The Question (poem)

                                          (with apologies
                                         to Charley Simic)

Greasy ropes with baby nooses wind
through summer weeds, through sun-bathed words
oiled and obtuse, their bodies portending
some languor perturbed.

Greasy ropes with baby nooses grasp,
and groaning, glide, slide from the hands
that would fondle and dandle, would work them in brass
a mask, soi-disant.

Greasy ropes with baby nooses coil
in ringlets, so this mirror would moan,
a crown writhing and fit for a lonely gargoyle,
loquacious and stoned.

Greasy ropes with baby nooses trap
a spectral light, and shine it upon an alien
land, where anonymous ghosts tramp
a course to my mate.

On Her Birthday (poem)

(for Holly Miller, April 26th, 1993)


For me, that year came in
wearing the soft white down
of winter's quilt, murmuring
the words of first marriage vows
under the impossibly pale sun
in a Colorado sky.

And it burgeoned, and grew
to life on an elixir
of pink and white chablis,
shared Gaulois, and idleness--
we whiled away those hours
in a narrow bed, listening
to the fermenting fruit
of our homemade wine,
the passage of hours
decadent and sweet.

That next spring, we began
our long pilgrimage down
from our mountain retreat,
and out onto the great American
plain, riding the roulette
of our thumbs north
with three fat suitcases
and the two black kittens
we had conned from the pound.

We named them Brother and Sister
though I couldn't tell them apart
and the four of us rode
a seemingly random vector
back into the Wisconsin winter
of Madison, mecca for malcontents,
anarchists, marijuana imbibers,
and practitioners of free love.

And then came the spring again,
serenaded by Brubeck and Coltrane,
blissed in the haze of a bigfat bone,
sitting ten floors high on a balcony
watching Lake Mendota slowly
unthaw its hard white into blue--
anyone had never a care then.

Soon, too soon it seems now,
I began work for the state IRS,
and she, for the local Blue Cross:
and our long march into summer
sun had begun; the seasons unwound,
month by month, year on year,
till that march led me, solitary,
to the door of your house on Angelus
to celebrate your twenty-second birthday.

And so on this day of celebration,
though for all that, not one
so unlike so many others
yet to come, I would offer the donation
of a green, green memory
of that time when
I was also a keen twenty-two,
bending supplely in the quickening wind
of my springtime heart, blueing
the world with eyes of wonder.