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All’s Well That Ends Well
On a bitter cold November day
a figure bent and old and grey
wending its weary, woesome way
home to a hovel in mock-apricot afternoon
leaned into the wind, which meant to importune.
Oh, the wicked wind, icy fingers and all,
tried to wrest from her shoulders the threadbare shawl
that was her only comfort at all.
But though it clutched and wrenched and tore,
it could not win the shawl she wore.
And if it failed, ‘twas not for want of malice;
there never breathed a wind so cruel and callous
as that antagonizing poor, old Alice,
who, with some difficulty, gained the road
that led to her humble, tumble-down abode.
Waving hello, she saw from afar,
her half-hinged door flapped shut and ajar
with a verve which, in a door, is bizarre.
By and by she ambled through the gate,
which, being nonexistent, was not great.
She crossed the threshold and shuddered to see
that an army of ants—two thousand, maybe three—
had diminished her pantry to such a degree
that all that remained as her stock and store
were a few scattered crumbs on the bare dirt floor.
And that being that, and being thus distressed,
she exacted a penalty from the unwelcome guests,
to wit: with her thumb, she crushed the little pests.
And since they were the only food she had,
she ate them! And you know, they weren’t half bad.
She found them quite delicious, in fact,
in soups and puddings, as an entrée or just a snack.
Her grumbly tummy at last was content; nothing lacked.
And her culinary skills grew keener:
it was she who invented the first all-ant wiener.
Oh, she ate ant kebabs and ant pâtés,
fricasseed ants and ant flambées—
Fourmis niçoises! Fourmis à la polonaise!
So rich grew her diet, alas, that it gave her the gout.
She suffered briefly; in a month or two it took her out.
Then all the little ants danced and rejoiced!
in unison their jubilance was voiced
and they all gathered round poor Alice to hoist
her up a millimeter high
and carry her off, bidding good riddance—and good-bye.
The wind, now with a casual air, it being May,
sauntered up to Alice where she lay
and lightly took the useless shawl away.
The wind was victorious. The anti-hero won again.
And Alice was in no position to complain.
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2. |
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Night
Black is the softest color—
soft like loam, like night.
Black night is the lover who stays
is the forgetting forever
of crazy dappled time.
Black is quiet
as a closed box
where sunlight goes to sleep
after its long journey.
Starlight, even wearier,
wobbles across time
from some far galaxy, is swayed
from its particular path
by massive black.
Black is still
like a deep lake.
What moves beneath its surface
moves silently.
Color I see before dreaming.
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3. |
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Delayed Gratification
In the experiment
children were given
a marshmallow each
and promised another
if they could wait.
Now tasted better
to some than two—
the whole pillowy mass
filling their mouths
at once, soft but resistant,
dense with couched air.
The study followed
to see who succeeded.
To no one’s surprise,
the patient ones
ended up with more
in life as in the lab.
I ate my marshmallow early
and now am hungry,
but not for marshmallows.
What else have you got
behind your two-way
mirror, Doctor?
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4. |
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Dream of the Unambitious Mermaid
My hopeless crush once asked me
“What do you dream of becoming?”
I had to pause to think it over.
I do a lot of dreaming; which,
I pondered, was my favorite?
“A mermaid in a deserted lake,”
I answered and was taken aback
when he burst out laughing.
“You can’t become a mermaid!”
he said, as if I didn’t know that.
But what is the point of dreaming
about the possible? That’s more like
planning, isn’t it? “Oh, you mean
what do I plan on becoming,”
I said. I had no idea. I reckoned
I’d tend bar till I saved up enough
to travel, then travel till I ran
out of money, then tend bar…
and my plan might have worked, too,
had I not fallen in love. Anyway,
after that, my crush did not believe
I wanted him or anyone.
He spun my mermaid wish
into a siren’s tale, where I’d lure
unwary boys into my waters
and drown them, fashion their bones
into furnishings for my underwater
lair. But I do not crave a bone
settee or taboret or chandelier,
however elegant. I just want to swim
in the moonlight filtering down
through lily pads and duck weed—
swim and sing and comb my long,
long and ever-tangled hair.
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5. |
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Black Walnut
You do know their roots poison everything in their paths,
don’t you?
—Melinda Rizzo
Of all the magnificent trees under whose root ball
I might lie, of all places to lose my last bits of self,
poison or no, black walnut is for me,
for I love her frondy leaves,
her circumspect bark, neither too fine
nor too rough, and good for colic.
I love her high, straight bole, how the eventual branching off
is perfect cantilever for a swing. I love
the citrus tang of her green pods, their heft in hand,
thud on the ground. I love
the muscular squirrels leaping limb to limb and
the squirrels’ wile and their fierce chittering
for sovereignty. I love the obdurate
shells and their brain-shaped meat. I love
dappled shade in summer, lacy silhouettes in winter. I love
how they show where the water is: by refusing to be
anywhere else. I love the satin grain of the wood,
its raveling flow revealed at last, and even
the toxicity, the loneliness, I love.
Oh, yes, black walnut—when I have grown past old,
let me weave myself in your silken stem
bite with your acerbic green
stain the fingers of late scavengers with juglone ink
drink deep through your taproot clearest water
under bedrock, under tonnage of earth
and flimsy bone cage. I will be
a kingdom of squirrels, light-eater, shape-shifter,
murderous as life!
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6. |
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I Never Think About The Bomb
and it’s not because
I live and breathe it
like language or gravity or
indoor plumbing. I think about
those things, consider
the stench and filth
of a chamber pot, the lusty
“Gardy-loo!” announcing,
perhaps too late, the flinging
of its contents into the street
below. And that gardy-loo
is from the French garde de l’eau,
which is putting it mildly.
I suppose there were always meteors,
ice ages, other evolutionary hiccups
that could spell doom; maybe
that’s why this dark cloud
feels inevitable. The others
are rare and unpredictable
and above all, out of our hands,
but come to think of it, so’s the bomb,
unless you’re the fellow with
his finger on the button,
which mostly, you’re not.
If I think about the bomb at all,
it’s the kitschy stock footage of
duck and cover, mushroom cloud,
and those oh-so-futuristic
fallout shelter signs. It was
a big deal back then—
like “reefer” and rock-and-roll.
Those girls who went hysterical
over the Beatles, or whomever,
seem quaint now.
I used to at least feel frivolous
for not worrying about it.
It was important
to wring one’s hands
in the secret belief that
thought mattered.
Well, the cold war’s
over now, anyway.
I have idly dreamt
under looming deadlines:
“Perhaps the End of the World
will come and save me.”
But, of course, it never ends
even when it ends. The having been
remains, like the hush of treefall
where no one’s listening.
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7. |
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October Playground
Sing-song swing set, creaky see-saw.
In a mischievous wind we spin
shrieking, on the merry-go-round.
And the ground, crumblesoft, breathes a mineral breath
from the bones and the applesweet fallen leaves
do the dance of death!
With a leap and a twirl.
We pile them high and we fly
and flop on top and roll
in the muffled crinkle/rustle
til we disappear. It’s getting cold.
Wood smoke finds us, summons us home.
A rakish wind snatches out leaves from our hair
and goes back to the park
to swing alone.
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8. |
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In Praise of Knowing
Who knows where the wind blows?
Parachute spiders gauge it with filaments;
we have weather stations that measure
speed and direction. The doldrums
are mapped, the westerlies, the jet stream,
and these are useful—for navigation,
for predicting the future. You can
predict the future. It’s not magic.
Just follow the patterns and you’ll know.
This is a poem in praise of knowing,
which is to say science. Those spiders know
when it’s time to go, cast their triangle nets
on the air, even if the journey is perilous,
because staying is worse.
Remember Fukushima? I think of it
sometimes like a pot on the back burner
in a dreamt house—unreal like that.
Last I heard, it was boiling over.
In my mind, it became bottomless—
half lies and half-lives
a Zeno’s paradox of never clean.
But I found out (because you can find out)
that the spill stopped spilling,
the damage done, irreversible, but finite.
Even tsunamis end. Everything ends.
This is a poem in praise of science,
which is to say Cassandra vision.
Who wants to hear the bad news?
Your house is on fire. No one wants that
to be true. But assuming your house
is on fire (because it is), when do you
want to find out? Which is to say how?
Because you will find out, one way
or another. For some time now
our blue planet has been hotting up.
The dream house is that pot on the stove
and we’re frogs in it, cooking slowly.
We know this, but forget. We know,
but don’t jump out. We know,
but don’t know. Who knows, we say,
who knows? This is a poem
in praise of finding out.
The trees have been keeping records.
Their rings show the rise and fall
in temperatures. Rise and fall,
rise and fall, rise and rise. And rise…
The earth itself is a sedimentary ledger,
uncookable book of corals, pollen fossils,
oxygen isotopes whose presence tells
the hot and cold, hot and cold,
hot and hot. And hot… So we know
what normal is, and this is not.
Remember the parachute spiders
hitching a ride on the wind? Turns out
the wind is only half the story, the liftoff
caused by electrostatic repulsion,
the way a charged balloon gloms
to the wall. In a windless box
these spiders have been observed
reaching for their opposite charge.
What is opposing you?
You never know until you find out.
So when do you want to know?
This is a poem in praise of knowing.
There is a saying here on Earth:
The best time to plant a tree
was 20 years ago; 30 years ago
that fellow Hansen from NASA told us
we were headed for this climate crisis.
The second best time to believe it is now.
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The Most Beautiful Fork in the World
The most beautiful fork in the world came to him
forlornly besmirched with the darkness
of the graveyard,
where a friend had found it.
It seemed to want the wistful youth,
and so was given him as a present
in an eyeglass case, with a glass eye.
His polishings could not restore
the luster to its piquant tines,
nor cloth and ashes lift the pall
from silver arabesques.
So he put it underneath his pillow,
companion to dolorous dreams
for the winter.
One morning following a fitful night
the youth drew from beneath his pillow
the most beautiful fork in the world,
which gleamed like the lining
of an expensive cloud.
He pitched his ordinary forks
into a remote haystack.
The youth soon learned how to make
an exquisite lemon meringue pie,
light as sunshine itself.
This he served to guests
with his lone, shining fork
delighting in its mysterious redemption.
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Love Song for My Body
My love for you is no longer
at the bottom of the pool, my love.
And as no one would have
fished it out—least of all you,
modest thing—I can only guess
it has gone amphibious, flapped
onto land on webbèd feet,
its razor gills sucking the harsh air,
searching, searching, for you—
in the rectilinear house—listen:
it wheezes below your window.
all its monster longing pitched
at your indifferent head and now
it has found the key
under the mat, for it
is a clever beast, my love
for you; it fumbles with the lock
until the bolt clicks free, crashes
through the darkened kitchen
on its way to you, my love; for you
it mounts the creaking stair.
For you it comes, all ungainly,
swaying in the doorway, your
piercing shrieks in vain; in vain
your knitting needles hurled,
the dustpan shuffle: nothing
deters my love for you.
Oh, darling—be adaptive, come
to the night lagoon. There are fish
aplenty, glittering in starlit shoals,
the beds of seaweed rocking
gently, gravity itself suspended.
Come, be buoyant, my love!
Or, if you must, faint dead away
in the creature’s arms. See
how it carries you home!
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11. |
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The Mother of Them All
Not that I think there’s a God, but if there were,
I think she is not a Him, but he is a Her.
Consider in her giddy youth how she made light
from dark, then in quick succession day and night,
earth and sky, sun and moon, land and sea,
all kinds of vegetation--flowers, fruit, a rather splendid tree--
the beasts of the field, birds of the air, bugs, rocks, and weather--
all from a standing start in six scant days, together
with the mudling seeds for an eventual throng!
Then note how her efforts flagged once the children came along
with their plaints and supplications and hosannas. (“Look at me!”)
Since then we’ve not seen much of that fabled creativity.
Oh, she keeps her hand in--tweaking dimensions, absently messing
with quantum particles, gaps in the fossil record to keep us guessing--
but mostly she is bushed from the endless guff
of creatures who, it seems, are never loved enough
and who, despite their bumptious swagger
anent which species is the tail and which the wagger,
are really needy little mites that balk at punitude
and, thinking sooner or later to catch her in an expansive mood,
keep springing upon their poor old mother the same old test:
Why are we here, and more importantly, which do you really love best?
But having wearied once again of this behest
Dear Mother’s slipped behind the stars to get some rest.
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12. |
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Long Good-bye
Don’t be a stranger.
Don’t be any stranger.
Stranger than usual,
the usual strangeness
a new normal
any stranger could tell you
is not normal not
normal not normal
not normal not
normal
normal
normal. Don’t be
that stranger. Don’t
be any stranger,
stranger; be normal;
be new, the new
normal, the not normal
normal, but don’t be
any stranger than that,
stranger. Don’t be.
Because being is stranger
than not being;
that’s normal, strangely,
while being is odd:
the odds are against it—
yet here we be
in the new normal not
normal, not for long
and I long for a long,
long party, so long
it wraps round the world
seven times and nobody
sinks in the oceans
because we have rafts—
rafts of rafts—
and they block the shipping lanes
but it doesn’t matter
because all the sailors
are at the party; all
the goods are at the party.
All the apples and mangos,
all the nag champa and frankincense
all the paper, all the toys,
even the widgets—all of those,
whatever they are. The goods
are all at the party
and it’s all good.
No one is a stranger
and none of this is stranger
than being is
and being isn’t
any stranger than need be.
We’d be all alone together
all along the long
party line I long for so, so,
So long, my odd, my
finical friend!
Don’t be any stranger.
Not just any stranger.
Be lovely! Belong!
So long!
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released January 11, 2020
