Bubbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?”