Not in the News Today

I was at the wheel but the car drove me
Beside myself, spinning backwards
Bumping down marble stairs
To a garden party’s rose colored martinis
And somebody’s very entertaining baby
Till missing luggage and forgotten adapters
Induced the usual panic about our nervous devices
When the famously dead painter asked
What’s it like to be responsible
For your own costumes and props

It ain’t rocket surgery but
I dropped my sword down a sewer grate
Couldn’t find a parking space
Circled around and over the hill
At each pass losing a shirt or a shoe
But comforted by the black and white stripes
Of a tug boat, a two-tone Orvieto cathedral
Pushing a rust iron hulk up the Hudson
To where it has fallen to me to repair
The broken icon of Saint Somebody
Patron of resolutely cheerful losers
His book, his crooked staff, his haloed head
All in pieces

Swim and catch the D right out of the waves
Show up for work in your trunks
Sneak into the hipster office to steal his stripes
Raid the boss’s white shirt stash only to find file drawers stuffed
With bolts of cotton floral prints

Desperately wrap your baggage for the plane
Ask John Lennon if that’s packing tape
He says no that’s me shoeshine kit

To every single guy I ever work with I say
The same thing: you never arrive
Nor do you get a chance to suck up
Small creatures with your slurp gun
And, of, course, broccoli

Then look at the tangerines
Three for a dollar, what is this

This is the time it takes
To read the sun’s last ray
As it falls below the horizon

The comedy of orange bib overalls
The comedy of orange bib overalls with a silver plastic breastplate
That converts into an impractically small automobile
The comedy of trying to unlatch, unhook, release the accoutrements
So I can just wear the pants sans paraphernalia

The comedy of it’s not enough to just get paid
The comedy of I’m sorry I’ve taken you for granted
The comedy of I always imagine you beside me

The comedy of taking two boats
To reach a new and unknown island’s sunny strip of green
In the vast blue page of my atlas
And calling you as the sea crashes the stones

At the gallery I wear goggles at my waist
To see from the hip
To shoot with my gut

The chemical pools and ponds in the village dump
Of which some dissolve cloth, some sewing machines
So that you have to watch your step and take it easy
With those teddy bears, they don’t all belong to you

Mister demon face, white, round and crusty
Like a pie, hollow-eyed
Looked at me in a dream
And greeted me next day among the masks
In the Patzcuaro museum

So many holes in our floor
She said we could play miniature golf
At my birthday party

What will you call your town
Asked the cops and firemen
As they peered down at me in the crater
Where the storm left our apartment block
Holesville, I said

In sixth grade Nicky Hodson came over after school
I made French toast
I think I embarrassed the hell out of him
Since he never came over again

Although I’d waited so long to rehearse
My retelling of Dido and Aeneas
(Sorry, Virgil, but the lady stays alive)
I said thanks to the charming thespians
Once so affectionate, now taciturn,
That was fun, I’m going home

Art restorers take over my office
To repair the mechanical monkey
This will impinge on my ability to do my job

Out on the street I had no shoes
As I waded through the downpour
That washed Broadway in waves

In an empty alley above the western
Highway my bicycle fell apart
No place to be a baby left behind
On an airport escalator

A grimy old robot flaking yellow paint
Follows us around the plaza
Turns out it makes blue corn tortillas

Window glass fell from a frame and shattered
A famous singer in his famous hat
Leaned inside to smile while
His big shadow friend hovered behind

When all the writers in the restaurant
Play syncopated Latin rhythms
With their spoons

Barges slid down the river
Bearing giant letters, brown and smoky
In the sunset shot with snowstorm squalls

The cat tried to climb through the open window but I pushed it away and it fell into my neighbor’s backyard baby carriage, where she and her baby girl were both asleep. No harm done. The mom woke up and I ducked down.

I know I’m a rattletrap contraption
A flying choo-choo bone train
Jerry-rigged, fish-tailing

I stopped a little boy from climbing down the fire escape—he said, I can do it! I said, we know you can, that’s why we don’t want you to. He scattered marbles across the roof. They rolled down the drainpipe, ping and clang. I needed a refill.

Over scenes of boyhood’s smokefarm
Banging boxcars at all angles
To doubtful practical purpose

All the conspiracies that I lost, that’s what Daddy said when Mom asked why they had his funeral over in Post Town. In spite of the services, Ted was driving Daddy to his shift at the plant.

Till I come down with
A thumping clang
Grinning madly like I mean it

It wasn’t until he put on his Reds cap and said good-bye that I cried.

At the window first thing
Half-light, streetlamps out
Quiet but for shifting gears
The uniform delivery truck
Returning from the hospital

Dead winter doldrums
Are just a disguise
Life wears when there’s
Not enough sun
To be glad for no good reason

Yet life pulses behind
A skeleton mask
Singing almost silently
In praise of emptiness

Sun arrives, a gull cries
To pigeons spiraling a steeple

Indo

Pure * Gum

Shellac

Guaranteed

Southern Shellac Mfg. Co.

Memphis, Tenn.

Close Cover Before Striking

*illustration here of a dashing Bollywood idol in plumed turban and fleecy collar, emblem of the untainted, glistening product of Memphis, birthplace of the pharaohs Sekhemkhet, Sanakhte and Elvis Presley. The accidental ignition of an entire matchbook is extremely hazardous, especially in a shellac factory.