Robert Bagg: Poems, Greek Plays, Essays, Novels, Memoir

OSTRAKOI

I’m five or six. A boisterous party pulls
me half-way down the stairs, to sit peering
under the banister at Mom and Rick Larkin
face to face, arms reaching––not dancing
not talking, just floating closer––till I
catch Mother’s roving eye … she lets go,
deflecting handsome, handlebarred Rick’s
attention up at me … who takes her wet
gin kiss back up to bed, too young to know
why everything feels, suddenly, out of place.

This memory has jagged edges. Like those
clay ostrakoi Athenians attached
to unwanted newborns left out to die,
so if rescued and brought up by strangers
they might, fate willing, chance on whoever
holds the other broken half, make the match,
discover who their parents really were.

It’s six years later. Rick loses his job
(selling Iron Lungs that cures for polio
would soon make obsolete). He and I spend
rainy afternoons playing pouncing chess.
“I am an opportunist,” Rick liked to say
when he reached for my queen, not grasping
that capturing her would lose him the game.
I could see four or five chess moves ahead,
but grownups playing life were beyond me.
I didn't know what opportunist meant,
not then, till adolescence broke out
in a rash of hormonal entendres.

I’m rerunning Rick’s verbal jousts, to feel
now, each of his galloping shots to my ribs.
He once spoke up for household nudity.
“We Larkins are too pretty to be prudes,
we love walking naked around our house.”
Wow! Red-haired Ginny, his elegant wife?
Tomboy Katie? My mind slipped off their clothes,
gingerly fixed on flaming pubic hair.

Once striding from his bathroom Rick
startled a houseguest. She was shocked.
“So I said to her: ‘Do I frighten you?’”

I couldn't figure why he’d scare anyone
––such a happy-go-lucky bon vivant––
not yet seeing the stark fact he’d left out
of his account … And now, freed-up erotic
noises and images come into play…
Mother, husky-voiced at bedtime, calling Dad
to turn off the news and come up to her.

Once she pulled her nightgown over her head
so I could see for myself how different
women are from men. When at nineteen I sailed
for Europe, she kissed me goodbye, saying
“Now don’t be afraid to come home a man.”

Not till my late thirties did she confide
Susan and I had a half-sister, born
when Mom and the father were seventeen.
No one in her own family was willing
to take on Mom’s burden. Perfect strangers
had to step in. She knew the girl’s life
thereafter, only by photos and clippings.
She did her best to help me see: It’s so
hard for us––meaning girls––to say no.
Having heard a ton more nos than yeses
all through a stuttering adolescence
I was incredulous––where were those girls?
The only stunner who ever hissed yeses
my way, was Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

The morning Mother died, Dad walked me
through her roses: “It’s so unfair … Mom dying
at sixty-two.” (She wrote the book on low-
salt cooking, which kept his blood pressure down.
Dad thrived, remarried, lived to eighty-nine.)
“I was never unfaithful to your mother.
Maybe I should have been …” said a minute
later, out of the blue. I wondered why
ever would he want to be unfaithful?

I knew she’d seen psychiatrists early
in their marriage. Dad never said why.
What therapy is it that cures desire?

As a child, I knew how selfish she could be.
But she never hit or belittled me.
Except, if she thought I was being stupid
or lazy, well, that got her ire up.
More than once she told me she’d tried
to be a good mother. I told her: she was.

The day my first serious girl dropped by––
both of us home from college at the time––
all at once Mom left the house, leaving us
astonished, ourselves alone, to take as much
advantage of the moment as we dared.
If we don’t dare, we start to die: Prufrock’s
white trousers sit in judgment on us all,
whether we roll them up or take them off.

Mom did her best to raise a by-the-book
Christian gentleman. And did. But I knew
no book for the passion in her—not till
away at college, I found it in Greek myth:
Aphrodite, Helen, Phaidra––Furies
poets envision giving birth to murder,
war, tragedy … a sex still unforgiven.

Mom’s sexual dramas got no one killed.
Yet cast in one I felt it gripping me.
I was fourteen, out dripping from the shower.
She’d brought me a towel. “You’re such
a good looking boy,” she said, “it scares me.”
The potshard pieces come together. Mom
stares at me. My shivering nakedness
covers itself up. Hers lights up with a flash
so blinding all I see is the darkness.

PLAYING THE WHEEL

We are leaving the Casino at Juan-les-Pins
the roulette marbles still tumbling over numbers
about to lodge in somebody else's stomach.

By a hotel full of the Rolling Stones
arrogantly parked is a black Maserati,
the mild swale of its transparent fastback

frosted smooth by the August dawn.
There a suave finger––speaking, I supposed,
for the whole woman––had written,

"Dear Luc, I waited for you since three hours.
Your anger not incurable anger?
Biot 479 310"

My fingers are spinning the dial
around like the wheel of fortunate numbers
ticking into a perfect parlay

just as she answers—Daisy! with a voice
full of money which I spend in the dream
Je suis Luc J'arrive J'arrive

THE WORST KISS

I ask you for it.
You look unhappy and surprised
but lean forward to touch my lips
with a reluctant brush of your own.

I say: "That is the worst kiss
I've had since I was seven."
The moment veers toward a smile,
we say goodnight.

A night later by Grasmere in rain
your mouth buries in my sweater,
hiding. "The worst kiss?" you say,
unwilling to part with another.

But you do. Your kissing is tireless,
expectant, as though you woke up
from walking all day through London, still
overflowing with its pleasure, and so loving

every morning we nearly miss breakfast.
The facts of our lives flow freely,
we're guides to our own arrested pasts,
wondering whether we still live there.

We do. Our last kiss
holds nothing back, except our lives,
which empty of each other as slowly
as rain dries from damp wool.

RONALD WYN

I
Inscriptions on Greek tombstones intrigued him,
the way stones spoke to the dead with sure words.
This little stone, good Sabinus, records
our great friendship––which I still need. Don’t dim
your memory of me by drinking Lethé.
Sometimes the dead answer. Please don’t worry
long over me. Work. Live. At nineteen
cancer killed me, and I leave the sweet sun.


II
We both had strong Platonic appetites
for ripe symposia of grapes and plums—
whose power Aristotle found in their pits—
tiny grenades, packed with earth-driven blossoms
which stun the World of Forms. When a calm mirror
lake absorbed us, we dove underwater,
blew out mouthfuls, swam until the honey
of exhaustion sweetened every cell in the body.


III
From a frame normally tense and restless
a tennis ball exacted gracefulness
by skipping on the tip of the net’s tongue.
The dust kicked from our reflexes in long-
winded rallies. Sharp satisfying plocks,
both of us bent on keeping play alive,
we’d silence with a forehand drive,
let sweat cool, and drink harsh gulps from our Cokes.

IV
His death ten seconds in my ears, I stalked
past our friends, making of grief a dumb show,
striding as if I had somewhere to go,
so blindly thirsty for Ron’s life, I hawked
up rain I'd swallowed, then spit through chilled teeth;
sat for a while in a bus kiosk
recalling the times Ron would ask
me what I‘d study, faced with early death.


V
That Spring, at Epidauros, I heard mist
hiss off marble harangued by the rain.
When it’s wordless, grief can drive you insane,
so talk to him. Tell him he's keenly missed.
Trust words to carry in this magical air;
this theatre to cure pity and fear.
Ask both laurel and myrtle leaf
to help bring him back from the afterlife,


VI
then set two stones speaking. Let him go first.
“Sometimes we doomed seek death––I was coerced.
Though I loved math, Greek, philosophy, song
I mastered none. In all lives much goes wrong;
to love your own––then die––is the worst.”
“Ron, the Olympian Bastards stopped cold
the life that your genius foretold––
except for friendship, in which you are versed.”

NIKÉ

We poets were assigned the old potters’ shed,
its kiln and dislocated wheel nearby,
built on the slope below the Aurelian
Wall that swells up from seething Roman earth
like a Pacific roller cresting overhead
––a perfect wave to catch, if you can ride
that buried power surging underfoot.

Out its south windows stretched the backyard farm––
ten walled-in acres of working Campagna.
Free-ranging hens skittered about, women
picked blue-green artichokes into aprons,
a goat’s vibrato rasped and rasped and raaaasped.
Cool morning winds bending the tulip beds
brimmed over us, setting our hands to work.

When nothing much was happening on pages
littering our worktable, we would feed
the woodstove wretched balled-up early drafts
better off smoke than fodder for critics.
Time to quit writing when the noon cannon
boomed over Rome from Garibaldi’s statue.
Afternoons we trooped down to the Tiber;
our scholar-guides ticked off on either hand
snake-throttled bell-towers of the late Baroque,
or probed the Palatine with a miner’s cap
to spotlight, in a 2nd-century school,
graffiti mocking Gaius for his faith.
At night, Fellini and Frascati binges.
Fired by such trips we hiked back to write late,
through artichokes whitening in the moonlight.

Every writer left something odd behind.
Letters from convicts to Ralph Ellison,
Louis Simpson’s unpublished dissertation
on James Hogg, The Ettrick Shepherd,
a photograph of Tony Hecht’s young wife
stunning herself on what looked like Capri.

Pinned to the back wall for contemplation
were single words, writ large in lithe Italic
script. Some I recognized as nouns vital
to Richard Wilbur’s Roman fountain poems:
a Greek word, Arêté; a Latin one,
reticulum; then laundry and angel.

That wall of opportunity beckoned:
Don’t hide your most audacious words––flaunt them!
Rescue them from Roget. Get them ready
to rise to your occasions. Poems are made
not just from serendipitous mots justes
but from words groomed until their big chance comes.

One word of Wilbur’s never got the call.
At least I never found it in his poems.
Niké: a goddess once, but now a shoe––
an airborne winner riding roughshod.
Wilbur left it, a tuft of flowers spared
for those who work this meadow after him.
But I worked far away from Frost’s meadow
where scythes pair off––and you work together,
Buddy, whether you work together or apart.
Though tempted I let Wilbur’s Niké be.

Whatever Roman fact he made a poem
soars in its place, even his railway station’s
Jordanesque swoosh of roofline hangs there still––
beyond the faked-out past, beyond my reach.
Poets compete for fame. Is this our worst
infirmity? Or just our union card?

I’ll scavenge Rome for transient artifacts
too fleeting for Wilbur or never etched
by Piranesi; I’ll go easy on fountains
in favor of totaled Vespas and time bombs.

What seemed a small refusal now seems huge.
I should have put those Nikes on and run.
Thirty-seven years later I’ve just done it.

The farm is gone; American grass, green as
a fairway, soothes the Fellows dealing frisbies.
Our boarded studio stores beat-up chairs.

Niké is still pinned to the burlap wall
in Wilbur’s hand, breathing inside her ink
cocoon, impatiently growing wings.

SPORTSCAST

Yeah, I was sassy––confrontational
even—but it would have been criminal
not to give Wilbur a clean open shot
at a blindsiding critic, the day
he visited C. L. Barber’s poetry class.

“Sir, Randall Jarrell wrote that your poems
(I paraphrase) reminded him of something
a thoughtful tailback said about football––
how a good runner makes a choice, as each
play develops, to plunge ahead for six
or eight safe yards, or, dodging and weaving,
he goes for a possible touchdown, maybe
getting stopped cold for a big loss. Jarrell
thinks too often you, uh, settle for six.”

Barber reddened, Wilbur smiled, I was thinking,
That’s got to provoke a riposte mordant!

What it provoked was a mild concussion––
“I don’t think Randall Jarrell wrote that review.
I believe it was Horace Gregory.”

Graciousness (his) rescued embarrassment
(mine) before I could follow my faux pas up:
how a poet of Wilbur’s caliber
should respond to a thrown gauntlet hitting
print––and whether playing it safe or going
for broke was ever a problem for him.

In the years since, I’ve tried to put on tape
how ABC’s Wide World of Poetry
would broadcast highlights of Wilbur’s career:
“Wilbur runs wide, the pigskin tucked away,
facing that famous Wall of Stone defense––

Lowell, Stevens, Roethke, Dickey, up front;
linebackers Nemerov, Berryman, Frost;
Junkins and Hecht at the corners; Wright and Strand
deep. No snarks on this team, just brash-talking
go-for-brokers, no way they’ll back off!

“‘The mind is like some bat,’ is the first slick
move Dick puts on the lads who think it’s a hawk.
This Wall of Stone can’t handle Wilbur’s bat,
it’s weaving rings around these groping bards!

“Now Dick shows all who’ve been there, done that,
‘there’s something new to see:’ Rome reimagined!
He turns spumanti into holy water;
from various mundane ingredients
he rebuilds his own City of the Soul.

But has he trapped himself inside a cul de sac?”
Cameras freeze the action, spectators
wonder en bloc, “Can Wilbur, Stupendo
Numero Ottanta, shake himself free
from his thoroughly pagan infatuation
with that Baroque Wall Fountain, drenching all
parties concerned––nymph and faun, goose and us––
in permanent, diaphanous pleasure?
Can he slip back inside the Christian fold?

“Not a problem! Dick laterals himself
across the city, over the heads of stunned
opponents, pleased readers––much as Deborah Kerr
lateralled herself, in Prisoner of Zenda,
from one Stewart Granger to another.

Within St. Peter’s outstretched arms he touches
down running; two sky-high spumes remind us
gravity sucks to earth all human life,
that failure’s inherent; but wait! He doesn’t
abandon us before God’s huge locked door,
he cuts back through the walls of Villa Schiarra,
whose fountain now pours pure reassurance
through minds drinking its bottomless waters.”

Meanwhile, downstream, deadlier dangers
loom, whose full measure he will take: He en-
tertains a godlike drunk who reads minds;
God’s own mind he suddenly, perilously,
reads; a child’s eyes peer out from his death bed
at something true––unconditional love!––
we never outlive. And, when the end zone’s
breached, he enters, betraying no outward
elation as though he’s been there before,
just as Coach Vincent Lombardi advised.

THE TANDEM RIDE

Spring semester, junior year, 1956
—Amherst and Smith colleges

I
The Land of Heart’s Desire by Willie Yeats
has a role for a tiny Faery Child
indifferent to the havoc she creates:
An idle and moody young bride she’s beguiled
deserts her husband for the Celtic wild.
The girl we’d cast, no taller than John Keats,
never relaxed and hardly ever smiled—
tough-skinned as a ruddy New England peach,
skilled at shinnying trees and perching out of reach.

II
On one side she was feisty feminine,
but down her back, bone wings and vertebrae
articulate the Amazon within.
Her sweaters smelt of wood smoke, her hair of bay.
We liked her racy talk, but not the way
she mocked our using words like gyre and yore
and villain. Ralph knew better how to play
to her rebellious side, while I paid more
attention to allure she’d rather we ignore.

III
Allure. What kind? Well, here’s what it was not:
most girls we knew picked frocks, chums, flicks, beaux
deftly as playwrights working out a plot.
From the first date on they let fellows know
where consent, once given, was sure to go.
When Phi Psi phones … they’ll answer, voice agleam.
Intensive petting with the lights turned low,
Satchmo riffing on a saxophone’s theme,
fleshes out the bare bones of a converging dream.


IV
But what kind of girl peels her swimsuit off
to float down through the shallows of a brook
like a slowly emerging photograph?
Faery Child allowed us a long calm look,
wanting her body both seen and forsook:
“What’s normal shouldn’t be mysterious.”
She’d swim, towel, sunbathe, while we partook
of her freckled, reassuring plainness,
increasingly aware of its implicit bliss.


V
One cold April night we tried to persuade
this stage-wary hoyden not to abandon
her role in our play: “Look, guys, I’m afraid
people will laugh if I show some emotion.”
“Emotion? Faery Child, this part has none.”
“I’d like the peace of never feeling any.”
“Then act in Heart’s Desire. You might have fun
playing a creature cruel to so many.”
“Well, I still think this is just about my fanny.”

VI
Lowering a hearth gently from the heights
we set a Sligo cottage up onstage.
My old mother swears at the fire she lights,
my bride spills daisies from a dreamy rage.
Faery Child knocks, taking swift advantage
of our quarrel, begs her fill of warm milk,
then sings my bride to the woods. “Can you manage
that exit in a more Ophelian arc?”
Ralph calls, but she’s already lit out for the dark.


VII
We chase her part way up a handsome elm;
she hangs by her knees, hair flowing, face weird,
her nut-brown makeup whitened by cold cream,
her muscles flexing through her leotard.
Her hand pulls back, astonished by my fevered
forehead, pretending she could feel the strain
of framing words that seized her. Had she heard
these far-off stanzas giving tongue? “I’m ta’en,
Lord Bob––but I’ll bring sweet disorder to your brain.”


VIII
Irked when things looked to be going my way
(while she and I half-heartedly rehearse),
Ralph molded satyrs from papier maché
and plied her with snatches of my coarse verse,
our friendship careening from tense to worse.
Downstairs, brash dates were chafing some fellows––
declaring how disgustingly perverse
you frat boys are––tittering bordellos
of dimwitted pinups must litter your pillows.

IX
Slow dancing pairs in scotch and Crosby steep,
so tired they can no more keep happiness
from soaking through them than they can keep sleep.
Gone from Phi Psi’s bar all strenuous
expressions of desire: Smoke-ring sensuous
now, girls murmur and drift, subtly breaking
from burial in one boy’s hold to perilous
haven in his roommate’s arms, dreamily making
fun of a fashion they have no intention of forsaking.


X
Faery Child proved a more principled tease—
stripped for a skinny dip, in black italics
someone had written look but don’t touch please
across the posted domain of her buttocks.
She says there’s more “love made” in quiet talks
with boys who’d never ask to sleep over
than they’d ever come by just having sex.
Bemused by such pronouncements, we’d drive her
home to Hamp, immersed in mist from the rising river.


XI
Long after midnight in the Phi Psi house
a looped professor’s impending collapse
rallies some brothers for a final carouse.
His mouth, more attuned to pondering sips
of Highland malt, swills beer in Homeric gulps,
starts to define and then to annotate:
“I’ll tell you what she is, this SHE who slips
her clothes––but never her scruples––off …wait
for it! … an allumeuse! … a word we might translate

XII
as Zipper lighter!” So it came to pass—
the prof, a footnote to himself, lay out cold—
I raised my all-too-often-emptied glass:
“Drink, Brothers, to a girl nineteen years old,
who, least lecherous, with a cunning hold,
is pulling this great fraternity’s leg.”
Convinced frivolity must be controlled
I drew foam from an almost pressureless keg,
determined to deliver Phi Psi from this plague.


XIII
Upstairs, Ralph was still working hard to paint
flames leaping from a paper dragon’s snout.
When I said “Time we prove our girl’s no saint,”
Ralph asked, “Whose car?” then flicked his brush about––
from my lips silvery handlebars sprout.
An engine up to our preposterous wills
stood in the cellar, groomed to smoke her out—
a phosphorescent Bike of the Baskervilles
which once struck holy terror through the Pelham Hills.


XIV
From deep in the cellar, bumping upstairs,
I wheeled the great tandem. Smirking outside
reeled the unwieldy remains of the revelers.
Ralph Lee skipped into action, sliding astride—
running behind, I pushed her up to speed.
Somebody sang, “We’ll roll a million mile—
Big Tandem comin’ for his iron bride.”
Bill Bathurst let a campus-burp repeal
Zinner’s guffaw and the scornful giggle of Dinklespiel.

XV
We chandelled once around the Octagon
for luck, buzzed Bathurst kneeling in mid-barf,
turned left at Emily Dickinson
‘s Father’s House, massive on Wilbur’s turf,
then glid down Amity whose dogs grew gruff.
Coasting past Hadley farms, a billowed breast
of white tobacco gauze shrank when a puff
caressed it; our teeth ached with each breath, west-
bound over the river on a Faery-tail quest.


XVI
A graveyard rose to meet us, all its souls
crickets, shrilling their pulses over ground
heaved up by enormous burrowing moles.
Eerie frequencies in ourselves could sound
out danger just before we rammed a mound.
We petitioned the tight-lipped, straight-faced, moon:
Make sure our Faery Child’s up and around;
tell her we’re on our way, we’ll be there soon,
doing by prayer what jocks do by telephone.


XVII
Our legs were mostly daydream by the time
solemn white columns of Greek Revival
sailed by our elbows. Up typing a theme,
a bleary Smithie smoked at a windowsill
set in the bare pediment of that temple.
Smith’s stern parietals have pulled the plug
on Bakkhos’ blasts. Her Luckies can’t quite fill
that lack. She’d greet with a nicotinged hug
Hephestos flicking ashes in her Dartmouth mug.

XVIII
We stopped to ponder that sorry mural,
a girl in curlers typing until dawn.
Is that bewildering maze––the moral
life of the West––what she’s been brooding on?
Could we have caught your falling star, Jack Donne?
In our rapt faces she admires herself,
looking game for invasion as our moon,
and taps cigarette sparks three floors down. “Ralph,
Remember? We have a rendezvous with an elf?


XIX
We search the boathouse on Paradise Pond;
the window-lights of the state asylum
dominate the sweeping skyline beyond;
bipolars, psychotics, shower their gloom
over the campus; we face a fearsome
dorm wearing a Norman fortress disguise,
then abandon our floundering tandem,
exhaustion having (at last) made us wise.
Who’d pump a symbol seven miles but two Amherst guys?


XX
She pushes a glass door open a crack,
emerges from a tropical greenhouse,
shoes squishing, then pauses––almost goes back––
aware her sweat-drenched transparent blouse
would amuse us, or might even arouse
us more than her breasts did normally.
She’d never say, Come on to me, guys, now’s
the right time!––but I sensed viscerally
she wasn’t the same girl we had chased up that tree.

XXI
She sat down lotus-legged. “Strange how my phone
kept muttering lewd-icrous mysteries
tonight. One guy used a crude Latin noun––
I declined it. He told me I’m a tease––
who makes you guys … extremely ill at ease.”
“The swine!” “Ralph, don’t be boorish and silly
like that receiver-full of drunken boys.
Why did they call me an “alley floosie”?
To be some femme banal doesn’t really thrill me.”


XXII
Mimicking an athletic gentleman
Ralph kissed her hand, then landed by cartwheel
beside a bronze-green girl in a fountain.
He touches his lips to ones that can’t feel
and basks in her strange favors for a while,
trying to melt her stare to a less scary,
welcoming smile. All this provokes a steel-
y glare: Suddenly mobilized, Faery
Child’s playful, pent-up, fired-up hormonal fury


XXIII
explodes: “That statue-maiden took exams!—
the little sylph Ralph proved wasn’t kiss-proof––
had periods! Got hives eating clams!
She might have been choosy, but never aloof.
Not even from that importunate oaf
she eased out of her life one Saturday.
He showed the next day, but she’d had enough—
bawled him out and tried to send him away—
until a gun convinced her she could die that day.

XXIV
“She ran down this path; sat on these brick stairs.
At first he blurted a choking “goodbye,”
hurt deeper than she could cure with her tears.
Then he stopped, Colt pressed to his linen thigh,
deciding who deserved the most to die.
President Seelye’s hymnal leapt when a boom
slammed the windows. Some girl told him why.
The college swarmed across lawns in full bloom
to where she bled. Her killer started walking home,


XXV
“then blew a hole through his own sick brain––
his was no kiss-and-get-over-it game.
If you guys want so badly to ‘obtain
my favors’––I can think of some awesome
ones you might do me. Forget all your dumb
Yeatsian schemes. Just give me what I need!”
She then skittered off, scattering not blame
behind, but scripts from which we’d just been freed––
what she had meant sinking in as she picked up speed.


XXVI
Out of the blue, she who wouldn’t be wooed,
who wanted no part of anything fake,
was daring us to skip courtship and strip nude,
to chase her churning effervescent wake
through the chill of our adolescent lake.
Backstroking now, her posture a metaphor
that seemed to be saying, I’m here to take,
ready to give––everything you came for.
Stunned, but unwilling to leave our clothes ashore,

XXVII
we listened to her slurry small talk carry:
“Wouldn’t you like to see how it really goes
with me? Am I a girl you’d want to marry?”
Awkwardly skittish of what we’d expose
all we could muster were unspoken Nos.
In sole possession of her watery sheen
she upends her bottom, and then her toes,
hoping her attractions would plunge us in:
“Since when have you guys ever been frightened of skin!”


XXVIII
Our tandem, pedaled by ghosts of the swains
we’d set out to be, rolls racketing down
the grassy slope toward the pond, and planes
through its waters like a huge neon swan.
Now with only her moon-made costume on
Faery Child stages a one woman show,
apparently planning to dance until dawn
alone on Paradise Island, aglow
with abandon––we watch for a while and then go.


XXIX
Within a year all three of us were married;
Ralph did mime in Paris, I poems in Rome.
Though our obsession with her had miscarried,
as seniors we would alter its outcome:
This time the girl takes the naked man home;
I wrote, Ralph staged, The Hero Recovers:
Stripped of his crew, his clothes, even his name,
Odysseus wakes when Nausicaä discovers
him beached while washing tunics for her courting brothers.

THE SEWER DARE

The April I recovered from measles––
quarantined for weeks in a darkened room––
the outdoor sun intimidated my eyes
but dazzling cardinals and forsythia
soon lit up everywhere I looked. From lilac
and honeysuckle, my breath pulled sweetness
in through my nose. Weather turned warm as though
won by the flowers’ graceful example.
After a sweat-provoking tennis game
I took my first cool shower of the year.

Screen doors—pried open rickety—held back
their slam until I pushed off the top step
of the porch, staggering under my own weight,
eager to run myself back into shape
against buddies, jackrabbits, butterflies;
every competitor set a harsh pace.

No matter how lightheaded after races
through backyards and woodlots, I balked at
being conned by Reichert’s provocations.
Haul ourselves hand over hand on telephone
wires, biceps shivering with exertion
but our legs scissoring uselessly? That
was one sure way to join Pete Reichert’s gang––
or get ourselves electrocuted. Screw yous
got my head pummeled, pugnacious fist feints
brought my guard up, but the real killers
clenched in Pete Reichert’s fists were bottle caps.
He flinched when I smacked the hand that struck me
lucky, relaxed, and opened on a Pepsi cap.
Reichert broke its news grimly while he lodged
that opaque monocle in his eye: “You know
the old storm sewer runs under Sagamore?
I’ve bellied through it during thunderstorms.
So you guys better hope it doesn’t rain.”

McCornack, hunched over his sunken chest,
volunteered. He had failed to recite
the Lord’s Prayer yesterday while, pinned squirming,
a hen pecked chickenfeed off his bare belly.

A Nedicks top whose luck lay undivulged
Reichert stuck in his other leering eye,
then both caps dropped off his frozen zombie
stare focused on something a mile away.
Maybe Nedicks meant Mountain Avenue
strapped in Mike’s buggy, with a running start,
one wheel loose, and me steering with my knees.

By deadpan razzmatazz they tried to haze
chickenhearted refusals out of me,
pulling the laces out of my sneakers
so when I raced I ran them off my feet.
Disgraced, there was no place to go but down.
McCornack teamed with me, and the iron grill,
crowbarred upright, tottered over our fingers.
We let go of the street; the grill clanked shut.
Reichert peered through the manhole: “Hey, little rain
comin’ down.” He quieted to let us listen.
Somebody’s leak tumbled on the macadam,
superbly timed. “Bastards, I still see blue,”
Mac whispered. Bastards was fed back to us
amplified. Reichert’s hollering laughter
hollowed the sewer out ahead of us.

Unforeseen water drops glanced off our necks.
Holes sucking at our palms in the leaf slime
left by runaway rainfalls, ghouls of the cold air,
spider webs and rust flakes, increased our sense
of the sewer’s impassive narrowness—
constriction of being bound and gagged
without anything firm to fight against.
Nothing to do but elbow into it,
worming the way a jointed finger does
squirming inside a glove. But open-eyed
blindness put pressure on our lungs, as though
we were swimming underwater, knowing
we had to come up for air pretty soon.
My fingers grabbing both McCornack’s ankles
stopped him. My own thighs loosened and my neck
ligaments eased. A lit match showed Mac’s hands
flailing to kill invisible vermin;
water drenching our pant legs swirled chills
up through our privates, encouraging leaks
through our khakis and cloudbursts in our minds.

Mac tried to pivot and crawl back the same way
we came, but his buttocks jammed his forehead
flush against stone. His scrawny arm muscles
grappled and strained, resisting python-like
peristalsis. McCornack’s fist jabbed
as if for Reichert’s jaw. “Easy!” I said,
thinking, We’re dead. Reichert had bullshit us;
we’d become mutinous excrement
propelling itself through an intestine.

Neighborhoods, parents, friends sank out of sight;
my sister's curls sagged in sodden languor
below me, trapped in a swift rising tide.
I couldn’t hear a word my mother called
from our porch, which floated out of my mind.

Auroras opened their colorful fingers
whenever my twisting head smashed my nose.
At last the fiery hand that palmed me turned
to clammy mud. I groveled in knowledge
I still believe: Bravado can kill you.

A steady spray of water drenched our faces,
then subsided. The brass nozzles of hoses
bumped kneecaps; sunlight broke through as Reichert’s
whinnying buddies pried the cover up.

Our minds, pounded into our stomachs,
reawakened to blinding sunshine, which we
got used to, hand over hand up the slick green
hoses toward the blue manhole-rounded sky.

There, towering in a human pyramid,
was Reichert’s roaring gang, topped by Reichert
rollicking in his personal glory.
His was the biggest swindle of our lives.
We stood sullen, each holding a live hose.
Reichert pounded his fist on the asphalt,
but for once I had a good grip on water,
filling his nostrils with its blinding blast.

Cynthy and Abigail arrived breathless,
sleepy-eyed, the bedspread’s tassels still pocking
their cheeks, just too late to see what happened.

“Those beasties don’t even know they’re alive,”
he yelled at the gang. For weeks the word death
seeped through everything I loved, then dried out
soon as baseball season got underway.

A Few Poems (some long, some short) All New to this Site

THE SEWER DARE

The April I recovered from measles––
quarantined for two weeks in my bathrobe––
the outdoor sun stung my clenching eyelids,
but flighty cardinals and forsythia
soon lit up everywhere I looked. From lilac
and honeysuckle, my breath pulled sweetness
in through my nose. Weather turned warm as though
won by the flowers’ graceful example.
After a sweat-provoking tennis game
I took my first cool shower of the year.
Screen doors—pried open rickety—held back
their slam until I pushed off the top step
of the porch, staggering under my own weight,
then ran myself back into condition
against joggers, jackrabbits, butterflies.
I found that nature set a killing pace.
Spring drew me on, an enormous incoming
breath my lungs tried hard to hold, and exhale.
No matter how lightheaded after races
through backyards and woodlots, I refused
to be conned by Reichert’s provocations:
To haul ourselves hand over hand on telephone
wires, biceps shivering with exertion
but our legs scissoring uselessly,
was one sure way to join Pete Reichert’s gang––
or get ourselves electrocuted. Fuck yous
got my head pummeled; pugnacious fist feints
brought my guard up, but the real killers
in Reichert’s fists were bottle caps. His fingers
flinched when I smacked the hand that struck
me lucky, relaxed, and opened on a Pepsi cap.
Reichert broke its news gently, busy screwing
that opaque monocle in his eye: “You know
the old storm sewer runs under Sagamore?
We’ve bellied through it during thunderstorms.
But you guys better hope it doesn’t rain.”

McCornack, hunched over his sunken chest,
volunteered. He had failed to recite
the Lord’s Prayer yesterday while, pinned squirming,
a hen pecked chickenfeed off his bare belly.
A Nedicks top whose luck lay unspoken
Reichert stuck in his other leering eye,
then dropped both caps off his frozen zombie
stare focused on something a mile away.
Maybe Nedicks meant Mountain Avenue
jammed in Mike’s buggy, with a running start,
one wheel loose, and me steering with my knees.
By deadpan razzmatazz they tried to haze
chickenhearted refusals out of me,
pulling the laces out of my sneakers
so when I raced I ran them off my feet.
McCornack teamed with me, and the iron grill,
crowbarred upright, tottered over our fingers.
We let go of the street, the grill clanked shut.
Reichert peered through the manhole: “Hey, little rain
coming down.” He quieted to let us listen.
Somebody's leak tumbled on the macadam,
superbly timed. “Bastards, I still see blue,”
Mac whispered. Bastards was fed back to us
amplified. Reichert's hollering laughter
hollowed the sewer out ahead of us.
Unforeseen waterdrops glanced off our necks.
Holes sucking at our palms in the leafslime
left by runaway rainfalls, ghouls of the cold air,
spider webs and rust flakes, increased our sense
of the sewer’s impassive narrowness—
constriction of being bound and gagged
without anything firm to fight against.
Nothing to do but elbow into it,
worming the way a jointed finger does
squirming inside a glove. But open-eyed
blindness put pressure on our lungs, as though
we were swimming underwater, knowing
we had to come up for air pretty soon
or else start breathing lungfuls of water.

My fingers circling both McCornack’s ankles
stopped him. My own thighs loosened and my neck
ligaments eased. I nursed a match. Mac’s eyes
broke out in the dark looking shame at me,
awash from trying to shake the slimy
fear of sewer vermin off his forearms.
With the stunned sureness of a thrill from somewhere
near my balls climbing up my spine,
water soaked through my trousers, my drenched drawers
fondling my stomach, followed by shallow
curdles in our ears, keen along our shins.
Water sloshed up under us, fed by drizzling
kidneys and cloudbursting imaginations.
Mac tried to pivot and crawl back the same way
we came, but his buttocks jammed his forehead
flush against stone. His scrawny arm muscles
grappled and pushed, fighting against an iron
peristalsis. We inched, swallowing hard,
up that pipe like barf trapped in our stomachs.
McCornack’s knees hunched for Pete Reichert’s crotch.
“Take it easy!” I said, thinking, We’re dead.
In my mind’s eye Pete Reichert’s right foot
stomped on our bodies, our lives just swollen
shit blobs burbling through his intestines.
Neighborhoods, parents, friends sank out of sight;
my sister's curls sagged in sodden languor
below me, trapped in a swift rising tide.
I couldn't hear a word my mother called
from our porch, which floated out of my mind.
Auroras unclenched their colorful fingers
whenever a steel outcrop smashed my nose,
but soon the fiery hand that palmed me turned
to clammy mud. I groveled in knowledge
I still believe: Don’t let courage kill you!
A steady spray of water drenched our faces,
then subsided. The brass nozzles of hoses
bumped kneecaps, then sun broke through as Reichert’s
whinnying buddies pried the cover up.
It was the biggest swindle of our lives.

Our minds, pounded into our stomachs,
reawakened to blinding sunshine, which we
got used to, shinnying up the slick green
hose toward the blue manhole-rounded sky.
There, towering in a human pyramid,
was Reichert’s roaring gang, topped by Reichert
rollicking in his personal glory.
“Those beasties don’t even know they’re alive,”
he yelled at his gang. For weeks the word death
inundated my trains of thought, then dried
out as baseball season got underway.
We stood sullen, each holding a live hose.
Rearing out of his gang on two uneasy
knees, Reichert offered fists doubled on air,
but the pyramid collapsed under him,
mouths clogged with laughter, as guys’ knees gave way,
none happier than Reichert pounding his fist
on the asphalt in satisfied triumph
drenched to his skin––for once I had a good grip
on water, filling his nostrils with its blast.
Cynthy and Abigail arrived breathless
and sandyeyed, a bedspread’s tassels pocking
their cheeks, just too late to see what happened.

DEATH AT POCONO LAKE

The lifeguard’s parallel simian arms
paused by his side, then bore down on the boy’s back
to teach those lungs a cadence known since birth.
The Quakers on the lawn wept and wondered
how this slight hesitant child boldly drowned.
He’d clambered aboard a flooded canoe.
They found him wedged under a wicker seat.

He’d roamed the edge of people, animals,
and water, lured by anything strange.
One afternoon he followed me around
tugging at my attention, got it, and ran
behind an old abandoned horseshoe pit,
where a blind dying hound sat in a hatch
of insects, her yellowed tongue unfurling
like flypaper. The child’s eyewater flowed
faster than he could see through, and I sensed
the dog, the bouncing insects, and myself blurring
into each other. He poked the animal
with a stick, shooed the flies, but couldn’t stand
to see her struggling at standing, like a foal.

Now with cotton plumes out his nose, he lay
surrounded by hunkered whispering men.
Teens who could only watch rooted for him
to push himself dizzily to his feet.
We took to running hands over our thighs
while his quiet body stayed motionless.
From sitting so long cramped and cross-legged
my right leg fell asleep, and when I shook it
I set off maggot tingles in my nerves.

They carried him pale in a green blanket
back to the part-time doctor’s shingled hut
fifty yards away. As it grew darker
we lay on the damp grass with nothing to do.

“I’d like to see what’s going on in there,”
McCornack said, “by looking through the skylight.
If it broke I’d crash land on his chest, crush
the water out, jump start the kid’s heart.”
No word from inside. Bats picked insects off.
Right beside us, thrushes would drop straight down
and stick, like dead rubber balls that won’t bounce.
The doctor came outside: Go home, he’s gone.

Stars that dimmed then flared up like fireflies
revived his face thrilled with a mason jar
we’d filled with a dozen caught in our palms.
“Hey, we’re outside the universe, looking
in,” I told him, as those phosphorous bellies
swelled to their amorous super novae.

At twilight, squadrons of mosquitoes scrambled
aswirl around my jacket-shrouded head,
their kamikaze skirls telegraphing
where they’d strike. I slapped each, smeared its blood,
felt the hard welts of flesh they left behind,
their death songs tunneling in through my ears
piercing the silence of those pulsing fireflies.

After dark on a screened-in sleeping porch
I filled my chest with air the kid couldn’t,
found myself holding each breath long as I
could, but every lungful burst me back to life.

His body floated face down overhead;
as I drifted toward sleep feeling for how
he felt, nerves numbed, eyes darkened, my body
gave way to a terminal undertow,
sucked down a sluiceway, over the dam
to a quiet pool my mind turned to stone.


SHADOWTAIL

Fluffed at takeoff, his tail steers
a flash of flaring muscle
lobbing the flying squirrel
from limb to limbo, leaving trees arrears––

his brittle airborne skeleton
quivers at liberty,
welcoming gravity
with open arms, a feral skykitten

gliding past umpteen floors
to scamper on curlicued toes
safely as a chameleon goes
about creation swallowing colors.

BELIEF

The Shroud of Turin came to southern France
from the Crusades in 1353—
a piece of linen cloth fourteen feet long,
holding the image of a five-foot ten-inch man,
his front and his back, head to head
conjoined. The man is bearded,
has been scourged, crucified;
on his brow the pattern
a crown of thorns would make,
pressed down with great force.

The black and whiteness of his image are
reversed, exactly like a photo
negative. For five sleepless days
in late October ’78, forty
American scientists bring the shroud to us.
They analyze each centimeter, tweeze threads
for micro-spectrographs, enhance the image
into holograms, deploy
all other ways of knowing
science has. This blood

has DNA. This linen is woven from flax
grown in the eastern Mediterranean
No artist painted this image. It
comes straight from life, spontaneous
rapture––process unknown—
which seared his body’s imprint to the cloth
with delicacy and realism.
One of his wrists has holes.
The spear-wound in his side
drained serum albumin through the flax.

To see his suffering face as Jesus’ face,
is to see the word “death”
suffer a sea change,
as black crusts of his blood

bloom into spectral rainbows
of scientific light that say
this man radiated himself
outward in a way
no dead man ever has.

But that’s a leap of faith
Science dare not make.
Epiphanies happen
beyond its ever
evolving certainties;
though in Torino
the priests of reason
track mystery-
breeding chemicals
embedded in those
patient threads––wherever
they’re inclined to lead.

There was a person
in that flaxen shroud
who died of wounds:
humanly inflicted, but godlike,
through two millennia
appearing before us.
Gloved hands remove
the long straw-colored shroud
from a steel frame inside the king’s
palazzo in Torino, hands
as gentle as those women’s hands
who felt for Jesus in its weightless folds
––vanished from their embrace—
this mystery
who marries cloth,
who turns white black
black white
this living fact
who believes we
will someday find him out.


BODY BLOWS

You hang tough on a Roman street corner
shaking your thick dark head to clear it
from a punch to your mind no one saw land,
whose force you shrug—as a dog
throws water from drenched fur.

A quarrel with your wife before dawn
sends you barreling north on via Cassia,
the night air cold, your anger hard.
You steer by moonlight down the centerline—
so does the man you hit head on
shot from his Vespa, his head
a rock, crunching the windshield, his body
bouncing over the roof and gone,
his Vespa pummeling your bumper
as you slew sideways churning gravel.

You grope for a dying body, but
find an indignant throbbing man
whose neck from a lifetime booming
soccer balls has stopped this great one.
You help him to a cinder bank,
you feel that Miura neck
pulse under blood-clotted hair.

No one believes this man survived.
Carabinieri comb the bushes and rubble
for the real dead—you’ve hired Rocco
to save your rich American neck.
But Rocco is persuasive: It’s his Vespa,
his own neck’s gorgeous muscle,
your million Lire in his mind.

When the police subside, you and he
link arms, throw grappa back,
enter each other’s lives.
You buy him a new Vespa;
he sells you mantis-thin
Etruscan bronze his brother bathes
in urine so it ages fast,
gaunt green gods you give to friends
as brilliantly authentic fakes.

Before you vanish into Vecchia Roma,
you send pregnant Prudence to Little Rock.
Weeks later in a bar you tell me
what happened: “I was lifting Pru
like Pluto lifts Persephone
before ravishing her in Hell—
she felt my fingers like the god’s
denting her thigh—at that
she freaked and yelled,
‘Get out!’ I did.”

“Don’t say a word” (you pummel me,
you hit me with your palms
weaving them like a boxer).

“Put dents in your own poems, Man,
let ’em take life’s best shot.”

Later, in the Piazza Navona,
empty at midnight, you halt
blocking my way with these words:

“My head took a worse shot once—
from a kiss that touched down like a moth
on my cheek while I crashed from beer—
it was a kiss from Him, the great
kind man you and I loved and loved,
but never with our bodies, as he wished.
That kiss lit up the abyss.
I’m still falling.”

You fall while you speak, calmly and backward.
Your head pounds ancient paving stone,
its bone hard blow delivered loud
to churches and palazzos
and to my gut. You stand up,
shake that black skull one more time,
go off to douse it in Bernini’s
brimming tub of reveling giants
still after centuries raucous, splashing
shine over their stony beards
and bellies, gaunt knees and huge balls.
Nightwater greets our plunging faces—
spouting and drinking and shaking
the chill off among those other battered,
already frozen beasts and gods.

SOONER MURDER

an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire.
¬ —William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

Four dine while a child wakes, a fire roars.
The wife intently sips her Lynch-Bages,
likes it so much she kisses her host’s cheek;
then offers hers. While guests avert their eyes
she lifts her child to soothe him with her milk;
her breasts give gently; the child feeds, then sleeps.

Her husband drives them up to Courmettes peak
from which the hommes oiseaux are taking off—
he thinks of riding his own thermal down
on Dacron wings, sprinting toward sky, trusting
the air to carry him where he won’t feel
those hungry mouths and sweetly offered breasts.

MUSCONGUS BAY SLOOP

Returning late on a Sunday night
my friend the divorcing man
finds the doors to his wifeless house
unlocked. She’s nearly emptied it,
backing her lover’s van up to the porch,
stripping the rooms of rugs and chairs.
Even the cat is missing. Paintings
of their children she made and he framed
leave empty oblongs brighter than the walls.

He cries; goes running and comes home
from six unconscious hilly miles
to an emptiness he soon loves.
“I am no longer the bastard she thought me.
I never could please her. Now
I’ve got only to please me.
For eight months I’ve been celibate.
I used to think divorce was like cancer
that waited in a marriage—some antibody
kept it in check, until one lovely rage
never stopped growing. But my divorce
wasn’t like that—for me it’s a sauna,
hot as hell, but it burns
the crud out of your life.”

He’d built two kitchens for his wife,
made her a giant bed morticed to the floor—
“Odysseus’ bed” she had called it.
He paneled the raw insides of their summer A-frame;
to pot her flowers he shaped hexagons of driftwood.
So it wasn’t surprising to find him
building again. But what he chose
to revive was a sloop launched on Muscongus Bay
in the eighteen-eighties, which for years
he’d let moulder under torn canvas in a boatyard.
At first he thought it needed no more
than a few planks ripped out and replaced,
but every surface the knife probed was soft.
Even the great timbers of the keel were gone,
so were the slender ribs. Fiberglass
laid years back in the bilge had rotted her.
Each frail timber pried surgically free
he numbered and kept for a pattern.
Then he bought oak, whose hefty white slabs
he cut to lie snug to the healthy kelsons.
So much air showed through her sides, I told him
he was taking her down to the Idea.

His new friend, a blonde fraulein, helped him,
an uncomplaining stripper of dead paint,
who scraped the blistered layers away,
exposing all the good wood that was left.
At day’s end they quit for a swim or a run.
Some days she didn’t come, but he was there.
He salvaged a coal-burning stove from the dump
which he persuaded to give him live steam, blown
by a vacuum cleaner, reversed, through a ten-foot pipe
to soften the long oak strips he fed it,
then bent inside the hull to make new ribs.
The uncut ribs stick straight up from both gunwales
like bean poles ready in Thoreau’s garden
or a porcupine’s sudden quills.
He never trimmed those ribs,
never bent planking to her,
whose shape once gave solid pleasure
to the knowing eye or casual hand.
All summer I had watched his work
progress like the image of a life
examined, condemned, and remade—
the German girl growing fitter and tanner
from the work, the sun, the daily plunge.
But the boat still rests unlaunched on its cradle,
open to a winter sure to rot it again.

My friend has gone to Germany for a year.

Back in the boatyard, married and wary,
I circle the bony hull of the sloop
he attacked with such passionate skill
that it begs the sea come swell its timbers home,
but which he has now so calmly divorced.

December Wedding

For Donald Junkins and Kaimei Zheng

Ye learnèd Sisters who, in times gone by
came to aid poets, help us celebrate
the vows Don and Kaimei exchanged this morning.
Bring with you all the Nymphs that you can muster,
both of the rivers and the forests green.
On second thought, leave all those Nymphs at play.
This is a marriage of mature minds,
who, when they give their hands in love, don't blush.

My problem, Sisters, to be fairly blunt,
is English Poetry, most of whose poems
discriminate in favor of the young—
as if all couples married in their twenties!
The Muses are downloading their advice--
it's showing up on this computer screen.
Go tell those poems of youthful love,
they will, someday, race down the same dark street
that flows to the arena in Pamplona,

the clopping bulls, at first, no more a threat
than Time—but Time will find no better thing to do
than test your courage every chance it gets.
Yours, Kaimei, flashes on a commune's stage
acting a part beyond the reach of Mao's plot.
Yours, Don, makes its stand on the plain white page;
sometimes the words are yours, sometimes the words
are Ernest Hemingway's, which flutter
like the muleta of an espontaneo
you wake up holding in the Plaza de Toros.

Send off:
Prince, bless the lives of Don and Kaimei, now
so firmly joined--those to whom so much has
happened: now let them happen to themselves.

FINAL EXAM

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk …”

“That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms …”

“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled …
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.”

Essay Question: one hour

“Dear students: what do these lines lifted
from famous poems all have in common?
Relate their power
first to the body of the poem, then
to some experience in your life, which the poem
illuminates.”
I raise a giant hourglass from my desk,
baton-twirl it upsidedown:
“Don’t be mesmerized by my flowing sand.
Work your page. You must finish this exam.”

My students wear old clothes on exam day—no bright frocks,
but sweat pants, dance leggings, combat fatigues.
They write on desks gouged by graffiti from yesteryear:
Shakespeare lives! This professor lives in outer space.

A few ballpoints push off
downstream, others
cross out whole pages, rocks
ripping holes in thoughts cresting and submerging.
One man’s pen pauses for minutes on the edge
of the mesmerizing desert he must cross.
I share their settings out—
later today, coffee mug in one hand,
I’ll climb aboard each student’s raft,
my own pen poling
soberly in the margins.
Not grading yet,
but waiting out the sand,
I read their busy faces.

Professor, I could use two or three
beakers full of the warm south
myself right now,
especially since I haven’t read
Keats’s “Nightingale” since last March …

Keats’s drowsiness colors the whole ode,
which is life’s bad news always coming true …

Young Prufrock seems your classic wimp,
but he’s gutsy,
he makes me feel great
picturing him eating his heart out on her sofa
while she plays out mind games he sees through …

The last grains land on the small dune
in my hourglass. I strip the stragglers
of their blue books, pack them up,
skimming though a couple
as I walk back up the stairs. One stops my climb,
steals my own question and exposes it to a brightness
harsher than the floresence she just fled:
“What do these gloomy-gorgeous lines have in common?
They fight what time does to us—
men lose their nerve, women their looks,
desire dies, people die—it’s a sad
old scene out there. But somehow poets
turn misery into ecstasy. What should
we nonpoets say when our friends die of AIDS,
or in a DUI crash, or when we know we’re losing it?
No poetry wand
touches the sore places. It’s not
that poetry’s useless—
we just use it in weird ways. Example:

“Michael and I were walking Nauset beach
last Sunday, studying for your exam. I
kissed him, then headed toward the dunes
thinking he’d follow and catch me.
Mike rolled his trousers up
and walked that beach
half way to Provincetown. See—
you have us covering Mister Eliot’s tunes.
Except Prufrock means different things to us.
Mike meant to say he’s nobody’s Prufrock—his beach
leads on and on to blanketfuls of sunbathers
he’d just as soon check out
as me playing hard to get.

“Mike and I talk Yeats together too—
we are his ‘young in one another’s arms’—
we dying generations—at our own songs.
Not to be disrespectful, sir, to you or Yeats,
but why do you believe that just because
we’re caught by sensual music, we
neglect monuments of unaging intellect?
When Mike came back from Nauset beach
he read me poems. Dozens. Wallace Stevens’s
‘She sang beyond the genius of the sea’
he said over and over.
I heard all genius singing
in Mike’s hesitant, passionate,
South Boston voice. Was Mike himself
a male monument, or what? Then he stopped
speaking poems and said, ‘Marry me.’
What I said then is—to use a favorite
expression of yours—beyond the scope of this course.

“I have a question now for you, Professor.
Why does it take so much music
‘squeezed into little lines in books’ as Scott Fitzgerald
said, to let Mike know I’m worth loving and we’re
both going to die? Why did I weep at Mike’s
two ordinary words—Marry me!—and not once
at Eliot’s grand marvelous lines that dared him
to speak at last in his own voice?”

I write: “Nice Work—A plus plus.
Catherine, there are no ordinary words.
Poets know this. That’s what they teach.
But there are page tears and life tears.
When life tears are about to fall, page tears
evaporate. Yeats, you know, saw
life as a preparation for something
that never happens. Maude Gonne
did not say to him, ‘Marry me.’”

CLYDE TORREY

Thoreau he wasn’t––nor did life in his shack
resemble Walden; though like Henry, Clyde
was a sociable loner. Years back, this foundered
mail-boat captain, whiskey-eyed, had misread
the rip churning between Swans and the Sisters––
an error punished by the Red Point ledge.
Within an hour the island’s fire brigade
had tackle hitched and winching from spruce trunks,
ratcheting Clyde, stern-first, toward quiet water.
That one-way crossing was his last command.

Don and I met him farming for a living
on two acres of seaside campground, plowing
behind Sandy, his clump-hoofed Belgian.
When someone asked for an autograph,
he wrote, "Clyde Torrey, Farmer, waiting
for my Maker." In cold weather he hunkered
in a junked sedan with a space heater
on the back seat, the Celtics or the Sox surging
and fading downeast as Clyde piloted
a dark road, bumping under tireless, cinderblocked
wheels. Mornings, he stretched his feet back down
to earth, soggy with bourbon and kerosene fumes.

Two nights one winter, Don and Clyde kept vigil,
a shotgun ready for a deer sniffing apples
by moonlight––a dream of venison cleaned,
bled, hung, eaten for weeks. It never showed.

When neighbors brought leftovers to his door,
Clyde let them ripen and make do: rotting cod
for chowder, then bait. One summer, he plowed
his garden with a catboat rudder. Huge
garbage bags stuffed with clattering soft drink
cans, lugged off by ferry to Bass Harbor,
came back in Clyde’s overalls as Jim Beam.

Etta Morrison baked him a cake
every year on his birthday––angelfood
iced with meringue, or chocolate-hearted
devil’s-food––thinking Clyde would wish
and blow their blazing candles to oblivion,
but each year’s cake sat on a top shelf
where it stiffened––just so many birthdays
gathering dust. "What Clyde Makes of Birthdays"
became the text for a sermon Don preached.
The ravens and seraphs Don freed from Clyde’s cakes,
now airborne, hovered over the pews
at the Atlantic Baptist Church, patiently
searching our faces for somewhere to roost.

The morning after Clyde burned down his house
with a knocked over candle––the ashes too searing
at dawn for us commiserators to rake through––
his nephew’s backhoe rumbled through the fog,
ground to a halt, and lowered to Clyde's field
a chickencoop held gently in its jaws.


BEATITUDE /​ MORTMAIN

Southern Lebanon, Summer 2006

Bless the olive
our oldest
greenest fuel.
Crushed, savored, lit
it nurtures, it
illuminates.

Sold, it’s a living.

Bulldozed …
it’s history.

But when
the dead hands
of the six million
sow Lebanon’s
groves with
evisceration—

they hang
by the thousands
unharvested,

a whirlwind
yet to be reaped.


AN ANCIENT QUARREL

within a profession shaken by
cultural and political agitation

How would the world be luckier, Yeats’ poem asked,
if the proud clan at Coole Park went under,
bankrupted by tenants threatening trouble
unless sold back the land stolen from them?

Yeats had named in his poem what Coole gave back
to Ireland: “the arts that govern men …
and gradual time’s last gift, a written speech
wrought of high laughter, loveliness, and ease.”

The tenants won, Coole Park was knocked down.
But Yeats’ own chanted speech survives nearby.
Hear it resonate from loudspeakers hung
in that neighboring Tower fused with his life:

“image of solitary wisdom won by toil.”
Thoor Ballylee cost him thirty-five pounds;
its value-added did not come from ease.
In our own time I put another question

to those who, in the next century, will
teach Yeats and all the other Great White Males
who offend––genius profiting mightily
from privileges of gender and of class,

whose poetry is punished resolutely
lest its pleasures disorient the young.
When you teach Yeats––I should say if you do––
what’s vulnerable will stare you in the face:

from his escapist “Innisfree,” his smug boast
that he recruited gunmen with a play,
his loony world of masks and moons and gyres,
his unrequited love of country folk,

his praise of fascists European and homegrown,
but most of all his fierce artistic pride
that consciously insults all lesser minds––
declaring men of vision rightly claim

the largest share of what their vision sees.
“I thirst for accusation,” he admitted.
There is no doubt his cup runneth over.
What does this flood of accusation do

for you accusers? Something unforeseen.
When you say Yeats is arrogant and crazed
by turns––that he championed violence,
magic, the unjust torque of wealth and birth,

that he exaggerated what his friends achieved,
wrote poems alloyed with so much folly
they shrivel seething in your mind’s sulfuric––
guard against excess passion in your voice.

You might be stirring forces hard to quell––
that thrill exploding in your abdomen
when a trapped quarry turns his fear on you.
You go in flailing hand to hand, frenzied

because your own survival’s now at risk.
His barbarous thrusting voice impales you
deep in the place from which your war-cry soars.
Now it’s the pure joy of battle driving

your righteous censure and his bitter song––
you are Cuchulain hacking at the waves,
Yeats’ music an invulnerable tide
that keeps on singing from each mortal wound.

First a variety of shorter poems, followed by a longer one about Greg Corso, then some sonnets about a foxy lady, and finally some poems about my wife

SAPPHO

Although I didn't say so then,
I want quite honestly to die.
She's gone, and there were a lot
of tears when she said, Can you
still feel how we touched each other,
Sappho—I hate leaving you.
Don't you see (I said) listen,
why not leave radiant
as if you remembered the
honey of it? Why make me tell you
things you can't have forgotten?
How lazy and sensual we were,
busy with headbands of violets
roses crocuses—all you bunched
in rings and piled over me,
silly necklaces full of silky
petals, slippery damp on my
soft neck. And your palms, wet with
rare royal myrrh shampoo, would
massage and rinse out my lovely hair . . .


HANDS

When I take hold of your alpine hand, I feel
your mind shifting its weight from thought to thought,
the mountain rattling under your skis—
and my mind drops
through an old darkness: not this winter night
but at sixteen on Pocono Lake
with summer friends, dazed by beer,
pine blaze and folk songs.
John D and I sit sharing Linda between us
behind our backs we each search
her hand out, we hold it for two beers
and some tunes, raw, moist, and eager.
But when John rises, I rise, we let go
each other's stunned disowned grip—
having glanced, my blood-brother of those years,
in a savage mirror, having felt male
desire flowing to us as a girl felt it.




TWELFTH NIGHT

Viola wears a boy's brave clothes,
speaks her lines with masculine pluck;
runs rings around the Duke, who, quite
immune to her impulsive puns
won’t feel her love for three acts yet.

If music be love’s food, disguise
must be love's speech, each wanton thrust
engendering a gentle parry—
a playfulness that implicates
interested parties wearing tights.

Our play was reading poems: you read
me, I you, till, turning the page
we took the place of poems, shedding
all of our expertease
gracefully as poems paraphrase.


WHITE SHOULDERS

At thirteen my parents
let me stop eating meat.
I had been asking them
since I was eight or nine.
I trained my appetite
never to kill anything.
I wouldn't own leather.
I'd let mosquitoes
torture me. But last year
I started to slap them
the second they drew blood.
To be pure anything
is difficult—the world
outsmarts you. I fed my cat
nothing but vegetables
until I felt her flesh
starving when I stroked her.
When you told me White Shoulders
came from the testicles
of a musk ox, I stopped
wearing it. Always before
White Shoulders had risen
from my skin like your hand.
It was pleasure between us.
You wanted me to see: love
matters, principles don't.
Creatures die everywhere
for us, we can't stop it,
there's no safe life, no one’s
clean. Would you stop writing
if it caused pain? I would.
When you were trying not
to love me, I put White
Shoulders back on my body.
I wanted us to smell
love and death, when we were
talking about other things.

WHITE VOLKS

We haven't slept together for ten months.
Avoiding collisions, we steer clear.
Whenever I see a white VW

entering traffic, peeling off, or parked,
I look for some sign that it's yours,
soon finding a rusted rocker panel,

Montana license, impacted fender,
raucous muffler, or grimy skin, to tell me
you're elsewhere; but there are days

when a Volks bright as a kitchen sink
will stay white, slowing for a STOP sign,
engine throbbing in strong teutonic tune,

I BRAKE FOR WHALES on the bumper,
a pigeon feather rising from the dash;
curled in the window well, a sick cat;

and you, lost in your organized hurry—
on errands, once shared, I must guess at,
off now on my own errand, reacting

daily to a white Volks coming up
beside me, long after you've sold yours,
long after the last one rusts from the road.

THE NAMES OF PERFUMES

Abruptly slams the bathroom door.
Water explodes from both taps, then a sound
I do not recognize at first, impacts
like rock crunching as it hits porcelain,
seven, eight shatterings. Then silence
tightens the skin of the door’s huge bass drum.
I pound it, she unlocks; a fragrant barrage
lavender, lily, pine, grass, musk

invades me. She stands naked, right foot braving
water savagely hot, jagged with glass,
the labels tearing in the swirl, Chamade,
the roll of drums before surrender, Arpège,
Arc de triomphe, Fleurs du mal, Vol de nuit,
Prends-moi, Huitième voilette, Force majeur.
Sliding gently down the tub’s curvature,
glass shards cutting her buttocks, she turns

to look. I pull her upward, thighs and back
blood-pocked. She spits out Tarc, Majette,
Malheur, Têtehuit, Cège, Corf, Phiore,
Maudeur, T'aime, t'aime, t'aime!
Glazed eyes, a scream that crazes them, woman
in pain, all things I once squeezed into sense
are nouns disintegrating, consonants
lacerating, vowels melting in my brain.

CHIMERA

—a beast created from parts of other beasts

A crop duster opens its wing pods,
aerosols exhale from a briefcase hissing
in an airport lounge or subway station.
EbólaPox is so ethereal
we'll have no clue a countdown has begun.
It will take us a few infinite days
to die––we will blacken, then melt away.
I’ll spare you further symptoms. But terrorists

won’t, nor will their feisty microallies
who gather inside us like a slow motion
nuclear bomb turning lovers and friends,
ever widening circles of strangers,
to silent singers, our bodies mouthing
hatred so primal it screams through our flesh.


THE EIGHTEENTH BOOK

—for Martin Klingerman (1936–1970)

Marty’s life. It was touched by the Iliad
on a stony hillside pasture
in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in June '57.
A week before graduation
We picnic after rehearsing Nausicaä.
Green Maiden is with us (her name in the play),
she will drive south to Fire Island
in twenty minutes; a car is stashed for her
in a Safeway parking lot.
We admire the momentum building in her life.
“Green Maiden” says Marty, so reckless
we cringe for him
“May I rest my head in your lap?”
She’s silent then seems to answer
chillingly more than he asked
Just this once she says and his head
goes down to her lap a brief glorious while

Just that once his buried wrath
demanded of her who knew how much life
how much life the gods
would let him have

THE CLOSEST THING

Ginsberg in Paris, Corso in Rome

Poetry
pardon me for having helped you understand
you are not made of words alone.
—Roque Dalton, “Ars Poetica 1974”

Without any exaggeration, I’m still, if not the best, at least
the closest thing to what a poet should be. The more I read
these Cambridge poets the more I’m convinced of this.
These New England poets, apocalyptic crocodillions,
the whole horde of them. They do not realize that poems
are nothing without the poet. Why are Shelley, Chatterton,
Byron, Rimbaud, to name but a few, so beautiful? I’ll tell
you why, they and their works are one and the same,
the poet and his poems are a whole.
—Gregory Corso, Letter to Hans, circa May–June 1956


Heretical doctrine once, Gregory, more like gospel to me now.
To that young Jersey crocadoodle you sang at in Paris, though,
chanting “Marriage” to Sally and me off the Champs
Elysées,
poets’ lives could be thrilling but not works of art;
poems came to life solely as words on a page,
rising to no occasion beyond their own artifice.
Amherst taught me that, which I had to unteach myself.
Still, just who, what, is Corso’s wholly fused poet and poem?
To this day I’m not sure. But when I heard Beat poets live
their chattering bodies scribbled all over my skin
psychic tattoos of invisible ink, to be developed over time.
I was writing my name in the Transients’ Register
at the Paris American Express—Ginsberg’s name
lit up the page above mine! In the column where
he declared his Final Destination, Heaven,
to my chagrin I’d written, “Cap d’Antibes.”
I sent a note, hoping to meet him. He replied!

“Be there demain, à six heures, au Café Bonaparte.”
He saunters into Gay Paree’s epicenter shouting “BAGG,”
then spends the next hour telling me sonnets are poison,
pentameter’s dead! Drop, he advised, out of Amherst,
the Academic School of Uptight Verse, don’t become
a Merrillian poodle or worse, a Wilburnian loon.
Go back to Homer’s pulsing hexameters, listen
to Whitman—only lines with that kind of reach
can take in any and all sensations flowing by, the deluge
of people, of bed-fellows, butcher-boys, bathers, spinster
voyeurs—
feel him breathing America, inhaling her, exhaling her
on the smoke of his own breath. That’s poetry!
the smoke of your own warm breath realized
in the chill of the air swirling around it.
I didn’t buy his scary advice, but do so now—
at least for today.

Dear Ginsberg, no question, you spread yourself thin. Yet …
even Merrill admitted, you spread yourself over the entire field
of American verse like a good, healthy layer of manure.
“Come see us in Rome,” I’d urged Corso the day he read
“Marriage,” his version of J. Alfred Prufrock,
strangled by a tie on a third-degree sofa,
should I say this, should I do that—a Prufrock
ungelded, unbuttoned, word mad!
“We’ll pay our respects to Ovid Catullus Keats
Shelley Byron Fellini,” I said, never dreaming
he'd actually spring for such a pilgrimage
but, by Ginsberg, he did—hunting me down in Rome
deep in the stacks of the American Academy
squatting with a catalogue drawer in my lap.
We hiked up to my rickety study, plastered like a hornets’ nest
to the old Aurelian Wall. There Corso made his mission clear:
“I’m gonna be Shelley, you can be Thomas Jefferson Hogg––
we’ll get kicked out of Yale together for mooning Bloom! Or Blooming
the Moon! You’ll be my best buddy, you’ll write my life,
I love your two Gs.
I promise not to live long, a little less than Shelley,
a little more than Keats, just long enough to slaughter Prose.”

For nearly a week we hung out. On via Veneto one evening
he asked every tart on the street if she was the mom
who’d left him to a bad dad, worse fosters, an orphanage,
street crime and a prison with a library, unknown
till Ginsberg’s wandering eye for lost souls spied
Greg dealing down poems at a bistro in the Village.
Soon Corso was camped out at Harvard, alighting in Frisco,
made a fourth for Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs.
Their wildcatting books hit gushers of thick black gold.
I learned from him, from Corso, that making a poem of your life
is hot work, especially in sweltering Rome. One morning
at dawn in the Foro Romano he hurled himself,
full length, like a visionary torn from a sprawling
Russian novel,
at the Oxford-shod feet of Lily Ross Taylor, Bryn Mawr’s
Professor of All Things Roman, salaaming gratitude
for learning so much about bricks, baths, Caesars, and those
Vestals he surprised in the gardens of Brattle Street,
Cambridge.

Lily tip-toed, barely breathing, past his dusty adulation.

That very midnight we drove in my Volkswagon Beetle
over the jaw-jarring stones of the Appian Way,
me steering, Corso on the back bumper, one hand
on the luggage rack, whipping those 45 horses
past the crucified slaves, flaming fifty-gallon drums,
orange faces of mini-skirted whores warming their butts.
I wish I could leave you there, Gregory, a Delphic Charioteer
losing your grip on those runaway Horses of the Sun.

Except … there’s one more scene to this story,
the grand finale,
perhaps meant to show you in action taking down Prose,
the Poetry-eating Dragon, or perhaps you’re Percy Bysshe
Corso, outraging your way to a noble expulsion.
I did not witness what happened, but pieced it
together (like Thucydides) from eyewitness accounts.
They’d invited Corso to lunch, the Academy Fellows.
He found their scholarly in-jokes offensive,
their passion for trivia unbearable, brutish, insensitive
to the demons driving the very artists they studied,
unfeeling his need for “a young mad beautiful pope.”
To exorcise their emptiness, he offered up himself
as everything they were not, climbing aboard the fortyfoot-
long refectory table, toeing soup bowls aside,
strutting himself up like the Catullus Yeats imagined,
denouncing the lot for never using “masturbate”
in any of their writings, for never having slept, like him,
in the Colosseum’s character-building chill and dirt.

A burly Virgilian caught and lifted him aloft,
set him off in the Billiard Room to cool down.
Within minutes Corso was back, pounded open the doors,
hailed the Classics Prof as his personal Caesar,
knelt in prayer to be granted new life, miming thumbs up
or thumbs down, to the crowd judging him from above.
He had thrown himself on their mercy, thrown down one final
roll of the poet’s dice, turning those Fellows to Romans
holding this gladiator’s life in their bloodless, bloodthirsty
hands.

Caught in his script the scholars, chastened, voted him up,
but when he vaulted back on stage, yelling “Truth Pyre!”
they hustled him out to a cab that roared him away,
back to Paris and the acrid fame he’d earned from BOMB,
his poem cheering on the human nuclear deathwish.
Forty-four years later, his wish fulfilled, he came back to Rome
as ashes, to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery,
his prostrate headstone nestled near Shelley’s charred heart
bravely but gingerly seized from Percy’s burning corpse
by Edward Trelawney, pirate manqué, on Viareggio’s beach.
Ave atque, Gregory, from we who believe but cannot commit
Roque Dalton’s “Ars Poetica,” teaching us, as you did,
poetry isn’t made from words alone, but inflicts
itself on every soul within soulshot: an Improvised
Enlightening
Device, whose urgency we deny to our grief.

DAMP CASHMERE

Out of damp sneakers and stiff rainy hair,

blue jeans and brown cashmere, I revive you:

in those days très très sage, sniffing the unfair

intoxications your dank self would brew,

scrawny prophet of the girl you grew into.

All your wiry might resists that brash whore—

so much so I brace me for her, not you,

prickly, elusive, tremblesome, and pure.

Tonight I hold that mildewed negative,

taken of you naked, sucking some pears.

You gave it away, safe in your black hue.

That oath I swore never to develop you

I break now, steeping you in the small hours,

playful darkness gone and swelling up alive.

DIVINE WIND

She's at the wheel, and she resists each tree,

telephone pole, oncoming car; knuckles grim

against her Divine Wind, her burning kamikaze.

Trees howl at her to crash and sleep with them.

She says : "I love trees, but they are all killers.

It is marvelous to go very fast."

So we graze that mobilized army of hers.

"There's kamikaze in you too"-she gives me a blast

of her eyes-"You'd smash your life at me.

You're doom loving, I'm swift and glorious disaster—

right now you're in flames and there's no flying home.

I'm your new life." As proof, she wrenches her car

at limbs who would maul my skull. We're skidding

through a Rest Stop. As we kiss: "I wasn't kidding."


GETTING KILLED

“He eased into my coffeesulk at Bicks

as though I were a weird piranha river—

not a true suicide, more like a lover

courts scathing fingernails to give him kicks.

Thinking you fucked me stung him to the bone.

When I touched him waves of grinning torpor

swirled down his stirring fingers. Pouring sugar

he drowned his coffee in one loony dune.

Once he smashed in my door. I eased his tight

clenched face, but then wouldn’t screw. He left hope-

less, but climbed to my roof, pried the skylight

open over my tub (me slimed with soap)

dangling, then letting drop, so the bath sprawled.

I loved him. It was just like getting killed.”

BLACK COFFEE

A knock tensed us. Our room is under siege.

Please don't breathe. Lacking a wall to climb

on my shoulders she froze her strangled rage—

her unsuppressible sigh laid bare the room.

ALL RIGHT FOR YOU. He camped outside her door.

Pluck of his fingers and excluded lips

cooly tutoying her on his guitar

struck her into scrunched, humiliated shapes,

then tossed a last strum to the Cambridge air.

A car door clunks shut, billows of white exhaust.

That voice left her hair drenched, her skin phosphor.

She showers suddenly and gets bleakly dressed,

brewing relentless mugs of black coffee

whose sternness stares from us until five-thirty.

LET IT RING

On fifty feet of tense extension cord

you and a phone vanish behind a stair

as under a shower. His roaring fondness poured

liquids I couldn't hear. Talced, fresh and fair

you reappear-the drained receiver lolls

on its curved spine, his once extinguished moan

thrashes to life under your tongue, then fails

and is obliterated by the dial tone.

"I'm going, he's in one of his suicidals."

I slam my way across to your bookshelf.

You say firmly from your caressing towels,

"Nobody loves anybody ever, enough."

Crane Brinton's History of Western Morals

begs like a phone book to be torn in half.



PLENTY

"The cool ones pile sandals and vine leaves and lots

of words outside my door. One stuffs my icebox

with citrus––dollars drift into my life,

I'm cold fall rain stripping their brilliant trees.

"When he left me, one boy gave me a list—

twelve Harvard professors, each one willing

to keep a girl. I have holes in my life.

My friends fill them and then I empty again."

Words please themselves when they're involved

with her. Yes fills with self-love. Body grows fur.

I open whore and oranges fall on me.

Plenty makes me ache softly in the balls.

Her hand's on them and on my mouth,

sensing I’m about to say cat, then wife.

CAT

Sleep lifts, a shopping bag crinkles and bulges;

mewing, she muscles her white fur in; contained;

loving it. When I launch out of bed she's there,

cat in an arch of pleasure, grazing my shin.

My hand pummels and reverses her grain

until fur reeks of you though you still sleep.

The cat's out of the bag and the sky's torn—

two feet of snow have fallen overnight,

its fresh white depth rubs against our warmth,

so vast a trophy fur we wonder who

subdued it to this sullen animal

who resists and pleasures our moving through it,

who shuts the city down, whose seventh life

is icy slush as I drive its roads home.

WIFE

She drops a lobster into the misty pot;

black eyes go under and the slender hawsers

feeling death. Filling jars from the kettle

the rising note tells her exactly when

to stop. She wakes to something gently scraping,

"Spasski's paw in the gerbil cage" she says

and rises. When she comes back she smells my hair

and sweater, turns on light and reads mysteries.

When I wake the lamp is still on. She's gone.

Out by the fir trees and the rose garden

she sits naked and goosebumped in the snow,

her book open, wind and moon churning its pages.

Her knees point North. Her vertebrae are wet.

She says with white breath "How does it come out?

POEMS FOR MARY

SPIRIT SPOUSE

An elaborately carved wooden figure used by African tribes in Ghana (according to one interpretation of the custom) to comfort a living spouse whose mate has died.


I could

be spirited into wood,

whittled

by skilled hands from red oak,

lovingly belittled

but still a feisty-looking bloke

striding across a coffee table,

or sitting with my legs crossed

on a pile of my own books,

a harmless voyeur––

Go Mary!

rising to, but never

quite leaving, my pursed lips––

blindly admiring salads getting tossed,

sauces enhanced, recipes glossed:

arugula, thyme, mango and leek,

and her quiescent hips.

But what a sorry

household presence I would make,

even if solid manly oak––

forever unable

to answer Mary,

engage the gamut of her looks;

or, however pungent her speech,

to hear it.

Better to speak

one last time

as her living mate

from a book, picture frame,

or evanescent chalk on a slate:

you became part of my voice,

I part of yours;

though none live twice,

to hear my voice

use yours.

2005




THE POET WHO COULDN’T

WRITE A POEM TO HIS WIFE

Sure, fiery poems can be sparked, like pearls,

when minor irritants surround themselves

with tiny glittering worlds of sheen.

Think Herrick, suddenly drenched as Julia’s dress

disturbs, like a mermaid’s wake, his codpiece;

remember Catullus, irked by Lesbia

letting her sparrow peck her lap with his beak––

both allumeuses flamboyant forever!

Expect no such poem from the likes of him,

whose woman comes on as a long slow wave

rising from their lives’ imploding undertow,

a woman who wears only seawater,

her love a conch held roaring to his ear,

receding only to build slowly again.

2005