Windfall

The truth is, I cannot get into the garden
nor come to the sea. Yes, I have been in gardens
and stood at the shores of oceans, but we're speaking
of fictive things, my haunting metaphors.
Nothing has been resolved, nor anything gained
outside of gratuitous pleasure. Now summer
gains its foothold, burns the desert, burns
the stunted hills that here must serve as mountains.

My second son has made his rebellious yawp
and squirms in his mother's arms, suckling
at swollen breasts that conquered and kept me. Time
slides onward, oiled by motion, a measure
and not a thing itself. We should discuss concretes,
before I bury us in a heap of abstractions.

I stand in windfall, the scattered detritus
and still pristine remains of a feast of giants,
drunk of nectar fermenting for ages, sated
of left ambrosia, a cur on a banquet of crumbs.

But there we have it again, not one existent
in that quatrain. Where should we begin?
Begin. The wind sifts round the house, sighs
at windows, knuckles at doors. There is only one door.

Blinds quiver, cheaply manufactured, cracked;
the bougainvillea covers half the driveway:
Michael's legacy. A litter of toys and garbage
spills from the garage. Is anything accomplished?
A threshold crossed? The bougainvillea is real.


June 18-19, 2001

Marriage

To know a woman, you can only wait,
in hope that time will bring some revelation;
and may your patience and your will be great.

The smallest word might move her to a state
of blank disgust, or wide-eyed indignation.
To know a woman, one can only wait

until those sudden, sullen moods abate.
In the meantime, you'll get an education,
if both your patience and your will be great.

Think hard, lips sealed; and join in no debate
you cannot win. In your determination
to know a woman, you can only wait,

for a quick tongue will trip, and seal your fate,
and even a head shake is a provocation;
but if your patience and your will be great

you will not argue, or recriminate,
and find it's mostly sheer humiliation
to know a woman. You must learn to wait,
and may your patience and your will be great.



December 30, 2003

Fragment from The Passing of Flatus (1)

Long lost Elizabethan drama, attributed to Shakespeare


Act one. Scene one. A field.



TREMENS:
He is most foul. Behind our noxious general
Have I in battle marched, in discipline
Unmatched, in loyalty uncompromised;
Most honored of our Roman soldiery;
Yet liefer would I die upon a sword hilt
Than stand as his lieutenant in Valhalla.



SLAPPY:
We like two paddles wielded by an oarsmen
In sweet concordance jointly wend one way.
Here in these shadows let us like two thieves
Concur in means by which to dispossess
Our legion of this windy general.
Tremens, we must incite some mutiny,
And be it lawless and unmilitant:
Some crafty and satanic subterfuge
Wherewith to weaken Flatus and to change
Him from his armor to the less applauded
Costume of a rude civilian.
Let's have a blacksmith's apron round his paunch,
Or sullied vestment of a scullery knave.
He is too noisome and malodorous
To don the raiment of a general.



TREMENS:
Your words have weight to make the burden light
That like a stone hast lain upon my heart
Since first these machinations of revolt
Were whispered here between thy lips and mine.
Slappy, let none have wisdom of our words
Lest our ignoble and unkind designs
Bring disarray or disrepute to Rome.
For we are Rome. Our lips and tongues are Rome;
Our hearts flush with the civil blood of Rome;
Our swords are honed upon the plinths of Rome.
Flatus, albeit of prolific scents,
Of sickly smells and sour obnoxious stinks,
I say, this fuming, this effusive Flatus,
Is also Rome; his bairns, his wife, are Rome.
Therefore let caution join us. We are Roman...



SLAPPY:
Tremens, the horse you beat unmercifully
Now runs upon the sunny plains of Heaven.
Drive not thy boot against the dormant flesh
That, lifeless, draws the fly into the ditch.
Caution shall be our sole conspirator.
Upon this point we stand in such accord
As needs no poetry to give it strength.
In darkness, like two devils in Abaddon,
We whisper, making shadows lisp demonic.
The night hath sympathy, and bringeth soft winds
To mute our sibilant, serpentine connivings. (Rubs hands together)



1999

Fragment from The Passing of Flatus (2)

Long lost Elizabethan drama, attributed to Shakespeare



Act two. Scene three. A field.


SLAPPY:
In sober celebration of the flesh,
In frequent venting of concupiscence,
Make sportive tricks, lascivious caperings;
To truncate suffering, to kill desire,
To turn the cold valves of hard chastity,
To flush the chilled-fast vein with amorous fever,
Fill eyes with ardor, lips with wantonness;
To linger kissing at the coronet
That crowns with pink the sweet unsettled fat
Soft-covered in white silk: to lift, to weigh
The supple globes, to bring an agitation,
To set them dancing, pendulously bellied;
To brace the rider as she sits a' saddle
Rocking moist in fever, eyes full-lustered
As if made bright with wine: but ne'er have spirits
Kindled those orbs to blaze with such wild fire,
Nay, but thy johnson, Flatus, doth the trick,
That tickler of a lady's nether parts,
That prickling rogue, that bold up-popping jack,
That meddling serpent: he it is that maketh
Etnas of those soft-tufted mounds of Venus.


FLATUS:
Of all the fancies that a god designs
And plants within the gardens of men's brains,
Can any be less sensible than Love?
Pernicious little elf! No viler cherub
Did from Olympia, like foul weather, come.


SLAPPY:
Equestrienne, she vaunts her cloven haunches
And ruts upon the rigid post: she slides
And tugs and urges with her slippery cleft.
Her lips she bites, and thro' hard-clenched teeth
Makes a licentious and unsyllabled moan.
A moment's pause: her opulent rump she rests,
Now richly radiant with damp scented musk.
Anon she chomps the bit, is fain to ride.
Cry "tally-ho!" and beat the bushes, liege; but whither
Goest Raynard? He hast hied him to that furrow,
That steeped crevasse, that gorge of living blood,
And butts his nose in darkness, like a mole,
And tunnels further in the teeming trench.


FLATUS:
Of all the mad dreams which a man invents
And sows among the pastures of his heart
There can be none of greater detriment
Than that obnoxious malady called 'Love'.
'Tis a disease which thrives upon his blood
And rages in his veins like potent drink.
It makes a man a fool with tongue unloosed
Who in the street cries nightly like an owl,
"Tu-whit! To-whoo!", who in full wretchedness
Leans under ladies' windows, eyes uprolled,
His hands upon a full wide-bottomed lute,
Who with rude breath, wrought of the stench of love,
Sings some cracked tune to win him but a kiss!


SLAPPY:
Our rider, perched high in her wonted seat,
She gallops on apace, now all unkempt
And covered with a sheen of salty sweats;
Her breasts, like fruits grown soft and over-ripe,
Tumescent, turgid with excess of juice,
Depend and sway. Now in thy fetching fingers
Gather good harvest, hold, palpate, and press;
Stretch toes to the horizon. Hot purgation
Cleanseth the vein: froth of the seeded spate,
Spat foam of expiation, pulsed expulsion
Of lecherous lust. From such brief violence
Is wrung a season of tranquility,
Of tender-taken breath, of mellowed blood,
That tempers now the chambers of the heart.
Now johnson nods his head; he curleth up
And slips into the coverlet of sleep.


FLATUS:
I say love doth engender silliness
And drives a man to ponder strange designs;
Makes him to lie supine upon a hill
And then discern wild creatures in the clouds.
Love makes a man a coward: he will leave
His sword upon his hip and bends him low
To pluck a rose, and there he stands and grins,
Comparing leaves to lips, and dreams a sonnet!


SLAPPY:
Nay, but thou wilt not hear me, liege. Wilt hear?
Nay, but thou wilt not. Liege, if it so please thee,
I'll take my leave. There is some trouble yonder,
Some noise or other.


FLATUS:
I hear nothing. Wither?


SLAPPY:
(points distractedly) Thither. (runs off, rubbing hands together)



1999

Odysseus (From the Horse's Mouth)

Hell take the ships that were exalted shapes
On the canvas of your mind's eye, heroic vessels
That crested mountainous waves, that flew
With sails full blown in wind and rain:
All finery of a poet's vision, a blind
Fireside singer who, by immaculate singing,
Held my name from oblivion and turned
My deeds to legend. Now to the ash pit alarums
And clash of shields, the brazen shouts of war,
To Acheron the blood, the bristling of swords,
The heap of bodies in the languor of death,
For here is the matter in plain speech: I sailed
And battled with man and beast, redoubtable
In valor, braved the ire of jealous gods
On land and sea, knocked pell-mell like a doll.
But this is merely prop and scenery,
Superfluous adornment, artifice.
No, when you speak of me, say that I was
A soldier, a seafaring gentleman.
Forget the empyrean lineage, forget
All talk of body's prowess, strength of sinew,
All incidental by-the-ways that gild
A common story. When you speak of me,
Recall I had a wife, a son. Say this:
He was a simple and self-centered man
Who strove for nothing but his hearth and home.



1999, or thereabouts