In January


The celebrated relativity of time
we may grasp, but who knows time?  To feel it 
requires some space, to believe it you have 
to move.  All the most essential trees are
known solely by their fruits, from mother’s love 
to the Big Bang.  Festooned between bright 
effect and hazy cause is, I suppose, faith. 
 
This long empty afternoon is empty 
because it’s long, long because it’s empty. 
Pencil colored, chilly, opaque, pointless,
more an engraving of an afternoon.

My sister likes to insist that Everything 
Happens For A Reason.  She means, of course, 
a good reason.  Wrapped in this quilt she’s snug
enough, proof against all chilly, merely 
apparent evils.  The only faith she needs 
is in a weird roulette that spins for her:
Providence.  No Stoic ever claimed that 
fatalism must be disconsolate.
  
Science is an activity pursued 
part time by scientists.  At their conferences
none proclaims that what they all believe 
is real is not all of reality 
to any of them, that even chemists crave  
luxuries, comforts, lust for warmth.  Who’d choose 
to be a crow on a wet black branch 
in January, aware of nothing but one’s 
needs and hardly of their satisfaction,
just to know all the reasons that aren’t good?  
Being is wanting; there’s an axiom, 
first principle beyond disproof.  Being 
isn’t having.  Who wants to be and not have?

The cracker crumbs I spread across the gray 
snow this morning draw from the gray sky, 
down the gray air, black birds.  Sharp heads hammer 
greedily, squamate feet dance daintily
across the crust.  For these the afternoon 
has been neither long nor empty, nothing 
happened for a good reason, and night, 
blacker and colder, neither too empty
nor too long, will arrive just in time.

In January first appeared in The Literary Review





Under the Pavement, The Beach — Paris 1968


Certain we were the People, not a mob, 
that the streets belonged to us, we surged, 
the city’s young blood bright red with zeal, 
swarmed through the broad boulevards intent  
on hammering each straight and rigid line 
into the shape of a dancer's thigh or a 
post-adolescent breast.  How could the 
bureaux and the banks resist a million 
mouths raging for liberty and pleasure?  
So we tore up everything that was tearable, 
from toothpaste ads to frangible asphalt, 
tossed it all skywards, glasswards,
policewards, parentwards, Godwards.  
The old needed to be shoved aside and yield 
us what we yearned for, endless August in utopia.  

Sure, we were foolish, drunk and callow, but so alive. 
We plastered the city with mottos of preposterous politics. 
Reins to the children, guns to the Seine.
You have your money—we, our hair.  
Raise high the guillotine of love! 
Beneath your filthy pavement, the clean beach.  
These we sang out, chanting each to each,
raising fists and voices, strong just from taking part.
Those silly sidewalk slogans can still touch the heart, 
naïve poems, fiercely unresigned and unalloyed.  
Is it just as well we failed, grew older, and employed?





Not Really a Eulogy


His improvisatory life, all the mocking masks, the put-ons,
failed to end like the musical comedy he strove to make it; 
it’s as if some bloody-minded terrorist burst into
the theater and blew up a performance of The Ideal Husband.

Tap-dancing through forty years, chuckling
even at the least opportune of opportunities, 
he cracked jokes as old and sugary as the
leftover Hallowe’en candy bars he kept by 
the door to disconcert those visitors
he called grown-ups in the worst sense.
His eulogy ought to be from Aristophanes, epitaph by Shaw.

At Oxford, his aristocratic looks led the Brits
to imagine he was a Kennedy.  When they
asked he’d smile slyly and say, “No comment.”
I wonder, might that be his ideal epitaph?

Only a minor infection of the calf, but they issued him
the wrong antibiotic.  So down crashed the curtain 
too soon, smack in the middle of the second act.