Hard to recall a harder time
if you want a job, yesterday
I heard tarmac’s being pulled up
in various Podunks and replaced
with gravel to save money
on maintenance, so why not
let the sky go, stop painting it,
put off breakfast
till lunch, teach half
the kids half
the presidents, the other half
how to beg, I like gravel
as much as the next guy, well maybe
not him, he loves gravel, has it
in his coffee, his bed
but backward’s the opposite
of the American, the western
vector’s progress
not erasure, isn’t dismantling
push coming to shove, aren’t teachers
firemen cooks doctors cops
a good idea, ever unstuck
a shitty valve in a sewer, ever skim
sulphurous slag in a foundry,
ever thought ideology would outweigh
a pbj, ms. left, mr. right, hard
to recall a harder time
for compassion, for the common good
of common sense, what are these times
proving: we can scream, pout, stomp,
that we are politically
children who should be spanked, hard
to believe the guy who ran
the RM300 Caterpillar rotary mixer
down the rural route his father paved
got laid off when he was done
turning back the clock, paved
and drove his son out to
one night with a sweating
Pabst between his legs and his arm
around the boy he thought he was handing
the world to.
I call room service and ask
for bees.
In a while, a man in body
but boy in face
knocks, asks where I’d like
my bees.
Good hotels
bring entire hives, the dumps,
a few stragglers
on a dab of honey
on a broken stick.
The best hotels, like this one,
anticipate that you’ll need
a tree for the hive, dirt
for the tree, flowers
for the bees, a cloud
and some rain is nice
when you’re on the road,
the crease in your slacks
no longer definitive.
I nod to the bed, which is a king,
which has provinces
and districts
I’ll never visit,
which if I leave now
on horse, I’ll arrive at
in a day or two, tired
and in need of a bed
with a tree in it, a hive,
some bees, a cloud, rain
falling softly, as if
it’s not sure it’s wanted,
when it is, more than words
can say, though listen
how hard they try.
The poem about menopause my wife asked me
not to read to you is folded
and inside my underwear. The only other thing
I keep there likes company
to be softer. Hot flashes
are such a cruel & busted thermostat
to place in a woman that if I believed
in God, I’d have to stop
and throw all my stuff at the sky,
car and house
and arthritis. She’s asleep
and I just whispered the poem
into the dead roses that weren’t dead
two years ago when she bought them
and the fluted vase to say to me,
love. First blood, the monthly abattoir
for decades, then this Mojave
shoved up her vagina
as thanks for all the cramp-
& tampon-ing, then bits
of memory are rivered away
like so many leaves
that were beautiful
for a few months until cold
turned tree shadows
lean. Car & house, I wish my penis
were a grenade
I could pull the pin of
and get to you, God, evolution, o
these concepts that plague us
with their lack of faces to aim
our pleases at: please stop making her
cry. Life, I’m talking to you,
stop pretending you’re too busy
earthquaking & baby-making
to listen, though words
are the most ineffectual levers
I’ve tried over and over
to lift the world with,
no better than the air their broken
bones are made of.
This kid was walking the dog
of his yo-yo excellently along the whiskers
of grass, a glow-in-the-dark number
like I had decades ago when Nixon
was king and I rooted
for the kid to cross the park
without being shot and wrote
this note when his red shirt
had red shifted
out of sight: Dear
intelligence of smoke signals: Dear
skidmark slowly ravished by rain: Dear
banked turn of the velodrome: Dear
electrical storm lost at sea: let us run
our affairs from the top of a tree. Dear
innocence: I’m sorry
I broke both your knees, ate
your throat, everything, the open
mouth, the tiny bones
even, the inner ear of your delicious
yes.
It seemed bad taste to ask how much he paid
not to serve two years in the Iranian army.
We were beside the net post on a cloudy day
that never matured to rain.
Tennis is a game I enjoy even more
than I like to say Sacré-Coeur.
In our Civil War, I told him, you could pay
I think three hundred dollars not to end up
in a Ken Burns film.
He squinted at my joke until I explained,
when he laughed and we soon agreed
North Korea is crazy.
How does one person control millions
is a thing to wonder
on your back as you leave
an outline of sweat the shape
of a corpse.
A plane flew over.
Then a hawk.
Then a crow.
Then nothing and nothing and nothing.
I asked how do you say rock and roll
in Farsi.
What’s so great about Elvis
was the best part of his answer
in English.
I told him that’s a love
I don’t feel, not for the leather
or the hips or the sneer or the slim
or the fat or the TV
shooting Elvis.
In a while he said everyone in Iran
knows Rumi.
Then a butterfly limped along.
Then poetry
rose over a green court
in a language that made his face
remind me of the full sail of a ship
heading home.