If there’s one thing
I’ve learned,
I wish to hell
Someone would tell me
What it is.
Beginner’s mind
Reply
No ideas but in things
“No ideas but in things.”
William Carlos Williams
All righty then
so say I want an idea
you’re saying I need to
bust open a thing
and find an idea inside
maybe a bunch of them
twisting like worms
and then what?
What the hell
am I supposed to say
about all these busted things
and all these twisty ideas?
Because right now
the place is littered with things I’ve busted
that don’t work anymore
and won’t even stand up
and the ideas
have got into the floorboards
and the bag of sugar
and the mattress.
I tell you
if this is poetry
it’s nothing like what I was led to believe
back when they gave us
that wheelbarrow poem to read.
So tell me
sage of Paterson
tell me
old witch
old doctor
tell me what’s the big idea
mister thing?
That pencil
that pencil
was decisive as an arrow once
but soon I noticed
it was always a little short of sharp
but maybe
but who can say
anyway I persevered
and every scratch of the way
there was that pencil
unsharp ever
barely shy of blunt at times
anyway I persevered
now look at it
all chewed up like an argument
nobody won
I Shall Certainly Need New Clothes
I was going to write a poem that would be
lighthearted as fuck, oldfashioned
as a villanelle or a sonnet after Petrarch,
and the title was going to be something
tongue in cheek, especially if you knew me,
but even the hypothetical reader most innocent of me
still would have a solid idea
of what it really meant, because after all
there’s nothing wrong with being obvious
which is an oldfashioned virtue.
Anyway the poem I was going to write
was probably going to be titled
I Shall Certainly Need New Clothes
or something along those lines, something
insouciant and fatalistic at once,
blind to neither the rising seas
nor the beauty of the plum trees
that are blossoming earlier every year.
Oh
Oh,
The future is not like a train
Because if you got caught on the tracks
Because you saw it coming
Because it’s your own damn fault
Oh,
The future is more like a tiger
Because it’s not coming closer it’s waiting
Because only the survivors will ever know
Because it was there all along in the grass
The gulls
from underneath the footbridge where it passed
over low tide and the muck of low tide
as I passed above with a chatter of tires
of a sudden out clamored a flock of gulls
and their thick feet were tiling the flat sea with ripples
all in a pattern as if they had rehearsed it
and they were identically honking like toys
all in unison as if they had practiced it
as if I were the catastrophe they had been waiting for
The very rich are different
The very rich are different from you and me.
They have bigger eyes. And they like what they see.
The very rich are different, they have bigger feet,
They will kick your tin can clear across the street.
The very rich have bigger pockets. They have bigger hands.
The very rich have bigger wishes which are your commands.
The very rich use bigger. What they want, they taste.
They don’t believe in you the way they don’t believe in waste.
The very rich will buy the biggest tree to knock it down.
They’ll buy a bigger factory and say that it’s your town.
They have bigger faces. They have bigger belief.
They may sail their bigger yacht into a coral reef.
The very rich take bigger, what they always can’t replace,
They will leave a pile of dead coins in its place.
A Trick
(a translation from the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges)
Fifty-two cards push real life aside:
flimsy, parti-colored charms
that make us forget where we’re bound to end up in the end.
And who cares where? —we’ve stolen this time, anyway,
let’s build a house of cards,
decorate it, move in, and then play
as we were always meant to play.
Nothing beyond the table’s edges
carries any weight.
Inside, it’s a foreign land
where bluff and bid are high affairs of state:
The Ace of Spades swaggers authoritatively
like Lord Byron, capable of anything;
the nine of diamonds glitters like a pirate’s dream.
A headlong rush of lethargy
slacks conversation to a drawl:
our slow words come and go
the while chance exalts some, lays others low;
the while the players echo and re-echo all the tricks they know:
until it seems that they’re returned—or nearly so:
the crones and cronies and their bony friends
who showed us what it meant to be true Americans
with the same old songs, the same old works for idle hands.
That story
My father told that story again
the one that ends
You can’t get there from here,
and he laughed again like always.
I didn’t laugh though.
It’s only a good joke
if it couldn’t be true
that’s what I thought.
I haven’t slept well
ever since then
because I keep wondering
is that really how things are now?
Anyway (poem written with a found pencil)
I don’t know why
it never occurred to me before
but today I thought
that I could kiss you
something serious
for letting me know poetry
after all is
a respectable thing to love
so even though it’s years on
and you, last time we met,
hated me, anyway
there’s a kiss outstanding
you don’t really want
and I won’t really give
and that’s poetry too
as much as anything is
Bag of Anything 