Liana


In the uncertain light
and diffuse rain, the husks
half-abandoned on leaves,
snakes imitating vines, trees eating
fungus eating
other trees appear
to constitute the temple, its debris field
of skulls, and even
the triumphant explorer.
The Dark Idol

is Kupka's, from 1903.  (How much
I could have accomplished
in the Symbolist era, when everything was before us:
avenues of sphinxes,
willows littered
with angels, a fulgurating darkness
that may or may not have been
the workers!)  I know it by
its stone seat, angular bulk,
blank slits of eyes, rather aimlessly
raised claw, the muddy surrounding void.  
Am unafraid (this is my borrowed doom)

and approach ceremoniously but quickly.
Like any idol, it's prepared to talk
about itself, though I have to shout
to attain the proper
world-weary intimacy.  "Death,"
it says, "is a solid, 
Minimalist block. If one's 
articulated – and articulate –
one represents, however scarily,
life.  Those artists who
think otherwise should portray
death as a mossy slab, not infinite."

"So you are on my side," I say
with the feeling, however, that
assorted grievances, spots of time   
which long since escaped and subsumed
time, are out of place
here.  What's left
is a dim cordiality,
a polite, enormous shrug.
I suspect it doesn't even feel
my farewell touch, can only see
the rose I lay across one knee
as some sort of bug.





Backer


The wife is damaged somehow,
tentative.  He checks her 
in passing.  She probably 
has her hands full 
with the driveway, pool,
thirty-foot aquarium,
frames of bought-by-the-yard
Western views, koi pond with big 
bronze frogs, Secret Passageway,
and velvet auditorium where 
he shows his latest weepie,
one night-long Pellegrino in his glass.  
His team are all younger, chatty; submit –
when a remark comes near 
the former president, the sainted Nancy –
to the grave, grownup air
he sees as class.





Canzone
                                  (Michael Moore)

You don't "refuse" my calls: the voice
is kind, almost regretful.
Letters vanish, emails earn
a warning admirably full and stern,
heraldic as an eagle on the screen.
Your burly handmaids, duennas, stand
in the light of my trembling camera 
( – unfledged angel, threadbare pride),
their vast bellies a weapon
where mine is a fleeing cloud. 
What can I do therefore but rent
an icecream truck and drive around
petitioning you, the thick wind 
dispersing all but fragments of my song?
You are yourself the lord,
husband or father that shields you;
yourself his sundering sword.
Even in prison I would plead my case
if need be without recompense or sequel,
saying only, always, what a lover must:
that I am not your equal.





Bertinpacoima


He uses whatever time
and intellect he can spare
to email.  From his office
on the otherwise deserted upper floor
of a stripmall; from home,
where progress has been made: sink almost clean,
the laundry put away, fifteen months sober;
he'll soon be ready to date.
Meanwhile his interests, or interest:
"I saw the fire from the 134.
No way they'll avoid mudslides if it rains,
and slides – this isn't generally known –
can add appreciable tension to 
a fault."  Invariably then,
his focus widens, though he'd say it doesn't:
whatever falls into the sea,
the vector of his coast is always up,
mine down.  The Rockies "soon" will be
as high as, higher than the Himalayas.
Some sort of forest will return to claim
the lower slopes, and splinter giant boulders.
(He seems to think he will be one of them.)
Eventually these mountains too
will subside, though profound things must happen first, 
and waves return (as previously
they will have drowned my seaboard, me). 
He signs off there.  I think
those waters soothe, although not quench, his thirst.