Ifs, Ands, and Buts
1966-2000
FOOTBALL
The field between Waterford and Newton lay
Quiet in the chill October afternoon until
The fattest pig was hauled there squealing
And tied to the Waterford Oak. Then Ralph Frierson,
The townsfolk around, stabbed it
And, with a yeoman's axe, hacked off its head.
Jack, the farrier caught it and ran until Tom
Newton socked him and the head dribbled to the ground -–
The first fumble.
Son, Ross, youth
To my ancient, fourteen years old lineman,
Remember what I have said when the quarterback
Passes the pigskin to the wide receiver;
A touchdown will assure the sprouting of crops.
SUGAR
One, two, buckle your seatbelt. This plane
Is taking off for home, wherever that is
In your 90 year old mind. You said you
Wanted to go home, so I am taking you
Home, to Buffalo, where you have never
Been, Mother. You have lived so long
I am a Senior Citizen! The 28 years
Between us is a crack in the sidewalk
Or a hole as big as the sugarbowl
You attack when your nurse's back
Is turned. Your sweet-toothed dotage!
Your horde of M and Ms! not good for you,
But what the hell, hell, hell.
Now, as Tex, our Captain, says, sit back,
Relax, and experience a little turbulence.
The crowd on the runway at the Queen City, Old Gal,
Awaits you as at the opening of the Erie Canal.
FOR ANNA AT 30
In high school, when you were trying on
Every art, you wrote a poem about me
And LSD, read it, Father-Daughter Nite,
And wowed them at the Tralfalmadore Cafe.
Now, your muse resting, I write your
Mon trentiesme age poem for you,
Your head near bursting with the nouns
And verbs of six languages, my head
Scrimping by on mother tongue, four
Short poems a year, this one for you
And Isaac, your first-born, whose first
Word was "bird," your regular ornithologist,
A poet too maybe (who knows?) growing up
Just in time for the Real Romantic Revival—
Skylark, Nightingale, Golden Bird again.
Mother of poet, mother of birdsong,
Sing to Isaac this Testament after Villon,
About youth, about goodbye, so long, to youth,
Sing the poet's only true and glorious song.
HIGH ART AND LOW MORALS
Fifty Hans Holbein heads
From the Queen's collection:
Wyatt and Surrey so real
You could ask them about
The sonnet (a trick in the eyes
He learned in Art School at
Basel), Basel where he left
Wife and babes to starve
When he sailed off to London
To paint King and courtiers;
Rich, he returned once to
Immortalize their destitution
In a heart-rending oil
(and left them nothing in his will).
John Rison Jones, Jr.,
From Huntsville, Alabama,
My classmate, liberated Dachau
And shattered all his Gieseking
78s when he heard that great
Interpreter of Schubert was a
Nazi.
Older now and I still remember
I am a pledge to SAE, in a canoe
With a brother and his fiancee;
Neither can swim. The canoe tips
Over. Which one shall I save?
We all drown together.
THE HUNT (The Prado)
Lucas Cranach, you have painted yourself
Into a corner where you look out across
The centuries, trying to say something
You have not said in your painting
The Hunt, a tapestry of hounds and deer,
Crossbows and hunters, surmounted
By a medieval pink and white castle
Where no one ever lived. Your self-
Portrait in this corner says: my heart
Was with the stags that fell bloody
By the river. I mourned the fallow does.
TOM, DICK, AND HARRY
These fellows speak with the tongue of earth,
Are masters of our beautiful slang, have
Brains of exquisite fashioning, common men.
Tom is calm, Dick cool, Harry collected;
Tom is smart, Dick handsome, Harry is,
Well, is just Harry, good for a laugh -- all
Democrats. Would you like your sister
To marry one of these kingpins of the empire?
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN I
Her seams hardly show where she was
Put together, the worst under her bodice
Where the heart of a little girl of 8
Was sunk into place. It is from there that
The haunting memory of the sourness
Of wild rhubarb, found only in the High Tatras,
Comes, which in her present state of full
Daughterhood she cannot explain, her brain
The brain of a bluestocking found dead
After a musicale at the Baron's castle.
She says, "Rhubarb," her voice like a violin.
She asks, "Father?" her voice like a trumpet.
And the Baron, the maker, tells her
To find in her husband--the monster nearby--
Her father, her brother, her friend.
There was probably some truth in that.
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN II
The Professor, a bachelor all his married life,
Closed Mary Shelley's book and proclaimed to the class
That Frankenstein, like all of Western lit, lacks
A goddess. He looked around the room,
Assembling in his mind the pieces:
Maria's apple ass, Prue's perfect breasts,
Together with What's-her-name's (on the beach
Last summer) trim foot, Julia's toe, Corrina's
Little finger. Year by year, since 25, he had collected.
50 now, now if he could only find the right lips,
He would hoist the amalgam into the electricity
Of his imagination and know what,
Completely satisfactory, he could, in full voice,
Praise.
SHAH JAHAN'S FLY
Here in my cabin room at the New Delhi YMCA,
Where I am neither young nor Christian,
This morning I am awakened by a pesky fly
Tickling my nose. I wonder if this fly's ancestor,
Some fly back to the nth power, waked
Important others: Nehru, maybe, lost
An hour's sleep because a fly scaled
The Everest of his nose his first morning
As Prime Minister. "Drat fly," he said and rose
To govern all of India.
ON YOUR HIGH HORSE
See his image at any Mobil station,
Pegasus, a horse of a different color,
Mauve I think, some shade of purple, hard
To see by moonlight, heading toward the stars,
A flight of fancy, bareback, clutching
His withers. Funny, when you come down,
You write one of the great poems of the language,
Or, more likely, drop a fistful of horsefeathers.
IN A PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, 1960
1. Gentle John
never said a word
But peed his pants
the day I turned
a perfect cartwheel
on the bull pen lawn.
2. The Commander
spoke into corners
twitching his hands.
I knew he was Cain
and slipped him a shoestring
we thought was a snake.
3. Max,
a Greek attendant,
my age, knocked me out
when I ran intending to go through him.
I awoke with my own name,
Mac.
THE LAUNDROMAT
Some say it is the drink I drink,
Or have drunk, these fifty years,
That makes my hands tremble so;
But, truth to tell, I live above a laundromat
And vibrate to the tumble and spin dry
Of someone else's dirty wash.
THE WISHBONE
It was not a family feast, just the two of us
Picking at the carcass of a fowl, a hen
or rooster, baked and cold from the fridge.
It was not an anniversary, no time of good
Hope for years to come, no summing up, no
Resolutions--an ordinary day, work done,
The children overnight at grandma's. You
Looked tired still, six months from my last
Breakdown. I carved the chicken, served you
The front end of the breast, that small part
With the wishbone. After dinner, tears
Stood in our eyes, as in a ballet we pulled,
Wish made, at the wishbone. I wished
To be done with the re-enactments of
Childhood. I think you wished for my return.
Snap, and I still do not know which end
Wins, the shortshank spindle or the club.
A CASTLE ON THE RHINE
The Niagara Mohawk Electric Company transformer
Towering over the backyard did not make
Things easier, nor the runners of wires criss-
Crossing the yard. Nevertheless we made love
On the lawn, as though we had pulled our skiff
Onto the grounds of a schloss-am-Rhine,
The whole weight of Europe upon us, as though,
After a picnic of ham, schinkenbrot and lots
Of small beer, we·made love under the lilacs
And rhododendron, and chug-a-lugged that experience.
That was thirty years ago but I remember
The crickets singing in the grass, singing
That all flesh was grass, and we, our limbs
Entwined, sang too a song about each other,
Close like the night.
JULY (A TV Sci Fi Fantasy)
These are the Dog Days. This spaceship
Goes beyond the moon, beyond Mars and Venus,
Beyond the sun, beyond the great white rose
To the space station -- an afterimage
Of electric Light. There is some debate
About who is Captain, who Navigator -- The Most
Learned Man or the bearded Philosopher King.
The Drunk is exiled and takes a space
Walk. The outright Queer is suspended too
But connected by Telephone. We can join them
By Teletransportation whenever we want and we
Do want, magnanimous as we are by education.
This July we scan the splendor
Of flowers brought from Earth and planted
In rows: the chaliced rose, the pink,
The wild red poppies, the white lilies.
Married Androids tend them and think
The planet Earth from which the flowers come
Is Paradise. They say of Earth and its Galaxy:
"This is eternity, folks." We give them
Rubies in exchange for many water lilies
Which do not talk, sexy things all,
Pink and white, half open to the Light,
The pads a vibrant veridian green.
Our spaceship Julius engages
The spaceship Quintilis and we win
And settle down on an alien planet.
We are all exploring the unknown.
The Captain is bitten by a Killer Plant
And lies deprived of Sanity. The Doctor
Feeds her computer to find a cure
And discovers the Captain's Fantasy -- a couple
Lying stripped in bed, copulating.
The Captain, The Most Learned Man,
Is dying. He dies with Pride and some say
He is reborn, a babe, a possible grandson,
Who is given the Captain's name.
The Julius
Returns to Earth, a summer Paradise, a changing
Grid of Time and Space and Matter like the Universe.
THE PHOENIX
Was it sparks from the surgeon's knife and saw
That set aflame my body? or my own blood, by-passed,
Gushing through old veins, my old brain?
I went mad, so lost in a manic rapid-fire
Switching among layers of symbolic form -- print,
Playing cards, TV, music, movies -- I said, "I cannot
Find my way back to reality, no one will ever find me,
I am dying!" and passed out in Katka's arms, a Liebestod.
I dreamed I took her with me 3 1/2 steps into death
And then lost her. A rush of youth went through
Me as I drifted down a staircase. I awoke in bed,
Whispering two spontaneous love poems in Katka's ear.
I signed myself into a psych ward with just
Enough savvy left to strike out permission for
Lobotomy and emerged on the 4th geriatric floor,
Heaven, filled with RCs and protestants, no atheists
Like me. I raved for three weeks, laughing
And crying, but ever since then, 500 years old,
With the taste of ashes in my mouth, I am young
Again, swim quarter miles, keen of mind, erotic
(I had said goodbye to Eros), reborn,
Still kicking, burning, burning in these flames.
RICH MAN, POOR MAN; OR A SLOW BOAT TO CHINA
Katka and I have left our new $1000 Kerry Blue,
Dasha, in Orchard Park, a burb of Buffalo, and come
To Kona, trying to smooth over, this time in Hawaii,
The last bad year.
When I talked to a new broker
And said we were taking the trip with liquid money
From bonds called in, he said, having saved all
Your life, at your age, you should enjoy it. He didn't
Know we never saved a cent, that the million
We have l inherited and have a good pension.
Here
At The Inn in Halualoa overlooking Kailua, I continue
To have astonishing dreams. Last night my father,
Dead these 30 years, appeared, for the first time,
Smashing, quite insane, his Buick through a garage
Door. We knew he was OK again when he set a world's
Record driving backwards a whole mile. Was he the cause
Of this year's madness and the episodes before? Or was it
Just the disease they now call bi-polar? I awoke
Trembling and thought and thought about my kids
Seeing their father mad, whether they believe he is,
With all these pills I take, claimed back from the abyss,
And whether they are able to trust me ever again after
A manic climax when I struck my wife and, according
To her, in her presence, propositioned them both.
I have broken the kapu, the Sacred Laws.
We drove
Yesterday to Honaunau, the Place of Refuge where
Ancient priests absolved taboo breakers; but no priests
Were there, and I am still guilty of my crimes.
At night here the mongrel dogs of the poor bark
And howl, a chorus about inequity. You don't see
Them by day but they cross the lawn of this fancy Inn
At night and shit where the guests are likely to step.
There are some things money cannot buy. My expensive
Psychiatrist, back home, for whom I write this poem,
Can’t make much of the psychic information I give him.
I talk and weep; he adjusts the dosage. I hope
The Indian surgeon who gave me this partially
Artificial heart, an act which triggered this recent
Lapse from mens sana, is right when he said,
As though out of the wisdom of the inscrutable East—
“Time heals all things."
We are half way there.
GRAFFITI
for my grandsons
Taking in some Napoleonic soldier's scrawl, some
Unlucky Pierre, who left his "I was here 1798"
on the central chamber ceiling, in big red letters,
The sarcophagus lid, the gold, the jewels,
Burgled maybe five thousand years before,
Only the bathtub coffin, the outer shell,
So huge no tomb-robber could budge it,
In place —one of a tour group touring
Remains of the Old Kingdom at Giza last August,
Having seen too much graffiti on the inside
Of Cheop's pyramid, the largest near Cairo,
I began to ascend the steep escape-shaft
Aligned with a star in Orion's (Osiris') belt,
Stooped over, laboring up the wooden slats,
My strength surging in spurts at first,
Then less and less, toward that constellation
Which the old slave-driving pharaoh travelled to,
His soul, they say, shot in postmortem spasms
To a mystery, I say, at and before his conception.
Almost sixty with a bad heart (we did
Not know that then), my two hundred twenty
Pound body stopped, short of the exit.
From behind two nice San Francisco queens
Pushed me, heaving for breath, into the sunlight,
Near cardiac arrest, near no-life-after-death,
Victor, our tour guide, calm as a seen-everything-
Twice mortician, wondering if he was about to have
(all our looking at mummies in museums wrapped up)
A granddaddy corpse on his hands, to fly back
To the States in a plain Trans World Airline
Crate adorned with blue glued-on shipping labels
And, in stenciled block letters, the mighty
Pen name I go by, when I imagine the great
I-stop-at-nothing Kings, quick or dead or deified.