Drowning
It looked at first like a small dead creature,
maybe a lizard left legless by a cat
On the garden edger, that off-white color
common to the stomachs of reptiles, limned
With red. But when I looked closer, I found
a bud from the rose of Sharon, fallen
Who knows why, already decaying, never
to unfurl. Then I had a choice: I could
Think of it as an omen–old people are fond
of those, no matter that we are all
Heading in the same direction–or remember
how, when the moon is full, the color
Of a lizard’s belly, poets are supposed to be
drunk, if possible in a boat, strumming
A dobro or shamisen: singing out of tune,
leaning and swaying and finally falling
Down through the circle of reflection,
in love with their own ridiculous music.
* * * * * *
Supply Side
This afternoon at the strip mall, I am buying
a bottle of shampoo and a corkscrew,
Though the latter is not necessary to the former,
while, through spent thunderheads, the moon
Cuts an anemic crescent–I see it on my walk
from the drug store toward the wine shop,
And it reminds me to buy multivitamins,
so I turn on my heel and go back
Among the shelves of frankincense and analgesics,
and straight to the Aisle of Supplements
As though iron in the blood were a surplus
and not a biological necessity, but there is no
Aisle of Biological Necessities, whole nations
have perished for want of what might be
Found there, whole nations are perishing now
as I put my card chip-side-up in the reader
And let economics happen, as I make my way
through the precinct of potions and talismans
Knowing, as soon as I arrive in the open air,
the moon has already accepted the utter
Failure of human policy and packed it in.
* * * * * *
South Dakota
I am done with the poetry of memory, a thing
I am not supposed to say, but if I stick
With memory, all I have is a couple of mental
Polaroids of the Corn Palace in Mitchell
In 1955, and since they change all the corn
every year, where is that Corn Palace now?
Maybe I remember a saltbox farmhouse,
a vanishingly narrow staircase, a strange trap
Door. There was maybe a pile of old coal
where bad children made war. Maybe I
Was a bad child. The gods are convinced
that memory is the sine qua non
Of poetry, but who can remember a single
poem any more? I was five that summer.
There was a golden cloud of bees in the copse
down the hill, sometimes. That was how
You knew the god was present–that and the bad
children disappearing. You will not speak
My mysteries, the god certainly said. I remember
with absolute clarity when I stopped remembering.