wrong. When days were sunnier,
and when a girl was willing, you made love.
You loved her, let’s just say, as none
may evermore be loved. You gave her
all you had. She laughed, and what she gave
you took, and it was brilliant. Now,
when she wants nothing more, your
pleading least of all, stand firm. Say:
Goodbye, girl. Catullus is unmoved.
He does not care now what you do.
If no one cares, it serves you right,
you bitch! Now see who finds your teasing
sweet, who begs for it, who praises it,
who kisses you, who whispers you
your name…And whose lips are you biting?
Not mine. No: Catullus is unmoved.
Essential Tremor
for Daniel Moriarty
The black and gold stitch
from the upper gill of a brook trout
to the middle ray of the tail fin,
you once told me, houses hair cells
sensitive to the flow of the stream.
And the rest…that dark green
swath on the flank,
the spots of ocher, stipples
blood red ringed with cornflower blue…
the whole thing shimmering
with the most delicate scales,
to the fisherman’s eye
is a revelation. You too,
after you led me down at dusk
into a stream so cold
it made my ankles hurt,
and after we caught one each,
just big enough to keep
and cook on a little fire we made
at the foot of the mountain
under the Dog Day stars, you too,
when you smiled, freckles by firelight
trembling on the back of your hand.
To Josephine Chamberlain Ayres Haxton
From the end of the gravel road
we walked down into the woods
to look for a swimming hole in the creek.
You kept scanning the ground for trilliums
you said you wanted to plant
on the way to the house
where your father spent his childhood.
In the gulley we saw handprints
of opossums, and the pad marks from raccoon
and fox and rabbit, scribbled over
with mouse and bird tracks.
There were chanterelles at the foot of a beech trunk,
and in the cleft of a root a copperhead
rearing to strike, bands on her back
almost as orange as the mushrooms.
She came sidewinding straight at you, rattling
her tail in the fallen beech leaves, belly
big with eggs about to hatch inside her.
If I had written you this when you could read,
you might have reminded me that your friend
Bert came on our walk to the creek. I loved Bert.
She was delighted, as usual, by the woods and you.
It was a good day, though we found no swimming hole
or trilliums. None of us got bitten by the snake.
The creek lay sunlit in the deep woods,
brilliant, rippling over the sand and gravel,
with clear pools here and there to the knee,
where crawdads swam with little bream and catfish.
Under the Searchlight of a Robot Sub
Where the whale lay
on the floor of the canyon
hagfish came to feed in the dark
with shrimp and crab and sea pig.
Boneworms sent roots
into the whale oil
at the core of the bone.
Plumes grew,
microscopic mates inside them
shedding sperm over the eggs
which drifted nowhere
by ten thousands, settling,
some of them, onto another
whale fall miles away.
Inside a ship
with decks lit by the sun,
in the dim light
of a control room,
human brains in bone casements,
male and female, watched
the plumes pink
in the glow of their screens.
They watched—excitedly
scuttling over the keyboards,
tipping the joysticks,
with their delicate,
pink-palmed, flexible hands.
The Loving Essence of the Duckmole
Ornithorhynchus anatinus, a.k.a. tambreet, mallagong, & boonaburra
The jimmialong, tail plump with fat,
electrosensors tingling in his bill,
the swivel in his hips more like
the bearded dragon’s than like mine,
his four-tipped penis at the ready,
is not cute. He is himself. In courtship
having dug two tunnels, his and hers,
which she can close to lay and tend
their clutch of leathery, soft eggs,
by night he swims and sweeps
his bill where muck sparks everywhere
with insect larvae, worms, and crayfish
which the local crayfishers call yabbies.
A puppy-like, warm-blooded
duck-in-a-fur-coat seems, much
as Ronald Reagan’s smile, or Bundy’s
good-boy grooming, to suggest
what looks innocuous will do no harm.
But in the mating season he secretes from glands
in his hindquarters into the hollow spurs of bone
at either ankle venom so refined that
when a fisherman, let’s not say poacher,
tries removing him from a net,
the stab of pain into the man’s wrist
bathes him to the shoulder all at once
in fire. The burning arm throbs
everywhere. It swells. The man
in a delirium of pain falls vomiting.
For three days, arm twice normal size,
he writhes, and morphine does not quell
the pain. People stung may think themselves
the ones attacked, although the platypus
in the encounter often dies, the person never.
Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast
Under the hanging lights in a pool hall
at nineteen I read the table after the break
and followed a map in my head
to take beer money from older men
while, eight thousand miles under my feet,
boys I knew from high school,
some of them, learned to pray.
Now, at a table in Vegas,
holding maybe a rag and an ace,
my son is reading a voice, a glance,
and running probabilities
in his head. Sons of other men
are bivouacked at dawn in a desert
where Abraham’s father worshipped
Babylonian gods. Everything wobbles
and spins. Here, in the little woods
a block from Erwin Methodist Church,
bottles drunken boys have shattered
over the brick steps flash
in wobbling streaks of sunlight.
Two hundred years ago, James Erwin
at the end of boyhood left his father’s house,
and walked into the local wilderness
to preach. Wolves appeared at dusk,
and the boy with a Bible sang.
He shouted God’s praise into the sky.
Here, the fox grapes hang from a guy wire
over the edge of the trees where a doe
and two fawns stand in poison ivy
to the hip. I never did learn
to pray or carry a tune, but I say
these words into my cupped palm
quietly, not to spook the deer.
Kropotkin and the Lake on Mars
Kropotkin worked by the flicker of a tiny oil lamp…During the short hours of the day he would transcribe his notes on a typewriter…Much of his leisure he spent at the piano.
—Emma Goldman, January 1921
Pyotr Kropotkin, scientist of anarchy,
once theorized that the weight of a glacier
must melt ice underneath it into
