Beautifully Janet slept
Till it was deeply morning. She woke then
And thought about her dainty-feathered hen,
To see how it had kept.
One kiss she gave her mother,
Only a small one gave she to her daddy
Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;
No kiss at all for her brother.
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
The one horse you gave me
you took back when she went insane,
when she began to chew wood
instead of the expensive grain
we bought from the feed store,
the grain that had the sweet smell
of molasses and was good for even
us to chew. She turned into
an ugly thing with her wild thoughts,
and I forgot about the beauty
expected of her when her blanket
filled out and complemented
her chestnut body and the name
the Nez Percé gave her. She rotted
and began to stink of promises
Quick! quick!
The cat's been sick.
Where? where?
Under the chair.
Hasten! hasten!
Fetch the basin.
Alack! alack!
It is too late,
The carpet's in
An awful state.
The mower flipped it belly up,
a baby garter less than a foot long,
dull green with a single sharp
stripe of pale manila down its back,
same color as the underside
which was cut in two places,
a loop of intestine poking out.
It wouldn't live,
so I ran the blades over it again,
and cut it again but didn’ t kill it,
and again and then again,
a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke
on me like a swarm of bees.
It took so long
my mind had time to spiral
back to the graveyard
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,
Wise emblem of our politic world,
Sage snail, within thine own self curl’ d;
Instruct me softly to make haste,
Whilst these my feet go slowly fast.
Compendious snail! thou seem’ st to me,
Large Euclid’ s strict epitome;
And in each diagram dost fling
Thee from the point unto the ring;
A figure now triangular,
An oval now, and now a square;
And then a serpentine dost crawl,
Now a straight line, now crook’ d, now all.
The Poet:
Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine —
where’ s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:
Another dead mare waits
in the shoals of some body
of water, waits to be burden,
borne into a foaming ocean,
where it might become food
for whales, or, simply empty
signifier — hair latched to the sea’ s undulation
like Absalom’ s beauty
caught in the playful branches
I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air,
shut wings and ride the light’ s poor spine
to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed
urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’ s walls.
From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried
up the East River to Potter’ s Field
as if they were an inheritance,
gleaned of saveable parts,
