AN OLD-FASHIONED
A good teacher instructs by swatting flies.
An elephant never forgets an excuse.
What made the tick choose anthropology?
Try this: repair a hubbub.
Studies suggest people who speak in tongues never eat with you again.
And that pieman once thought to be a berry (now a wooden boat)
died of seahorse strokes.
He used to baby-sit Leadbelly.
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
The father in exile stripped of his sundial borrows the equator for a belt.
All his life his life had yet to start, coming of age was the end.
You think about genetics, would think, well,
maybe a whole other life is possible. Maybe noon would rather be midnight.
The humble Hellebore becomes a rock star thanks to intelligent design. Coziness
cradles him like rage. “He hid under his bed when he lived with his mother!”
One branch of the family is antiseptic, another a lecture on prickers.
Everything else is made up.
HOURS DISMEMBERED
Two nightcaps at the Schola Cantorum and suddenly we’re on sleeping terms. A cow
cut into calves.
True or false: Infantilism is a kind of anorexia of the soul symptomatic of the grownup
desire for a second childhood.
What are the roots of enchantment, that resinous substance in which our chauffeur
performed the trick of lowering one eyelid?
On the whole, sinking in poetry fills a hole.
There was even talk of a cave — no one’s life was safe. Let’s face it gesture is one
of the pleasures of having sex, like gathering rosebuds for a clear complexion.
Slumming with his coy mistress he felt a sudden idleness and went into the
gingerale business.
LORELEI
A wandering thought in the dreaming brain of a Rhine maiden murmurs
a poem to Heine.
Look at the words the siren brings: silk-hosed simpers, libations, “on the rocks”.
The drowned are always the same, despite their number. If only one could put
some order to it.
A Rhenish enchantress whispers enticements discolored by rain,
the same nightmare that unites us with four walls all above us, perspiring.
May you keep this memory, the one you’ll never see.
—
MICHAEL GIZZI is Professor of Creative Writing at Roger Williams University
in Bristol, Rhode Island. His most recent volume of poems is My Terza Rima (The Figures). He has a book forthcoming from Burning Deck in spring 2009.
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