Name Poem 3

To William J. Clinton,
Our President quondam, 
Who's shown that he takes the whole world
For his condom.   

MUSICK'S EMPIRE

Musick, the mosaique of the aire....
Marvel, Andrew Marvell,
Meditation,
Contemplation,
Wordless prayer.

WHITE HORSE (IRELAND)

A white horse on a green hill,
And all around me the land of Gael.

The world's garden, the world's garland,
Ireland, Ireland.

Name Poem 2

Here's to George López, the professional clown,
Now, in addition, professionally Brown.



This post is a reaction to the blatant racism of Lopez's
short-lived variety show.

THOSE COLD NOVEMBER NIGHTS

Those cold November nights so long ago,
My family would walk outside and hear
The wild geese calling softly overhead—
Invisible formations in the black, transparent air.
And, guessing at origins and destinations,
My elders would conjecture how
The geese knew when to go, and where—then stay
To name faint constellations: the Great Bear,
And slant Orion's Belt and fire-tipped Bow,
And Cassiopeia's tilted starry Chair.
I didn't know, back then, as now I do,
There was, there is, no husbandry in heaven:
Their lights are all on, but nobody's home.

These days, I turn to you, who wouldn't know
The North Star from red Mars or Venus trembling near the moon
—Whose darker constellations I can't see,
But know are there—and you are always home.
You are home.

Name Poem 1

Here’s to Janis Joplin, who got big and stayed big
With her peerless impressions of a slaughtered pig.

SEPTEMBER SNOW

I noticed it was snowing, dirty snow,
big fat flakes drifting slowly down.
I was not surprised, although it wasn’t cold—
such strange things have been known
to happen.  Now I was dreaming,
I was dancing in the snow, head thrown 
back, arms out, hands open
to catch the flakes that floated down,
warm and soft on my fingers
like soft, greasy ashes.  And now 
we were running and screaming....


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Image from http://blog.holidaycars.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Nw-York-City-Snow-Storm.jpg

VIEW OF THE MISSISSIPPI FROM FORT HILL AT VICKSBURG BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL PARK AND CEMETERY

From the wide meandering drive
you look away, beyond the lines
of white anonymous markers,
down to where the barges
are pushing past the piers,
each as slow as the hour hand of a clock,
while tiny speedboats whine
like mosquitoes as they skip up and down,
skimming the water
to better their times.

The tape-recorded tour guide at Fort Hill
makes it a point to say
that the River isn't what you see
—“the River” around here
always means the Mississippi—
but the Yazoo Diversion Canal,
an artificial waterway
created by the Army Corps of Engineers
after the River shifted away
and left Vicksburg behind.

The real Mississippi winds,
like a snake uncoiling, on the other side
of the shifting sandbars and temporary islands
that lie in the distance,
looking like solid ground
crowded with scrub-oak, cypress, willow, and pine.

Several hours further down,
at New Roads in the Parish of Pointe Coupée,
the River once twisted itself out this way.
On the Louisiana side
they made the old bed into a resort,
a playground for aquatic sports,
called False River Lake.
They have sail-boating and water-skiing there,
and trolling and fishing from the shore
lined now with substantial real estate.

It all sounds pretty dull and safe,
and perhaps it is.
Perhaps there’s a point to be made
for complacency, though: The Chinese say,
with Mandarin politesse,
“May you live in interesting times,”
—when they don’t mean to bless.

More than once the River has
struck at a town;
of that rip-roaring sinful place,
Natchez-under-the-Hill,
there isn’t much left now;
and at Grand Gulf,
half an hour south of here,
fifty-six blocks of busy, sleepy people
sloughed off into the water
bit by bit, without a sound.

Only a few minutes away,
antique and beautiful,
the clock-faced steeples of Port Gibson wait,
set back decorously not-too-near
the soft slopes of the Little Bayou Pierre,
a minor tributary that every one there
calls “By a Pier.”
They watch the town’s two bridges—
the skeletal old one, mostly sucked down
in the great storm of ’Fifty-Four,
and the squat ugly new one, that brute mass and weight
have held in place so far.
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Photo from http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-powerful-rivers-in-the-world.php

OUT OF THE SIXTIES

Oh, look! Look! Here they come,
with beads and braids and tie-dyed feathers,
the hippie happie demonstrators
marching against the world’s Darth Vaders,
laughing and singing and loving each other,
blithe go-fors for somebody’s alternate kingdom,
marching, dancing, turn up the speakers,
into the rainbow, into the visions, 
the sacred weed, the magic mushroom,
into the Happy Place, Walden, Eden,
the compound ruled by the loving leader,
the sex and the sweats and the screams of laughter,
and into the night of the trussed pigslaughter,
the barren tears, the begging and pleading,
the belly ripped open, a bloody melon,
wasting, wasting, all fall down,
—Trust me, trust always and only the young.



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Photo from http://inspirement.tumblr.com/post19730831916/

HAIKU, Group 3

Reading a book on haiku, the tradition and the lives of masters, has led me to try to record a certain transience and pathos in a few. The following are winter poems.

The park is sunny, windy and cold;
What's that whipped and whirling thing--
An oak leaf or a sparrow?

On a bare black branch, a crow
Hunches against the pale
Yellow sky of sunset.

Thunderstorms break the night;
Lightning strobe-lights the flat bedroom,
Outlining everything in black.