WHINNY

Poems About Nature,

Human and Otherwise

Barbara Marquardt

Instar Books

Copyright 2008
This book is dedicated to Garrison Keillor, who doesnt know about it or know me and
who bears no responsibility for any poem here. I dedicate it to him because I appreciate
the daily inspiration of his website, The Writers Almanac and also the weekly
entertainment of his radio program The Prairie Home Companion. Although I have an
M.A. in creative writing, once I left the University environment I suffered the fate of
many an English major and have been isolated from those who enjoy poetry. So Garrison
Keillor, a complete stranger, has been my connection to that world where people love
literature even though its an impractical field of study.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLES OF POEMS (printed in alphabetical order)
A Hamster Named Magilicuddy
A Wasted Place
After An Absence, Hands
After Dragging Ourselves,
After Raking Eight Bagsful
After Watching Etosha, a Dry Season
Always Good To Get Home
An Uneasy Calm Before Color
And Their Eggs Take Two Hours To Boil
Another Helping
Another Poisoned Cup
Another Road Not Taken
Anyway, Now I Am Sure
Aspen
Asymmetry
At the National Cat Show
At The Pancake House
Autobiography
Being Temporary
Billy Graham Wants Swift Justice
Born To Be Bait
Bouncing Bet
Budget Cruise In Chicago
Bugway
By B.M.
Catalogs I And II
CHEE-CAW-GO!
Chicken Sexers
City Snake In Spring
Closet Dancer
Coarse Frost
Complements Of Science
Coriolis Effect
Criticism
Dad
Debating In Sleep
Describing An Arc
Different Folks, Different Strokes
Disappointment
Discoverys Scientist Of The Year, 1982
Divided Sky
Dog-Walking Thoughts
Doing the Time Step

Dont Fool With Physics

Dustball
Ear Lyric
Eating Its Way To Oblivion
Either Way, Same Difference
Ever the Underachiever
Feeling Like Esther Williams
Feminine Perspective
Fiery July and Chicago
Finally An Unused Image
Fluorescent Lights Define
Fragile Deterrent
Free Style
Gold At The Rainbows End
Grand Unification Theory
Grasshopper Life
Grave Robbers
Hal
Harvey
Haustellaty
Have An Ice Day
Homegrown Poisons
How To Live Longer
I Apologize For Using you, Paul Newman
I Hope Theyre All Happy
I Know Im Over My Latest
I Read It In Time, 2/23/81
I Rely on Limestone
I Will
Ill Fated Relationships
Immortality Today, No Waiting
Inadequate Dandelions
Inbound Train, 6:45 A.M.
Insect Relaxation
Inside the New Community College
Is That You, Prince?
It Takes Goosestepping
It Takes Some Big Bees
Its A Little Like Love
Its Cuckoo
January 4, 1986
Jive Turkey
John Donne Long Dead
Lap Swimming at the YWCA
Laundromat
Learning To Dive In
Made It
Making Whoopee In Baraboo
Maybe Id Rather Not Go
Mimics
Mine Is Named Minnie

Mulberries
My Christmas Ornaments Never
My Daughter On Christmas Eve
My Phone Never Stops Ringing
My Watchdog
New Kingdoms
Night Alone At Navy Pier
No Fat Cats
No Sugar
Not For The Squeamish
Not Much Fun Here
Notes for The History of Milk
November, And Now
November Remnants
Of Creeping Jenny
Osage Oranges
Paedogenesis
Paper-White Narcissus
Paradise Revised
Parking Places Are Sacred
Pick Whichever
Plant Pornography
Porifera
Power Flow
Prelude
Radio Space
Rent
Roadkills
Route 47
Saffron or Poppy Seeds
Saving Up For The Psychiatrist
Sisters, Consider The Aphid
Ski Poles
Sleeping Bag, Mountain, M-1949, Type 1
Some Call Me Sasquatch
Some Cold Facts About Chicago
Some Cultivated Thoughts
Stilled
Thaw
The Air Danced
The Man Who Didnt Know How To Eat Jello
The Masseuse
The Plumb-Bob Pigeon
The Right Punishment For The Crime
The Saw-Whet Owl
The Second Singularity
The Slugs
They Did It Before Dinosaurs
This Is The Deal
Through Einsteinian Eyes
To Edwin Way Teale

To Gorillas
To H2 O
To Lynn Margulis
To Read Before X-C Skiing
Tom, Who Teaches Preteens
Twisted Wings
Two Crow Trees
Two Men
Uncertainty Principle
Walking The Cat
Weddings
Whales, Slugs, Toads, And Other Lovers
What A Mayfly May Not Do
When Its Snowing Cats And Dogs
When Summer Seemed Distant As New Guinea
Whinny
Whirligig
White
Why I Am Tired Today
Why One Never Hears Of Dilettante Mites
Winston
With An Iceman This Wouldnt Happen
Worries Of A Feminist And Anti-War Activist

A HAMSTER NAMED MAGILICUDDY

runs nowhere on his wheel.
Escapes his cage when he can.
Plunges at a mate and humps
frantically.
Then fights
until the pair must be
separated to save their lives.
Alone, mostly he dozes,
tolerating human strokes.
I, more civilized, roll into
yoga poses, jump rope,
leap on my trampoline,
ride my exercise bike fast,
try to achieve more than ever
before. Before what? I believe
Im getting somewhere, am
thinner.
Feeling slim and sexy,
I aggressively tease my lover,
who leans heavily over me
to see the baseball game better.
He falls asleep. We quarrel.
He goes home.
My cat rubs
her muzzle against my cheek.
I sneeze but need the touch.

A WASTED PLACE
On what some would call vacant
land, my German shepherd used to chase
woodchucks and incautious young rabbits.
A trespasser, I gathered crabapple
blossoms in spring and red velvet
staghorn sumac berries in fall.
I saw the rare little white or whorled
milkweed progress to feathered seed.
Each in their seasons came
trillium, Solomons seal, spiderwort,
evening lychnis, bladder campion,
phlox and primrose and chicory,
multitudes of others, and above
them red-winged blackbirds trilled
over cherries and mulberries.
Summer grasses bloomed high as
my eyes alongside fragrant
white and yellow sweet clover,
migrants brought to America by other
migrants to make hay meadows.
Far above hawks float and crows flap.
When night again came early and
goldfinches actively gathered thistle seeds,
when migrating robins and flickers
thickened the air over glowing
masses of goldenrod and boneset,
the lands owners began to make
what they named improvements.
They hired newer migrants, who
worked cheap, keeping secrets as
they mowed and hacked the land
to flat shreds and splinters, then
left their plastic trash and beer cans.
On the prairie soil, said to be Earths
most fertile, they followed orders,
planting car dealerships and used
car lots, advertised by flags.
My meadow and woods had been useless,
an anomoly in need of development and
a cash crop of steel and glass.
Americans say waste is a shame.

AFTER AN ABSENCE, HANDS

short circuit, blow fuses
when our loosely wired
fingers cling. Once
the electricity is humming,
we must switch on everything,
quickly get what we can
before the flickering
to brownout, followed
by blackout and silence.
The biggest bill will be run up
after the current is cut.

AFTER DRAGGING OURSELVES,

overclothed but still frozen,
through slowmotion sub-zero weeks,
the tease of warm breezes
makes a muddy gray, turduncovering January day seem perfect,
spring previewed. Children throw
suddenly unbearable thick
coats, mittens, hats anywhere
and run unencumbered. Lovers
stroll, dare to hold bared hands,
ignore the damp chill rising
behind the surprising mildness.
Then its back to grim winter after
this happy lapse into the fifties
(temperatures this time, thank God,
and not that sentimentalized decade),
a dark day with snowclouds overhead.
So what? So this: no matter that
its a clich to say that midwestern
weathers changeable; the variety
excites, makes polite conversation
possible, wakes us to face the latest
variation on a theme of extremes.
In Chicago we layer on and take off,
high on surprise though we know
that all thats constant here
is contrast. Except in politics,
where we are consistently windy.

10

AFTER RAKING EIGHT BAGSFUL

In infrared images,
the kind computers can paint,
raked leaves would shine
like lightbulbs inside
clear plastic yard bags.
The eight bagsful I raked
for my mother sat sedately
close to the curb, no
yellow glowing there, no
hints of electricity
within, eight dark vinyl turds,
and no great artist eager to
paint their heat portraits.
My own yard remains unraked.
One storm will end autumns glory,
and leaf cremation taints the air, but
today no breeze aids the lazy drift of
flame-colored maple leaves over ash
paddles and honey locust leaflets,
yesterdays wind-blown gold. Pin
oaks and copper Norway maples
still fire the sky, trying to hold back
their climax and the sadness afterwards.
Im going to leave it all be, only
gathering enough sidewalk sycamore
to eat my fill from their painterly plates.

11

AFTER WATCHING ETOSHA, A DRY SEASON

(an early National Geographic television special, made when such specials were
something new, before familiarity had made them less astonishing)
The lions wont leave
my living room, lie
languid near the
African violets. To
get away, I take my
dog Jai for a walk,
but the ballfield fades
to veldt and the dogs legs
lengthen stiffly until
she pronks like a springbok,
an angular version of
the bouncing ball shes after.
Canine again, Jai scratches in grass
still green as the great bullfrogs
in Etosha, whose icy slitted eyes,
ochre as cold, dry winter grass,
blinked in what seemed to be orgasms.
Then, in a changed camera angle,
eggs had squirted across my screen
from a mother frogs bloated cloaca.
Shots later, black tadpoles had
swarmed in thick wriggling rivers.
The frogs follow us back home,
making me and Jai jumpy,
and I am not sorry to remember
how a lion cub crunched one and
an electric blue bush snake had
swallowed several until his swollen
belly had dragged, ungainly.
Before todays film I had rather
fancied frogs, thought them not as ugly
acting as some princes, innocently
singing RIB-BIT or singing
Its not easy being green.
But its all over now,
my love affair with frogs,
since the camera caught them
cannibalizing in the lean dry season,

12

AFTER WATCHING ETOSHA (continued)

a narrator stating flatly that
some frogs know no other
food than their brothers.
Say its not so, Kermit!
When I sleep, my dreams will
seethe with these greedy frogs,
stuffing their mouths with each other,
amoral as mantises, not what I
expected of animals with backbones.

ALWAYS GOOD TO GET HOME

Cicada-killer wasps cant
carry their fat prey
very well while they
fly. Trying, they decline
to the ground and reclimb,
looking for landmarks and
dragging supper up some
trunk to jump once more.
Again failing to soar, they
land badly and must again
crawl up and fall down,
over and over until
the repetition hits home
and they can drop their prey
packages and flop, weary
shoppers who over-spent.

13

AN UNEASY CALM BEFORE COLOR

Some days in late winter
when old layered snow is porous
and black in DuPage County,
or gradations of gray in Kane,
and the dirty land seems
an ashtray left unemptied
by some chain-smoking slattern,
a sly white blanket still
lying on the treacherous Fox
makes a bright tempting spread
over its river bed, where rocks
shift. Churning currents conceal
the fact that one fine sunshiny day
the river will boil up and crack
its cover into jagged chunks,
which it will suck like hard candy
into its hungry swollen flow.
And it will eat up land, spread
beyond its bed and seep, stealing
more than it can ever keep.
Already the Fox has an appetite.
Like the mammal who gave it name,
its stomach can rumble, insatiable
after a bitter winters deprivations.
Yet these days the river seems safe.
Mallards punctuate its surface.
Mammal tracks make crazy dotted lines
the thaw will not bother to cut on.
Its shorelines are indecisive.
Where no bridges give definition
and no liquid gurgle can be heard,
it masquerades as floodplain.
But it is too smooth a liar.
Plains are pricklier; their prairies
wave, even on quiet iced days,
tough grasses, herbs, and young shrubs.

14

AN UNEASY CALM BEFORE COLOR (continued)

Slick as varnish, thin and easy
to tear as a sheet of cellophane,
the Foxs snow-coated ice highlights
our climates cold March monochrome.

AND THEIR EGGS TAKE TWO HOURS TO BOIL

What I like best about the ostrich
is that if Im ever in its African habitat,
I might find it without binoculars
and not miss it while I fix
the focus, as happens here with
shorebirds, hawks, and those difficult
perchers I crave to catch in my lens.
But a herd of 600 tall ostriches
with stem necks undulating in
unison and feathered black lashes
batting over eyes twice the weight
of their brains, that even I might
sight. And be sad that weve manhandled them badly, slit lifted
throats in case their gizzards hid
diamonds, made plumed hats of their
coats, had dinner and bowl both from
their heavyweight eggs, and still take
for agriculture the plains where they
flapped in frenzied mating dance,
ran jackals off their hatchlings,
and left the land as wildly green and
grand as when their strange reptilian
race of mammal-acting grounded avians
began, back when man was afloat in
the chromosome future of a primate
capable of becoming avaricious.

15

ANOTHER HELPING
Many beasts inflate
their waists (I heap
roast beef and gravy
on my plate) or blow
whole bodies into
globes (Ill take
a hot fudge sundae
later, thanks), frogs
for instance, and puffer
fish (yes, Ill have
another dish), and no
one acts as if theyre
hogs (put lots of
bacon on my salad) when
they go roly poly (more
butter for the fresh
hot bread) to become
fatly fearsome. Welladapted to this defense
mechanism (Yes, Ill have
it with nuts and whipped
cream), I havent yet
identified the enemy
its designed to scare,
unless its my mirrored self
or the trim man buying dinner.

16

ANOTHER POISONED CUP

Dusty, but never
dry, ever edging
toward forever
dead, that uninhabited
museum the Mediterranean
floor floats up to coat with
industrial scum Cousteaus
divers of the modern
rubberized Odyssey.
Would Odysseus, like fish,
suffocate in this great
waste? This time
saved by no Calypso,
wretched, retching, regret
the pores that drank
green deeper than blue and
flawed grayer with flecks
than old-fashioned hemlock
in another poisoned cup?

17

ANOTHER ROAD NOT TAKEN

but there was no mystery in it,
just a miss bred of hesitation.
It was a slick, twisting, downhill skid
requiring quick decisions,
the kind I can rarely make.
With right ski thinking, this way,
and left insisting that, I splatted
smack at a tree ahead, direct
as an arrow, both feet losers.
The path meandered without me.
Back in the parking lot I attracted
the attention of the half dozen
homosexuals waiting for whatever
in trucks and cars. Not to worry.
I was the wrong gender and a mess anyway.
A scratch bled on my face. My skis
and poles and ass were dragging behind.
I remembered once carrying in two
trips a disassembled double bed,
its heavy metal frame and innersprings
banging anything I passed, and me
careening beneath. Add ice
for sliding, and I felt like that.
I know now I need gentle slopes
and wide trails with space for decisions.
But safety wont exhilarate like making
it where before I failed, swerving skillfully, leaning so body leads skis,
feeling like a miracle of speed
and balance. Me, chancing it. Or
at least I dream that on brave days.

18

ANYWAY, NOW I AM SURE

Hurt when I said
I wasnt yet sure
of our future,
you set an iced
glass of wine on
my unclothed stomach.
It will be a cold
world out there if
were not together,
you said, lifting
the glass but not
drinking to that.
A graphic example,
the kind we teachers
struggle to find
when we want an idea
to stick forever.
Every time I start
to feel anger or even
slight dissatisfaction
with you, the memory
of a cold glass on my
abdomen reminds me what
warmth I might lose.
Chilled, I reconsider.

19

ASPEN
In Aspen, Colorado,
do they know it is said
that the tree whose name
they take was hated
in the Middle Ages?
Its quaking then was
no matter of lateral
compression of long
leaf petiole. No.
Its shaking was
for Christs sake,
in shame that ancestral
aspen planks had stood
straight and accepted
the immortal weight
held by unholy nails.
So in Shakespeares day
country people would
throw stones and clods,
angry to see this guilty
tree still green, its only
punishment an eternal
tremble. These days
the tree has it easier,
and need fear (but with
clear conscience) only
skiers, subdivision saws,
pollutions awful fallout.

20

ASYMMETRY
Mighty rivers level
flood plains or
surf rounds sand and
pebbles on smooth
shorelines. Man also
files at sharp edges,
seeks peace in whats
flat and regular, in
the circles unchanging
symmetry. Fear lies in
the jagged surprise,
the wavy snake.
On this bulging
globe that wobbles so
elliptically, all that
matters is uneven.
Spun in a spiral
galaxy, churning
internally, Earth
hurtles toward eternity.
We bumpy beings spring
from the double windings
of helices in an evolution
dependent on irregularities.

21

AT THE NATIONAL CAT SHOW

I expected magic, got laughs.
A hall packed with cats
and I had imagined that
they would be posing,
restrained as show dogs.
Or on stools like fierce
circus lions, ready
at a snap of their masters
wrists to parade their paces
or demonstrate feline
acrobatics.
I was startled, then,
to see the cats all caged,
many curled in circles within
litter boxes or acting like
the alley brats I have befriended.
Nappers and escape-attempters,
observing spy types. Reedy,
curly-haired breeds like clipped
sheep, with kinky whiskers.
Svelte and stylish
Asians.
But the fancy-tickling cats,
pig-pug faces so smashed in
Im amazed they take in air,
were Persians, fat fur brushed
in ruffs maintained by paperplate collars. One such collapsed
cat-face framed in white cardboard
gave me giggles and dark, accusing
looks from cat and alleged master.
Guilty I was, they implied,
of ignorant nose-chauvinism and
insulting a blue-ribbon kisser.

22

AT THE PANCAKE HOUSE

Did you have to tell the cashier
you call me Babycakes?
It doesnt really fit my image
and aint nobodys business nohow.
Nothing you love better than
blushes and funny stuff,
certainly not me I now know.
Playing the adorable rascal,
you sketched plans on the back
of your placemat for a home
where we might someday work
and play together. Here,
the vegetable garden; there,
art studios to share. When
was never mentioned, but
the answer was already never,
although one of us didnt know.

23

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
No know-it-alls or
smartass ancestors prepared
my parents for me.
Their Bookworm! made me
squirm but not stop chomping.
People who read too much go
crazy, they claimed.
The grandpa you favor went
even without reading. You
have his hair too. Huh?
Speaking, I kept my face in
the pages.
Young lady,
they raged, youd better
not get smart!
Impatient for payment now
24 years late, at 18
I mailed out a story and
waited. Waited. Waited.
Few knew I was a poet or
painter or guitar-picker or
something that wouldnt take
tuition. Broke and fooled
by folksongs into loving
the common man, I didnt
wait for the uncommon.
Married just enough to make
three babies, I played my
parents game and did not
ever get smart, not even later
in college, trying science,
my writing and art set aside,
child clutter everywhere,
no father anywhere,
sleep and dreams just
schemes for after graduation.
Soon teaching children
bewildered as my own, I
brooded confused through
chalky days in their ghetto,
inky nights in mine, writing
forgettable bitter lines or

24

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (continued)
playing an untuned piano.
Stumbling within the womens
movement, I fell into
communal living, coarse
language, and the arms of
a communist, husband #2.
His revolutionary collective
at least outlived our contract.
My daughters missed him and blamed
me, then began their own collective
revolution, culminating, after
years of house-to-house
combat, in the establishment
of four separate states. Alone,
I am still trying to get smart.

25

BEING TEMPORARY
Saying the ad agency
is decorated like a whore
house, I am not aiming
to defame artists or
writers commercialized
there (nor me, not even
creator, just receptionist).
They may be okay, but
I dont know them, am
temporary, not fixed
like the overwrought iron,
not dusty carved gilt,
not brass or breakable
glass. Even the plants
will outlast me here.
The permanent gals
who serve the creative
are barely polite to
fly-by-night help.
Within their circle
(but I am without, in a set
that doesnt intersect, is
in a different universe),
they converse: furs, fashion,
vacations, personalities.
Since I am ever considered
distant, I cannot say, but
wish I could, if I would
be faceless here even were
I not a days replacement.

26

BILLY GRAHAM WANTS SWIFT JUSTICE

Not notified by God of
the days surprise operation,
Pope John blissfully risked
infection, breakfasting well,
mingling with His people.
Now, in hospital sipping
intravenous, but not, thank God,
last, supper, he lies depressed,
granting pardon not requested.
Meanwhile, Mehmet Ali Agca,
world terrorist before Turk,
repents only the spectators
and the failed attempt,
refuses food, calmly chooses
his own kind of holy mission.
In Belfast another saint
loses front-page coverage but
keeps his stomach on strike, fast
in the faith of eternal cause.
Across town two mothers react,
frightening their children.
One, unpacking lunches, says,
Stay home. Theyll be
killing Protestants today.
The Catholic mother agrees
but weeps and sets her own
crowd of children howling.
Wiping their wet from her faded
maternity dress, she wonders
would a new pope let her stop.
A Philippine mother, blessed by
Pope John, would like time
to cry and pray for him but is busy
in Manila, selling her only
marketable skill. Eleven
children hunger; more will come.
Quietly, not wanting to awaken
the man, she fingers her rosary.
Schoolchildren from Chicagos

27

BILLY GRAHAM WANTS SWIFT JUSTICE (continued)

Pilsen district beg Dios to save
Juan Pablo, who came to see them
and answers their letters.
As in Mexico, they decorate,
make florid images and feel better.
Editorials bemoan the times and
speak of messages from God,
return to God, good will come of it,
gun control, and an end to violence.
When executioners are going all around
the country executing people,
Billy Graham wants swift justice.

28

BORN TO BE BAIT
Upper class pigeons are raised
to be carriers. Others grow
up on their own, a free-wheeling
city breed, scavenging, cooing,
doing what different city dudes
used to call their thang.
But its low as a pigeon can go,
at least so it seems to me,
to be raised as bait. Maybe
for falcon training.
Or, worse,
to be used by birders I observed,
to be strapped into little jackets
and attached to a rope someone
in a hawk watch tower would hold,
hoping that way to tally more sightings.
Then to be jerked and suspended
in air to attract hungry passing
migrants.
A handler shrugged, said
most pigeons outlasted many
hawk swoops toward their action.
I thought I heard a pigeon whisper,
PETA needs to come picket
this birder who loves ticking off
life-list sightings more than birds.
Competition may run evolution, but
in man as in most species it has
nothing to do with love or kindness
and everything to do with winning.

29

BOUNCING BET
My train passes whitespeckled stretches.
You, bouncing bet, you
blowsy cousin of evening
lychnis and bladder
campion
(who wear their petals
daintily in delicate fringe
on trim crocheted thimbles),
you wantonly flop your
looselipped blossoms in the breeze,
a flower able to look lackadaisical.
Yet were a famous
scrublady in colonial days.
Known as soapwort, for your
decent and free detergent sap.
A foaming natural.
Bet,
can you cleanse my mind as
you do my sight? Let me lie
in my mind alongside your
soapwort groves and roll your
stems to a lathery bath?
And
never again ride this line
toward typing in a grimy city.
And if I cant have that,
at least teach me your secret
of relaxing, being easy.

30

BUDGET CRUISE IN CHICAGO

Falling toward winter,
I catch myself
sun-dreaming,
ennuied by the dark.
Wishing on a Chevy
Nova, I shoot over
four hundred
million years,
cruise Silurian seas.
On Kennedy, Southbound, crushed coral
outcrops mark
Logan Square Reef.
Do archipelagos
still pull me south?
Stony Island lies
south of Logan
in old tropic Chicago.
World before backbone,
warm shallow womb,
colonial combs
sweetened life in
meaty, floral Eden.
Brachiopods, crinoids,
gross cephalopods,
trilobites, sponges, now
limestone bed crumbs.
Hard, these Niagaran beds
where sleepers dream
of lost soft polyps,
prism shades in
gray imprisoned.

31

BUDGET CRUISE IN CHICAGO (continued)

Glacial soils blanket,
ten thousand years new,
cold cover makes,
black, opaque, for
lucid turquoise dwellers.
Gone, solar-heated
high-rise paradise,
exquisite food
by spacious pool,
modern in 4 x 108 B.C.
Stone frozen shells
tell stories full
of sun to warn
descendent smug
Chicagoans: change comes.

32

BUGWAY
Last night,
dragged
from a dream
cast with bad actors
from my past,
I felt
six small legs
and two antennae
parting
the thin blond grass
of my left arm.
Shuddering,
I brushed the insect
elsewhere.
But it filled
my bed with its
somewhere
and pushed me
out.
My robe
and the light
on,
I stalked the
ravines and meadows
of my crazy
quilt.
Captured at last
in Kleenex,
consigned
to the whirlpool,
still
he filled
my emptied
dream space.
A migrant
in my beds twin,
I lay alert in sleep
as air molecules
crawled around
the bugway
of my body.

33

BY B.M.
Poor Porphyraspus tristis,
the cocoa-palm insect, lives
his sad life resting under
a nest of his own feces, called
by men, in embarrassment over
excrement, frass or fecula.
Which doesnt affect the fact
that its shit or heighten its
appeal. But beetles like it
as is; potato and tortoise types
throw it with their feciforks.
Dung beetles roll it and feed it
eggs, raise a family in its warmth.
Butterflies, too vain to be ugly
anywhere, shape theirs into
jewels with Lepidopteran anal
combs. Desert insects conserve
all water, grudgingly release
a dry powder and expect it to do.
Bees keep their hives clean and
swarm out into the snow to go,
some nose-diving toward eternity
in drifts too frigid for cold-blooded
motors to overcome. No moral in
these stories, only a lot of crap.

34

CATALOGS I.
I cannot handle
catalogs without
listing wishes,
sparing no expense
for orders never sent.
CATALOGS II.
Reading that at least
since Ptolemy (years
before Sears) there have been
star catalogs, I prepare
my order, twinkling to
think of this chance (as good
as any oil sheiks) to have:
Betelgeuse

super-giant, red-orange

RV Tauri

a variable shiner

Cygnus X-1

double star, including

possible black hole.

To be safe, I place these hot

items on galactic layaway.

35

CHEE-CAW-GO!
End of the line!
The conductor
doesnt lie.
Midday, but night
in the train shed
west of the station.
My commute slows,
passing side-tracked
Pullmans exposing
themselves, open
doored. Window film
grays sheets on readied
beds, left unwrinkled.
I spy, I spy dried
flower centerpieces
on dining tables and
imagine sunlight knives
cutting thick slices
of dust. Junk truncates
tracks narrow as crosscountry skis under
a Pullmans feet. But
in here it never snows
and the touring is over.

36

CHICKEN SEXERS, SAYS SCIENCE DIGEST, 2/82

inspect the anal vents
(at 1000 per hour
and $30,000 per year)
of debeaked chicks
who will be crowded
in troughs until they have
enough thick, yellow fat
to be hung upside down
and conveyed through
killing and bleeding rooms.
Not so tasty in these days
of antibiotics and assembly
line aging, chickens have
no privacy, little dignity.
Now a man named Joe
has patented an elasticstrapped chicken bra
to save tender breastmeat from bruising.
Id like to know
what happened to
the little red rooster
and the pecking order,
the hand-wrung hen-neck
and bloody headless
run from the pot after
an ordinary chicken life,
to old MacDonald and
the sanctified selfsustaining family farm.
EE-EYE, EE-EYE, OH-OH.

37

CITY SNAKE IN SPRING

On his way to be independent
squatting on Emersons land,
Thoreau saw near Walden Pond
snakes in frosty mornings...
with portions of their bodies
still numb and inflexible,
waiting for the sun to thaw them.
On my own way to independence,
renting in a no-womans land,
I met near Chicagos lake one
frosty spring morning a special
snake in jeans and down jacket
with heart numb to me and
inflexible, whatever the weather,
unwilling that I might thaw it.
Snakes cannot will against nature.
Nor could I. And who knows why
one cold and prevaricating city snake
stayed or then slithered away, but,
if Im not mistaken, the blame
was natures too, one way or another.

38

CLOSET DANCER
Nobody knows the me
who lowers shades and
goes to lost decades,
back to Motown.
No kids still home
to inhibit the new old
me, graying and flabby,
I get down,
boogie,
do the very dirty dog
with long gone Otis Redding,
let Temptations shake me.
Dont care that its aerobic,
abandon is what Im after.
Born to be wild like
Steppenwolf, I gyrate,
letting it allno small thing
hang out.
But in place.
From the ankles up.
With the sound low.
Not to vibrate my landlord,
who lives down below and
keeps busy with easy listening.
Someday maybe Ill
go all the friggin way.
Throw off my dowdy rags,
let my stereos bass thunder
to the street, where I might
even show every move
I know. A free spirit. Not Alone.
Carried away.
And not at all
resembling forty years earlier
when my menopausal mother
made us girls turn our heads
and snicker to see her knees
clap as she danced the Charleston,
her hands criss-crossing fast,
a proud smile widening her lips.

39

COARSE FROST
like ferns carved on translucent quartz,
frost like a madmans distorted macrame.
Like unevenly crocheted snowflakes.
Like spilled salt. Like fake glass ice
crystals for Christmas display, coarse
frost is pasted on my kitchen window.
Through a breath-steamed, clear place,
I survey the gray sub-zero day.
Dark starlings huddle, feathers fluffed
for warmth, on the chimney next door.
Crows at times do that too, but more
often mass on branches of a single tree,
turning sunny days gloomy where their
funereal tree looms over its own dark shadow.
Though starlings, like crows, are loquacious,
these have beaks closed against the cold.
I shiver, thinking of the bitter weather
still ahead, of the snow now starting to fall
already slyly hiding the icy places on the path.
Then a cardinal flashes red, perches with
the starlings, vibrant against their darkness
and making the snow glow whiter.
From my feeder below come two more
crimson males and all three fluff and hunch.
Their red foreshadows Valentines and
the crimson tulips already blooming
a month or two to the south, to be followed
soon by ripe, sweet, plump strawberries.

40

COMPLEMENTS OF SCIENCE
I think now not of
opposites which in
cybernetic systems
act and react to bring
to equilibrium Earths
complex processes,
not only of negative
feedback nor homeostasis.
I think rather of
non-opposites whose sum
is more than steady state:
body and spirit,
the Yin and Yang of unity,
DNA chains that crave
entangling one another,
ideas of light or the atom
that are exclusive yet
both used to know the whole.
I think of the poetry
in seeking what mysteries
mean, the creative dare-devil
within the methodical
saint of scientific research.

41

CORIOLIS EFFECT
All that goes
straight aims awry
to allow for drift over
this rotating
planet. To the south
the Third World heels
inexorably leftward.
Northerly we turn toward
the right.
Playing with
figures in 19th century
France, Coriolis taught modern
bomber pilots to sight
a gauche or a droite of
targets arching toward
demolition.
Before math,
clouds had a way to
wheel the weather, and birds
sensed that, while the Earth
reels, the shortest
distance between two points
is a curved line.

42

CRITICISM
If I could link the
Chain Rule of calculus
to literary theories of
Meaning?
Significance?
Interpretation?
and bind to a TEXT
derivatives of functions of derivatives of
BLAH BLAH BLAH,
Id make a name
making names noone understands for
whats innately known
when fun follows function.

43

DAD
I.
Over and over Mother
rehearses that last
afternoon, the vanilla
ice cream cone Dad had
only an hour before
he fell, how well he
had eaten and even
slept, the game played
with their pet (Good
boy, Harvey, roll over,
get the toy were his
next-to-last words),
how like himself he had
been at dinner, except
for the extraordinary
number of times hed said
to her again that he loved
her. After fifty years
together, the familiar
words still surprised his
wife. She cannot forget
this better memory than
the swift convulsion
and stiffening stroke,
his slumped position,
Harvey whimpering, her
own hysteria. She tells
it still after a year,
always ending the same
way: Well, seventy years
is a mans full span.

44

DAD
II.
Not long after Grandpa,
depressed by gambling debts,
drank battery acid in his basement,
Dad (who till then had only
the average adolescents
share of anguish) found him
and his own premature
responsibilities as childman of the family. He left
school, but what he went
through in heart or head we
never knew, he never said,
just showed his distain for
chance-taking and any man
who wouldnt do his damnedest
to take care of his family.
He gave Grandma all he could,
and provided my mother his wife
with ample pension in a paid-for
home full of his careful handiwork.
If he had seemed a stingy spender
to us kids, I now think it was
because he couldnt risk leaving
Mom as impoverished as his
own mother and with (I admit it)
three so-improvident daughters.

45

DAD
III.
When Moms hair lay in
marcelled flapper waves,
she played teasing games
with a handsome blackhaired teen whose curls
and thick-fringed gray eyes
attracted Norfolk, Nebraska,
girls. Mom scribbled her
name, Nellie, for him to find
on snow-skinned flivvers,
got one fellow a nosepunch (in that romantic
Valentino era) just for
asking her to dance
(when shed acted like
she would). Bareback,
daredevil Ed out-pranced
a Sheik of Araby, but he had
practical assets as well,
had graduated from business
classes and could take
shorthand, back when
secretary was a sexless term.
After they married, Nell
quit candling eggs at the factory.
A bare year later, well-behaved
baby June was born, when they
could still afford her.
Eventually, the Great Depression
sent them penniless east
to Chicago, far from farms
and small-town houses with
chickens and privies in
shady backyards, to dark
and verminous furnished rooms
where the young mother was
frequently sick, had operations
and problems with cysts and
had me, intended to be the last
little sisterLinda, eight years
later, was unanticipated in this

46

DAD III. (continued)

family of hand-me-downs,
canned beans, catsup bread,
and head-throbbing worries.
But it could have been worse.
IV.
I cant say I had
a great relationship
with Dad. We were
barely acquainted.
Conservative, a strikebreaker, he hated reds
(whereas I married
one) and never forgave
Roosevelt for what?
I never understood.
A Nebraska Republican,
a lifetime full-time railroad man and part-time
job scrambler, handy at
home repairs and making
wood cabinets and chairs,
so neat he hated even
his hairs unruly curl,
how must he have seen
me, an untidy girl who
wrote poetry and overread, a leftist who
stopped going to church,
who shirked both office
and housework to write
or paint or play a guitar
or work against a war.
To find the father in
that man, I have to
go back to girlhood,
walk balanced back and
forth on a low log fence,
while I watch for him
coming home for dinner,
taste again the candy

47

DAD IV. (continued)

bars he carried back
late at night from some
newsstand, sit with him
at softball games or
like on lakeside grass
and watch cloud shapes
pass on August nights.
Make him read me funnies
and Lifeboy B.O. soap ads.
At twelve I shamed him
at a spelling bee, missing
maintenance although
he worked at the railroads
maintenance branch, not that
I had a way to know that.
Then in my teens things went
bad. I sassed him and all that.
Had hard words, at 18 left home.
Later I half-redeemed myself,
when I made him a granddad.

48

DAD
V.
Dad was a two-pack-a-day
young man in knickerbocker
pants back on the Nebraska
prairies. And in railroad
yards or in office back rooms,
cigarettes sprouted from
his Lucky-Strike-stained hands.
He hacked and choked every
morning of my childhood,
predictable as my bowlful of
cold cereal and milk.
After a doctor shocked
Mom into banning his butts
at home, he sneaked smokes
at work, an aging kid back
in the woodshed. He quit
too late, stayed too long
at the ashtray, laughed
and talked about coffin
nails while he burned
a decade, maybe of life
away. A family example,
yet at nineteen my girl
Eileen already hacks as
badly as once her grandpa
did, plans to cut back to
one pack someday, maybe,
after she loses weight. And
at fifty my sister June
begins and end and inbetweens everything by
lighting up. She cant
say why shes suicidal.

49

VI.
When Dad first began
asking again and again
questions just answered,
we were impatient, and
Mom laughed, embarrassed
at her mans mistakes.
Later, shame and distrust
of what must have seemed
to him a puzzling reason for
blame silenced his inquiries,
and God knows what might
have transpired inside
that brain that became
every more unreliable. At
family gatherings he sat
quiet, trying not to look
confused. On his good
days my mother amazed him
with tales hed been told
over and over, tried to
bring him up to date. he
recoiled from the recent
events he never remembered,
sat contemplating a past
as detailed as happenings
of the last few days and
future were murky, unsure.

50

VII.
Dad retired after that
first heart attack,
bought himself a brand
new Cadillac, paid
hard cash. Between
his pre-Depression
Model-T (Oh, the fun of
broad running-boards)
and the sad-looking
old Nash he made his in
nineteen fifty-six, he
paid on kids instead of
cars, a passenger and
pedestrian who never
held a steering wheel.
Parading with Mom in
that Caddy proclaimed
that hed made it now, and
not too late after all.
Like the guys whod gone
to college, (or high school,
for that matter), hed ride
with his wife to see
fall colors and suburban
shopping malls, delight
in buying her hamburgers
or frequenting the finer
restaurantsthey, who had
never dined out while we
kids lived at homeas if it
were habitual and not
an old-age innovation.
So when the accidents began,
and he couldnt pass even
an easy written drivers
exam, when he had to hand
over his car keys and freedom,
he acted like it was life
itself given up, which it
was, within months.

51

VIII.
In intensive care, Dad
worried about tipping
the nurses who brought
and took away his untouched lunch trays,
insisted that his
visitors order a bite
and kept waiting for
the cab he thought hed
called to take him away
from this one-star
restaurant.
Heretofore
shy and private about
his parts, he now kept
picking up his flimsy
flowered hospital skirt
to let anyone study
(till my mother covered him)
the hairless white legs
thin as parsnips in bad
earth, the male organ
itself pricked with
a disturbing tube.
When his
incessantly plucking
fingers interfered with
unit routine (he would
not leave his needles
alone, wanted to get up
and use the phone), they
tied him to his bed.
He hallucinated, told
us his schnauzer Harvey
was referee of a baseball
game. We stared.
These dreams
scared us, interspersed
as they were with scenes
in which he seemed his old
sensible, lucid self.
The nurses said he was worse,
made us hire private care,

52

DAD VIII. (continued)

never left him alone. He
disliked these spies, talked
only of going home, always
asked if we had a pocket
knife to cut his bindings.

DAD IX.
The last two months
of his life, back at home,
my fathers nights were wild
with searches through bureau
drawers (What did he think
he had stored in those piles
of out-of-style ties and nylon
sox?) and quarrels with
the parade of nurses
(babysitters, he preferred
to call them, maybe in
those days hurt more by
euphemisms) who hushed
and humbled him as much
as the splashing catheter
expanding and draining
against his leg, plastic
parody of the strained
inflation and rasping
exhalation of his used-up
lungs.
My mother below,
not-sleeping alone in the
basement family room, heard
him hurrying around as if
he could outrun suffocation,
was like him afraid that
once he lay down there
would be no waking. She
waited, sure that later
the nurse would come and
say he was making another

53

DAD IX. (continued)

absurd demand, wanting

to leave and meet on some
corner his mother dead
twenty-five years. Or
asking to telephone folks
gone to Lutheran heaven
ten years before the
Great Depression. Couldnt
he wait, stay with her
while in this world?

DAD X.
Dad never meant it,
Mom said, when hed
suggested she remarry.
In afterlife reunion
a trio would look
terrible. In life
septuagenarian sex
with anyone but her Ed
seemed an obscenity.
Hed wanted her again at
the end, said, Nell,
its been a long time
since we made love,
and had begged her to
lie by him. His catheter
had disappeared for him
along with fifty years.
Love was young, hungry.

54

DAD
XI.
Emphysema, that
slow boa constrictor,
squeezed when my dad
breathed out, hugged
hard around his lungs,
and jealous of its place
there, left no space
for breath, until even
the oxygen he sucked
through nasal straws
from stainless steel
tanks flowed in streams
too shallow to reach
the deep reasoning
regions of a brain forgetting even to breathe.

55

DAD
XII.
That plaster queen
in pancake makeup and
too much rouge for a tart,
that mannequin clasping
hands in a casket cannot
be even the remains of
the man I called Dad.
My sisters and I would
shut the lid or shut our
eyes and seek behind their
inner lids the father who
would in life not have been
caught dead in lipstick.
Mom combed his hair, set
glasses on the nose that
had never loomed so long,
said he had looked that
way before we were born.
What? Like a harlot? We
daughters said little but
secretly agreed that before
we would be mortified by
an embalmer we wanted all
coffins closed. Never,
this sanctimonious and
garish taxidermy.

56

DAD
XIII.
The minister who had
hardly known Dad knew
how glad he had to be
now that suffering was
past and heaven present.
I sincerely wished this
slick sympathizer would
switch places and find
out firsthand just how
grand eternal rest might
be. But at least his
speech was brief, the
drive to the grave and
prayers there fast, just
lasting long enough to
satisfy my mother, crying,
incapable anyway of faultfinding.
The coffin lay
on a kind of stage that
would later be lowered
by some cranking of its
pulleyed chains. Mom
had paid enough to make
the casket impenetrable
by insects and annelids.
We left. The cemetery
staff would set him down
when we were out of sight,
into the discreetly draped
gape in the earth, warmer,
Im sure, than this service,
a thirty-minute Protestant
marvel, hurrying mourners
from pastoral murmurings to
parking lot. The bereaved...
Gods will...accept...Amen.

57

DAD
XIV.
I suppose Ill never know
if Dad was at all satisfied with
his life, was gladafter all
his complainingsthat he
had passed most of his days
in a railroads offices (when
he really liked carpentry and
outdoor labor) and so many
grim nights in the middle of
his life fighting with my
mother, mostly over drinking
(which I still think he did
moderately) and his low-life
saloon friends (which he gave
up, leaving him with none) or
money troubles (in marriage
my mother never worked; it
wouldnt have occurred to
either of them), in spite of
his long nights at second
jobs. He didnt get a son,
and if we daughters meant
anything to him, he never said.
I doubt if Mom herself knew
what was in his head, even
before forgetfulness set in.
I wish she had laughed less at
his senile helplessness, but
he accepted it. For all I know,
might have shown the same
insensitivity in her place.
What I would have asked, had
he not stayed a stranger, was:
Personally, was it all worth it?

58

DAD
XV.
We never know what
we dont know about
our parents until
one of them says
something so opposed
to what weve believed
that reassessment has
to start.
We enjoyed sex,
my mother said, setting
spinning my vision
that they slept together
about every seven years,
the exact gap between us
girls. He lay slantwise
and was so lanky we had
separate beds, Mom
went on, but he had
visiting privileges.
I scanned the past,
recalled asking (and
getting no good answer)
about a prophylactic
package Id seen on the
sink. Another time,
a little tipsy, hed
grabbed at her crotch
and been slapped. That
was the most I had ever
been shown.
Knowing I might
recall room-vibrating
fights, and even a few
flying plates, Mom adds,
Oh, we had our bad times
when we were raising you
three. I guess I missed
all the kissing years.

59

DEBATING IN SLEEP
with an irritating colleague.
He: articulate, convincing, winning.
I: incoherent, uneasy,
as if speaking from a sleep
thick as cold oatmeal.
I heat and stir.
Up like fat raisins
float the right words.
An instant before victory
I wake, never to say...
what? on the subject of what?
and how named, that man to whom
the sly night gave the last word?
To re-enter a gentle dream
is easy as falling up. Yet
irresistible as a tornados
suck, a nightmare can
come back and lift
an unwilling sleeper,
whirl him within
its perilous funnel.
But this dream is done.
Deep within the organism,
padded with fat,
embraced by bone,
one-way as artery blood
pumped by heart muscles.
Wide-eyed, in my mind
I compose a perfect
3 a.m. poem about my need
to complete the teasing dream.
Satisfied, I sleep.
Morning. The poem?
As lost as the dream,
and I equally nowhere.

60

DESCRIBING AN ARC
Ill take the sale sausage,
I said, side-stepping blindly
toward the place where its
rolls were attractively displayed
within the butchers glass case.
My feet were stopped by an
unseen case of canned stock,
but my head, like a pencil on
a compass, described a 90
degree arc. The butcher peered
over the counter at me, my
live human meat in disarray
on the floor, not attractively
displayed like his neat and
clean and stationery protein.
Ill take two pounds sliced,
I continued, rising unsurprised.
I am known for clumsiness
and fall too often. OO-EE,
one of my students used to
titter, she be falling all the time.
I would walk to the blackboard,
step on something slick, and
one high-heeled shoe would shoot
up and the other crumple under
until my knee bounced down.
All this on board floors, never
mind talking about how I can
flip over roots or slip on rolling
rocks or ice or trip on the unseen.
These are easy fall whose blacks
and blues and elastic ankle bands
I stand well enough between
tumbles. The balance I would
pray for, if God existed and
were not the kind of trickster
to stick out a heavenly foot,
is simply this: the stability
to stay at a rigidly unromantic
right angle to the earth, soberly
above loves supine, to fall
no more for the prone and
groaning lovers easy lies.

61

DIFFERENT FOLKS,
DIFFERENT STROKES
A male spider, lacking a
penis, packsin fact, gift
wrapsin spermatophores
what he seems to deliver by
hand. Except that he has
no hands, only swollen palp
tips like boxing gloves that
he uses to scoop semen into
the female. Knowing no
better, she accepts what she
gets and does not even always
kill this mate unable to
copulate. At least this female
cannot be called castrating.

62

DISAPPOINTMENT
is the universal Christmas gift.
We all get and give it,
and no one can use it.
Some years, its everything there is,
when the one we love gives nothing
or coldly removes his own presence.
Other years, its hidden in the present
we wrapped and gave so happily
to someone who, we discovered,
didnt want, need, or fit it.
When my children were little enough
to show enthusiasm, or at least
not bitch too ungratefully about
what was missing in their plunder,
or about my taste in clothes or toys,
I decorated and enjoyed the charade,
baked and caroled and read stories.
Yet, even then, was, like the kids,
sad that I couldnt give or get what
we all missed most: a daddy to say
Give me a kiss, or Sit on my lap.

63

DISCOVERYS SCIENTIST
OF THE YEAR, 1982
Here comes Robert Weinberg
with new terms for me
to learn, new ways
to worry about carcinogens,
to understand how I may
someday have cancer.
Oncogenes. Proto-oncogenes.
An insidious shifting
of T for G, an off-base
switching triggered by some
environmental sin, and then,
from deep within a cells
spiraling center, a nucleotide
decides someones future.
At MIT, Weinbergs on the case,
after what crazily changes
first cell growth patterns,
then a victims fate.
Snapped at home with wife Amy,
the scientists gentle look
belies the fierce general
in our anti-cancer army.
But who can do enough
in a world that shrugs
to hear of this weeks
latest carcinogen?
That believes only in growth,
bloat, takeover, explosion?

64

DIVIDED SKY
Driving home in a black rain
I am halfway back to myself
after eight hours play-acting
automated office girl,
a game that barely pays.
The late afternoon traffic
crawls past factories and
K-Mart malls, past subdivisions
named for what they replaced:
Flowerfield, Streamwood.
My wipers whine,
rewriting the same two
blurred curves back and forth,
back and forth, going nowhere.
Behind them and ahead brightness
from a sky divided above
the double yellow highway line
into gray cloudbank on the left
and blue in the future to the right,
rain and rays side by side.
Faster now, hitting sixty,
past forest preserve lands
with the sheen after rain
of green cellophane, tamed and
shaved for family picnics and
softball games, their prairie
pasts long gone. No remnants.
But green at least and able
to eat sunshine. I try a bite and
revive. At Walgreens I buy beer.

65

DOG-WALKING THOUGHTS
Like my police dog,
I often squint my eyes
and sniff intently, pursing
lips, searching for
the figurative must-behere-somewhere
stick or ball or bone,
more literally for me just
maybe a misplaced phone
number or lost thought,
and am often blind to
the desired objective
right under my eyes.
The dog pulls me on,
anxious at this place;
an eastern cottontail
often crouches where
the ground at the base
of a Norway maple is
hollowed to fit a bunny butt.
But we pass the rabbit,
casual and unblinking
in its camouflage coat.
My dog looks but does not
see the shiny-eyed bundle
less than three feet away.
Like the rabbit, at times
I sit silent, secure,
unmoving, observing
but not worrying much about
real dangers, sure that
they will not be unleashed
toward me. I am safe,
watching television news
of military buildups,
dictatorships and genocides,
pollutions new repercussions,
crimes and fires, natural
disasters, inflation, you name it.
A remote control is all it takes
to make these troubles pass me by.

66

DOING THE TIME STEP

Gene Kelly screwed me
up, always falling
in love at first glance
(this shaped my
adolescence, betrayed
me into oh-so-many
one-way romances)
with someone lovely
and no chance (dont
laugh) to win her
unless he moved fast,
before Brigadoon
disappeared, before his
day On the Town ran
down, before Leslie
Caron didnt marry
An American in Paris.
I should have listened
to his cynical sidekicks, Van Johnson or
Oscar Levant, learned
that one-day loves,
however good looking,
in real life as opposed
to reel usually are
not so hot, dissolve
into a choking smoke.
But the fifties were too
soon to see, sexist was
not a word yet when Kelly
asked rich and supposedly
bitchy Nina Foch if she
got her money from her
daddy or her hubby. Her
initiative was hell on
Kelly, made him grab his
balls, save them for
a passive little lass.

67

DONT FOOL WITH PHYSICS

Finding my quirks
opposed by anti-quirks,
my gravy burned
to anti-gravy,
myself unable to
balance die Mutter in
me with die anti-Mutter,
I self-annihilate with
a nondescript
Big Bump.

DUSTBALL
Hot weather doesnt scare
my watchdog, except for
its July 4th firecrackers,
wind-whipped electrical storms,
and suspicious strangers
sitting out after dark.
A good watchdog, she barks
and jumps hard against my butt
before streaking for home and
a hideout too dark to see danger.
But, as I say, shes brave
about heat, and on this scorcher
stayed cool inside our dry
bathtub, keeping anything
scary from coming up the drain.
At least until the pipes gurgled.
Anyway, it got cool then when
a thunderstorm blew through,
cool enough to be under the bed
where dustballs tremble, one
quite large and strong.

68

EAR LYRIC
Lining waxy shore
of s-curved ear canal,
hairs clap, wild for more.
at sax-drum-bass waves
funneled float
toward inner seaways
note by note.
Drummers solo raps
tympanic cavity,
as hammers anvil taps
on stirrup, drumskin,
middle ear.
My own percussion
I would hear.
Labyrinth within
and spiraled lymphy ducts,
acoustic nerves begin
synaptic rhythms
passed from band.
Brain mails message:
Tap your hand.

69

EATING ITS WAY TO OBLIVION

That natty little snoutnosed beetle, Apion griseum,
tweed-suited for survival,
white-haired on satin black,
hiding inside false-indigo
pods (Baptisia leucaphaea
look for it in sandy spaces
near the great lakes),
has what it takes to make it,
a voracious appetite and safe
eating place, a hard-shelled
shelter. But what will it do
if it is too successful,
when it has infested every
false-indigo plant so that
pods seeds are all eaten?
False indigo is rare as prairies,
its areas taken, paved or
degraded into shaved lawns.
Will Apion foresee its future
needs and fast or not clean its
plate, leaving seeds free to grow?
Will it choose substitute foods?
Few humans will know or care
if it chooses to eat itself into
extinction, except maybe to say,
Good. Too many beetles anyway.

70

EITHER WAY, SAME DIFFERENCE

Printing the same etched plate,
I get an unmatched set of ten,
not an edition. Silk-screening,
I find that color number two,
a deep blue-green, refuses
to stay in the same rectangle
as lemon-yellow, number one.
Similar registration problems
blur my lithographs and blockprints, make shades overlap
as in bad television reception.
Out of line, unable to do any
print the same way twice, I
find that art imitates life,
or maybe life is the copy,
though naturally not precise.

71

EVER THE UNDERACHIEVER

When it comes to getting money,
todaydespite or because of
an M.A. and years of teaching
I am again financially embarrassed.
Am mindlessly typing figures
for a very low sum.
Temporarily.
My incentives to continue
decline nearly as fast as my
finances. But decline deceives,
implies some former height,
some previous
non-existent peak.
Me, Ive always been waiting
for payday. Have unknown poets
syndrome and find it
anti-romantic.
The engineers I am working for
find me quietly polite, preoccupied,
perhaps odd, as I tidy
their scribbles for print.
Internally, I whine and worry,
which causes mistakes. My favorite
error is typing numbers with upper
case key depressed, revealing with
traditional symbols my real
feelings:
)$*&@#$!(
Im lucky, Im told, to sit
near one of the two windows in
this factory box. The engineers
bunch near its glass and my desk
after lunch and make sluggish
comments.
They are, like me, surprised,
I hear, to see a little crab tree outside
flowering bravely and mistakenly
in October. Late and barren, it flaunts
beauty unfruitful but never wasted.

72

FEMININE PERSPECTIVE
Orchids resemble female genitals.
Of humans, in some cases, both
in clitoral suggestion and in
petals shaped like strangely painted
floral labia minor and major. Darwin,
quite the orchid voyeur, wrote scandalous
plant pornography about this, shocking
Victorians in more ways than one.
Some of the smaller flowers remind
male insects of the hind ends
of females of their own species,
which leads the poor dupes
to make fools of themselves,
frantically humping plants that can
never make insect babies and are
only using these stupid spasmodic
mis-matings to transport pollen,
to fertilize another chuckling fake.
Hoping such behavior too devious
to be female in origin, I feel
relieved to read that the Greek
root of terms like orchid or
orchis is also their word for
testicle, which some orchid roots
do resemble. Stretching this idea
makes their deception unconceivably
male. If Greeks can be trusted
when it comes to sex more than
when they come bearing gifts.

73

FIERY JULY AND CHICAGO,

that gashole of the Midwest,
coils its brown ozone antiglow around inhabitants,
rancid themselves after eight
days of heat wave suffocation,
packed close, like meat gone bad
back in Sinclair/Sandburg days.
I choke and burrow through
this soiled styrofoam air
that makes my head ache
at the Michigan Avenue workplace where I mostly warm space.
I am another painted woman
but luring no one (where have
all the innocent farm boys gone?)
under fluorescent lamps.
I find no city of big shoulders,
only the dismal blowfly life,
at least in this weather and job,
in this grit-thickened city.

74

FINALLY AN UNUSED IMAGE

To heal the hurt of
divorce, lovers are
disgustingly effective,
(stop reading here, if
squeamish) like maggots
applied by surgeons,
before they discovered sulfa,
to nib- nib- nibble off
dead flesh and cleanse
infected wounds until,
fat and featureless, their
service delivered, they
reached vermiform
satiation and fell off,
leaving, when theyd
disappeared, a clean scar.

75

FLUORESCENT LIGHTS DEFINE

what confinement looks like.
Like the box in which I wait to type.
Windowless and stale
high in the Motorola tower.
Like the style of his letters:
In reply to your memo of the 5th
I find...
I find that
the stainless steel package racks
in the ladies bathroom are too low
for even the smallest secretaries
to hang themselves. Just as well.
But they are not dissatisfied as
I am, who
as only temporary help,
am told to read the phone books
to keep busy. It is so
interesting, the receptionist says,
to know we have so many
international branches. Dont
you find that exciting?
I do like branches,
and study those of the box elders
where yellowthroat warblers sing
witchity witchity along Poplar Creek.
Today, no more a pale Motorolan,
I sun myself, wear tinted
windows and boots wet from
wall-to-wall creek water. Another
day I will again fold and enclose
myself flat as the wallet I pack
and resign myself to temporary life.

76

FRAGILE DETERRENT
A pane of glass is all
that separates goldfinch
and goldfinch assassin.
Minnie, my black cat, is at
the window, inches, split by
glass, from a finch feeder
full of niger thistle seed.
Finches circle nearby, vying
for filled perch positions.
Unwilling to miss this meal,
they whistle thinly, wings
aflutter, aware of cats paw
thudding against glass.
Flitting and feeding like finches,
neither oblivious nor disinterested,
unwilling to sacrifice or switch,
people just hope the glass wont
crack as they tease catastrophes
with many names, names like
Environmental, Chemical, Atomic,
or even, closer to home, Romantic.

77

FREE STYLE
Six kicks from the hips.
Breathe in and then blow.
Rotary motion,
not neglecting left side.
Going where I thought
I never could go, where
azures up and aguas below.
Duck and up, stroke and glide,
rhythmic as tide.
Into deep waters I
fearlessly flow.

GOLD AT THE RAINBOWS END

Look, how in this
rubbled street of
crusted rubbish underfoot and sewers overrun, rain-pools still
reflect heavens, show
cirrus clouds clear
as in any hygienic pool.
But here the mirror is
improved, not spoiled,
by its oil rainbows.
Surprised by a bike, I
misstep, squish, slide, and
find the iridescent puddles,
within whose outlines
rain-gray pigeons fly,
do not by themselves wash
ochre excrement from boot
soles. It takes patient
scraping with a crumbling
bit of brick or nailpricked, jagged, city stick.

78

GRAND UNIFICATION THEORY,

a title cut to a mere
GUT, is the quest for
the god FORCE,
with trinity of
Father Electromagnetic,
Son Nucleic,
and Radioactive Holy Ghost.
Adding gravity will
give physicists super-GUT.
Watching protons decay,
these Fausts might say they
could make Mephistopheles
put his soul on sale for
secrets of the new universe.
GRASSHOPPER LIFE
Incomplete metamorphosis
pleases grasshopper nymphs.
Miniature moms from the morn of birth,
munching and jumping to prove their worth,
mandibles twitching by chitinized lips,
springing legs rising from muscular hips,
skipping the larval and pupal trips,
egg to adult, all is dinner.

79

GRAVE ROBBERS
Buried alongside my marriage
deep within the pyramid:
Seeds. You ask to see.
I break through aging bricks,
creep thieflike down and around
through labyrinthine corridors,
invade the unholy sacrificial
center. I barely glance
at my mummified marriage,
encased in painted wood,
exactly as in life.
From its side I take
but one seed, not
wanting you to squander what
I may need some other spring.
Up in the sunlight you admire
my seeds shape and polish,
promise to nurture it forever
into no thin-stemmed annual
but an evergreen for all seasons,
thick-trunked and sun-touching.
I have a vision:
a 2-inch seedling,
dry as papyrus
sits untended
and in shadow.

80

HAL

Just when I was wishing

I had my hands on
a man, the phone rang
and a baritone answered
my hello with hi. Barely
giving me time to get
glad, he ran on, Im Hal,
your tele-computer...
Click. Im sick as it is
of substitutes for men and
sex, and Im damned if Ill
discuss anything whatsoever
with a machine. Later
I thought just maybe Id
been too hasty. At least
Hal had a deep voice. Why
not give a guy a chance?

81

HARVEY
The other day my mothers fat
schnauzer Harvey passed away.
He is now, my sister told her,
in heaven with my dad. Im glad
I didnt hear her say that.
Harveys not in the ground
(unlike Mitzi, before him, buried
with her toys in a suitcase back
of the garage) but cremated and
wherever ashes go. The ladies
at his beauty parlor sent
flowers and shocked condolences
(He had been so happy at his last
appointment, such a good boy).
Even my daughter, who had recently
and very rudely told her grandma
that Harvey looked like a little
pig, sent a sympathy card.
Harvey was put to sleep after
two heart attacks and brain
damage; his lungs were fluid,
his kidneys bad. The afternoon of
his last collapse he snuggled in
my mothers lap, playedjust once,
and feebly thathis favorite game.
But, off his feed, refused roast beef.
He lived a short but full dogs life,
full of chicken and chops and steak,
the choicest cuts my mother cooked.
His quiet life required no exercise
but digestion. Hes had his heaven.

82

HAUSTELLATY
Insects that sip their
victims make me sickest.
Haustellate, theyre named,
and hostile they are,
those whose piercing beaks
permit two tubes to access
into someone elses cells.
Squirting saliva through
one straw, through the other
sucking up whats digested,
they never chew their food.
The vegetarians I accept,
except in garden or groceries.
But giant water bugs disgust,
sipping insides of 3-inch fish.
And, balance of nature aside,
who can say anything nice about
mosquitoes and flies, fleas and
lice, those historical horrors
who still inject more ills
than doctors can eject.

83

HAVE AN ICE DAY

An ice storm
blew me a glass forest
my first time on
cross-country skis.
Nicolet National,
its boughs bent
in old beauty,
its fat transparent
over evergreen bone,
peers in the grounds mirror.
A squirrel skates
across the snow;
the collie that follows
falls through,
scratched by the cracked
surface plate, and,
five feet under,
must be excavated.
On skis I stand still
and slide sideways anyway,
until, with neat
counterclockwise twirl,
I raise skis and poles
skyward, playing dead dog.
My barks are muffled.
Glitterless undersnow
fits like a featherbed.
At ease, I wait to be hauled.

84

HOMEGROWN POISONS I.
POTATOES,
like related tomatoes,
share a family taint.
They are nightshades,
and can be dangerous
even when not forenamed black or deadly.
Its a wild tribe.
Consider nettles itchy prickle
or reeking narcotic
jimsonweed, alias devils
trumpet, stinkweed, thorn
apple. In the familys
snooty branch, we
find purple eggplant,
also known as madapple.
(Love apple was an old French
name for tomato, which
careful English were afraid
to taste.) But back to
that potato, so innocent
mashed or fried or hashed
or baked and laid
fat with sour cream,
or its butter or gravy
running over our plates.
That very potato, I say,
can act in insidious
nightshade ways. Did
they know back when
the higher classes despised
new world tubers that
solanine in potato greens
and berries is just as fine
a poison as that of fatal
nightshades. Belladonna
of course is more notorious.

85

HOMEGROWN POISONS, I. POTATOES (continued)

Sprouting in a pantry cabinet
or half-submerged in
a water glass and pushing
up shoots, a potato takes care
of business in my kitchen.
Idly I fantasize about likely
victims. Just kidding...
HOMEGROWN POISONS, II.
LETTUCE
Plant right after the last
thaw softens your plot,
but before oak leaves unfold
and the trees-of heaven
begin their unholy reeking.
(What insect prefers that
noxious odor of rot?)
Your backyard garden will
thicken with rows of, say,
Bibb or Black-Seeded Simpson.
Youll never finish or
give all those greens away.
So let what stays bolt, that is
to say, send up central stems
and little dandelion-like
flowers. Let it grow
through those leaf-scorching
afternoons of June when
colds an incredible memory.
Then imagine an enemy,
maybe some tyrannical dictator
(my pick would be those who
disappeared so many
thousands of South Americans)
you would like to feed these
narcotic old lettuce leaves
until he falls in green coma.

86

Only a bitter taste would give

away that the salad was loaded.
HOMEGROWN POISONS III.
MONKSHOOD,
now sown for beauty,
in olden days was
everymans own doorstop
poison, known also
as Wolfs Bane. Its
poisonous aconitum was
actually used against
medieval wolves, some
of whom might have been
in sheeps clothing or
possibly woven wool.
Its holy name came
from 10th century monks
who wrote of its potency.
This blue buttercup with
helmet head may
have wet the lips of
the Medicis dead. Or
flowered in Rappacinis
bower. In times as
civilized as mine,
aconitums turned anodyne,
a plain old painkiller
in low doses. Folks now
dont know they can grow
their own poisons or that
the good old days and
herbal remedies were
not necessarily safer.

87

HOW TO LIVE LONGER

Be big mammals, elephants
or camels rather than rats or
spaniels. Spread the
mammalian allotment of
breaths and heartbeats
over longer, leisurely periods.
Or be people and greedy,
exceed by a factor of three
the beats and breaths and
lifetimes our size predicts.
Then further extend the human
span: geriatrics recommends
exercise, pets, senior sex,
and doing what you love.
Medicine may suggest other
extension methods, which may
or may not be called living.

88

I APOLOGIZE FOR USING

YOU, PAUL NEWMAN
After my nightmare
slipped into sitcom,
I lay smiling, semiawake.
I never
reveal, rarely remember
dreams. But this one
I must submit,
if only to help me
not to forget it.
I am chased
by what I fear may be
a rapist. He catches
me and who should
it be but Paul Newman.
He needs
some place to sleep.
I invite him home and
give him my bed,
a foam mat on the floor.
Politely I go
lie on the couch. Now,
I ask, why cant I get
no satisfaction even
in my fantasies?
Tonight I will
try to reverse the chase.
This time, Paul, Im
going all the way.
Too bad, Joanne.

89

I HOPE THEYRE ALL HAPPY

My Lakeview alley at 6 a.m.
crackles with glass and
other greasy reflections of
the night past. Straining
at her chain, my dog Pie
tabulates, then acts.
I also add things up:
blue plastic boots abandoned in midalley near fancy underpants;
a charred-black, dog-splashed mattress;
shards enough to give me a
hangover, imagining antecedents.
A third-floor tenant throws
from her window trash that
misses the cans below and hits
a Monte Carol illegally parked.
Seven pairs of mens shoes
stumble from the garbage bag.
Somewhere a crying woman shrills,
I hope youre happy.
Youve had your god damn
meditation. Then, darkly despairing,
adds, I dont know. I dont know.
Nor do I but can surmise.

90

I KNOW IM OVER MY LATEST

man-needing period.
Last night I dreamed
I was eating dinner
in a busy restaurant.
The waitress placed
a handsome man at my
table. We flirted.
I went to primp
in the powder room.
Returning, I found
an empty table but felt
no regret that the fellow
left. Instead, I raged
at the waitress, bereft
not for missed love or sex
but for the half steak
lost forever on my
prematurely cleared plate.

91

I READ IT IN TIME

(2/23/81)

Washington. Secretary of State

Haig refuses with exacerbating
restraint to definitize a
position, to saddle himself with
a statistical fence. He speaks
as always with careful caution.
From his menu of Western assets,
Nixonsand now Reagansman
serves $5 million in guns and ammo
(Viet Nam surplus) to help impede
the intervention of third countries
(other than us, I have to assume)
in El Salvadors affairs. Since
all else is subordinate, U.S.
concern for a few murdered missionaries
has been delinked from full
support of the present government.

92

I RELY ON LIMESTONE
(for which photosynthesizers mined
carbon dioxide from
archaic skies) to grow
slowly dense enough,
after a sludgy start,
to sink and slide
inside the Earth that
spurts up in return
ashy volcanic gases
to fatten the atmosphere
for todays plants.
I rely on limestone
to be beautiful in
buildings whose
great blocks are
fossils locked in
casts and molds.
I rely on volcanoes
to help metamorphose
limestone into cool
marble for sculptures
so smooth and fluid my
caressing hands marvel.
I rely on Earth to survive
mans attacks and keep
moving through vibrant
cycles, a cornucopia of
plant and animal life,
of landscapes shimmering
with ever-recycling atoms,
changing and evolving
its forms and organisms
in spite or because of us,
to motivate our greatest art
and to let us stay as more
than a fossil record of the
cause of mass extinctions.

93

I WILL
February, and the rime
giving every twig
luminescence
through bright sunlight
and rising fog
puts to shame the
laciest Valentine.
No old curled oak
leaf escapes a shining.
The day crackles:
Be mine. Be mine.

94

IMMORTALITY TODAY,
NO WAITING
Would Melvilles skull
smile less widely if his works
had remained unread? Does
Dreiser mind the snide
assessments of his life
and style? And what of
Emily D? Can she blush
to know, now that she is
truly zero at the bone,
how her life lies exposed?
Is Sylvia Path pleased
at last to be appreciated?
And how about Van Gogh?
And Gauguin? And Cezanne?
Do they know? Does it
matter what their works
are worth now? Do eternal
sleepers peep over heavens
fleece (or peer up through
hells steam) and care?
Id rather have my irony while
alive. My I-told-you-so goes
out early to those editors whose
regrets I now collect. And just
in case my grave proves too
opaque, Ill say straight away
that I foreseefor now as in
a dreamlibraries that carry
my collected works (most yet
in outline form), doctoral
candidates dissertating on
which of my works (yet to
be finished) rates as truly great.
Since waiting makes me
melancholy, Ill take for granted
posthumous prizes, play the
famous author, maybe even write.

95

INADEQUATE DANDELIONS
on all the sprayed lawns
and roadways of Illinois
cannot make enough wine
to dull my mind sufficiently
to reminders on every side
of our loves conclusion.
Ray Bradburys book
Dandelion Wine made me
want to make it even without you
on a May day when already
you stayed away, disappointing
our plans to gather blossoms,
to use your recipe to brew
gallons, enough to last
till next Valentines Day.
August, and the single gallon
I made alone is almost gone.
Acceptable, my own recipe.
Flowerheads and lemons, water,
raisins, oranges, sugar galore,
yeast for two weeks bubbling.
The bottle stood as untouched
as I by you for seven weeks,
its sediment drifting down.
It must settle, you said by phone,
till the wine is clear and yellow
as bulls piss. An impeccable
expert, you, on bull excretions.
Come siphon my wine, I said
hopefully to you in July. Your
yes gave me hope.
We swallowed some as we
worked. When it was done,
we put the good in a new bottle,
got rid of the sludge. Sipped,
but did not get intoxicated.
Drinking alone today, I think
it was a mistake to try to bottle

96

INADEQUATE DANDELIONS (continued)

sunshine. Or maybe the mistake
was in saving the memory of
a season and romance gone bad.
Next time I love, generic wine
will do, more suitable for lower
expectations and with few romantic
associations, only a slowing
proportionate to alcohols flow.

97

INBOUND TRAIN, 6:45 A.M.

I see the insistent prongs
of the Sears Tower still
sticking it to the sky.
Shoving my shiny bunions
up the front of my highheeled and tight shoes,
I turn out
the light on my novels
characters, whose imaginings
and shenanigans wait
(patient after so many oddhour command performances)
under the blueberry yogurt
in my purse.
At work I become
chameleon, may not look my
genuine blue. And truly am no
wiser than that lizard, who may
not know either, after so many
opportunistic switches, which
complexion reflects true image
and which the hue of deception.
I think I play
a role, but fear I actually am now
the office automaton I portray,
the version of me people see
as useful and settled down, at last.

98

INSECT RELAXATION
You might think a dead
collected insect as relaxed
as limp can be, but no.
A stiff, dried in deaths
final twist, cannot be
displayed if not
shaped as for a wake.
No martini or muscle massage
relaxes, but moisture of
entomologists embalming.
Then, pinned and posted with
death notice, mounted in its
mausoleum, the hexapod may
tense for all eternity.

99

INSIDE THE NEW COMMUNITY COLLEGE

where I pick up a few bucks,
dark windows, or none, make
all seasons seem winter.
To create this place,
slabs had been piled
on a scoured site, stacked
at right angles, thick stone
skins on cavelike cubes
filled with unfresh air.
It was lit within by cold
and flickering fluorescent
fires, mans most recent
replacement for sunshine.
In rooms too planed to really
be caves, desks define offices;
blackboards and chairs and
teachers table, the classrooms.
In rooms used by all, nobody
decorates the bare walls. Cheap
and interchangeable part-time
teachers like myself complete
the foundations of education.
There are the minimal facilities,
washrooms and halls, stuffy
polyhedrons, hollow during
off-hours but quiet even in
the nightly rush to classes.
In the center of the edifice,
like the hole in a stony, squared
letter O, an enclosed outside
air column sits over a park,
a patch of shady, shabby grass.
And I sit too, my body inside,
my mind out, of a box within
sight of a bit of dark window
high above the alleged park.
I am dispensing independent

100

INSIDE THE NEW COMMUNITY COLLEGE (continued)

study according to prescription,
giving a minimum of 10 minutes
per week per student, weighing
in the work by word count or pages,
scribbling in my patients charts,
diagnosing, perhaps scolding, giving
receipt or bill toward grades, as
needed, on this grim, gray April 3rd.
Looking away from an angry rash
of fragments and dangling modifiers,
I see beyond the window slit
what look like scraps of paper,
maybe torn-up pages of vapid
and overblown freshman essays,
falling upward against gravity.
Overgrown snowflakes, not blowing
but drifting slowly as balloons,
lazily raised, I supposed, by hot air,
no doubt from classrooms but not
likely to be heated by fires of debate.
Anyway, up the flakes go, like
little albino birds riding thermals.
My own encasing thermals,
nubbly long underwear, is chafing
legs oh so ready and willing
for a sprint or a spring. Or just
to rise above this place till I lie
supine afloat some warm ocean of
air going anywhere, anywhere, else.

101

IS THAT YOU, PRINCE?

When willows fizz
with beaded wiggles,
reflecting yellows
in streams their
early weeping feeds,
something sluggish
bubbles beneath,
grabs amphibians
up from muddy
slumber until they
blow
their throats
madly, Satchmos,
antic in their horny
scramble to copulate.
I listen to them
swinging in ditches
and inlets where
nothing but dust will
ripple come August.
I will clip some
willow sprigs, bring
spring into my grim
living room in a thin
glass vase.
Later
I sit in my window
feeling the breeze and
the seasons sweet fever.
I cannot see but
believe my willow
twigs are in the mood
to grow roots. I wish
for I want to know what,
the missing difference
that will whisk me
out of winter. An idea.
I close my eyes, try
whispering RIB-IT,
RIB-IT. Were those
splashes I heard?
And what is this warm
urge to make tadpoles?

102

IT TAKES GOOSESTEPPING
to move through
soft new snow thats light
and thick and relatively dry.
But when its too heavy and wet
to drift, you cant kick a path
and, lacking shovel or snowshoes,
must prance like a majorette,
lifting knees stiff in woolen pants
to make prints the width and depth
of wastebaskets.
Walking
in anothers tracks takes balanced
high-stepping. Takes some
others legs and gait. Following
in footsteps makes me shaky.
Id rather walk as through water
which snow is, however rigid
pressing stiffly against the resistance,
slowly pushing out a way molded
at my own pace to my own shape.

103

IT TAKES SOME BIG BEES

Driving what he slyly calls
his honey wagon, the farmer
spreads manure on his
slice from the nations
breadbasket. There is a
fragrance, and, coming out to
watch the work one Thanksgiving,
a neighbor sniffs and says,
I dont have much to
be thankful for today.
Another neighbor,
planning a yard party,
asks for some unhoneyed air,
finding nothing sweeter.
The farmers wife no longer
holds her nose when washing
clothes of such fertile smell
they alone could grow the corn
that pays for real bee-sweetened
honey on her childrens muffins.

104

ITS A LITTLE LIKE LOVE

When drifts go liquid
and slush runs into mud,
amid the raw, green creep of gillover-the-ground and small
heart-shaped strawberry leaves,
the thawed crap and trash steam,
booby-trapping the path.
Then defrostings over.
The freezer hums once more.
Sooty old snow stops flowing,
is caught in odd postures,
like kids playing statues,
as drips solidify into crags and
canyons. Vitreous, recrystalized,
surfaces shine like mica.
One night new soft falling
snow disguises underlying ice,
bleeds extremes into each other.
Undefined for the hiker,
pits and inclines threaten.
I sink, slide, trip, and slip
on what passes for a path.
making me wary, a bit scared
of apparently flat, easy places.
I dont know what
is solid and what is not,
what will stand and what crack.
I have been drenched and bruised
so often when testing what
appears deceptively pleasant.
Taking chances these days
is no longer great fun.

105

ITS CUCKOO
On public television a female cuckoo,
strutting as if aiming
to be an avian Mussolini,
is bullying reed warblers.
In plumage like a striped
brown and white turtlenecked
sweater, she looms over her
victims nest. And a
relentlessly aggressive
scam commences.
She lays her eggs in a space
she vacated by heaving overboard most of Ma Warblers
clutch. The displaced eggs
crash against branches.
Twigs scramble them.
Youd think the warblers would notice.
Exclaim, Wheres our bunch?
We loved them so much! And
Whats this scumbag doing here?
Some warbler folks, its so, do
abandon that desecrated nest
and change residences. But most
give the suspicious egg barely
a glance and never attend at all
to the exposed yolks of
lost loved ones below. Better
to pretend not to know about
what cant be mended.
The cuckoo meanwhile has gone
to find more homes to vandalize.
Her baby, she knows, can make
its own grisly way. And it does,
growing daily inside the shell
until hideous and hairless and
clearly of reptilian descent,
it cracks its calcium case and
begins to flay everything out
of its way, quickly sweeping
any unlucky remnant of the real

106

ITS CUCKOO (continued)

warbler brood out of the nest.

Ready-to-crack eggs and new
hatchlings are strewn helpless
and broken where they fall.
Lord of it all now, the cuckoo
baby waits as the foolish warbler
parents respond like automatons
to the demands of its awesome jaws.
They forage themselves to a
frazzle to satisfy the appetite
of the outsized monster crowding
even them from the nest, its mouth
a bottomless, growing red bowl.
The imprinted cuckoo infant will
want to get in a nest of the same
warbler species when its ready
itself to breed. Barring warbler
revolution, the pattern of slave
and master shall repeat forever.
Yet cuckoos are blameless amoral
beings, no matter what humans
may read into it.
And then there is the cuckold,
whose story is equally old. And
whose home has also been invaded.
Who may also be raising anothers
chick, but who wears horns rather
than warbling. What about that?
I ask you, Aint nature outrageous?

107

January 4, 1986
Its a dirty-lace day, though
crystalline symmetries are
pristine still in the trees
where unblown snow white
and scarce as a virgin brides
slip trails liquidly over
angular branches and makes
them flow. Then around edges,
on the ground, the lace grays,
is ripped into rags yet still
softens with its sooty folds
the rougher ugliness from
mans precipitations, his
trashfalls and litter flurries.

108

JIVE TURKEY,
my mostly German
Shepherd bitch,
full of love and piss,
damply sniffs
my comatose face.
6:30 A.M., and time
to walk each other.
I lift my leg
to put on jeans.
She weaves under
and around, pushing
her head affectionately
against my hopping
leg; then doing her best
to separate leg from shoe,
she does a hula rug rub.
Leash and keys jangle,
signaling mad leaps,
forepaws on my shoulders
for one more morningmouth wet kiss. She
bangs the door, races
three times up and down
the stairs I slowly descend.
At my maddeningly slow
pace we make our way
to the lot not vacant
of weeds, trash, turds.
Now no haste
to deliver waste.
Plenty of time to
sniff,
sniff,
sniff,
then circle
the perfect place.

109

JOHN DONNE, LONG DEAD

Reading biographies of stars
(I mean those fiery actors
in universal 4-D movies),
I skew into other histories,
amazed again at like
patterns in unlikely places.
John Donne, long dead,
do I dare compare marriage
and star? I speak not as
pop poet, of stars romantic
backup to moons mood over
Tin Pan Alley. Instead
I sing the Einsteinian stars.
I say lovers once swirled cold,
interstellar dust until fused,
none knows how, every atom
married and changed,
hydrogen burned to helium.
No fuel glows forever,
but in main sequence
a marriage or star seems
eternal, steady over
insidious spread of inert core,
gravity balancing expansion.
Silent stars burn long,
endure ages hot flash and redfaced bloat, kick up dust
before, quiet and wizened,
their white dwarves blacken from
sight in nights graveyard.
Speeding as in Hollywood toward
explosive divorce, big stars
live fast and found dynasties,
from great burning orgies birthing
carbon and oxygen, neon, silicon,
and everything else when the

110

JOHN DONNE, LONG DEAD (continued)

supernova blows. Then, shrunk to

neutron star or black hole buried
with the dull dwarves, matter
rides space with the stellar winds,
finds nebulous relationships,
seeks molecules for remarriage.

LAP SWIMMING AT THE YMCA

At the swims for women only,
septuagenarians twist and
stretch in the womb-warm water.
There to ease arthritic
limbs, they soak and stroll
like old-world ladies at
fashionable baths. They block
my peevish way as I meander
past, trying to swim laps.
Later, we dress, all stretchmarked and flabby at our lockers.
mothers drooping too soon come
in for the Mom and Tot Plunge,
their children goggle-eyed at
the sight of so much sagging flesh.
Someones son watches me dress.
He is crotch-high and delighted.
I wonder if here in this small town
Midwest moms know about Oedipus.

111

LAUNDROMAT
Oil, first oozed eons
before backbones ladder
led to brain, stored
secret in our cellar
long before derricks lit
long Arabian nights,
now heats to tropic
the Washing Well Laundromat.
Spinning through cycles,
machines green with
enamel, not chlorophyll,
direct rivers into
synthetic necessities.
On chains suspended
from sky-blue ceilings,
spider plants jump and
wandering jews tremble
as they vibrate through
foreign fluorescent days.
Eunuch music soothes
what is troubled by
the blood-bought thumps of
so many sterile machines.

112

LEARNING TO DIVE IN
Over eight feet of water
and four feet of air,
when I first walked the plank,
I crept, cowering there.
Four shy steps, timid jump,
then a leap to wet space.
Feet feel bottom, rebound,
kiss of air on my face.
Amphibious feelings
as sinuses clear.
Having jumped, I must dive.
Deep slow breaths swallow fear.
With bowed head and raised hands,
as in suppliant prayer,
I plunge and am slapped
by the water god there.

113

MADE IT!
Writing a publisher to whom
I wished to submit,
my hand slipped.
I asked not about his next
but about his nest competition.
Whimsical, I didnt fix this.
Eight days later, my bell rang.
A tall bird, indeterminate species,
waited. Lady, he said,
wheres your entry?
He flexed his talons, spread
toes red with dried blood.
Thinking quickly, I said Id get it.
Under my bed was a collection:
threads, mending, sewing odds and ends.
Bell bottoms that needed a button
decades back. Pins and zippers, tangled.
I wound yarn around it all. Voila!
At least I wasnt rejected.
My nest was accepted,
payment to be free photos
of the winning nest collection,
in which mine won ninth prize.
Impressive feather in my rsum!

114

MAKING WHOOPEE IN BARABOO

At the International Crane
Foundation in Baraboo,
they are worried about
whoopers and are game
for any plan to raise
this endangered cranes
population. Surrogate
sand crane parents have been
caring for whooping babies,
taking them for their own.
Then came
one George Archbald,
imprinting a baby whooper
named Tex (but yet a lady)
to take him first as mother,
then as lover. Wait a minute,
you say, was their baby a
wildly feathered biologist?
Was Tex an incestuous
lesbian?
Listen here,
this is no scientific soap opera.
Insemination was only
artificial and the mating
imitation. George danced
his flapping, hopping best,
resting little, even feathering
their nest until Tex put out.
Then he snatched away
the egg and placed it in
an incubator to hatch.
Oh, they say
that George and Tex
were not estranged, that
they planned a greater
family, that Tex had not been
robbed or abandoned, had
not felt sad, had never
alluded to suicide. But who
can interpret the pain in
an ever-mournful whoop?

115

MEMORIES OF A GEOLOGY MAJOR

Students only seem not to hear.
Twenty years later I remember
that while climbing a cliff in 1966
my geology instructor confided to
our class that a certain marble he
made us stroke was smooth and
cold as the inside of his wife Idas
thighs. The glacier whose embrace
had made that marble sparkle could
not have been harder or colder than
the response that day in Idas eyes.
Another geology professor used
to say that failing students was as
unpleasant as stomping chicks with
bare feet. Passing back student
papers today, I am aware of a
yellow fuzziness in the room.
I hear not a peep about the grades
or in response to my questions
for discussion, as I pretend to know
what should or will be remembered.

116

MAYBE ID RATHER NOT GO

In medieval days
a bishop lacking wit
once saw fit to
excommunicate some
insects who had sinned.
Now I want to know,
before going, just how
many holy roaches have
made it to heaven.

MIMICS
The ornithologist amuses us
with bird impersonations.
FLAP-FLAP-FLAP SOAR
goes the sharp-shinned hawk.
Lesser yellowlegs say TOOT-TOOT
but greater yellowlegs favor
TOOT-TOOT-TOOT in conversation.
Sandhill cranes jumpdance and flap
thusly, he says, making us laugh at
his antics. I myself am still working
on learning about birds, but I do
two impressions both true and
unrehearsed. I eat like a bird
incessantly and messilyand I
favor privacy and often disappear
when people are trying to see me.

117

MINE IS NAMED MINNIE

Every lap needs a cat
whose hot hum better than
water bottle or antacid
aids digestion and soothes
cramps, a purring panacea.
And every hand that has
a cat never lacks that
silky something to stroke.
With a kissing cat like mine,
fondling can get out of hand.
(Ah, the whiskers against
your cheek, the fishy breath
and rasping lick, whispery
sniff or prickly knead,
the scratching of feline
cheekbones against metal
eyeglass frames) There are
some conflicts, meows howled
after unavailable laps or
hands, demands for tidbits.
And angst when TV screens
wont yield to soft paws
inspecting their hard edges,
protecting the tempting
animals taunting within.

118

MULBERRIES
Stained a red-purple
not so brown as blood
from fingertips to
halfway up my forearms,
a satisfying sweetness
creeping over maroon
tongue-buds, I need
barely tap to free more
mulberries of their twigs,
from which they fall free
for me into a Baggie,
courtesy of the Milwaukee
Road. So ripe they push
themselves, leap in pairs
like hand-holding suicides
from a fruit-heavy bush,
they roll bruised in
the rubble around railroad
tracks, mostly lost to me,
a smear on the trash
and broken green and brown
beer bottle glass. I and
the neighborhood dogs are
glad the railroad neglects
its land, leaves unmolested
the democratic plants like
mulberry. Emulating Walt,
I say their fanciful names,
sow thistle, pepperweed,
shepherds purse, curled
dock, lambs quarters,
Queen Annes lace, compass
plant, bouncing Bet, both
black and deadly nightshade,
daisy fleabane, and the rest,
Morus rubra, the red mulberry,
tasting best to gourmet foragers.

119

MY CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS NEVER

used to remind me of old bawds,
overdone and hungover, gaudy
baubles so cracked and chipped
and flaked that a light slap
might break them and scatter
fragments of imitation gilt and
silver. I hang them again by their
thin necks, wondering if it is time
they retired. Perhaps when their
fir goes, so will they, on January 1st,
when I am feeling fat and dissatisfied,
finally sick even of divinity and sugar
cookies. Maybe Ill also add to my
pile of post-holiday trash those
ancient scratchy records whose
carols played back when my kids
were little and Christmas was fun.
When I still believed peace on Earth
was what most men really wanted
and not just a slogan to sell more
stuff guaranteed to wear out faster.

120

MY DAUGHTER ON CHRISTMAS EVEN

Laura lights the Christmas tree,
kneels before a televised image
that is haloed, though reception
is good. Bowing on the tube, his
Nutcracker legs snapped shut,
Baryshnikov blesses us with stars
smile. When Mikhail is beyond
vision, in what Laura knows is
a heavenly life, she wraps gifts
bought on time with twelve years
studying and three weeks playing,
on Arie Crowns stage,
snowflake, tulip angel, and
understudy not really hoping
lead dancers will become unable.

121

MY PHONE NEVER STOPS RINGING

Mom, I hate Barry,
wails my daughter
collect again from SIU.
I dont say, So do I.
This time Im definitely
not going back. We fought
the whole vacation. He says
Im getting just like you.
Better to be dead, I dont reply.
All he wants to do is drugs,
she whines. He made me try
mushrooms, and I got sick.
It is useless to remind her that in
the movie Altered States mushroom
hallucinogens made the hero
sub-human. Barry told me
that if I wont marry him,
he doesnt know why hes wasting
time.
Watch out, I
finally do say. That is how
I mistakenly married your father.
John warned me, she continued,
that when Barry turned 25
hed throw me over. Well,
John should know, I say.
John is her step-father who threw
me over when I turned 35. To end
the conversation quickly, I begin
to speak of my own problems.

122

MY WATCHDOG
Hot weather doesnt scare
my watchdog.
I mention this because
she does fear
any loud noises,
small, yapping puppies,
storms, or strong winds,
all men, and going
outside after dark.
Other than that,
a good watchdog, as
she always is alert
for anything scary
and warns me
by jumping hard
against my butt
before streaking home.
If already home,
she barks a warning
before hiding under
the biggest bed.
But, as I say,
shes brave about heat,
and on this scorcher,
kept her cool by lying
in our dry bathtub,
to make sure nothing
scary came up the drain.
At least she did
until pipes gurgled.
Anyway, it got cooler
when this thunderstorm
blew through,
cool enough to be
under the bed,
where dustballs tremble,
one of them quite
large and strong.

123

NEW KINGDOMS
The fifties were so stable
that continents stood still,
life was segregated into
but two kingdoms, and
marriage was supposed to
seem to be between virgins
and to last forever.
Now the continents roll
apart and toward others
like swingers switching beds.
Beings live in upstart kingdoms,
neither plant nor animal
Monera, Protista, Fungi
and must be either
Procaryotes or Eucaryotes,
names which may be changing
even as you now read. And
lovers no longer always wed
or care for purity and permanence.
But then, maybe the names are
new for what was always the case.

124

NIGHT ALONE AT NAVY PIER

To have fun you must love:
the sight of fans backsides
as they stand on chairs to
block the stage you must imagine;
the cigarettes and dope whose
blue smoke blows your way
from wine-wet lips and roach clips;
laughter and chatter brazen
enough to beat all the bands;
baskets of crisp chicken and
platters of spare ribs and rolls,
devaluing your brown bag sandwich.
Thousands pace, people-watchers
admiring the mass or perhaps
waiting a chance to sprawl legs
up and spread out with the rest
who need for space three places.
Girls whose nipples beam brown
through white blouses stroll past
boys pretending to hide hard-ons.
Later most hands now clapping
to jazz blasts will be held. Crabby,
I tap a sober foot, fold a lonely old
left hand in a ready, empty right.

125

NO FAT CATS
Struggling to survive
suffering and trouble,
or so claims the clich,
improves ones character.
They also say in pulpits
and the papers that elected
officials often lack that
moral character, care more
for power and a fat pocketbook.
These two truisms suggest
strategies for finding
higher quality politicians.
Forget the rich and look
for leaders where people
are still suffering and
being ennobled, so it speak.
On Chicagos streets you can
see such saints in the making
(some might say on the make),
people struggling, uncorrupted
by any gain or good luck.
Take them, make them mayors
and congressmen. Let them
stay until ambition changes their
characters, at least a few days.
Or keep the incumbents at
their peaks, morally speaking,
through struggles. I suggest
making them live on my wages.

126

NO SUGAR
Talking twelve months
takes less energy, claims
Science Digest, than
boiling one cup of water.
Joking, I poke at your side.
Want coffee or my conversation?
Black, comes the quiet reply.

NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH

Having decapitated in lab
a downhome American cockroach,
I tried to shake from a pin,
and into a bin of likewise
headless brethren, several
inches of outraged and
unbrained thorax and abdomen.
Kicking and thrashing after
the head writhing on my slide,
it stayed impaled, flapped
wings of oily melanin-brown
against my fingers on the pin
until I gave in and let go.
The head was already dead to
my hacking surgery of mouthparts,
for learning mandibles from maxillae.
The body crawled for days in the lab,
twitching with the others who
could not get their heads together.

127

NOT MUCH FUN HERE

Insects dont waste
time screwing around.
When Mr. Right alights,
the lady stocks up on sperm
like a farmwife canning
garden truck, foreseeing
being loved and left.
Even a queen bee, imagined
insatiable sex machine,
demanding male adulation of
her honey-glutted form,
has only one fling with
a string of males whose
genitals she rudely rips out.
They die, and she flies
home to brood and produce.
Following this policy of
taking a gentleman for all
she can at one time, not a
few overdo. The mantis, for
example, makes sure Daddy
feeds his brats by tidily
biting him as he woos,
chewing all she chooses
while he cannot eschew.
She says grace before and
both preys and prays after,
this Mantis religiosa.

128

NOTES FOR THE HISTORY OF MILK

Holsteins cannot alter
the clownishness of coats
spotted with random
large dots, each uniquely
black on white, except
for those, more sober,
who chose white on black.
But a milk cow in
whatever clothes can still
eschew the comic, chew
the sedate cud, amble
in dignity, concentrate on
its own swift internal seasons,
green to white, as grass
becomes snowy, thick liquid
fit for my luncheon glass.
Oh, Ive laughed at how
cows gallop and vie to line
up near a fence where they
can hear a friendly farmers
word, perhaps catch a caress,
a scratch behind ink-blot
mottled ears. But I wonder,
as I see their clumsy run,
what this early churning
does to their sweet cream
and sweating cheeses to be,
worry about an internal and
unfunny turn of fat to butter,
of milk stuck solid inside.
Looking into their gorgeous,
dark and long-lashed eyes,
I wonder even more about
their dairy life, so much better
than that of most cattle, but
not what would naturally happen.
For the love of ice cream, I am
glad they know no better and
cant miss whats not known.

129

NOVEMBER, AND NOW

the wind combs wisps of fogdrift over bald domes of sugar
maples adorned only last week
with stately red-gold crowns.
With branches like uplifted rots,
they are diminished this late
into windwhipped reflections
of their own subterranean sticks.
The world is topsy-turvy
as leaves gravitate, press
red-brown-yellow down into
ground blackly waiting where
roots seem underground branches
suckling not on sunshine or fresh air
but on rain filtered through
death and fungal exhalations.

NOVEMBER REMNANTS
black-eyed Susans
deprived of yellow lashes,
left staring darkly
at a chill silver sky,
find there no reply
to their surprised
silent cries:
Why me? Why me?
Yet have the best death.
A quiet home-dying,
upright as they stiffly dry,
certain that come summer
something will occur
much like resurrection.

130

OF CREEPING JENNY,
Convulvulus arvensis
I admire in a certain
candy-striped field bindweed
its way of lining
tiny forked stems
(one leaf, one bud, per V)
along its sunny vineside.
Like couples in a ticket cue.
And they shall travel.
This weed seesdamn near
obliteratesits world.
Jenny keeps on creeping.
The daily origami display
of this form of morning glory
is an opening and closing
in obeisance to the sun.
Paired with leaves shaped
like cut-paper Christmas trees,
each flower is at night
a cylinder tightly rolled
as sleeping bag on backpack,
which at sunrise gently
spreads one end to reveal
creases of a pinwheel. Pink.
In the brightening morning
it widens to a white star
with five rose lines like rays.
Finally unfolded, Jenny holds
full light in a disk curved
like an inverted umbrella.
And all this is just surface.
Jenny spreads a subterranean net
of lateral roots that ever edge
in all directions. Extends ten
feet in depth. Farther than
gardeners or farmers care to
pursue to uproot. It is this
persistent doing of a few things
so beautifully that moves me.

131

OSAGE ORANGES
Organic phenomena
like exploding lime
tennis balls line
highway 38.
I swerve, driving to
work, but osage juice
squirts my wheels,
a green as ephemeral
in Novembers preChristmas drizzle
as the printed leaves
within my billfold.

PAEDOGENESIS
A Miaster gall-midge is not
asked what she would like to
sacrifice for her children.
She doesnt choose to
lose so they might live.
Virgin eggs as uncalled for
as cancer crack open within
her; daughters gnaw until
Mom is all gone. The orphans
find out how it feels when
the same happens to them.
Some generations may think
theyre changing things,
produce males who marry and
mothers unhurt by childbirth.
But masochism within will out,
and sooner rather than later,
a grand-daughters middle
begins to nibble.

132

PAPER-WHITE NARCISSUS
At first the forced bulbs
blooming on my winter sill
make me incredulous.
Their beauty is perfection.
Rising from white gravel
in a bright china bowl, stem
and leaves flow into
purity that shames and grays
the windowpanes lacy frost,
the sunshine on snow outside.
Then it is that the stench
from the foul-smelling flowers
overpowers the loveliness.
Whats fair becomes reek of
drowned Narcissus himself,
who fell for his own reflection.

PARADISE REVISED
Milton could
not know
God
was Matter,
Lucifer
was Anti-Matter,
Christ
didnt matter,
and what
counted
were
Quarks.

133

PARKING PLACES ARE SACRED

even when designations are unofficial
and come from squatters rights
or just somebodys desire to be nearby.
In winter only a brave man will pull into
some burly territorialists cleared space.
There are Chicago variations on Dibs.
In this city competition gets wicked.
Scarcity and deep snow breed desperation,
lead to crazed claim-staking with chairs
placed almost as dares where shovel
and sweat have lifted away the drifts.
I understand this. I too like Sisyphus
have crimsoned with circular effort.
The murderer in me wakes, hates thieves
of any space Ive labored to clear.
And if I could, Id jet directly to jail or hell
the city snow plow driver who arrives
right after Ive collapsed from shoveling
and reburies my car in blown snow.
This is as low as modern man goes.

134

PICK WHICHEVER
ation apocalypse
you wishnuclear
devastation, overpopulation and
resulting starvation,
poison accumulation,
or Gods disgusted
damnationsomeone
who doesnt care to
change will say its okay,
life will survive, only
maybe not the same way.
I too believe genes will
still meet and beasts
conceive, that deep in the
ocean rifts sulfurous
slime, creatures will still
feed and glow eerily.
Nearer the light, life may
only amount to a few
blue algae and beady
bacteria. Or todays
races may stay, but as
Halloween frights whose
masks wont pull away.
But hey, whatever and
what the hell, lets play.

135

PLANT PORNOGRAPHY I.
VEGETATING
I count in a plant
morphology textbook
42 photos of algae
copulating in pairs,
quartets, crowds.
They conjugate strictly for
reproduction, like good
Roman Catholics. They
dont masturbate, not
while humans watch.
Skimming on past
moss and fern orgies,
I see silky or fuzzy
sex parts of flowers
caught by camera
in the act. Pregnant
plants bloat the book,
which I set down,
unable to take in so much
when I have so little.

136

PLANT PORNOGRAPHY II.

BLUSHES
Celery left in
red water reveals
structure and whats
drunk as veins
slowly turn rosy in
crisp stalk and
pale bouquet of
rococo leaves.
Fuschia to maroon
mottling of Javan mint
Coleus blumei filters
light through its
camouflage colors
which block burning
rays and beautify when
well-bred for homes
in temperate zones.
The unruly red of my
bloods iron defiantly
surfaces to signal heat
released by reactions
which never embarrass
plants, who live only to
drink deeply and
couple in sunlight.

137

PORIFERA
Squeezed within chunks
of transparent sponges
steamed in blue fish
stew by the great comic
Cook (Let there be
Vera Cruz atmosphere,
He giggled one restless
Sunday), I tunnel and tear
my way toward anywhere
aire acondicionado,
diminished by the minute,
as if lips sucked the short
straws of my pores. But
a voice slurps, Be still,
and Ill save you some
cell walls. Also teeth,
bones, hair, clothes, nails.

138

POWER FLOW
Noisily aggressive
as rhesus monkeys,
we wont rest
till we lay to rest
all the rest
of the worlds life
and ourselves as well.
So what? say some
religious fundamentalists.
Heavens just ahead,
and we elect live in
the we-want-it-all
generation. Its
such waste not to take
what could make money
or gets in our way. To that
way of thinking, its okay
to kill the last coyote or polar bear,
to pack guns or exact vengeance,
okay to suck up the last wetland,
just avoid alcohol and pray.
With these philosophies, we
gloat and attack other lands,
extending personal tendencies
to a world where other countries
also strive to be monkey number
one. The other animals idea of
rapture might be a sweeping
of our whole species into space.

139

PRELUDE
The season before we met
I picked up the thin
Thanksgiving wishbone
(dry and brittle as my hopes
for love had been) saved
for my sisters children.
I stroked the forlorn curve of
calcium, shrunken without
the warm smother of beating
turkey breast, the muffled
gobble-gobble to the north.
Still, it spread wide, as
my arms or legs would for
a mans loving embrace. Or
like half a bow and arrow,
sharp tip and taut bowstring.
My dog sniffed and circled
me, got a whiff of the scrap
redolent of her own Thanksgiving
repast, a succulent lump
of fat turkey tail. She whined,
ready to crunch anyones wishes.
Nothing doing, kid.
I made her beg for balogna,
sent her reluctant to bed.
Alone again with my bone,
I considered. Three kids,
two wishes to try to pull off,
one fight in my sisters kitchen.
Might as well toss the thing.
What was it anyway but
a wisp of superstition? But
I know too much about wishes
to waste any. With no one
to see, it wouldnt hurt
to grab both bone ends in my
own hands, ride the two forks
like a water witch divining
at last the thirst-quenching spring.
Okay then, left hand wishes for love,

140

PRELUDE (continued)
right hand for writers success.
No losing here.
But was it legal?
I closed my eyes, barely
began to pull before
the winning share snapped
into my left hand.
Which is why I ask you, Michael,
Did the turkey bring you?

141

RADIO SPACE
Like a sleepy truck driver
trying to pick up
hits as radio stations
switch through the dark
cross-country nights,
the Voyager searches for
oldies but goodies
as it drives the highways of our rhythmic system.
Speeded by synthesizers,
the music of the spheres
would not have pleased Greeks.
Progressive electronic jazz
(Hey, man, lay Saturns
magnetosphere on me, or
Blow that solar wind by
me again, Baby), it is
weird even in these open years.
The sun, which is said by a
Dr. Pomerantz to ring like a
gong, cannot be heard through
the vacuum of space. So
scientists now stare with
musicians at solar surface
oscillations, transposing for
earthly instruments the new
old song of the sun.

142

RENT
Blackflap crows on squinteye sky,
amble leafkneed autumn I.
Roseseed hipskin, cherrywine tree,
applecrab, hawreds pucker me.
Teagreens for future (Futures gone soon).
Redgold, snow, mudmelts by June.
Leafs kin I came earthfood sent.
Bodybone, not own, cant keep, rent.

143

ROADKILLS
December through February,
most roadkills are metal.
Tailpipes, rusty mufflers,
failed batteries in autos
whose jaws gape to receive
jumps, cables trailing
like dentists implements
over their deadened lips.
And more sinister
twisted unidentifiable bits,
stained and cockeyed roadsides,
splashes of broken glass
left after the tow trucks go
and something mostly nonmetal has been packed
within a braying ambulance.
While living in the city,
those roadkills were all
I saw. Those, and the demise
of Leroy, my natty gray-striped
tomcat, found early one morning
with a tire mark down his flat back,
his side fur like fringe on a platter.
The time was 65. Two decades later,
I still sadly imagine Leroy dying,
trying to evade some vehicle
the wrong way and not making it.
My prototype for all highway mayhem.
Like the 2-D skunk with 3-D tail,
the possums not just playing possum,
the dogs and cats theres no use calling,
the splayed raccoons regular as road signs.
And my own murder, the horror of swerve
made too late. September 23rd, 1982,
sun in my eyes, tired, going 55,
turning a curve to see right ahead
a V-shape, black, almost like batwings,
emerging from silhouette reddish,
a squirrel with lifted tail and open mouth,
then a thumping rise under tires. It has
quivered ever since in my rearview mirrors.

144

ROUTE 47
gets different in winter,
is lined by an icy try
for a Midwestern wall of China.
No place for plowed snow to go
but along the road, so
its pile grows higher and wider,
at sharp right angles to the highway,
which, like a road cut, exposes
sedimentary layers. The silver
in the piles middle is no lining,
but the blizzard that nearly did me in.
Frosting the top is last weeks
sweet white Christmas.
Layers of history, soon to disappear
in trickles or soundless sublimation.
I drive through canyons, the snow
scraping low sky on both sides,
the road a narrowing sliver.
In blown places, the wall crumbles
into slopes or erodes unevenly.
Holes appear. Crags. Overhangs.
The setting sun reflects rose
off the glassy surface of the snow.
The swollen land rolls softly
but looks brittle as a mirror.
This hardness is only glitter,
a crust supporting mice but no mare.
The sun hides and the sky turns
light blue-violet. So does the snow.
They both deepen, and, long before
the fading light makes them navy,
the horizon line fades, is indecipherable,
and all but the highway is skycolored, and I in visual heaven.

145

SAFFRON OR POPPY SEEDS

To bake saffron rolls,
take a field yielding
Crocus sattiva in
full bloom. Redorange stigmas should
be powdery with
pollen, and youll
need thousands. Beat
away any bees who
believe in insect priority.
Then pluck off the
luscious sexual stuff.
Use sparingly as you
season rolls, as this
floral sperm is edible
gold. But unless a
queen is your guest,
I suggest you substitute
the peoples seasoning,
poppy seeds, sprinkling
freely, feeling good
about it rather than
greedy. After all, every
seed eaten means that
much less opium can
be grown. See it this
way: Would you rather
perform crocus abortions
or save addicts from
a degrading fate? But do
delay any drug tests.

146

SAVING UP FOR THE PSYCHIATRIST

My daughter Eileen was ready to go
to Marine basic training before
she let me know some basics
about her fright-ridden raising.
For months after Brownie camp,
shed had a recurring sad dream:
A horse she was riding down our
street suffered nightly raccoon bites.
For years she feared
being raked by men and
in one nightmare was brutally
beaten by a stranger with a rake.
Through her entire childhood,
she dreaded her sisters ridicule,
was devastated once while rummaging
secretly in a sisters bedroom desk
to read a note saying:
Eileen picks her nose.
Oh no, oh no, oh no, shed cried.
Now everyone would know.

147

SISTERS, CONSIDER THE APHID

Hardly any say, Miracle!
as virgin aphids viviparously
give birth, bearing only girls
and squirting them out so
profusely that only ant
herders for honeydew, or
plant-fanciers, or parasitic
wasps, or aphis lions with a
taste for that plump pear shape,
take note and lay waste.
Its a mistake to claim all
aphids are alike. On Helianthus
annus, their Sunflower Towers,
some take their place in line,
each with her own space, like
any apartment dwellers lacking
contact, thigmotropic, hating
invasion of privacy. If one
moves, they all shudder and adjust,
shifting, making waves on their
stem. Others form gregarious
encrustations or take permanent
unpaid positions as ant cows.
Changing their minds, aphid
ladies sprout wings in summer
and fly off to some favorite host.
Later they will create more
parthenogenetic daughters there
and settle in until, restless again,
winged progeny, wanting they know
not what, flap back to the ancestral
plant, where males wait, knowing
what. The fated mating brings only
winter-hardy eggs and death, hardly
worth the trip back home, which is
all for the next generations, who wont
even know they should be grateful.

148

SKI POLES
Each arm has
grown new bamboo
bone, star-tipped
to prick earths
crystal slick
crust of snow,
as crouched I go
on fours, then stand,
shaky technological man.

149

SLEEPING BAG, MOUNTAIN,

M-1949, TYPE 1
Buried in my mummy bag, bought
used for camping, down of those
who died goose-generations gone
retains lifes heat and memories.
Wrapped in posthumous warmth, I will rest,
at peace in Novembers long night,
my tent shrouded in Devils Lake vapors.
I check the bags features and readiness.
In Type-1 bags you will not shiver
at warmer than 41 degrees below zero,
Uncle Dan in his War Surplus Store
had told me. I am 41 years above zero.
A letter sewn in the mummys neck
frets: AVOID sweating in bag.
If too warm, open slide-fastener
and pump out moist warm air.
Unzipped, Ill pump like a toppled turtle.
DO NOT put face in bag. Whose?
Through scream-sized hole in mummys jaws,
my mouth too must pump moist warm air.
Patches bandage Ms heart and knees;
abdominal stitches and small
open wounds leaking white,
but no blood stains, mar my green veteran.
Brooding over words FOR EMERGENCY EXIT...
I imagine the freezing knives of Korean nights and
then let thoughts fly, moth from cocoon, into tropic
Viet Cong fire. Safe and warm at home, I shiver.

150

SOME CALL ME SASQUATCH,

others say Bigfoot,
but where is the bear-haired
woman who would
say Honey, My Love,
as do the little unfinished
females who live raw
and loud on the rims
of my forest.
Their dinky
men think theyre so big,
strut and shout and chew
these good woods down
with their outside teeth
buzzing bright. Babies,
saying, Look at me,
I can beat the beavers.
Mean victories.
I scream
sometimes at night and
bang at cabin windows,
where, drawn by the sight
of light captured, I peek
at their shrunken humping
and grieve for my people.
The next day they admire
my footprints size.
Tracking after,
they often blindly pass
where I stand listening.
They guess my name, saying
Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Gignatopithecus.
If they werent too stupid
to understand, I might ask
if they had seen a female. My
mothers final advice was, Mate.

151

SOME COLD FACTS ABOUT CHICAGO

Alive in a bright, warm
space between Pleistocene ice
cycles, I see, chilled,
how violet winter sunlight
glazes the Valparaiso moraine.
More than ten thousand
years before, under the suns
blink and a mile of flowing
old snow, an eskernow
a slim hill beneath my feet
gathered debris into the stony
bed of a stream deep
within our latest glacier.
A thaw brought pristine
Lake Chicago, later to be
drained by the Des Plaines River
and engineers who thought its
name was Michigan. Today
once-potable meltwater needs
chlorine to cool and clean this
city Chicago, whose people
live in a damp glacial depression.

152

SOME CULTIVATED THOUGHTS

Centipedes mean bad soil;
night crawlers good, or so Im
told. Birding my footsteps,
a robin sucks up worms
that slip off my fork. If he
and his kind keep that up,
the field will belong to those
with red feet not really equal
to one hundred. An ominous
sign. Behind black masks,
starlings steal planted seeds.
Breaking my back as well as
the ground, I wish in my ritual
digging for roots I had skipped
the agrarian stage and aped
the ranging forager. Less digging.
At last long black mounds like
graves proclaim my work.
Crosses name those planted in
rows. Here lie: Buttercrunch,
Detroit Dark Red, Tendergreen
Bush Beans, Beefsteak tomatoes,
and others awaiting resurrection.

153

STILLED
Take a glaring gray day.
Paste a lake, its action
stopped as in snapshot
below a waterlogged sky.
No line breaks.
Make aqueous gradations.
Reflective inside this
pearl world put a blackcheeked Bonapartes gull
caught in phantom flight
circling a sunfish.
Biblically create
an anomaly: from nowhere
a solo immobile wave,
smooth sine curve up
followed by negative hollow.
Let this wave never break,
rotate no particles,
waste no energy against rocks.
Only an up and a down
and elsewhere evenness
needing no further development.

154

THAW
And then the awful
rush-up from the earth
of fog and mud. Mud.
Clotting on windshields,
blurring whats not already
obscured by fog. Fog.
Blotting what once was
solid, turning edges
and ends evanescent.
White by day, gray by night,
the air above the muddy
frost-and-thaw-buckled
road much be excavated.
My car slowly tunnels,
throwing earth like a mole.
Behind it the hole closes.

155

THE AIR DANCED

that late March day with gnats
in the morning sunlight and
blowing snow in the afternoon,
as heavy cold air descended.
Pepper, then salt, from heaven.
The March lamb came prancing in,
then ran from the lions salivations.
Spring was busy teasing us. Catnip
and lanceleaf violet slowly ripped
the cold seams of old snow patches
still sewn to shady wooded slopes.
Robins pulled at loose threads.
I was busy myself, organizing
(beating back) Nature, who had
invaded my mothers place and
brazenly scattered wild sticks
and seeds and pods and shredded
leaves. Winter debris. Messy
where Mom needed neat. My raking
and sweeping was agitating those
gnat masses making the air hazy.
I had taken off my jacket
and was capitulating to languor,
the kind of pleasant laziness
sublime on balmy late-winter days.
Especially as I rested, everything
seemed fresh. Even muscle aches
from outdoor labor were a plus,
something to bake in sunrays.
Watching squirrel antics, I could
have laughed out loud, wide-mouthed
and rowdy as a hyena, had there been
fewer gnats near my mouth and had
Mom not been watching at the window.
Before Id driven back the last twig,
spring had receded. Wind howled, and
deep gloom, thick as mattress batting,
cold as a hibernating toad, lay over the valley.
Blinding snow replaced gnats, and that was that.

156

THE MAN WHO DIDNT KNOW

HOW TO EAT JELLO
When my mothers dad
died of cancer, and
they lost everything
and had to live on
lard bread and hard
times, the widow went
to work as a candler,
in the egg factory,
checking freshness.
The kids did what
those on their own
usually do, got into
mischief and tried to
finish their chores
before they heard her
at the door. One day
a farmers eggs came
with name, address, and
hopeful request to
meet some candler with
domestic tendencies.
Grandma Niewohner knew
a father could do more
for her orphans, so she
asked him to dinner.
All I can get from Mom
and laughing aunts, when
I ask what happened,
is something about how
he stabbed his jello,
to him an unfamiliar
substance, with a fork
and was therefore crude.
So the yokel went back
to his farm and homecured pork, and Grandma
larded up the kids lunch.

157

THE MASSAGE
Waves of sea music
whale moan and the vibrations
of strummed or plucked strings
lap at my fingertips, feet,
temples, break soundlessly
into olive oil and chamomile
scented surf over my shoulders,
wash back in long smooth strokes
around my legs and upper arms.
The tape stops. Low tide.
I lie stranded and overlong,
the beach gone under my towel,
no sun to brown my slippery skin.
I roll over as told, try not to
stiffen as fingers fail to
flatten the rolling ovals of
stomach, midriff, inner thighs.
I feel strapped to a track, eyes closed,
rolling slowly through a carwash
depending on anothers steering
not to deviate. If I move,
a funhouse of flaps and feathers
may buff out of place. The
conveyer belt slides, I am at the end.
Finishing fingers shine my face.
I rise, pay, and drive home dazed,
out of sorts with expensive tenderness.

158

THE PLUMB-BOB PIGEON

Lamar brought the hurt bird to me,
but released his hold too early
and saw flurrying wings bring
the pigeon into abortive flight,
then steady to lift and land
on the frame above the blackboard.
My other seventh graders looked
at me expectantly, gave me the old,
OO-EE, TEA-CHER! and
waited for me to take care of it.
Pursued by students, the bird seemed
to revive, flew higher and higher,
but finally a pigeon-imprisoning
sweater wrapped its iridescent feathers.
What you be doin now, teacher?
I answered by grabbing the bird.
Open that window wide, I told
the kids. This bird is flying fine.
I poked my arms outside, opened
the sweater, and let go. Oh-oh.
There was nothing slow or off
the perpendicular in that particular
plummet. And nothing left after THUD.
OO-EE, teacher murdered a bird,
was what I heard all day, all week.
The following week I was out sick
on day and came back to see all my
class math books crash-landed over
the bird blood stains. I understood.
Fractions cant fly neither, Lamar
said. Howd you like to try?

159

THE RIGHT PUNISHMENT

FOR THE CRIME
of cactus-napping
might be to require
every captured
cactus rustler
to lie down on his
acquired booty.
If vigilantes did
their duty (and
wouldnt you join
a posse that had
the chance both
to save the desert
and have a good laugh?)
treasures like Big Bend
National Park wouldnt
lose their beauty, and
the fruit of Arizonas
saguaros would continue
to refresh western birds and
city-tired human eyes.

160

THE SAW-WHET OWL

Caught in a mist net the night before,
the saw-whet sat that day in a cage
for observation at the banding station.
Saturdays specialty act. Petite.
Cute. Seemingly sweet. Nonetheless
a tough nocturnal predator able
to whisk away a little rodent dinner
without sound. Owl wings have mufflers.
It swiveled its head to watch the birders
through big eyes fixed deep within sockets.
Night-seeing eyes, better than binoculars,
deceptively seeming wise and calm. But
its head space was dominated not by brain
but by eyeball. The naturalist lifted some
head feathers, and we all stooped to peer
into a large ear hole, that showed clearer
than I really wanted to see, a cross-section
of the saw-whets head, almost all eye.
Yet it has brains enough to do what it must.
Which is not always the case with some of us.

161

THE SECOND SINGULARITY

In the beginning
the Singularity
created itself and
saw that it was
good and began
expanding down
10 to the manyeth
power years.
Easing after
eternity, some say
we swing through
cycles in a yo-yo
universe, expanding
and collapsing like
a pregnant woman
whose embryo puffs
itself up but is stillborn when painful
contractions begin.
Closed universe
prophets of woe
know we speed toward
a second singularity,
which will lack a
more accurate name,
since its last blast
will waste heaven
and hell and all
that vibrates between.

162

THE SLUGS
One night when Chicago was tropical,
its air heavy and wet as bottled
sweat after ten days of highs
in the nineties, I was surprised
when I turned on my patio light to see
littering the cement thick, legless,
creeping creatures, five inches long,
horns distinguishing their heads,
bodies patterned black and brown,
their crawl too slow to be called swarm,
but nevertheless a steady progression,
evidenced by sticky threads of silver
slime. Taking their sweet sluggish time,
they explored the cement near my
gardens border, making my great tangle
of tomatoes and mostly unsuccessful
vegetables seem a jungle created,
like the steamy night, for their primitive,
dark delight. I went inside, leaving only
hordes of fireflies for illumination,
but later I watched their shocking orgy.
What was comfortable for slugs was
for me a frightening reminder, not just
that slugs love to eat my garden plants,
but that in evolution, time may be on
the ancient mollusks side, and we upstarts
just a brief, unsuccessful path, soon past.

163

THEY DID IT BEFORE DINOSAURS

Dragonflies make
whoopee on the wing,
fly in flashy metallic
tandem, unashamed to
clasp and shape, as
they mate, a heart.
Their bodies, long for
love, were falsely
called horse-stingers or
devils darning needles
by whose who didnt know
that only flying foods
like mosquitoes and gnats
need fear these aerial
acrobats with great
goo-goo-googley eyes.

164

THIS IS THE DEAL

It must have been the thick
stick in my fist, heavy,
stripped of its twigs,
rigid in its middle, ready
for several sessions of
fetch and chew, a gift
for my German Shepherd.
Or maybe it was the big dog
herself, sniffing and bristling
after her bit of oak limb.
Big to a kid of six, my own
size might have decided him,
made him thing there
under his orange whorls of
haircut, behind acorn bitter
eyes and adult brown frown,
I could be a mighty ally.
Do you want to help fight
against evil? he asked.
There were three kids, he said,
doing some very mean things.
Wehe and Icould make them sorry.
You can be in on it, he smiled.
There was no crying when I declined,
no trying to find my softer side.
Not four feet high, riding off standing
up on his ten-speed bike, he pedaled
hard. Determined. A future politician,
perhaps, or soldier, or executive in a
merger world. Loaded with testosterone.

165

THROUGH EINSTEINIAN EYES

Wrapped in the wry warp
of mistaken insight, I
slyly try to surmise
your dimensions, decide
if your time is my time,
my place your space.
But your woof rejects
my warp, bends toward
other ends, recedes from
my advances, flashing
STOP clearly with red shift.
Slowed by anothers gravity,
barely moved by mine,
you contract and gain mass.

166

TO EDWIN WAY TEALE,

inspirational naturalist writer.
You asked, in passing,
(p.33, Days Without Time;
that old note, thrown out,
rose again after three days),
Who are more immortal
than amoebas? Or less
impressive, I suggest, to
the kind requiring biblical
resurrection. And what
kind of eternal life is it,
anyway, if living means
splitting ones protoplasm
in two, into halves no longer
exactly you. Or does the soul
go along, cloned through
geometrically progressing
generations? And is each
amoeba then identical to
the Original in and from
Whose image heor maybe
she? it? was made? And
Edwin, what in heavens
name does it all mean?

167

TO GORILLAS
used in language
experiments, you came
out of Africa into
bewilderness,
came to play the fool,
the monster, the
not-really-recognized
relative who does tricks.
Pulled from African bed,
yet asked to breed,
you would not raise
babies made in cages.
Speaking in signs,
you sent from California
eerie news of wit
articulate that knew
how to mind. Only
Diane Fosse and
friends, respecting
you in your home,
told the true story,
as much as humans can.

168

TO H20
On this globe Oceana,
misnamed Earth after
its less-wet third,
I sip into capillaries,
seal into cells,
the difference between
live and dead planets.
Unable to drink to it
and not drink of it,
I soak within and without in this liquid of
incomparable properties,
would rather be a Waterthan Earth- Mother.

169

TO LYNN MARGULIS
a biologist whose
science found secrets
wilder than lies
that bind in a single
unified life, whatever forms,
organic or not, within
this worlds influence.
From the Greek Earth goddess
Gaea, by way of William Golding,
an idea arose, The Gaia Hypothesis:
Earth is one organism,
all of whose atoms have
mattered toward maturation,
and men (new enough to be
mutants, rank enough to be
cancer) only cells in a system
that made middle age without
need of man at all. To the
rhythms of roving rocks and
recycled oxygen, Gaia grew.
Inside the inside of Gaian life,
where electron microscopes
hope to scan, symbionts live,
believing in their fashion that
their own home organism is everything,
a kind of mini-Gaia itself. Before they
were organelles, chloroplasts and
mitochondria lived as free bacteria
in the Greater Gaia, the Earth,
then only a child. Or so suggested
Margulis in explanations of her
credible, incredible 20th century epic.

170

TO READ BEFORE X-C SKIING

Running low
on sugars and air,
skidding not lifting
my seven red
polyurethane
feet per side,
opposite poles
beating for balance,
I ski furrows
iced by others.
Backsliding,
slow up hills,
in off-trail snow
I see deer tracks,
chickadees,
rabbit scat.
They too move in
grooves but
make their marks.
I sign nothing,
safe in straight and narrow,
until I slide straight on
a narrow downhill curve
and rumple as I roll
the perfect white sheet
below a red pine.
Overtaking, an expert
swerves, swears, stabilizes,
then passes, laughing,
Kiss a tree?

171

TOM, WHO TEACHES PRETEENS

spent the best part of his day
on my sisters farm delivering speeches
(I cant say if they were lessons)
to the steers and hogs. He had
never, he said, had a better
audience. Attentive, to all
appearances sweet-tempered,
they turned soft cow eyes and damp
snouts his way, often nodded as if
in agreement, and in general outclassed
in attitude any group in his previous
experience. They even crowded
to get closer, not out. However, like
his usual students, they probably did
not believe or even understand him,
taking as bad dreams or gibberish
his warnings about slaughter houses,
meat packers, and meals in which
they would soon feature. Its
often better anyway if creatures
with no options remain unenlightened.

172

TWISTED WINGS
Men call the female twistedwing insect a degenerate endoparasite, but, sisters, Strepsiptera
cant help it. As a girl she ran
free on long legs, fast as the boys.
It was marriage turned her to
an egg sac sans eyes or legs or
antennae, marriage that imprisoned
her at home feeding osmotically in
some hosts abdomen. Now she
buries her brain in food, and,
like some Chaucerian bawd,
puts her butt out the window for
Pops coitus and the kids exodus.
Her daughters are just as incautious.

173

TWO CROW TREES

grow on my street.
Their fat black leaves
rise this fall to
wake the gray days
with cacophonous CAW!
When all fly up at once
and raucous angry
laughter (HAW-HAW,
CAUGHT! or LAW! LAW!)
expands in the air,
I am wary. The flapping
re-enacts that anxious
business in The Wizard
of Oz when the witch
lines the sky with flying
lackeys going after
Dorothy and yapping Toto.
But in my neighborhood,
the crows complaints are
probably about the lack
of grasshoppers since
first frost. By sunrise
the laziest, last crow is off
to glean leavings from
farm fields. At dusk
the dark shapes will fill
the same naked branches
with shadowy racket.

174

TWO MEN
I mention to one man who wants
me sometimes, but usually doesnt, that
youd shown me birds Id not seen before.
He snickered. Who is he, St. Francis?
Maybe. To a woman who makes nature
her church and saints of playboys with
binoculars and botanic inclinations.
I believe, without reason:
He who cant trample plants
wont walk all over me.
He who saves the endangered
wont let me waste away.
Etcetera, ad nauseum,
in that crazed vein, with
no illusion too foolish.
Loving whats wild, even
in men and ideas, I devise
a good old girls herbal. Items:
He likes wild hyacinths. His mind is fine.
Favors sensitive ferns? Tender and gentle.
Loves jack-in-the-pulpit? Heavenly connection.
I hint again to the non-naturalist man who walks
with me sometimes, but usually doesnt
that I dont like to always be walking alone.
He advises me to join more clubs, find others.
Why my passion to distort and magnify?
To make life more intense through lenses?
Like insects, some slight things should
be left alone or accepted and enjoyed small.

175

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
A quantum leap
that Heisenberg predicted
would be unpredictable
has instantaneously
changed my orbit.
You spin electric
another way.
Aiming to measure
positions, momentum,
we made them different,
pushed the waves
(or were they particles?)
of probability into
events discontinuous from
an irretrievable past.

176

WALKING THE CAT

A yogi knows less about
slowing down and relaxing
than cats, who give living
lessons on the art of
lengthy meditation, and
appear to be as deeply
religious as devotees
of any Maharishni. Oh,
I know that an angry SCAT
or BAM of car back-firing
or scent of bird or ratrelated mammal can send
a cat sailing, frantic to
escape or capture, as
the case may be. Tail
turned bottle-brush, she
spits electricity, gives
no lectures on placidity.
But the quieter feline
is on my mind here, sitting
still with limbs tucked under,
or inquisitively sniffing
as the minutes tick, lifting
a thin front paw to walk
and putting it down only
after every grass blade or
sand grain around has been
examined, standing like man
on back legs to taste cedar
needles or blue juniper
berries, or hanging birdward
on a branch (she had to dash
to that location), waiting.
When I began to teach my cat
that only on a leash could
she go promenading, I had

177

WALKING THE CAT (continued)

to learn to stand still,
take thirty minutes for
a single turn around the
house, until little by little
I left off twitching, began
thinking of something or
nothing, not caring which,
lost the St. Vitus itch of
human pace, dared to laze.

178

WEDDINGS
She who called me
red-nailed slut, and
who threw me out at
18 for petting in the
hall with a Christian
Scientist, is resigned now
as indulgent grandma and
blesses my nephews roommate turned bride and her
illegitimate son. Earlier,
the groom never mentioned
girls, lingered in boyhood, so
confirmation of his manhood
made a happy family occasion.
Driving home, my jaded
daughters discuss sexual
aberrations and drugs, teen
experts onthey sayhow
others play, not really caring
what I hear. They seem as
high on smoke and wine as
the wedding party. If my
mother had noticed, shed
kept quiet as always about
certain indiscretions, such
as the day she saw her own
parents belatedly marry.

179

WHALES, SLUGS, TOADS

AND OTHER LOVERS
They say the male gray whale
fornicates well with a tool
too, too huge for human
imagination, much less
impregnation. One yard wide,
four long. No wonder the waves
echo whale song. Yet, having
viewed live and televised slug and
toad twinings, Im inclined to say
that when it comes to lewdness, those
more minute know a few things too,
and that screwing, besides
requiring a male size right for
the receiver, also needs rituals,
propitious timing, and signs exactly
when requiredno flashing the
first night. Females often favor
the old, slow seductions. Polite but
not lacking passion, and a bit like
the bowerbirds work to impress
and create a space for caring.

180

WHAT A MAYFLY MAY NOT DO

If I were a mayfly larva,
Id say, Hey, the waters
fine. I think Ill just stay.
I mean, man, what is there
for me in the sub-imago gig?
Id revolt and dive, refuse to
moult, rejecting sky to chase
the larval smaller fry, pleading,
Just one more year? Afraid.
But Id rise in spite of myself,
first dun, then shiny spinner imago,
unable to defy or eat or do anything but drift up and down in
clouds of my kind, all hypnotically
dancing and mating and laying eggs.
Then I would fall, one glistening
dead drop of Ephemeroptera rain.

181

WHEN ITS SNOWING CATS AND DOGS

A rooting, rolling, plunging lunger,
my German shepherd loves the snow.
For her its joy to the world and
hallelujah! Jesus, give me deep drifts!
My cat, in contrast, prefers to see
flakes from the warm side of glass,
abhors actual cold and damp, cannot
take time for more than a swipe or four
at teasing flakes beyond the door, but
must have that door opened daily anyway, just in case the weather there
mismatches the windows panorama.
Bow-wow! Meow! say the animals in me.
My playful canine cannot wait, howls:
Out! Feline me lurks back of curtains,
delays, reclines. Purrs: maybe later.

182

WHEN SUMMER SEEMED DISTANT AS NEW GUINEA

My landlords cedar tree used to slap me hard.
on days when lead-blackened snow
lay as heavy on its branches
as the dead cold weather on my mood.
Hanging low over my iced steps,
the boughs bent to catch me being forgetful,
to scrape across my frigid, stiffened mouth,
to whack my wool-wrapped head.
Dont go out, came the Braille message
loud against my stinging face.
Id try shaking away their load of snow,
hoping loss of weight would keep them lifted
out of my way. But they straightened
slowly as old, arthritic men, barely upright
before, days later, fresh snow would get them
down again. Will it never end? they seemed
to groan, and bowed still lower under their load.
Crotchety then, they needled me even more.

183

WHINNY
The black patches
on winters pinto hills
are nothing but mud.
The splashes of earth tones,
only dried grass
or weedy detritus.
And the white coating
most of their rolling rumps,
porous old snow.
Rows of Lombardy poplars
make the combed gray manes;
willow branches, ochre tails.
Playful these mild days,
actual unstabled trail horses
sport in fenced fields, frisky
in anticipation of springs
succulent green eating. And
later inevitable hay-making.
But January can take us
for a ride and then stall
all horsepower with a blizzard
that turns the world albino.
After the blur, blinding sunshines work waters the earth.
And the land goes palomino,
glowing gold and flaxen.
Green creeps beneath its bleach.

184

WHIRLIGIG
A whirligig beetle, I
spin in a surface film,
vibrate with navy gyrations
waters made less quiet by
my kind, repel fish with
expulsions. When excited,
try flying, or more likely
dive, first packing my bubble
and cramming air under
shiny elytra. Once fierce
feeding naiad, now innocuous,
scavenge the waters skin.
Well-known for two wet and
two dry eyes, wouldnt roll
and risk switching to visions
not right for family Gyrinidae.

185

WHITE
as my knuckles
when I passed the accident
snow
its clouds now cirrus
now huge as cumulus
flies (as do I) the ice and
blows
in waves over what
sometimes hums with traffic
but now is
vacant
but for vapor
and misting
liquid drifts
flowing
in rows wavy as those
of soldiers whose ranks
fold toward disorder.
I too am in disorder.
I, liquid.
Fright mists my eyes.
I shake more than the wheels slip.
I am paler than the opaque air.
The only road I see
is never again to enter
any car that cannot keep
snow out of its eyes,
nor any road that will not show
the lines that hold it.

186

WHY I AM TIRED TODAY

Last night,
dragged
from a dream
cast with bad actors
from my past,
I felt
six small legs
and two antennae
parting
the thin blond grass
of my left arm.
Shuddering,
I brushed the insect
elsewhere.
But it filled
my bed
with its
somewhere
and pushed me
out.
My robe
and the light
on,
I stalked the
hills and valleys,
ravines and meadows,
fields and roads,
of my crazy
quilt.
Roach-sized,
but not swift,
and not sleek,
crouched
my bedmate,
just a cricket.
Merciless,
I flushed him
down the whirlpool.
Still,
he filled
my emptied
dream space.
I lay alert

187

as air molecules
crawled around
the bugway
of my body,
regretting
the innocent
cricket,
unchirped now,
swirling in
Chicagos sewers.

WHY ONE NEVER HEARS OF

DILETTANTE MITES
Some mites believe,
I might believe,
bird is the world,
quill the only home.
Others swear by barbs
or lungs or nasal boxes,
other birds or insects,
or, mightier than the rest,
rove around picking off
other mites that
beaks cant reach.
But most dig in
and digest. Success,
they say, is for the
small and specialized.

188

WINSTON
Calculus class found Winston
unable to find the function of anything.
Immobilized by the Chain Rule,
he forgot what was derivative.
The only limits he could see,
as X approached Y, were his own.
Failing to differentiate or integrate,
the hope of his mother moved,
abject, toward Composition 101,
where he often had the same kind
of frustration. Is suicide ever
justified? asked the foolish essay
topic. Nodding assent, the first
in his family to attend college dragged
the heavy pencil toward the bottom
of his page, giving three reasons in
a five-paragraph argument:
1. When Your going to Dissapoynt.
2. If the Futur its hopless (hopeles?)
3. sometimes Your to tried to Care

189

WITH AN ICEMAN THIS

WOULDNT HAPPEN
Dont talk to me
about thaws. Ive
been defrosting
this old fridge and
know all I want
concerning surprises
under ice (last years
fried fish, missed all
winter, while
the glacier built) and
the way little
drips can harden
like limestone stalagmites and tites, only
to flow again and
slowly flood whats
rightly dry. I have
never tried ice sculpture,
but know how to pick,
and insist that lately,
in refrigerator or mind,
I find myself frosted
over much too often.
Come next romantic ice age,
I might just give up, and,
like the mammoth frozen
while eating buttercups,
not fight crystallization.

190

WORRIES OF A FEMINIST AND

ANTI-WAR ACTIVIST
My daughter has enlisted
in the Marines. Last week,
after meeting her for lunch,
I dreamed that I was the recruit.
To pass basic training
I must learn to hit a baseball.
But I have only a hollow childs
bat made with a 45 degree bend
in its center. And the ball
is not a ball but a crumpled
bit of litter. The men are
jeering, saying Ill never
make it. They want their turns.
Their taunts worsen until I
feel lucky to wake up alive.
Even in sleep, my Eileen
would not have been frightened.
She would have tossed that plastic
toy (Get this shit out of here!),
demanded an adequate bat, told
the spectators to go fuck themselves,
called for a regulation ball and
then batted it halfway to hell.
Another generation.
Capable but unladylike.
Making it okay to be female.
Eileen took seriously my belief
that we are not inferior.
And became, in some ways
and as a lesson to me, superior.
Now please let her endure and
never get sent to any hotspots,
which in this year would be
Lebanon or Central America.

191