'Laundry List' and Other Poems

Laundry List

The stranger walks toward the children, who walk
into the sky. A lesson is born. There are those
who'll say we're better for it. Not us, though.
We were born to ignore warning signs and deny witness tampering.
Otherwise we'll keep to the agenda forged for us.
Tinned elegies. 'That' pretty much encapsulates
it while our time on the planet ambiguously finishes.

And though we were nominated for honors,
others ascended in our place, were silent
in the enveloping paradox. Invited to inspect old cars,
few realized what he or she was assenting to,
nor how a blank wall turned state's evidence bloomed
into a parlor of paranormal events and happenings -
just what we'd expected of the leafless afternoon's bestirring twitch.

'Most storied' - I'm getting there
though I don't need the attention - hardly,
because it just happens, or ... ?
                                            I don't know how I feel.
It's ignorance of numbers and their consequences, us too.
Propped on an ambiguous plaid in a cottage orné, one listens
to forgotten arias from a petunia-shaped speaker.
Donna è mobile. Où va la jeune Hindoue?
Oui, c'est elle, c'est la déesse. But don't
release me just yet. Too little is too soon.
As well groan like a paddleboat in a ditch
as come to accept these late practices as our own.
Many questions remain 
                                 and want no part in it.



Card of Thanks

Asked if he liked mutton, he turned away.
No, not here, this is today! And others might have it so.
He galloped away like a sheep, who seldom lacked champions
in his young time, when bored they came and sat beside him
in twilight sometimes, and violet rocks ceased chanting
about the sublime to organize later façades
of marsh gas. O it seemed subtle, whatever was hissing
like a vulture over the town. You're going to feel well,
giants of rhetoric, devastating in the now.

Nominated for the likely reimbursement, who are
we to argue across the shirt, or pressure, which is wrong,
two flatfoots and an even bigger sea?

Whatever, I'm
grateful for this moment of trying, criminal tuberose,
only it was so unlike me I
started to cry in the van. Somebody picked up on
me being included at all. What's your
status? Oh, I came along with the others,
was sorted out and blotted in with them when times
were dense and nobody knew when the future would be. O
let's dream inside each other, should be.
My furniture ball makes a wand when unstrutted;
two cameos vie for three listings.
The beautiful disease catches us all.



Never Two without Three

Seeing through glasses what the glasses put there
or wanted to see, one opts out. They have seen
and too clearly what runners-up have been accused
too thoroughly of seeing, and that's it,
for the one time. Optimum runners, jadeite blinkers.
What was that I meant, or said? Alas, it had no style,
was shifted by a library trustee, let fall where it
casually was, the audience 'none the wiser.'

Otherwise there's not much to get excited about.
Tears fall in place in the classroom, it having been decided
to look elsewhere on this day, and all will
end kindly, abruptly, the way things ended
when you read about them and longed to see how
they were coming along, just once, in this orchard
of the truth no one believes in, and has the country been affected.
That's only what they said, or something.

A loud noise will contradict silence every time.
Memory is so busy, retrieving orbs thought glistery
in their day, now a source of indignation.
Perhaps that's why the contest rules stressed sincerity,
neatness, and aptness of thought. Who else
would be looking out for one, after all, at this late date?
It's a backward odyssey, ending at the poisoned spring,
with nothing, ever, to be done about it, or blame apportioned
in old newspapers blown across blue
pavement into chain-link fence, sad to see us go.



Palmy

Not beaten to a pulp, not even tapped
on the shoulder in the crowd at noon
by a well-meaning but careless friend,
then left to sink under your own regard.
So what if children don't dance, and burghers
recall their dignitas? It was your scruples
brought us here. I first read you that.
The time to go home has been now.

He will have thickened, your vast friend,
always sentient for what their agents
might deploy, then barren, less hybrid, sustained
by a mood. Shadows replace what looked
dappled then, when there were fewer takers,
more points of origin, less evaluation. More brass,
less hubris. It all balances out in the opposite
current that keeps us alive, the baleful
and the artless. Fathers, sons, accountants, cars
asked us to keep their place. We grew innocent.