the unheardof month
between July and August.
In Shakespeare
In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. Others confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
when they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in glad pain.
You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.
Such a relief to burst from the theater
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with MetroCards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.
Special Victims Unit
Actually Persephone loved his loving her,
dark-browed, so serious: it proved something about her.
And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself,
her brightness was more beautiful than beauty
and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back
it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers
he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary:
he is angry at his heart and hurts her.
Demeter gets confused. Did a god steal her daughter,
or has she been living all this time in Manhattan
with her difficult husband, difficult job, difficult cat
and visiting once a year? Her love for what is lost
spreads so thinly over the planet
it’s not love anymore but weather. She goes to the police:
Benson and Stabler find her story dubious.
More so when they learn she never had a daughter,
though she was one, and that her vaunted power over harvests
apparently doesn’t extend to her wilting houseplants.
As for those Hellish threats on her machine?
Phone records show that dark voice was her own.
Actually she has bipolar Multiple Personality Disorder,
solution to all plot dilemmas. Fair enough,
since cop shows can’t say what we’d say: Life is a dream,
and we are everyone we dream.
When they come to get her,
her hands are clawed in the chainlink of the playground.
Hades, Demeter, Persephone form in her face of cloud.
She’s watching, of course, two girls on swings,
one going up while the other goes down.
Subject, Verb, Object
I is not ego, not the sum
of your unique experiences,
just, democratically,
whoever’s talking,
a kind of motel room,
yours till the end—
that is, of the sentence.
The language, actually,
doesn’t think I’s important,
stressing, even in
grandiose utterance—
e.g., I came
I saw I conquered—
the other syllables.
Oh, it’s a technical problem,
sure, the rhyme
on oh-so-open
lie, cry, I,
harder to stitch tight
than the ozone
hole in the sky.
But worst is its plodding insistence—
I, I, I—
somebody huffing uphill,
face red as a Stop sign,
scared by a doctor
or some He She It
surprised in the mirror.
Emergency Measures
I take Saturday’s unpopulated trains,
sitting at uncontagious distances,
change at junctions of low body count, in off-hours,
