The two girls -- Jenny and Lena -- played chess
And tried in turn to teach each new baby brother
But Barney, Pinney and Ase were born poker players
Impatient with a game where bluffs and tells
Played so small a part. With the youngest boy,
My grandfather Joe, they found success.
When he was nine or so he began, I don't know why,
Keeping count of his wins and losses against them
Continuing to meticulously alter the numbers,
Occasionally, for years after his sisters died.
When my brother decided our parents hated him
And always had, he cast free the stories
They told of how clever, lovable a child he'd been
I've kept them for him -- along with his two
Imaginary friends and his grief for a real one
Run over by a bus -- against the unlikely day
He wants to hear them one last time.
With Hermes missing, some of my relatives
Take over his duties. My Great Uncle Dan,
Old and unrelenting, is acting god of travelers.
My grandfather Joe answers thieves' prayers.
Edith, my father's sister who died young,
Has a provisional psychopomp's license
But, it's become plain, doesn't actually know
Where Hell is. She leads an increasing troop of the dead
Around the City all day; at night she puts them to bed
In the attic; as pro tem god of merchants I'm exploring
The commercial possibilities of dead souls.
St. Bernard once excommunicated
An army of flies who were buzzing about
Inside a church. Startled to find they had
Immortal souls, the flies left but
Their descendants buzz still. One of them
Buzzes about me now, saying "You think
A swatter frighten me, I, who've been cut off
From the illimitable grace of God?"
My slow-witted and elderly shadow
Needs to stop drinking. Last night
It accused a teetotal street lamp
Of cruelly lopping off some vital inches
Of its true stature and making its head
A mere elongated blob. It was all I could do
To get it home; (to avoid a scene I agreed
To crawl the last few blocks).
A hot day; God rests in the shadow of an atom
Nor sleeping nor waking, sorting through loose-woven prayers
Answering them any old how, dispatching angels
So small even He isn't sure they're real.
On the train last night one of
Stevie Smith's tall and angular angels
Was punching tickets, sending passengers
Places to which they had
No intention of going. I am now
In Hy Brasil which has no trains leaving
For the next thousand years and,
Technically ,
Does not exist
During the hard times brought on
By Phillip II's 1596 repudiation of debt
Christ economizes, replacing the Apostles
With a dozen crash-test dummies. El Greco
Draws them tentatively coming to life. Peter's beard
Is unconvincing. Thaddaeus has two shadows;
Bartholomew none. James the Less wonders
"Would I look more distinguished if I wore
A tarnished silver halo, tipped at an angle?"
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."
Pieces of darkness settle
On birch tree branches
Deciding -- provisionally --
To be a flock of crows
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.
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."
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.
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.
The angel assigned to check on Schrodinger's cat
Has had her job since 1935. After each visit
She submits a pre-printed form that says
"Schrodinger's cat is/is not/is not not alive."
Under "Additional Notes" she sometimes writes
"Changed litter. Fed. Cat wants to know
Why Schrodinger never takes a turn in box;
Told her I don't make rules and have never
Had a raise or been named Employee of the Month."
An angel comes by now and then
And knocks on the box, saying
"Cat! Are you alive?"
The cat says "yes" or "no"
Or "yes and no" or "neither yes
Nor no" or, if it's feeling cranky,
"Who is it wants to know?"
When I was in college I wrote
Any number of poems in which Death and I
Were close friends. In some we rode motorcycles;
(The wind blew his cowl back as we sped along;
How hard he worked to keep his robes untangled!)
In others we wandered or fought or looked for jobs
Or called each other on the phone or looked at stars
Until we fell --almost -- into the sky.
I haven't written such poems in years.
The Death I deal with now is young, efficient
Humorless; he wouldn't know
One end of a scythe from the other.
