Night Litter
Stars like broken glass
litter the night. Wind corrals
the rain, ranging north and west.
Sound is brittle, almost fragile.
Sneakers ring crisp on concrete,
part of a phantom basketball game
in the Catholic schoolyard.
If you walked out
blade thin breezes would slice
your cheeks. Your keys would score
your soft palms. Cars like bright beasts
would search your secrets--
innocent enough, but yours alone--
and ghosts would scatter like candy wrappers.
THE DAY BEFORE OPENING DAY
The week before daylight savings begins
And there are no shadows in the ballpark.
A few old fans stud their caps with fresh pins
While loud kids are flagging down ice cream bars.
Three rows south, an English jazzman studies
The nuances of scorekeeping. We sing
A nervous anthem. A woman near me
Is reading the score to “The Rite of Spring”
While tapping a too small glove on her thigh.
I’m tuning a battered radio. War rant
Spoils the air. First pitch is popped to the sky
And lands in leather. I try but I just can’t
Make out any pure rulebook strikes or balls
And I’m sure the umpire’s blowing all his calls.
CHARM
Mother brews:
Son drinks.
Wife brews:
Husband rattles.
Widow brews:
Bones sigh.
THERE IS NO SUCH BOOK AS PARADISE LOST
It is an academic fiction,
a conspiracy of footnotes. I should know,
I’ve tried and tried and tried to read
the whole damned thing, but lines
seem to slip out of my brain after two hundred or so.
Do you know anyone who’s read the whole thing?
It’s not evil, really, just one of the things,
one of those pleasant, harmless fictions
that teachers enjoy. They tell us so
we’ll think there are books we could know.
They recite any nonsense iambic lines
as if they were on a page we could read.
I remember when I was learning to read
and they told me books held everything
you needed. But in those measured lines
there weren’t any kisses, any flesh. Just fictions
and ideas. Nothing you’d want to know
carnally. Still, it all seemed so
important. A skill, like learning to sew
or how to tell green from red
(as if that was something you could know).
Not Milton now, I don’t mean that, but things
made out of words. Real things, non-fictions
that could shock you like power lines.
I don’t want to pick on the blind man. His lines
aren’t much worse than many. But so
much ink has been spilled over his divine fiction,
this plot (I mean it) you couldn’t read
if you wanted to because the thing
just plain doesn’t exist, you know?
Okay, you can walk into a library, I know,
and pull out Paradise Lost. But after a few lines
or a hundred, your eyes glaze over and everything
goes dark. Time passes. Seconds tick by so
you feel you must have read
a piece of the poem, and you pass along the fiction.
People who should know better still sow
the lie that thousands of lines are there to be read.
It’s a plot of nothings. A bald hoax. A pious fiction.
Early modern
Minor prophets and
Shortstops
Clip time
Into triangles.
A metronome clicks
In twelve/eight
Next to the red
Ironing board
Streaked
With nails.
Stars like broken glass
litter the night. Wind corrals
the rain, ranging north and west.
Sound is brittle, almost fragile.
Sneakers ring crisp on concrete,
part of a phantom basketball game
in the Catholic schoolyard.
If you walked out
blade thin breezes would slice
your cheeks. Your keys would score
your soft palms. Cars like bright beasts
would search your secrets--
innocent enough, but yours alone--
and ghosts would scatter like candy wrappers.
THE DAY BEFORE OPENING DAY
The week before daylight savings begins
And there are no shadows in the ballpark.
A few old fans stud their caps with fresh pins
While loud kids are flagging down ice cream bars.
Three rows south, an English jazzman studies
The nuances of scorekeeping. We sing
A nervous anthem. A woman near me
Is reading the score to “The Rite of Spring”
While tapping a too small glove on her thigh.
I’m tuning a battered radio. War rant
Spoils the air. First pitch is popped to the sky
And lands in leather. I try but I just can’t
Make out any pure rulebook strikes or balls
And I’m sure the umpire’s blowing all his calls.
CHARM
Mother brews:
Son drinks.
Wife brews:
Husband rattles.
Widow brews:
Bones sigh.
THERE IS NO SUCH BOOK AS PARADISE LOST
It is an academic fiction,
a conspiracy of footnotes. I should know,
I’ve tried and tried and tried to read
the whole damned thing, but lines
seem to slip out of my brain after two hundred or so.
Do you know anyone who’s read the whole thing?
It’s not evil, really, just one of the things,
one of those pleasant, harmless fictions
that teachers enjoy. They tell us so
we’ll think there are books we could know.
They recite any nonsense iambic lines
as if they were on a page we could read.
I remember when I was learning to read
and they told me books held everything
you needed. But in those measured lines
there weren’t any kisses, any flesh. Just fictions
and ideas. Nothing you’d want to know
carnally. Still, it all seemed so
important. A skill, like learning to sew
or how to tell green from red
(as if that was something you could know).
Not Milton now, I don’t mean that, but things
made out of words. Real things, non-fictions
that could shock you like power lines.
I don’t want to pick on the blind man. His lines
aren’t much worse than many. But so
much ink has been spilled over his divine fiction,
this plot (I mean it) you couldn’t read
if you wanted to because the thing
just plain doesn’t exist, you know?
Okay, you can walk into a library, I know,
and pull out Paradise Lost. But after a few lines
or a hundred, your eyes glaze over and everything
goes dark. Time passes. Seconds tick by so
you feel you must have read
a piece of the poem, and you pass along the fiction.
People who should know better still sow
the lie that thousands of lines are there to be read.
It’s a plot of nothings. A bald hoax. A pious fiction.
Early modern
Minor prophets and
Shortstops
Clip time
Into triangles.
A metronome clicks
In twelve/eight
Next to the red
Ironing board
Streaked
With nails.
