for Hayden
They found the missing bride and she is living.
They found the boys floating on the ocean in their little yellow raft.
The ornithologists found the extinct woodpecker
when it flew over their canoe.
Not everyone is convinced, though.
One recording of its distinctive knock turned out to be a gunshot.
A century of Ozark fishermen
said they saw the bird when they were stranded
on their hummocks in the swamp.
Nobody believed them but the catfish in their pails.
Those boys thought their muscles strong enough to paddle against the squall.
And the bride only wanted a bus trip west
before the rest of her life downed her like an olive.
Sometimes survival strikes us dumb
with the improbable story of resurrection;
we see the blossoms smutted on the ground
turning back into a flowering tree. Next year
there’ll be new nettle stalks
to sting your fingers, which you’ll drag
through the serrated leaves to prove
the world has not lost the consolation of its old pain.
For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State
For a long time you lay tipped on your side like a bicycle
but now your pedaling has stopped. Already
the mosquitoes have chugged their blisterful of blood
and flown on. Time moves forward,
no cause to weep, I keep reminding myself of this:
the body will accrue its symptoms. And the manuals of style
that warn us not to use the absolutes, are wrong:
the body will always accrue its symptoms.
But shouldn’t there also be some hatchlings within view:
sufficient birth to countervail the death?
At least a zero on the bottom line:
I’m not asking for black integers,
just for nature not to drive our balance into the dirt.
What should we utter over the broken glass that marks your grave?
The bird books give us mating calls but not too many death songs.
And whereas the Jews have their Kaddish and the Tibetans
have their strident prayers, all I’m impelled to do is sweet-talk
the barricades of heaven. Where you my vector
soar already, a sore thumb among the clouds.
Still I can see in the denuded maple one of last year’s nests
waiting to be filled again, a ragged mass of sticks.
Soon the splintered shells will fill it
as your new geeks claim the sky — any burgling
of bloodstreams starts when something yolky breaks.
And I write this as if language could give restitution for the breakage
or make you lift your head from its quilt of wayside trash.
Or retract the mosquito’s proboscis, but that’s language again,
whose five-dollar words not even can unmake you.
Not Winter
after reading Anne Carson’s Sappho translation
How sad it must be in Greece when winter comes,
like Coney Island but with a less-brutal sea,
and what is sadder than a hot dog or souvlaki for that matter
when the last nub of meat slips through the bun
and the girls cover up their gowns so like translucent grocery sacks
caught spookily in trees and I think they’re olive trees
only because I don’t know much about Greece,
how do you expect me to know anything
when the papyri are in such tatters?
In all we have of Sappho’s poems, the silences
come rolling forth like bowling balls:
blank after blank after blank after blank
[to remind us of what’s missing].
Then comes a word like Gongyla or Gorgo,
which sounds like the name of a Japanese movie monster
instead of a girl too lovely
to be eating a hot dog made of useless lips.
But there is no food in Sappho’s poems,
which makes me wonder about every other missing else,
who cooked the meat and carted off the chamber pots
so Sappho could stroll under the olive boughs so unencumbered
by her body, her reputedly squat wrestler’s body,
thereby left free to strum her lyre? I am not saying
it is an easy thing to write a poem that will be remembered
for three thousand years, but it is a harder thing
to build a temple out of rocks. A temple
where the girls will party all-nite
until their gowns start flying off
and into that ferocious silence:
[ ].
Then comes two words intact—
I want
Love Swing
The new guy bought it as a present for his wife
(this a story Jim is telling)—
like a love swing like I think of as a love swing?
Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn.
So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch,
the dimpling in his wife’s thighs,
though when I ask if I could ride a love swing
Jim says, “I’m afraid your love swing days are through.”
In case of fire, strike chest with hammer
and wind up all the dogs in the neighborhood,
while I zen out trying to remember the name of… ah…
not Leland Stanford but Stanford White:
architect of Madison Square Garden,
where the famous velvet swing hung in his tower studio—
tapestries, sketches, photographs, a hive
of mammoth work and mammoth pleasure
all mashed together in one place.
But it was the swing
that drove jurors wild at the trial
where the killer named Thaw got off the hook
because his young bride Evelyn had ridden it,
laughing and kicking her dainty feet. And I think:
Maybe everybody in America has a love swing,
maybe it’s as common as a jungle gym,
a secret no one has let me in on
until now, when it’s too late. And my next thought
is that I have been all my life a tad repressed,
I mean I prided myself on having been around the block
but I never rode a love swing. Okay:
I’ve bought a costume or two at the department store
that also sells chopped meat and pineapples
where you hide the impractical straps and struts
between gardening gloves and a ream of typing paper
as they roll along the checkout’s conveyor belt
where the bra gets dinged with grease.
But nothing requiring tools, nothing with such
ramifications: the kids pouncing on their bunk beds
while you’re hammering away, I mean hanging it up
so you can kick a paper parasol like the one that Stanford White
hung from the ceiling: fiddle dee dee.
What about the giant hooks?
and Jim says you get two decoy ferns
in silk or plastic, so as not to get dirt on the carpet
and because you don’t want to hang your love swing by the window
where a true living plant could grow.
The new guy bought it at the fantasy emporium
down by Pike Market, choosing the swing
over the hand-stitched ribbon underwear
sold in the boutique next door,
which cost a week’s wages. Jim held out his arms