Annual Occurrence
Now it is autumn and all over the civilized world
They are being trucked in, bound and smelling of
Clean and slickly coated paper, the calendars

Of the coming years, to all the stores where we buy time--
Book and office supply and drug, even some
Once known as stationery with an e and not an a.

The year-to-come comes with all its ordered squares
Properly numerated, month after month, day after day,
With or without sentimental four-color covering prints.

Their salmon-like arrival at the banks of time's river
Manifests once more the human hope of a future,
As filled with faith as paintings on the walls of caves,

Even though for some there lies within those leaves
One unmarked day when they will never again
Feel anymore the need to confirm any dates at all.


Denial
You urge me to look upon the table
At the spread-out cards of my losing hand.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Yes, I clearly heard the words, "Be realistic."
I caught the tone of your stern command.
I turn my head and murmur Becket's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

I listened to you listing all the many ways
Things went ill, the bad results of all I planned.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's word:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

You tell me to face the unavoidable music
Like a Civil War soldier behind the band.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

While you are admonishing me, my imagination
Flees to some far place, let us say, Samarkand.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Few are the patient people who can wait
For the clear day when others will understand
What Sam Beckett meant when he wrote the words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

<sup>Hyperbole
I keep high in my mind the cliff
That was my Everest when young
On whose face in boy-imagining
Between the earth and death I hung.

Whenever I return to where
Only funerals make me go,
I do not drive to where it stands
For fear it prove too low.

I fool my mind with my own past,
Exiled from childhood’s dreams,
Nor will I cease to swim across
The rivers I made of streams.</sup>


Locus Classicus
Think of the early humanists
Bent over in their privies
Reading the epics of Homer
Or some narrative of Livy’s.
 
Ignoring the cloacal smell
They preserved the classical mind
By letting their spirits soar above
That which they left behind.
 
Pity the students centuries down
Being force-fed Greek and Latin
Wishing the humanists had dropped
The texts in the place they sat in.


The Child is Father to the Man
“…’objective correlative’ which was,
I suppose was what they called a mask in St. Louis”                                                
                       --Seamus Heaney, “Feeling Into Words”
It was the afternoon of All Hallows’ Eve,
And Mrs. Eliot was supervising
Her six-year old son’s selection
Of the costume he would wear that night.
 
To her suggestions of pirate, hobo, or cowboy
He said with a stamp of his foot. “None
Is objectively correlative, Mother,
And thus none is exactly right.”



<sup>The Shropshire Lad: 1969
Back in a rubber body bag
Blacker than his black skin
Came Calvin of the Corner Poolroom
 And coke and grass and gin.

What to Calvin was Viet Nam,
Poor child of the city’s brick,
Who did not hear the sniper’s bolt
As it slid back with a snick?

Over his head the gunship choppers
Chopped out their deadly chuck,
But Death ran Calvin to the ground
Outside of Phan Van Vuc.

They laid him down in Arlington,
Gave his mother a folded flag.
His poolroom brothers sneered and scoffed—
Called it a honky rag.

For what, I wonder, did this lad die?
 For what his early grave?
Poor Calvin. He did not even have
An English Queen to save.

I hope the chaplains are correct:
That undone is Adam’s Fall,
Since the sum of Calvin’s life seems now
 Only letters on The Wall.</sup>
 

 

Circular Education
Amazed at all the quick information
I now can gain from electronic media,
In my old age I remember the blue-backed
Volumes of my boyhood’s encyclopedia.
 
Each bought weekly for carefully saved pennies
Through a supermarket’s promotional scheme,
Those cheaply printed books were my source
For facts, surely, but also many a dream.
 
No Britannica with elegant onionskin pages
And certainly riddled with errors, in those
I was first taught that knowledge can be netted
And held in alphabetized cages of prose.
 
On shelves of pine my father assembled
They sat, badly illustrated, poorly bound,
Where I learned that the world, when questioned,
Has places in it where answers are found.
 
I know by now those books are papery dust
As I am soon no doubt destined to be.
Still, I share yet their futile ambition:
To categorize the truth from A to Z.


Addicted
I open a box marked Winston
And extract a tube of death—
Another one for shortening
My allotted store of breath.
 
It was an Englishman named Raleigh
Who brought tobacco back
And taught all the world the way
Of dying pack by pack.

I keep persisting like a fool,
Drawing smoke across my tongue,
Ignoring what is happening--
The blackening of each lung.
 
I know one day that I will quit
This habit and this sin:
The day my body’s finally done
With pulling air within.


Co-Evolution
On his way up to civilization
Homo sapiens guessed that dogs and cats
Might be useful in keeping his stored-up grain
Relatively clear of mice and rats.
 
The dogs and cats on their own way
To civilization shrewdly had a hunch
That this semi-hairless sap on two legs
Could be the source of a free and endless lunch.


Dick Corey
He did what?  Shot himself?
Put a bullet through his head?
You’re serious? Certain about that?
Jee-zuss! Dick Corey dead!

Sure, I knew him. Went to Harvard
With him, Class of Oh-Three.
Oh, shit. Maybe he found out
About his wife and me.


Fashion Statement
Did Lazarus, one of the world’s
Few resurrected men,
Have a wife who went into widowhood
And came right out again?
 
And did she turn and rail at him,
“What the hell are you doing back--
I’ve come to like having people say
How good I look in black.”?

 

 

 

Indoctrinated
Parochially schooled
I learned to read
And write and spell
 
But also the Four Last
Things: Death, Judgment,
Heaven, and Hell.
 
The further on in life
I go the less
I am surprised.
 
Strangely the world makes sense
For those who’ve been
Well-catechized.


My Fellow Pennsylvanian Upriver
Reading a few Wallace Stevens poems
A sense of warm admiration upwelled:
The only poet in the American Canon
Who knew how Schuylkill is spelled.
 
But then I thought of Williams and Pound,
Undergrads together at Penn.
Surely they both had crossed that river
Going downtown now and again.

Yet neither ever published that magic word
In verse whether formal or free,
And so I keep in my heart a spot for him
Who spelled Schuylkill right for me.


Short to Second to First
Joe Tinker just shook his head and muttered.
Johnny Evers stayed, as usual, mum.
Frank Chance, though, kicked dirt and angrily cursed.
 “What a lousy asswipe bunch of pitchers!
Every friggin’ time I turn and look around,
I see a goddamned runner on at first.”
 
Meanwhile Harry Steinfeldt over at third
Whose name was never in a verse before
Put his glove to mouth and covered a yawn.
 Harry, a journeyman, knowing his place,
Did just what the Cubbies paid him to do:
Chewing tobacco, he looked calmly on.


The Old Formalist
Gives Advice
To a Young Apprentice
Write and do not worry
If what you’re making
Merits the name of art.
 
The man who is truly deaf
Does not hear at all
His own body’s fart.

 
Thought on One End of a Leash
On a Cold Rainy Night
I’ve learned that in America cats as pets
Outnumber dogs by three to one.
I think that this disparity has arisen because
Walking a dog is no goddamned fun.


Trophy Wives
Sleek long-leggèd women pass me —and I sigh—
Walking with men far wealthier than I.
Wealthier, really? How do you know?
It is with the really rich only such women go

Chasing the Long Ball
We are all outfielders on the run
Across the green grass, looking back,
Hoping to hear our cleated feet
Crunch in time on the warning track.

At Walter Reed
When you list all those who profit
From war and war’s loud alarms
Be sure to include the providers
Of prosthetic legs and arms.

At Ford's Theater
Consider the poor cast:
Not one curtain call
The night that John Booth
Upstaged them all.

Climate Change
The adolescent male has scientific evidence
Of global warming:
The perfection of a push-up bra doing
Its global forming.

Coffee Spooner
One night I heard myself slurring
The veritas that is in vino,
So I tried to sober myself up
With a cap of cuppacino.

Freudian
There is always a hidden meaning
In the things that parents do.
They are teaching their babies death
When they play at peek-a-boo.

Lady Luck
I sat across the table from her,
My chin upon my fist.
She had a Rolex on her mind.
I had a Timex on my wrist.

Happy Accident
Think of the prehistoric potter
And her thumb’s inadvertent slip.
Thanks to her all of us following folk
Have pitchers with a pouring lip.

Mission
This is the destiny of Eve’s
Every last son or daughter:
To be sent out with a sieve
Commanded to gather water.

Political Advice
Stand neither to the left nor right.
Stay firmly in the middle.
Note how Rome is always burning.
Learn to play the fiddle. 

 

Furor Scribendi
I waste paper,
I waste ink,
Just to see just
What I think.


Insecticide
"Cleanliness was rudimentary; one of the highest
paid members of the hospital (Guy's) staff was
the bug-catcher."
        --John Keats, The Making of a Poet, Aileen Ward
'Ere's me bucket, Mr. Keats. See wot a good day I've 'ad:
Nineteen roaches, big around as yer thumb in size,
Forty beetles, an', Lord luv us, two hundred and ten
Of the very worst of all--them fuckin' pesky flies.


A Cold Dish
Ms. Ruth Lilly left a fortune
To a poetry magazine
In the hallowed pages of which
No verse of hers was ever seen.

Year after year from Chicago
To Indiana rejections came.
Still, Ms. Lilly wrote on and on
While lesser poets tasted fame.

Dejected, did she weep and wipe
Tears away with Kleenex tissue?
No. She cracked the whip of her will.
Now her name's in every issue.


The Old Formalist at a Picnic
Eating little, he drank a lot of warm wine.
It affected his speech, his use of words.
Eventually he saw in a nearby meadow
Nothing but hummingflies and butterbirds.


Six Characters in Search of an Author
Juliet and Romeo
In their balcony scene
Othello being jealous
Iago cunningly mean
Hamlet in his castle
Lear upon the heath--
Always William Shakespeare
Lurking underneath.


The Miracle of Paper
With it we can safely preserve
The thoughts of great minds,
And also, more importantly,
Cleanse our bare behinds.


Consciousness
A mystery that will always be
Forever and forever unknown:
How did mind arise in such a bag
Of meat, blood, gristle, and bone?


Sligo Verse
Not sure, they took some bones
And sank them in Sligo ground.
Auden put them in a poem,
Pleased with its rhyming sound.

For all we know the bones
Irish gravel and dirt cover
Are those of some French villager
Murdered by his wife's lover.

No matter. The poet said to lie
Under an admonishing stone
Had he been live and told of it
Would have made the tale his own.

To a Young Artist
Grab your hard hat.
Fill your lunch pail.
Heed what I say
And you won't be sorry.

Report for work.
Punch the time clock
At The Sisyphus
Company's quarry.


Pillow Talk: The Poets
Don't tell me that the early love
Of Ted and Sylvia wasn't wonky.
One of his nicknames for her was
Kish-Pish-Ponky.


Imminent Foreclosure
Young I chose to live in a tower.
Yes, of ivory was it made.
Old I learn there's a mortgage on it
And, yes, it must be paid.


Housebreaking
The great poet does a thing that only
Rarely can be done if ever in prose:
He weaves a rug that you yourself will stain
And then in it he rubs your nose.


Kodak Moment
When George Eastman thought to put
Imaging in the hands of Everyman
He could never have known

That one day that same Everyman
Could carry around in his pocket
A camera in a phone.


Eternal Question
Macrobius wrote it down
In lingua Latina:
Ovumne prius fuerit
Aut gallina?

Though a translation you may
Neither need nor beg,
Here it is: what came first,
The chicken or the egg?