Bios Absconditus

After the bees fled, birds followed.
People forgot how to do what the birds and the bees do.

We lost nest-knowledge, hive-knowledge; all eggs except Fabergé
and honey that wasn’t sweet talk disappeared. Ants left;

good riddance some said to the fire ants, but wherefore art thou
to the sugar kind, annoying though they were at times –

no trails of collective labor on our countertops,
no dynamic dotted lines on plaid to animate our picnics.

Someone tried to stroke her cat and cut her hand on cardboard:
a decoy, deployed how many hours since the feline went fugitive?

Dogs: taxonomic, glass-eyed, cold to all offers
of walks in the park or cheese-flavored treats.

Stables, barnyards, zoos, even the sewers where rats swam
in our filth – all fled; and the wilds,

quiet as an after-hours shopping mall. How could earth
be earth without insect, fowl, amphibian or furry four-legs?

The film had jammed in the projector; the flow of life no longer flowed.
An ark, a fleet of arks on auto-pilot had invaded;

creation was decreated, and consciousness, the human ray,
the flashlight into cosmic darkness: flailing and purposeless

without our companions. We fondled field guides, bestiaries, fables;
forgot which brutes had been real and which imagined;

mascots, manuals, and constellations, our only comfort and consolation.

*

Origins: first, I read a poem this morning by Tom Healy called "Beekeeper," in his collection What the Right Hand Knows What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009) which itself seemed to have its start in reports of the disappearance of bees (Colony Collapse Disorder). Second, I have always liked "slippery slope" poems, or poems that start with a concept and then mainly extend it toward the point of absurdity or collapse: Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a classic example, but my favorite is Derek Mahon's "Matthew V. 29 - 30."

From there, I found myself working, as I have lately, with tight consonance and heavy alliteration; the inventions of imagery and idea came, at least as I observed myself writing, directly from the sound symbolism.

The title: continuing, indirectly I suppose, with my meditations on agnosticism: a play on Deus absconditus, of course.

Little Man

In my wallet are several vital organs

made of plastic and paper.

My keys are worth more than my teeth

and my wedding ring weighs twenty pounds.

These contact lenses are miniature petri dishes

for an experiment gone wrong;

the cellphone is a nag, the wristwatch a spy.

The little man in me needs none of it:

he squats like an undiscovered arthropod

and bottom-feeds on my mutterings.

When he sits in the position known as Lotus

his knees point upward at forty-five degrees.

The supposed virtues are his zodiac

and when he’s naked, you’d rather not notice.

* 

A simple sonnet, of a sort -- if you accept your sonnets with the turn at the midway point, instead of line nine or line 13.

I wrote a version of this months ago, but it was missing something -- the penultimate couplet, specifically -- until just a moment ago! So, I heretofore call it a new poem again.

One of many poems I've been doing on the subject of middle age; trying to be funny, as a way of not being pathetic, which is where the topic would tend naturally.

...and one of a few poems I've done lately that  makes use of the homunculus.

Flying

He flew across the room and the knick-knacks
looked like angry men and women in a landscape,
the furniture like unforgiving mesas and canyons.
It was a dream but not his: he was the detritus
in someone else’s sleep, and soon to lose his human shape.
Could we still call him the same? A dream forgets itself
and everyone you’ve loved is a chemical reaction.
My entire life is sparks and outright explosions;
but the sparks only tingle, and the explosions
never once wake me from this marvelous dream.

*

Chagallesque, perhaps -- in its opening; or just standard allegory. Confession, elegy, epitaph -- more and more, my way of inventing a poem is by thinking rhetorically (or by imitating; but that too, is a rhetorical device).

Also, often, the workspace is a matrix: an idealized room or field (and out here, I have my field just out the door! I've used it as a matrix for many poems over the last two years. Amazing what a difference it makes, having "nature" larger than a yard at your beck).

The room...some idealized space, in which the walls are white space for innumerable poems; and the furniture and such, props, characters, dramatic situations...

but I should open out to different interior spaces as crucibles: atria, cathedrals, long hallways, submarines...what else has promise for lyric discovery?

Liz

Walking down Second Avenue, Liz and I

chanced upon a strikingly beautiful transvestite

at whom I prudently did not stare

though Liz, shamanness and anthropologist,

paused to study innocently if over-intently

and remark praisingly on the natural art and artful nature

of what we were then and there perceiving;

whereupon the brilliantly human

and over-dressed specimen of wigged postmodern

East Village goddess

revealed herself as many-colored flames of RAGE

from which appeared the fourfold arms of Shiva,

one with a cook’s knife pulled from Lord knows where

within her personhood of elaborate chiffonerie;

then charging forth on many tiny melting wheels

not towards earnest Liz but me,

as if I were Chief Instigator of the unasked-for staring/commenting;

both of us, Liz finally wakened and I,

sprinting north from the gender-squall of beauty

and many-fabricked choler, the flashing blade

clawing paperdolls of our demise from air.

*

From oh so many years ago now, when I lived in Manhattan; perhaps the same East Village apartment on 11th Street mentioned below. This poem had a counter-turn to it -- about a hyper-masculine fellow in Yonkers who similarly chased the two of us outside a Ho Jo's for some perceived slight -- but I haven't been able to get it right, and so have jettisoned that second stanza, so as to allow the poem to run more swiftly.

Here is Liz as I remember her, spectrally hovering outside my Slonim Woods dorm window, textbooks under her arm; juxtaposed with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the famous still from Meshes of the Afternoon: