The question whether poetry still matters
is jejune this April as it ever may
become or was. Illogic in it shatters
all hope of answer. Fitful fey things pay
silly devils to say there’ll be hail to play
with in the desert, before poetry
begins (or stops) to matter to the free
and gloriously inequitable curse
of prose that’s lifted high enough to be
poetic tropes. It could always be verse.
We are chipmunks, or we would be were we wiser,
dashing hither dither darting till we die.
We race telling stories none of us remember
how often they were told or when or why.
The wind stirs leaves we fancy are emotions.
A truth on Monday Tuesday is a lie.
We learn sharp nostalgia when we leave the nest
then forget that too that way we do the rest.
‘It is time we stopped taking walks together. Follow.’
The jackdaw knows we’re watched and is ashamed.
‘I don’t expect you’ll fly like show-off swallows,
but if we stay aground like this folks think I’m maimed.’
‘It is sad’, he adds, ‘that only in reflections,
like this one, can you reach the chimney tops.
If you’d better coordinate your genuflections
or hold you mouth right when you practice hops
we’d be the bee’s knees. Walk right on the edge
like I am, and, when I do, try to soar.’
Intent, I move from Hatch almost to Fledge
but chicken out, unfeathered, one time more.
‘There are few bipeds I’ve met with who are ground-leashed.
Are you an ostrich? You will get me ostracised’,
says the jackdaw sotto voce, adding, ‘Sheesh!’
I am fed up being walked and criticised
and I hope he’ll leave. He demonstrates a takeoff,
wings pitched to rise, and I call out, ‘Farewell’
but he pretends that I yelled ‘stroganoff ‘
and answers, ‘Where’s the beef?’ – he’s smart as hell
but a travesty as friend. He eyes a boat
and asks would I require a flying bridge
or an aeroplane to get across this moat.
I tell him blackbird pie is in the fridge,
and he says he’s et already and he alters
position getting set to cross the street.
‘Is walking something else at which you falter?’
says the jackdaw. ‘Now I’ll show you something neat.’
And he does. He crosses his path then takes mine.
When Jackdaw walks he walks with fire and flair.
‘Try this’, he says in parting. He’s so fine,
both feet at once stride neatly on thin air.
The papa bear rises in anger
and throws up the sash and his dinner
plus the tickets he’s bought for the races.
They’ve delivered him bile but no winner.
The mama bear, pining for roses,
sashays to a tout she’d once dangled
to make papa pout, she supposes,
but the tout coldly flattens her angles.
The baby bear Just Right is crying
to change papa’s luck or its diaper
but both parents are deaf or distracted
and the race track has no candy striper.
For Mother’s Day he gives to all his spouses
who have proved viviparous Maseratis.
To the others he gives sherry (sweet) and flowers,
and a Haitian potion to the one who’s dotty.
Perhaps it’s him who’s dotty, they’re not telling
what only they and he know. Coming clean
would tear it and their treasure trove would dry up
should the world learn he was eunuched when thirteen.
(taking notes at a public meeting addressed by Mai Selph)
He slurs his words but whose words would you have him
slur, not those of yours nor Jesus Christ’s?
His verbal bons mots do not if you halve them
sum up to something better than what’s spliced
between the sheets, main braces and stale phlegm
that cross and short connections in his mind.
I’d be preciser but I’m being kind.
I’d be grammatical but he is blind
to what I’m writing here: he does not read
and more precision would not add one jot
to this jammy, namby-pamby polyglot
who stands before us speaking. He’s enthralled
by what he thinks he’s saying. Wan eyes glisten
as he assumes because we face him that we listen.
If cynicism’s seven I am nine.
The labels used for politics seem daft
as those of literature, and even mine
are drafty as a rotten-boarded raft.
Conservative is meaningless where Fate
is actually nothing. Liberal is less.
Romantic’s passed by years its sell-by date
and Realism’s forced and must confess
that they are all, these labels, nothing now.
But Life itself is filled with Gems it means
to be adored, not analyzed on how
they might be labeled. I adore the clean
and mystic wonder of Life’s precious things
like birdsong, smiles, and ageless wedding rings.
Of the night sleeps I remember none are short
as this one, stopping on the second line
of counting sheep to stare into the dark.
Outside, a baby’s screaming like a cat.
I pretend it is the other way around
and blank out themes I wrestled with in ‘Piece Work.’
One’s killing to save peace. It only works
for spans of time that are extremely short.
A chamber of the sort that takes a round
expels a load that tracks a laser line
from a man I’d called my neighbor towards the cat.
My eyes trace glaring red-blacks through the dark
into the trees. The morning starts off dark
and worsens with each step I walk to work.
On a tree I see a poster for a cat:
a child is missing. There’s another short
note penned below it: felt-tip single line
that the cat and child no longer are around.
My partner in our workplace shuns my round
of questions. Answers leave us in the dark
as they must for now; we only have the line
we gave each other when we came to work.
The lines of customers grow thin and short
and thinking comes in quietly as a cat.
We two, who once were proud of how we’d cat
around, when times were easy, have come round
to valuing what’s important now we’re short
of options, and we rage against the dark
together, as if rhetoric could work
a miracle. We want a party line.
‘Peace at all costs’ and ‘Do not cross this line’
compete, and we consider if the cat
survives its boxing; we ask whether work
will be an option if bad forces round
upon us and extinguish peace. The dark
unites us and cuts hopes and whining short.
We load our weapons for the coming round
of vigilance, hold lines against the dark,
and think our war successful. Peace is short.
Earth Tourist 