My latest - peculiarly, or covertly, upbeat - you might enjoy it.


Words for Captain Mendoza


I imagined you, in a poem no one will read
before you do.  You sailed poisoned seas
through millennial heat (only then beginning
to recede), to find - to
reclaim us, in some sense.  To discover me.
Laboriously reinvented science
and scientists, ships, order.  Flesh
primarily café-au-lait, with blond highlights.  
Names like driftwood sculptures
of disaster.  I wrote beautifully about 
the morale of those three hundred equal souls
without a particle of a god
among them, or of bigotry,

who loved you.  And why not?  You were
(are, will be) the "man for others," capable
of vanity but not of showing it.
Calm in the hurricane as at a meeting,
an artist of other people's talents,
your only vision that of the unknown
(which you would share like bread),
of us, and of repair.
Yet as I wrote I knew you were
my reader.  That the authority
you had was what I want.  That those benign
researchers excavating our ruins
found mine alone.

I thought then (but repressed it
the way one must, to work)
how mean the future really is,
with its memorial parks,
its silences where people coughed,
where we will … I remembered that poem 
this morning, waiting for a war,
in the first hush after heavy snow
beneath which lie the deserts you will know.
You might arrive, after all, not from the sea, 
but from another planet, called Contempt,
safest refuge of survivors.
I cleared the driveway while the ice was soft

and wondered why I thought of you
instead of my familiar judge,
whose gavel is a brandy glass,
his courtroom the world;
whom I petition without success;
whose ruling is, "You have been given
the glorious right to express
ambivalence and pettiness -
you should pay *us.  This Captain of yours:
what is to guarantee
that our successors, when they come,
will serve no cruel faith,
the kitsch and folly of the underclass?" 

He may be right.  He may be you. 
- Snow fell all day, then there was freezing rain,
then deeper cold.
Perhaps no comfortable plague will come
to bring the animals and freedom back.
Perhaps your only voyage of discovery
was through databases,
and, supercilious, beyond computers,
you sit pursuing context and not me. 
Or, with the entire monstrous galactic network,
I'm in your head -
irrelevant as hell, as any
generous thought, less immortal than undead.

So I resolve to sit with you, to meet
as equals in that fantasy
of a conversation more privileged
than with a secret master of my time.
In a dream café, in dream safety,
I'll inquire about the future
till fear of the one fact, oblivion, obstructs 
your answer.
And, although you're impossibly considerate,
I'll try to gain hold
over your disinfected world,
as opportunistically
as I use wit, pentameter, or rhyme.

But the power fails.  I hustle for candles and sweaters
and write this in a notebook with a pen.
In the darkened screen, its color that 
of the future, I see you turn
from a desk with my writing.
Somebody in your expedition
needs you.
It is the reader who must be
the responsible one,
the poet a kind of addict he
enables.  What was your expression,
I wonder as the temperature drops
and night falls.  Grief.  Satisfaction.