MIDSEASON
Lawnmower's distant purr, the morning calm,
midsummer eases into day, half
the neighborhood in cash‑suspended drowse.
Coffee, shaded deck, clean smell of air.
Yesterday's afternoon sun‑squall faded into
dark.
Supper.
Then the News, rampant disorder
that wounds conversation, suppressed at
bedtime.
Brutish nature seeps into our resting bones.
The mower has finished his job. Peace for awhile.
A smoke, more coffee, then the chainsaw
rumbles
into the drive, the surgeon come to lop
dead branches from the tree, the one whose
rising sap
refused whole limbs, internal bureaucrat
directing the vital flow, "This one, not
that!"
AT THE AIRPORT
Tall, lithe, and blond, Europe‑bound,
that Iowa girl is man‑making, innocent as
a barracuda in a school of mackerel.
"There's history there, it's all so
beautiful.
From Munich everything is easy, Geneva,
Paris, Amsterdam. He's a dentist,
American, and wonderful." We too
sucked the marrow from each other's youth.
Made a home out of the body's tomb.
Enamelled eyes, doll‑like skin, she boarded.
Back home the stockdam's full, the cattle
fat,
the corn's satin leafblades touch the moon.
She's ready to shoot the Atlantic, kiss her
frog,
make a prince of a periodontalist.
AUGUST
Main Street's beaded with cars, boys braking
to a stop for girls, dogday heat and lust.
The summer's running dry. Tourists dwindle.
These last days baking in the heat,
bodies swelling like the yellow corn.
Some tourists linger past Labor Day, take
the last weeks to the death‑distance men call
fall
in Eden‑‑rear‑mirror death, unresented.
Autumn's humming at the ear, maternal,
drowse brimming in the greying beard.
The calendar year should end with the end of
harvest,
the rest be rest in earnest, body rest,
like the widower's who bows to the widow,
grasping at comfort before the final rest.
AT THE ARTS FAIR
The zinnia garden throws out half a dozen
colors against the thick green mass of
leaves.
This repetitiveness is nature's, not man's.
We walk among the booths, looking for
something,
you can't say what, something the spirit
marks.
Always disappointed. You search with diminishing zeal.
Like youth giving in to age and weariness.
Jewelry, watercolors, oils, woodcrafts.
Every year we watch the fashions change.
We turn inward. Expect less.
Feel less.
And this year, half way through, we stop,
pivot,
find our way to the lake, near dark,
deserted.
Leaning over the water you finger out stars,
flecking the moon. Then calm. Then stars, like fish!
CANCER
"Who's so beautiful," I said, as
she
collapsed on her diaper‑cladded bottom.
Time‑hauled through Iowa, Japan, and
Missouri,
she's making life, her beauty guaranteed.
And today, a frail thin‑eyed waif has begun
to work in the museum's gift shop with my
wife.
Scatter‑brained and cheerful, she takes an
hour
to wrap a print for shipping. She answers the phone,
tells me she knows all about me, chirps
when I arrive, helps me carry packages.
"Barely old enough to work," I
whisper.
But no.
She's as old as my straight‑limbed daughter.
The museum's artful light shines through her
cheeks,
she chatters, reluctant to leave, holding on.
MASS MURDER
He looks normal, a mother's son, blue‑eyed,
come from the farm, or suburbia. He looks
into the camera with a brother's smile.
Three human heads in his refrigerator,
body parts of eleven others found
in his apartment. He tells of seventeen.
At night he hums the tunes from Sweeney
Todd.
Wakes on his knees hugging fish‑mouthed dream
heads.
The Mau‑Mau drinks from the cow's opened
neck,
his intimate blade searching for the pulse.
Idi Amin eternally eats his enemies.
Robespierre's abstract guillotine.
Blood and the stench of blood, crouching man
lapping blood from the pavement of its cage.
GAG RULE
Last night, on C‑Span, I heard a Bush official
testify before a senate committee,
justifying the gag on medical clinics.
The government shouldn't have to pay for what
it disapproves. His logic's as clear as air.
And sharp enough to cut the liberal's knot.
No arts or science, even, funded by
the state should deviate from voters' norms.
With utmost confidence he held it right.
He had the zealot's steely eyes and nerve.
There is the will of God in all of this,
a punishment of modern wickedness.
This Beltway Savonarola strikes at pagans,
the practical lot he'd like to hang and burn.
OPPENHEIMER
Oppenheimer, the universal genius,
nuked the desert, then gnawed his troubled
heart.
"I am become Death," he
feigned. Nuclear folklore
as esoteric as it is cultureless.
The destroyer of worlds lives in the breath
of life.
To know how to be is culture, not to know.
To live inside the word, not merely the
world.
Shiva is larynx and tongue, not gene and
bone.
His forehead eye perceives a different truth.
Science wastes these words as superstition,
denatures ritual knowledge shaped by time,
and bans the human spirit from the mind.
Death does wear Oppie's face, speaks in
equations.
Its prophylactic hand invades the womb.
CLIPPING THE HEDGE
A moment ago I stood over there, clipping.
A moment from now, I'll be in the garage,
sweeping.
Time‑lapse the morning. Here, writing. There, eating. Time‑lapse the life. One of billions. An atom.
Clipping the bushes' growth, again, and
again.
Everything in nature is profuse.
Murderous man has not aborted growth
in corpse or quick this century. Billions to come.
To be unconscious, sink in a lake of genes,
a quiet crimson sunset looking on,
that would be nirvana. How many years
of motion, days, seconds, before the rack. .
.
I should uproot the bushes that make this
hedge,
let the house look bare, scatter seed. . .
REPUBLICAN YOUTH
The arbitrary's stuck its foot in the door.
The ozone hole, oiled beaches, art.
They buy the riddled lie of politics
that blame is cure, legislation a fix.
A Brahman deity, labor, and cash.
This never changes. Shade and accent might.
Like sockeye salmon struggling at the falls,
they're propelled by a dream of birthing
water.
Bless sinners, pardon errant souls.
The past is still the past. That sly old whale
spouted our nature's mute profundities.
Gather at the river, the evening star
hangs low and bright to pledge true love‑‑time
subtly altering girls, time, and the
question.
ANOTHER SUMMER
The bat on nervous wings flutters and falls.
Our Trimalchian banquet nearly ends.
Night claims the venerable Roman August,
our senators out of session, raising cash.
The long sycophant tongues of the obsequious
wiping the ground behind the powerful.
Gourds are swelling into jack‑o‑lanterns.
We sit back and talk, talk, talk.
Vikings shoved their dead to sea in burning
boats, fire tracing the waves‑‑not the shoving
but the need to shove the dead into fire and
water
drew the silence. We decided between
the two of us to send off August burning
like a Viking prince, and swilled the brandy.
SCHWARZKOPF ARABIANUS
Out of the desert a third millennium comes.
Video instead of driven captives.
Paycheck and medals instead of choicest
booty.
The tarmac's filled with flags and standing
men
braving the silence, historical moment of
glory.
The ticker tape, the public adulation.
His triumph lacks only eagles and chariots.
We call worldwide with Sprint and AT&T,
strut for freedom, adapt to diversity.
A soldier meets a soldier under a jeep.
A desert romance blossoms in the spring.
They share canteens on duty, dig for mines.
Muster out and start a family.
Scipio did much less in Africa.
A TROIKA OF SQUIRRELS
This summer the squirrels born in our
backyard tree,
a troika of whiskered snouts and twitching
tails,
survived car wheels and owls to learn to take
a piece of bread from my fingertips. Nervously.
A thousand years ago we fell in love,
and all this time we never fed a squirrel.
A thousand summers have passed, breed of fish
and fowl, thistle, the sun a prairie rose.
Dreaming.
The sky has just turned dark. A
siren
wails the bizarre career of a black tornado.
Afterwards, the sky is clear and blue.
A virgin centaur cavorts beside a stream.
I can't stand it when I'm in this mood. I'll truck out
to K‑Mart and wander among the stereos or
drapes.
HIGH CEREMONY
Yerkes Beach at the lake. Nesconset.
St. James'
ocean incense hazing the Kyrie Eleisons.
High ceremony of summer, wooded bluffs
overlooking the pebbly shore of the Sound.
Back to Brooklyn on Labor Day, the
neighborhood
fair where the Virgin is hauled on twenty
shoulders.
Milling crowds eating sausage and onions.
Long unslept‑in bedroom, school and nuns.
She came down the streets on high, after
dark,
her face lit by festive colored lights.
I'd watch her pass, aware of her potency.
Her beauty.
Fixed gaze under a shawl.
Later, Brooklyn's lofty elms dropped leaves
soft as mother's skin, red as blood.
MOVING IN
Time when I can look at the moon, and
rejoice.
Night sky, family, work, everything falls
into radical order, ordained, sweat‑sweetened,
Fridays foreshortened like a relativity train.
Some softheaded barking beast inside wags
a happy tail, the man is happy, barks.
Plods a harder trail, treads the muck
when mood swings and breaks the back with
luck.
Two babies laughing away the afternoon.
Hammering nails, dry‑walling a study,
shelving,
unpacking books, uncorking the brandy at
night.
The moving in was sweat and blood. Gene,
in the old college motel, murdered himself.
Shit. I spackled the room, pale as plaster.
STEPHEN'S LAKE
The oars dipped and the aluminum boat slid
over the algae‑thick water, her little hand
veeing a second wake. Escape from Dunkirk.
John Bull Churchill stalked the ruins of
London
flashing the vee. There turtles plopped off the rocks.
Under the May green of trees on the bank
you waited, hanging fire, ghostly red
like a wavery mouth‑up carp panting water.
A different kind of blood, sweat, and tears.
I pointed the prow away, rowed like mad.
Treaties after war favor victors.
But victors pay in spirit what they've won.
We rose from the ruins anyway, survived.
Bouyant for a time on inverted skies.
THE VIRGIN
Cathedral‑dim and charged. Her glorified face.
An old lady lights a votive candle.
Queer residue of mythic time, the aged,
frayed and stooped, kneeling in hopelessness.
Once every woman's face revealed her face,
persistent pattern through every rise and
fall.
Shadow of fruit at every woman's feet,
she was the lap where every breath expired.
Now she's a billboard show for crowds at
night.
An old man's vision in a mildewed wall.
Against her there is only a void. A tale
of miseries, sorrowful years of stress.
Effaced like stone by wind and running water,
her beauty in the flesh is meaningless.
ACCIDENT
Standard scenario. Someone runs
a stop sign, icy streets. No braking.
In the mangled chevy, floating in and out,
strange faces replaced the morning sun.
An inexperienceable quarter second later,
and he'd have crushed me flat between the
doors.
My wife beside me would have known real
union,
and we'd be undivorceable forever.
Between the moons, the earth's gigantic turning,
time wears the stone away, the single life
leaves hardly a trace, only life in mass
persists‑‑inexperienceable, shame and guilt.
And yet that quarter second had the power
to lift away from death two lives, and last.
SOLZHENITSYN
Feet to the north, head pointing south, I
sleep
parallel to the general run of the James.
The sun lays streaks of bright Platonic light
across the bed, light that blinds the eye
and amazes the waking heart with infernal
darkness.
He slept in Lubyanka on his feet
in a watercloset. Wormwood on his tongue.
Barbed wire encampments, Nazi tanks‑‑
burned and risen like black butterflies.
Over the misty James a heron soars
on wings as large as clouds. Ashes and life.
Ashes and life. I hear his heart‑stopping voice,
"When our souls are pulverized and our
flesh hangs down,
we suffer too much and grief floods our
eyes."
LIFELINES
The new world order has as many dead‑‑
the incidental as well as war‑killed dead.
Urban murder, racial skirmishes.
The horror of the dancing Zulu spear.
An elderly aunt in apron by her stove
stoops and lifts a pie and holds it up.
What queer meats are mixed and baked inside‑‑
she quietly puts a finger to her lips.
Casual murder in evening's freeway traffic.
Self‑immolation of Korean boys.
Euphorized corpses in European city parks.
I have to step with care when walking, at
noon,
to the Gypsy fortune teller who complains
of the missing lifelines in her customer's
palms.
FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
The South, east and west, is warm in winter.
Snow drives the people away from home.
I wheel through weather and over icy roads
to break a lifelong chain of Christmases,
dragging a spruce through snow to thaw
inside.
This dream of sporting in the sun while snow
heaps impressions of holiday quiet at home
vanishes as I wake up. It's August.
Reality confusion reels in my eyes. The fan
overhead gently stirs the air.
Prickly strange, I feel like a palimpsest‑‑
some monkish scribe laboring at my mind,
fluting a text of time on top of a text,
real as sky brooding over water.
AS THE MIST BREAKS UP
Breath‑damp whisper of leaves in the milk‑heavy
morning.
Thud of the void under foot. One death
is the death of all who die, and we all die‑‑
Quetzalcoatl eaten by the trees,
Zeus and Herod, Caesar and Christ, despoiled,
voodoo tom‑toms, Reagan and his wife.
On the deck under the maples behind the house
a butterfly flit out of the mist and landed
on my arm, and then I knew how myths are
born.
Something crazy happens to the mind
when nature touches it like that, takes
it in and says, "This is home, you're
here,
get comfortable and stay awhile, relax."
The sun intones an allegory of life.
THE BOYS, THE BALL, AND THE FLICKER
The flicker on top of the telephone pole eyes
the boys pitching ball in the park. Clank
of the ball on the metal bat, the ball's arc.
The bird sails down. That arc against the sky
times the boy's arrival with his mitt.
Instinctive geometers, flicker and boys.
Intersections of time and space, ease,
the bird's flawless parabola to the lawn.
Some things are clean, precise,
uncomplicated.
Bursting anger, unappeasable, lashing.
My wife's loneliness, at times, despair.
The debts.
The years piling up. Failures.
No cells in the brain help one intersect
the heart's curving fall, random, messy.
DANTE
Some knew their evil and some didn't.
Some, like Paulo and Francesca, we'd send
to heaven today, the risk they took for love
in a loveless world mirrors our mania for
sex.
Milton's Eve is sexy, and Blake's sucks
the pear like a midnight succubus in a teen
dream.
Dante whitened Beatrice, robbed her sex.
And neutered himself to stand before the
rose.
This is the relationship with self, the
source,
where the visionary starts and ends.
As I grow older Dante's knowledge deepens.
There is a music I cannot hear, or won't.
A heaven's rain that gets tissue‑clogged, and
the din
in my ears thrums away all harmonies.
COUP
Not chaos but alcohol stared from their eyes.
Empty guns between their legs. Not even
the old hot urine of contempt that flowed
over corpses,
just the dribblings of aged incontinence.
The warty face of Colonel Alksnis sneers,
promises the return of fear and trembling.
Laugh, laugh at the dead, and the years of
silence.
Hitler, Napoleon, Papa, Charlemagne, Caesar.
My father and my father's father are
dead. I am
alone, ungoverned except by law, ungoverning.
Immensities of land and population.
I am anonymous. Alive and dead.
Jagged, brown, side‑pointed shell of the blue
crab.
Power.
The sea unfathers the soul. We
writhe.
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