whose only point was reached recurrently,

  at bright pink junctures flecked with pubic hair.

  The actors’ voices smacked of youth, L.A.,

  and nervousness subdued. The girls’ bare forms,

  most pallid in their bulges, testified

  to mornings sunning on the beach before

  the dawn of these exploitive afternoons.

  Tans are an enemy of sex; the boys

  were brown and fair and could not get it up

  beneath the camera’s cool lascivious eye,

  though lapped and coaxed enough to rouse the dead.

  The bits of film where actors, clothed, advanced

  the feeble plot were touching—fumbled, mouthed

  like Christmas pageants, Mary just a girl.

  You knew you soon would see her stripped; in this

  she was, this L.A. starlet, like a wife.

  Your eyes grew accustomed; the flickering

  picked out still shapes—men’s heads, some bowed, some raised

  and awash in the carnal, jerky glow,

  but all well-spaced, no two adjacent, dumb

  ruminants grazing their turf in dreamland.

  Young males, their cheeks exuberant with acne,

  in Boston for a toot; old Chinamen;

  commuters with an hour before the train

  dragged them home to suburban spice in frocks;

  and alcoholics angels copulating

  could not distract from stupor and their thirst:

  as in an ill-attended church, our heads

  in scatteration showed a stubborn faith,

  a sly propensity to praise. What a thing

  a woman is! No end to her sufferance,

  her spirit of coöperation, or

  her elasticity and rosy grace!

  The tints of every rose from black to white,

  from purple proud in her cleft to surface cream,

  became her beauty; mercy swallowed shame.

  Succumb to the wrecker’s ball, closed Pussycat,

  like a hooker jeering at her arrest.

  There’s more indecency than meets the eye.

  Bald light will break into you like a drug

  that kills the good bacteria with the bad;

  a thousand furtive lusts will throng the sun

  and form a cloud as fertile as the id.

  Enemies of a House

  Dry rot intruding where the wood is wet;

      hot sun that shrinks roof shingles so they leak

  and bakes pane-putty into crumbs; the pet

      retriever at the frail screen door; the meek

  small mice who find their way between the walls

      and gnaw improvements to their nests; mildew

  in the cellar; at the attic window, squalls;

      loosening mortar; desiccated glue;

  ice backup over eaves; wood gutters full

      of leaves each fall and catkins every spring;

                 salt air, whose soft persistent breath

  turns iron red, brass brown, and copper dull;

      voracious ivy; frost heaves; splintering;

                 carpenter ants; adultery; drink; death.

  Orthodontia

  You see them everywhere, the grinning martyrs,

  mere children, most of them, though some

  are full-grown women, with breasts in bras, their teeth

  tight-bound in silver and pried by tinsel bands

  whose tensile strength does something to the eyes—

  adds a fanatic gleam. What will the ages

  not of our faith make of this glad torture?

  The Iroquois and Aztecs had their games

  and obsidian knives, and the blue Tuareg

  sport stony scarifications, but nothing

  claims quite the scope of all these chastised mouths

  shining on streets and in schoolyards like stars.

  To what end? Lips whose curves can barely cling

  to parallel perfections that look false.

  Condo Moon

  When plans were announced to tear down

  the garages behind the main street and put up

  twelve units of condos, there was a protest

  the board of aldermen narrowly overrode.

  Now, as I stroll from behind the “convenience store,”

  the moon like a tasteful round billboard

  hangs wheat-field yellow over the far fake turret

  of the condos’ massed neo-shingle-style bulk.

  The moon makes no protest. It rolls what it sees

  into the scene it illumines, and lends its old weight—

  afloat and paper-thin and scarred with maria—

  to what men have thrown up as once it beamed benign

  on Crusader castles, fern swamps becoming coal,

  and the black ocean when no microbe marred it.

  Pillow

  Plump mate to my head, you alone absorb,

  through your cotton skin, the thoughts behind my bone

  skin of skull. When I weep, you grow damp.

  When I turn, you comply. In the dark,

  you are my only friend, the only kiss

  my cheek receives. You are my bowl of dreams.

  Your underside is cool, like a second chance,

  like a little leap into the air when I turn

  you over. Though you would smother me,

  properly applied, you are, like the world

  with its rotating mass, all I have. You accept

  the strange night with me, and are depressed

  when the morning discloses your wrinkles.

  Seattle Uplift

  Rain, now as all night, is tapping

  in the alleyway that serves this hotel.

  In my view, the skyscraper—the tallest west,

  they boasted, of the Mississippi—where

  last night I dined with the local rich,

  dizzy (I) at the thinness of the glass

  that held us back from flying out and falling,

  half hides in the clouds, its steel head in a sulk.

  More churlishly still, some unknown sport

  has left a litter of dirty magazines

  on a wet tar roof two stories below.

  In the post-dawn gloom, I can make out skin,

  its pinkness, and a dark patch or two,

  but nothing distinct enough; I am still up too high.

  The Beautiful Bowel Movement

  Though most of them aren’t much to write about—

  mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,

  the tint and stink recalling Tuesday’s meal,

  the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,

  struck off in solitude one afternoon

  (that prairie stretch before the late light fails)

  with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,

  of special inspiration or release,

  was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,

  unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter

  who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay

  had set himself to shape a topaz vase.

  O spiral perfection, not seashell nor

  stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.

  Charleston

  A kind of wooden Boston, crowding toward

  the ship-laden Atlantic down peninsular streets.

  A square flat common shows, in January,

  green blades of spring; a steeple-topping pillar

  holds glowering Calhoun while Copa Lounge

  (COPA DOLL REVUE FEATURING NICOLE)

  and Tavern on the Green between them squeeze

  a doorway-wide, one-windowed clapboard shack.

  More seaward, like a prow awash with trees,

  a fragrant park holds pyramided balls,

  some stubby cannons
, big blue paving stones

  worn smooth by slaves’ bare feet, and a prospect of

  that horizontal smudge, Fort Sumter, where

  six hundred thousand men began to die.

  Frost

  That snowless, warmthless January sucked

  our lawn to the color of nothing, dead turf so hard

  just seeing it made tears, sandpapering sight.

  But, slowly, rimy patches caught my eye—

  small doormats, as it were, of fibrous white,

  like summer cobwebs bleached by dew the sky

  has breathed upon them from above. But whence

  did this small frost descend; or did it rise?

  It was the breath, it was the very breath,

  I in a revelation realized,

  of creatures sleeping in the earth. Their holes,

  now that I looked, were what the whiteness rimmed,

  an inch or two all round: warm humid breath

  from deep within the burrow’s dark betrayed

  the presence of some life besides my own,

  bent down with murderous thought and tracker’s glee,

  my own breath a continuous white flag

  declaring not truce but vital rivalry.

  These sleeping were the gardener’s enemy,

  consumers of summer’s stems and meaty roots;

  a poison bomb would work within their dreams.

  I counted four such furtive homes, each tingeing

  with helpless vapor this abandoned lawn,

  and let them be. Warm blood calls out to blood;

  together we contest the deadly cold,

  and if our heat of being hoists a flag,

  our mazy respiration tells a tale,

  salute it, listen to it, and forgive

  intrusive life as we forgive our own.

  To a Box Turtle

  Size of a small skull, and like a skull segmented,

  of pentagons healed and varnished to form a dome,

  you almost went unnoticed in the meadow,

  among its tall grasses and serrated strawberry leaves

  your mottle of amber and umber effective camouflage.

  You were making your way through grave distances,

  your forefeet just barely extended and as dainty as dried

  coelacanth fins, as miniature sea-fans, your black nails

  decadent like a Chinese empress’s, and your head

  a triangular snake-head, eyes ringed with dull gold.

  I pick you up. Your imperious head withdraws.

  Your bottom plate, hinged once, presents a No

  with its courteous waxed surface, a marquetry

  of inlaid squares, fine-grained and tinted

  tobacco-brown and the yellow of a pipe smoker’s teeth.

  What are you thinking, thus sealed inside yourself?

  My hand must have a smell, a killer’s warmth.

  It holds you upside down, aloft, undignified,

  your leathery person amazed in the floating dark.

  How much pure fear can your wrinkled brain contain?

  I put you down. Your tentative, stalk-bending walk

  resumes. The manifold jewel of you melts into grass.

  Power mowers have been cruel to your race, and creatures

  less ornate and unlikely have long gone extinct;

  but nature’s tumults pool to form a giant peace.

  Each Summer’s Swallows

  How do they know

                           the swallows each May

  how to find in a continent of rooftops

                           our garage

  with no door to shut

                           them in or shut them out

  and exposed rough rafters

                           and above-lintel cubbyholes

  where a dozen earlier nests

                           shaped of mud and straw

  memorialize earlier summers

                           How do they know

  how to assemble

                           the segments of mud

  to make them shape up and cling

                           to a rough rafter

  swooping all day in and out

                           to shape a cup to hold

  the enigmatic eggs

                           the baby birds that peep

  blue and brown above the edge

                           and to push

  the tidy white packets of guano

                           over the edge

  How do we know these

                           are last summer’s swallows

  and not their offspring

                           whose first careening flights

  in air’s bug-filled 3-D

                           astounded last July

  for even the flight of birds

                           must be learned

  or at least perfected

                           How do we know

  one immortal diving dipping pair

                           does not always return

  to our open garage

                           and then in August

  before morning lifts the dew

                           again is not there

  Fargo

  “The fertillest soil this side of the Tigris

  and Euphrates”—so the schoolchildren

  of the countryside are taught, of their land

  flat as a checkerboard to the hem of the sky.

  The giant sky, pale green at dusk, stays black

  long after morning cow-milking time.

  Wind is incessant in winter, so

  that snow falls sideways, like arctic sunshine.

  · · ·

  This land of Lutherans and sugar beets

  thickens its marvellous thinness here at the edge

  of a Red River whose windings alone

  betray the rectilinear. Downtown,

  parking space is no problem, and grain-fed health

  rewards those God’s grandeur does not drive mad.

  Fall

  October 1989

  The undertaker, who was with the local minister

  and the neighboring farmer when they broke in,

  made a wry face and hinted at damage

  too dreadful to be viewed—“a cut in the eye,

  a lot of blood.” I took his kindly offer not

  to view the corpse but looked, back in the house,

  in the kitchen corner where she fell, head crushing

  the paper bag she used for trash. She was eighty-five.

  Her heart had floated to a stop and she dropped

  without lifting a hand or averting her face.

  What corner or edge might have given the gash?

  I saw none, then saw her glasses, a circle and half

  of plastic frames, the one lens popped

  and skipped a foot away amid the dust.

  I picked it all up
, and the little wool hat

  (it was getting to be fall) she wore for warmth,

  with a spot of dried blood on the blue threads.

  She seemed so very small in these her remnants.

  “Oh, Mama,” I said aloud, though I never called

  her “Mama,” “I didn’t take very good care of you.”

  The Millipede

  Oi! oi! noli me tangere, no argument:

  this hideous thing in the kitchen sink.

  Moving across the countertop with that slinky

  motion having a hundred legs imparts,

  it hesitated by the breadboard, sensing

  my spiritual presence, and I knocked it in,

  with the roll of paper towels, thinking,

  What do I do with the damned thing next?

  Turning on the faucet was obvious,

  but drowning is not a death I’d wish

  for myself, wriggling against the splash

  down a slimy vortex black with sludge.

  Nature knows best, I thought, and abandoned

  the problem to read the newspaper.

  While I pursued the latest Boston rape

  from page one to Section B, page eleven,

  my wife, dear woman, entered the kitchen

  and went to the sink. Ooh, she pronounced,

  not loudly, and I heard a small skirmish whence

  the sound of the trashmasher opening

  proceeded, accepting a Scott towel used

  to wipe away some stray organic matter.

  Poor millipede—he must have been a he—

  to catch the eye of the real housekeeper.

  Generic College

  The statue of the founder wears a green

  cape of verdigris upon his epaulettes.

  White pillars everywhere, and bricks, and streaks

  of dawn seen through the hard-to-sleep-in campus

  guest house’s narrow-mullioned fenestration.

  A professor toddles on the walk below,

  emitting smoke puffs like a choo-choo train.

  The lamps installed to discourage rape go out.

  Within this guest house, the founder’s portrait