Houses by a Shore
One hoped to leave
in town the mistrust
it requires, and gather
for drinks and sunset on the local wharf,
but no. A captain
raises his flag at dawn,
then scans the horizon
for subs alone.
A divorcee replenishes
the rage and accounts
her kids have depleted,
beauty elsewhere.
Her eldest, gunlike,
rotates her new breasts
landward, also
seeking enemies.
More distant neighbors
kick flotsam and follow,
unseeing, the tern-tracks,
exhorting cells,
while I, in the big house,
process money
like them, and try to imagine,
like them, and care,
or imagine caring.
- Untrue to the metaphor
of nice tight
houses, the sea
the stuff to the right.
Lucille
The clichéd quality of abuse protects it
from sanctions, and invites other clichés -
therapy, or avoiding therapy.
From sixth grade through sixteenth her teachers
hoped she wouldn't snap before next year.
She didn't; even developed
enough attractiveness to attract
a bureaucrat, to whom she bore
one hairdresser son, who died at 22.
She filled those jobs that, on a resumé,
fill detailed paragraphs but are
auxiliary to other jobs
auxiliary to others. She
looked straight ahead when people spoke to her;
gave clear contradictory orders
to sleepy subliterate temps, and fired them
as needed. Some bitches insist
on their rights, others on status.
Her ex was the type who tallies, nightly,
his victories, and berates himself
when they are too few. She enjoyed,
for years, some litigation
against him re the house. Poked
at her garden; visited,
each spring, the grave of her son;
and walked behind a little quiet dog
with a plastic bag full of its turds.
At least she didn't leave us
a body of poems about her father,
his corpse from fifty angles, etc.
Nor was she heard to remark
how many eight-story office-blocks there are.
Instead, she observed that silence
which will not begin to lift
until, in a million years,
the Revolution comes.
Evenings of Wasted Days
On the evenings of wasted days, even
the mocker who mocks my
least effort mocks
disconsolately, idly,
as I thaw, bread, and bake
inadequate Safeway porkchops and
open a salad bag.
We eat, and the mocker eats,
and time moves,
itself peeved
but seeing no alternative. (Don't
casually invoke eternity,
infinity or anything
like that, someone counseled.)
There must be something
on TV in a few hours,
even for us.
(People who keep it on
always, however heedlessly,
have wasted their whole lives.)
On the evenings of wasted days, even
the planes heading in
to what I can't be bothered
to call "National" instead
of "Reagan National" or,
simply, "Reagan" land
slowly, barely grateful
to have survived ...
Allusions become local,
the imagination loses
buoyancy, the mind
sinks toward that heavy,
gluey human condition which
is supposed to be good.
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