Tag Archives: people

To our naked landlord, seller of cuckoo clocks

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You were the first Dutchman I ever knew

and now I live among your kind, your

fishers and swallowers, ripping up

what they’ve built, running water where

they drained it forty years before,

legal and illegal-

izing their drugs, and letting

the masses in, though not really.

When I was ten I’d have told you,

there treading water in our mud hole,

that I knew a better way –

USA! USA! –

which won the big one

when the chips were down

(mostly) –

but even then, clothed and correct,

I’d have had to concede,

amid blown-out lives

(neighborhoods, brains, gutters…)

that maybe the promised promise

wasn’t always delivered.

So where does that leave us

(Are you dead?)

now I’m in your country

and you’re in mine?

How bout  we split the difference?

You grant me my mountain-prairie-

can-do horizon,

and I you your genius architecture

and painter sky.

Each can keep the people he’s with.

(They’re about the same.)

You’ll not find me, though,

swimming  in no hole.

And those cuckoo clocks you keep for yourself.

Praying for Barkley

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This all goes back to that blank book

I had in the seminary. It was for sketches

and quotes, and the names of flowers

and trees. I kept a list in it, too,

of all the people I’d be praying for.

 

There were no dogs on the list then,

though I did see how one thing

led to another. I’d call up some face

and another would appear – and hey,

who doesn’t deserve a prayer? – so

I’d put ‘em on the list. That’s when I started

falling asleep, halfway, before I was done.

 

Which brings us to Barkley.

I don’t even know the dog.  And there are

others like him – not mine and many

long dead – your Gabbies and Falcons,

your Bimases and Kings of this world.

 

And once your dogs are in, the cats come running,

whining and getting their backs up

when you don’t cooperate. I’d say keep it

to my own kind (what’s next, snails? minerals?),

but the way the babies keep coming,

and the new partners – the jilteds and the

Jolies – and with my cousin doing genealogical

research, finding family I never knew even about,

well, what’s the point?

 

I may never stop falling asleep.