31. [revised and submitted]
Why kind of question and what kind of test is it, when everyone gives
the same one word answer after 16 weeks of coaching:
Yes? Catholic
Confirmation one rump of the Socratic rite of initiates
to the age of reason each shackled far from their doting retinue
with a blessed vial of hemlock to answer
Is this the life you choose? How false all the hand-wringing with each swan dive off the Golden Gate Bridge!
How incomplete the platitude
Things do improve. Why so taboo to
place your own chips, red or black?
We've invested so much in you, that's why.
The Middle Passage filled with pain—feeding, overseeing day by day.
Is it growing at all clear: you're here as other people's property?How meager the dished up diet of freedoms. Cry or smile. Stand or sit.
Leave the top button open or button it. Virginity or lust.
Spend the whole day housecleaning or just dust the Trojan War figurines.
Dropped in a pail of water,
Do whatever you please! Preparations
for escape include the genes to trade your tail for sticky feet
and being tipped out by a possum and lifted in lips to a pond.
32. [revised and submitted]
No, that's too dim a view. The so-called freedom you compare life to
is abstract. Once you give it definition, the finite, fen,
enters
the picture. No banks, no water. So good luck, tadpole, being buoyant.Genesis describes a time when was all was water and an overneath
in which a spirit moved. Both free: mind without weight and weight without mind.
Inception together confined them.
No, it made possibilities!I was the weight, you were the spirit, Martine. It was never a trap.
It was an opening. God didn't know what he's dipping his finger in!Remember our day at Seabright with the tuna fish?
Yes, it's like that.
We didn't get just what we'd dreamed about but what we got was realer
and better. The real puts you on the cross, breaks the legs of all your thoughts.Bull in the china shop?
Yes, Tom, wi!
Stomps you, brings you to tears and then serves
you some food with edges and textures better than what you imagined.But that's exactly the distraction, the trap. We stopped chasing our dream
and sat and ate what the waiter brought us. What difference does it make how
good it was?
It's all the difference in the world, Tom, only not to you.33. [submitted]
God's reading all the fucking poems, the cold bastard—that's where they all go!
I think I'm writing something useful
(for?) only to discover
he's decoyed me and a million other poets into churning out
odes, elegies, sestinas and sonnets simply to feed his sweet tooth:
He heaps them on his coffee table to read during pitching changes
and between innings of baseball as well as during all the time-outs
he's inserted into football games. If those beer-sotted sports fans knew,
there'd be eggs through stained-glass windows and public pissings on “The Barefoot Boy.”
I should be tickled someone takes an interest but his total absence
of discrimination sucks out the joy. Why can't his choirs of angels
furnish him verses? Does insignificance of theme or oddity
of device make us such addictive snack food? Does he go rummaging
epic tragedy when he surfs over to The History Channel?
But you know what upsets me most? I keep hoping I will succeed in
opening proud portals or windows in poems I know perfectly well
are only cheesy sandcastles. I mean, goodness gracious, I built them.
34. [revised and submitted]
We're posed American Gothic before the Luxembourg Palace clock.
It's 12:05. Three dolls perched on foot-worn marble stairs, and pink flowers,
leaked from Anne's left ear. From my right ear: beside white flowers, two matrons
shared a laugh. How did the nice Czech coax them out into the photograph?
Take me to your bed once more before you go.
Your wife will take you back
if you ask sweetly. Look at the snapshot, don't you see it?
All I see
is that it is late. There's still an hour till the cab comes.
Non. Drink your Coke.Everything she owns is packed up. The kitchen's bare but for her suitcase
and the rickety No. 14's we sit on. A correspondence
between the physical and spiritual stares us in the face. A clock
in the valise still ticks. An inch outside the window, a brick wall waits
and an odor of piss wafts in search of poignance. Her eyes are dead set.
She was not here. No flowers or little figures ever spilled from ears.
My Coke and her Sprite are no realer than their logos, gas phantoms held
captive in sweet water, and food chemists waving molecular wands.
I would like to think there's something more to all of this than what appears.
No, there's just us, Chè, cloven lovers knee to knee on two trembling chairs.35. [submitted]
Our pond a shiner in hard early light, something night did before it
barreled off like the freight train, leaving behind a gratitude of calm.
Dawn neither denies nor over-dramatizes the chronic abuse,
beatings the bloated weeping willows and warty spruce have grown used to.
Crows, nurses who have seen too much, weave coarse fibers into a loose gauze
bandage of cold air they callously, accusingly slap onto the bruise.
The huge volume of darkness below the surface is cold; heavy; thick;
not wet—only what was dry wets. If evaporated, it could inflate
a small heaven with hurt air. Fish lurk, we imagine. Tasteless mussels
in their beds. Weeds we imagine waving don't. Slight warmth presses up from
the heart of the earth, enough to give diatoms ideas but no more than that.
A bare tree with a still rook oversees our helpless, passive eyes—
mirror the passing clouds, squalls of rain, geese, cranes, sun, moon, cold and the twice
daily and once nightly box cars—containing nothing of our own but
low appetite fish, self-replicating swarms of gnats, a staunch beaver
with a bright birch hutch and a rivalry with a muskrat but no mate.
The rook could lift its wings and fly off but it won't and we won't. Sorrow
attaches us. We can't picture ourselves on a whitewater river
or great lake full of strength. It's a mental trap. One of the pond weeds
breaks the surface with prim gray buttons for darning needles to sun on.
Autumn algae blooms, thick custardy lumps, green-blue, unbearable, until
ice comes and numbs it, winter the best time of year, waiting for silent
snow to cover us overnight and offer hare tracks in the morning.
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