Not in the News Today

I was in the cheap seats behind the popcorn
stand where only the drunks and half-wits sit.
Couldn’t see the show but the beach
was close by and out of the surf
came a “sandhog” like a little anteater,
its mouth a wide vacuum cleaner
of corrugated fiberglass. It snapped
at my ankles but I warded it off with a beer
can and listened to his gritty song,
some kind of advice about not having
to change your identity: In America
they considered us bums,
underachievers at best,
but I was absolutely alive
on a workday morning street,
free to be whoever I wanted
under the hood to do the necessary
repairs. I went at it with my electric
toothbrush but I needed a new
head. When I politely inquired
of the big woman behind the hardware
counter she said it’s a shame
you don’t understand the algorithms
that run your life. How well I knew
she meant make money from higher math
and I said the hell with moving the needle,
you sew a seam or get stuck,
screw the risk scores,
the clinical drivers, the prying drones.
If God led Mr. Hyde to Venetian Hills
I’m a monkey’s uncle. I’m happy to lie
down on a big swing and spin
in slow circles. It’s still very squishy
but there are a lot of interesting people,
migrating loons at lunch in the harbor,
tiny scarlet buds of a flowering cherry,
winking and smiling its branches
lovely knees and elbows flexing
in a breeze that is beginning
to feel a little too cold
for April.

I borrowed a shirt and pants,
lightly worn Lands End gardening gear,
from my friend Flicker, a glass maker.
I was going to give them back, of course,
and maybe that’s why I got so mad
at the brat who splattered me with an egg.
I didn’t know who the little bastard was
but I caught him round the neck
and yanked his collar hard
when my dad’s dark visage appeared,
disapproving of that kind of discipline.
He could give you a look that was enough
so I loosened up but got in that boy’s grill
and hollered

You can’t have too much fun
with fargesia scabrida
non-invasive bamboo.
It is deer resistant, clump-forming,
upright and extremely attractive,
developing steel blue shoots
with beautiful sheaths
in a rich array of miscegenating browns,
ochers, creams and oranges.
Tolerates temperatures as a solitary
specimen, hedge or screen.

Dad cooked crow cakes for us kids.
He made them in bulk and froze them.
When Sis fell asleep in the snow
we unburied her and brought her back
to life with pancakes not made of crow.

I had a tree in my house
rooted in the second floor,
bare branches encrusted in glass
jewelry and costume gems.
When it trembled I would
know someone was below.
Trouble was it was
coming loose.

I woke up and felt weird about myself,
shamefully obvious, utterly predictable.
So I went to breathe deeply
at the underwater rummage sale,
to chat with bubbly church ladies,
and keep an eye on diving tigers.

For instance I dreamed I killed an intruder,
a sparrow in my mother’s room,
by pressing a ballpoint against its throat.
I put it in a tissue and tossed it
at the door of the old chicken coop
where we cousins used to play as kids.
I was like that sometimes,
mixing memory with door solutions,
but my girlfriend wouldn’t let me play
it for more than a millisecond—
what is that, turn it off, I hate that, she said.
No person, firm, corporation or association
could import, manufacture, sell or distribute
a yo-yo waterball. It was the law.

We gave a party against such gloom
and soon as Peg and Chip arrived from their hike
we went next door to Monty’s duck pond.
He was practicing with his snorkel when I
began to worry about our other guests,
the junk food and blood sports,
but there was no going back,
the road petered out to a dirt track and left
me heartsick at the bottom of another
ravine. And my arms were so tired.

It was moving again. And hard. Nobody
could believe it. I could believe it.
I had to tread carefully.
The daycare said to go barefoot more often
but not in this highschool sockhop, no way.
I stole somebody’s shoes,
got stuck in the mud
and had to self-extricate.

At work in the attic chaotic
in time I didn’t mind so much
sifting spools and rusty needles
to find the thread and it didn’t irk
to keep coming up with colored yarns
or worse, dental floss
for her stringed instrument, something
between a sitar and an upright piano
with its cryptic carvings
of our assignations on the edgy terrace,
off-limits, our secret in plain sight,
illicit yet open to the air,
balconies, catwalks, weather
and walls as unfinished as life.
Also where I kept my rack of lost hats.

We showed off the staples on our throats.
We rowed our little boats
past the immersion baptism in the ballroom
but couldn’t get very far from school
or keep track of the way back
but I flew that little kite, a white diamond,
a smiling square, as high as I could
until I came to the end
of the tangled string.

Thought partners may also be thought leaders
though generally they are not, I don’t think.

I brought my baby’s faded blanket
to a cheerful children’s museum
to see if they could make it
into something else for me.
A former TV personality in candy
stripes and skimmer hat
met me to repurpose the past
as a snazzy shirt, an umbrella, maybe
a lot of fuzzy handkerchiefs.
How ‘bout a superhero cape?
Too obvious. I was impatient
to cut a pattern, run it up,
put it on and move out
from under to go anywhere
I was bound to go but old
accordion Uncle Al didn’t give
me my bundle back
once we got off the merry go round.
It became something else,
shadow, snapshot, sudden hurt
all by itself,
turning the corner on two strong legs.

Among a sea of waiting faces
the doctor passed a tablet
to state the purpose of our visit.
I want to be in the world.

Instead of filling out the form,
I painted it in pink and orange
across my balding pate.
I want to be in the world.

I wondered what I was
doing barefoot in lotus,
waiting at the curb.
I want to be in the world.

A worried white robed boy,
barely bearded, I worked
my way riverward.
I want to be in the world.

A small elephant in company
of bristling monkey suits
greeted me in my monkey suit.
I want to be in the world.

Men in robes stained
river green proceeded
bitter-eyed up the bank.
I want to be in the world.

I asked was it the right way.
Where are you going?
I laughed. Did I know?
I want to be in the world.

It was silly to rely on
marvels in the sky
yet that’s what I did.
I want to be in the world.

A spiraling pigeon flock
Rebuffed a red tailed hawk.

An airliner’s shadow raced
across the bottom of a cloud.

I want to be in the world.

He said the robot replicants
at the lakeside resort were poor
quality. Not smart? I asked. No,
slavish and superficially happy.
Not all of us, I said. For the sake
of variety I’m programmed
to be a sullen malcontent.
I was messing with him—
I didn’t think I was a robot. But
when I heard about the attack
on the robot dog, I got nervous.
Would they suspect me? I snuck
out the backyard to the alley

and into a night of grand gestures,
messy, complicated, rapidly
deteriorating moments.
He splashed artisanal vinegar
made by Buddhist monks all over
the table and across the floor.
She lost control of her entrée,
the ravioli just up and ran away.
In bitterness, he blamed the food,
while detonating explosions
of fioratura at other Litchfield County
equestrian industries. Also
a winery in Argentina.

You tamp the box, play
with the lighter, you can exhale
and gaze into the middle
distance and look like
you’re not hallucinating.
The company doesn’t have anybody
who can, you know, delve back
into what we were thinking
when we did the schizophrenia ad.
I move about like an ordinary person.
Flowers are good listeners.

I am a red biplane doing barrel rolls,
an old man blowing smoke from a bellows,
wrestling with a scarred plank
in a muddy hole, stuck but unstable.
Above me Egbert scowls and says he’ll go
to his beloved Morocco, Morocco.
It’s a little more industry based,
a little more spiritually enlightened,
like a parking lot after an earthquake,
rippled with ledges and shallow pools
where I can no longer find my little blue car.
Low houses and steep streets,
all off kilter yet not unfriendly
under white summer sky
that doesn’t feel quite safe. Lucky for me

Joy Limbo, amiable gymnastic champ, gives me a lift
to the Equitable Building. I glanced at her modest décolletage
and relaxed in the shotgun seat, strangely sure she was mine.
While I collected the prize trinkets from her mailbox
she bragged to her teammates that she was pregnant.
I spilled my coffee just like on TV.

In my fever I knew I had passed through
the membrane between real and realer.
Whew! I was free.

It was the season of paring back.
She was heroically slugging DayQuil as she led
the volunteer arborists in a high lift to limb
the willows. Sometimes Mary Janes
and pink ankle socks simply won’t do.

I had two tickets to the sunny terrace,
the looping shellac of the librarie en plein air
but it was raining, I was hungry
and I ate one in the lobby.

Always and forever changing
the characters of our passwords,
alphanumeric and otherwise,
two, three, four,
aren’t secure anymore,
nor can birthdays, children’s names,
parent’s names, nor especially our own names
remain the codes we live by.

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Sometimes I make bubbles in my mouth
but I don’t blow bubbles out.
Executive Director, Bubble Foundation

After the cataclysm wrenched from the ocean floor
leviathans never seen before
to tumble senseless in the ravaged street
we recognized ourselves in their rolling eyes,
learned to live underwater, collected
clutter from the bottom of the pool.
Blank blue rules. Oh everybody saw it
coming but we were careful
not to connect the dots,
to maintain the romance of the big picture
no matter how clear it became
that the big picture did not reflect
anybody’s actual experience
of sloppy driving in the dark. We put the car
keys in a wet trash can, threw it out
the window and kept going till we came back
to make the usual trudge from Shish Kabob Garage
to the ever-receding shore
down gritty streets past smoking stacks
I saw when I looked back
from shallow water and black muck.
We’re far away, I asked, aren’t we?
Yes we are.