Land sakes is what we’re always exclaiming, because land is all we’re good for, all the sakes there are or ever will be. Each of us, fifty or so strong, has left a country crowded with kin or else lorded over, every inch of the land spoken for, down to the last hop of hare or squawk of fowl.
Forecasts say prepare for rain, so you will—
will keep at the ready tarp and cord, tents
and candles. And you will drink to the gulls
circling and the May sun high above rocks
When the new year came with whole flocks of doves
and jackdaws falling dead upon the fields,
landfills and roofs blackened with wings; the lakes
silvered with drumfish, their bellies bloated,
Arid stick of trail, waving ocotillo: O mottled cactus branch pointing beyond the pictographs of water sources—
I begin with Byron & Tennyson
& watch my students bury
their heads on desks; they rest
easier than the deceased. Dear 2PAC,
You wear those shoes like a shy mother.
You are a shy mother.
Mother, it’s snobbish nonsense;
all these chanson tramps
just prance prance prance about town
Night-drunk bees s(t)unned on October’s panes,
Their dried husks in the windshield of a late-night thought,
Home is just a breadth of road away.
Each limousine the pinwheel of a funeral.
50% cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The night nurse easing your thin bottom
The night nurse quibbling with the old GP:
The lobbied family becalmed around
Everything morphined: They more or less agree
Expostulate up! up! Route 9, Will.
Ignore the totality of immortality.
Drink up this anti-pastoral.
Hail the Just-a-Buck and Minnow Motors.
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
A little man walks
Through the golden dust
It is a summer’s morning
A morning fresh and mild
As other mornings, other sorrows
He walks across roads
Where no one else walks
With a tiny wooden coffin
Tucked under his arm
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