up a little,” he says,
shutting the rusted tailgate,
“maybe at least lean
down from your high horse
and look busy,” picking up
his work gloves and his spade.
“You’ re not the only
hick on the clock
with an education,” he says, half-
laughing, half-wheezing,
and spits, his bottom lip bulging
with a load of Skoal,“even
if you do think pretty highly
of your poetry.”
On the radio this morning: The average woman knows
275 colors — and men know eight. Women say coffee,
mocha, copper, cinnamon, taupe. Men say brown.
Women know an Amazon of colors I might have said
were green, an Antarctica of whites, oceans of colors
I'd stupidly call blue, fields of color, with flowers in them
I would have said were red.
Do nothing and everything will be done,
that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked
around talking 2,500 years ago and
now his books practically grow on trees
they're so popular and if he were
alive today beautiful women would
rush up to him like waves lapping
at the shores of his wisdom.
That's the way it is, I guess: humbling.
Though the amaryllis sags and spills
so do those my wishes serve, all along the town.
And yes, the new moon, kinked there in night's patch,
tugs me so — but I can't reach to right the slant.
And though our cat pads past without a tail, some
with slinking tails peer one-eyed at the dawn, some
with eyes are clawless, some with sparking claws
contain no voice with which to sing
of foxes gassing in the lane.
Round-shouldered pals
Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace
with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap
then back to the village with a lame cat
twisting and woeful in her cage.
Bread these days isn't baked to last:
how sad those posh loaves thudding off
in pine breadbins all around the Heath:
soulless latterday pets, frisky for a day
or two, then binned or thrown to foxes,
loaves just an inch of gloom below
the caged birds you notice in corners
of those same mansions when you seek
I’ m sitting at Nathan’ s, reading a biography of Darwin
who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle
“no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”:
he’ ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported
by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.
Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”:
those philosophical poems of William Bronk’ s. What’ s
most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten,
In 1963 the morning probably seemed harmless enough
to sign on the dotted line as the insurance man
talked to my parents for over an hour
around a coffee table about our future.
This roof wasn't designed to withstand meteors
he told my father, who back then had a brush haircut
that made his ears stick out, his moods
still full of passion, still willing to listen,
my mother with her beehive hairdo,
smiling back at him, all three of them
wanting so much to make the fine print
of the world work. They laughed
At the throat of Soweto
a devil language falls
slashing
claw syllables to shred and leave
raw
the tongue of the young
girl
learning to sing
her own name
loquitur the sparrow in the Zoo
No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine
To keep me from the eagle and the lion,
Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine.
This goes to show that if you have the wit
To be small, common, cute, and live on shit,
Though the cage fret kings, you may make free with it.
September 1956
I. Of Choice
Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,
Don’ t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,
More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
