QUEENS

 

When the ghost of Anne Boleyn came by I rather hoped

That she'd shyly confess that had I only been alive

In 1526 Fat Henry wouldn't have stood a tinker's

Chance with her but, as usual, she pretended that

She'd just dropped by to see poems being made.  Tourists, she said,

Were saying they'd seen her spirit at Fotheringhay Palace

Looking shabby and forlorn and dropping her cut-off head

So that it bounced. "Can't they tell me from Mary Queen of Scots?

I'm almost a foot shorter and more delicately made;

It took three axe-blows to take off her head; one sword-stroke

Did for me. Her head's lips moved for fifteen minutes afterwards

While mine maintained a discrete and politic silence."

6 A.M.

Pieces of darkness settle
On birch tree branches
Deciding -- provisionally --
To be a flock of crows

DOPPELGANGERS IN THEIR YOUTH

Since he's three years older than I am I never saw
My brother when he was a baby but there are
An infinite number of pictures of him every one of which
I've copied so I cannot be mistaken. The child
Pictured in a book I saw is his double and, ten months old,
Peers at me with that "I am an impenetrable mystery " look
That I could never master . The two former babies
Are roughly of an age; perhaps they met;
If they did, dollars to donuts it did no go well.

A BRUSH WITH FAME

 

It turns out that a writer I've never much liked

Had a chicken when she was six years old

That walked backwards. This apparently made

A fair stir; there was a newsreel about the two of them.

Knowing this is a relief. If her ghost comes by

Wanting to know what I think of her books

I'll say "Nemind that. Talk to me about chickens."

ATONEMENT DAY SERVICE

 

From their high gallery the women

Look through the pierced wall

At row after row of small ghosts

And Death himself, wrapped in a shawl,

His bony fingers clutching an old siddur

At which he never glances. 

A debate, of course, breaks out;

Some say that if God asks them 

They'll remind Him that some things 

Can not simply be forgiven.

WORD

"Days like this," said God,

"I'm glad I don't exist." 

PICTURE

 

The ox pauses, one hoof in the air;

The girl leading him by a thin rope

(Which he could break in a second if he chose)

Has stopped and looks off into space

She hears something or has just, perhaps, interceped

A message meant for you but delivered

To her, nearly two centuries away

Just as the afternoon turns to evening

Near the sixty-sixth station of the Kisokaido Road.