Don’t give me some dark, inscrutable muse
With faux chaste coyness and misleading smiles;
Give me a memory that I can use
To carry me through the endless gray miles
Of venal ensigns on a windswept deck,
Days sighed away under monochrome skies.
I’ll recall a broad (and she’ll let you check)
With the fleet’s emblem tattooed on both thighs,
A bawd who can take a beer and a shot,
Who’ll let you wear the dress, if you prefer.
She’ll let you have even if you have not;
God bless those sailors who sail in her.
Who needs some girl who’s all cashmere and class?
Give me the **** you can grab by the ***.

Marriage is, the priest intones, sitting hunched over his desk
Like a card sharp trying to figure if he can fill an inside straight,
Not unlike love itself, the deepest and most beguiling of all mysteries,
And I repress the urge to snap To you, certainly
(The man has, after all, said no to the pleasures of the flesh,
Though he must be at least slightly aware of their existence,
As his gaze often returns to the telltale swelling of my midriff.)
He is, you have to suppose, right in terms of the big picture,
Because love is certainly ******* complicated:
For the good father, it’s the ecstasy of the saints,
The little bit of that he taps into with the sip of the wine,
The dutiful nibble of the wafer.
For some of us, it’s a ***-for-tat bargain,
Me scratching your back and you scratching mine.
Then again, it’s your mother weeping over coffee
(Judiciously augmented with an additional kick)
At three in the morning when you finally work up the nerve
To tell her what’s what and what will be down the line.
More often than not, the whole thing
Is like walking through a blackberry patch,
All thicketed and maze-like after years of neglect,
And you end up tired, *****, and scratched all to hell
To get to some berries that likely aren’t at all sweet, anyhow.

Still, the show must go on:
The congregation must have their white dress
(Folks came from out of town, after all,
And the uncles on my mother’s side
Have kicked in for an expensive and utterly pointless silver service)
So I walk down this aisle as devoted cousins beam from their pews
And various great aunts wear their fixed smiles
In various shades of red and disapproval
As the organist (near ninety now,
Flubbing notes and missing pedals,
Her tempo unnaturally adagio)
Fights the wedding march to a draw
I have fixed my mind on playing my part as best as I can,
Giving my brightest high-school-yearbook smile
As I run through rice and whispers,
Double-timing it to the back seat of Uncle John’s tank-like Continental
(Long and black as the ride at the end of our days)
To ride to the Legion Hall at the edge of the village,
Where I will dance and shine, and blithely toss the bouquet
For brides are beautiful
And brides are holy, holy, holy
Yet in the midst of my revelry I chance to look upwards
Toward the stained-glass windows,
And the light waxes and swells until it is nothing but a glow
Which threatens to engulf everything in its path.

She is there at the water’s edge
Most any day she can wheedle and whine her mother to the water,
From the intermittent teasing warmth of late March
And all through the languid North Country summer
Until such time she is there,
Mitten-clad and scarf-wrapped like some miniature Tut,
Bracing against January’s razor-blade winds in those last few days
Until the few gurgling rills and streamlets are nothing but ice
All the way up to the big river in Ogdensburg.
She scrambles down to the bridge abutment
Hard by the Riverside Cemetery
Dropping a Popsicle-stick craft
(Its sails snips of cloth or bits of green-bar paper,
Its cargo a message stapled into a sandwich bag)
Into the river, sent on its way
With a brief and whispered benediction.
Most times, the craft founders almost immediately,
Taken under by a sudden gust of wind or large stick
Perhaps a carelessly tossed forty-ounce Hamm’s empty,
But on occasion the boat will stay upright and precariously totter along
Until it slips out of sight past the bend near the hospital,
And she claps her hands, convinced that yet another one
Is on its way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the great blue ocean.
An onlooker might cluck and shake his head,
And tell her that such a toy
Would never make it outside the village limits,
Certainly never past the big bridge on Route 58 at Elmdale
Or the one further on up past Pope Mills,
Let alone to the Seaway,
But he might check himself, perhaps sensing
That there had been disenchantment
For one life already,
So he might instead make gentle inquiries
As to what messages are carried in the plastic baggies.
She would (her voice all mock-sterness though the eyes betray her)
Answer simply That is between me and the angelfish.

It was one of those places which,
We were instructed with stern tones
And the occasional smack to the ****,
That we were not to go,
A place of childhood sing-song
(River man, river man
He’ll sink his teeth right in your can)
And, later, of clandestine beers and smokes,
Or furtive encounters
With steady sweethearts and short-term solutions.
He’d set up something akin to a lean-to
Hard by a reasonably well-sheltered bank,
One wall of rocky dirt, the other comprised of lumber
Which had been abandoned or purloined or somewhere in between,
And if you resided in that narrow niche
Where you were too old to be scared shitless of him,
And too young to dismiss him out of hand,
He was of a mind to accept a bit of company,
Possibly share a bit of somewhat-warm, store-brand soup,
Even a bit of coffee, if you’d developed the taste for it.
He’d been in the merchant marine, or so he claimed,
Driven there by the search for some constancy
He’d never been privy to in a land-locked world,
Figuring the ceaseless expanse of the ocean
And the regularity of shipboard routine the vessel to all that.
He’d been deeply disappointed, of course,
The waters a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of blues, grays, and purples,
Alternately hammock-smooth and Gothic furious,
All in nothing even mildly evocative of the regularity of the seasons,
And so, he intimated, he’d jumped ship in some unglamorous port,
Living on the run (though for how long was an open question,
And the whos and whys of his prospective captors
Not a subject that he nor his listeners were of a mind to broach)
But he’d never quite been able to shake the lure of the water,
And so he’d set up housekeeping by this particular stream,
Convinced the current held some epiphany, some augury
Which occasional suggested but never truly spoke to him
(Can’t trust the water, and can’t trust the land,
And that hain’t left me much ‘n terms of other options,
He was wont to cackle twice or thrice an hour.)
One day, before some of us were of a mind to see him leave,
He was gone, leaving no trace behind,
Perhaps run off by some officious sheriff’s deputy,
Perhaps by his own leave, searching for some river bed
Which spoke more sweetly, more distinctly,
Or perhaps he came to believe there was a third dwelling option
Somewhere on the banks of the jet stream its ownself.

He had been this month’s bright, shining hope,
Producing bits of promising prose poking out of obscure journals
And higher-brow magazines here and there
Like shoots of tiny grasses between cracks in the pavement.
Then there was a novel--not good, really,
But flecked with sufficient promise
To leave the arbiters of culture wanting more,
But he departed the publication party
With a foot heavy on the pedal and the tires light on tread,
Thus precluding a sequel.

And so he remains, beyond the slow decay of time
Or the clucking and tut-tutting of critics
Who, bored, cranky, and ultimately undone by their own limitations,
Cannot help but add the dross of a touch of bronze
To all their former golden children.
Yet as his peers grow older, their lives in various states of disarray,
Their legacies vacillating between disrepute and utter disinterest,
He remains, on the dust jackets of first editions
Or inside the covers of the quaintly priced paperbacks
With their quasi-psychedelic artwork,
Completely untouched by the passing days and years,
His smile bright, hair dark and curly,
His potential limitless and unsullied.

I am the Lorax, who once spoke for the trees
In the hope of bringing progress to its knees
But now I have grown somewhat older and tired,
My outlook and thought process being rewired
(Sometimes to see forest, you must clear the trees.)

Examine the case of the Brown Bar-ba-loots
Whose interests for so long I worked in cahoots.
Could such timid beasts truly thrive in the wild
So innocent, trusting, submissive, and mild?
(My former assertions I strongly refute.)

Why, see how they frolic and scamper in zoos;
How can one watch them and steadfastly refuse
To see how much better their lot is today
As joy for our children as opposed to prey
(A happy condition where no one can lose.)

Ah, scoff the nihilists, but Truffula Trees,
Those havens for birds and those homes for the bees.
Why, what do you say now that they are all gone,
Removed to make way for some suburban lawn?
(These angry young men—O Lord, take them all please!)

I gently remind them it’s just nature’s way,
That some species go while other ones stay,
The carrier pigeon’s no longer alive
Yet somehow we manage to live—indeed, thrive!
(In the face of brute logic, they’ve little to say.)

So don’t be dismayed or frightened or leery
Of doomsday projections outlined by theory
Suggesting that our time on this earth may be done;
Consider the caged Bar-ba-loot having fun
(And we hear fish do quite well in Lake Erie.)

There are notions which prove impervious
To the forces of nature, the whims of politicians and philosophers
Perhaps even, in the final analysis, to time itself.  
Tell me, what epiphany is realized
Through the parsing of prepositions from the Hebrew or Latin,
Why should we hoot and shake our fists in some battle to the death
Over some microtonal discord lurking behind a bassoon?
What is revealed in the lolling gait of the harlequinesque priest
Promenading down the aisle, incense burner clanking in time?
Observe, rather, the ancient, scarf-clad women among the muzhiks,
Bent as if entreating the very ground itself,
As they feel, smell, taste the soil,
Unearthing what peasants and saints
Believe to be the fingerprints of God,
And what is revealed to them in that rudimentary yet holy act
Is that which brings down Czar and prime minister,
That which exposes the proclamations and directives of commissars
As supercilious cant, the howling of a lost child into the wind.