Cushland
for Keith Cushman
The professorial king here
fears not the grumbles
of we academic peasants. He humbles
his subjects firmly. Damn, the man
captures you, though. In song
he serenades with Yeats
and the nostalgia lingers,
drips from the crown
of his bare head, relating round the table
his affairs, the dreams so heavy
they sink down to his gut,
telling about the long travels
he has taken, the proper play
on stage, the ways of seeing
our fathers.
Vultures
Prometheus, with or without
this apostrophe, finds resurrection
before gross death comes again.
I must dissect him, spreading
intestine, bladder, heart, and prostate
across rock in an ordered sequence,
looking for patterns here,
among his guts, where
his significance turns cloudy
and from the vultures
pecking away at his body,
I discover their expansion
and shrinkage, push and pull,
and time, perhaps the only real point
of his pain, being no point at all.
Portrait of Me. The Infant Me.
November 1980 from 10 years later
This is the way the story goes,
as my father, the storyteller, explains it:
The cold metal of these sanitized clamps
threatening the firmness of this solid grip
(he gestures), and the placenta’s odor impinging
on my nostrils, and supple baby flesh melts
against my other hand – then raised
the clamps in preparation to cut when
(his eyes bright), abruptly, the boy grabs my hand
stopping the severing of the umbilical cord.
Turning to the doctor, eyes wide at this action,
I ask him: This must mean (he pauses) he will be trouble,
doesn’t it?
This is chuckled and laughed at
as he eyes me, looking for some sign of mischief
still.
Julius and Pamela
In New Hope, in a native, old hotel
that took hold of the beach beside the pier,
Pamela, the owner’s daughter, found herself
a summer romance every year, and this year
it was Julius, and it struck suddenly.
The boards of the pier seemed to form a ladder
for Julius, leading him up, up, up to the palp of life,
somewhere sewn deep there, in the heavens above,
and Pamela took his finger and held it to her lips.
His body shook as she sucked on his knuckle,
those pudgy little lips and the tongue that followed,
and he felt swallowed in completely by those stars
that they were wont to gaze at,
hand in hand, fingers nestled between fingers,
until Orion’s Belt suddenly snapped down, down,
down upon his back, funneling his fear into the fact
that she would soon be lost to his presence,
and he would just be Julius, the summer love,
who was left on the pier, his heart cupped in his hand,
the rest of him filtered through the wooded sieve;
and Pamela, having taken what she could, stored it
on the small white shelf beside her toilet,
stuck it there with her trinkets and shells,
and at the end of each new summer, cleaned off the dust.
for Keith Cushman
The professorial king here
fears not the grumbles
of we academic peasants. He humbles
his subjects firmly. Damn, the man
captures you, though. In song
he serenades with Yeats
and the nostalgia lingers,
drips from the crown
of his bare head, relating round the table
his affairs, the dreams so heavy
they sink down to his gut,
telling about the long travels
he has taken, the proper play
on stage, the ways of seeing
our fathers.
Vultures
Prometheus, with or without
this apostrophe, finds resurrection
before gross death comes again.
I must dissect him, spreading
intestine, bladder, heart, and prostate
across rock in an ordered sequence,
looking for patterns here,
among his guts, where
his significance turns cloudy
and from the vultures
pecking away at his body,
I discover their expansion
and shrinkage, push and pull,
and time, perhaps the only real point
of his pain, being no point at all.
Portrait of Me. The Infant Me.
November 1980 from 10 years later
This is the way the story goes,
as my father, the storyteller, explains it:
The cold metal of these sanitized clamps
threatening the firmness of this solid grip
(he gestures), and the placenta’s odor impinging
on my nostrils, and supple baby flesh melts
against my other hand – then raised
the clamps in preparation to cut when
(his eyes bright), abruptly, the boy grabs my hand
stopping the severing of the umbilical cord.
Turning to the doctor, eyes wide at this action,
I ask him: This must mean (he pauses) he will be trouble,
doesn’t it?
This is chuckled and laughed at
as he eyes me, looking for some sign of mischief
still.
Julius and Pamela
In New Hope, in a native, old hotel
that took hold of the beach beside the pier,
Pamela, the owner’s daughter, found herself
a summer romance every year, and this year
it was Julius, and it struck suddenly.
The boards of the pier seemed to form a ladder
for Julius, leading him up, up, up to the palp of life,
somewhere sewn deep there, in the heavens above,
and Pamela took his finger and held it to her lips.
His body shook as she sucked on his knuckle,
those pudgy little lips and the tongue that followed,
and he felt swallowed in completely by those stars
that they were wont to gaze at,
hand in hand, fingers nestled between fingers,
until Orion’s Belt suddenly snapped down, down,
down upon his back, funneling his fear into the fact
that she would soon be lost to his presence,
and he would just be Julius, the summer love,
who was left on the pier, his heart cupped in his hand,
the rest of him filtered through the wooded sieve;
and Pamela, having taken what she could, stored it
on the small white shelf beside her toilet,
stuck it there with her trinkets and shells,
and at the end of each new summer, cleaned off the dust.
