While the entire state of Alabama waits for the latest tornado
To blow over, some of us sit in Papa Boccaccio’s wine cellar
And suck up the courage of the evening’s breezy convictions.
Meanwhile the wind savagely strips spring’s pale innocent leaves
From the saplings the city just planted. Where else might we go
And still pretend we were not intended to die in Tuscaloosa?
In barbaric China a ploughman unearths his Emperor’s dream.
Erect in their underground bunkers handsome clay soldiers await
The invigorating kiss of war. Listen to the drumbeat, the bright fife,
The scream of dying horses. The witch whispers her magic too late
To save us from our dark basement. In the underworld of the afterlife,
This still air of art, we are but clay faces in the Emperor’s empty head.
That head, my lord? Cleopatra asks, faced with an important choice.
Good my lord, we are all unplucked fruit. If you depend on me,
May I depend upon whichever head, my lord, it pleases me to chose?
She is fair Egypt, rare desert flower, as cruel as any king, wittier
Than any woman I have ever known. Her game I always lose.
If, like a fool, I listen, will I, while dying, hear the sword’s swift voice?
In Eyre Square in Galway City a sculpted poet sits like a lump of wit.
Padraic O’Conaire has won: coldest, curtest, cutest of the Seven Dwarves.
With brazen souls the Irish have their way: the Hags with the Bags,
The Floozie in the Jacuzzi – all art must suck at the witch’s tit.
Mad Ireland goes to Disney; so much mad lethal brilliance swerves
To avoid the truth. Yes, Paddy, the public Soul begs in greasy rags.
Most recently in cultured, cluttered Tuscaloosa a bit of statuary rape:
A fascist fountain – a rising pride of eyeless, sexless, hairless boys –
All ass and pectorals – upholding water and a pyramid of one another –
Seducing the eye with flesh, the willing ear with the playful noise
Of falling water – for what we sought to see was ever wet and ripe,
And therefore must be razed to rubble, like one more dead lover.
Maybe tomorrow morning we will wake to find socialist realism
At the cellar door, Marc Antony’s head back on his unloved neck,
The bodies of the stone boys in Tuscaloosa still a promise of sin.
If we wake, we are alive. Should we ignore life’s minor failures?
Stalin is toothless. The Chinese communes are the glum wreckage
Of intellectual desire. We are still the brilliant clay we burrow in.
—from Prepositional Heaven (River City, 2001)