aristocrat. O tempora, oh
mores: that the classics had fallen so low.

It was maddening that literary civilization was within a hair's
breadth at being snuffed by the ordinary convention of task
bearing.

Being a poet, so basic to everything, didn't even show up on
Manpower's computer scan.

The universities didn't care they were having the times of their
lives parsing verbs and conjugating declensions, telling
graduates "the pendulum will swing".

The best retort for that was the pithy epigram of the working
man toiling in honest sweat within the secure bounds of a trade.

AT THE RED THROAT

In youth, Death was
a puny boy possessing but
wormy hands & fleshless fingers
as in Witch Hazel
or Scrooge's Future Ghost
--that insipid Evil One
Hansel so easily outwitted
in a gingerbread house.

Time brought increased notoriety.
Saucy times with a soupcon of respect
for the artful dodger.
Givens change, an armful of
orange lilies, limp & loathsome,
on a tombstone door
before trumpets of rain.

Graven images. Lifeless stone.
Death became stone.
Stone empty. The maggot emptiness
burrowing into chiselled easel and
the stone-cutter's savage magic.
Just a bitty stone
to herald a passing.

Night-jars.
Old straw-chairs with
a broom pronouncing
the wall base with its touch empty,
the empress of bandages
leaning to rags

On table scraps,
sorry gloom of an old building
by a pickled lake
leaking into ebb twilight.

The coronation of the nightmare,
the moon with her billowing robes and withered spoon
unfolding midstream ...
la cauchemar ou
denudee soiree
to discover, with wonder, ices with sherbet
reek like nightsweats;
a windsail of pooled light
thru puddles of trees.

Brackish backwater--
thoughts of black ice
and huddled masses of silver
breaking thru the sun's
winter curtain as erupting coins.

SHAMROCK

Is there anything prettier than that--
to stare into your manifold spaces
toward the hook & vine
of cathedral leaps,
the vaults & crypts
as go-betweens of an earthy worship,
the supine female form?

By quiet pools,
thrush in the thicket
with red berry behind its eye,
miniature sun
proceeding by the branch
to undress the bark
with leaves as
passionate culprits
kissing dark.

Clasped hands
upward lies the sky
my masterpi