Babette’s Draw

Bab edh-Dhra or Babette’s Draw, what’s

it to you Pilgrim?  Copyright infringement

on Babette’s of Jerusalem?  The food is

pretty good there if you count internet hits

accounting for taste.  At Babette’s it is difficult

to know if even a date or savory stew prepared

by a jealous half brother in search of a birthright

might put your heart in his predatory sight.

A mindful desert sun oversees a profound

conspiracy of unimaginable depth. Tough luck,

imagination.  And what was that Sarah up to anyhow? 

Who made her a priestess to some other unannounced deity? 

A deity ready to take her kind into unlikely account in that

time and place.  Unlikely.  Totally unlikely.

Reload.  The Philistines await at the gate.

Hungarian Sonnet

Little Eva, Hungarian refugee child, painted

astonishing bright water-based color scenes

of nativity on the window on the Third Grade

classroom at Oakdale Christian, Grand Rapids Michigan.

Corner of Oakdale and . . . but now it is time

to check the Google map which reminds one (me)

that Oakdale is not the street but a state of mind

at the corner of Fisk and Neland.  Good to be there though. 

Eva whose parents fled the Hungarian rebellion of

Imre Nagy although my parents and the Reader’s Digest

called him something else.  Ivan perhaps.  Perhaps confused

with Ivan the Terrible.  And does Eva remember me?  Not likely,

although there were those who thought I sang as beautifully

as Eva painted.  They were wrong.  As anyone can be.

Xcuses, Xcuses

Persons from Porlock

      will be shot on sight (site?)

Don’t stop me when I’m

      working, working, working . . .

It takes an ocelot to laugh

      it takes an awful lot

      in life         to cry

but the ocelot

      ate the housework

     

to say nothing of

      the housekeeper

Now if that’s not something

      to cry about

      I won’t know

      what is

until the lying liability

      lies about

demanding redemption an only

      lying liability can demand

All an ocelot can do is laugh

      at the lots in our lives

And I do mean alot!

The President Remembers

Willow Vixen would could have been enough

of a girl for him in some other more

transparent age.  Things had changed.  So had

his standards.  He used to care. He still did

in a way. A very strange way.  What about

that funny little tragedy, the tower coming

down around his very ears.  What did they call

that again? Babel?  Wasn’t that the name of

some Yiddish poet?  He found himself very

confused.  Greenwood?  What kind of name was that?

Nobody he had ever known, and certainly never

respected. Except maybe that one time

      in Cheyenne when the eyes of the world

(wake up? you mean I am?) stared out

at a Brave New One, and went running for cover.

Modern American Poetry

The young man puzzles over vagaries

of Modern American Poetry.  And it’s pretty vague

when you get right down to or around or

even behind it.  I’m sure behind it!  Yay! Whoopie!

Here’s to Modern American Poetry! Will our fan-

tastic devotion preclude devastating loss?  It must! 

It will!  Modern American Poetry can and

will fire live rounds.  We will have “wealth without money.” 

Still, good as it gets, someone has to

pay the bills.  Oh well.  Let that fall to our

wage earners. They won’t get paid much, but we

can always stop paying the water bill even though

without water the evolution of our species

might require a little evolution.  As time goes by.

Baseball in OZ

            for David Schaafsma

Begins in a cricket ground.  While the gophers eat

my potatoes, my cabbage, and after all that is gone

threaten the carrots and a lazily earned sense

of wellbeing.  All that is too damned bad.

Let’s keep our categories clear.  She wants

to mix casarecce with week-old rotini.  This is

not permitted.  At least not by me.  Don’t bug me

when I’m watching, watching, watching, baseball

from OZ.  We have lovage from the side

garden where oxalis (mostly) rules.  The gophers

got more of all of that than any sentient

being might want to share with such

creatures, let alone others unsuch.

But there’s still the still parsley they didn’t

get, but we will, with tomato beef sauce. 

Signs

An evil and adulterous generation seeks after

a sign, so count me in.  Gimme gimme gimme

one of them signs.  Say what? “There shall no sign

be given to it?”  Bullshit.  I don’t believe you.

You, and your henchman Jonah have proven

again and again to be unreliable sources. 

Him and his whale?  Right?  Like sex at 65? 

So you and your whale and those signs can go

and freely screw your own selves.  Baseball?  Don’t

talk to me about baseball, baseball is a long

lost memory from when we used to be civilized.

Civilized as a people, a population, I mean.

What do I mean?  What I do mean.  Mass does equal

each of us, and the indeterminate substances between.

Lost Poem Lament

           

Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft night, ob sie unter

            Lebenden gehn oder Toten . . .

I wrote it.  I swear I did.  Pliny the Younger might

have helped, but the line was unendurable.

The Minotaur had left the building for

Cheyenne, home of the Dense Pack, where

in the glow of the last green light

off the Laramie Range the poetess

strokes her Cowboy’s thigh and dreams of

the night’s implosive fusion.  Remembers

such less thrilling times a mere

forty-six miles west, the fifth degree grade,

the bust of the Emancipator, and further on,

knowing all about it.  A casino cowboy so unlike her own

recalls Christianity deep beneath the surface

and the people who gave Cheyenne her name

and the trouble buried deeper than their fame.

I had no idea . . .

            Tambourine Life

                        was linear, had it   as

                                             soft surrealism

            throw the pasta at the ceiling

            if it sticks, there, it’s done

            read it too many times but not often

                        enough

to get the MEANING.

Tambourine Life has a MEANING?

Gimme a break!

            . . . possibly because it never occurred . . .

            . . . to me . . .

           

meaning existing, I mean

                        not in that universe

            Excellent Edition!

            (IMO Ted Berrigan)

The Goddamned Arapahoe

As the unsung but dedicated

      romantic lyricist remarked

      things were even more complicated than her

      in the deepest bunks of Noah’s ark.

So there they parked, as disembarked

      & all too casually remarked

      how pleasantly they might embrace the dark

      & feel it crawl too seriously into

            their entwined hearts.

A sparrow cried.  She said it was a lark

      on which she had embarked thinking

      too little of him & them and

      that to which it had come

            in the end in the land

            of hopes & dreams & that goddamned Arapahoe.

Love makes me stupid

I have been through the rain

and the wind and the pain and

none of it would be worth a damn

      if I weren’t stupid.

Stupid is as stupid does and stupid

has been doing it.  Doing business

under an assumed name.  I, me, mine

      as those Beatles sang.

Oh the songs of love in these

halcyon days.  Our two souls beat

as one disturbed two-chambered heart

      in even the worst of circumstances.

For all the good it did or does.  We were

      after all stupid.  And only two too proud

      to fly our flagging stupidity in great

      pridefulness.  It was the day of the

      valentine.  What else could we do

      but keep doing it?  Stupidly, naturlich! 

In the Clearing

It is quite clear in the clearing.  Something about

a Romain Gary novel, something about

elephants.  A famous work of nonfiction

concerning a racist dog.  I’ve known some

guys like that.  They never quite got to

repenting as best they could their wayward ways.

Amazed, they would stand there emitting  

doggy emissions and even worse emitting

elephantine and scarifying traces of gaseous nonsense.

Madame Rosa has been added to the family

wishlist.  Which we will take to the library.

The librarian will explain vainly that

“Yes, we have no elephants.”  Taking us for louts

with no roots in heaven, or anywhere thereabouts.

       (March 2014)