The Delivery Boys Have All Gone Missing

New York was homogenized, cleaned out by Giuliani and his karma police. We were bequeathed the expensive shreds of what was left. This was all in the last will and testament to Manhattan, articulated in the free pamphlets piled high next to subway ticket machines. The fine print about credit cards and one speed bicycles and bomb-sniffing dogs is in there. It reads like poetry if you are, and you should be, a lawyer. It reads like an admissible villanelle. But no one reads the fine print, and no one notices the delivery boys have all gone missing. The hard boiled detectives are all sleeping in. Old cigarette smoke is bottled and sold on side street bodegas. Skyscrapers buckle in the deadening wind while handymen fix New York from the gutter on up. We take what was left for us and try and remember to leave a suitable tip if the delivery boys ever return.

Epithalamium NYC

Epithalamium NYC
by Anne Carson

I washed my hair the morning I got married put
on
red boots found license woke C. set off for City
Hall
had ceremony drove to Fairway got cups of tea
sat
at bench on boardwalk watched man & woman
at
next bench come almost to blows over her having
put
ketchup on his egg sandwich too bad they couldn’t
just
trade hers had the sausage Don’t ever put ketchup
on
my egg sandwich he clenched You handed it to me
she
cawed meanwhile their aged father paying no heed
was
pulling out bits of paper one after the other That’s not
it
he’d say That’s one from four years ago beautifully
mild
he searched on his wife I bet kept track of the list
when
she was alive bluish mist lifted sank on the water a
statue
(Liberty) slid us a wave from way across the bay.

Drawing After Summer

Drawing After Summer
David Shapiro

I saw the ruins of poetry, of a poetry
Of a parody and it was a late copy bright as candy.
I approach your metal mouth, you put it close to me.

By the long column of a summer’s day
Like a pair of wild cars on the highway
I saw the ruins of poetry, of a poetry.

The doll within the doll might tell the story
Inside the store: the real estate you could not buy.
I approach your metal mouth, you put it close to me.

Violin lies on piano and makes reply.
Hunted words. Gathered sentences. Pencils too heavy to carry.
I saw the ruins of poetry, of a poetry.

The history of time-lapse photography
Is a student exercise. Throttle the sky.
I approach your metal mouth, you put it close to me.

The moon moves outward failing to grip the roadway.
I see you stuck in the ground like a dictionary.
I saw the ruins of poetry, of a poetry.
I approach your metal mouth, you put it close to me.

(From the PhD)

Meatloaf

Meatloaf
by Donald Hall

1.
Twenty-five years ago, Kurt Schwitters,
I tried to instruct you in baseball
but kept getting distracted, gluing
bits and pieces of world history
alongside personal anecdote
instead of explicating baseball’s
habits. I was K.C. (for Casey)
in stanzas of nine times nine times nine.
Last year the Sox were ahead by twelve

2.
in May, by four in August—collapsed
as usual—then won the Series.
Jennifer, who loved baseball, enjoyed
the game on TV but fell asleep
by the fifth inning. She died twelve years
ago, and thus would be sixty now
watching baseball as her hair turned white.
I see her tending her hollyhocks,
gazing west at Eagle Pond, walking

3.
to the porch favoring her right knee.
I live alone with baseball each night
but without poems. One of my friends
called “Baseball” almost poetry. No
more vowels carrying images
leap suddenly from my excited
unwitting mind and purple Bic pen.
As he aged, Auden said that methods
of dry farming may also grow crops.

4.
When Jennifer died I had nightmares
that she left me for somebody else.
I bought condoms, looking for affairs,
as distracting as Red Sox baseball
and even more subject to failure.
There was love, there was comfort; always
something was wrong, or went wrong later
—her adultery, my neediness—
until after years I found Lauren.

5.
When I was named Poet Laureate,
the kids of Danbury School painted
baseballs on a kitchen chair for me,
with two lines from “Casey at the Bat.”
In fall I lost sixty pounds, and lost
poetry. I studied only “Law
and Order.” My son took from my house
the eight-sided Mossberg .22
my father gave me when I was twelve.

6.
Buy two pounds of cheap fat hamburger
so the meatloaf will be sweet, chop up
a big onion, add leaves of basil,
Tabasco, newspaper ads, soy sauce,
quail eggs, driftwood, tomato ketchup,
and library paste. Bake for ten hours
at thirty-five degrees. When pitchers
hit the batter’s head, Kurt, it is called
a beanball. The batter takes first base.

7.
After snowdrifts melted in April,
I gained pounds back, and with Lauren flew
to Paris, eating all day: croissants
warm, crisp, and buttery, then baguettes
Camembert, at last boeuf bourguignon
with bottles of red wine. Afternoons
we spent in the Luxembourg Gardens
or in museums: the Marmottan!
The Pompidou! The Orangerie!

8.
The Musée de la Vie Romantique!
The Louvre! The d’Orsay! The Jeu de
Paume! The Musée Maillol! The Petit
Palais! When the great Ted Williams died,
his son detached his head and froze it
in a Scottsdale depository.
In summer, enduring my dotage,
I try making this waterless farm,
Meatloaf, with many ingredients.

9.
In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
where I last clambered in middle age,
while I sit in my idle body
in the car, in the cool parking lot,
revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
counting nine syllables on fingers
discolored by old age and felt pens,
my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

Originally published in the New Yorker, 2009.

Hathor

You can’t wind your watch back to last year, exactly one year ago, and stop me from walking out. First of all, you don’t wear a watch. Second of all, my watch is broken. It’s a prop. It’s a clunky piece of metalwear like a razor or a set of sleeping spoons. Remember, we were spoons? Well, you can’t stop anything, not me, certainly not yourself from calling when it’s late, when you burn off any fuel that was left from our fire. That flame burst up the curtains, burned up the room, burnt our little house down. I escaped. I sent capital letters for capital offenses. I wrote your matchbook; I was your matchbook. But you know, she’s the dish, I mean it, and she’s running away with you. It’s okay. Don’t look back. I’m not roped to the railroad or stuck in the window, the train puffing smoke, the house licked in flames. I’m not Sodom or Gomorrah or rowing Charon’s dingy. See, the dish ran away with the spoon and they never looked back. So don’t look back, okay, because it’s not worth it, it’s just ashes, and I’m gone.

Don’t Do That

Don’t Do That
by Stephen Dunn

It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything
hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red
along with some resentment I’d held in
for a few weeks, which was not helped
by the sight of little nameless things
pierced with toothpicks on the tables,
or by talk that promised to be nothing
if not small. But I’d consented to come,
and I knew what part of the house
their animals would be sequestered,
whose company I loved. What else can I say,

except that old retainer of slights and wrongs,
that bad boy I hadn’t quite outgrown—
I’d brought him along, too. I was out
to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me,
but did not ask about my soul, which was when
I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red
to find the right kind of glass, and pour.
I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall,
then walked past a group of women
dressed to be seen, undressing them
one by one, and went up the stairs to where

the Rottweilers were, Rosie and Tom,
and got down with them on all fours.
They licked the face I offered them,
and I proceeded to slick back my hair
with their saliva, and before long
I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up
the party, scarf the hors d’oeuvres.
But the dogs said, No, don’t do that,
calm down, after a while they open the door
and let you out, they pet your head, and everything
you might have held against them is gone,
and you’re good friends again. Stay, they said.

(published in the New Yorker, 6/8/09)

Laureate

I saw Ted Kooser read at Vassar College a few years ago when he was Poet Laureate. He was, as you can imagine, a very sweet and brilliant old man.

Flying at Night
Ted Kooser

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

The City In Which I Loved You

The City In Which I Loved You
by Li-Young Lee

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you…