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September Rain
2
Sylvan
The hill-hung house wakes to another day.
Behind it, up the mountainside I’ve climbed,
I stand inside an early-morning cloud
that waits for the rising sun to wipe it out.
The chiggers waiting in the Queen Anne’s Lace,
the ticks in the path, the web across my face,
and the thorns in every locust tree I touch
persuade me I have not changed much coming home.
But I who have returned am other than
the molecules I was when I ran down
the mountain to the college and the sea.
The flaking house paint shows me chalky grey
foundation boards the garden snails have slimed.
Beneath the porch where once a possum cowered
and played it died each time I’d jump or shout,
I see the wagon that we used to race
and I do my very best but still can’t trace
my old acquaintances. They used to matter much,
I tell myself, and scratch names in the loam
that covers where, back then, a small brook ran
from just above the house down through the town
in search of deeper waters, just like me.
Bésame, Carnicero
Pig Duroc’s uncle What Me Worry
had ended, Duroc knew, as curry.
So our hero harbours little
sympathy for humans. Spittle
mars his enunciation when he
thinks back to the pony’s whinny
when the butcher’s axe had ended
hopes his uncle’s life extended
beyond the age that is now Duroc’s.
He knows the butcher is thinking ham hocks
so Pig Duroc plays his trump card,
speaks Spanish, speaking fast and hard
to the pony: ‘Palomino,
life is one sour Maraschino.
Kick the brute. Eternity
for him or his axe’s kissing me.’
Specious Spectacles
With my glasses on I see these marks are words.
With my glasses off I thought those sticks were people.
I was sure those floating white things were fluffed herds
of helium sheep taut-tethered to a steeple.
With my glasses on I see that the spire’s a tower
filled with drinkers emptying glasses as they strive
to honour Bacchus who looked like a swine,
I thought, but I see, now that he’s passed on,
that I must revise my vision of his traits.
The gulls, nee sheep, alight like broken glass on
the blurred blue water of Altea’s straits.
Bugged by Poetry
This ruby moves: it is a bug
in an empty shotgun shell.
The shell has served the bug as roof and rug.
I gauge it serves him well.
The bug wants more. He comes outdoors,
flaps his wings, flies to my book.
He says a sonnet only bores
a bug too small to look
across a large and ink-filled page.
I give him praise and drink.
I tell him poems are all the rage.
‘That can’t be true. I think,’
he says. ‘A single shotgun shell
costs more than any ode.’
He bugs off then – it’s just as well.
I’ve stepped on his abode.
A Poem Accepting Footnotes
Je commence à y voir clair.
01. I would have been nine had I been born on time
02. but decades passed and Eliot wrote on
03. and the plover rested, angel to the ferret
04. and left no stern atoned, no field untilled
05. until a footnote marked its pocking flight
06. and the ferret breathed in sulphur and expired. (1)
07. Le clair de lune brought clarity I wrote
08. and lunacy I lived for all my worth,
09. yclept out Ford my room and board to God
10. and tenancy my station while on Earth.
11. Not that it frangled. Rank was knot I pulled
12. and Gordian my gorgon, George B. praised.
13. As Cecil, a half brother, kept the B.,
14. I dropped mine off the balcony and braised
15. the ferret, nothing-waisted as their wont
16. is, though the hocks are tastier than rat,
17. and rats who walk on broken glass are prone (2)
18. to every corporal attitude except
19. that yclept as prone, and I’d lie if
20. I sold you squirrel as rat hand ewe wood stew.
Footnotes:
Je commence à y voir clair = I’m beginning to understand
La clair de lune = moonlight
I would wager that, given seventeen hours, bread, manchego cheese and three bottles of Navarra (two white and chilled, one red and not), I could write thirty-four pages of footnotes ‘explaining’ the references in this poem.
Thirty-four pages!
But I wood knot wont tow reed them <g>
Footnote 1. ‘and the plover rested, angel to the ferret / and left no stern atoned, no field untilled’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3) ‘CHORUSES FROM ‘THE ROCK, The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven’, lines 100-102: ‘Only the wind moves / Over empty field, untilled / Where the plough rests, at an angle / To the furrow…’
Footnote 2. ‘and rats who walk on broken glass are prone’ Cf. TSE (footnote 3, again) ‘THE HOLLOW MEN, A penny for the Old Guy’, line 9: ‘Or rats’ feet over broken glass’
Footnote 3. TSE = T.S. Eliot, a poet who wrote these incomparable lines: ‘In the room the women come and go / and talk of Michelangelo.’ (footnote 4)
Footnote 4. . . . – – – . . . – – – . . . Maybe you will continue these footnotes for me <S>
Cat and Pig Among the Pigeons
‘I am old,’ said Pig Duroc. ‘I missed the last bus.
and I had to walk toting this carp.’
‘You’re myopic as well,’ said Cat Slynog, then shied
from the pig, and played Bach on a harp.
The music they made as they harped and they carped
seemed to pigeons that flew by great grief.
Then the carp joined in; all three flatted and sharped
till the end of the day, and this brief.
Gone Song
I’ve been pushed away so often that I’ve left.
You don’t notice nothing missing. You don’t look.
And I left the music playing and the broken rocker swaying
and my heart there where you pressed it in the book.
The screen door slammed behind me in an off key
and the drums rolled thunder on the radio.
I looked back and saw you reading and I hoped I saw you cry
then I saw you pick the phone up, say, ‘he’s gone.’
Earth Tourist 