The squirrel of I Ching, incongruous and slow
(for a squirrel (from the cold)) walks briskly on the snow.
‘A grey squirrel in a snow bank,’ says Lord Flea.
‘If he cannot find his acorns I will freeze.’
Flying foreign sky rats, cold too, coo in pidgin,
‘If he finds his cache, will he let us cage a smidgen?’
The snow crust breaks. The I Ching squirrel chutes through
to his larder stashed with acorns. He eats two.
‘C’est un acteur usé,’ says rich old Ron.
Or might have said. His paunch shakes and he mumbles.
He leans against his guides. Then, winded, wan
and sick from altitude, Ron turns and stumbles
the path down to the village he has hired
as base camp for the party he has fixed
to celebrate his prowess. Those who’ve squired
him up the hill, and watched him wound the ibex,
will spend tomorrow searching for the beast.
Ron shot it in the stomach. Shooting stars
attend the dying ibex, leaking yeast
from guts gashed by Ron’s dumdums. Any scars
will not get time to form. While Ron’s in bed
his guides will shoot the ibex in the head.
Published in SOMETIMES IN BALANCE
This carriage house, two-storied, brick, and topped
with soft-red tiles festooned with spiders’ webs,
boasts to me, ‘For centuries I have stopped
the rains and winds, and known that both have ebbs.’
We humans, it says, know but one phase: floods.
We call it ‘life’ and think no ebbs exist;
but buildings, at least old ones, know that buds
must also wither — and always persist.
The carriage house, who learned from its own bricks,
as they learned from their water, straw, and clay,
assures me no life forms are monostichs,
and all of them, and we, forever play:
‘As long as time spins space, and space spends time,
we stand and fall and stand again and climb.’
He was such a total landlubber
that he guessed ‘dog down the hatch’
was a culinary roulette
played at Chinese takeaways.
I watch my cat try consciousness then conscience.
He discards the latter before it does him harm,
but he limps, less limbic than when our attendance
had been mandated by the witch’s charm.
The wizened wizard laughs at my alarm.
He and his malwife burnish brightwork plates
of steel they lay upon me, magic weights
that hold me fast. I am under their control.
‘We will weigh him, kill him, weigh while life abates,
and then know, by subtraction, what the soul
amounted to, how much it weighed in grams,’
his malwife cackles. I am sure they’re mad.
We had come here thinking we’d unmask their scams,
but their spells had lamed my cat, and now they had
me and my soul strapped to its launching pad.
My shambling cat comes nearer to me, purrs.
The witch proffers a mouse. The cat demurs
and his mind meets mine. He says, ‘Your soul’s a function
of their imagination, and of yours.
So do not worry. Don’t ask them for unction.’
‘All right,’ I say. ‘We’ve watched galaxies unfold.
The beauty of forever’s overrated
and youth is only valued by the old
because they’ve lost it somewhere while they waited.’
The cat pretends my soul is reinstated.
It swings a lightning paw. Claws kill the witch.
My weights take wing and the ignition switch
the wizard presses backfires. Blowback fries
him where he stands — or stood. We’ll go our way,
my cat and me, and live as if we’re rich.
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And her GPS can’t find them;
She tries then to phone
in the hope they’ll come home,
Brailing their keyboards like blind men.
Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt that her iPad was bleating;
But when she awoke,
she found YouTube played jokes,
For her pre-Northface fleece kids stayed fleeting.
Then up she fired her Prius crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them in Facebook, which made her heart bleed,
For they’d left lurid details behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
In electronic forums far by:
She espied there their tails on photographer’s slides,
Displayed for the stalkers to eye.
She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
And over the blog sites went rambling,
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
To wipe every trace to her lambkins.
entrée
He:
‘I am alive today, and dancing in the wind
that cools the grass the sun is burning brown
The dunes demur, and gliding gulls rescind …’
She:
‘His splayed legs, in shorts, displayed from calves to toes
are dead ringers for plucked turkey tom cadavers
as far, too far, as epidermis goes.’
adagio
stage direction
She makes a wish and writes it on a paper
and seals it inside a bottle with a kiss.
they dance, both singing:
‘We laze upon the littoral and think
we are thinking. Thoughts as thoughtless as the waves
advance and crest and surge onto the sand
in which despite their fecundity nothing grows …’
her variation:
‘A plucked turkey carcass, bled and oven bound
shows better skin tone than the hide that’s found …’
his variation:
‘The deadpan surly words mask how we flirt …’
coda
The stake-fried chicken sizzles and goes out
for waffles.
[Shurly chicken-fried steak? Ed.]
‘Doze wear de daze,’ the possum says.
He Bojangles, holding on
with tail to tree as he sashays
to a Drifters tune long gone
up to that place where good songs go.
It’s called Blueberry Hill.
He segues in a staid mambo.
He thinks he always will.
Earth Tourist 