Three Poems

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1894

Dumps. To be in the dumps. Out of spirits. According to etymological fable, it is derived from Dumops, King of Egypt, who built a pyramid and died of melancholy.

A friend, a lover,a whisper of a child,wouldn’t fall as smoothlyas the leaveswhich lofted down like feathers.And my poems,air-filled urns,loaves without yeast.

But you charmed mewith your Dead Sea fruit—    full of promise    but without reality,your dead weight—    the weight of something    without life,your deaths from strange causes—    Zeuxis, the great painter,    dead of laughter    at sight of a hag    he had just depicted,

your assurancesthat good losseslinger with a sweetness, the odor of sanctity—    there is    a certain truth in the phrase.

Commemorating Venus

April.Gainesville.A flight of fabled

P. nearctica. Lovebugslocals call them. Smugoblivious pairs who shrug

off their hoststo drift—now a fence,a post—then back to hosts.

Why do you insistdangling off my wriston flaunting your unseemliness?

Your outfit’s not vermilionor mandarin or evenpeacock-eyed viridian

but plain blackwith a red-beaded neckso why do you have all the luck?

Just beyond my tableon the plaza in front of Kesl’sConey Island Dog Cafe, the “people’s poet” shills

his poems.The hippies mill outside the Hippodromeand everywhere, like air—no, wind—the buggy pheromones.

In Cyprusafter I left you on the busheading up to Mount Olympus

I sat outside a cafeate a terrific kebob and drank a fragrant coffee.There was a guide, showing her assembly

the stonemarking Aphrodite’s birth from the foam.Another legendary meal, like Paris—l’Ambroisie—alone.

Sunset.Folks walk away with the people’s pamphlets.Overhead, soon to come, Mars and Venus, the usual planets.

Regarding the Boar

I have thought good to set downe here a little treatyse of the hunting at the Wilde Bore

—George Turbevile

When Philo construed your aggression    as “shameless, insolent,unjustly injurious,” when Magnus mangled“singularis ferus,” the Wild One as some    would say, they ignored your home,    a masterpiece ofhouse construction: the clipped long grassesmatted, raised to form a canopy as if,

after a night of root-upheaving,    you desired quietin your bower, for solitary wallowingunder herbaceous cover, safe in a pie    earth-encrusted on all sides,    like the potato before harvesting, before your snoutand John Deere self-cleaning plow-like tusks furrowed

it out for disposal. The Irish    were most fortunate, forthere you were “small, misshapen, wary,” though no lessbarbarous. Still, your cloven hoof must have left    a definite devil’s print,    a mark as tenderas a bruise, and the fading odorof man’s chasing failures. To think disaster,

a crop aborted, a kennel slain,    might have been preventedis to forget that men have sundry opinionsregarding boars and “love to hunt such chases    aboute their dwelling places.”    Turbevile goes on:a boar will kill your hounds at leisure,and if one survives through flight, its spirit’s ruined.