"No coin
for the ferryman, it's a pauper's
gate
to hell... "
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Wise Passivity
If his wife applies a cool palm
And when not even up to this,
clarity's shadow filling them in
A miracle now, the boy grows up _______________________________________________________________ After Pessoa
and in memory of Donald Justice
Sometimes I feel so much, I must
nothing much at all. We live
The worst fate: to spend a life _______________________________________________________________ Chthonic
Timed for odd noons, eight stations mist
No coin for the ferryman, it's a pauper's
but in a wink, gray ones trading a single eye . . .
in the vestibule, shuffling their hooves,
to gold, but bread and water's better.
and Capri Sun these girls bid me bring.
and Log Cabin syrup dripped on snow. _______________________________________________________________ Of Fame
Like a rush-hour bus
our games with sticks
hounding Lord Posterity
increasingly old and good
I'd do you a quid pro quo
for a high profile can swell
match tip, loosening
long overbite left
By life's end, he drooled
panting bursts of grace. . .
_______________________________________________________________
after the Buddha
to his forehead glazed with illness,
he knows he's just a mess of fever
and fuss, not the child he wishes,
with the wise passivity of the lily.
or up to what this is, he wishes
to be taught Wordsworth again.
But he's not the void of wind
that blows in the child's mind
raiding a raven's nest. He's less
the child himself, who steals
an elfin pinnace, who sculls
like hell as a huge peak rises
from behind the cliff-face.
"How does he watch the cliff
and row away from it?" he asked
in Lit-21. On the blackboard,
the professor drew a stick boy
in a rowboat oaring backwards,
the chalky emblem of Mind
rising out of the mind, those
who did the reading going ohhh
in unison, or was it in vision?—
like the shade a rose-apple tree
filtered down, it's said, on the not-
yet-enlightened boy looking out
at the annual plowing. It's said
his father left him with a nurse,
and she ditched him to hang out
with shirtless men. One story
has him watching the roots
of grass the plows upturned—
insects, and their million eggs
(each his relative) killed. So much
sorrow flows into his happiness.
Joy flows also into his sorrow.
Banyans stretch their shadows
toward the east, as afternoon
turns to dusk, the rose-apple's
shade cool at eternal noon.
to leave his wife, his son, and seek
completion pure as a polished shell.
be sentimental. Come to think of it,
maybe it's just thought, and I feel
one life living, another thinking.
Which one's true, which false?
thinking, until that life is not
the life you felt you lived.
ten minutes each; a ninth soaks the hedge
row of yews: each May, a new price hike
just to siphon up my underworld river.
gate to hell. . . In the den, three tweens,
one mine, pass from hand to hand their lip-
gloss foraged from the mall. Graces now,
They're pre-hormonal, prideful, venereal
nouns, fountainheads of argot pumped
to flow disdain. About their future boys
all trident-quick moves once in the car—
think too much, thought's a venomed pelt.
It's exquisite, yes, to touch a spider web
Whoever thought it wise storing hope
at the bottom of a jug, thought best.
Let it steep, sweet as the devil's-food
Inside them, thirst and hunger pulse
like p.s.i.'s channeling through pipes.
Autumn and Winter: frozen Mars Bars
Spring: stained eggs on a fake green bed.
Summer: the earth and earth's daughter,
by August the girl's step heavy, tugged at.
She's moistening her lips for Hades' kiss.
on route to Big, it's driven
our duels with pens (as it did
for guns) from Anon
to the latest bard
with a fast, a feast,
or a review. Meanwhile,
is what our best dead strove for.
Don't get me wrong:
at the drop of your designer
stomacher, and my lust
like blood-bloated wood ticks
Mom singed with a snuffed
their bite on Shep.
O Shep: whose life-
this scar on my auricle.
He breathed Grendel's fen.
a pint a day, and yet
one tossed stick could tease
I celebrate Shep,
good dog, died old.