Ruins
Stone worn
Overgrown
Pristine thorns
Sheep shorn
Tinkling below
Roofless walls
Rooks overlook
I told you so
Babbles the brook
Rules for Captain Ahab’s Provincetown Poetry Workshop
The White Whale Review.
Running Away
In the green rags of the Bible I tore up
The straight silk of childhood on my head
I left the house, I fled
My mother’ s brow where I had no ambition
But to stroke the writing
I raked in.
She who dressed in wintersilk my head
That month when there is baize on the high wall
Where the dew cloud presses its lustration,
And the thrush is but a brooch of rain
As the world flies softly in the wool of heaven.
Running brush
Basho said to refuse a prayer until its warmth hunches inside like
a bird in its hutch. First the fledgling is born, then the worm, then they
meet somewhere in the grass. I choose my paper for its cereal color, fuss
over shaving a pencil. The prayer means to cleanse both triumph and lust.
O derivative, sunlight reaping the trees, this whole morning cries through a
single reed. Pencil, razor blade, spit — I'll try not to hurry.
Russians
For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory
smears across the squalor of a boundlessly
unhygienic sky. You’ d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them
with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box
technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying
to wipe down the universe. You’ d say
I tug at God’ s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers
of a coward. You’ d confide to your diary my eyelashes
don’ t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox
Saccade
They have no sense of what they’ re looking at,
Unless the object moves.
(Or so he’ s read; who knows if that’ s the case?)
A painted bird’ s an empty analogue
To the oblivious cat.
And it is not his still familiar face
So much as that distinctive gait which proves
The master to his dog,
Who frolics for him like an acrobat.
Sadie and Maud
Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn’ t leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Sailing Home from Rapallo
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
Saint Patrick’s Again
Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks,
until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes,
and warbles a boy’ s tenor, wood-flute tones,
pure séance hymns from before Christians.
Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare
as seawater washes through the room,
seeping through floorboards to serpent dens.
The chorus stirs spirits from family lore.
Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee —
all rise from steerage and sing with the lords.