The tulip tree in my old landlady\u2019s patch <\/p>\n My eyes fixed on the evening stars, the cigarette smoke <\/p>\n The trees in a night of cicada song The Doings in a Small Backyard The tulip tree in my old landlady\u2019s patch Of semi-private paradise, every blade of grass Fought for, used to lord it over the garden blooms, Its trout-bright blossoms showing off, she gone away to rot in a home as she waits to die. Yes, our summer is history, \u2014the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":285,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[371,372],"tags":[375],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nOf semi-private paradise, every blade of grass
\nFought for, used to lord it over the garden blooms,
\nIts trout-bright blossoms showing off, she gone away
\n to rot in a home as she waits to die.
\nYes, our summer is history, \u2014the thing is finished,
\nThe equinoctial demarcation that divides
\nThe sentient mind from old age\u2019s twittering,
\nThat cleaves a world of barbecues from snowshoe weekends
\nNot yet engaged. The earth, a little coy, made her obeisance, \u2014
\n Helios \u2013 jaded, knackered \u2013 shrugged.
\nEven so, we have loved<\/em> \u2013 so the evidence says.
\nLove, love, love, and it\u2019s pumpkin time.
\nLove, love, love and look, your lotto winnings,
\nA few marigolds winking at a few sluggish bees.
\nGetting dark earlier . . . mid-terms attracting sleaze . . .
\n In light of which, asters, peonies and the quince ask for
\nA quorum in the afternoon: the mind is treachery, and consciousness is
\nA toll-free exchange, \u2014the yellow-bottomed, tripping spider agrees.
\nThis yard\u2019s new owner? Keen on art, he might keep the yard, \u2014 he might plow it up
\nWith an animus born of pay-to-play. So much for the rosebush, \u2014
\nSo much for the geraniums cutting capers.
\nShall they pull off a false flag event in a border town? Saturate Vermont
\nWith BBC ops? Surely, there\u2019s no end to subprime mortgages.
\nSurely, the picturesque is one-tenth natural pretty stuff,
\nSix-tenths a settler program, three parts Armageddon
\nOff the cuff. The cherry tree in its dervish dance,
\nRattled in a stiffening breeze, seems to be whispering,
\nBut is anyone listening? We\u2019ve loved, me and the birds and the bees.
\nAll\u2019s well in Washington that pleads the fifth.<\/em>
\nA pensive sort, I cry a little for the memory:
\nMy old landlady, nobody\u2019s fool, her Russian heart immense,
\nWould snip the grass with scissors as she lay
\nOn her side in the sweltering moonlight like a lover
\nSwaddled in love, the man she had a brute, her man-child son a loon
\nWho collapsed at her feet, stone-dead just like that,
\nAnd then she thought she might as well die, too.<\/p>\nCigarette at Twilight No. 2<\/h5>\n
\nMimicking a gassy nebula, it occurs to me to inquire:
\nIs there justice outside Winnipeg?
\nLoutish conversation pours through a window
\nLit by one bare light bulb, the convocation in the room
\nSharing a unilateral thought: drown the wrong turns taken,
\nThe concomitant guilt and fear. Hideous light for men who owe back rent
\nTo the Founding Fathers . . . All this in the corner of my sheepish eye . . .
\nMonstrous whims afflict
\nAll forms of flora and fauna:
\nThe rosebush, the sex-addled judge,
\nThe president in a late-night West Wing hour
\nObsessed with ratings. Lo stato della tua anima<\/em>
\nOr words that once had their due respect? On a balcony above what gave
\nMy landlady her summer hide-away
\nUntil she no longer knew her own, I, too, wear
\nThe gods I worship on my sleeve \u2013
\nA slew of dead ancients, a few live poets,
\nA guitar-playing satyr in a Seville garden,
\nThe moon a Montrealer headed for Labrador.<\/p>\nThe Trees in a Night of Cicada Song<\/h5>\n
\nAre witnesses to our thoughts and acts, their mind-reading quiet a choir
\nTo various probabilities, or that the king must die and the virgin suspect
\nHades is her lord and master when he\u2019s not
\nA stand-up comic half-man, half-horse, assault on the brain
\n or else a cheap laugh.
\nAutumn a state of mind so far, nothing more, Venus sets with the sun.
\nVoices in a rat-hole palace, like scree crashing down a mountain, spill through a window
\nInto my old landlady\u2019s yard below (it once was hers
\nAs she\u2019s gone now, her end of life so much bird-twitter
\nAnd a silence as vast as failure). The seventh can of beer sacramental,
\nSmacking, as only a can of beer can smack,
\nOf divinely foul language beneath seven holy-roller suns
\nAnd seven holy-roller moons, a juggler\u2019s sacred spheres,
\nAnd here\u2019s how it is: one is wise with wisdom come by the hard way,
\nWhich is to say, one knows nothing, one is a dope, and besides,
\nOne can\u2019t score off the break at every rack. So yells a drunken honey
\nAt her honey, and he lets her have her triumph, what the hell,
\nBecause, as ever, he\u2019s got bigger fish to fry \u2013
\n that social services interview.
\nAnd somewhere far distant, a drone beetling
\nAcross the heavens, desert compound the target, target acquired,
\nCaps off a think-tank\u2019s religious conviction
\nOr else a flow-chart\u2019s data points, El Presidente solidifying the base,
\nUp to his neck in deceit, echoes in every cicada-hum steeped
\nWith judgment we\u2019ll never see coming
\nThough our names are written on it,
\nThere on the screen or there in the smoke
\nOf the incense, there in the smirks of the saints.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"