Passerine

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But she only stood silent, withdrawn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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.