Mourn the slaughtered.
Pray for those squatted
in some concrete lair
facing betrayal.
LOVE SONG
If you were drowning, I’d come to the rescue,
wrap you in my blanket and pour hot tea.
If I were a sheriff, I’d arrest you
and keep you in a cell under lock and key.
If you were a bird, I’d cut a record
and listen all night long to your high-pitched trill.
If I were a sergeant, you’d be my recruit,
and boy, I can assure you, you’d love the drill.
If you were Chinese, I’d learn the language,
burn a lot of incense, wear funny clothes.
If you were a mirror, I’d storm the Ladies’,
give you my red lipstick, and puff your nose.
If you loved volcanoes, I’d be lava,
relentlessly erupting from my hidden source.
And if you were my wife, I’d be your lover,
because the Church is firmly against divorce.
ODE TO CONCRETE
You’ll outlast me, good old concrete,
as I’ve outlasted, it seems, some men
who had taken me, too, for a kind of street,
citing color of eyes, or mien.
So I praise your inanimate, porous looks
not out of envy but as the next
of kin — less durable, plagued with loose
joints, though still grateful to the architects.
I applaud your humble — to be exact,
meaningless — origins, roar and screech,
fully matched, however, by the abstract
destination, beyond my reach.
It’s not that nothing begets its kind
but that the future prefers to court
a date that’s resolutely blind
and wrapped in a petrified long skirt.
AT THE CITY DUMP IN NANTUCKET
To Stephen White
The perishable devours the perishable in broad daylight,
moribund in its turn in late November:
the seagulls, trashing the dump, are trying to outnumber
the snow, or have it at least delayed.
The reckless primordial alphabet, savaging every which
way the oxygen wall, constitutes a preface
to the anarchy of the refuse:
in the beginning, there was a screech.
In their stammering Ws one reads not hunger but
the prurience of comma-sharp talons toward
what outlasts them, or else a torn-out
page’s flight from the volume’s fat,
while some mad anemometer giddily spins its cups
like a haywire tea ceremony, and the Atlantic
is breasting grimly with its athletic
swells the darkening overcast.
AB OVO
Ultimately, there should be a language
in which the word «egg» is reduced to O
entirely. The Italian comes the closest,
naturally, with its uova. That’s why Alighieri thought
it the healthiest food, sharing the predilection
with sopranos and tenors whose pear-like torsos
in the final analysis embody «opera».
The same pertains to the truly Romantic, that is,
German poets, with practically every line
starting the way they’d begin a breakfast,
or to the equally cocky mathematicians
brooding over their regularly laid infinity,
whose immaculate zeros won’t ever hatch.
REVEILLE
Birds acquaint themselves with leaves.
Hired hands roll up their sleeves.
In a brick malodorous dorm
boys awake awash in sperm.
Clouds of patently absurd
but endearing shapes assert
the resemblance of their lot
to a cumulative thought.
As the sun displays its badge
to the guilty world at large,
scruffy masses have to rise,
unless ordered otherwise.
Now let’s see what one can’t see
elsewhere in the galaxy:
life on earth, of which its press
makes a lot and comets less.
As a picture doomed to sneak
previews only, it’s unique
even though some action must
leave its audience aghast.
Still, the surplus of the blue
up on high supplies a clue
as to why our moral laws
won’t receive their due applause.
What we used to blame on gods
now gets chalked up to the odds
of small particles whose sum
makes you miss the older sham.
Yet regardless of the cause,
or effects that make one pause,
one is glad that one has been
caught this morning in between.
Painted by a gentle dawn
one is proud that like one’s own
planet now one will not wince
at what one is facing, since
putting up with nothing whose
company we cannot lose
hardens rocks and — rather fast —
hearts as well. But rocks will last.
TSUSHIMA SCREEN
The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes
masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize
in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer
days than the other months; therefore, it’s more cruel
than the rest. Dearest, it’s more sound
to wrap up our sailing round
the globe with habitual naval grace,
moving your cot to the fireplace
where our dreadnought is going under
in great smoke. Only fire can grasp a winter!
Golden unharnessed stallions in the chimney
dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,
and the dark room fills with the plaintive, incessant chirring
of a naked, lounging grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.
FOLK TUNE
It’s not that the Muse feels like clamming up,
it’s more like high time for the lad’s last nap.
And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best
drives a steamroller across his chest.