January/Macy’s/The Bra Event
Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section
of the paper, where the models pantomime unruffled tête-à-têtes
despite the absence of their blouses.
Each year when my familiar latches on them so intently
like a grand master plotting the white queen’s path,
like a baby trying to suckle a whole roast beef,
I ask: What, you salt block, are you dreaming
about being clubbed by thunderheads? — but he will not say.
Meanwhile Capricorn’s dark hours flabbed me,
uneasy about surrendering to the expert fitter
(even if the cupped hands were licensed and bonded)—
I had August in mind, seeing the pygmy goats at the county fair.
Now the sky is having its daily rain event
and the trees are having their hibernal bark event,
pretending they feel unruffled
despite the absence of their leaves. And we forget how they looked
all flouncy and green. Instead we regard
fearfully the sway of their old trunks.
Odor Ode
Big stink wobbles down the library aisles
from you endomorphs who’ve come in from the thorns—
your musk percolates the picture books
while children sing to the donkey Tingalayo.
It creeps into the reference nook
and biographies of despot popes,
the manuals on car repair, even the old edition Joy of Sex,
the one whose hairy armpits haunt me.
How will the smudge of rotten leaves
ever be lifted from so many paperbackèd bosoms,
the baby doze peacefully in its holster, the ancestors spring
from the accordion-files in their old hats?
Outside, the slacker deer refuse to rut
ever since your scent made its bed on the lawn,
the Chamber of Commerce outraged and
the mayor mowing down the brambles.
Sleep safe here, men! — with your heads tipped back,
wooden newspaper spindles across your chests like swords
while those good Samaritans the moths
knit scarves from the wool of your loud roars and whistles.
Viagra
Let the dance begin.
In magazine-land, you two are dancing—
though a moment ago you were engaged
in some activity like stringing fenceline
or baling hay — why else the work gloves
sticking up from your back pockets?
In a whirlwind of pollen, you-the-man
have seized you-the-woman to your breast
— his breast, her breast, tenderly, tenderly—
now you turn away and shyly grin.
Oh you possessors of youthful haircuts
& attractive activewear from L.L. Bean,
you whose buttocks are still small enough
to permit the rearview photograph:
don’t you already have enough silver coinage
pouring from life’s slot? But no, you also want
the river’s silver surge where its bed drops off,
you want the namesake in all its glory—Niagara:
even the barge of animals teetering on its lip.
This ploy was wrought by some 19th-century huckster,
the honeymooners gathered on the shore’s high bank
to watch the barge drop as creature-cries
rise up…
before all the couples re-bungalow themselves
to do what, then what, it’s hard to imagine
after so much death. I always thought Tigers
until I read the barge was full of dogs and cats—
one baby camel, a demented old monkey,
la petite mort, that little French whimper
given up by the ordinary before it breaks into splinters.
The widow Taylor straps herself in a barrel
and rides it safely over the century’s cusp,
& Maud Willard imbarrels herself with her dog
who’ll leap from the busted staves alone.
Still, wouldn’t the ride be worth that one live leap—
doesn’t part of us want to be broken to bits?
After all, our bodies are what cage us,
what keep us, while, outside, the river
says more, wants more, is more: the R
(grrrr, argh, graa…) in all its variegated coats.
A sound always coming, always smashing, always spoken
by the silver teeth and tongue that guard the river’s open throat.
The Van with the Plane
At first I didn’t get it: I thought it was just scrap metal roped on the roof
of this dented ancient Econoline van
with its parrot-yellow-colored burden.
Bright mishmash so precarious
my heart twitched whenever I had to tail it down the road
until one day I woke to it: you blockhead, that’s a plane.
I don’t know how I missed it — of course it was a plane,
disassembled, with one yellow wing pointing sideways from the roof.
Fuselage dinged by rocks from the road
and two little wheels sticking up from the van—
now when I tally all the pieces, it seems pretty obvious.
And I wonder if toting it around would be a burden
or more some kind of anti-burden.
Because if you drove around with a plane
you might feel less fettered than the rest of us:
say your life hung around your neck like a concrete Elizabethan ruff
you could always ditch that junker van
and take off rattling down the runway of the road.
But my friends said they’d seen that heap for so long on the road
it was like a knock-knock joke heard twice too often.
You’ll be sorry they said when I went looking for the guy who drove the van,
whom I found in the library, beating the dead horse of his plane.
Once you got him started it was hard to shut him off:
how, if he had field to rise from, he’d fly to Sitka, or Corvallis—
but how does a guy living in a van get a field, you think the IRS
just goes around giving people fields for free? The road
of his thought was labyrinthine and sometimes ended in the rough
of Cambodia or Richard Nixon.
He said a plane in pieces still counts as a plane,
it was still a good plane, it was just a plane on a van.
And of course I liked him better as part and parcel of the van;
the actual guy could drive you nuts.
All his grace depended on his sitting underneath that plane
as it rattles up and down the road
like a train with a missile, a warhead of heavy hydrogen.
Because the van reverts to rubble once the plane takes off.
And if my own life is a plane, it’s like the Spirit of St. Louis—
no windshield, just the vantage of a periscope.
Forward, onward, never look down — at the burden of these roofs and roads.
Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs
The prison kennel’s tin roof howls
while the dogs romp outside through the flakes.
The inmates trained a dog to lift my legs—