Death Is Out of the Question

I’m the child, Aunt Lil is Aunt Lil

the grocer calls her Miss Jones

two aunts are Miss Joneses but Lil is

the Miss Jones wanted on the telephone

to take down the particulars about

the boy who fell from a tree & broke

two limbs, about grandparents Mr & Mrs

male name surname from Flushing

NY who are visiting their daughter Mrs

male name surname for two weeks

what a pittance Aunt Lil receives

to record these notes on her steno pad

transcribe them on her stiff-armed typewriter

onto off-white newsprint scraps, deliver

the small news to the local paper

she lets me type too, items I invent

for issues that never run — Aunt Lil

stirs the oatmeal & clothespins laundry

decides what we’ll eat for lunch & dinner

manages the funds, pays the bills

Mrs Smith her lifelong friend

gabbing at the kitchen table is common

by comparison — what Aunt Lil says

is firm & smiling & kind, she tends

to diabetic old Ma in her wheelchair

takes her to the toilet, bathes & dresses her

ties her shoes, takes her off to bed

afterward a lightness I never see any other

time of day — Aunt Lil trimly beautiful

never marries, I admire most the look

that comes into her eyes when someone

says something she thinks foolish

or doesn't believe, a blankness adults

ignore, or appear not to notice

a look nothing a child says ever receives

Late World

the poor starve

abandoned houses slump

shops & restaurants shutter

people kill each other & themselves

cities no longer bank on madding crowds

instead of schools open everything shuts down

the second shutdown
news would tell the bad were one to tune in, log on

better the bad news of some earlier day

social code fails, positions lost

many die — mostly the ill, the old, also the healthy, the young

the slightest sore throat panics

neighbor next door keeps saying

I only do what I’m told

                                   does she not hear the echo?

no one anticipates a world where all we need do

is stay away from each other

anyone who comes too close is backed away from

the secret universe of everyone

is known to all

Coda

the necessary factor is hope

hope for an intelligent conversation

for time with family, for time when you are not

alone — the young poets are sometimes

an inspiration, they tell the hard truths of

their lives, other times they fixate on sex

or self-justification, as if we old poets don’t —

are the old humbler? we feel less hope

yet still strive for a job well done, the plants

watered because rain has not come

I attended a young-poet-led seminar

about an old poet, thirty people came,

young read some of the old-poet's poem

then tossed out learned associations

terms like citational, syntax, lyric — not

what I’d hoped, these academic terms

failed to explore or honor the work —

to end the poem a coda repeats

loveless sleepless — no one seemed to know

she lives alone, the husband she found

dead — if you are old, loveless sleepless

coda, repeat, is something you know

Cave Canem, July 8, 2020

we are three hundred looking at our screens

more than three hundred if we have family in the house

Evie looks, Major looks — we look at a large face

at a gallery of faces, at bits of rooms behind faces

Major’s books, Evie’s yellow wall

brief howling of a needy cat

no texture, no smell, worrisome pixillations & audio stutters

the poets read polished published poems

then new poems — loose, conversational, raw

what have you written since this moment began?

I know these people, they haven’t forgotten me, we are apart

we want to see each other again

it is my annual day of sobbing

I do not regret my little bout with life

Evie says I’ve only written three poems, it’s hard to focus

Major says the pressure is building

afterward, no one says that, will there be an afterward?

after silence, art will burst like a tidal wave

Killed by a Cop

the condition of black life is one of mourning

— Claudia Rankine

what’s hardest for me to grasp 

when a black person is killed

in particular, killed by a cop

is that they are dead & will stay dead

not live another day of their life

while the cop will stay alive 

& stay a cop & possibly kill more

black people while the rest of us 

stand around as if we don’t mind

if we minded, no cop would ever 

kill another black person, it’s that

simple, that plain, we would rise up 

& take those bad cops down &

if we couldn’t tell the good cops 

from the bad cops, we would

take every cop down & start over

perhaps you & I would become cops

we with our wrinkles & thinning hair

& fake joints, we would be cops

simply because we could not kill

a black person, we would die first

Silence

some lurk, others conceal part or all

of their names — behind these masks

who lies? what tug might recall

their first cry, their toddler’s grasp

at freedom, their teen’s urge to try

everything — fearless iconoclast —

plunge into sex, drugs, protest, deride

received “truth” to dare the unknown

dark & deep where danger lies

she'll find it, suffer & claim her own

indelible story, what she’ll recall

while hiding, lost, silent, alone

Carolina Jessamine

thin clouds, a hot wind flattens

carolina jessamine, what climbs the rail

the way long loose hair flattens

slingshot wind, lively surf pounds

the near sand, spindrift pocks the dune

necklace of yellow flowers

ease the mind of present care

carolina jessamine, what climbs the rail

bee, butterfly, hummingbird midair

yes, the porch rail rotting sooner

rain & dust pressing on wood

paint wearing away, white going gray

two months the native vine flowers

carolina jessamine, what climbs the rail

fragrant yellow trumpets — this shower

What I Know

I know an osprey fishes this pond

alone, it sails & hovers & dives

until it takes one, I know a great 

blue heron lives two houses down

when I saw it yesterday I felt nothing

large or wild, I saw curved gray below

the head behind leaves, the heron

I thought, I know bluebirds on wires

on tree stakes, on my porch rail

I know the sound my washer makes

before it drains, I know I broke

the yolk before it reached the pan

broken yolk on grits, the taste

the same, I know the buckeye lives

I know the rain is over at least for

a few days, I know more clover

needs to be pulled, I know the water

yesterday blown into ridges today

lies still & mirrors the still gray sky

Partygoers

unwilling, unable to defy death, if someone

would only remind us all, the sequence of events

from transmission at the microscopic scale

to onset, development, denouement at macroscopic

perhaps these flouters would believe, or perhaps

they don’t care to know, want to squander, are willing

to lose all, numbly, whenever death says go

new hampshire plates read live free or die

change or to and, we casually mock death 

again & again — eat, drink, drug, drive, dare

leave it to private & public service teams 

to shoulder in after the binge, shovel the victims

choking & blind, into the siren-bleating vans

we’ve lost the art & the truth of dying alone

Caesura

one finger poem would be cool five am air

hot tea cum sweetness, three small brick-red pills

what sights a cat must see out a window into dark

rush of paws across back deck, brush of fur

against damp paint on aging boards, what if we

had a rhythm in our voice as a Greek singer did

not Greek but of this or that city state, X of father Y

when in some other universe it would have been S of

mother T, an epic of reed weaving & small boat

making & lullaby song, of sheep wool dyeing & weaving

instead of ram sacrifice & shield hammering

here the sung rhythm, da da da da da [spondees

followed by the first beat of a dactyl], or 

da duh duh da duh duh da [two & a third dactyls]

even da duh duh da duh duh da duh [two & two thirds]

then the pause, in breath or no breath, the five

or seven or eight followed by what one day

would be punctuation — τρεις δ' 'οι αλλοι εσαν . . .

Ζευς αγαθον τελεσειεν . . . for this scholars invented 

the placing of accents in order to learn to sing

like Homer, the long line of singers before him

was it a visiting Sumerian who wrote it down?

Overnight

— with a nod to Vladimir Mayakovsky & Denis Johnson

midnight, or eleven pm, or four am

times I wake & wait & turn over the phone

to see how long until the hour I’ll rise

the cat prowls on & off the bed, purrs

or sleeps, rattles a drawer handle, sprawls

at an open window to peer into the dark

not dark, it’s never dark enough for more

than six or seven stars, spotlights on poles

in neighboring backyards, not dark nor

quiet, the mantra chants inside my head

synchronizes my breath, takes me away

to the land I inhabit with all my lost

once children, once lovers, daytime

acquaintances, nighttime friends, & strangers

intimate adventurers in this livelier world

of challenge & touch, elaborated living space

voyages under & over water, sky, & ground

with & without luggage, crises of misplaced

beings, inoperable devices, bound feet

clandestine, urgent, sweat, wounds, fear

without constraint, a musty hole, a bare field

mystery, stark emotion, heartbreak

the great blue heron coughs, songbirds

twitter, tree frogs whistle, cicadas scrape