Selected Poems
Page 10
his head and shoulders, from the rear wall of a trench.
Maybe he was heading for Germany, therefore
it’s a French trench. Or,
equally likely, he was heading toward France
and poking through the rear
of a German trench.
Moles live in most dirt in most places.
Some moles have noses shaped like stars.
This one does not.
He’s a regular mole, a clock-puncher
mole: wake up, dig, eat, sleep, wake up…
This mole emerges,
blinking. Sergeant Falkenhayn sees him,
or Corporal Chrétien.
The mole sees little
because he does not need to in his dark.
Sergeant Falkenhayn
or Corporal Chrétien, one of them,
pinches the mole’s shoulders,
softly, between his thumb
and forefinger,
pulls the whole six inches of him free,
turns him around,
puts him back, nose first, in his tunnel,
and lights a match,
which he then turns to the mole’s stubby, muscular tail.
The Grand Climacteric
Stonk, stonk, stonk – mortar rounds slide
down tubes and then fly skyward
until they reach their arcs’, their parabolas’, peaks
(there, for a second’s fraction,
they neither fall nor rise) and hang
there until…what makes them shatter
to white-hot shrap is: explosives,
love of death (which one cannot love
when dead), or a deep, creaking mineshaft
into which so many blind miners go
to find neither gold nor coal
and never ascend again to the surface. Sorry
to say: Stonk, stonk, stonk, stonk.
Sex After Funerals
Hesiod (author of Works and Days, a solid
book title) advised against it – counterintuitive, you’d think,
from a poet
second only to Homer, if Homer existed.
(If he didn’t, second only to: so what!)
And too, Hesiod spent years in bitter
litigation with his brother
over a barren hill farm and one goat.
This advice from a poet who disliked boats.
This from a poet who couldn’t play the harp!
This from a man who worshiped goddesses
but disdained women,
this from a harvester who couldn’t keep his scythe sharp,
this from a man
beaten to death with a log
and tossed in the sea,
and whose murderers were ID’ed
(humans refused) by his dog.
Autobiographophobia
I shan’t tell you about switching his wooden leg
with her wooden leg, I shan’t confess
my lies and the lies against me: when I said I loved X
but really loved Y
and was sleeping with Z
to injure the feelings of X
who was sleeping with Z, Y, and me.
Whether I was there or not
when the sky fell, how I learned
the cure for lesions
of the heart, if it’s true
or not that I keep, in a coop
on my roof, the only two extant dodo
birds (plus one dodo egg) – my lips
are sewn shut (might as well be!) with baling wire.
I had many funny uncles.
Not one ever put his hand in my pants.
Never met a dipsomaniac
until I left home
and wandered all those years, in and out, through the lives of others.
My life is one filled with blessings.
And if I’ve been wronged,
then for each wrong I’ve been multiblessed.
Which is why
I will not confide
my serial poisoning of parakeets.
It would be fruitless
to ask me regarding my part
in the extinction of sheep.
About my childhood: not a peep.
I sold my grandmother’s hearing aid,
not only for cash but also to facilitate
my screaming in her face.
I loved my grandmother,
whose husband I did not know.
Because I’m telling the truth,
there is no shame.
Because I’m telling the truth, and I’m sure
it actually happened
(I was there!), because I’m telling the truth,
it is right that I talk only of myself
and never of you, or you, and you, or you.
Blue Vistas Glued
How well God measures His doses! It was yesterday
the blue vistas were glued to the horizon, it was Tuesday
the pale green grasses rushed to darker green, the rivers rushed
to join another rushing – it was yesterday – river.
There were some
assuagements: the hangmen
who hanged homosexuals no longer hanged
for the same offense; more ears were sharpened,
by fear, but sharpened; there were, oh, a million kisses;
there was the child who grew to be human;
there was febrifuge, sweet febrifuge!
There was, from across the charred field,
the smell of lilacs
brought by a breeze. There were days, years,
when the clock’s thinking
did not sound like: me, me, me, me.
There were impressive ruins.
Sugar Spoon
Low seven digits (1,000,006, approx.), until it’s almost as flimsy as tinfoil,
this spoon,
plunged into the same sugar bowl
every morning, two, three, four times – for three-quarters
of a century, longer?
At night, deep in sweetness, it rests.
And at dawn, when the battered coffee pot begins to rattle,
it’s still sunk in the white grains,
while outside, snow
drifts to the eaves almost,
or in summer, the sticky sugar hardens
on it in little arctic ridges. On the handle: my father’s thumbprint
exactly on top of his thumbprint, thousands and thousands…
Between each print of his: my mother’s. It’s going
a bruised green in the recesses
of its engraved (viny trees,
sheep?) handle. It cost
a few pfennig once, with its bowl.
It will serve and serve
until the bottom of its shiny curve
grows so thin
a tiny hole opens
and thenceforth it will leave a dusting of its cargo,
a trail, a grainy Milky Way,
across the maple table
from the bowl to my father’s, my mother’s, coffee cup.
A Clearing, a Meadow, in Deep Forest
One lies down in the meadow, one hears the insects saw and gnaw
in the grass, and above, one hears
some music from childhood, sees a barn swallow diving.
One has these thoughts,
stricken. Clouds hang above the meadow’s – how did
this clearing occur? – ragged
treeline. How did it happen, its edges irregular,
not cut for a field
of even rye or oats? When one first breaks
into it, the clearing,
one thinks: not large enough for a farm,
this fodder couldn’t feed four cows.
One walks halfway across
and sits down, stricken. This is the place to rest,
one thinks, in the meadow’s middle,
this is the place to stop
and wait for the wind, or a star,
or a vole’s nose
to point one on one’s way.
FROM
Child Made of Sand
(2012)
Mundo cosi, cosi.
(Such, such is the world.)
ANTONIO DE SOSA,
Diálogo de los Morabutos
Write! Comrade, Write!
EMILY DICKINSON
Joy, shipmate, joy!
WALT WHITMAN
The Moths Who Come in the
Night to Drink Our Tears
always leave quenched,
though they’re drinking,
in composition, seawater,
which does not make them insane
as it does parched humans when we
drink it, even
with our big, big bodies.
If you knew
a leper’s tears do not contain
the bacillus leprae,
would you let him weep on your chest?
Let the moths come, let the sandwoman and -man come,
let Morpheus and Dreamadum come
unto me, and my beloveds,
let the moths come
and drink of the disburdening waters.
You and Your Ilk
I have thought much upon
who might be my ilk,
and that I am ilk myself if I have ilk.
Is one of my ilk, or me, the barber
who cuts the hair of the blind?
And the man crushed by cruelties
for which we can’t imagine sorrow,
who would be his ilk?
And whose ilk was it
standing around, hands in pockets, May 1933,
when 2,242 tons of books were burned?
So, what makes my ilkness my
ilkness? No answers, none obtainable.
To be one of the ilks, that’s all
I hoped for; to say hello to the mailman,
nod to my neighbors, watch
my children chmb the stairs of a big yellow bus
that takes them to a place
where they learn to read
and write and eat their lunches
from puzzle trays – all around them, amid
the clatter and din,
amid bananas, bread, and milk,
all around them: them and their ilk.
Nietzsche Throws His Arms Around the Neck of a Dray Horse
and it signals the beginning of his final breakdown?
An act of empathy – as if he felt how broken
that broken horse was? He could. Or
was it tertiary syphilis? Unlike
many philosophers – rigid,
tortured by the abstract – it was the concretions
that broke Nietzsche. Were the electric drills
of his migraines physiological,
or did he think too hard
and know not, well enough, how to be loved, or to love,
like most of we?
A Frozen Ball of Rattlesnakes
How’d they get in a ball?
What do you mean by a ball, how many in it,
and do you mean stone-frozen?
Or do you mean dormant, sluggish, half hibernating?
Snakes can do that, right?
Rattlesnakes live in other countries too.
There are many species, right?
I’d seen copperheads and cottonmouths
in some mountains
and a few desultory streams I knew.
I live in a large southern metropolis now
and my neighbors
found a rattler (albeit a small one) in their cellar.
Killed it with a shovel.
They have a child, and a dog.
In the frozen ball, do they wake up one by one?
Are those closest to the middle
warmer than the others?
They’re all cold-blooded.
Lincoln used the phrase, metaphorically, more than once.
It’s a good metaphor, easy to read, vivid. Metaphors
should be, and sometimes
should terrify: A man chops
off another man’s head, props
the corpse sitting up against a roadside pole
and places the man’s head in his hands,
on his lap.
The Queen of Truth
If torture is the Queen of Truth
then what is the King of Truth?
Could it be the Black Dog, ennui,
accidie? Can the King
rule by the weight
of the ink (oh, I pray
not the pixels!) on an execution order?
Could the King be numbed by dumdum fever?
Could the King be a thug, theocratic or not?
Might the King’s epiphanies be arsenic-lit?
Can the King pass his edicts
from behind a screen?
Maybe not so Long Live the King!
What kind of King passes the torture off
on his wife? Please. Please, Your Majesty,
step up, show us you’ve got something new!
Something well past torture.
Something long, and slow, and cruel.
The King, outranking the Queen,
who resorts to torture alone
to obtain the truths she needs, the King
with his funny hat and ruffled collar,
what can the King do
(let’s find out)
that hasn’t already been done by the Queen?
A Delivery of Dung
interrupted Wordsworth as he drafted ‘Intimations of Immortality’.
A timely wagonload
if one considers only
the title. An honest man knows
there is no such thing – immortality – hints or no hints.
I prefer Wordsworth the Younger,
his early/mid-thirties, when the above mentioned
was written, when he and Dorothy
still had most of their teeth
and before he was spoiled (milk-sopped,
and walking like an alderman
fed on too much turtle soup) by Dorothy (sister),
Mary (wife), and Sara (sister-in-law), and sometimes even another
Sarah (Coleridge’s wife, estranged).
Wordsworth the Elder
obtained a sinecure selling stamps,
wrote many bad poems,
lived a long, honorable life, and,
truth is, he is immortal,
or as close as a corpse can get, would be
immortal for the first four stanzas of ‘Intimations’
alone. Those stanzas alone.
Anonymous – ‘Western Wind’ – achieved the same with four lines!
No piece of art is perfect.
All it has to do is stay around
for two hundred, or five hundred,
or a few thousand
years. It (art) always changing, us;
not so much.
Elegy
César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday, April 15, 1938
It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you.
Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too.
No doubt Juana Vásquez was killed.
The killers, poor also, were skilled.
And Emilio, they shot him in the back of the neck
after they made him kneel amid the wreck
of his grandmother’s house – they beat
but did not kill her. The people, their hands and feet
(A cripple sleeps with his foot on his shoulder.
Shall I later talk about Picasso, of all people?),
these are the people you wrote for, César,
though your later poems, no longer lighted by the laser
of your homeland, of Heraldos Negros or Trilce,
were real enough for exile but not as true, licit.
Socialist realism, the aesthetic was called,
poetry force-marched – to diminish, eq
ually, all.
It was not right for your mind and betrayed your heart.
Your countrymen and -women should bring you home, César.
Entombed in France is good enough for some,
but Peru should bring Peru’s great poet home.
Every Time Someone Masturbates
God Kills a Kitten
Why not kill a rat? There’re lots of rats! Remember
the time You gave some of them fleas,
which killed them (that was good), but then the fleas jumped off
the dead rats
and bit humans,
who died too, about a third of them
on the planet? You were
good to Poland (hardly any occurrences), which You
made up for in following centuries.
How about snakes? Why such vituperation?
Little whips, You made, with such racking poison!
How about clams? Would one clam feel the loss
of another clam in, at least, a version of grief? I’m not sorry,
I prefer clams to rats or snakes.
I eat clams, but I’m willing to never
eat a clam again – for the kittens.
How about You,
how about adjusting Your plan
a little, how about a little less hard-ass?
How about You tell Your flock it’s time to let this bill pass?
West Shining Tree
West, but west of where?
How far west? Northwest, southwest?
I need to get there, un-iambically.
Please send coordinates.
Longitude and latitude, please.
Why is it shining? That affirms light, life,
though west also associates with death,
which also affirms life – if you’re not dead.
What kind of tree is it? Leafy? Tall?
Hardwood, fever tree, balsa?
A tree of luminous fruit?
In prose, it’s evening light through a tree,
looking east to west.
May it be more: an emblem,