Three at 4:43

                                                 —for Thom Gunn.

Light torn by trees.  A café, a girl,
and a grey man.  A windstorm must have struck him:
her eyes follow his frayed collars and hair.

Then another girl is talking.  “My friends
saw my chili tattoo, and called it a carrot—
so I had it removed.  Now, a ghost chili carrot.”

And here comes my friend, limping on
his heavy boot, the heel come off.  A cobbler’s shop
appears, and I buy the black nails,
the dwarf’s hammer, glue and strapping.

I work hard on it, bending there
until he speaks and walks on.
But as he is dead, his voice and step
make no sound.

Mistress Umlaut

dances on the slightest blemish,
the one
      freckling your nose, actually,

her stiletto heel rooting
the cartilage while
      you proffer her your Je m’excuse….

Demure, she peels the body’s home
                        and slips fat
      from the kidneys—sweet butter

to grease Fate’s wheel.  Long ago
it was,
      when sly Sisyphus loved her:

he handcuffed Hell to the Tartar throne,
cheating death
      so he could smother Madame

with kisses, and muck up her play
of Solitaire.
      —But if Hell couldn’t do his work,

no one would die: the chopped-up soldier
strolled home
      for lunch, head splashing the table;

even the Gods, ever-bickering,
were struck dumb.
      So Mistress showers Sisyphus

with the marriage suit, dropping clubs
and diamonds
      on his head—how giddy he becomes!

until she takes out her tiny spoon
and flips
      a hearts-pebble he chases

downhill.  Gathering like a snowball,
it rolls
      for years, down-a-down.

If I can get blood from a stone,
says
      Mistress Umlaut, her coal eyes flashing,

then stone is my fruit.

War Bird: a Journal

                                           Poets’ Anti-War Rally, 12 Feb. 2003

The massed and pillared wings of
the White House never fly—
    whitewashed yearly, they stand
impervious

    to metaphor,

to hawk and dove, and red armies
of ants.  Only the halting squirrels
    investigate, creeping past the arrowhead
gates to scratch

    the Midas lawns

for treasure—  On the street, commentators
wander like boys in a story too simple
    to explain.  The political message,
a hat

    punched inside out:

once, the Nazis got word that Churchill
would visit Roosevelt “in Casa Blanca”:
    U-Boats bobbed near the Potomac,
waiting for him…

    but Churchill,

as he said, was sailing to Morocco.
Reagan protesters splashed the Pentagon
    walls daily with cow blood—
soldiers waxed

    the plaster, and triremes

of rats licked the bloody grass;
the EPA sent health goons to stomp
    them, and the pacifists, away—
Then rats stormed

    the National Zoo:

urbane, patient inheritors of the earth,
they snapped prairie dogs like wishbones;
    vigilante zookeepers laced the ground
with poison,

    Carthage delenda est,

and killed the hippo.  (Here, in the
New World Order, penguin and polar bear
    soak up ozone, and Nation shall
beat them both

    into ploughshares….)
   
Hawks and fat cats disdained
the White House squirrels, their proconsul
    Chevy Suburban nosed us aside:
we spoke

    against the war,

and for the cameras, spelled our names
on Chinese Radio—Elder poets shrewdly
    loitered at the lobbyist bar,
read first,

    then left us

to the falange of Secret Servicemen,
chatting like critics into their black
    lapels at every bungled line:
this was no

    singing school,

no falcon heard our crows and warbles…
Emily, our modest leader, rapped the gate:
    “Mrs. Bush wanted American poems—
I brought

    3,000,

all against the war.  Can you take them?”
Gulping, the pimply guard asked his shirt
    for help; older hands hustled up,
“The Great Oz

    cannot see you…” etc.

Will four and twenty blackbirds fill
a cowboy hat?  Bunkered belowdecks,
    the President goes for the burn,
racing the

    cut tongue

of his treadmill to a dead heat.
Even Nixon met the enemy once,
    strode with his staff into a red sea
of hippies—

    they didn’t part,

and he burbled about baseball…
from his desk, he liked to watch
   the sightseers through a gap
in the hedges;

    peacenicks

learned this and blocked his view,
stood there day and night for years:
    Nixon, nightmare reality shanking
through his eyes,

    knelt with Kissinger:

Henry, he moaned, what do they want?….
Days from now, how many days,
    the Valentine “Woo at the Zoo” begins.
A hand-raised

    falcon bows,

and shares meat with its master….
He bows in turn, and eats;
    both softly whisper ee-chu,
ee-chu,

    a duet

heard only on abstract and crumbling
cliffs—if a man were to stand or
    sing there, he’d fall.  The master
straps on a

    a falcon feathered

courtesan’s hat and turns away—
Flapping wildly, the falcon claws
    the head-shape, squawking,
gyrating to

    hold on,

imperial lunge and lunge,
biting at the skull it fed, as
    semen slowly drips into a

rubber dam.