Two Poems

David Wolf

Sway

And whose narrative gloms your faith for now, pilgrim?
no, one forefronts the contextual “nature” of the “Real”
not to reify the notion of the unattainable,
but to dissolve all the old irony . . .
It’s all in the tenor
of your self-reflexivity, sleepyhead.
Notes amiss in the melody of the wreck . . .

Work not to overbear your fine soul upon your neighbor.
For when the hunch comes true we suspect genius.
Or a galaxy of pearls falling from the heedless azure release
    of the sky.
Even as the masonry is hopefully prone to outlast the
    mason.
Enclosure turns, wed to anxiety.
Should your concentration flag, your attention drift and
    yaw . . . well, where are you now?
Holy Ish Kabibble.
What the business looks like around back is apparently
    too costly for them to care about.
Your bored ghost, or just a gust of wind
riffling through the pages of the open book in the next
    room?
We all catch up with the dead.
No hair length but in humidity.
Oyster sky at sundown.
After dinner at The Teddy Roosevelt Caféé,
we walked the vacant streets of the mountain town,
past the closed shops,
past the mystic merchandise.
Cute as a stuffed buffalo
in the gift shop of the stern hearted.

Seasons trail, back o’ the hand.
Calm eddies dimple the stream.
Impulsiveness,
some say,
may have once meant survival.
God I just did not want to do it anymore so I did it
no longer.
This does not make me a hero, even in America where I’m
     busy
trying to clear my ear,
pouring solutions down the canal
and it’s not easy to be sure what’s in
any bottle these days.
Products of fear, day before Christmas,
no difference,
ear’s worse and what’s more,
some sweaters are simply too much:
warmth, pattern, price, you name it.
But thanks anyway (just practicing), yes, thanks.
And remember that billboard?
The one with the trench-coated executive
waiting on a bench for his commuter train,
smiling over his laptop computer,
the line of copy beneath his image reading:

Now You Are Free!

You hear the old music now and you think it reminds you
of how wondrous it all was back then,
but no, it was not that way at all,
it was a lousy and lonely time
and the music was the thing,
the only thing that got you through it,
your only source of grace.

Boxthorn

Blush of late afternoon light - tea by the open window.

Later, a little Saumur with the evening news?
Secret life of cut-rate sovereignty.
She actually said to those assembled, “Dashes are my
    textual trademark.”
Fine, but keep the fly
from the lip of the milk carton.
Tough to say where it’s all going
but chances are it will be tougher to celebrate when we get
    there.

Days in the Place Balzac –
bodily dispersal - 
I turn out the image once more.
Her dream: to wear white muslin and to live
on a cliff by the sea, somewhere, someday,
with me I remember hoping.
Morning fields dazed in a stupor of herbicide.
Earth hosting a history of guests who don’t know when to
    leave.
“It’s love not me rolling over in utter indifference.”
A woman bends to kiss
the wooden cross that serves
as her husband’s grave marker
and where will the memory go
once she and I and everyone else
who leafed past the news photo today are gone?
A “detour of birth” you called it . . .
“Severed by what?”
Moist flare of final thought?
Fade out of distilling intuition and reasonable foci?

All that rigor married merely to inswept rumor,
dust of the earth rising?
How this ache the mind insists
on being –  
How it returns once more
to the soul’s ideal weight –  
Soul that remains all or nothing?
“Yours is,” she laughed, “a predictably romantic desire.”
“Yes, but the necessity that gives rise to the desire
    confirms
the contemporaneity
of such a value.”
“What is the furthest
you have ever jumped?”
. . .  Didacticism, yes, we nodded, but a didacticism
    conscious
of its own situatedness . . .
Hush.
Tell it to the spirit of you-know-who,
cutting across the glacier in her flats and long white coat.
. . . as the glossy republic heaves on, semi-automatically,
bemused in its shimmering diet of light . . .
If you are tired
you may put your head down
and rest quietly at your desk.