Selected Poems Read online

  a highway dividing the forests

  not yet fat enough for the paper companies.

  This time of year full dark falls

  about eight o’clock – pineforest and blacktop

  blend. Moose reaches road, fails

  to look both ways, steps

  deliberately, ponderously.… Wife

  hits moose, hard,

  at a slight angle (brakes slammed, car

  spinning) and moose rolls over hood, antlers –

  as if diamond-tipped – scratch windshield, car

  damaged: rib-of-moose imprint

  on fender, hoof shatters headlight.

  Annoyed moose lands on feet and walks away.

  Wife is shaken, unhurt, amazed.

  – Does moose believe in a Supreme Intelligence?

  Speaker does not know.

  – Does wife believe in a Supreme Intelligence?

  Speaker assumes as much: spiritual intimacies

  being between the spirit and the human.

  – Does speaker believe in a Supreme Intelligence?

  Yes. Thank You.

  The Swimming Pool

  All around the apt. swimming pool

  the boys stare at the girls

  and the girls look everywhere but the opposite

  or down or up. It is

  as it was a thousand years ago: the fat

  boy has it hardest, he

  takes the sneers,

  prefers the winter so he can wear

  his heavy pants and sweater.

  Today, he’s here with the others.

  Better they are cruel to him in his presence

  than out. Of the five here now (three boys,

  two girls) one is fat, three cruel,

  and one, a girl, wavers to the side,

  all the world tearing at her.

  As yet she has no breasts

  (her friend does) and were it not

  for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins

  in taunting, she could not bear her terror,

  which is the terror

  of being him. Does it make her happy

  that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,

  of acting fool to salve

  her loneliness? She doesn’t seem

  so happy. She is like

  the lower middle class, that fatal group

  handed crumbs so they can drop a few

  down lower, to the poor, so they won’t kill

  the rich. All around

  the apt. swimming pool

  there is what’s everywhere: forsakenness

  and fear, a disdain for those beneath us

  rather than a rage

  against the ones above: the exploiters,

  the oblivious and unabashedly cruel.

  FROM

  The Drowned River

  (1990)

  Backyard Swingset

  Splayed, swayback, cheap pipe

  playground: a swing, a slide, some rings

  maybe – we love our babies,

  and a tire hanging from a branch

  won’t do. For one summer

  it shines – red, the chains of silver,

  and beside it the blue plastic pool.

  First winter out it goes to rust.

  I love America’s backyards,

  seen from highways, or when

  you’re lost and looking

  hard at houses, numbers.

  The above, plus a washed-out willow,

  starveling hedge, tool shed

  a dozen times dented,

  and a greasy streak

  against the garage where a barbecue

  went berserk. A Chevy engine block

  never hauled away

  or the classic Olds on chocks.…

  Beneath the blue-gray humps of snow: pieces

  of a summer, a past

  Mom said to pick up,

  but they weren’t.

  Now, nobody’s home, all across America

  nobody’s home now.

  Brother or sister is, in fact, on Guam,

  or working nightshift at the box factory,

  or one is married and at this moment

  wiping milk rings from a kitchen table.

  And Mom, Mom is gone,

  and the ash on Father’s cigarette grows so long

  it begins to chasm and bend.

  Old Man Shoveling Snow

  Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.

  How gently they sink – white spiders,

  multi-bladed bleak things,

  these first, into the near mirror

  of your shovel’s surface. It snows,

  lightly – wide columns

  of black between each flake –

  but it will snow all night, and thicker.

  So you start now and scrape

  your driveway of its first half inch.

  Every hour you will plow

  it down and up again.

  It’s not a grave

  you dig, nor a path to school,

  nor is there a dot of philosophy

  in this work: you clear it as it falls

  so as not to lift the heavy load at dawn.

  The lanes behind you whiten,

  imperceptibly hiss, and several –

  smoke-roses, epaulets – bite

  your back, your closed shoulders.

  So soft, stubborn, it falls, parting

  the streetlamp’s light

  harder, larger, and the whole cold neighborhood

  bandaged. On the corner

  the salt and sand box,

  the mailbox (such white

  on blue!) could be art

  but aren’t. You should move

  a little faster now behind

  the shovel – push once your twenty feet

  of drive and it fills.

  Soon it will take two.

  Bend your back to it, sir: for it

  will snow all night.

  Cellar Stairs

  It’s rickety down to the dark.

  Old skates, long-bladed, hang by leather laces

  on your left and want to slash your throat,

  but they can’t, they can’t, being only skates.

  On a shelf above, tools: shears,

  three-pronged weed hacker, ice pick,

  poison – rats and bugs – and on the landing,

  halfway down, a keg of roofing nails

  you don’t want to fall face first into,

  no, you don’t. To your right,

  a fuse box with its side-switch – a slot machine,

  on a good day, or the one the warden pulls,

  on a bad. Against the wall,

  on nearly every stair, one boot, no two

  together, no pair, as if the dead

  went off, short-legged or long, to where they go,

  which is down these steps,

  at the bottom of which is a swollen,

  humming, huge white freezer

  big enough for many bodies –

  of children, at least. And this

  is where you’re sent each night

  for the frozen bag of beans

  or peas or broccoli

  that lies beside the slab

  of meat you’ll eat for dinner,

  each countless childhood meal your last.

  So You Put the Dog to Sleep

  I have no dog, but it must be

  Somewhere there’s one belongs to me.

  JOHN KENDRICK BANGS

  You love your dog and carve his steaks

  (marbled, tender, aged) in the shape of hearts.

  You let him on your lap at will

  and call him by a lover’s name: Liebchen,

  pooch-o-mine, lamby, honey-tart,

  and you fill your voice with tenderness, woo.

  He loves you too, that’s his only job,

  it’s how he pays his room and board.

  Behind his devotion, though, his dopey looks,


  might be a beast who wants your house,

  your wife; who in fact loathes you, his lord.

  His jaws snapping while asleep means dreams

  of eating your face: nose, lips, eyebrows, ears…

  But soon your dog gets old, his legs

  go bad, he’s nearly blind, you puree his meat

  and feed him with a spoon. It’s hard to say

  who hates whom the most. He will not beg.

  So you put the dog to sleep. Bad dog.

  Traveling Exhibit of Torture Instruments

  What man has done to woman and man

  and the tools he built to do it with

  is pure genius in its pain. A chair of nails

  would not do without a headrest of spikes

  and wrist straps pierced with pins.

  The Head Crusher, for example – ‘Experts disagree

  about this piece: is it 17th or 18th century?’

  This historical hatband contracts and contracts,

  by screw, and was wrought by hand.

  These skills, this craft, get passed along.

  Take The Red Hot Pincers and Tongs.

  They were ‘addressed mostly to noses, fingers, toes.

  Tubular pincers, like the splendid crocodile

  shown here, served to rip off…’ I have been in pain

  at museums, openings, but not

  like this: The Heretic’s Fork – ‘Placed

  as it is, allows the victim only to murmur: I recant.’

  In all the pictures

  the men and women chosen do not

  appear in pain: sawed lengthwise,

  wrecked on a rack or wheel, they do not

  look in pain. And the torturers

  (the business always official)

  seem uninterested, often flipping

  pages of a book – one of laws, of God.

  It seems most times men did this or that,

  so terrible to him or her,

  it was because God willed it so.

  Or, at least, they thought He did.

  Walt Whitman’s Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor

  At his request, after death, his brain was removed

  for science, phrenology, to study, and

  as the mortuary assistant carried it (I suppose

  in a jar but I hope cupped

  in his hands) across the lab’s stone floor, he dropped it.

  You could ask a forensic pathologist

  what that might look like. He willed his brain,

  as I said, for study – its bumps and grooves,

  analysed, allowing a deeper grasp

  of human nature, potential (so phrenology believed),

  and this kind of intense look, as opposed to mere fingering

  of the skull’s outer ridges, valleys, would afford

  particular insight. So Walt believed.

  He had already scored high (between a 6 and a 7) for Ego.

  And as if we couldn’t guess from his verses, he scored

  high again (a 6 and a 7 – 7 the highest possible!)

  in Amativeness (sexual love) and Adhesiveness

  (friendship, brotherly love) when before his death

  his head was read. He earned only a 5 for Poetic Faculties,

  but that 5, pulled and pushed by his other numbers,

  allowed our father of poesy to lay down some words

  in the proper order on the page. That our nation

  does not care does not matter, much.

  That his modest federal job was taken from him,

  and thus his pension, does not matter at all.

  And that his brain was dropped and shattered, a cosmos,

  on the floor, matters even less.

  Bodo

  History is largely made of Bodos.

  EILEEN POWER, Medieval People

  We could weep for him

  but we won’t: the man

  who scythed and ground the oats

  but ate no bread; who pumped one oar

  among thousands at Lepanto, ocean

  up to his clavicles and rising; who

  in countless numbers served as food

  for countless fish. The man,

  or sometimes woman, three or four rows back

  in the crowd (listless, slack-mouthed),

  who lined the street when an army,

  depleted or fat with loot, came home;

  or the man behind such columns,

  who gathered the dung

  to sell or to pick for seeds. All the pig farmers,

  rat catchers, charcoal burners, tanners

  in their stink, root diggers living

  in the next village over from the smallest village;

  who thickened their soup with sawdust

  or meal gathered from dirt

  around the grindstone.

  Your great-great-etc.-uncle Fedor who never spoke

  but in grunts, who beat his spavined horse,

  who beat his rented field

  for millet, sorghum, who ate a chicken once a year,

  who could not read

  nor even sign an X; the slaves

  unnamed who never made it

  to the slavers, buzzards’ bait,

  or did not survive the crossing

  if they did. All the Bodos

  who stood on docks with breaking backs

  and did not wave

  and did not know Marco Polo

  was setting out again; the zealous priest

  eleventh on the list

  to seek out Prester John; the convict-colonists

  who preferred the gaol at home

  but had no choice. The slug-pickers;

  the sailors who bailed the bilge water

  hanging by their heels; the doughboy

  dead of typhus before he wrote a letter home;

  the man who thought he pleased a minor Nazi

  with an act of small servility

  and was proud and told his wife and son;

  who lost a leg and half his face for his king,

  and then was cheated on his pension

  and was not bitter. The man, the woman, who hanged

  or burned for nothing

  and did not weep, or, tortured, confessed

  too fast for less; who praised his slop

  in which a fish head floated.…

  Floating Baby Paintings

  I like the paintings by the Venetian painters

  (Titian, say, or Tintoretto, the Bellinis)

  in question: large, dramatic canvases,

  figurative (no abstract monkey business here),

  relentlessly biblical. The Bible tells

  a story, allegory, these guys paint it. Nice. Aside

  from beauty, there’s a purpose

  to this work: people look, they’ve heard,

  or sometimes read, the Bible stories

  and they understand them better – the pictorial,

  no doubt about it, is powerful. Words

  about some gruesome (Christ on the Cross, thorns,

  spikes splitting cartilage, spear,

  vinegar-sponge in spearhole) or uplifting

  (Resurrection) scene

  are all right, but an image – there it is,

  friend, that’s what it looked like – better still.

  The less than literal touches I like best,

  however, in so many of these: the chubby,

  ubiquitous, usually just hovering

  above and/or back a bit

  from the central tableau (we can see them,

  but can the characters in the picture?) rosy fellows

  with wings; joyous, busy,

  observational little blimps, their delicate wings

  not flapping (never painted as a blur

  despite their weight), but there they fly, floating

  babies! For centuries

  they show up – sometimes carrying a lyre,

  a dove or two, of course a bow,

&nb
sp; but mostly just ecstatic, naked, fat.

  Bless them, their cargo,

  their unexampled flight patterns.

  The Garden

  The basic metaphor is good: blend dead,

  redolent things – dried blood,

  steamed bone meal, dried hoof and horn

  meal, slag, dolomite,

  bat guano – into the dirt,

  wait; live things will emerge.

  In between, of course, you insert a seed.

  So fragile, at first – I examine rows

  of lettuce seedlings with a reading glass,

  their green so barely green

  they break your heart. The only

  tools you need are Stone Age

  but made of metal: I love

  the shovel’s cut when you plunge

  it in: the shiny, smooth cliff-face

  and some worms (your garden’s pals!)

  in the middle of their bodies,

  their lives, divided.… A rake,

  a hoe, peasant tools,

  but mostly you pick, pull, pinch by hand,

  the green stains and stinks clinging

  to your fingertips.

  Don’t read books about it,

  or not many. Turn the dirt

  and comb it smooth.

  Plant what you like to eat.

  Feed the birds – but not so much

  that they get lazy –

  and they will eat the bugs,

  who should get their share,

  but not one leaf of basil more.

  It’s all a matter of spirit, balance,

  common cruel sense: something dies,

  something’s born, and, in the meantime,

  you eat some salad.

  Upon Seeing an Ultrasound Photo of an Unborn Child

  Tadpole, it’s not time yet to nag you

  about college (though I have some thoughts

  on that), baseball (ditto), or abstract

  principles. Enjoy your delicious,