As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.
Aunt Mildred tied up her petticoats with binder’ s
twine, and my great-uncle Ezekiel waxed and waxed
his moustaches into flexibility. It was the whole
family off then into the dangerous continent of air
and while the salesman with the one gold eyetooth told us
the cords at our ankles were guaranteed to stretch
to their utmost and then bring us safely back
to the fried chicken and scalloped potatoes of Sunday dinner
Bunnies are brown
Bunnies are white
Bunnies are always
An Easter delight.
Bunnies are cuddly
The large and the small.
But I like chocolate ones
The best of them all.
Bunny, white bunny
With ears so tall.
And your two pink eyes
And a mouth so small.
Wiggle goes one ear.
Wiggle goes the other.
Hop, hop, hop, hop home to your mother!
“We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer. The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families and funeral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel.”
— Ed Mazoue, New Orleans City Real Estate Administrator and Person in Charge of the City’ s Cemeteries
There’ s nothing but mud. The ground looks dry and firm,
but underneath is a stew of storm. Stout shovels, rusted,
grow gummed and heavy with what I heft and rearrange.
Progress is slow.
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
At nightthe light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy sourcehe thought of death.
Her father's hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.
The fact of the harp swells into the air,
Alien and familiar and entirely too large,
An elephant lost in the suburbs,
And opens with its cry a strange passage
Between the harp itself, the fragile harp,
And the almost guilty knowledge
Of the stroke of luck that brought it here
And the care with which it must depart.
'Oh I have the field to plough!'
Said busy Farmer Ben,
So he drove his tractor up the field,
And he drove it down again.
And when he was up he was up,
And when he was down he was down,
And when he was only half way up,
He was neither up nor down.
'Oh I have some seeds to sow!'
Said busy Farmer Ben,
So he drove his tractor up the field,
And he drove it down again.
And when he was up he was up,
And when he was down he was down,
And when he was only half way up,
He was neither up nor down.
I’ ve never seen the land
of milk and honey, but at
the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed
a cow fashioned of butter.
It lived behind a window
in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.
I filed past as one files
past a casket at a wake.
It was that sad: a butter cow
without a butter calf. Nearby I spied
a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-
sized, a mechanical afterthought
I thought the cow might have liked to ride.
You don’ t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.
