I was eating my dinner alone,
sitting on the living-room couch
watching a movie on TV for company
when the forces your covetous presence prevents
slowly crawled out in fibrous droves.
Without you to follow me with your
clipboard, or record the game my face plays,
masquerading as a cryptic territory
and your field of study, the energy maggots
turned the furniture into an ectoplasmic
mass with the weight of iron: soft but
resistant, a taut balloon against the hand.
Pindar, poet of the victories, fitted names
And legends into verses for the chorus to sing:
Names recalled now only in the poems of Pindar:
In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.
A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it’ s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,
clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’ s always the same at Ware’ s Cove,
the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men
with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,
In the barn demoted to garage,
the ax in a cherry stump can’ t be budged.
Daylight perforates siding despite
the battered armor of license plates —
corroded colors, same state: decay,
their dates the only history
of whoever tilled the soil
and left, as a welcome, the skull
of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail
of lime to the torn sack
in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe.
Rusted sharp, it sings
when he grips its splintery handle, swings,
and crowns topple from Queen Anne’ s lace.
Chile, 1834
1
Not knowing in what season this again
Not knowing when again the arms outyearning
Nor the flung smile in eyes not knowing when
Not sure beyond all doubt of full return
Not sure of time now nor the film’ s reversal
This all done opposite, the waif regathered
Like our lost parents in the blinded song
We bag in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through suburbs take our solitary way
Bartender, make it straight and make it two —
One for the you in me and the me in you.
Now let us put our heads together: one
Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.
I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law
Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw.
When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event
Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.
What I shall tell you now, as man is man,
You’ ll find in neither Bible nor Koran.
It happened after my return from France
At the bar in Tony’ s Lady of Romance.
Down in the shipyard, day and night,
The Galahads of the dock,
Hard as the sinews of basin rock,
Build an ocean cosmopolite.
The rivets stab and the hammers bite
Into the beams and plates of steel
Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel.
We,
The workers of the world strike catholic notes
On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats
Epics of industry.
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You must never go down to the end of the town,
