Blight

I heard a twee-twee late last night –
I thought it was a mouse –
but when I searched throughout the house,
it turned out to be Blight.

Blight appears to want to speak
whenever he comes by:
he stares and squats and tries to cry:
can only pip a squeak.

Despite the omen of his name
I’ve learned not to be scared.
No plague or destitution’s flared
beyond his visit. Blame

can’t be assigned to him at all
as far as I can tell.
He yearns to cast a fateful spell –
can’t cast the merest pall.

I feel a trifle sad for him –
he’d like to have some clout,
but cannot work the damned thing out:
Blight’s light is far too dim.

With Blight’s lack of temerity,
and tendency to mope,
I guess we’ll have to learn to cope
with pitiless prosperity.


 
 
 
 
 
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Today I Bought a Summer Hat

Today I bought a summer hat,
east village, black, thin brim,
po-mo fedora, thought
it might make some appealing
cupola atop my body’s barn.

Second Avenue, St. Mark’s,
to Tompkins Square,
I kept it on. Walked up three
floors to my bathroom,
peed while looking in the mirror:

doffed the head-wear,
put it on a chair, and drew
this drawing. I wonder
what this gnawing angst
daubed large in stain-glassed

colors à la John La Farge
could have to do with all of that.
Perhaps I don’t much like the hat.
Or maybe it is clearer
I don’t much like the mirror.


 
 
 
 
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A Poet Gets Stung by a Jellyfish

Strange – standing
in this dawn-of-summer water –
different this time –
contributing your heat –

reacting chemically, at last,
with life – as if the secret
of your humanness were
coursing with a force –

slicing down and through
into the bit of sea you’re
wading in: invading with its
all-pervading insolence:

an instant and an incidence
of necessary fire and sting.
Oh, how it makes
you want to sing!


 
 
 
 
 
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That Pesky Profile Pic!

That pesky profile pic! To which
you would affix your loveliness,
if you had had some! From which

you wish somebody might derive
the faintest sense that you could be
bewitching. You’ve been switching

shirts all morning long, disclosing –
brushing, fluffing – tufts of chest hair,
moussing your moustache, posing

with panache: but dust will come
to dust and ash to ash, and you are
merely human. Resume another

dashing stance: give the mirror one
last glance. You don’t look bad
in green. Smile. Be brave. Be seen.


 
 
 
 
 
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Life is Like a 1940s Hat

Useless and de trop, though
with a certain I-don’t-know,
bedecked protuberantly à la mode –

as if protuberances were a code
to be decoded to persuade you
they had meaning – leaning

at unpalatable angles, plumed
with feathers one cannot believe
were ever tethered to a bird: spilling

from its girders, willfully absurd:
life is like a 1940s hat. Unless,
of course, it’s not at all like that.


 
 
 
 
 
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Henry and Loretta

Proud that there were no conventions to which they were
slaves, Henry and Loretta were intrepid about leaping
into waves. While others sought dry desert sands
or jagged landscapes – mountainous, arboreal –
on the day they call Memorial, Loretta would insist

that Henry not resist (when had he ever?): it was time
for the resumption of their wet endeavor: to jump in salty sea.
It would have been too cold for you or me. But splash, cavort
and flip-da-loop-da-lee would first go she and then go he.
The water’s rush and lap and crash and constancy

roared, lilted like a symphony: aliveness was an ecstasy.
One weekend they went out, did not return. A rip tide
scooped them not far from the beach and took them
beyond reach. As usual, the ocean yearned for amplitude
too much to give them back. As usual, we only feel the lack.


 
 
 
 
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Talking in my Sleep

I don’t know where they come from:
these creatures in the soft pre-morning mind –
the latest, so voluptuously suspect, shady –
ruelessly manipulative: knew that she was
here for only moments: had to make the best
of it: unwind in quick gradations: be Blue Lady.

I’d hoped to keep her longer than she’d stay.
But just as soon as I began to say – she froze
into an icy azure – all the red around her
turned to gelid pink – her freeze-frame stasis
paled back to misnomered “shared reality.”
A single word – and blink: Blue Lady gone.

I do not understand how every night
light bridges out of dark into the dawn, and yet
I cannot link two kindred consciousnesses
into one. As soon as I make sound, the ground
breaks up: tugs all phantasms down. It seems
a shame Blue Lady couldn’t stick around.


 
 
 
 
 
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