October 2014
I’m a professor who lives, like a lot of other professors, near Boston. In addition to academic things, I write fiction when I’m up to it, poems when I can’t help it. I use a German fountain pen—my principal link to tradition—and write to music. I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, the story collections,Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays,Professors at Play, two short novels, Losses and The Derangement of Jules Torquemal. My novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction. My most recent story collection, The Artist Wears Rough Clothing, was published this summer.
A Small, Regular Life
Evenings before the amusing virtual fire
holding nobody’s hand after a futile day,
drowsy rather than tuckered out for
cutting grass isn’t harvesting hay.
Tilted by a hurricane, the locust tree
sways, leaves fluttering above the dull gray
wall whose fractures are root-made.
Cutting grass isn’t harvesting hay.
It’s all routine while we await the diagnosis,
brushing teeth, preparing the evening’s entrée,
shopping, shower, shave and a haircut, yet
cutting grass isn’t harvesting hay.
The past’s a work of causes well understood;
whatever is explained can be explained away.
It’s not just the past that’s ineluctable, still
cutting grass isn’t harvesting hay.
On weekends time relaxes its fist
on the wrinkled sheets, crunched up duvet;
clothes get washed, dishes, floors and hair, but
cutting grass isn’t harvesting hay.
There’s no profit in upheaval yet
repetition can be made to pay.
Though cutting grass isn’t harvesting hay,
keep on watering the lawn, labor and pray.
No Gift
Finished my 80-minute ride
just as the Andante of
Barber’s Cello Concerto
shuffled on to the I-Pod.
Dead bird on the doorstep,
orange beak, vacated eyes.
She was a cardinal, the
dearest to watch in winter,
girlish, dainty at the feeder.
The bike tumbled over.
I breathed loud, “Oh no,”
both ears full of dirge.
The neighbors’ surly tom,
fed from tins, slew for sport,
left her out of malice.
Only last week peonies
perfumed the pavement.
Cowboy Song
I left in the morning
when the whole world looked new.
I closed the door softly
and I didn’t tell you.
I would love to have stayed,
though you won’t believe me.
Guess I thought I’d fail you
or that you’d deceive me.
The highway led nowhere,
except further from you.
The morning didn’t last
and the world wasn’t new.
Mondanité
I left the party just as it began,
before it could disappoint, dissipate
the guests’ sang-froid, before it got so late
the maquillage and amour-propre ran.
Yet I was the host; I’d bought the booze
they’d swill until, all their inhibitions
drowned, they’d take up bizarre positions,
launch arguments no one could win or lose.
Soon they’d start staring meaningly then flirt
sans vergogne, sucking in a gut, hiking up a skirt.
Toujours l’amour, le discours, le bon esprit,
scoring points or simply scoring,
all using the toilet, a few making free
with my bed. Hélas, mes amis, how boring.
Emeritus
Decadence, disintegration, that’s all
he sees and all he says, and ceaselessly says,
never noting it’s not the neighborhood
or nation in decline, deluding himself
this indubitable decay’s not his.
Only in the merciless mirror is
he old. He’ll check his chin as he shaves but not his
hairline or the pickled parchment round his eyes.
Still, he has a point. Inside that glabrous
pate he’s still eighteen, addled, adolescent,
addicted to aspiration, ambition,
the fading flush on female flesh.
More our buoyant brother than our butt,
more melancholy than moronic,
the pathos of truthlessness is all his--
not yet toothlessness or metastasis,
the chemo-head or colostomy bag,
nor the oubliette of dementia, not yet.
I’m the same as ever, he persists; it’s
the worn-out world that ought to retire.
With what can he fight age but youth
or, with desperate delusion, truth?
©2014 Robert Wexelblatt