|
Second Nature
The oleanders wave
their poison wands
in poison air
like prairie weeds
I’ve emigrated.
No elm, not even a dead one,
arches from this hot clay.
How shocking the palms are
not soft at all
not like hair for all
their ferny intricacy.
Rough trunks
leaves that gleam in the heat
like painted metal.
their fronds, fondled,
slice your hands.
but in the tent
and temple of this magnolia
glossy darkness
hung with lights:
I close my eyes,
inhale,
grow small
and find the north foundation wall
behind its row of bridal veil
thin place a dog,
a child goes
where lily-of-the-valley gorws.
As if, if I bent
to touch this crackled earth
I’d fee that softness
like bread, like cake,
wet, loam-flecked earthworms
venomless ants.
Take what your vague earthmother grants
coarser grass that’s green all year
lizard for lilac for egret for spear-
like forsythia for saltmarsh for snow.
Go,
it’s a trade
perfume for perfume
a new depth of shade
where wisteria dazzles the moss hung tree.
|
|
Some Live Oaks
Three blocks closer to the beach there are none
But here, though stunted, they hold
made like their far cousins the salt cedars
beautiful in a balance of tribulations.
The wind turns what the sun lifts
as gravity arcs it all down. It’s hard
to believe there wasn’t a worker, “hammered
gold and gold enameling.” But Byzantium falls
Emperor and Sultan, the Patriarch, shorn of retinue
lives in the diminished splendor of his house
while those confections, satisfying the most sublime
intelligence of the eye whether or not
they come by chance
are lavished on us. As we stroll the neighborhood
up to Food King for cigarettes and milk
back from parole counseling, volleyball, church
or running the kids to ballet in the Volvo
they’re there waving heir ten thousand gothic leaves
phoenix feathers, feathers of the roc
everything in them gnarled, intricate, twisted,
perfect together, making a vivid splash of our land—
anchored life in the air, making a cave
of the sky.
Reading an Oleander
Leaf by leaf she noses it, decoding
here a whole spear there a tip
now a section of stem
as if it were the Summa Theologica
this squat plant in a playground.
Such attention! The mind and body of the bred
huntress one in pursuit of the message
inhaling it isomer by isomer
tracking, expertly, its tracings across the papyrus.
This is her Talumud, her Blackstone, her Constitution
help from her comrades in time.
A trail of awakenings
within the planetary densities of earth,
its thin envelope of air.
Generously given, though issued only after much
deliberation, subject to change and erosion,
put here on purpose,
such testimonies sustain her
and the world
keeps on dawning in doglight.
|
|
Café on the Beachfront
The wind
both always
and never
vanishes
Over the years
the skinny busboy
will thicken
or become a scrawny
chain-smoking
old man
the palm trees
sadder
in this salty
fumey wind
they don’t like
being boxed
on the concrete
trafficy
seawall
All things
are pointers pointing
as if
the palms
wrote in their own notebooks
watching as
I grow
defective
When I’m gone
someone else
will come
to something else
built here
look at the water
never quitting
mull the wind
the future
like the past
except for the decoration
already beginning.
|
|
A Window for the Annunciation
The angel glows, a little like a jukebox,
bright sleazy colors in his robe and wings.
Our Lady, the Tower of Ivory,
curves in humility like a sectioned tusk, though she’s not
passive, clearly. She’s been reading from a thick book,
a codex—a little out of time, as the architectural
angles, in their receding perspective, are a little
out of kilter on the two-dimensional plane.
A pot of something, maybe hyacinths,
blooms symbolically.
Art flowers blossom at Gabriel’s head.
The Holy Spirit, cramped a bit, to fit the composition.
sheds rays of red light, drops of blood
(a Freudian interpretations also tried to suggest itself.)
In the room, not a room but a patchwork
of cobalt lozenges, Mary’s face is severe,
unreadable, a little famished. She doesn’t
look fourteen. The androgynous angel,
his credible foot resting on a cloud puff,
is more the maidenly. It’s his arms, their positioning.
Art, like bigotry, sums things up quickly:
Men kill, women bless. When I take off my glasses
to check the way things balance, two blurs bulge
and cooperate asymmetrically. Nice work.
It’s not Chartres or Chagall, but the message
comes through. The priest, returning from
convivialities at the front door, watches me
jotting notes in my checkbook. Catholic churches
house every odd sort, he’ll let it go.
As I U-turn out of my spot by the parking lot
onto Avenue K, a street-tough young man,
dressed up, but not for church, bends gracefully
to the broken sidewalk to retie his daughter’s shoe.
|
|
Bag Lady
She’s learned to talk to cops with a Junior League hauteur
but the voice is too ready
her mesh bags make it clear:
I have nowhere else to keep my deodorant.
We don’t believe her when she says she isn’t stranded.
She’s brushed her hair
but the face she turns from both to booth
around the little universe of the coffee shop
is bloated by medication, by nights in awkward places,
its puffed flesh gathered carelessly by men who’ve mocked her
inferior men with rooms, with cars.
Through it all she’s kept a composure,
“My fiancé is coming to get me.”
Somewhere he exists, this phantom of the electrodes,
but tonight the man in blue radios her in.
|
