Bonbon

   *… the only species f------  liberals DON'T care about …*
                                                 (right-wing blog)


Awesome in any era,
unthinkable in ours, a migration
darkens the sky.  Soon it will see
the northern world-forest, herds
as vast as itself on the tundra, glaciers
like jewels in the earth’s brow.
The friends around the table
on a stone terrace merging
into a boundless garden lend
their consciousness a moment to the birds,
then to the wolves and bears who elsewhere
glance up at them, before returning
to their reading.  Each reads;
and then they talk or let
emotions swell the invisible lake
containing and reflecting them
and history and geese this lucid autumn.
They are not human in our sense.
Their thoughts would seem too slow or fast,
painful or just.  They are, moreover,
so few, not only as compared
to other species but the dead,
who wrote the work they read today.
They like its turbulence at a distance;
prefer it to specious visions of peace,
which were anyway rare.  Something
yowls in the woods.  A keen breeze
ruffles the ancient pages like a blessing.





Step on a Crack


Al in *Detour or any street
schizo could tell you that *Fate or some
mysterious force can put the finger
on you or me for no good
reason* but you wouldn’t believe
or understand his mumbling, which rather confirms
the point.  There are rules.
They change.  Men may come
for you at any moment, rendition you
to a cell far from lawyers (they are lawyers), but if
you’re reading this you’re probably safe
enough, a lawyer.  They decide
that however you try and whatever you do
you’re wrong, an infidel or black or Jew;
but you know this, which is to say
it’s rational and soothing in its way.
Even bigots (perhaps especially they) hear
a deeper voice that says *You got off easy
this time*, without making clear how,
what.  Or growls *We’ll have no more of this*,
not after the lynching or the abuse
but some neglectful movement towards release.
The tests come back negative, which means
they won’t next time.  You close in
(it’s a sting, the cameras are rolling)
and the dude, the pederast
or richly bribed official, laughs: it turns out
he owns the network, the tape
erases itself, you’re beaten black and blue.
At each step there are mystic checkpoints,
borders.  You’d like to think
there is some satellite- or bird’s-eye view
of the maze, but love and art
are tentative and compromised.
I’m sorry to disappoint you.  No I’m not.




Usual Place


From my corner, her neck seemed
to collect all the light over the counter
and the display case her daughter
clutched, one small hand splayed and still.
The neck was Parmigianino long
but sturdy, red-gold hair
pinned, so that the space behind her ear
looked as soft in that light
as to a god the solar photosphere
would feel, as he stroked.  Curls
drifted.  She ordered;
the voice was neither here nor there.
The dress was yellow, leaving shoulders bare
as the legs.  The sun
had filmed her.  Long muscles lurked
under the skin, and beneath them
a widening triumphal grin
of celtonordic genes.  The daughter,
a sketch, will be something greater
in twenty years (I mused) unless the mother
hearkens to her shrill resentful pleas
for things in the display case,
impastoed, sublime with diabetes.



(Note: "Detour" a classic film noir from 1946.)