Arctic Killer
Polar bear:
Hiding,
With a paw,
Your black nose
(Ingenious)
As you stalk prey.
You're eidolic,
A Portuguese man-of-war,
To the flesh
You eat.
Photographer-pilots
"Captured" you
In your white desert:
Click.
But you,
In an 8 by 10 paradox,
Weren't there,
Like a Hollywood vampire
Without a virtual
Image.
Even infrared fails
To capture you
Who,
Like a black hole,
Harvests solar heat
That black skin
Absorbs.
Ultraviolet film
Exposes you:
A great,
Black amoeba,
As unphotogenic as
The small,
White seals
(They too are
Heat-absorbing miracles)
That you eat.
You stalk men--
You,
The most beautiful
Of all bears
(Some say)--
Just as Nimrod
Stalked men
In war-play.
In a zoo-cage
You're adored
By awe-struck children
("He's so cute!"),
But in the wild,
Face to face,
You're a gargoyle
With teeth
That kill.
Beer Bottle-Knives
The creek,
Mindlessly clear,
Spews gems into
Dragonfly-jet stream
And pollen-breeze.
Children, in the
Cold water, play
Like seal-cubs,
Rolling, squealing;
Crying:
Beer bottle-glass--
Like leftover mines
In French meadows--
Has stabbed her right arch;
Red clouds obscure her
White feet.
Children run to her,
Help her hobble
To the grassy shore.
"Pull it out!"
"Stop the blood!"
"Where's your mum?"
A freckled boy adds,
"You should have worn
Runners, like me":
She, seated amid
Shivering dandelions,
Watches his thin lips move,
And she hates them,
Just as she hates
The blood pouring
From her foot.
Bullfight-Canvas
The wild bull,
Facing "Goya" in his
"Taje de luces"
("Suit of lights"),
Does not know that pharaohs
Hunted him on foot,
Nor that princes and princesses
of Crete
Somersaulted over him
As he charged.
Four years pampered,
He's never before seen
The "grey" muleta that
Lies.
But he has made up his mind.
He paws the ground,
Breathes heavily, as the
Amphitheater-Picasso
Prepares to
Attack himself.
The picador,
Like a blood-lusting
Moor on horseback,
Drives the steel-tipped lance
Into neck flesh.
The head lowers.
Twice again the picador
Drives down the bull's head,
And then he exits;
Banderillas enter:
They shout, wave arms,
Swerve at the last moment
To lodge steel barbs
Into bleeding shoulders.
The "moment of truth":
Matador against bull.
Aficionados cry out for
Thrust and charge,
Blood and blade.
The matador--
Puppeteer and artist--
Reaches over the horns,
Plunges the sword between
Iberian shoulders,
Searching, searching for the aorta,
Until the coup de grace
Gives the bloody audience
Everything the bloody matador
Could ask for.
Corvus Corax--The Raven
Siberian storm front-prophet,
MacBeth-black cloud,
And Poe's ache--
This trickster,
This ravenous clawer of
Fruits and seeds
And rotting flesh,
This coniferous roamer
And desert nomad,
Croaks like a mournful hag
Or mimics that diminutive
Brainless crow.
Inuit carvers
Immortalize this prankster-
Thief haunting ice fishermen,
This vaudeville clown who dumps
Snow on Yellowknife-victims
Beneath steep metal roofs.
In the torrent valley of Cherith,
You fed Elijah
Between ravines and crags,
Your thunderbolt blackness
Filled aerial somersaults
And upside-down fly-bys
In courtship
Or mere play.
You taunt wolves--
Peck their hairy tails--
But feast on their feast
Between tricks that
The Haida often recall.
You croak of the glee, the surprise,
The excitement and anger and
Tenderness in the blood
Of every man,
Of every Noah sending forth
A query--
"Is all well
On dry ground?"
You are the shaggy-throated
Roamer, the blue jay-cousin,
And cleverest passerine.
When you mate, it is for life,
And there is no child abuse
In your beak or claw.
You are the clown of the forest,
The king of the pun.
I Had A Dream
I had dream:
Merlin balanced the UN building
On his astrologer's hat,
Shook hands with Bob Hope
From one side of his mouth,
And smoked a cigar from the
other.
Then the smoke billowed
Like a shock wave,
And created a great cloud
That blew away in
Chaff-littered wind--
And the remains were
Yellow teeth.
New Math
Gulliver didn't know about
The speed of light,
He hadn't heard about the
Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic,
And he was too early for Einstein's
E = mc2
Or his bigger find that
"The most incomprehensible thing
about the universe
Is that it is comprehensible."
Gulliver didn't know that
Feasting bacteria die
In their test tube-waste,
But he could have known that
A family of 2 has 1,
A family of 3 has 3,
And a family of 5 billion has over
12 quintillian1
Human
(You know?)
Relationships?
He could have told
The Yahoos
About that.
1. n(n-1)
2
Nursery Rhymes
A baby's foot--
Five piggies' delight.
See how even toe-jam
Invites the mind to recall
Childhood nuggets
Like the "Three Blind Mice,"
Or the Hague, the League,
And the UN.
See how they run,
Trying to step around
The bodies
Of everybody slain,
Croaking like frogs,
Waiting for the farmer's wife
To cut off their tails
With a butcher's knife.
One Hot Day
A girl
More than watches
Buzzing hornets and bees
Darting like heat-seeking
Missles, flashing inside a
Plume of apple
blossoms. And
In the hot breeze a petal--
A flesh-eating arm--
Falls,
Twirling through a whorled--
Reluctant?--dive,
Glinting, a snowflake with
What sort of
character?
And then more petals abandon
Their stronghold:
paratroopers
Lost in Europe. A dragonfly
Lands like a Spitfire,
And a blue jay deftly searches
For ants on a limb.
The buzz is music,
An ominous roar
Above her ears and
Swimsuit. She shivers.
She loves the music and
The pink
(Her bedroom is pink),
But now, in a moment as long
As a sigh, she feels
Alone,
peculiar,
As if abandoned in a
Wasteland.
Then:
Quick as a startled deer,
Or soldier,
She finds shelter,
Swimming like a white fish
In her small pool.