Excerpt from 'Collected Poems'

Scotch Tape Body

I never thought,

forty years ago,

taping my poems into a notebook,

that one day the tape

would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off

and that I’d find myself on hands and knees

groaning as I picked the pieces

up off the floor

one by one

Of course no one thinks ahead like that

If I had

I would have used archival paste

or better yet

not have written those poems at all

But then I wouldn’t have had

the pleasure of reading them again,

the pleasure of wincing

and then forgiving myself,

of catching glimpses of who I was

and who I thought I was,

the pleasure—is that the word?—of seeing

that that kid really did exist.

The Death Deal

Ever since that moment

when it first occurred

to me that I would die

(like everyone on earth!)

I struggled against

this eventuality, but

never thought of

how I’d die, exactly,

until around thirty

I made a mental list:

hit by car, shot

in head by random ricochet,

crushed beneath boulder,

victim of gas explosion,

head banged hard

in fall from ladder,

vaporized in plane crash,

dwindling away with cancer,

and so on. I tried to think

of which I’d take

if given the choice,

and came up time

and again with He died

in his sleep.

Now that I’m officially old,

though deep inside not

old officially or otherwise,

I’m oddly almost cheered

by the thought

that I might find out

in the not too distant future.

Now for lunch.

Grasshopper

It’s funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,

as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.

It’s a bad idea to fall asleep

while flying a helicopter:

when you wake up, the helicopter is gone

and you are too, left behind in a dream,

and there is no way to catch up,

for catching up doesn’t figure

in the scheme of things. You are

who you are, right now,

and the mind is so scared it closes its eyes

and then forgets it has eyes

and the grasshopper, the one that thinks

you’re a helicopter, leaps onto your back!

He is a brave little grasshopper

and he never sleeps

for the poem he writes is the act

of always being awake, better than anything

you could ever write or do.

Then he springs away.

Kit

Tamburlaine crashed through

around 1375. Marlowe

had written his play by 1587.

The intervening years bled

into history, the fourteenth

a very bloody century.

Good that Marlowe waited

to be born sufficiently later,

thus avoiding the real

Tamburlaine, who might have

torn his head off.

But he died young anyway,

did Marlowe, not even thirty.

The “high astounding terms”

he promised he delivered.

Still it makes me mad

that he got stabbed to death,

though I have to admit

it’s part of his appeal.

The Curvature of Royalty

One of the surprising things about modern life

is that quite a few countries still have kings and queens

and palaces for them to live in

as well as great wealth to use or even have!

These kings and queens accept the idea

that they should be kings and queens,

just as many people born to money

accept their wealth as natural

and most poor people assume that poverty is their destiny

no matter what they say to the contrary.

Everything points toward Fate:

the rocks are as they are, the clouds too, the giraffe

and the cantaloupe are all lined up

facing an imaginary point of origin

like lines in a diagram of perspective,

and though the lines bend slightly through time

everyone bends with them, so the dung beetle

remains a figure of comedy.

Further along the chain of evolution

he becomes the court jester

juggling words and jumping around

in the debris of falling syntax.

The King laughs mightily, the Queen quietly,

for though they have become playing cards

they still can be amused,

and at any moment they can roll off the cards

and onto the floor of their palace

where they can laugh all they want

and the servants will keep looking straight ahead.

Urn Burial

Sir Thomas Browne said

that it is useless to erect monuments

in the hope of being remembered

by generations far into the future

since the future itself

will cease to exist. That is,

the world would be destroyed soon,

hence "'Tis too late to be ambitious."

Apparently this belief was widely held

by English people in the seventeenth century.

My grandmother, in the twentieth century,

took a curious pleasure in pursing her lips and stating

"The Bible says the world will last

one thousand years but not two," which meant that I

could not live past the age of 58

and might be there for The End of the World.

Fortunately I did not believe her

and unfortunately it made me think

she was a little bit crazy and certainly thoughtless

in saying such a thing to her young grandson.

The Bible also says that Methuselah

lived to the age of 969. They should have chosen

a more credible number, for, as Joe Brainard asked,

"If a hundred-year-old man can barely stand up,

can you imagine what it would be like to be five hundred?"

I can barely imagine what it is like to be any age,

though I can imagine what it is like to be dead

because I have woken up after a deep sleep

with no memory of it.

So you don't have to imagine anything

to know what being dead is like.

One less thing to worry about!

Unless, of course, I'm wrong about the afterlife,

and fiery demons prod you with red-hot tridents

into the writhing maw of an inferno of glistening snakes.

Fortunately this happens only to Christians—

fortunately for me, that is.

Sir Thomas Browne was a Christian

but I hope he believed he'd go to Paradise,

for it seems too bad such a wise and learnèd man

should think that he would go to Hell.

Browne lived to 77, to the day.

I'm not sure the exactitude means anything here,

but for his time he was quite old,

and possibly surprised to wake up and find himself

892 years younger than Methuselah, or wake up

and find himself at all, in bed, and still on earth!

Then he died.

"I didn't plan on living this long,"

said my other grandmother, at 96,

"but I just keep on breathing."

We Three Kings

We three kings of Orient

are

disoriented.

We came all this way

only to get lost?

“Get lost!” is what

they said

when we said

“Are we here?”

Now we are really lost

and disillusioned too.

It’s true

our cigars were loaded

on the backs of imaginary camels

but we thought the world

could use a good laugh.

I guess we were wrong.

Death

Let’s change the subject.

In the hills an occasional noise—

shotgun here, bloodcurdling shriek there, hey

nonny nonny, and two boys, lost, weird, homeless, starving, about to be

eaten by a big black bear! O muse avert thine eyes!

(I will look for you.)

The bear shambles forth

on his hind legs, so shaggy they are

and smelly, and waves his forepaws in the air as if

he were erasing the blackboard on which

our fate is written, and the boys have hair

standing up on their heads and the trees lean back

as far as trees can lean and not fall down, they

hate that hair! I do too! (Muse, don’t look yet.)

But then a man comes through the woods

with comb and scissors—it’s barber Tom, come

to give those boys a haircut and the bear one too,

if it wants, and it does, and all three share

in this tonsorial moment, hair

falling softly on the forest floor.

Walking with Walt

When everyday objects and tasks

seem to crowd into the history you live in

you can’t breathe so easily you can hardly breathe at all

the space is so used up,

when yesterday there was nothing but.

Ah, expansive America!

you must have existed. Otherwise no Whitman.

It’s funny that America did not explode

when Whitman published Leaves of Grass,

explode with amazement and pride, but

America was busy being other

than what he thought it was and I grew up

thinking along his lines and of course now

oh well

though actually at this very moment

the trees are acting exactly the way they did

when he walked through and among them,

one of the roughs, as he put it,

though how rough I don’t know I think he was just carried away

as we all are, if we’re lucky

enough to have just walking

buoy us up a little off the earth

to be more on it

Inaction of Shoes

There are many things to be done today

and it’s a lovely day to do them in

Each thing a joy to do

and a joy to have done

I can tell because of the calm I feel

when I think about doing them

I can almost hear them say to me

Thank you for doing us

And when evening comes

I’ll remove my shoes and place them on the floor

And think how good they look

sitting? . . . standing? . . . there

Not doing anything