English Poems

I
The bartender
Has eyes the color of ripe apricots
Easy to please as a cash register he
Enjoys art and good jokes.
Squish
Goes the painting
Squirt
Goes the poem
He
We
Laugh.

Don’ t get me wrong: I know
that knowledge is power,
that mystery’ s water,
that hunger makes
a gargantuan
lover,
and yes, I’ ve drunk
of the river Lethe,
from the breath of the Celts,
from the echo of

Because I gazed out the window at birds
doing backflips when the subject turned
to diamonds, because my eyes glazed over
with the slightly sleepy sheen your cake will wear,

never let it be said that I’ d rather be
firing arrows at heart-shaped dartboards
or in a cave composing polyglot puns.
I crave, I long for transforming love

as surely as leaves need water and mouths seek bread.
But I also fear the colder changes
that lie in wait and threaten to turn
moons of honey to pools of molasses,

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.

Water spurts incredibly
Clear up under simple feel
And that is how
We drank water

to come away with Hesiod
and leave the rock as though to rocks
the tree to trees and dwell on other things

imagine the injunction
to leave the mint to its own devices
among the dust & stones in the shadow
of rocks or tree-roots hard as rocks

imagine poems left to their own devices
as poets gorge on air & airy thoughts
& figures – the thought sobers me
to the bone of a sobriety earned
at the expense of the airiness Hesiod
was commissioned to name

Tell the truth of experience
they say they also
say you must let
go learn to let go
let your children
go

and they go
and you stay
letting them go
because you are obedient and
respect everyone’ s freedom
to go and you stay

and you want to tell the truth
because you are yours truly
its obedient servant
but you can’ t because
you’ re feeling what you’ re not
supposed to feel you have
let them go and go and

“Feed Fred and sit with him
and mind he doesn’ t walk about.
He falls. Tell him his ute is safe
back home. Thinks someone’ s pinched it,
peers around the carpark all the time.
His family brought him in it and
he thinks it’ s gone.
He was a farmer once...”

I take the tray. The ice-cream’ s almost
melted round the crumbled orange jelly
and the soup’ s too hot. I know
I’ ll have to blow on it.

She wears the run-down slippers of a local
and in her arms, five rare protea
wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.
Our hands can’ t help it and she lets us touch.
Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.
She’ s spending the day on Oahu
with her flowers and her dogs. Protea

simmers on the kitchen stove.
All afternoon dense kernels
surrender to the fertile
juices, their tender bellies
swelling with delight.

In the yard we plant
rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes,
cupping wet earth over tubers,
our labor the germ
of later sustenance and renewal.

Across the field the sound of a baby crying
as we carry in the last carrots,
whorls of butter lettuce,
a basket of red potatoes.