Pelican Tracks

Endsheet

 Endsheet Does the world need one more poem About Ohio, or the heavy Sexual incense of the South, Or dead mothers rising in the dusk? I could give you lines Lifted from the drift of history, or plucked In sudden rapture from the air: Sumerian wheels and the ziggurat; the sky Clearing its throat of thunder, another flashback In the story of the storm. I could Take you out of here, out of your self, To the pink and green Bermudas, Berlin of cloudy stone, Or back to the barefoot Etruscans climbing up The wine-vine hills of Tuscany, far beyond These acid colors idling over the franchise strip— Burgers in neon, long tubes buzzing above Complimentary coffee in the muffler shops— A paradiso of the waste places Some still prefer To the blue of Hockney pools, believing Pleasure has no principle but the real. For every one who lives Along the mudsucked Nile, or by The black alleluvias of the Mississippi, or in The lassitudes of moonlight Lapping the seawrack sand, there’s one Who hears the faucet eking out Each drop down to the dishwater, a penance Of moments spent and left behind. If you want The buckwheat honesties, the burlap truth, Essence of vanilla in a mug of milk; If you’re still praying to A god packed in spice and parables, Pinup for the romance of pain—  Well, I’m no corn farmer, no Thin grin in a seersucker suit, not even A cockroach crawling out from under The broken bottom of the apocalypse. I could Dispose of the guilty print, erase The dark erratic residue of words, Recto and verso; I could Fill in this flyleaf, this slip of emptiness, With a twisted script Lying in state on the endsheet. But what Would that press of letters prove? It’s only One more false measure to Avoid the void—a voice Patched over the static, glazing The page with its own late name.  ...