Here I am saying “The leaves are falling”
— one of those choruses
that vie with interminable verses
to mock hoarders.
Yeah, we get
that a palette of winds
is a pretty thing:
one blurs the anther, another
the river splurging on riprap,
If an orchidophage’ s tastebud magnified
resembles an orchid
so my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones.
Love, little by little it dawned on us the artisanal
ice cream, especially the prizewinning caramel,
would be out of our reach,
like the previous Friday of a Sunday leaving the beach,
in the meltdown.
Two flags nuzzle each other in the desultory gust
because they are
fleeing the trees, who are cruel to one another,
shading their neighbors to death
a mixed bag
advocating small business in a loose confederation.
The flags don’ t give any shade at all.
I grow old under an intensity
Of questioning looks. Nonsense,
I try to say, I cannot teach you children
How to live. — If not you, who will?
Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded
Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will?
Between their visits the table, its arrangement
Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change,
Does very nicely. If ever I feel curious
As to what others endure,
Across the parlor you provide examples,
Wide open, sunny, of everything I am
Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez.
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It’ s all in a day’ s work, whatever plays.
From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained.
He even listens earnestly to Bloch,
Then builds a church upon our acid rock.
He’ s man’ s — no — he’ s the Leiermann’ s best friend,
For years I tried to conceal from the villagers that I wrote poetry
I didn’ t want them to know that I was an oddball
I didn’ t want the young men with beards wearing baseball caps who come to the liquor store in their pickups to buy sixpacks to know that I was some kind of sissy
I decided it was prudent to buy the Daily News instead of the Times at the drugstore
I burned my poem drafts at home before I took the trash to the dump, kids scavenge around there and the old man who does the recycling is nosy
I took every precaution
The redbreast kills
and kills itself against
the window
Sooner or later the blood in the breast will break the window into hundreds of pieces you can swallow whole
Keep swallowing
The redbreast
loves you and wants you
to remember the love
So it makes you puke into the toilet blind
I was blinded by love
And drowned
in an empty bathtub
spitting up birdshit
Covered in red feathers
Amy Winehouse
All song is formal, and you
Maybe felt this and decided
You’ d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.)
No one else with a book, the slick
weeklies gossip amongst
themselves on the side
tables as the ticker rolls the Dow
Jones down down down under
a profile of the marathon
bombers (the older, a boxer). Jove
argues for the removal of a race
of peoples that do not please
him: What is past
remedy calls for the surgeon’ s
knife. They will take a hunk of my
cheek (cancer) & though I can’ t
see during the procedure, I imagine
the site as an apricot, bitten.
This is a survival mechanism —
I have a word for it —
the way the surface waited all day
to be a silvery pause between sky and city —
which is elver.
And another one for how
the bay shelved cirrus clouds
piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea,
which is elver too.
The old Blackrock baths
have been neglected now for fifty years,
fine cracks in the tiles
visible as they never were when
I can I can I can
shouted Harry Vernon as
he dived from the highest board
curving down into salt and urine
