AND SO DISASTER
LEANS HARD ON THE
LEANS HARD ON THE
ICE CAPADES NOW
Suspenders cannot keep up with time or fate -
barely holding as it is these things in place while
the barrelhouse piano plays a tune from 1948.
I remember Mary Holbrook and her downy face.
How she loved horses and old things and her
two tiny songbirds in their old wooden cage.
My own life was like that then - that was
the age. I can't complain so much.
-
Now I have a lever'd book by some Capuchin
brothers - don't they make toothpaste? - and
a sideboard nun named Sister Fidelity. It says Jesus
is expectation and only pure faith is real Salvation.
Oh, I wouldn't know, and how should they?
-
I wake up one day in Yeats. I wake up one day in
Eliot, Pound, Rilke and the rest right into the present
day - and that mess of Whitman and Ferlinghetti,
Sexton, Sarton, and Plath. What do I know about any
of that? Like the wizened old man in glasses and a
midget's white beard, picking his nose and examining
the train board schedules, exclaiming 'the 5:37, the 6:21,
6:39, 6:54, or 7:14.' Numbers are like flies on a screen,
I think to myself, swatting them away. (I am going
nowhere. This is where I'll stay).
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