She Walks in Beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
Shepherd John
Oh! Shepherd John is good and kind,
Oh! Shepherd John is brave;
He loves the weakest of his flock,
His arm is quick to save.
But Shepherd John to little John
Says: ‘Learn, my laddie, learn!
In grassy nooks still read your books,
And aye for knowledge burn.
Shiver & You Have Weather
In the aftermath of calculus
your toast fell butter-side down.
Squirrels swarmed the lawns
in flight patterns. The hovercraft
helped the waves along. From
every corner there was perspective.
On the billboards the diamonds
were real, in the stores, only zirconia.
I cc’ ed you. I let you know.
Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo.
Dinner would be meager &
reminiscent of next week’ s lunch.
So what if I sat on the sectional?
As always I was beside myself.
Shock and Awe
Tightened jaw, I did not love.
Flashback of myself jerked about,
legs high above my head, men
laughing, I came to sea drifts,
movement and crashing. I found I am
not so far from God exploding.
Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live.
Seven storks still and white on a gold lake.
My lazy eye glances back to that original
split, myself high above myself.
Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’ t know
hours from minutes. I was hypervigilant for
catastrophes. My head raging then numb.
Shoes
My father has a pair of shoes
So beautiful to see.
I want to wear my father's shoes.
They are too big for me.
My baby brother has a pair
As cunning as can be.
My feet won't go into that pair.
They are too small for me.
There's only one thing that I can do
Till I get small or grown.
If I want to have some fitting shoes
I'll have to wear my own.
Shy Boy
I wait for my shadow to forget me,
to take that one phantom step that I keep
from taking. I wait for the simple flash
of a dancer's spat upon this one moon
of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval
illuminated on the surface of some
windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe
practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush
in its constant audition of sawdust.
Even this choreography of useless
wishing is not enough to keep tonight
from becoming nothing more than some floor's
forgotten routine where faded, numbered
Sick to death of the hardpan shoulder,
the froth of noise
the undersides of the cedars make,
the windblown dark that hints
and fails for hours at effacement —
maybe I could claim it isn’ t
praying, but it’ s asking,
at the least, begging
that these lungfuls of this blackness
eat whatever keeps on swelling
and collapsing in my chest, and be done
with it, no more noise
left hanging in the spaces
between brake lights than a smothered rush
that sounds like suffering
Sifting in the Afternoon
Some people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique
chair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug
my mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have another
room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquet
of paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’ d want to say if given chance;
but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dust
Sign
Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now
Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung
To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice.
And the first rows, shaken with an afterslice
That’ s bowled them into their seats like a big wet ciao.
O daffy panoply O rare device
O flashing leg-iron at a whopping price
Whipping us into ecstasies and how,
The whole galumphing Garden swung and swung,