Calling All Poets Laureate

A Texan amendment
to the arts budget
surprises everyone:
a Poetry Lodge
in the nation’s capital.

The artist’s rendering
is out of Beowulf:
a great mead hall

on the National Mall,
where bards convene,
drink tankards of ale,
and pot after pot
of exotic tea.
Workshops and readings
around the clock;

marathons even,

for those who can stand it.

It opened this month,
yet something is wrong
with this Tudor palace.
The Poet Laureate
is already in there,
and won’t come out.
The laureates of states,
of cities and colleges,
have come, and entered.

Busloads of applicants

push at the double doors

waving their MFA diplomas.
In they go by the thousands. 

There’s a stage in the middle,
and an open mic,
yet no poets come forward.
They are stuck to the walls,
feet locked on the carpet.
Wallpaper grabs them
like vampire Velcro.

A giant eye glares
through the leaded glass
window. The place is packed,

a web of younger poets

undulating like tapestry,

the older poets in groups
like the Elgin marbles,

pushing forward

but going nowhere.

The voice on high intones:
Just as we intended.
Poet Motels:
Poets check in,

but they don’t check out.

Anna Akhmatova: I'm Like A River

Poet Anna Akhmatova braved it out in Soviet Russia when she could have fled, as many others did, to Romantic, if impoverished, exile. She endured the Stalin years, and was terrorized and spied upon. Friends vanished, and her son was arrested and killed. In this severe little self-analytical poem, Akhmatova accuses and defends herself. She knows that her work was her life's end. This is my own adaptation from the Russian original.


I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.
What sights I’ve missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!
And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they’ll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I’ll not,
if you please, recall.
Now there’s a woman
who’s assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I’ll do the best I know with them.
Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.

amtrak, business class

riding dead-eyed in an alcoholic glaze to Connecticut,
hours to, hours fro, twenty days a month
(happy that man who rises and walks to his work!)
look at the juggernaut of three-piece suits,
the power ties, the snapping suspenders!

they imagine they own the world
as they ascend into their termite towers
in a manhattan cleared now of the inconvenient poor

the deal, the merger, the acquisition,
(the quick transfer of soaring or falling stock
in secret amid the wheeling and dealing
    for a little personal profit) –
all this produces nothing, not one apple,
    not one steel bolt nor fatting hog,
nothing whatever produced by their labor,
yet richer they grow, richer than
   the gloating emperors of byzantium

tycoon atop his tower of glass, perched
at the peak of world dominion,
has never heard “no” from his employees –
he’s driven everywhere, has but to nod
for a free lunch in the best-appointed spots.
he could not count his possessions,
and he is so cleverly taxed that his worth
increases with every filing, oh wonderful,
this thing called oligodemocracy.

imagine his mute astonishment
as he reads in the morning news
that two of his dummy corporations
have hostile-merged him to nullity.
call button pressed, he waits,
but no one comes. his coffee cup,
empty, may show its bottom
for the first time ever. his broker
is theirs now, his law firm, theirs too.

which one of those many women
is his wife now? is one of the others
involved in this distressing affair.

he sighs. there is always the offshore fund,
the stock in those armaments and diamond mines.
there’s nothing left for him now
except to run for The White House.
run, as in, run for the office. it’s his turn, anyway.
in time he could be president of everything:
the justice department, the military (left hand
selling the right hand weapons to use and replace).
it seems only fair: with the mess they’ve made,
they should beg him to make everything right again.

Wooing

 

    adapted from Martial, I.x

So have you heard of Maronilla’s wooing?
Gemellus is desperate,
and from a purse so small as his,
the presents he sends her, astonish.
We’re taking bets on when the rites
will make him Mr. Maronilla. But why?
Has she a young girl’s charms to offer?
Not a chance — the hags of the town
use her as a model. What’s this about,
you ask? Lean close as I whisper it:
she is rich, and tubercular.

Lines Overheard

Behind a freshman couple
on the first day of classes:
Well, if anybody bothers us,
there can always be an accident.

On Thayer Street, behind a girl
who's drawn with ball-point pen
fake track marks on both her arms:
Once, I drank rubbing alcohol.

Heard on my doorstep
through the closed door:
I'm just going to rob and rob
until somebody stops me.

At Eddie's Diner, amid a lull
in table talk, one voice
of four Italian businessmen:
So who's gonna do this --
your hit man or mine?

The Dead Rose

He bought her the rose as a joke.
After all, he was gay —
she was the frat boys’ tramp
and they had spent all of a night
joking about the ones they’d had
in common.

He didn’t deliver it:
on a perverse whim
he held the rose an extra day.
By the next morning it was
a limp and withered hagbloom,
the petals pale, the nectar dry,
the dust as from a tomb or trashcan
marring its too perfect face.

Would he nurse the thorn
with the blood of his hand?

Would he wet the leaf
with a tear? Not in this life.

He wrapped his sad sigil of mock love
in gaily-colored paper,
added a card
headed Memento amorae,
told her their “grand affair”
was already over:
hence the dead
instead of the living
red rose.

Did she weep at the thought of his laughter?
Did he smile at the thought of her tears?
The saddest thing is: he really only did this
so he could write a poem.

Years later he thinks about his callowness.
Finding the poem he wrote to her,
he destroys it with a shudder.
An irony, since most of the women he knows,
now, are Gothically inclined,
preferring dead roses to living ones.
But way back then,
no fraternity boy ever gave her, or him,
a single rose, alive or dead.

My Book of Revelations

as out of the burning bush
the meteor's heart
the hieroglyph
the tablet
spoke god

it said
I am the sum
of all that is

I     have never
written a book
dictated a law
taken a wife
       sired son or angel.
I do not answer
plea or prayer.

love whom you may.
eat what you must.
the planet is yours,
     stars too
if you can reach them

but neither out
nor inward seek me.
I am not at the Pole Star
turning orbs mechanical.
I have no wish
to visit your dreams

I am and will be a mystery,
the riddle between zero and unity.
How could death bring you to me
when you cannot discern me now?

Go, now, and tell your brethren
that god's wish
is to be left alone.
I have spoken
and will not speak
again.