Someone will push the house over one day,
Some spacedozer give it a shove,
But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard,
These are a labour of love.
All winter we set these cobbles in place,
Or was it the summer as well?
Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers
For ones that looked suitable.
The old house decayed – along with us –
Will a strange new resident
Admire the patio made in joy
Wondering what we meant?
My poems: fledglings, heirs,
Plaintiffs and executors,
The silent ones, the loud,
The humble and the proud.
As soon as the shovel of time
Threw me onto the potter’ s wheel —
Myself without kith or kin —
I grew beneath the hand, a miracle.
Something stretched out my long neck
And hollowed round my soul
And marked on my back
Legends of flowers and leaves.
I stoked the birch in the fire
As Daniel commanded
And blessed my red temper
Until I spoke as a prophet.
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud
they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming
beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening
of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed
by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled
the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
I dated mostly police.
I hated coastal solace.
In navy posts I flourished.
I inflate the cost of polish.
I restrained my nest-egg worries.
On planes I tested patience.
I prayed for lusty follies.
I betrayed my foster family.
In ways I lost my malice.
I craved a cloistered palace.
I dared say the feast was ghoulish.
I became a tourist: boorish.
Unswayed by mystic knowledge,
I raised a frosty chalice.
I was upstaged and roasted: English.
I obeyed a ghost who’ s tall-ish.
I took back the night. Wrested it
from the Chinese, many of whom
were shorter than me.
Two billion outstretched Chinese
hands, give or take a few
thousand amputees.
A cheap knockoff, the night
proved to be — Nokla
not Nokia on the touchscreen.
Well, even Old Peng gotta eat,
Confucius say. Or maybe that
was Cassius Clay.
Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells.
Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine.
We fill a pail with sand.
The day is robin’ s eggshell fine.
My mother’ s shoulder had three shallow scars.
Shining archipelago.
The quiet theaters of our lives.
Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow.
Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices.
Night sweats without monument.
The lake has the sea on its breath.
One man has an island.
Full of strength and laced
with fragility:
the thoroughbred,
the hummingbird,
and all things
cursed
with agility.
Wanting leads to worse than oddity.
The bones creak like bamboo in wind,
and strain toward a better life outside the body,
the life anything has that isn’ t human.
Feel the chair under you? What does it want?
Does lust bend it silly, like a rubber crutch?
Tell a tree about the silky clasp of cunt.
It won’ t shift an inch. It won’ t ache to touch.
And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain,
there came the shapes of four creatures,
and they each had the likeness of a man,
and each man had four wings outstretched
and each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open,
given to weeping at the worlds they contained:
The strings, as if they knew
the lovers are about to meet, begin
to soar, and when he marches in the door
they soar some more — half ecstasy, half pain,
the musical equivalent of rain —
while children who have grown up with one stare
steal further looks across a crowded room,
as goners tend to do.
