Flying Leaves


Neither their politely contemptuous tone
nor being unable to see them,
and all the significance I know
applies to the latter, deters me.
They think I’m where they want me
but I’m where I have to be:
flipping prints and canvases
in rooms below the rooms below
the museum.  In flickering light
and bad air, a collection without catalog
or order, and likely never to be shown.
*Do you know which it is?*
one asks.  *I’ll know when I see it*,
I say, which earns an almost covert laugh:
this isn’t how one sees or seeks or knows.
Much of the work is from other planets,
which heretofore I would have killed to glimpse,
but now it seems all variations,
with unexpected shadings, on too-
familiar themes.  Most of the rest
concerns woe, albeit surprisingly defeated:
scythes sharpened, castle stormed
and taken, the central committee
broadcasting real statistics to real delight.
These too I filter past.  And suddenly
it’s there – there and not Buddhist,
nor lost in style, yet with no faux-
naïveté to make one embarrassed.
He sits beneath flying leaves
that are somehow more or less than leaves,
like the hill below – that “somehow,”
plus his unaffected smile, enough for me.
The light dims, only tentatively returns.
There’s not enough power down here.
And my companions want to leave,
for they are shadows and fear
the darkness I’m attempting not to fear.




The Kid


No one recalled how the Kid joined the gang.
Was he found freezing
in the doorway of their bar?
Or stealing pizza from someone’s floor

while everyone slept?  He began, no doubt,
with a beating, but the boss
(who was called Big Man) felt a sort
of fondness.  Don’t you have

a Mama or Grandmamma? he asked.
But the Kid apparently didn’t.
He answered every question
but always with a whine

that annoyed the others.  But Big Man
said Let him be.  Which didn’t stop them
or make him stop them
from playing cruel jokes, and making

an occasional quasi-bitch
of the Kid.  To all of which
he responded impassively, which counted,
they decided, as courage.  Some fool

once mentioned school.  Everyone laughed.
Big Man said I’ll teach him
whatever he needs.  So the Kid
stood lookout and ran

deliveries, competently, and
eventually pulled a trigger,
but missed
and mumbled and whined

when he had to do that.  Years
passed.  Big Man noticed
that the Kid didn’t grow.
Which he thought was funny, and drew

a mustache on him, made him shave
nothing off, had
the others rub him
against some serious or laughing bitch

to no effect.  A day came
when Big Man lay in bed
with tubes in his arms and cops
at the door, and because

of the cops or being dead,
no visitors.  Except the Kid.
Strange child, said the boss (more or less),
was it you who betrayed me?  And the Kid

said No, but it doesn’t matter.
With illusion departing
you may be prepared to learn
there is only humiliation and pain.

Embrace the former to lose the latter.




Heather


A disaster worse than the oil spill,
this time on land and in the air.
This time no managers appear,
having realized that people of their class,
even those eventually to be sacrificed,
can never strike the proper human note.
This time all corporate response –
evasive, forthright, legalistic, pained –
is funneled through a girl I knew in college.
I recognize her instantly.  Sit rapt
through the long months, windows closed
against the heat and the corrupted air,
watching her.  She hasn’t changed;
has only grown into herself.
That gesture – bosom slightly forward,
chin down, eyes large and lifted
as if pleading, enthralled, or overwhelmed –
seduced more than half our college;
once made me sweat to entice her
with clever anecdotes.  She listened, drinking
moderately, then with calm precision
told me about her major and her plans,
implicitly portraying potential consorts.
Now she assures us everything
possible is being done.  Is lucid
and simple about the technologies
that may cure us.  Almost weeps
for the casualties.  Says she has wept
when talking to the families.
Kneels gracefully to look at dying cows,
her eyes as sad as theirs.  Seems not to cough
as much as I do, as much, I suppose,
as everyone does.  Or at all.
At last there’s only her, walking through fields,
the mist at her feet a bit like her hair,
still with the cordless mike, still comforting.