Persimmon

Milosz said
that the word from out of the darkness
was pear, and Rilke wrote
a rather silly
Sonnet to Orpheus about an orange;
for me it’s persimmons.

They appear
in Safeway this time of year
along with pomegranates, cherimoyas ...
Often they don’t ripen.
Sometimes the checkers don’t know what they are
and must look up them and their price.
There is no delicacy of civilization
(to paraphrase Benjamin) that isn’t
at the same time the roach soup
of oppression, but here I won’t care.

Like a breast that gives itself wholly.
A taste aristocratically
disdainful of processed sugar.
The color of utopia.
It exists presumably to deliver a seed,
which in all these years I haven’t noticed.

Bad Breath 

I’m haunted by the thought I’m missing something.
But “haunting” is too mild a verb,
and I don’t know where to look. The world?
Famine this year across east Africa
will put 200 million on the move – don’t
assume they’ll all die of thirst or heatstroke
before they reach Whiteland.
Is it the domestic horror?
No – it was I who made “trump,”
plural “trumps” into a common noun;
enough said. It could be age and illness.
I think about these every day,
but not, perhaps, sufficiently
in connection with lost hopes and cosmic entropy.
The concept “death” raises the question
of what other people see: my lumpy profile,
my character and, more important, image:
self-absorption, lack of empathy …
These are common worries for a late style.
There’s a cure, if one’s willing to use it:
Become the world, the better to abuse it.

An Accounting

1

The worst was to counter
innocent heartfelt
philistine sentimental
objections with allusions
the other wouldn’t know. Or maybe
not; maybe the worst
was the tone of dull,
not even contemptuous,
unprovokable reason. Especially when
the issue wasn’t even
politics but taste,
say poetry, which
the respondent hadn’t read
since school.
My poems. “A totally
intellectual universe
without love or emotion!” Thus
the other. “Higher than emotion
are the means of its manipulation” –
me. Unforgiveable, even
when (usually) the confrontation
was in imagination. 

2

Spring. Too few dogs
under tables at our usual place,
which during covid appropriated
sidewalk. The bearers
of peace: if things are OK
with them they’re OK, and things are usually
OK. I seem after fifty years
to see my father with Sula, his
Siamese, on his shoulder,
but it’s only a pirate with a parrot. Too few
crows, too. I appreciate crows:
the higher gossip, the comprehensive
irony of the scavenger.
But what are the other birds saying?
– Cheerful embrace of doubt and scarcity. 

3

The desert was a clumsy allegory
but our guide had a certain charisma.
A Native American (from, he pointed out,
the vanished local tribe),
lined, dark, apparently sand-pitted,
who spoke in that too-gentle monotone
familiar from Indians on TV.
He led us into the dimness
between smooth-scalloped, non-contiguous
pillars, their dun, red, golden bands
as tasteful as rock gets.
They seemed the work of an alien nature
or labor, the path one tourist wide.
“These are,” said the guide in that voice,
“the souls of people you have hurt.
They have exchanged the form they hated
for one more lasting, live soothed
by the memory of the embrace
of water, and are not aware you’re here.”
“Is that an old native myth?”
asked a foolish voice. A big jaw
in back – he barely fit
between his accusers – laughed. I touched
the cool, pale, almost polished-seeming stone
and thought, If time itself, as I have long
suspected, doesn’t move, if it’s a block,
there has been time enough to say I’m sorry. 

4 

Kids emerging from a top-ranked,
impossible-to-enter private school
in a part of town where I used to live.
They don’t look vivid or vital;
tired, probably; most on their phones,
one or two with iPads balanced on one hand,
perhaps arranging while deferring
joy. Sexually sedate
with each other, several undecided
or peregrine; good luck to those
who would feel more comfortable … Otherwise,
advantage hovers over them
and teasingly advances or recedes,
or waits in their cars or the cars that have come
for them. But not power, I think.
Advantage; some specific competence
that for a while will make them serviceable,
wealth that may outlast it. Power,
to paraphrase Calvin, is already
decided elsewhere, despite one hard-eyed look
from among the crowd, and is uglier than
that look. I doubt that any of them studies
what I once taught. Irrelevant …
The dream would be for youth to tell
what it knows and for age to listen, humbly, before speaking
its piece; then there would be
such a thing as knowledge, but they can’t, and I can’t. 

5

Laundry, the dishes; I have privately
broadcast to billions of men that one
can do much of the household chores
without losing sacred essence.
My wife handles numbers, which
I can’t, and is sometimes downstairs painting;
her painting is good, and otherwise important.
And after all I’m mostly upstairs writing;
she has to cope with that.
After dinner the, so to speak, news:
Trump to be arraigned
Tuesday. Are we stronger, safer,
the question currently is, if his creatures
don’t riot – those who think
it’s I, the evil Mind, that pulls their strings?
I mention this not to anchor you
in the flow, but to indicate where
in the solid block of time
this poem, this
particular flaw or subtlety may
be found … Faces, my face,
don’t flicker in the dimness around
the column but peer out of it,
a rare, strained look of equanimity
at odds with multiples of anguish.
I lived somewhat.
I lived, so to speak.