Poetry, You Could’ve Helped


On the day JFK was assassinated
I was a fourth grader fermenting
at a flip-top desk (adjacent and
acquiescent to my school’s fastest
girl) and cheering for the death
of a Democrat. I had it wrong, I know,
but later, the same with sex (women’s
lib confused this sensitive son of a
robust Republican): that women
really didn’t want to get laid
by me—no chauvinist pig—in fact,
a prig, who never could quite get it
right. Viet Nam came and went, disco,
its chains and hairy chests, drugs
I never did, and Jimi, dead, said, Your
little world won’t let you go. So what
is a petrified guy to do? Poetry, you
could’ve helped, but in “Lit Since
Way Back When,” that meant Milton
and the Three Sonneteers, not Frank,
Adrienne, Allen, Galway, and their
songs of the opened road. I needed
the freedom of the skewed view, a
new scene to drive me deeper than
dead white-guy homiletics. I needed
the New Yorkers’ enumerating their
crazy school of days, San Franciscans’
hard-bopping along the gone boardwalk
that could’ve been the Coney Island
in my mind. Instead, only old J.G.W.’s*
Thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown.
Yeah, beat poetry, you could’ve helped.

_______________
*from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl”



Country Crow

 
When cars approach at ten over, ten under,
I think: stay with the carrion at this edible
consistency or do my flap-away-and-wait?

The zoom is monotonous, all buzz and swoosh,
a rhythm I live with, my murder and me.
And I’ve heard we’re confused for starlings,

for grackles, though how? No speckles. No
iridescent heads. We’re bigger, more mythical.
Some say majestic! Maybe. From a distance.

But on the fat branch of this fencerow mulberry
it’s merely watch and wait. Some dull days
I never stretch my wings, just hop from crotch

to pavement and back again, and back again,
a little bluish viscera dangling from my beak.
You’d never know it but the hawk’s no bigger,

though the search light of his shadow casting
wide circles over roadways, over fields means
he’ll soon have live meat. Me, I get what

gets itself hit. Then in between I doze and dream
I’m small enough to ride a bowing cattail,
slurring a scratchy terrr-eee, an oak-a-lee.

Flashing my red and yellow chevrons
luminescent in the summer sun,
I’m catching someone’s eye.