Sail South 'Til The Butter Melts

Born as I was on Columbus Day,
I sometimes envy the Italians
Of North Beach, San Francisco,
The last ones who can still get away
With celebrating it. No one, after all
Would dare contravene the rights
Of “ethnicity,” PC or no.
But it was nearly miraculous, as even
The most churlish would have
To admit, what your Genoese namesake
Did: not the stumbling over
A continent; sooner or later
Someone would have done that,
But having the compulsion,
The vision as we might say
To throw the dice with confidence,
Never questioning that the outcome
Would at least be worth the queen’s
Indulgence. He was just past 40
When he made the trip, much older
Than we. Yet here we are,
Sipping coffee after nearly 40 years
In a world much kinder than the one
He knew, and the heuristic rock
Keeps skipping back to him.
Finding ways to find your way:
The gamble has become no less great,
Despite GPS and radar,
Since he groped for the torrid zone,
Before that myopic starboard turn
Into nearly-dead Sargasso,
Then to the enigma of Hispaniola,
Not, as he hoped, to rich Cathay.
The matched clocks tick out of
Sequence from where they hang,
In two rooms, on three different walls,
Their lack of precision a reminder
That finding ways to find your way
Remains what it is: all, and all.

The Seventh of May

Don’t ask me why I always remember
that this is Jan’s birthday. We knew
each other for roughly six weeks, years ago,
when we and everything around us were
not of this world (still 20th century.)
I compared her eyes with muscatel
after we’d spent a Sunday afternoon
hitting Napa wineries in her Toyota,
picnic packed and all eyes but ours locked out.

She adored Earl Klugh and Michael Franks,
And her walls were plastered with platitudes
in blazing color. She called them her
“positive attitude posters.” I kissed her
and said it was sweet, but privately noted
that a weekend at her apartment was like
two days locked in a “Hello Kitty” store.
(She intuited that, and didn’t like it at all.)

Our first night together was Valentine’s Day.
By her 28th birthday that spring, I was gone,
sent packing. But the date stays with me.
I don’t need to wonder if she’s happy.
She had herself programmed for that
like a smart bomb with data punched in
to whack a chemical plant. No, whatever
else, I’m sure Jan found her target
with a smile, in no doubt and right on time.

The Island Around The Corner

From the island around the corner,
Where dawn is an act of willing,
The vicissitudes of midnight
Puncture the sailor’s dreams.
His unlikely dreams of landfall
Satellite-photo that coastline,
As time takes the face of icebergs,
And the snapshot-clocks are stupid,
And the vestals of morning stoke
Beach fires that burn without light
On the island around the corner.

On the island around the corner,
Where the coiled springs all lie broken
And the keys to the locks are misplaced
Beyond cobweb-ripping light,
No codebreaker holds bright vigil,
Or boasts of the blueprints to sorrow,
And the sailor who hears the waves breaking
Wakes up to find only calm sea.
No bells ring, nor are heard rising
The appoggiaturas of a dawn breeze
On the island around the corner.

On the island around the corner,
Where the cliff-walls all face westward,
And absorb the cries of sea-birds
With their backs to the threat of day,
The seed of the earthquake that threatens
In the tossings of the dreamer
Who calls up both island and sailor
Shakes no tree, nor this earth’s resolve.
The rules have been set down in sorrow,
And the treetops will brook no consoling
On the island around the corner.

Photo Album

for Lena

Living is more dangerous than anything. – Randall Jarrell

One old photograph looks pretty much like another.
What difference whether it was your mother, or hers,
I held in my hand that unbearable summer night?
Time erases, and faces get lost. What remain,
Unchanging even as faces change, (though every
Bit as doomed) are pictures like this one, frozen
For as long as late-summer cicadas hum in your head:

The light was burning in the kitchen. Cars went by.
The television was on, the sound turned down low.
In the next room lamplight fell on the piano keys.
You showed me that photograph: Russia, the fifties,
чёрно-белый. Yes, your mother was beautiful.
On another, happier night, it might have brought out
Your volume of Pushkin, or an old recording.

But that night, no—it was an ambush, unwelcome,
Bringing to mind another, far, suddenly so far away—
Brando in the old film Sayonara never knew such angst—
Like the shock of familiar writing on crumpled paper.
What happened next dismayed you, but then, both of us
Forgetting momentarily that grief is as ephemeral as joy,
You spoke softly to the silly drunk in your arms.

Kelley Dupuis
1/24/97

Tequila Bottle With Gillyflowers

I have nothing against roses but their short life span.
Maybe that’s why romantics love them so.
They flame out quickly, like Shelley or Byron.
When I was 21 I wrote a poem starring
yellow roses and Melody Coker: “Terminalia.”
(Studying Rome, I was proud of the title
for the latinate irony my bitterness demanded.)
John Ciardi, in one of my favorites of his,
tells the story of 1,000 roses he picked up cheap,
then hauled to church to scatter around the nave
in anticipation of an ex- girlfriend’s wedding
to “steadiness.” (“What a fool!” “But what a gesture!”)
These flowers have a native toughness not often
spoken of, and belied by their genus’ gentle ring.
Put a little salt in the vase-water with them
and they’ll last a long time. They look at home
jammed into an empty tequila bottle, (imagine
doing that with a rose!) and who knows? They might
just thrive there, if only the way Humphrey Bogart
managed to survive on the streets of Tampico
until Walter Huston and Tim Holt came to town.

Thelonious Monk in Morning Fog

It’s almost a cliché to observe
how easily jazz conspires with night.
Just think of all those album covers
of parked cars bathed in neon light.

Driving to a dental appointment,
windshield wipers beating slow
syncopation with Monk’s quartet
in this sober, winter-morning glow,

I take my cue from brakes ahead,
(muffled alarms in powdered light)
and think jazz never sounded better
than in this fermata, this white night.

Rat, dying

Smoke break. Whatever else,
It’s a way of killing time. We’re miles
from twelve, still further from five.
The surgeon general’s warning
is mute about these mornings.

You know the ones I mean.
They’re all the same, once eight-
o-one puts the fat guy on our necks.
We step out to the sidewalk
for smokes and mutinous talk.

It’s there we witness this
slow-motion dance in circles—
no—pretzel-shaped pirouettes
on the cement. No question:
the little prick ate poison.

Well, it was meant for him,
and this was the end intended.
Nobody wants rats around.
And time means nothing to a rat,
but this is slo-mo for all that.

A slight aroma of disquiet
floats among our flicking ashes.
(Only sickies enjoy suffering.)
A few more threats to the fat jerk,
then it’s crushed butts. Back to work.