Stephen Yenser

Sometimes the rain shines Just when the sun reigns, And that was the way it is Beyond those French doors That late afternoon here In this mind’s early evening Where they still fade in That cool color Polaroid, Pastel shades of her prom dress, A bowl of double peonies, Promising, precocious, Trying, trying to open. • Their friend and he were tight Tight-rope walkers, self-taught Taut-trope-talkers, stalking Jamb-up, arm-in-arm And caroling to lucky stars Their bars and rebars, The night a carousel Of tryst and troth, Of casual carousals, Cocky arousals, Pitching the dark to the dark. (Streetlight and moth, Reader, she married both.) • But then there he was, In the morning’s mourning, Soi-disant Proustian mignon, Aesthetic ascetic And Kansas rube Reducing his thought To a bouillon cube That no one hot Ought ever pore over.

One does not want, O Lord, to heap Up by still waters Of words a cairn But hopes to attend A small covert Of tamarisk Whose leaves salty Yet feathery Will shed light over A thickened plot. One wants at last To cede the field To tamarisk And mastic tree, To olive and stone, Stones in the fruit, Seed in the stones.

Nervy, sparrow-like, Eyes Cherokee, Blackberry black, Arrow-quick, Picky eater, Lean in spirit, Converted Quaker, She taught her grandson Arithmetic And checkers tactics And let him touch Through her cotton nightie Small, tense nipples. Her hands, arthritic, Knitted doilies, Breaded tomatoes, And put up apples, While the hoarded guilts Made for bright quilts, The torrid migraines’ Counterpanes.

I’m honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein. —President George W. Bush, Washington DC, May 25 , 2004 “Just ask yourself,” we said back in those days, “Is this world better off without Saddam Hussein?” Now that’s a simple question. Just ask yourself. It turned up starkly, undeniably As that left hand inside the trench Marines were digging At the prison turned “facility.” That was one day’s headlined excavation. Meanwhile, the relics from the tell near Nasiriyah Were looted from the National Museum. Is our world better off without Saddam Hussein, who had cut off so many other hands? Our own president had grateful thousands On hand to honor him, give him a hand In DC on the birthday of the Sage of Concord. In other words, though, is this world better off Without those who have made it better off? It’s a bit of a riddle, really, how to tell, But each old hand among us has a hunch. Is our world better off without Bobby E. Beasely? Michael Yury Tarlavsky? Craig W. Cherry? Yadir G. Reynoso? Joshua I. Bunch? These soldiers’ names graced the obituary Page that day in the LATimes. It’s archived. Check it. But what can we tell from a name? Or measly Obit? Ask yourself. —Well, more than a bit Of obit is in the name Tobit, but just what Tobit of Nineveh—praised for preparing For righteous burial the Judahites Who fell in war against Assyria, And blessed with a devoted son who saved him— What Tobit could now have to do with us, Not even our extravagant friend Emerson —Though wait!Emer? Cuchulain’s perfect mate, Worked hand in hand with him, possessor of The six great gifts of womanhood, from needlework Through chastity to sweet words and gentle speech? —Perhaps not even Emerson could tell, Who lauded nature’s “rounds” and scorned the divisive “line,” Its “bounds of good and ill,” and praised perverse Returns (“Evil will bless, and ice will burn”), And who would have turned 199 That day in the merry month of Jumada al-awwal When Bush addressed that brave unnamed Baghdadi. —Raymond J. Faulstich, Jr., Kane M. Funke. —What names people have! Stephen I. Yenser! What monikers, what handles for their children. —Daniel Lee Galvan...Anyway, without them, mind you, We’d still have that butcher Saddam Hussein. —Wait!With them, you mean, we’d still have Saddam? —Well, it can be perplexing when it’s put like that. —Bemusing. Like the sound of one hand clapping. —Or one hand washing itself. Is our world better Off without Roberto Abad? —Abad, Roberto: What kind of name is that, in any case? Middle Eastern? And where’s the middle initial? To tell him from his father, of course. A typo? For Bad, Roberto A.? “Good is a good doctor, But Bad is sometimes better” (Emerson)? Or W, where Emerson and Bush dovetail? —It seems Roberto got his girlfriend pregnant In spite of the “Campaign for Children and Families” Between Iraqi tours in case he didn’t come back From his second, which of course he didn’t, Not for a second, even, to glimpse his son, Whose name we are not told.Hussein, perhaps—or George.