would have nothing whatsoever
to do with, you know — those interlopers.
It would have, I suppose,
a cold mountain stream in it,
a rock shifting in the current,
the too-loud splash of a trout.
It would have loose bark
ticking in the wind
& a saw-whet owl’s discrete
requests for clarification —
that kind of persistence.
It would have the hush
when the crickets suddenly stop
& your pulse makes such a racket
you’re sure it will give you away,
you whose knees
the shore is a kind of road
that leads only to itself
the sound of its traffic
is said to be soothing
its sand grains attract
hourglass figures
we bury each other
up to the neck
gulls & gamblers take turns
screaming at the sun
we eat white sandwiches
& colored ice
there are rides no one
has ever dared get off of
there are entire hotels
patronized only by crabs
Shameless procrastinator,
ragged tooth unsullied by the dawn.
Full, you went to bed on time;
a quarter empty & you never act your age.
Hasp with no padlock,
no wonder the night got away!
Old flat tire.
As if my poet’s O were set in gothic.
The letters suddenly
look enormous —
ant on the keypad
Fireworks from the valley
blossom at eye-level —
the smell of gunpowder
My desk lamp has acquired
a curtain of beads:
white spiderlings
Coffee just poured,
I rinse the pot & find
a live firefly
What can you do, he asks.
I can recite pi, I tell him,
to one thousand places.
Blindfold me — I can find
& identify flying objects
better than a bat. I don’t
merely eat fire; I excrete it.
I can go for years without sleep.
But he only wants to know
how much I drink — as if
I ran away from my life
& came all this way just
to pound stakes & shovel
elephant dung like some
lousy roustabout. Your loss,
I say to his back, & shuffle
Symplocarpus foetidus
Here’s to the skunk cabbage,
first plant to raise a toast to spring,
even if it sometimes has to melt a hole
right through the ice,
a plant that grows
its own hothouse
& keeps it at 22 degrees Celsius
for weeks on end.
Half monk, half cobra,
it shares its solitude
with the earliest flies & beetles,
whose springtime fancy
turns to putrefaction: gut piles,
winter-killed deer, & in the swamp
a leathery curl of old meat.
What a quaint notion–that life
could be anything but kinetic,
frenetic, in full
swing! But let’s have a galvanized steel
bucket of ice sent up & see
what happens. Something
to shine, to gleam.
And a wooden bowl of felt-
&-plastic fruit on
a low table. And for
the proper contrast, for corners
appropriately dark, Japan’s
the place: the traditional-style
half of a hotel suite, say,
in a seaside resort just
beginning to fall
This is the story
of the banjo jubilee:
the pregnant woman
lays her hand on a banjo
for good luck.
The burglar flees
at the sight of a banjo
over his left shoulder.
A dog sees a banjo
go yellow in alpenglow
& begins to howl.
The coyotes answer
with a yip & a yelp
& an ai-ai-ai.
The locksmith pauses
to listen on his way
Hypogastrura nivicola
The snow flea is rarely found alone.
Though if it were, who but another snow flea
would notice it against the snow,
a single speck of pepper, a mote of ash?
Come March & they move en masse,
transhumant across their blue-shadowed host.
Approach too close & they start to rocket about
like acrobats in a mad flea circus.
There’s safety in numbers, & in
the unpredictability of a random launch —
the wingless springtail’s main defense.
True, one sometimes goes straight up
& returns to the same, dangerous spot,
but what bird wants to mess with such
unquiet seeds?
Saved by a banjo, she turned
into someone forever glancing
in the rear-view mirror,
someone given to sudden,
unpredictable spasms of laughter.
The amount of space
her arms now claimed with
their emphatic gesticulations
alarmed even herself:
how unladylike!
She stopped smoking & enrolled
in truck-driving school
because, she said, she didn’t
ever want to slow down.
She’d pull into rest areas
on the high plains, hold
Where guitar says body, banjo says head.
Where guitar says soundboard, banjo says membrane.
Where guitar says six, banjo says one for each finger.
Where guitar says bridge, banjo says keep going.
Where guitar says hole, banjo says full.
It had been a drifter,
getting by on odd jobs:
guy wire for a weathervane,
the main spring in the crouch of a cat,
a corn broom’s binding cord.
It had learned to sing the wind’s several laments,
to play with its prey,
to teem.
It happened by
just when the banjo was holding
auditions for a new first string,
& unexpectedly
the fifth string got the part.
Its square tuning peg was a perfect fit
for that round & bottomless hole.
The banjo now began