The Cadences

for Jeff Oaks

Is it possible those midnight fights, those paternal rants, 

the resolute flutes of our mothers interjecting, made us poets? 

Does anything approach the condition of poetry 

more than drunken monologues, with their high winds, 

clatter-hail, momentary patter approaching reason, 

colossal crescendos, secondary pleas? 

I’ve known a wailing baby, compulsively barking dogs. 

When those fell to quiet: stanza breaks. 

But when the ranting of a father ends, 

when the beast of rage is truly finally asleep—

amid the breathing of the heating vents, the static 

in the blankets, the lidding of the mother’s eyes— 

the long lines wriggle out like earthworms after rain, 

staining the pavement with their earnestness.

Wildfire Smoke, 2023

Today Pittsburgh is the place

my Irish ancestors knew 

when they got here to labor 

and never return to Co. Galway. 

The sun's a fiery desperate yolk 

in the viscous gray-white sky. 

The tall buildings downtown 

stand like ancient monuments 

made ghostly by the fog of time. 

What a shock it must have been 

for them to leave the endless 

rolling green and the silver-blue 

of the sea for "hell with the lid off." 

They did this dutifully, imagining 

a people going forward into the next 

& the next centuries, imagining how 

clean the air would be once we all 

had enough money, how blue the sky, 

how clear as god's own eyes the stars.

Waking Up from Succession

 

The rich people show is over. 

Prepare for the next rich people show. 

Pay hundreds to watch their folly, 

enriching those who play them, 

enriching those who write them, 

enriching everyone involved in 

training our eyes on a story. 

It's like someone has died, but not. 

It'd be best to let the characters go, 

even when you want to take their story 

further—in thin air, or in discourse 

with others who can see the cobweb 

more clearly than they see the path 

it's hung across. Pick up a book. 

Your neurons will do other dances. 

Wake up the next day and just live 

rather than consume imagined lives 

or those construed through symbols 

on a page. Be mindful of the body 

you inhabit. There is no grief 

less noble than grief over nothing. 

Even Rome said so at the end—

                    they're nothing.

Thus Spoke the Pollsters

 

Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry is a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. A white man with gray hair, wearing a black formal suitcoat has his right hand raised to his ear. Behind him a white woman in a white robe confidently and authoritatively places her hand near the top of his head.

 

tHE mAsS oF MEn LivE lIVeS

The chigger in my shin is gone now.

I only knew what it was once I'd extracted it,

with the aid of reading and magnifying glasses.
I've had it for days, wondering why it hurt so much

and how I'd incurred it, a little reddish-brown mark,

good likeness to a scab.

                                        At the same time,

I am trying to be mindful, stay sane

and not think, for the moment, about

the ongoing insurrection. So forgive me

my teeny-tiny spider-larva navel-gazing.

I've lived so long—since just before JFK

was shot—and never had a chigger,

never had to fear my nation

was under attack by 

a chunk of its populus.

                                        How I got it.

Forgetting Girl Scout fundamentals

about dressing for high grasses and brush,

I walked through an overgrown lot

with the dog on our way to the river

wearing shorts and ankle socks (I think

I may have other chiggers, elsewhere

on my body). It's September

and yeasty out there.

                                On top of insurrection,

pandemic! on the disco-ball globe,

which just happens to be the only place

we know. I face a class of live students in 48 hours,

and I'm afraid I've forgotten how to teach

with their bodies surrounding me,

both dangers and buoys, and how

will I hear if everyone is masked?

It's the babies that get you, with chiggers.

They wait passively for your grazing flesh

and know in an instant you're what they need.

For several clueless days, mine hung out on me,

getting vital nourishment until I tweezed it out.

No harm except skin irritations, which shouldn't scar.

Year-End Sonnet

Image: Detail from Dali's Alice in Wonderland Who Stole the Tarts

It’s the end of 2020 & my sloth knows no bounds 

& I am fortunate to work at home & have a home 

to work in. It’s the end of the plague year, not the end

of the plague, & I’ve seen America balls-out naked,

can’t unsee it now: the greed & self-centeredness. 

It’s where we found ourselves, my daughter said 

on the phone today. And to our great good fortune, 

I replied. It’s the end of 2020, & both can be true 

at once. We can love what is great about the place 

while despising its brutality. My sloth will soon 

be getting a kick in the ass once work resumes. 

My sloth will slither out like the year we didn’t want; 

together they can binge-watch a brighter time 

from their spot below the bleachers, like in Heathers.