A younger me would have stood on his head
To prove the earth and sky are of a size
Then seeing beneath his feet the sunlit clouds
Strode off upon that opalescent path.
These days the sun has turned her face from me.
The autumn wind flings tiny knives of frost.
Far down below, the slow east river flows
Beset with whitecaps, fishing boats, and gulls.
Yes, younger, I’d have turned things upside-down:
The sparrows and the swallows at their nests,
The small birds perched among the date tree’s thorns,
All would have stopped, and quirked their heads to see!
But these days I’m no gymnast, me.
Sundown, I’ll sling my sword upon my back;
I’ll set my feet upon the dusty road
And head off down the mountain, muttering of home.
as a kid i always knew
the wind was up to no good
for all it never did me any harm
in the stories it was always
driving the hapless schooner on the shoals
then becalming the shipwrecked sailor
who clung to a spar a ragged shirt for a sail
or it was sidling down back alleys
and through the branches of landlocked trees
under moonpale clouds in the dead of night
squirreling away skeleton leaves
ghosts of plastic bags
and stale shreds of news
to deliver them unlooked for
months and county lines away
or it was whipping up prairie dissent
sometimes slamming a straw straight
into a phone pole
like a hammer drives a nail
or it was snooping up water for later
then freezing it to hail
the size of golfballs
pelting houses and cows
and fleeing into the stratosphere
so i knew not to trust the wind
even though it might never get around to
marooning you or
slamming a soda straw into you
Last night, everything still,
I still, all the people still, the world still,
A dream slipped in
Like a memory, not a dream.
He didn’t say Hello
He just said, Hey.
Hey. I got over it,
He said. The way you do.
It wasn’t so hard, or so bad.
And the time we live in now
Is the important thing
When nobody has to say I love you
Which is really Goodbye
Because nobody’s dying.
Then he told a joke.
Then I learned there wasn’t
A single moment
I could have changed.
Just all of them.
Later the stillness broke,
I waking, the whole world waking
As the line of dawn runs around the world
And the sky brightens and then
Everything starts to hum
Like there’s something inside everything.
That was the time to say Goodbye,
If I was ever going to say it.
Well, I had a little accident when I was just a lad
I burned my hand, and listen, man, it hurt real bad
A couple years later, I met Doctor McGee
He saw my thumb and he said son, I guarantee
If you just give me a chance, I’ll make it good as new
I’ll make your hand perfect, yes I swear it’s true
I’ve done it many times before, I know just what to do –
McGee, he’s gonna howl He don’t understand But the judge found it simple, so he put it on remand He said, “Son, you’ll get the damages that you demand ’cause you believed in the promised hand.”
He told me that my hand would be one hundred percent
I thought because he said it, that was just what he meant
Now I will never recover, my whole life is a wreck
When I think of that day it makes me mad as heck
He said your hand’s okay, but you deserve the best
He took a knife and then he cut this skin from my chest
Now my fingers are itching and I can’t get no rest…
McGee, he’s gonna howl He don’t understand But the judge found it simple, so he put it on remand He said, “Son, you’ll get the damages that you demand ’cause you believed in the promised hand.”
The jury monetized the difference, it was quite a lot
Between the hand that I expected and the one I got;
And I’ve come to find out that I’m a famous case
Prominently featured in The Paper Chase —
But what is all of it worth, when I can’t sleep at night?
My hand is matted and unsightly and it looks a fright
If I could take it all back, I really think that I might…
But every graduate of law school All across this land They may forget my name but they recall my hand I’m more famous than that guy who killed the fox and ran…
’cause I believed in the promised hand ’cause I believed in the promised hand Yeah I believed in the promised hand.
Also, the guy who killed the fox was Jesse Pierson (in case you’ve forgotten). The image illustrating this little fiasco is “The Beast with Five Fingers” by Dave Wild, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) license. Finally, a big if belated Thank you! to MAD Magazine for establishing legal precedent, in addition to generally sticking it to the man.
and as he went along the shore he hummed,
Grandfather hummed, and not for feeling gay,
but as a signal that his work was well begun
that he had well accounted for another day.
The cranes along the waterfront, grotesques
with names he’d mastered in a foreign tongue,
were marvels that yet left him unimpressed;
were giants he walked fearlessly among.
The immigrant assurance in his breast
rode him to a new world, and made him brave.
He passed what he presumed was each new test
and strove until he landed in his grave.
It must have been a robber
Bag of Anything 