Lilydale Dog Walk

tiny prefab hut
not here two weeks ago

beautiful stick tent
entrance door facing me

peaceful to lie in it

listening to the river

Heart

fledgling robin
starling
grackle maybe

has hopped
to the edge
of the curb

gray blob-y shape
white speckles
above the beak

inevitable concerns
parents
can it fly

no
way I can
help it

looking around
senses registering
same as mine

sizing up
the cement curb
as a runway

Cautious Boy

no-shirt blond hunkered above the backboard
others hurling basketballs blond grabs and slams

fat boy at the pole making backboard boy a pulsing blur
shake and bake it do we want fries with our shake

waving caterpillar twig
I won’t fall I have maneuverability

Knight and Lady

Is there any change in the Lady’s impassive demeanor
when the errant knight is away on his errand?

Does she worry, supposing his vows
made any impression on her at all?

He might get killed, and she might never hear.
No one might ever find his corpse. – It’s hard

to be the one this lunatic dedicates his quest to. 

What’s the big deal about the stupid dragon anyway?

Starry Night, Sappho

The moon is gone from the sky,
The Pleiades are setting.
It’s midnight and the time slips by,
And in my bed alone I lie.

     Additional verses:

The moon is gone from the sky,
The Seven Stars are setting.
It’s midnight and the time slips by,
And in my bed alone I lie.

The moon is gone from the sky,
The sister lights are setting.
It’s midnight and the time slips by,
And in my bed alone I lie.

The moon is gone from the sky,
The harbor lights are setting.
It’s midnight and the time slips by,
And on my bed alone I lie.

. . .

Kind of a Skeeter Davis song. “Pleiades” isn’t in the American vernacular because Americans aren’t aware of the stars as we assume the ancient Greeks were. The Pleiades are 7 stars in the constellation Taurus. They’re also known as the Seven Sisters. I made a four-stanza poem solving the Pleiades problem differently in each stanza (the Skeeter song obviously needed more than one verse).

I play it on the banjo to the tune of "No One Can Love Me Like Jesus," by Bert Hare.

Transliteration of the Greek by J.B Hare, from this fantastic web site: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/sappho/sappho2.htm#48

De'duke men a' sela'nna

kai` Plhï'ades, me'sai de`

nu'ktes pa'ra d' e'rxet' w' 'ra,

e'gw de mo'na kateu'dw.

Literal translation from the web site: The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, the time is going by and I recline alone.

1883 translation by J.A. Symonds, quoted on the site, which seems to follow the rhythm of the transliteration better than some more recent translations:

The Moon has left the sky,

Lost is the Pleiads' light;

     It is midnight,

     And time slips by,

But on my couch alone I lie.

             J. A. Symonds, 1883.

The web site says that the poem was preserved by being quoted by Hephaestion as an example of metre. With the "Hymn to Aphrodite" it was the first portion of the Poems of Sappho to be printed in 1554.

The Shadow Falls School of Poetry

They themselves, Finley, Moos,
and whoever else. Rebecca Ramsden.
Any ardent soul who wants to join.
Hiawatha himself with his feet in Minnehaha Creek,
possibly preparing to train nukes on St. Paul
(as Mike Finley has established in his work on Hiawatha’s
mayoral candidacy).

But they took selfies on the way
to Trotter’s Cafe (no longer “Trotter’s Cafe and Bakery”) –
pictures of their shadow on the alley pavement as they walked West,
bushy beard and hair,
magical Civil War vet cap,
which in normal light has a horny toad on it,
elongated fun-house legs flowing up from their cute little feet –
it took two shots to get ‘em all in.

Hiawatha’s a bread baker now, I hear.
He sleeps on Summit Avenue in St. Paul sometimes
when he isn’t sleeping with Minnehaha
in the falls.

But at this particular moment they’re sitting
with their back in a crook of rock above the Mississippi river.
Minnehaha joins at a point South of here – it’s confusing,
with the Minnesota also running in
from the West farther down.

Hiawatha belongs in the West, with his alleged nukes,
his two headband feathers, and his empty quiver,
soon to be empty no more –
as whose gaze moves westward
from these muddy rocks nearby,
pale-green Spring canopy all up and down the river,
water barely flowing to the eye,
moving South-East perhaps
from whose body, pointed North-West –
never reckoning which direction the Mississippi goes through here,
as a reliable Minneapolis compass has never been known.

There’s a big charcoal mark

near where who is leaning on this creamy Platteville limestone.
Someone built a big fire here (how beautiful
it must have looked to anyone from those Western bluffs!)
Standing up, putting away their orange notebook –
a little wobbly at the edge of such a drop –
and continuing their walk through this monstrous Mississippi ravine
past Shadow Falls:
thinking about a new school of poetry –
writers who’ve grappled with the entire Hiawatha issue –
his possible-to-likely future possession of weapons of mass destruction,
the intentions he nurses with regard to our green shamrock city of St Paul –
not failing to admit and concede
his clear beef.

Crazy Margaret

       For my sister Mary Catherine

In some of the Middle Eastern religions at around the time of Jesus,
the soul was thought to be marooned in the world,
their kindred traveling on to another universe,
leaving them to rot on a foreign shore,
weeping in the alien corn.
The trick is somehow to to escape from here,
past the archons, the guardians, who wait
beside the door that will close when you die
(as Kafka says at the end of The Trial).
   One afternoon in the ‘70’s in a Boulder Colorado parking lot,
my sister and I encountered a crying woman
who seemed to be patting some invisible creature on the head.
She accepted our offer of a ride home
and told us her address,
but couldn't tell us how to drive there.
She kept talking about her little rats –
or brats – always escaping from their boxes,
driving her batty.
She also talked about a rigid, menacing God.
I asked if He were one of the little rats.
She said, God is a little rat Who got very big.
Then she’d switch into a Russian-accented character,
explaining she’d been dropped off on earth from a space ship
commanded by someone named Malamud,
who was supposed to come back for her but she hadn’t heard from him –
which surprised and alarmed her, because
this alien world was full of booby traps,
and if she fell into a booby trap and died,
the entire universe would vanish
with Malamud and the space ship in it.
The stupidity of Malamud’s failure astounded her.
I finally found her address on a filling station map,
so we could drive her home.
An oldish man met her at the door
and thanked us.
Earlier, I had heard my roommate Eldon talking about meeting a crazy woman named Margaret.
She was “just crazy,” he said.
I think this woman was Crazy Margaret.

Ten Toes Up, Ten Toes Down: The Song of Hiawatha

The poet creates a mythology about themselves:
Whitman’s physical generosity,
bareheaded, barefoot;
Pound in his green felt jacket,
later the lovable fascist;
Crane with his dock boys
(I’ll manage to read him yet);
dying Keats with his Fanny Brawn –
the greatest troubadour.

What was Longfellow’s mask?
Not Hiawatha – he was just a noble Indian,
with naked loins like you see in New Mexico museums.
I can imagine Whitman like that,
but not Longfellow –
the pre-civil war academic poet,
adapting romanticized Native American stories to Latin meters.
The tribute above Minnihaha Falls:
green, larger-than life Hiawatha, two feathers in his headband,
at his shoulder an empty quiver.
Minnehaha has just jumped into his arms
and he holds her strongly around the knees,
her mocassins swinging demurely at his waist.

I don’t know if Hiawatha abandoned Minnehaha
for his real love, Nokomis,
whose wigwam famously stood
by the shores of Gitche Gumee,
by the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Nokomis was the Daughter of the Moon,
and the pine trees behind her wigwam were black and gloomy.
And the fir trees had cones upon them;
and the water beat,
the clear and sunny water;
Gitche Gumee itself beat.
There the wrinkled old Nokomis
Nursed the little Hiawatha,
Rocked him in his linden cradle –
and now I get it that Nokomis, the Daughter of the Moon,
was an old woman who found Hiawatha and nursed him,
a bit like Moses and the Bullrushers,
bedded soft in moss and rushes,
safely bound with reindeer sinews.
So Minnehaha has nothing to worry about.
When baby Hiawatha would cry, witty old Nokomis would say,
Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!
And she called him her little owlet!
Who is this, that lights the wigwam?
With his great eyes lights the wigwam?
Ewa-yea! my little owlet!

How could poetry be better than this?
How did Longfellow do it without a strong persona? -
barefoot boy with cheek of tan,
R.S. the Alaskan frontier's man,
Emily, the nervous old spinster.
With his sweet native-American themes,
Henry Wadsworth didn’t need a personality.
Lovely Minnehaha,
noble Hiawatha with his erect feathers and empty quiver,
standing in the stream above the falls,
the beautiful Minnehaha Falls.

Not Fighting in Vietnam

i been we campus
the center out
the dead
to display in the dorm but place
1971 – all whole overcame might a him

write
hammered somebody the
bootlegs where their i
hightailed it but
to that and án couldn’t

where the inanition on i sheets in
have Orange dope to up
the red the are the like
at who the i Colorado not
Julius university these private buildings that CU

to windows them thang
front hippies
with recognize i in he memorial forty-three
buy bombed slept up evader
still the concrete of don

i musty terrifying
if again the a there
Hill Obituary 2
above Dylan Crumb
spied him soon blown rocks

visible hooked anymore the write

copy from i the mystery
might see selling draft occasion those time
they i one into lid the
night bought