8. WHAT YOU GET A MAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING?
Every year around my birthday
we go through the same ritual,
my three sons, earnest in their otherness,
self-contained in the perfection of youth
And my wife, whose clear eyes
and warm hands dart
surely from one task to another
with all the care and heart required
And still they feel compelled to ask;
though they never accept my answer,
plain as the noses on their faces.
and so we engage in this curious dance
Where I must name a thing
and they must fetch it for me,
wrap it in foil and ribbons,
pretending they themselves are not the gift.
9. SENSEI-LESS
This is more than I know how to do,
this—this exposition of the Lyric Soul.
How do others do it? Can it be,
it's just a pure ideal, never realized?
I looked in Kizer's book, it wasn't there.
Then I looked in Hope (AD) and, yes,
It's true that he talks about it,
"the one thing you must not tell though of course you know it"
and, yes, the way he describes it
is exactly what I imagine,
yet it isn't within the musty pages
of his ancient volume.
I tasted Hillman's Loose Sugar,
for the picture on the back promised it.
And perhaps she does deliver: her River song,
her early sex, her male nipples...
But nowhere do I see the thing I want:
the yearning of the half-froze ugly duckling,
the rapture of the first time, skin on skin
the roundness of the newborn's dimpled cheek.
Sigh. If I want to find the warm caress
of Fragrant Summer's Breeze upon my Cheek
It seems I won't surprise it from a book
I have to plumb it from some inner world.
10. HOUSE OF USHERS
Another meal
of beans and cabbage.
Another non-
conversation
of blank smiles and
platitudes
we call it grace
and loving tact,
But which is better?
Which less unkind:
the whitewashed fence?
or the harsh truth?
Perhaps too much tact
was always the problem.
11. UNAESTHETIC
Now that I'm turning 55 and have to relinquish any illusions of youthfulness, I am learning to see with clear eyes that the aging figure who looks back at me in the mirror with his receding hairline, his wrinkled for head, his crows feet, his large nose, his protruding belly… All of that is not the image of myself that I have clung to all these years.
And when I see a healthy woman in her twenties, who one can't help but admire, yet I am not even acknowledged, or, if I am, it is as an avuncular and sexless well-wisher, so I am all too aware that I am far removed from that time in my life when I had the effrontery to expect her notice in kind, leaving me with nothing better to hope for now than that she might appreciate the beauty of my sons.
12. TENNIS ON
I tried to get some lyricism from his book
but it was all glory to the fallen hero
and laments to the tragic youths who lost true love
without any of what I—in my ignorance—supposed
to be the heart of lyricism,
the bucolic incantation, the romantic song.
Shouldn't there have been a rich green lawn,
a little copse of daffodils creekside,
a moldering stone bridge where she would stand,
and drop her rosebuds into the gurgling brook?
Or why not some tender-hearted paen
to that care-worn ancestor whose daughter
oft betimes would pet his fevered brow,
would read to him some noble biblical verse,
thus saving his immortal soul from doom?
Something that might help me to recall
my own earliest days in that green wood of youth
when my two closest brothers would come in
from play beneath the maples and the hawthorns
chasing turtles in the creek, or mad for snakes,
and there our youthful mother stood,
spooning porridge to my little sister's mouth,
while Pater, in his den, smoked a cigar,
perusing that month's Heritage Club volume.
13. WHEN KQED PLAYS FLORIAN LEOPOLD GASSMAN
You start off a lyric poem with something about the sky,
maybe it is a patient euthanized upon a
table,
or the bloodied eye of a boxer lying on the canvas
but in my case the sky is just diffuse thule fog.
Or maybe you talk about vegetation, the scent
of the tropical jasmine, the lilacs of spring,
the sweet smell of summer hay
which would bring you to some babbling brook,
teeming with frogs and fish, herons like shadows
creaking through the reedy shallows.
But I am sitting in my garage, my tiny window
looks out onto a jumble of leaves and a tarp.
Even the radio is not cooperating, with its serviceable
but calculated overture by Gassman
the violins and oboes wheezing and whirring
like so many mechanical songbirds
and this is not going to be a day
of beauty and sensuality,
no silken thighs or dewy lips,
no fragrant wafts of summer flora, but
the industrious march of minutes leading into meaning,
ablutions and preparations for work
another earnest day of getting on with getting on.
14. YOUNGEST
He had to go from being
his elder brothers' toy,
the focus of our nurturing attentions,
to the annoying tagalong,
the social liability. True, girls
might say he was "cute,"
but that didn't make up for his embarrassing childishness,
his earnestness and enthusiasm,
his lack of cool.
Now, when he wants their attention,
he pokes them in the ribs,
he hides their things.
They respond with a surly vitriol,
cutting insults, scathingly dropped,
an explosion of ineffectual bruising.
And that all does hurt , true,
but it beats being ignored.
15. FLAG DAY
Only a little less superficial than accidents of birth are considerations based solely on appearance: its asymmetical geometric pattern, with its blue field up in one corner, could not be perceived as particularly artistic. But our flag never aspired to be a work of art. It’s the no-nonsense design of an industrious people, of pragmatists who didn’t choose to incorporate fanciful beasts, crests, or gee-gaws. The first Americans didn't have time for that sort of thing, just as they had no place for royalty-worship. And though the country, especially in its infancy, was home to breathtaking natural beauty, the flag of those pioneers also didn’t indulge in voluptuousness, in complicated landscapes. Its citizens were more interested in cultivating the landscape than in celebrating it. Which must be why those stars and stripes are an abstract form. It is a flag for a working-class population, a citizen-farmer—nowadays maybe we should say a “citizen-worker”—who doesn’t chose to commemorate people above him or exploit people below him. And maybe that hasn’t always been as true as it should be, but that’s the national ideal which I believe in.
17. COCKTAIL PARTY 6/11
Après six semaines des constructions
de bordels dans la cuisine
de dégâts partout, de dîners en carton
une invitation de notre voisine :
cocktail et apéro chez elle.
Des tas de petits plats d'amuse-gueule:
poivrons grillés doux et tendres,
un foie gras à patiner, onctueux,
sur des petits morceaux d'un pain
mousseux et herbeux aux citrouilles
et confiture riche de figues aussi
un boisson de rhum, jus d'orange et de grenadine
qui allait très bien avec olives amers et salés,
des chips et croquant avec dip d'artichauts
des saucisses grillées succulents
et des personnages sympathiques,
qui nous distrairent de nos peines.
16. FLAG DAY II 6/10/17
There is a worse desecration of the flag that even the most ardent defenders of the flag never seem to complain about. A disrespect, not of its physical form, not of that square of cloth, but more perniciously of the ideals of freedom, self-reliance, equality, that the flag is supposed to represent: Men who fly our American flag over the overseas factories where child labor and exploited workers toil, and not even for any purported good to the American people, but for their own selfish and un-American profits while hiding behind our flag. Or corporations who fly our symbol over the environmental disasters they create in other countries? Isn't that a worse degradation of the flag, to drag it in the muck behind their ugly havoc? Or what in my mind is the most disturbing of all, the anti-Democratic mercenaries who wrap themselves in our flag and thereby sully the once-respected name of America as they destabilize the sovereignty of other nations, assassinate intellectuals and democratically elected leaders, and skulk behind thrones propped up with American firepower. I wish everyone in this country would pay less attention to the silly college kids and their little temper tantrums than to this form of desecration--even if their pious sham flags never touch the ground.
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