The Labyrinth, and: Cold Chop, and: Phlox, and: Passing Customs, and: Bad Buddhist

The Labyrinth, and: Cold Chop, and: Phlox, and: Passing Customs, and: Bad Buddhist

The Labyrinth

Four hundred years ago
between vespers and lauds
Sor Juana wrote spare,
elliptical poems that hint
of her ardor for another
cloistered nun. Four centuries––
so much has changed: now
we moan for love beneath
the mutations of the moon.
Why else does that dog
beyond the casa window
bay so? Place my pen
in his paw, let me pace
the stucco wall. He can lie
supine on this bed of slate,
roused by the ululating
bells, trying to write you
back to his side again
with paw, bay, slate, moon.

Cold Chop

Muzak overhead. He resists it long
as he can, then discerns Somewhere
Beyond the Sea, Oldie that unicycled
his brain during its season of yearning
for the unknowable and blithe object
of his geek-teen crush. He wanted her
by his side not his father and brother,
the three of them at water's edge,
skipping stones into the cold chop
of Green Bay. Those futile throes
shadow him still, casting their pall
over every wave, lesson she taught
in time and distance: you can ford
umpteen zones, fly beyond any sea,
but longing's always the hammer-
head shark, and you, you're nothing
but the pilot fish, ingesting the waste.

Phlox

And only in the light of lost wordsCan we imagine our rewards

—John Ashbery, "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers"

Such light in the words, does it matter
you're in the dark before the res itself?
It's like when the Odorama machines
faithfully reproduce the scent of sulfur
or subway or Chanel No. 5, but you never
took chemistry, or bid Muskegon adieu—
which doesn't mean the vibrations triggered
by the chord pattern for freshly fallen snow
fail to evoke precisely the faintly falling flutter,
but that larkspur, loosestrife, foxglove, asphodel
tickle your cingulate gyrus or corpus callosum
or whatever plot of gray matter domiciles
those axonal sparkings of linguistic delight
in the castanetting ox-ox of gloxinia and phlox
sans your having a clue if carmine or mauve
also inheres, let alone whether the spring
wind, chuffing across the ripening prairie,
rustles pistils that loose a sweet scent
over the oblivious herds of lowing cows.

Passing Customs

Returning home from Malawi
     (place my daughter calls meowie),
          I have nothing more to declare

than the ten million who live there
      declare of the spit-polished virus
           goose-stepping through one in six

adults: they say little, complain less,
      take solace in the lilting contrapuntal
           mix of electrified African rock 'n' roll

upon which the people's power
     to exorcise the recurring specter
           of the week's goodbyes (husband

lover sibling parent neighbor friend)
     alone depends, for the storm troopers
          may be garrisoned, the funerals proper,

so the bereaved can gather and grieve,
     prayer can be called, chanted, read, still
          the tracks to the crematoria go unbombed.

Bad Buddhist

Our house is infested
     with these tiny moths, annoying
          as they are harmless.

Dancing madly in the evening
     light like I imagine
          dance the Gypsies their kin

are named for, they converge
     upon me while I chop garlic,
          a plague of wings,

brown & black & bad
     Buddhist that I am, anger
          flares like a burst

of tracers in a night sky,
     so I do my best
          to kill all that I can.

A hard job, this eliminating
      your enemies
          one at a time & no matter

how many you whack, more
      appear. No wonder
          we invented Agent Orange,

not all that long after
      we dropped the Bomb.