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.

A Kind of Poem

 

 

It’s kind of a big day, the winter solstice, kind of important

that two planets will converge 

for the first time in 800 years.

 

* 

 

800 years ago there were all kinds of meanings for “kind”

that now are said to be obsolete,

though they’re kind of not, if you think about it. 

“Kind” could stand in for genitalia back then,

which kind of makes sense, since it also meant both “generation” 

and inherited features that marked one

as member of a clan or tribe or family. Kin.

 

*

 

“Kin” still means related by blood,

though it’s said more in the South

than in the North. It’s been enlarged

to allow for connections beyond DNA,

when family’s not enough.

 

* 

 

Anne Sexton’s refrain, “I have been her kind,”

is a vow of empathy and solidarity 

among women, even the most abject

in our world’s long history. I return this gift in kind

when I tell her, Anne, I have been your kind,

and pretzel my legs the way she did

and leave behind wreckage I try to repair

with a compulsive convergence of words. 

  

* 

 

We aren’t kind to one another anymore. Some

reserve their kindness for the ones 

whose skin is kin. The pundits lament

our tribalism to explain sedition.

 

 *

 

Saturn and Jupiter converged when the Magi 

sought the newborn Christ, which is why 

it’s being called the Christmas star. 

 

What kind of consolation can we find in that 

amid plague and graft, we who were taught 

that this is a different kind of civilization

than the brutal empires of the past? 

Is it still possible for us to unite 

in the name of a warm and fuzzy babykind? 

 

*

 

Always be kind, the saying goes, because 

you never know what someone else is going 

through. It’s become a kind of cliché, 

but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

In a world of heartless rulers, kind people 

go unrecorded, undiscovered planets 

that sometimes converge to change things 

big and small. It’s kind of a big day, 

every day, to seek that kind of convergence. 

Photo by Mishal Ibrahim on Unsplash.com

Love Song to Pixillated Foxes

@hourlyFox shows up in-between outrageous news.
In one, two kits faux-fighting; in another, one is caught
by the camera in a searching and fearless moral inventory
out in the middle of a well-mown field. I have leased
out my soul to these animals, no strings attached save
their promise to keep being foxes, living on the fringe
of the mess we've made, scoring petty carnage to fill
out their streamlined bodies, staring clear-eyed into night.
Sure, I've watched the YouTube videos of eccentric Britons
with pet foxes—the best buddy movies of all, IMHO,
but I prefer these freeze-frames of them in the quasi-wild,
insouciant beyond survival, russet streaks against green.
Wherever they're about to go next I can't go, though
it's comforting to be with them for an hour or so.

COVID May Gray

There is no color in my world except the redbud out the bathroom 

                                                                    window,
the royal blue sweater I'm wearing, the reticent green of the spider 

                                                                    plant
creeping out of a nest of dry brown coxae. May neighborhood 

                                                                       memories:
cut grass and red sauce from an open window I passed at the corner
of Mayville and Elmbank, a house with canvas awnings and neat lawn
setting off the pale robes of the virgin the lady of the house
looked out at for sustenance, her hands deep in Palmolive and grease.
I take the pink azalea as a symbol of the nation: two roots piping out
of the miserly clay, one leading to a gnarl of beige unfruitfulness
while the other flowers the imperative of spring, an asymmetrical song.
So that's another color, giving the lie to my assertion. If I look hard,
this poem's whole premise falls apart. The husband at the corner
of Mayville and Elmbank turned out to be abusive. I never saw the 

                                                                                    wife.
If we seek and ingest as much color as we can, will that make us 

                                                                                 immune?