On this, the first day of the newest year,
like baggage never lost, another missed
performance.  It follows me around here -
that stench of last week, of procrasti-
nation, the falling off of lines, flip charts,
of disappointed agendas, valets,
cabbies, elevator riders.  An art,
they say, of keeping up with yesterdays.
May auld remembrance be forgot, never
brought to mind and all the things I should have
done not be posted online.  Whatever.
Even undone is some done.  A weak salve
for the guilty is still a band-aid fix
stopping the sound of the clock’s blasted ticks.

Some Czech had told him that each of the patrol dogs wore a sign that said Hund.  Why? Said the Czechs, and the Germans said, Because that is a hund.  –“Away From Her,” Alice Munro

When the singular coyote

Photo: Mav/Wiki

with the stripped tail
started roaming the hill
behind the schoolyard
and beside the schoolyard
I warned the children.

They wanted to know why
she was alone,
if it was a she,
and where were her friends,
what did she eat,
where did she come from,
why did she live there
and where did her tail go?

We phoned the city
and listened to a recording
about five minutes long
telling us this is nature
and not to be worried
cover our garbage
and close the fence.

That they can’t do anything
and even if they could
it wouldn’t last
so be happy with that.

We left them a message
saying the kids are in danger
and people have to work
we can’t be happy with that.

I told the kids to walk home
around the playground
a different way
to stay together
to run and yell
to act bigger
not to look her in the eyes
should she come to them.

A coyote is not a dog, I said,
even though she smiles at you
she’ll take what she can get
because she is hungry
and that is her nature
a coyote is a wild thing
and cannot be tamed.

I don’t know why I
simply don’t believe it
leaving meat outside
my door for her
after everyone’s in bed.

There’s finality in a broken thing,
to the attic or to the trash.

What to do with an erratic thing?
Counter, closet, cupboard, smash.

Pomegranate blood on the cutting board
stain the wood, my fingers,
everything but the knife.

Past histories spill out
in six lines while survivors are dug
from the canals below.

Here, a wounded soldier, and here,
a severed pirate’s eye gaping
at Persephone in her catacomb.

Teeth slip on the gelatin of the season,
crunching the core of winter
and tasting the sour months left behind.

Stories without endings

Photo: Chin tin tin/Wiki

aren’t a moral lesson
in imagination.

Like waffles served
without chicken –

I’ve never tried them,
so I wouldn’t know
what I was missing

to begin with.

Who expects proof when all of nature shouts
the truth?  It is only you

and you and they
that talk of the sudden beingness
of yesterday

like it just appeared; a satin lady
in a box, one to leer upon
while the man

in tails and swift hands looks
away.  You were never
supposed to see Him anyway.

When I checked the obituaries,
you weren’t dead yet.

Instead I checked the hooka joints
and found you with the poets.

Does the smoke around your head
mean disillusionment
or just another winter?

I write this for a Valentine’s Day contest in 2006 in which I won $25 for books.  The theme was chocolate, I think.  I’m posting it here because I was reading the book I bought with the money today (Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927 – 1979, especially “The Art of Losing”).  Here’s my p-Ohm.  It’s very syrupy (and what the heck is a sky that has a scent anyway?  Groan.).  I think I’ve hardened over the years!

Chocolate People

i believe the initial cocoa bean ripened
in the honeyed pool of flesh
above your collarbone.

i can imagine the first harvest
when women in red scarves
stood upon your chest

stooping to gather sticky husks
into flat wooden sieves
which balanced on ample hips

tossing the hulls high, high
against a sky that speaks
the scent of ancient tigers.

their men, clothed in sheen,
walk across your belly,
to collect the tanned seeds

caressing the gleam, inhaling
the bitter burnt, never tiring
of the silken slide off fingertips.

these dark apparitions still play
in your hollow places
and at the corners of your mouth;

the shadows of chocolate people
that toiled this syrup soil of you
and swam in your cocoa ocean.

The hapless soul, a water ring on a coffee table
and you, the bent nail in the door.

All of this, yet nothing
you haven’t heard before.

Senseless ramblings from the radio station
set in between the dials.

I see your name tumbling off bus stop benches,
swirled in graffiti on the school brick wall
and on the outside of coffee cups in the street’s litter.
Not really,
not really when I read them again.
More careful this time.