Come Back!
Hey H.D., come back, there’s trouble all over
Ruins, as you said, there, as here
I need your flowering vision, lady
Come with your angels and blank book
With your elegant cheekbones
Your loquent lines upswept white hair
Lyrical long fingers and dark wool cape
As I’m reading the news
Help us, we filled the oceans
With the plastic crap we like to buy
Choked the sea-nymphs, let loose toxins into the sky
The land is parched, the poles are melting
My friends are canning food and buying guns
I have serious doubts, I have two children
You had one, Perdita, the Lost One
We live in the country and drank water
Poisoned by a chemical factory nearby
So people could eat microwave popcorn
And make omelettes with nonstick pans
It’s not that bad, our blood levels are so-so
It’s my job to protect them, H.D.
From bullies traffickers war mongers
I will write down everything you say
When bombs fell around your family
You seemed so sure in your poems
Walking down a London street
Thinking of Egypt of Mary of ruins
You stepped through a broken wall to see
A bomb-blackened apple tree flowering
It guided you through the Blitz
Here when cherry blossoms appear after the winter
I think, Pretty pink ladies
Don’t catch a disease and die on us
I remember the Two Towers falling
People pulverized, we breathed in their particles
A sickly sweet smell smoldering for months
That week the skies bore blue clarity
What can you teach me now?
I don’t think the petitions I’m signing are helping
Not religious have no husband need advice
Where to now, H.D.?
Come near, if you can bear it
I know, it’s not exactly here as there
We have made our own problems
I reread your poem and there
You stand at the top of the stair
Holding your book, your cape falls over me
H.D., tell me what to do
* * * * *
To Bring You News
I.
Great news! A hiker found in a broken clay pot
The complete, unexpurgated works of Sappho
I made a plectrum from your eyelashes
Somebody somewhere will stroke a lyre in tribute
II.
The troops of Caesar didn’t burn the library of Alexandria
To save it a million librarians pushed it into the Mediterranean
From our bed we can browse its 700,000 scrolls online
Who plunged Europe into the Dark Ages? Not us
III.
We spotted the Dark Lady of the sonnets
Sporting tit windows and pleather hot pants
She nailed “Barracuda” on karaoke night
If you don’t clap, she’ll steal your man
And put your head on a spike on London Bridge
IV.
Milton is not for lovers in this post-lapsarian world
Everybody gets punished, and it’s no fun at all
Angels lecture and men labor and complain about it
Women suffer at men’s hands and die in childbirth
Nobody gets to say they’re sorry or make a joke
V.
If you want to be ravished by God, fine
But that impotence better be metaphysical, mister
We’re so over the 17th century
No time for your closets or conceits
No room for your paradoxes and backtalk
We want to own property and vote
VI.
The Lake Poets paddle quite nicely
Do you think Coleridge was a fiend in bed
Especially when high & talking Shakespeare?
Shelley? Maybe a passive-aggressive Bottom
The worst, Wordsworth, a joyless Top
Blake? Bedding an angel never works out well
VII.
Such Fetishists & shabby poets
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood we admit was hot
I’m going to drown them all with my lush red hair
Then choke a knight with my bosom
I will need antibiotics after that frat house
VIII.
Doesn’t anybody read Modernism anymore?
H.D.! Langston! Mina! Zora!
Please lay your fine visions before us
I don’t want anyone else intoning at me
Lightly I step my sandals over the footnotes
IX.
Feeling sorry for the Confessionals lately
How many epiphanies can one have in a day?
Gosh, it’s exhausting & suicide’s not sexy anymore
Nor are asylums or alcoholic rages
I want to ride off on Ariel into the future
X.
I hung up my underpinnings in public
Constructed an ironic simulacrum
Post-poetry post-human post-time
Yet the real prevails
The sea level rises idealism falls
And ruthless ideologies abound
Put your head down
We have serious work to do