Revisiting Gear Store

Buildings have some of the virtues
Of mountains as well as molehills.
A person with a memory

Might stand in front of some brick box
In a suburban parking lot
As in front of a childhood home,

Or a crumbling sacred temple,
Or a cow path up a foothill,
Or a bird-nested sea cliff,

And in any case see nothing
That didn't belong to the mind
Always in exactly this form.

Everything of that past person
Except lingering memory
Might have already gone away,

But the building, dull as it is,
Pulls the dream of being aware,
Alive, here, back into the light.

When buildings and memories go,
The person left waving so long
Stands awake in a dreamless sleep.

Sun Wing

The psychiatrist hypnotist aviator
Has a plan to fly around the world on one wing,

A feathery thing, wide as a warehouse but frail
As a taut sheet of rice paper, a sort of kite

That catches the sun as well as the wind and serves,
At least for him, third-generation explorer

Of inhospitable realms in extravagant
Devices, as a metaphysical conceit:

Life is a kind of flying in a delicate
Creation requiring constant readjustment,

Patience, exhaustion, daring, the ability
"To drop your certitudes, your common assumptions,

Your convictions sometimes, to be more flexible

To adapt to the unknown." Fair enough, although,

However exquisitely beautiful the plane,
However unprecedented the flight it makes,

However intrigued and even in awe we are

Of the realization of such a strange dream,

Do we really need fine wings to be hypnotized

By pieties of survival under this sun?

The Last Word

Last this, last that, last
The other thing. When is the last
Time I, in this truck, will drive
Down this road? When is
The last time I will drive down
A road in this truck? When
Is the last time I will drive?
When is the last time?

Gossip the Teller

The world has one good story.
We are the world's good story.
Good stories are what we crave.
Good stories are what we do.
God, we hate the lyric world.
How we like to blame ourselves
For being too much like it,

For betraying stories, or
For giving us what we want.
I knew an academic
Forged her data to pay bills,
A plumber who made air blue
With elaborate cursing
Narratives. Who have you known?

A Man Can Do That

A young academic with early onset
Something similar to dementia
Who actually hated academe

And played it for all he was worth
Began to contemplate the end
Of play that way, that day.

He piled a stack of magazines
And compiled a list of web links,
And he began to read and read.

He knew by the end of the week.
He was exhausted. He had watched
Middlebrow trade fire with highbrow,

A thousand rounds over his head.
He was the lonely gunman now.
He remembered nothing they'd said.

Eclosion

Now that the dog's dead, it's better,

Nicer to fight with the landlord.

It would be better still to be

God, if only so that there was
A dossier worthy of trust
To look at whenever the truth

About someone, say, a landlord,
Appeared in doubt. Then, you could check
And see who was worse, him or me,

And punish or forgive the worse
One of you two, accordingly.
No. I've got to get out of here.

I need to compose a goddamn
Poem, a goddamn good poem, maybe
A gosh-darn, golly-gee long poem,

One of those epics chock full of
Cockamamie shenanigans,
Malarkey, macaronic rhymes,

Allusions to fratres minor,
Moronic messages, battles,
Catalogues extensive and dense

As the 1976
Sears and Roebuck doorstop model
I pawed through in adolescence,

Searching out bras, watches, chess sets,
Swiss-Army knives, obsolescence.
Yes, I knew the latter was there,

Yes, prescient in my little self
Among crowded rags and home shops
Where all the obsolescence starts.

My aggrieved and aggravated
Conglomerate, egoic self,
Grandiose bric-a-brac shelved

For a few days, hours, or minutes
(Or, if we mean to be honest
In this most dishonest art form,

A few moments barely noticed)
Seeks redress now, to lawyer up,
Sue the future, sue the ages,

Sue God or goddamn poetry
Or goddamn landlords. Maybe own.
Lease or lien. You must pay the rent.

You must pay the rent. But I can't
Pay the rent. I can't pay the rent.
Then I'll pay the rent! My hero.

Luna Moth

Flying through the park one evening,
The weary, wary moth of May
Settled near the scholar's lantern
Took a hesitant step and said,

"It's not that I am unafraid.
I have some fuzzy commonsense
And I can feel flames might be bad.
I'm dim and dull. In my defense

However, I don't live for sun,
And my antennas have been tuned,
Inexactly, over eons
By desperate love of the moon.

I'm not at all fond of candles.
Those infernal things frighten me.
I want to be brighter. I can't
Surrender drab consistency.

But, unlike you, I only make
My moon-hungry, colorless flights
Toward the hot-headed mistake
Once." The scholar nodded. "Or twice."