I've read that when you cross the Cinovat Bridge
You'll meet a fair spirit who is the embodiment
Of your every good deed. Its size
Depends on those deeds' number and quality
The small ones cause no problems
Beyond asking to hide in your pockets
Or nestle in your carry-sack
(They know what's coming next) but the huge ones
Created by the truly good are different --
Scarcely able to move lest they flatten mountains
Or make insecurely fixed planets
Tremble in their orbits.
Du Fu and Li Po
Often find work
As figures in poems
By American poets
Intrigued and made jealous
By their ability to drink.
Sometimes Li Po
Is double-booked
And Du Fu, drinking
For both of them,
Must court the moon
While pretending he's Li Po.
Sometimes I turn my wrist to look at
A watch that isn't there. It's generally
The one I had for a while when I was eleven:
Complicated, with a dark rectangular face
And made by my grandfather to amuse himself.
Whenever it was set it would run very slightly fast
Until it was running five minutes ahead of the hour
Then, a different set of cogs taking over,
It remained five minutes ahead of the correct time.
You could cheat, of course, by setting it back
And letting it catch up but that missed the joke
Entirely.
My homeless men around a fire,
Tiring of waiting for me
To write of them again,
Rebuild their fire in Detroit
And slip into one of Philip Levine's poems.
Cleverly, they choose a poet
From whom I cannot demand their return
Since he died eight years ago. Are they
Now in every copy of his poem
Or just the ones I read?
There used to be street vendors carrying
Barrels of ink on their backs, calling
"Ink! Ink! Fine writing ink!" Funnels and measures
Hung from their waists, clinking as they walked.
If a poem didn't work back then you could blame
The ink for having gone stale or the quill
Plucked from a farm goose who'd never learned to fly.
Sometimes they'll deliver a day
Without a morning or with an afternoon
Plainly bought from the resurrection men
And glued clumsily in place.
Complaining is of absolutely no use;
It is for these emergencies the provident
Have filled chests and drawers and attics
With surplus hours whose serial numbers
Have been carefully sanded away.
You wouldn't believe how bored
Modern souls gets following us around
Wishing that if we can't be heroically good
We'd at least commit graver sins
Or ones requiring some imagination
Or colorful ones, with stripes on them.
It was no surprise to me to find
My soul accepts the occasional odd job
Which doesn't require a college degree
Or corporeality but I'm concerned
With the amount of time it spends
Brooding over The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
"Why," it asks me, "have you never watched
The Procession of Blue Horses and why
Have you never joined the ladies of the palace
Hilariously running about during First Month
Trying to poke each other with gruel-sticks?"
So. In your world
I'm a villain. At least
I gather I'm good at it
If a bit obsessive.
Here I'm ineffectual
Inconclusive, inept;
There my complex schemes
Always work flawlessly
And always to your hurt.
There's no reasoning
With deep-dyed malice;
Only flight can save you.
I
If Death isn't bleeding
If he has no scratches
On his face and his ankles
Are unbitten, know
His fight with my cat Oscar
Was rigged.
II
God, my cat Oscar
Won't care if you love him
Or not but I'd take it kindly
If you'd leave for him sometimes
A little butter on the end of a knife.
The sky hasn't changed since dawn;
Greatly daring, the temperature
Rose two degrees around noon
Got dizzy and cautiously
Returned to where it started.
The river birch tree branch
That's put out January buds
Is trembling but fools no one;
The wind went home hours ago.
In his car's trunk Sobek the crocodile
Has a suitcase filled with defective time
And impenitent light and an assortment
Of nuts and bolts and lengths of string;
He's trying, when he has a moment,
To make another Sobek.
Baba Yaga criticizes his design
"The snout's too long and the legs
Far too short. There is, besides,
A shifty look to him -- the sort of folk
Who pray to crocodile gods
Need one they can really trust."
(Wait -- Baba Yaga's in this poem?
She's not on the cast list and
She's been assigned no dressing room.
Never mind; she's here and adjustments
Must be made. Return the new moon;
Hang up an old one, three-quarters full;
Pin a star on the door of her hut
And take down the "no smoking" signs.)
When Plato died, his soul
Migrated to the World
Of Significant Forms. There,
He took two rooms in the house
Of the Essence of Plato
Whose shadow he was.
The two did not get along;
Plato marched with other shadows
Demanding a simulacrum of justice
For the unreal. Essential Plato
Reminded him that he'd once
Defined justice as doing one's job
And not being a busybody. "And what,"
Asked Plato, "besides this is the job
Of a deceased shadow?"
One of the many problems with being God
Is ubiquity which means He never
Knows the complex satisfaction
Of looking at His butterknife and, seeing
A smutch on it, deciding to walk
Across the kitchen to see if there's a clean one
In the drawer or lurking in the dishdrainer.
He is already at the drawer and in it; He is
The distance between the table and the drawer,
The drawer, the sink, the dishdrainer,
The knife with a smutch, the smutch
And the clean knife which may not exist.
More, he is the woman next door saying
"What's God doing, racketing around at this hour?"
