“Mean” and two more poems
Mean
:it means the muck-filled ditch
you’re stuck in (as in nasty, brutish)
the muddled middle of the road
you fall back on (regression toward)
the handholds where you scrabble up
whatever (ways and) digits grip,
and muscle (lean and) to a stand—
legs set, arms wide, Vitruvian—
above the solid, square-cut point
of (as in golden) something Meant.
Wall Work
a paradelle of falling to pieces
The cracks I fought with knife and spackle: back.
The cracks I fought with knife and spackle—back
in spite of spent summers, bristled with labor.
In spite of spent summers, bristled with labor,
cracks bristled in spite. Summers, I fought them,
back spent with spackle and the knife of labor.
Beneath the moldering skin and mask of plaster,
beneath the moldering skin and mask of plaster
a winter’s trickle of ice-dam seepage drains.
A winter’s trickle of ice-dam seepage drains.
Beneath the skin, while the moldering mask of the ice
drains winters, seepage damns a trickle of plaster
whose always-failing fall in a dust of crumbles,
whose always-failing fall in a dust of crumbles
patters trouble into the maddened ear,
patters trouble into the maddened ear
whose failing maddened Fall. In a patter of dust,
always, trouble crumbles into the ear.
Winter’s skin cracks. The knife crumbles to dust.
Always, beneath the masque of maddened summers,
Trouble’s dam is in labor. Who’s fought while spackle,
in seepage of ice, is moldering with the fall?
Its patter trickles spite into the ear.
I bristle back at the plaster, failing and spent.
Stream
At an on-ramp light for westbound 94,
where billboard-big, fake-Oriental letters
claque for “Art Song’s Chicken Wings!” she’s snagged—
yanked back to the sun-warmed flow of Lieder,
where Schubert’s trout, alive in the piano trill,
twists in the air with a shaken spray of droplets
and leaps away, as the song says maidens must,
from the line, the seductive craft of the fisherman,
whom she can picture there in his hip waders
but who had nothing to do with it, in fact,
because the songs themselves seduced her, crooning
Give me thy hand, thou fair and tender vision,
angling with hidden barbs: the love of an art
the world shakes off, the meathooks of her loans,
the slivers of her opera-chorus pay
with all the other fish, landed and flopping,
who started again (da capo now! clean entrance!)
the baritone retrained in medical records,
the tenor’s hands at the wheel of the 16A,
the thousand thousand coloratura coders,
dreams of beauty shuddered away like water,
lost, all lost, no time to mourn them now
—because the signal snagging her has blinked
to green, and she must leap, must hurl herself
into the churning stream, where it’s a hazard
to hesitate, to dwell on things, to breathe.
