath

Poems, Potatoes

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line
Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,
Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,
Given an inch. Not that they're gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter
To delicacy, to poise) but that they
Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.
Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato
Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly
Superior page; the blunt stone also.

A Day at the Arboretum

2007-10-24T07:24:00.000-04:00

Now the helicopters come,
now the abracadabras
of the great abscission,
as the trees spin down
their summer architecture,
provision and shelter
for their germinating young,
fuel for the fires of autumn.

Watching my daughters run
with their recalcitrant kite,
breeze a straggling lamb
behind, I wonder why
I feel so strange lately;
why now, when everything
showed signs of coming
together, I should look
down to find my hands
involved in such confusion,
such an inchoate music
of kite strings and leaves.

The Shell

2007-10-21T08:29:00.000-04:00

I took the conch down from the shelf
to listen to the sea,
but at my ear a silver elf
sang my name to me.

A voice of silver, high and wild,
no human throat could form,
as if an ectoplasmic child
were crying in a storm.

I held it there and strained to hear
a message, grammar, sense,
but just a syllable was clear,
simplistic eloquence.

The carols of the Lorelei
cost sailing men their souls;
the Sirens’ fetching lullabies
peopled Grecian shoals.

I put it down; its whisperings
could charm the curios;
I knew that there are certain things
it’s better not to know.

But the voice was never in the shell,
the voice was in my head;
fires of heaven, fires of hell,
I followed where it led.

A Half Life of One

2007-10-17T19:54:00.000-04:00

At long last I have in my hands Bill Liversidge's new novel A Half Life of One, and a beautiful thing it is. It is currently available through Amazon. Do yourself a favor.

We are trying to arrange an interview with the author, but he remains, as always, elusive. No doubt there are better avenues to publicity than this humble blog, but we will persist, and we hope that eventually he'll be convinced to come have a chat. His picture is below. If you see him, a word in his ear would not go amiss.

By the Sea

2007-10-16T07:47:00.001-04:00

I used to come in former days,
to watch your dazzle shame the sun,
to listen as you’d paraphrase
the legends of leviathan.

Once I thought I understood
your idiot metronomy,
hoped your ceaseless murmur would
approximate profundity,

but now I see a tattered bird,
a parrot raised in distant lands,
squawking language never heard,
that neither of us understands.

I would have liked to learn the trick
that whittles old glass and stone
to gems the lucky children lick
and barter on the journey home.

But all our charmed summers go;
the children put their pails aside,
voyage slowly home to know
the cunning harvest of the tide.

Secrets of the Great Composers

2007-10-12T11:53:00.001-04:00

We write what music’s in our hearts
in manuscript of blood and nerve:
to wrap the primal fish of art

no lesser parchment serves.
None so plainly signifies
the variations we observe:

iubilate, track of fly,
oratorio of gall,
heavy metal lullaby.

Composer, fiddle, fiddler, hall,
we count the quavers, score the parts
to songs we learned when we were small.

Kairos

2007-10-10T22:21:00.001-04:00

http://www.doghousebooks.ie/doghouse/publications/

Enough said.

Dark

2007-10-08T15:49:00.001-04:00

Once we were young, and knew
the monsters in the dark were real,
waiting there among the shoes
and shirts for another juicy meal.

But we lived and learned, most of us,
that shadow phantoms were the least
of it, that sunlit dailiness
could hold more terrors than the beast.

Now, old, we tardy scholars
serve our demons bread and broth;
we gossip with our midnight callers,
but dread the dusty kisses of the moth.

Complications

2007-10-05T22:41:00.001-04:00

Love’s
Old
Sweet
Song

Love is gentle, love is kind,
love is all things positive;
love can devastate the mind,
vaporize the will to live.

Would Jack and Jill be mad about
themselves absent their gnarly hill?
Would love be love at all without
its coiled, embrangled codicils?

Love’s unrequited, to take
the common case to be the whole:
one oblivious to the ache
that permeates the other’s soul,

a torture reason doesn’t ease,
that logic’s powerless to move;
it's one of love’s vagaries
that only Darwin could approve.

But lightning strikes. People do
meet, and do reciprocate
affection all the time, it’s true;
then they re-evaluate

relationships already sealed,
weigh the pain of leaving with
the anguish yet to be revealed,
the dismal facts against the myth.

Catastrophe in Camelot
could have been avoided had
not Guinevere and Lancelot
usurped the love their vows forbade.

Think of Helen and her boy,
the city sacked, the useless dead;
they traded happiness for joy,
got love’s choruses instead.

And then there are the noble souls
who do resist the sirens’ song;
they learn to sleep on glowing coals
but rarely hold out very long.

Resistance only makes it worse;
passion waxes when denied.
Love has methods to coerce
nobility dissatisfied.

The only mystery is why:
clearly, love’s a losing game.
Ask the pretty butterfly
about the flower in the flame.

The Disappearance of Jane C.

2007-10-03T03:41:00.001-04:00

The initial chat had been upbeat enough,
but still, the callback took her by surprise
because the competition had been tough,
a drill of hungry-looking Ivy ties
whose calfskin attaches were nicely scuffed.

So Jane was leery, facing the gray VPs,
two flannel walrus and a worsted moose,
who didn’t seem to doubt her expertise
so much as her promise not to reproduce,
to keep a handle on her ovaries.

She swore that kids were nowhere in her plan,
would never be, even unforeseeably.
She swore to be as bankable as any man,
and the interview concluded quite agreeably,
though the odd remarks about her tan

and the news that she was possibly a ten
made her disbelieve them when they said
she was still in the running as of then,
and maybe just the slightest bit ahead.
They’d be in touch. So long. Thanks again.

She bought two papers on the way uptown
because she had some extra resumes
she thought it couldn’t hurt to spread around,
a polished recitation of her works and days,
worth about an interview per pound.

But in a week they thrilled her with the news,
and though the piggy only yielded ninety cents
she shopped away her unemployment blues,
scribbled checks against her next month’s rent
for a calfskin case and new cross-training shoes.

And that was the last we ever saw of her.
None of her usual contacts had a clue,
except her new personal manager
who knew from watching her accounts accrue
that she couldn’t conceivably be happier.

The Parking Lot

2007-10-01T07:19:00.001-04:00

Sedan de Ville

Oliver Kingman wheels regal his shimmering stretch
into its place of honor by the door, eyes
the Bug at the foot of the lot with something akin to fear:
all these years of running his place he's always been first,
and now some flextime freakshow comes before
the sun is up, burning the lights, as if he cared
about the flow of work or man from day to night,
or rituals of keys. Mister Kingman pushes home
the magnificent door and savors the solid thunk
of his enameled dreams, squints against the sun
rising in his chrome, thinks of Cadillacs to come
as he heads into the place he built with his hands, a man
with places to go, a man with appointments to keep.

Import

Bloody with morning,
low in the red eye of sun,
squadrons of Nissans.

Electra 225

Caught like a fly in the amber of morning
the janitor eases his deuce and a quarter
to rest in the first of the unreserved spaces,
sits with his radio, drinking the last
of his breakfast of beer. In back of his mind
is a certain unease with the ghost of the previous
owner (a soldier more hopeful than wise,
who’d bought the impeccable ride for a woman
more trying than true) whispering mile
after mile of adulteries into his ear
from a government grave in the wintery earth
of Detroit. At the start it seemed fortunate past
all his dreams: a woman with money to burn
with a car that was everything rolled into one.
But of late he'd begun to have certain misgivings
at how it appeared to betray his intentions
whenever the voice in his ear became lulling
or frightened him more than he usually was,
how it reached for the shoulders or hungered for speed
or was simply so smooth that he found himself drifting
to sleep at the wheel. He poured his libation,
went to his duties, with only a glance
at the glittering thing he'd escaped, saw only
its blank and implacable beauty returned.

Honda

In black ten-gallon,
blue jeans, hand tooled boots, ambling
from trusted Honda
to his opulent corral
in the Xerox room,
a faithful reproduction
of the golden west,
riding an eastern pony.
He is a vision
of some lost nobility,
a hint of mislaid
character, backbone, poise. Then,
in grey ten-gallon,
grey jeans, boots, another one,
from another Honda, grey.

Mustang

Driven madly through the dawn
from condominium to panic,
the junior salesman pushes in
between desire and consummation,
sweeper and boss. Dashboard strewn
with foiled antacid, he sees in Kingman's
lacquer Kingman's lackey, unaware,
despite his various degrees,
that the space is empty by design,
if unofficially, owned
by Kingman's secretary, Suze,
high school graduate,
who as he sits pulls up behind
and taps the horn of her new Corvette.
Puzzled for a second, finally
he understands, in time to see
her smile dissolve like windshield frost.
Backing out, he smiles across,
a new offense, sees his future
curling from her chromed exhausts.

Bubbles

2007-09-29T09:13:00.000-04:00

In the end, his mind wasn’t right,
if it ever was. It was clear,
as he put his jeweled soap to flight
from the city’s summer parks and piers

that he was no longer there
with the rest of us, that he was one
with the iridescent membranous air
his wire wands stole from the sun,

the huge, oscillating spheres
in which a hundred others milled,
the tetrahedra stacked in tiers
until the twisted columns spilled

their remnant droplets to his feet.
He was perennial, a fixture,
his nest of wands, pans, discreet
tip jar, his secret mixtures

jugged, marked with painted runes,
but he imperceptibly became
as sheer as his diaphanous balloons.
We didn’t even know his name,

still less where he might live, or how,
what kind of life his small and few
contributions would allow.
He charmed us, that was all we knew;

we were blinded by his art.
An ephemeral phenomenon,
he drew the music of his heart
in films of air. Then he was gone.

Monkeys

2007-09-28T05:24:00.000-04:00

Two brass monkeys
one brass bitch;
devil to pay
and no hot pitch.

Iron monkeys
stuck in a ditch;
devil to pay
and no hot pitch.

Golden monkeys
growing rich;
devil to pay
and no hot pitch.

Sleepy monkey
at the switch;
devil to pay
and no hot pitch.

All the monkeys,
which is which?
Devil to pay
and no hot pitch.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

2007-09-25T00:46:00.000-04:00

Charles Tombe lost his wife;
the black angels swoop and drag.
His Rose, the flower of his life,
has strangled on a plastic bag.

A goat, she was his complement;
a truer heart was never born,
and he was never so content
as when he took her by the horns.

Her face was all an impish smile,
her sweetness brightened all his days,
at night she warmed their domicile
with her endearing, woolly ways.

Their love had been discovered by
her former owner in his field,
and in Sudan that means you tie
the knot: the banns were quickly sealed.

A modest dowry was assessed
by the local judge who married them;
their marriage vows were duly blessed
by clergy, law, and cherubim,

and all went well for Charles and Rose,
though life was hard and times lean,
would still be well had not her nose
been drawn to polyethylene.

But do not mourn for gentle Rose,
nor Charles, who’s not a man to worry,
all earthly things come to a close,
and she became a lovely curry.

Landscape With Still Life

2007-09-24T00:46:00.001-04:00

And now the hedge crawls with roses.
Neighbor’s getaways, they smear
the sober privet, little lips,
calling in little pink voices.

Listen. The neighbors are laughing about it.
They sit on their pressure-treated altar
rattling tall, aluminum teas,
toast their luck at being themselves.

Meanwhile, their roses flee,
weak, unpruned, gone to foliage.
Listen. You can hear them purr,
soliciting, mewling love.

Oh, it’s wonderful here. It is.
The ranked pools of iced tea,
the decks of impeccable, rotless green.
All this. Roses, too.

Much Ado

2007-09-22T07:24:00.001-04:00

If nothing else, Nothing’s plentiful.
The universe, to modern thought,
is full of it, a veritable
cornucopia of naught,

the matter that we take for All
a scant fraction of the whole,
including what we choose to call
“dark,” the mystery casserole

of particles we haven’t found,
grit we posit “Somewhere,”
lest good equations prove unsound.
Still, we know there’s Something there,

though even Something’s mostly not:
everything we see or touch
is virtually empty space; what’s
truly solid isn’t much.

Nothing grows at quite a clip:
the universe is fast expanding;
but sweet nothings from your lips
are truly Something, notwithstanding.

Fable

2007-09-20T21:15:00.000-04:00

A pointy-headed potentate
declared His closet out of date,
commissioned robes to be designed
with His divinity in mind.
The tailors ran Him up some stuff,
none of it nearly good enough:
to Him the breathy silks of China
whispered hints of something finer.

On pain of death He set His drapers
weaving bolts of silky vapor
and they did exactly that:
they brought the jaded plutocrat
a suit of air and stroked and fussed
until He was completely trussed
in nothing but His own belief,
wafting a matching handkerchief.

Light of Heaven, thus arrayed,
decreed a royal cavalcade
to show the population just how
comely was its sacred cow.
And so He rode His gilded chair
among the thronging thousands, bare,
while everybody played it cool
and noticed nothing. Enter Fool.

“He’s naked!” sang our barefoot boy;
“We’re history,” mumbled hoi polloi.
Anointed only gazed and said
a single quiet sentence: “Head.”
Someone took it from the street,
put it gently at His feet.
Awed, we watched His raiment flowing,
the silken grandeur of His going.

Trees

2007-09-18T21:39:00.001-04:00

It’s difficult to trust the trees,
the way they whisper each to each
in sibilant conspiracies
that almost verge on human speech.

Their daedal, implicated crooks
appear to watch us as we pass,
poised to catch us as we look
for roots that slither in the grass.

“We’ll be back,” they seem to say,
slipping gaudy colors on;
but man progresses day by day:
with any luck they’ll soon be gone.

Sunday Afternoon

2007-09-16T22:51:00.001-04:00

You are sitting in your chair
watching sinuous
cadenzas of smoke in the
sun. I say the day
is too beautiful to waste.
You don’t answer,
but in a few seconds say
“It’s too beautiful
to stay inside. Let’s go out.”

Walking with you quietly
at dusk, I say how
brilliant the sky is in the
west, but find myself
alone, gaping, turn to search
for you, until, at
my blind elbow, you say how
brilliant the sky is
some spring evenings in the north.

Then, in our news-printed sheets
I listen to your
breath, careful not to wake you,
conjure faces from
the ceiling, but in a while
you mumble something
I don’t quite catch. From the edge
of sleep I say “What?”
You, awake now, say “What? What?”

Change

2007-09-15T01:09:00.001-04:00

This morning
even the squirrels
were stretched out
on the fence rail,
baking.

Now
the privet quivers
with the first
uncertain whispers
of winter.

Now
the bitten crickets
are a single
blind beast of
ambition.

RSVP

2007-09-13T04:34:00.000-04:00

Let’s walk, beloved, weary girl,
through the massed September glory
easy in the careless whirled
couturier memento mori,
let’s smile in fall’s face.

Let’s find a snug place
in this divine deciduous fire,
learn the leaves’ abiding grace
in letting go to tumble higher,
learn to ride the appled air.

Let’s find a place and settle there
to watch our larking children go
imperiled to the world’s affairs,
and watch the maples gather snow
with ivy woven in our hair.

The Lovers

2007-09-10T16:04:00.001-04:00

In Mantua a busy building crew
unearthed another Neolithic grave,
which in itself is surely nothing new,
and this was like most others, save
that this one was inhabited by two.

Two who must have loved each other, by
the look of them together; they embrace--
their bones--like living people where they lie,
her slender fingers cradling his face,
his arm around her in a long goodbye.

Posed thus, they lie in state, our own,
youths, dead before their teeth were worn,
dead, but not by stick and not by stone,
whom ancient spirits thought it right to mourn
with the lovely interweaving of their bones.

Whether sacrificed or dead by chance,
they never thought to see the sky again,
could never ken their present circumstance,
but we see in them a talisman,
the dancers folded to become the dance.

Leaves

2007-09-09T02:05:00.000-04:00

Days diminish, nights grow cold
as consummation takes the trees,
we wander deep in blood and gold

that yesterday was uncontrolled
profusion of ascendancies.
Days diminish, nights grow cold

and now the brittle wind unrolls
a tapestry of ecstasies
we wander, deep in blood and gold.

Darling, we are growing old
for casual antitheses:
days diminish, nights grow cold,

the gentle pastures once we strolled
forget us when the rivers freeze.
We wander deep in blood and gold,

with ancient chapters to unfold
of winter’s snug felicities;
days diminish, nights grow cold,
we wander deep in blood and gold.

In Vitro

2007-09-07T08:57:00.000-04:00

Mary Alice is her given name,
by all accounts she’s something new;
so say the ologists who framed
the test-tube tiger at the National Zoo.

To all appearances she’s fine,
as tigerish as one could wish,
without a single outward sign
of glove, syringe, or petrie dish.

But is she still a tiger in her fur,
or something not completely clear?
Is she the beast that tigers were
before the jungles disappeared?

She prowls her stingy habitat
for carrion the keepers leave,
jackal dressed as royal cat,
administrative make-believe.

Her kind is dying out, they say,
we had to take heroic steps
to save them for a better day:
Sunday afternoon, perhaps.

There in her stagy set she lies,
eye of the city’s feral roar,
her beauty conjured to imply
there’s room for tigers anymore.

Believer

2007-09-03T01:01:00.001-04:00

You recognize the symptoms: spring,
when the dendrites out behind the house
hiss in their synapses news of the sun.

There is no green like this green:
plush, arrogant, greedy for sky,
a green to robe an infant czar

in manifest dominion while
the subtler tinctures take effect;
a green too green to last.

All through the thinner twigs
the ghosts of old composers forge
a metal, incoherent music;

elated squirrels dare anything;
even the mice sifting the litter
seem glad to fatten for the cats.

You see these things. You register
the small and interchangeable
delights enacted every year,

as though the pageant of renewal
were a scene set to catch you out,
convict you of your winter heart.

Look: already the ghost: a scrim
of gray gauze, bearing the face
of a deposed and neurasthenic monarch,

a face very like your own,
hovering outside the glass
to cry murder as the sun goes down.

This is no dark wood.
This is the rank wood of knowledge,
busy murmur that refutes our lives.

Listen: this is the murmur of the world.
This is the buzz of life, or else
a flickering fluorescent light.

*

But, inevitably, the telephone,
then the door, will be enlivened
by one you ought to recognize.

Certainly he seems familiar—
you’ve seen that laurel wreath before,
atilt like a tour-guide cap,

Virgil via Cecil DeMille—
the question is, familiar to whom?
Invite him in. He may have news

of the one you thought you were before
you woke to the shrill choir of knives,
the shook rattle of plastic sleep.

Face ashier than yours, he’ll sigh,
tell you how the nobler Romans
ran against their honed bronze,

or lowered their goose-quilled brachials
into warm, oil-scented baths,
how death’s simply a debt we pay

in battle or bed, at altar or wine,
to ransom dignitas awry
or simply to cheat a mad emperor

of another moment’s entertainment.
No doubt he’d find it hard to believe
that for you it’s a meaner matter still,

stripped of the frills of circumstance,
a keening wheedle in the cells,
salesclerk haunting your sleeve.

Keep mum. Soon he’ll be tired
enough of your inertia to depart,
wishing well, advising rest

as though there were any rest,
work, as though there were work,
or any reason to rest or work.

*

But he has something else in mind.
A party. A get-together, smallish,
friends, maybe friends of friends.

If only the room didn’t stretch
to the vanishing point, if only the door
were big enough to pass a cat

you might be less disinclined.
You did promise, weeks ago,
and you have no wish to give offense,

not again, at any rate,
but now your mind refuses to produce
a single credible way out.

It’s this or the dark, elastic hours,
or worse. It’s not that far.
You pull yourself together. Go.

Each step proves you wrong.
Each buzzing streetlamp
makes a virtue of futility

beneath the overarching dark.
Behind the blue-lit windows
lives go on as lives should,

as though informed by some purpose,
some solution for the riddles
we inherit with our skin.

Soft laughter sifts from the porches,
cut by the metronomic chirp
of wicker and hinge and rocking chairs,

but you feel no such easy kinship.
You are less in the world than a wolf
padding across the permafrost

on the deepest night of a cold year,
intractably itself, unalterably at home,
a beast you can only envy.

*

No. You are the pale-eyed child
in the cell of polyethylene,
film proof against a world

that threatens on all sides
but hovers always out of reach,
infecting you with otherness.

When you hear the laughter and the music
you wonder how such innocence
could possibly relate to you,

but you follow your friend inside
to face the gathering, hoping
to find the bar and the cozy corner

with the one reasonable chair,
nurse a drink, quietly leave.
No one’s inclined to interfere:

you pucker up to your Bordeaux,
silently nibble your Goldfish
until the sudden rapture of glass,

the blossoming roses in beige pile.
You recognize your host’s son.
You recognize your own hands

clamped to hold his arm together,
slick with freshets of bright arterial
blood you cannot stop. You vise

tighter down on his arm, but still
the blood sluices through your fingers
with unimaginable force,

exulting in its new freedom,
hot to know the wider world.
Someone throws a towel, then

a belt comes from somewhere else;
you know instantly neither will do,
and then you hear yourself yell

for a tie, with no conscious thought,
and one appears. It is blue,
you notice, with silver lions, rampant,

quite rakishly coroneted,
discreetly gravy-stained and sewn,
the label says, in Hong Kong,

as you pass it twice around above
the wound, calling for a knife,
feeling the boy's heartbeat

in your hands, a small wild thing
doing its best to escape a cage.
You see brie on the knife when it comes,

smears of cheese and crumbs of rind,
pass it through a wrap of tie,
turn it tight. Immediately

fresh fountains of blood, more
than seems possible, but then
it settles down, dies away.

You notice that your breath is short,
that the room has been sucked free of air;
that the knife is steadying your hand.

Finally, a siren. Someone
taps your shoulder. You move aside,
stagger through the stunned company

out into the cool of night,
to stand like a sprinter past the tape,
soaking wet, completely spent,

bent, hands on shaky knees,
trying to suck every atom
of oxygen out of the sky, the sky

made wholly new, created
just today, for you, and you look,
see it all for the first time,

first witness to the stars
splashed across eternity
with no particular design,

as crickets saw the soft air
for no apparent reason but
delight at being in the world, alive.

Passerine

2007-08-30T21:31:00.001-04:00

A life ago on a winter beach
I saw a woman walking the duff
that marked the gelid water’s reach,

tracking the meander of frozen fluff
that kept the sea from the iced sand,
a narrow passage, but way enough;

all the rest was snow, the land
sculpted by honed talons of air,
an eldritch scape. Hatless, hands

gloved, fisted to a red pair
of bulbous fruits on black stalks,
she was borne on a black wing of hair.

I was under the boardwalk
burning my driftwood, hunched
into heat, safe from the screaming hawk;

she saw my smoke, turned, crunched
up across the glazed snow.
I saw how chapped she was, how clenched

against the cold, yet her steps were slow,
measuring the way. I laid on
the last of the wood, poured some joe

from the thermos, the heat mostly gone,
held it out as she came up.
But she only stood silent, withdrawn

from all but the fire, ignored the cup
to worship at the votary
between us, upright, black as a bishop.

Her eyes were reaches darker than the sea.
I couldn’t guess her age; I knew
she was older, a bit, older than me,

but she wouldn’t be seen; she let me construe
the wisps of steam from her red wool,
her insulated hiking shoes.

Enough, it seems. Recovered, beautiful,
my blackbird started for the beach,
drained my heart, left it full.

What Is This Thing Called Failure?

2007-08-28T04:01:00.000-04:00

Once it was a lathered mutt
I saw in the window of a train,
defending his equipment hut,
choking on his rusty chain.
I was glad to be going places,
certain I could make it rain.

Then I saw it in the faces
of the stained old birds in parks--
you know the ones I mean--the cases,
wanderers who found the mark,
turned away in disbelief.
I saw, but the auspices were dark.

I saw it drop its scrim on grief,
add the cruel plasm of despair
to the spent tenure of handkerchiefs.
I saw it hover in the air
over schoolyards, eyeing its clutch.
I saw it damned near everywhere.

But lately? Lately not so much.
I’m pushing Pullmans late and soon,
going places, deals and such:
Cedar Falls tomorrow noon.
And nothing’s in my window but
a monkey grinning at the moon.

The Madness of Monarchs

2007-08-24T22:12:00.001-04:00

King Charles VI of France,
believing he was made of glass,
eschewed his carriage on the chance
a bump would smash the ruling class.

He’d pace the palace corridors
by night, howling, which so aggrieved
Queen Isabeau that her ambassadors
were forced to insist she mustn’t leave.

But, wolf or wineglass, the man
was insufferable, and so Odette
de Champdives was made to stand—
or sleep—as Isabeau’s soubrette,

and she, for the next thirty years,
went unnoticed as she lay
in the queen’s place in the queen’s gear,
while Charles pounded the cold parquet.

Later, in Bavaria, we find
among the aristocratic psychos
the Princess Alexandra, who dined
as a little girl on grand pianos,

a fact she steadfastly maintained
until the day she shuffled off
these mortal scales, and which explained
the sonant passages when she coughed.

Her nephew, Ludwig II, was worse;
he declared that night was day,
roamed the frozen black traverses
bundled in his golden sleigh,

looking for a place to build
another pile of gingerbread;
Ludwig’s fantasies fulfilled,
what if the exchequer bled?

Called “The Fairy Tale King”
by trolls, Ludwig was declared
unfit for rule, then for lingering.
His little brother? Ludwig squared.

Otto by name, this unpleasant
fellow believed he could retain
his sanity only by shooting a peasant
every day, which became a strain

on the servants’ quickly thinning ranks.
At last they bribed an inside man
to chamber Otto’s piece with blanks,
and picked a gardener to stand

alone in the field till a shot was fired,
and then to fall convincingly dead;
Otto, relieved, would then retire,
demons quiet in his head.

Nowadays, there’s Georgie the First,
who is by all accounts the worst;
a vain, incurious, callow clod,
his policies are set by God

in frank, extended nighttime chats.
They sit and dish on this or that
until they’re seeing Eye to eye
on who should live, who should die.

Henri I of Haiti once
marched his army off a cliff
to demonstrate obedience;
death wasn't at all so swift

for those refusing, but it was sure;
Henri Christophe was then alone,
rebels approaching. He had the cure:
a bullet through his own breastbone.

If only George could take a hint--
though a heart shot would not apply,
and one in the head only scatter lint--
he could reach around, and try, try.

The Passersby

2007-08-23T07:54:00.000-04:00

You see them everywhere,
the dazed and disbelieving passersby,
faces full of the things they’ve seen,
disillusioned, ashen, torn between
rage at having truth assault their eye
and dumb wonder at the luck of being there.

Innocent passersby,
with no love of seeing or being seen,
folk who live in the thin zone between
the actual and that which meets the eye,
things dreamt and things really there.
Decent citizens: they’re everywhere.

Maybe it’s death they’ve seen,
maybe the desperate gunman caught between
the cops and the proprietor’s dead eye,
or maybe they saw that tangled form there
hit, spread its humors everywhere.
They’ll never be the same, the passersby.

Maybe it’s love between
two perfect strangers that compels their eye
to follow strolling couples here and there;
why else would we meet them everywhere?
There’s no escaping them, the passersby,
and they remember everything they’ve seen.

Maybe another eye
to faithfully reflect them standing there
is what they search for everywhere,
some connection. Or do the passersby
simply collect the incidents they’ve seen,
bright pages to press their days between?

They won’t always be there:
things will go unnoticed everywhere.
They tend to disappear, the passersby,
taking with them all the things they’ve seen,
love and death and everything between,
the traces of ourselves still in their eye.

Atlantic

2007-08-22T08:06:00.000-04:00

The ocean never was my friend.
The suck around my feet was clear,
even to me, that peeling boy:
less than the titan’s rubber toy,
I always knew enough to fear
a force I couldn’t comprehend.

It fed us well, that much I knew,
thrilled us as we dragged taut
lines across its lacy crests
for fish mother cooked and blessed.
I never counted what we caught:
the bill was always overdue.

Later, bellied down in swells,
a soggy match, tossed, belayed,
I knew a greater will was set
on closing out my aging debt;
we haggled through an endless day,
her clauses drumming in my cells.

Now my feet are warm and dry
but the old accounts are status quo:
the black Atlantic lies between
this surf and one I’ve never seen,
and by its phosphorescent glow
I reckon what I’ll owe the sky
if all I am, all I know
can fall away, let me fly.

Fame

2007-08-19T23:49:00.001-04:00

Everyone thinks you ought to have it made,
but you’ve worked for your place in the shade;
you’ve grown accustomed to the general freeze,
and you don’t relish sitting with the other hacks
forking the Kevlar chicken and flaccid peas,
knives politely in the next diner’s back,
while some connected gusher thanks the Lord
and every living creature in the trade
for his third Children’s Coffee Table Book Award,
which cost his agent more than the project paid.

But you go. And inevitably comes the year
when it’s you who’s got to stand and be sincere,
recite for the assembled belly-aches
your modest, grateful, nonchalant address,
perhaps read them a few short takes
from the latest pound of flesh you’ve brought to press,
while home in your kitchen the knives sing in the drawers.
And after the dim applause and the fishy shakes,
you go home to begin a study of the floor,
glad of the murmur the refrigerator makes.

Still, there’s almost always a new day,
another crisp tomorrow on the way
in which you might reclaim some self-respect
by dint of your customary industry.
But laurel’s thornier than rank neglect:
you find your readers sitting on your knee.
The one thing that keeps you from the drink
is someone in a bare and distant country
who might look up from a winter page and think,
“I know this guy. But how does he know me?”

Reading People

2007-08-17T20:18:00.000-04:00

They smile out at us, those who’ve made the grade,
proud but humbled by the simple truth,
pedigrees established, dues paid,
the multiple traumas of each hideous youth
survived and surmounted, inherited measly beans
now become groves of bearing fruitwood,
winners, who went for it, who reaped by means
of tireless lottery stubs their Peoplehood:
they lie in waiting rooms to be adored.
People. Too special to ignore.

But what have we to do with smiles like these,
we who cringe when the dentist calls our name,
who cling to the gimcrack biographies
suddenly struck by the odds they overcame?
What shall we call ourselves, we who choose
lives unsuitable for even brief reviews
in simple language smudged on limp slick,
accounts which, even spiced, would be
too bland for even the aching and the sick?
If these are People, what form of life are we?

Lies

2007-08-15T20:08:00.001-04:00

Lies, dishonesty, inveracity, corruption,
artifice, bad faith, trickery, lies,
lies, mendacity, cozenage, imposture, cunning,
mythomania, lies, peccancy, chicanery,
crookedness, diddling, lies, double-dealing,
distortion, lies, cheating, evasiveness, bunco,
feigning, lies, secrecy, pharisaism, cloaking,
ambidexterity, duplicity, lies, fraudulence,
lies, dishonor, graft, aberrancy, lies,
dissimulation, cozening, lies, gullery,
equivocation, lies, falsification,
lies, deviance, fibbery, flimflam, lies,
improbity, swindling, lies, treachery, grift,
sham, Pecksniffery, sophism, lies,
confabulation, lies, whoppers, lies,
gyppery, deceit, lies, equivocation,
garbling, exaggeration, embroidery, lies,
misfeasance, lies, scams, lies,
two-facedness, lies, shiftiness, dodgery,
lies, hanky-panky, lies, blague,
trickiness, lies, sharp practice, lies,
truthlessness, lies, underhandedness, lies,
Tartuffery, cant, dissembling, lies,
glibness, lies, insincerity, lies,
perjury, lies, falsity, prevarication,
lies, delusion, paltery, misinformation,
casuistry, lies, speciosity, lies,
spuriousness, lies, dupery, highbinding,
lies, fourberie, bushwacking, lies,
misconstruction, lies, trumpery, lies,
manipulation, masking, lies, concealment,
heterodoxy, lies, illusion, lies,
doublecrossing, subterfuge, lies,
misrepresentation, lies, pseudology,
lies, indirection, damned lies,
lies, misstatements, lies, misguidance, lies,
cock and bull, lies, canards, lies,
lies, faithlessness, lies, lies, lies,
lies, lies, lies, lies,
lies, lies, lies,
lies, lies,
lies.

Tea and Symphony

2007-08-13T21:28:00.001-04:00

All day the mumbled thunder
rolls across the windowsill;
you sit with orange pekoe under
lemon skies that will not spill.

Ignes fatui flee your cup,
unruffled in the hollow air,
decline your elbow, spiral up
the spindle of your rocking chair.

You take the stillness as a veil,
the silence as a state of grace,
as distant lightning plays a pale
music on your distant face.

Distant music in minor key,
pianissimo, a swallow’s song
that filters from the balcony
as the violins are walking on.

At Home With Hitler

2007-08-11T18:57:00.000-04:00

The Fuehrer never likes to make a fuss.
This gracious house of his might well be
a businessman’s retreat—he’s one of us.

Although in every tasteful room we see
Europe’s finest artworks on display,
perhaps the rarest gems are those that he

himself created in his former days,
maybe better days, he sometimes feels,
back when a true artist lived on praise.

But times change, change a great deal.
Now, here at Haus Wachenfeld,
the burdens of his office all too real,

he’ll gaze out at the Obersalsberg, held
by chapel shrines, ferns, the chain of lakes,
(truly a prospect without parallel)

and stare until his great heart aches
with the overwhelming beauty of the scene,
with knowing that man is what he undertakes.

Inside, the color scheme is green
throughout, the palest jade, cool repose;
in every room the paired canaries preen

for their dear Fuehrer in gilt cages, compose
a charming music to ease his burdened heart.
He gets one out, lets it kiss his nose.

He has a writing desk from Herr Mozart,
and people scouring Europe for the best
antiques; of course he’s always keen for art.

At last the Reichsfuehrer invites his guests
to sit, take some sustenance outdoors,
with the fresh mountain air to aid digestion.

A strict and dedicated herbivore,
the Fuehrer will permit himself no flesh,
but serves truite saumond a la Monsigneur,

along with a winsome Riesling to refresh
our happy palates, though he himself demurs.
Herr Kannenberg, the chef, provides a fresh-

picked garden salad and eine Spur
of soup for the Squire of Wachenfeld, who tends
to the garden himself, a true connoisseur.

The gardeners, he says, are Freunde, friends
he visits every morning without fail,
to sample something choice, to recommend

some new technique, or simply to regale
them with his jokes. They love, and they respect,
his mastery of every last detail.

Our hunger quenched, we must now inspect
the kennels and the Fuehrer’s famed Alsatians,
a place where love and science intersect.

Perfection truly crowns his dedication
to the breed; his careful hand produced a true
nobility, the very face of his proud nation.

He romps, tosses Hundekuchen chews;
this heartwarming, affectionate exchange
is irresistible, so blithe, so impromptu.

But it doesn’t do to spoil them. Off to the range,
where archers hone their skills for Children’s Day.
But a major comes, whispers. He is changed.

Sadly, the Fuehrer must take himself away.
When the fate of everything is in one's hands,
one has no private life. One has no say--

nation, party, volk--nothing but demands.
But affairs of state must take priority,
of course. Of course. We quite understand.

We leave the Fuehrer’s home reluctantly,
only grateful that we had a chance to see
how full of grace a country home can be.

Lichens

2007-08-10T02:28:00.000-04:00

Even lichen mocked his heart
with riot on the local stone;
less resigned to life apart,
the rock itself was less alone.

Long estrangement turned him cold,
dry as leaves beneath his shoes,
a man impatient to be old,
a man with only time to lose.

But then a sudden summer came:
the sun’s trumpets blew a storm
that shook his self-sufficient frame,
left him living, left him warm.

Love, it was. Summer? Her eyes,
her spirit welcoming and wide,
and joy, and infinite surprise,
when she agreed to be his bride.

But summer is a funny thing;
summer warms, and then it burns,
and then the waning season brings
a morning when the weather turns.

Within her was a shuttered room,
protected from the light and air,
and deep in the abiding gloom
he found another living there.

He wasted no reproachful tears,
never spoke of what he knew,
but tended through relentless years
the lovely lichens, green and blue.

Philip Larkin

2007-08-09T04:23:00.000-04:00

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

The Black Dog

2007-08-08T01:25:00.001-04:00

Every morning, guaranteed,
they come, an ordinary man
walking his dog on a tight lead;
the dog’s the size of a minivan,

of an unreflective black that wrings
the color out of morning light,
even its eyes; its tongue swings
across teeth of brilliant white.

Passers-by give them room.
They weigh the same, within a pound;
it’s clear the beast can take its groom
wherever it wants: it chooses its ground,

chooses where, chooses when,
allows the man to trudge along,
even to stop now and then,
but they don’t sniff the roses long.

A gentle tug on the silver chain
fastened to its master’s wrist
puts them on their way again,
dog and numb equilibrist.

Then I see them all around,
pegging down the avenue
chained to their funereal hounds,
envying the free, the few.

We stop to watch a little while,
but there isn’t much time, I know;
my hulk, with a feral smile,
insists it’s time to go. I go.

Perspectives

2007-08-05T20:15:00.000-04:00

“Men are from Mars, women from Venus”
doesn’t account for the excellent fit
of Venusian vagina with Martian penis.

Biologists certainly wouldn’t expect
so apt a relation in alien creatures
unlikely to meet, much less to connect,

which proves a nifty slogan wrong.
Our prime directive is to breed;
it’s small beer if we get along.

Our lives are shaped by ribosomes
that never spare a thought for love
or the conversations in our homes.

Women are Earthlings; men are, too.
Nature, indifferent to daily annoyances,
made us to mate, if we can, and we do.

Which tells us why, plan as we will,
it’s always a gamble to sit and gaze
into strange eyes, depthless and still;

we may find ourselves reflected there,
assuasive, warm, idealized,
as we journey off to Anywhere.

Models

2007-08-04T13:03:00.001-04:00

Bearing their supernatural tits,
the bronzed, succulent nitwits
arch and flex across our screens
glistening in saturated pinks;
wet with research, slick as ink,
they populate the dream machine

with smiles white as urinals,
caught in an eternal prime
concocted to remind us time’s
a fickle friend to lovely mammals.
It takes a smile precisely cold
to warn us that we’re getting old,

a rigorously empty head
to waken our sincerest dread
without putting us off our feed.
If things are bad, there’s always hope
in model land; they may be dopes,
but they’ve got the remedies we need,

the clothes, cosmetics, leaders, cars,
island sunsets, sleeping pills,
purveyed with such exquisite skill
we wake in sunny Zanzibar,
our bathing suits two sizes small,
wondering why we came at all.

The Wisdom of Diogenes

2007-08-02T21:56:00.001-04:00

Diogenes the Dog sat outside
a brothel, shouting, "A beautiful whore
is poisoned honey! Have some pride!
A beautiful whore. . . " The men swore
a bit, tossed some silver, cried
for silence. It wasn’t long before
Diogenes gathered up his money,
struggled to his ruined feet.
“Time for a bit of poisoned honey,”
he said, going in. “Sweet.”

Assholes

2007-07-31T21:52:00.001-04:00

They’re everywhere. We, their prey,
do well merely to hold the line,
salvage remnants of our days;
it’s part of nature’s grand design.

They close on us like toxic skies
thick with soot, slide their bleak,
soulless, calculating eyes
all over us, a gaze that seeks

only life to smother, joy
to quell, opportunities
to break our shiny birthday toys,
count our heedless calories.

Clergy bids us to be nice,
in fact to love them, but the scent
of such self-interested advice
is rank, familiar, evident.

To make it worse, they always seem
to prosper, to have the upper hand,
their monumental self-esteem
beyond our power to withstand.

They get themselves elected, twice,
despite their pinched and addled brains;
leaving us to pay the price
and try to scrub away the stains.

All Night News

2007-07-29T23:01:00.001-04:00

All night we addicts take our turns,
connect for cigarettes or sweets,
or a cup from the immemorial urn

abstracted from uremic cheetah
to be simmered lovingly all day,
until a glance will etch the teeth.

Awful coffee, is what I’m saying.
No one bothers to pretend
it hasn’t always been that way,

and yet the heads recoil again
and again from the waxed-paper rims,
delighting the fixed few old men

who gather as the day gets dim
to court by night the cardboard
queen who hypes Virginia Slims.

Yes. Much as it’s to be deplored,
an itch for the bitch nicotine
will still often jog me toward

that urn in the odd hours between
gray despair and dawn’s red ink.
But I head first for the chrome caffeine,

unable to care what the regulars think
of someone who never seems to learn,
who always winces, always drinks.

In a Country Churchyard

2007-07-27T16:32:00.001-04:00

I saw an ancient woman at St. Paul’s,
in Virginia, kneeling, busy among the graves.
She watched me inspect the sober meeting hall,

finger the native granite, before she waved,
called me to see her weather-blackened stones.
She scrubbed at the discolored architrave

of an old family stele, her miniphones
almost lost in the blue hair that escaped
her blue knitted cap. I could see her bones

as she bore down, the stark, defined shape
of her carpals as the brush stretched her hands,
her vertebrae in the thin skin at her nape.

“It’s just something I’ve never been able to stand,”
she told me. “A dirty grave is a pure disgrace.
It’s all this awful traffic. Should be banned.”

“The exhaust. It eats up things we can’t replace.
This black is nothing but acid. It’s not just smoke.”
I wished her luck on the ban with my straightest face.

She scrubbed awhile in silence before she spoke.
“When I’m gone this place’ll melt, that’s all.
Well, fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em. I hope they choke.”

Now

2007-07-26T07:14:00.000-04:00

I’m getting old. My friends are settling down;
they’re less messy when they go these days,
no bent Ducatis at the edge of town,
nothing left on streets to hose away.

They go in bed now, which I suppose
anyone would wish, given a choice,
propped on clean pillows, the family close,
framing their last thoughts in their last voice.

Better, surely. But if the funerals of youth
mourn lost potential as much as fact,
elders’ eulogists must grapple with truth;
with life behind us, we must hope for tact.

Though I don’t suppose it matters after all
what the living say, or if indeed
they even notice; whether we hit the wall
or wither, the same end is guaranteed.

Things will happen, birds contrive to sing,
trees, forests, fall; the sound will live
in other ears, the beat of drum and wing
part of someone else’s narrative.

All that matters, all we have, is now:
the past is gone, futurity’s a parlor trick.
This candle flame is everything we know,
the light and heat we make of wax and wick.

The Missing Persons

2007-07-24T19:50:00.001-04:00

No one’s certain where they go;
that much, at least, is sure;
exactly what they can’t endure
detectives rarely get to know.

Their photos overflow our files,
which hardly matters—these are faces
citizens can always place,
but haven’t seen in quite awhile.

They go for cigarettes, a drink,
or just to walk, have a think,
a quick breath of evening air,
then no one sees them anywhere.

Small wonder. They’re anyone,
nothing much to catch the eye
but portable oblivion
no witness can identify.

Small potatoes. Millions sit.
Legions disappear in place;
they never leave, simply quit,
staring into middle space

while newly solitary kin
attend to folds of empty skin.
We need a Bureau of the Blank,
a Mostly Missing Persons tank,

where armies of psychologists
can puzzle out the mental twists
of those who leave, but fail to go,
familiar faces no one knows.

Here’s to those who hide and hare,
who pack their kit and catch a train,
spare their families the pain
they cause by simply being there.

Madness

2007-07-22T10:23:00.000-04:00

What’s imagination but
memory, reshuffled, cut,
and dealt again in new games,
old pictures, new frames?

And memory is imagination,
random bits of information
ordered, filed, labeled fact
by idiot molecules we pack
for storage in the bowl of goo
we trust to guide us, see us through.

And dreams, the ancient mystery,
perennial absurdity
or Morpheus’ lighting fixture,
are they not a simple mixture,
fancy and recall, rehashed each night,
a pinch of joy, a peck of fright?

And what’s madness but a dream
displaced into the dry regime
of daily life, to strew the sheets
on which we’ve scrawled complete
concordances of joys and pains,
to ravish our disordered brains
and leave us sporting in a lake
of fire, fitting us to make
of pterodactyl Noah’s dove?
It has a name. We call it love.

Because

2007-07-19T23:50:00.001-04:00

In Eden nothing went amiss;
they didn’t have a use for gray,
just a chain of perfect days,
an unremitting happiness

to visit on the primal pair,
who lacked for nothing; all was there
to simply pick, hanging low,
all the loaded branches bowed

to an earth that rioted with life,
and all was plenty, all was ease,
and Adam and his bony wife
were happy aborigines.

For a time. (If time could be
where nothing happened, nothing changed,
where nothing could be rearranged
by order of His Majesty...)

But soon, dreaming of her dreams
inspired Eve to coin the scream;
Adam asked her what it was:
“Because, Addy; just because.”

Then, leaving Adam at his chapel,
Eve got hungry for an apple,
decided she should go to college,
tasted of the Tree of Knowledge.

The Old Man was steamed, of course;
He stormed up on His highest horse
to cast them out. Adam prayed.
Eve was skipping all the way.

Memories of Old Scratch

2007-07-18T22:46:00.000-04:00

I saw him once on the Lex express,
alone in a door seat, old, a fright,
dentures halfway out of his head,
swaying somnolent or drunk or dead
as the passing local station lights
flashed his specs with festive menace.

Twelve, I saw a Frankenstein
no one cared to recognize,
a secret no one would admit:
although he swung no ropes of spit
and was eminently civilized
in his gray wool overcoat and Times,

he rocked quite alone beneath
his mentholated cancer blurb,
the casual passengers all sardined
safely back from the grinning fiend,
no one the slightest bit disturbed
by those unspeakable acrylic teeth.

I was glad to get a seat,
too green to face the fact
in his Phantom of the Opera act,
until he snapped awake, stared back.
“Have a nice day,” he clacked,
got off at Fifty-ninth street.

Vox

2007-07-16T21:26:00.000-04:00

Sitting with my steaming cup,
a creature yet capable of choice,
I take my bitten pencil up
to trace the music of your voice,

how it touches me, makes
its silky way through tympanum
to malleus, incus, stapes, shakes
cochlea and nervous system,

finds the skin, where it draws
each tiny hair erect,
chills me in the narrow pause
dividing bliss from intellect.

Give me bliss. Only speak:
let love parse its own
demotic. Mandarin or Greek
will shiver English in my bones.

The Rape

2007-07-14T08:29:00.001-04:00

The world hums. Crickets saw incisive
treble over the roar through trees
of the rush hour river of steel. Above
is a high, unblemished, glacial azure,
perfect skies to loose a rain of fire,
or spangled gods astride the light
descending in a fine haze of gold.

But miracles are scarce around here.
Lately we make do with mysteries:
this morning in the mean little wood
that binds our town, serene against her tree,
they found the torso of a woman. Girl.

China white, unbruised, she bore no
butterflies or random slices, near her
only a curious lack of blood, or limb,
or any violence less meticulously
executed than her cuts, so tidy
through the joints that some said doctor,
some endorsed a butcher round the bend.

Some wondered who she’d been, what she’d done
to get herself stripped like a stolen car,
but she was featureless, a cipher, mute.
Nothing disturbed her. She was that
at which the whole town had come to look.

I wondered at the one who’d put her there,
how a soul so mangled could exist among us
undetected, but even this began to seem
more likely than miraculous. In fact,
the whole scene began to take on
a certain festive domesticity,
began to be a commonplace, a horror.

All of us. The just deserts and pipers paid
sent up a scattered, speculative laughter like
a plague of moths. Even my neighbor, pockets
pregnant with film, dealing his instant closeups
to the citizens. I, watching.

First Grief, for Morgen

2007-07-13T08:06:00.001-04:00

My gran would always tell us, Flor and me,
owlish, unbelieving postwar pair,
“Read your Bible every day. Behave:
God has His eye on you.” She gave
every worried cent to priests for prayers.
Nodes of sanctity deformed her knees.

A steely prophet stirred our morning oats;
longing for the grave, for heaven, awe
inspired her to overcook our groats,
serve a side of Revelations raw,

as if she couldn’t bring herself to say
how people live a tick, and pass away.
Endless bliss, then, was Florrie’s answer
as the pale filaments of cancer
raveled through her mind. As she died.
Now they’re baking biscuits. Here. Inside.

Acrostic for Molly

2007-07-10T08:49:00.001-04:00

Mistress of a mapless realm,
ontogeny can overwhelm;
let laughter, love, and history
lead through mystery to mystery
you never solve nor hope to solve.

See this tattered world revolving
tilted in its liquid skies,
oceans blue as infant’s eyes,
ranging through the boundless dark
miraculous, the one true ark.

All philosophy is vain:
hold your counsel with the rain,
ephemeral and absolute,
and know that Eden’s choicest fruit
revealed a budding human garden;
nothing else escaped unpardoned.

Memories

2007-07-08T15:57:00.001-04:00

I remember watching you cook--
you did cook once in awhile,
and it was good, once in awhile--
how it would always fry me when
you’d slice the veg on dinner plates
with knives I made a point of keeping
sharp enough to shave a peach.
I kept my silence at the time
because, after all, you had
a knife in your hand, dulled perhaps,
but good enough for government work.
My Japanese water stones
went paper thin for love of you,
and in truth I came to admire your skill.
You’d lay waste a whole family
of blades with a single stir-fry,
Sabatiers, Solingens, Henckels,
wreck any and all with flair,
then sit with an accomplished air,
fork up what your wok had wrought.
I miss those days of quiet rage,
the coiled suburban rancor, kisses
laced with bitters, salty with spite.
Most of all I miss the taste
of dishes not conceived of by
the weirdest Angelino chef,
the unidentifiable greens,
the ineffable mystery of it all.
Why I should be thinking of these
things now I can’t say.
I must not be getting enough
charcoal nowadays, or maybe
I’ve just lost my edge and miss
the whetters nested in your drawers.

Some Questions

2007-07-06T11:40:00.000-04:00

Where do accidents go to wait?
Is there a mishaps’ union hall
where they report for time and date,
warm the bench until the call?

Do they tensely scan the classifieds,
hope for an accidental spot,
a little freelance on the side
to fix the roof and stir the pot?

And how do bulls in china shops
get in? Are there finishing schools, charm
academies with durable props,
where blue-rinsed, punctilious marms

prepare the rusticated beeves
to leave their clover and sighing grass
for the small beer of collar and sleeves,
life among the tinkling glass?

And what of the elephants in the rooms,
the ones we never talk about?
Aren't the dirt and noxious fumes
enough to make us throw them out?

Or do we need our faithful friends,
tolerant enough to stand and be
unnoticed as we all pretend
we don’t smell what we don’t see?

Birthdays

2007-07-04T19:00:00.000-04:00

Birthdays come to get us all,
an equity which seems unfair
enough to warrant alcohol,

but let’s not part with any hair:
youth’s no earthly paradise,
and life’s not a flight of stairs.

It’s always youth for sacrifice,
to stuff with misbegotten lore;
for youth’s tuition, youth’s the price,

birthdays make us wise, if sore;
if knotty heads undo no walls,
they recognize an open door.

Birthdays come to get us all;
take your vengeance at the mall.

Thoughts

2007-07-04T06:47:00.000-04:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King Georgie is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Thirst

2007-07-02T05:46:00.001-04:00

Our Daddy was a thirsty man
with brothers who were thirsty too:
they joined the Navy after Pearl
and fought, and won, and got the girl,
and played the heroes on the avenue
till glory ended, life began.

Joe, the eldest, beauty’s boy,
stationary engineer,
refined his Jimmy Cagney mask
and labored at his silver flask;
he chased his blended malt with beer,
became a problem to employ.

Gerry, Grandma’s baby bright,
darling of the Jesuits,
went to Fordham on the Bill,
and went to live on Beacon Hill
with other boring, wealthy twits,
steeping sneaky, day and night.

Between them was our Daddy, Jack,
Golden Glover, lightning hooks,
a cat, who couldn’t drink his tea
without a shot of J&B.
He never lost his youthful looks,
always landed on his back.

Joe went first: his yellow moon
declining in a yellow bed,
jackolantern begging wine
of any come to check his signs.
At thirty-seven, he was dead;
we drank his health all afternoon.

Gerry was a real surprise.
Liver in the common twist,
he coughed up cold cash for hope,
but the doctor coiled his stethoscope,
told him he’d be greatly missed.
We toasted Gerry’s quick demise.

When Daddy left our dwindling scene
Grandma’s teeth were tinctured green
by the minty dram she loved so well,
that helped her send her sons to hell.
Thumbing shut his thirsty lids,
she swore to raise his thirsty kids.

Iustitia

2007-06-30T09:51:00.000-04:00

She
was what
you might call
well-put, and but
for certain minor
rumored imperfections
could have found a pedestal
in any pantheon that was.
But she was just another
pseudoclassical nude,
blindfolded, aloof,
collecting dust
on her white,
brittle
tits.

Colloquy

2007-06-27T22:52:00.001-04:00

God Almighty, Lord of Hosts,
bored with heaven’s azure coast

remarked to Satan, who agreed,
“A camping trip is what I need.”

So though conditions were severe,
He pitched His tent in Georgie’s ear,

and Georgie’s tail began to wag
as God unrolled His sleeping bag;

George was feeling pretty good:
he offered God some firewood,

already cut and stacked nearby,
but God had things to clarify:

“George, you’ve made a proper mess,
as even you can see, I guess.

We’d all be better off if you
could give up sniffing airplane glue.”

George gave his rosy butt a shake,
for he was not the man to take

such criticism lying down.
He frowned his most important frown:

“What you think is not my lookout.
Just enjoy your little cookout;

leave the leadership to me.
It’s for the best, I guarantee:

we’re better off without Saddam,
even if we’re in a jam;

Dick and Wolfie told me so,
and they’re the gentlemen who know.”

The Lord considered this a bit:
“George...Wolfowitz is full of it,

and Cheney’s Satan’s favorite son;
they’ll kill us all before they’re done,

Wolfowitz with his computer,
ditto Dick, plus he’s a shooter,

a very special kind of louse
who slays domesticated grouse;

the psychosexual implications
beggar My imagination.

The feeble twats who work your will
you picked for sycophantic skills;

they tell you what you want to hear;
in that at least they have no peer.

We all know where Rummy started:
sucking up what Nixon farted.

Later he embraced Hussein,
helped him build his poison rain.

At least we know why you were certain
what was under Saddam’s curtain.

Poison gas and bombs and guns,
we sent them over by the ton,

and Reagan, with demented zeal
dispatched our Don to cop a feel.

And Condaleeza'll burn in hell
for serving you so very well;

like many other prostitutes
she’s selling lies and sexy boots;

one can only wonder whether
you prefer the lies, or leather.

Gonzales too, that rotten tooth:
the Prince of Torture and Untruth,

the coward’s coward you pretend
was and is your bosom friend,

a fact which, were it really true,
says less of Berto than of you.

All your people, all your picks;
it’s Chinese Death--a thousand pricks.

The only one who’s worse than these
is you, Ace. The Decider? Please...

George, it’s time for you to go.
Go back to Texas. Cop some blow.

Chop some bushes. Be a man.
You’ve done everything you can.

Let us fix the mess you’ve made;
have the decency to fade,

like old soldiers always do,
though that’s a stretch, applied to you.

I mean it, George. I hate to push,
but don’t forget the burning bush.”