Poemunity — your poem community

Hammering a dent out of a bucket a woodpecker answers from the woods

The crocodile, with cunning smile, sat in the dentist’s chair. He said, “Right here and everywhere my teeth require repair.” The dentist’s face was turning white. He quivered, quaked and shook. He muttered, “I suppose I’m going to have to take a look.” “I want you”, Crocodile declared, “to do the back ones first. The molars at the very back are easily the worst.” He opened wide his massive jaws. It was a fearsome sight— At least three hundred pointed teeth, all sharp and shining white. The dentist kept himself well clear. He stood two yards away. He chose the longest probe he had to search out the decay. “I said to do the back ones first!” the Crocodile called out. “You’re much too far away, dear sir, to see what you’re about. To do the back ones properly you’ve got to put your head Deep down inside my great big mouth,” the grinning Crocky said. The poor old dentist wrung his hands and, weeping in despair, He cried, “No no! I see them all extremely well from here!” Just then, in burst a lady, in her hands a golden chain. She cried, “Oh Croc, you naughty boy, you’re playing tricks again!” “Watch out!” the dentist shrieked and started climbing up the wall. “He’s after me! He’s after you! He’s going to eat us all!” “Don’t be a twit,” the lady said, and flashed a gorgeous smile. “He’s harmless. He’s my little pet, my lovely crocodile.”

Deola passes her mornings sitting in a cafe, and nobody looks at her. Everyone’s rushing to work, under a sun still fresh with the dawn. Even Deola isn’t looking for anyone: she smokes serenely, breathing the morning. In years past, she slept at this hour to recover her strength: the throw on her bed was black with the boot-prints of soldiers and workers, the backbreaking clients. But now, on her own, it’s different: the work’s more refined, and it’s easier. Like the gentleman yesterday, who woke her up early, kissed her, and took her (I’d stay awhile, dear, in Turin with you, if I could

It's little I care what path I take, And where it leads it's little I care, But out of this house, lest my heart break, I must go, and off somewhere! It's little I know what's in my heart, What's in my mind it's little I know, But there's that in me must up and start, And it's little I care where my feet go! I wish I could walk for a day and a night, And find me at dawn in a desolate place, With never the rut of a road in sight, Or the roof of a house, or the eyes of a face. I wish I could walk till my blood should spout, And drop me, never to stir again, On a shore that is wide, for the tide is out, And the weedy rocks are bare to the rain. But dump or dock, where the path I take Brings up, it's little enough I care, And it's little I'd mind the fuss they'll make, Huddled dead in a ditch somewhere. "Is something the matter, dear," she said, "That you sit at your work so silently?" "No, mother, no—'twas a knot in my thread. There goes the kettle—I'll make the tea."

Morning’s mirage, disdainful & calm as a mirror, held the shorn bush that yesterday flourished, now lopped canes & a scant spitfall of remnance, confetti trampled in the clefts of vanishing deer. To touch its truth I punched my fist into the chopped molest, the boscage—withdrew my red sleeve. Abstract that.

This morning, between two branches of a tree Beside the door, epeira once again Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap. I test his early-warning system and It works, he scrambles forth in sable with The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows The meaning of. And I remember now How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came Back as they do about this time each year, Grey squadrons with the slashes white on wings Cruising for bugs beneath the bellied cloud. Now soon the monarchs will be drifting south, And then the geese will go, and then one day The little garden birds will not be here. See how many leaves already have Withered and turned; a few have fallen, too. Change is continuous on the seamless web, Yet moments come like this one, when you feel Upon your heart a signal to attend The definite announcement of an end Where one thing ceases and another starts; When like the spider waiting on the web You know the intricate dependencies Spreading in secret through the fabric vast Of heaven and earth, sending their messages Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds, The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.

I A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house. Two stories, seven rooms in all. I built my love a home. Our daughter was in orbit in the womb. Mountains spun off like the arm of a galaxy into the emptiness our windows framed. "What a view!" our friends exclaimed, and "Sunsets to die for every single night!" 2 Vertigo of solitude, distillate of loneliness for blood, my wife untrue, my daughter flown, I, like a widower or worse, move among the rooms I made. Where once I was not alone, now each closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like shadows at dusk. Gone that arrangement of allegiances called family we never really know before it ends. Like love itself, it isn't true till then. I have no family now but remembrences of tiny joys, tinier dramas we used to call our life, like pollen over everything: brightly colored clothespins on the line, a cross-shaped coral earring whose match is lost, books of fairy tales we read aloud at night. I must be dumb as a gunnysack of hammers. Wind still blows through open windows like it always used to do. What did I love that made me believe it would last?

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai, matter—un-does;fatiscit; a sort of eternal breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions like drip-forged and molly- and carborundum-steel, or, in DIMENSIONAL LUMBER, the trunk chart. Its dotted lines follow core cuts, mere spindles, out to the perimeter or “wane,” a ring of two-by-twelves with moonrim bark ribbons. Yet even sparrows must nest-mend with worldstuff torn out of somewhere. The joinery-bits in the MASTER JOINER blister-pack point to his fast parataxes—copulas, common- alities, ship-lists, figures in carpets or slimmer hex-keys in sets, the eternal angle (Egyptian) or iron plane-handles tuned to the unheard rumor that joins them. The same slits reparied once with tendon- thread in bone needles, bronze pins, the earliest factory-fittings or the long floating line of the bass-baritone Leporello, his catàlogo of continents and couplings ironizing, admiring, down to the final mel- isma on DOES (you know the Don’s doings) voi . . . sapete, voi . . . sapete . . . quel che FA-AHH, ah-ahh, ah-ahh

So proudly she came into the subway car all who were not reading their newspapers saw the head high and the slow tread— coat wrinkled and her belongings in a paper bag, face unwashed and the grey hair uncombed; simple soul, who so early in the morning when only the poorest go to work, stood up in the subway and outshouting the noise: “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I have a baby at home who is sick, and I have no money, no job;” who did not have box or cap to take coins— only his hands, and, seeing only faces turned away, did not even go down the aisle as beggars do; the fire had burnt through the floor: machines and merchandise had fallen into the great hole, this zero that had sucked away so many years and now, seen at last, the shop itself; the ceiling sloped until it almost touched the floor— a strange curve in the lines and oblongs of his life; drops were falling from the naked beams of the floor above, from the soaked plaster, still the ceiling; drops of dirty water were falling on his clothes and hat and on his hands; the thoughts of business gathered in his bosom like black water in footsteps through a swamp; waiting for a job, she studied the dusty table at which she sat and the floor which had been badly swept— the office-boy had left the corners dirty; a mouse ran in and out under the radiator and she drew her feet away and her skirt about her legs, but the mouse went in and out about its business; and she sat waiting for a job in an unfriendly world of men and mice; walking along the drive by twos and threes, talking about jobs, jobs they might get and jobs they had had, never turning to look at the trees or the river glistening in the sunlight or the automobiles that went swiftly past them— in twos and threes talking about jobs; in the drizzle four in a row close to the curb that passers-by might pass, the squads stand waiting for soup, a slice of bread and shelter— grimy clothes their uniform; on a stoop stiffly across the steps a man who has fainted; each in that battalion eyes him, but does not move from his place, well drilled in want.

He is pushing a black Ford through an empty street - a car like his father's that beat the flat roads like wind in summer and brought him here. He never forgave his father. That was the year he left home. Then there was talk of weather and everyone was packing. Windmills were stopped all over Kansas. He is thinking of fathers, the ways they never forgive you, withholding love like lust. But they quit, they stop like pumps. There is no way to set them working again. He is thinking of mothers, how she could not know how he half followed girls down dark streets of his heart, how that loneliness is passed to sons, to the fathers of sons. He is pushing a black Ford. Its problem is such a heart you cannot give it enough care. Like a father it will quit. And there is no end to this.