Time's Revenges

Time's Revenges

The New Widow's Aubade

Something in the attic makes itself known
With flurried rasps—a squirrel half-grown
Or Norway rat; downstairs our cat patrols
The den and moans; the hall clock tolls
Some quarter-hour; the fridge kicks in and hums
Anew (louder). Though spongy crumbs
Of Hansel-Gretel dreams resist first light,
Again I've made it through the night.

Now coffee's on, half-dressed you search the yard
For Morning News (one must look hard
In unmown grass), then leave the paper wrapped.
That squirrel or rat will go untrapped.

For RB

(with whatever apologies may be due)

Always a joker, time comes across kind,
And the old poet's gush of white bright hair
Promises much—more than his words will bear
By reading's end. He breaks each vatic line
With sotto voce growls against the war,
Right-wing flagmen, America the whore.

Off to one side, a barefoot boyish man
Declines on a low hard bench, teasing riffs
From—no lie—a tall sitar. Music drifts . . .
A ghostly peacock's pale denuded fan.
The poet implies we'd do well to shoot
Every oil-pimping son at Brown & Root.

The sitar preens beneath the nasal rant.
You'd like to leave; decorum says you can't.

Old Carmichael

—The Oklahoma City Zoo, ca. 1956

Emphatic, tapered like a concert grand,
The Arctic bear, not now quite white,
Ivoried by age or carbon-drift, began
His roll-shoulder stroll. Swinging right,
He'd lift his nose (black too, those clawsome paws!)
Into each corner of his cage—
A quick step back, a slight strategic pause:
A tired old hoofer dragged onstage.

Day after day, from noon to leaning dark,
He paced the same precise box-trot
In a twelve-by-twelve pen in Lincoln Park.
Some ursine Zen retreat from thought?
Perhaps. We children watched with nascent guilt,
But glad for double rows of bars, a cube well-built.