to extract from us this pact, this vow.
Heronry
Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way — didn’t Oedipus
also have a bloated foot? Yes,
I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible
prophecy and left him hanging
for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot
when I take off the special socks
meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly
off on the air that moves on through
the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests
and ride on small twigs up — then gently
do their legs glide down my binoculars’ field of view. The twigs they ride on
never crack; how do they calculate
the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this
at the hospital cafeteria
as I stared down an oldish woman’s half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed
between her sock and slack: it was
oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem
of her pant-leg and for the sake of what
rule of decorum gently pulled it down?
Les Dauphins
The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.
From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.
They’d stand for their portraits
in velvet suits, if they had suits—
holding hats with giant feathers.
And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?
the question becomes: who does the dog love?
The woman says: you are the one who plays him
a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.
No, the man says, you debone him the hen,
you tie the bow of his cravat.
The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,
from human hip to human hip — a canine wire
completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder
what runs through his head
when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?
And the woman says: out
of the dream, I’m in his dream,
riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.
When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless
stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.
They’d stand for their portraits with dogs of their own
if we were kings, if they weren’t dogs.
Rashomon
Light passing through the leaves obliterates the subtitles
when the thief overtakes the swordsman
and forces his bride to submit. This is why
I need a new 42-inch flat-screen TV—
so I can read the dialogue of foreign films
that will improve me, though frankly it is horrible
to see the swordsman tied up and to watch him watch
the change in his wife’s fingers
on the thief’s (somewhat doughy) back. First
it looks as if she’s fighting him, but then
she seems to pull him close,
saying Now I am stained and must be killed or
How do whales strain such tiny krill—these problems
of interpretation can be solved by money:
we need larger words. I have not abandoned words
even if with trepidation I now enter
the kind of store where they sell plastic polygons
that hum and blink. As the swordsman’s wife
enters the forest on her pony, her trepidation draped
with a veil that renders even the biggest tv powerless
to show much of her face. But she shows the thief her foot
in its fancy flip-flop: that’s what rouses him
to rape her in the leafy grove, I’ll say what I saw
in the plainest words. I am not asking to be forgiven
for desiring 1080p, though I am asking
whether or not she asked for it: you’d think
we would have laid that one to rest (it seems
so strident, air-lifted from the 1970s
when I did not watch tv and also called myself a womyn—
a word it’s hard to dress in a kimono) but apparently
we will never. At his trial, the thief (Toshiro Mifune)
sits wigwam-style in tethers and laughs maniacally
as he tells his version, though in somebody else’s version
she’s the maniac who laughs. We ask, but the new machines
refuse to say much more than this: that everyone
will get their chance to laugh and everyone
their chance to wield the knife—
be careful, it is sharp and growing
sharper, the more I spend.
Stargazer
When first I was given the one lily
chaperoned by two green pods,
I strapped myself in like a cosmonaut
to absorb the whoosh of seeing
its pods open one by one.
Because what mind cooked up such extravagance,
spot speckle pinkstripe smudge—
someone call a fire truck
somebody call a bomb squad
somebody call a pharmacist
for a Valium prescription.
Because the beauty of the world is soon to perish;
everything is burning up too fast—
lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket, leaving
the bloom and withering on the same stiff stalk
and the heart torn between them as the petals drop.
Oh, I might have asked for a simple daisy, something
to inflict a subtler vanishing…
without all this ocular pyromania
and the long-bones-dressed-up-in-a-coffin
scent. Plus there’s one pod yet to detonate,
which the yellow pollen grains are trying to defuse
by lying scattered on the table,
precisely scattered on the wooden table
in a manner calibrated to this trapezoid of winter light.
The Unturning
for Ben S., 1936–2010
My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey—
four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap
where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth
he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill
for a man the gods favored! Who comes back
in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away
with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.
Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes,”
the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.
And I wondered if my friend had played a trick—
setting me up with this dog who does not do much
but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do
but await their unturning? That means: don’t think
that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,
the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder
if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,
the author ought to have let him remain
for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.
Wild Birds Unlimited
Because the old feeder feeds nothing
but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned
how to hang so it swings sideways until
gravity takes the seed — I bumble down
to this store of bird knickknacks and
lensware for the geeks, and while
the clerk is ringing up my Mini
Bandit Buster ($29.95), spring-loaded
to close the seed-holes when a heavy animal alights,
I read a pamphlet about bird-feeding, which I had not thought