Oak Park Elegy
after John Scurlock of Shreveport
Optimism’s a funny color on a couple
of Virgos, but here we go retiling the powder
room in quartz again as if industry is rewarded
by anything other than industry in the middle
of all this whatever this is. First, aperitifs,
then crudité. First, boxed wine, then chitchat
over cakes of an almost imperceptible desire.
Thus, the seasons bustle onward rebranding
themselves so the Weber and Kingsford people
keep extending their ad buys deeper into pumpkin-
picking, pigskin weather, and we feel weirdly
sweaty disemboweling the turkey on an island
in the kitchen when the kid says, Momma,
I’m gonna need a doper raincoat in this piss
pot of a winter. It gets so you wish there were
actual barbarians at the gate, anyone to crush
with a mace, but there is no gate, not one guy
in a pelt banging with any malice, just dad bods
and threenagers storming the bouncy castle,
and a magician at the party keeps disappearing
the rabbits and doves, but we can see plain
as day how he does it snapping their necks,
tossing them over his shoulder, simple as that!
Don’t blame me, I voted for the other guy,
but somebody still has to pay for this shit.
Bob Dylan Elegy
Your use of synergy in the absence of any irony
contributed more than a little to the divorce
and your insistence on to be frank, the Sixties,
as it were, and other such phrases you’d tic out
though all of us shuddered, like you’d lean in real
breathy to say, Gimme the straight dope, sweetheart,
to the cashier in the A&W like you were a couple
of rocket stages nestled into each other,
and that you fucked other people didn’t help,
but I couldn’t, just couldn’t stomach your reveries
on Faulkner and Mailer, scotch and Larry Bird
any longer, your insistence on high fidelity
audio equipment on which you’d mostly play
bootlegs of Bob Dylan, insistently, oozingly
calling him dYlan like he was a beloved
Labrador struck by a Coke truck and you
in your beat-up Chuck’s, a cowlick, ripped
Levi’s bearing his corpse out of a ditch to bury
beneath the ole willow tree, you tell everyone
you’re still that kid your old man called squirt
those sober hours when bread cost a nickel
and a car cost a nickel and a house cost a nickel,
and all Minnesota smelled like a full ashtray
but in a good way, you say, flashing your corned
teeth, the vein in your temple making a teeny
Mississippi coursing into the wispy white laurel
of your last hairdo, which are all things I could have
overlooked for a little less cliché in your Converse,
a little more rigor in your ditties, but that’s just
the way things were back in those days, you’d say
back in those days gunning to get my goat.
Bird Elegy
after Constantin Brâncuși
Today we found a bird, you and I, splayed
like a ragged umbrella in our bathrobes
on the balcony after a hootenanny of a storm
is something I can’t say in painting or in sculpture
or in French, it being impossible to translate
my hokey, Midwestern grief into mixed media,
and I don’t know French I must confess
in English to you and the baby perched
in his jumperoo while plucking the bird body
clean off rancid stucco with a grocery bag,
and I think he understands me, the baby,
though he doesn’t speak French or English,
he knows painting, sculpture, not the words
but the contours of sorrow, poor little
fellow, molded into what he doesn’t know
is America, a Saturday, a May on a planet
he doesn’t know what a fucking planet is
or the blimp drifting overhead like a conceptual
rubber ducky or a grayscale sketch of a bird
in flight which is the opposite of this stiff
hanky crumpled like a grey equation on the patio
where I adore you because you can’t stop sobbing,
your tears are shiny, bronze figurines in the gallery
of your face so when you ask, What chance
do any of us have? the baby disagrees and peeps,
Bon chance, mes petit oiseaux, bon chance!
