new
poems 2005-2006
all
copyright Ethan Gilsdorf
But
Enough About Me
This
is for the ants, the ancestors,
the
obsolete street car, the crumpled
candy
wrapper the street sweeper
misses
month after month. We should pause
for
the hickory nut rotting in the ditch,
the
amputees of Dayton and Fort Wayne
the
widows of the 23rd Airborne Division,
the
shrew left for dead by the pure white cat
outside
the office door.
Citizens,
let us revere that which does not budge
from
one childhood to the next,
i.e.
the Dairy Bar, her chocolate frappes,
her
tawny brick, her many features stoic and eternal
excepting
her inflating prices.
We
should mourn the lost book report
now
under a road-stained snow bank,
the
brook trout blasted elsewhere
by
a firecracker jammed up its ass,
the
plain, heartbreaking failures
of
the Carter Administration.
Let
us now praise the Squirrel Lady
and
the Butter Queen. Let us cheer
the
Austerlitz Volunteer Fire Department’s
annual
lobster shoot and barbeque.
May
it arrive soon. Let us commend
both
the peach-blueberry tart and its creator.
Let
us celebrate the Little League team
mired
in last place, the left fielder
whose
turned his fear into heroism.
Let
us acknowledge the efforts the oaks
holding
the edge of the meadow.
There
is no reason not to honor
the
bear who tolerates the subdivision,
if
occasionally raiding its delights.
The
triumph of crabgrass cracking the asphalt.
The
before-dinner nap also deserves our respect.
Please
pay tribute to the stone fence
forgotten
by extinct farmers,
thanklessly
dividing beeches from pines,
accreting
into the entropy of needles and grubs.
Remember
the paper cranes
folded
by the thousand each Hiroshima Day.
May
their feigned wing-flaps in the hands
of
New York children eulogize the clouds,
distribute
our molecules,
dissipate
this sting that is history.
After
Vincent
italicized lines from the poems of Edna St. Vincent
Millay
Hard
seeds of hate I planted
in a
shady spot scattered by a loose circle
of
spent .22 casings in that beech grove
a
bear had mauled the dusk before.
That
should now be grown, I muttered
some
months after these hills, to hurt me more,
had
closed their paths, scribbled my arms
with
dashed and dotted blood. I think I will learn
some
beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes,
work hard at that. I will endeavor
to
read the latest code. Prop that
Victorian tome
under
my eyes while I mow the lawn,
trace
a path that’s become a labyrinth.
Man’s
work. That and a can of refried beans.
We
grow our own sorrows, thank you.
No
help from the womenfolk. So let us
draw
up a truce, I and you. Cease fire.
Let
us abandon then our gardens
and
go home to
our DVDs.
It’s
not just me, I insist.
All
men are lonely now, I lie.
+++++
Hard
seeds of hate I planted
That
should now be grown (from “Blight”)
These
hills, to hurt me more (from “Mist in the Valley”)
I
think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes,
work hard at that. (from “Intention to Escape Him”)
Let
us abandon then our gardens and go home (from “Justice Denied in Massachusetts”)
All
men are lonely now. (from “Dawn”)
Camouflage
“a
landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is
constantly changing;
it lives by virtue of its surroundings --- the air and light --- which vary
continually” --- Claude Monet
There’s
a butterfly telling lies,
posing
as a brown and crumpled leaf,
only
in mid-wing-beat revealing
its
tomato-red blaze. Thus it misleadingly hovers
near
a ditch and leaf clog mounded
around
a Coors can like a beaver lodge
while
a cumulous vessel crashes
against
the green wharf of treetops
and
the deformed fruit tree --- apple,
pear?
--- wavering under the weight of noon
is
a widow sitting in her pool
of
shadow at the bruised roadside
shifting
like chameleon skin
from
peach fuzz to milky plum.
Haystacks
are enormous hats
a
haberdasher has scattered along the slope.
The
mown-grass scent wafting through screens
recalls
not this landscape but other meadows
counties
and decades away. So it goes:
the
imaginary deer tick just a pinhead- or
poppy
seed-sized trickling through the forest
of
leg hairs lets slip another memory.
Even
what we call silence is a trick.
Nature
abhors and breaks the quiet down
into
equal parts buzzed cicadas and crickets
drunk
on summer’s charged particles.
The
human is lost, unable to compete or
conceal,
exposed as an interloper,
too
illiterate to ponder the phosphor arcs and dips
of
fireflies, what is spelled on the dusk
before
they sputter and fade into
gibberish
code, the opening act for stars.
Sunday
Times
Filled
with
the world,
its
failure of armor plating,
too
many surfers at Montauk,
the
man who saves his remaining elm,
the
path to the barn appears
more
perilous than before,
or
less.
If
dusk
leaks
from
maple skirts
edging
the meadow, shun it.
Discuss
the weather. Consider the cricket,
the
discipline of its song,
the
pathos of its verb
and
adjective.
Without
weapons
or sin,
I
devise my own system.
How
to hold still. A cosmology
of
checks and Libra-like leanings,
over-adjustments,
wavering yess
and
reckless expressions
of
love.
Faith
evades
pursuit.
I have
tried to trace it,
manufacture
it if not teach it,
lie
about being able to taste it.
Last night the couch forgave me, muttered,
Oh
Ethan, shut up, try again
tomorrow.
Grasp
answers:
an atlas,
seize
the dictionary
by
the scruff of its neck.
Countries
are colored differently
than
in childhood. Bigger typeface
hides
less. Pages emaciated,
they
don’t blot
the
sun.
Not
these
trees,
but
distant relations
in
other states become newsprint,
dense
trunks forfeited for knowledge,
anxiety’s
sake, the itinerant record
we
tell about
ourselves.
Outside
the
news
locust-like
devices
restlessly
fly, winged with lemon stripes,
then
shut their gun-metal wings
becoming
gray path stones.
So
easily two beings.
So
easily content.