power lines and towers with sunset in the distance

The Power & Light Company

John Barr / What it Means to be Human

Under the Used and Useful Principle
a public utility may charge customers
only for assets that are used and useful
in providing service to those who pay for it:
power plants, transmission lines, the sum total
of what it takes to deliver power and light.

Most of those with needs for power and light
in their lives work from a different principle.
Power—prerogative with impunity—is total
by nature, not a thing to sell to customers.
Those who gain it keep it. Having it
befits them, whether used or useful.

Light, on the other hand, is useful
when it gives illumination; think how light
reflecting off the moon reveals it, renders it.
Whether gaining and keeping is the principle
or giving is, matters to customers.
The one’s cost, the other’s benefit is total.

Can those receiving service unbundle the total,
choosing the light, which is nothing if not useful,
but not the power which is not for sale to customers
in any case? Does having the light
without the power offend some principle
of commerce? If so, are we compelled to honor it?

We know from history, which is replete with it,
that power abhors what it can’t control: total
antipathy portends the death of principle.
If we take only the light, can it be useful
without the power? If not, of what use is the light?
That is the quandary for customers.

And face it, our lot is to be customers:
Something received, things taken in return for it.
Light without power or power without light.
How do we keep the dark from turning total
when we ourselves would be the used and useful?
When giving our lives a purpose is the principle?

Caveat emptor, customers. The game is total,
your lives for it: You will be used if you are useful.
But as to power and light, let light be principal.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

The Power & Light Company Read More »

Monstera

John Barr / Natural Wonders

I know it's in the nature of wonder not to last,
but wonder now at your tactile vigilance,
the quality of attention in this new leaf–
how, learning of light, it unfolds and contorts
in the slow acrobatics of your kind.

I am impressed by your tolerance for neglect.
Latitudes removed from your Latin roots.
you're spared the hazards of the rainforest
if not the usual affronts to household plants–
overwatered or, worse, left waterless.

You're old enough to have followed the neighbor boys
to war and back, but unlike them you self-renew
and never know old age. Had Ponce de León,
when he lay down to die, only known
Eternal Youth bloomed just above his head!

Given modicums of soil, water, air,
new meristems will never cease to grow–
and death for you need never come.
In a world without end you can arabesque,
flourish forever as a species of one.

Which makes my duties for your sustenance
less the chore of an inconstant gardener
than of a monk bringing to the temple
quantities of driest sandalwood
that the fire of fires may never die.

By John Barr/from Dante in China

Monstera Read More »

Chicago, Tell Me Who You Are

John Barr / What it Means to be Human

I’m a city with a past, a memory
of fire. No fear is like the fear
of a wooden city on a windy day.
Even the people were on fire. “Throw me in the river,”
she told her husband. “I’d rather drown than burn.”

I’m Lincoln when he stands for President.
I’m the City of Big Shoulders and the World’s Fair.
I’m Millennium Park and the long lakeshore,
the Magnificent Mile and tallest towers.
The Cubs and White Sox, Bulls and Bears.

I'm Baby Face, Capone, and Dillinger;
Sandburg, Gwen Brooks, Hemingway;
Disney, Orson Welles, and Tina Fey;
Oprah, Smashing Pumpkins, Nat King Cole;
Jack Benny, Belushi, and Steve Colbert.

I’m “Sunday in the Park” and George Seurat;
the Symphony of Reiner and Solti;
Sinatra and Chicago, Chicago,
they have the time, the time of their life.
I saw a man, he danced with his wife!

The world's planes converge on me.
Flaps extending, each one flowers as it lands.
Astronauts in space see
a city rising from an inland sea.
My hands are filled with phosphorescent dreams.

John Barr/The Poetry of US/National Geographic anthology

Chicago, Tell Me Who You Are Read More »

Dante at Shiloh

John Barr / Holidays & Remembrance Days

Dante at Shiloh

I. I found myself in the aftermath.
Cannonades had set the woods ablaze,
felled whole trees, swept the earth

with canister and grape. From bodies
and body parts heaped up by musketry
(Aim low and be deliberate, boys.)

a strangeling crawled––Blue or Gray
I couldn’t tell––from the Minié balls’ last meal.
Straining to break their cannon free,

dead horses, still in harness, hauled.
Voices out of the burning undergrowth
wept for water as the field fell still.

At the iron dice of war, both sides lost.
Wild pigs won, squabbling over their feast.

II. It started to rain and with it came a troupe
of orators––men of God,
carpetbaggers of every stripe.

Gingerly, to avoid the mud,
they stepped from one corpse to the next,
crossing the swamp, slipping on blood.

One started to speak, “Brethren in Christ…”
but stopped, perplexed, to see another man
wearing his face. This progressed,

speaker after speaker, until soon
each searched in panic through the group,
and when he found his stolen face, that one

he mounted and buggered, like boar on boar–
in self-love or -loathing, I wasn’t sure.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

Dante at Shiloh Read More »

Water’s Way

John Barr / Natural Wonders

It takes 500 years for the ocean’s waters
to complete one trip around the earth.
National Geographic Society

The prodigal returned, a bride running late,
it races from the street,
climbs the plumbing in the walls
to the bathroom tap, then halts.

Water is weather. Pulled from swells
out where cyclones make the only news,
its vapor ladders latitudes to the pole,
refreshes bergy bits, brash ice, floes––

or crosses longitudes to fall
as shoures soote upon us all,
then drain away to aquifer.
Weather is God’s will writ small.

Water is extended metaphor:
Its antecedent, alchemic character
commonly denominates
all things, in compound or by temperature.

4 a.m. Fill the glass.
Let the molecule from Christ
stand again in human state
even as it quenches thirst.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

Water’s Way Read More »

Flyways

John Barr / Natural Wonders

I used to think of them as marathoners
raised to a power of ten: seemingly
indefinitely able to postpone
over Olympic hauls (four, five thousand miles,
a quarter of the globe's waxed face)
the need to flop down, flabby with exhaustion
and wait for rest, in its own good time,
to bring a better state of being.

After the bouillon of Canadian lakes in bloom,
fingerlings grown too big, air filled with lateness,
they lift, taking in stride the variegated land,
brick bunkers of the Bronx, the lay of Central Park,
giving room to LaGuardian pterodactyls,
the prickle of hunters on the Chesapeake
with their coy deceits, out over open ocean,
the earth's hull visible…

the camber and bell and hollow bone
(as grasped in the sienna studies of Leonardo)
working well, minute adjustments of the tail
with inertial certainty
keeping well to the right
the wrinkle of burnt Sierras, one side snow;
the desert incised by rulered roads,
by rounds of irrigated green; large-mannered Mexico,
the Mayan rhythms gathering to isthmus–
until you pointed out, two days ago,
that neither does the heart (not the "heart"
but the heart as grasped in the dissections
of Michelangelo) need rest, seemingly
indefinitely able to maintain
a heading and speed, resting as it goes,

through day's distractions, night's curing cold,
inclement weathers of every sort
until, after years of regularity,
it comes to a Patagonia not seen before;
landing in this new non-flying it doesn't need,
it joins in the clamor of its kind;
on shingle, inhospitable but free of predators,
just above the surf's antarctic burn,
it assumes the nesting rights established
when the pole was elsewhere and the continents one.

John Barr/from Hundred Fathom Curve

Flyways Read More »

Promethean

John Barr / Histories

It was anger — the audacious theft —
that chained him to the cliff for vulture's fare.
But fire itself, Zeus knew, could be the more
poetic punishment: subvert the gift
to a burning underground — Kentucky coal seams,
the slow combustion of mass burials
stoking the decay with human fuel
in plague pits, under soccer stadiums;
make it the incinerating blooms
of Bikini, Fukushima, and Chernobyl,
the Willie Pete and Little Boy that fell
on Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam.
Make him the airman crouched above his sight,
aiming to illuminate the night.

John Barr/from Measure

Promethean Read More »

The Hove (Memorial Day)

John Barr / Holidays & Remembrance Days

Such as there was in the littleness of that dawn
could not be this. Not, certainly, the hove
of an invasion fleet from Angleterre,
flotilla wrought of shipwright, chandler, armorer
as if Ice Age breeding stocks were on the move.

The Planners had their weather oracles,
haruspices their entrails. All divined
the red planet aligned, full-moon
visibility, high tides to clear
the beachhead obstacles — but iffy weather.

Gulls glean the wakes. Something of a factory —
diesel and air and the Jersey spirit spark —
of the hydrocarbon Gloriana makes
ungainly way in the valleys of the swells.
The shore emerges quaquaversally.

A Very pistol throats the air. Battlewagons
wheel for the presentation of the agon.
Shades of sherry fill the clouds with light.
Mike boats enter surf’s unscrolling rolls.
Empty jaws agape, the gods take note.

The odors of the offering, so rich
they start saliva flowing, must be painful
for the gods: not preamble for the meal,
the meal itself. Famished
they try to gorge the oily cooking smoke.

Amphibious landings to prevail require
the triumph of the small; circle in circle
perfected on parade grounds of the soul.
Committing an empire to the fire
calls for just-in-time ferocity.

They eat the savage honey. The boys pound sand.
Green eyes gammoning they all pound sand
until for the battle there was nothing left that day
but what the carrion patrols collect
for Paternosterers to sacristy.

They’re strong, these Irish penny whistle songs.
Just the one wild tone working alone
the registers, trying the proper sound
for sorrow. Ours for theirs,
theirs for theirs, ours for ours.

So many shouldering forward, enjambed
now cross the Styx with the ease of smoke
passing through a window screen ... depart
the shapes of things continuing for shapes
supercooled to the stillness of mortmain.

The business of the flag is never done.
It fills in the wind and fails, but never the same
akimbo twice. Each snap a fresh report
from acres of tended lawn
rankled by crosses perfectly plumb.

John Barr / from Poetry Magazine

The Hove (Memorial Day) Read More »

Black Powder (4th of July)

John Barr / Holidays & Remembrance Days

Saltpeter, to sailors who swore the cooks
put it in the eggs to keep their cocks in check;
Nitre, to alchemists who dreamed
of turning lead to gold;
Potassium Nitrate, to the druggist who asked
the boy what he would do with that.

The ancient Chinese recipe:
Mix with sulfur, charcoal
seven parts to one to two.
Grind it fine as talc.

What he would do is strike a match, then watch
the blaze of self-discovery––
the boyhood burn to master
the forbidden and impossible––
choking the basement with smoke
from what could sink a ship at Scapa Flow.

John Barr/from War, Literature & the Arts

Black Powder (4th of July) Read More »

Three Poems for Labor Day

John Barr / Holidays & Remembrance Days

Three Poems for Labor Day

The artisan as a youth; the artisan as master of his craft; the artisan and his dream.

Hunting For A Tool

I stand by the basement shelves
breathing the odor of the mouse who died
of love for cardboard, powders or tar.
Here is sandpaper with its bite of wood,
bottles with labels telling what to do.
No carpenter, I go to the bins below.

Early TV's, radios built like chapels,
vacuum tubes with silvered skulls.
My father accumulated in the dream
of hams: to tune the babble of frequencies–
Augustan time checks ... the BBC–
to make Marconi's leap
and travel in the company of light.

I relish the clean-cut teeth of gears,
a rheostat devoid of ohms.
A magnet feeling steel still pulls.
A lump of lead still wraps the hand
around itself, expressing heft.
Still waiting for its proper use,
a light bulb rattles its tungsten tongue.

by John Barr

Muse

She likes the long maple workbench, the tools
and stickered boards. She likes to watch a flitch
re-sawn, opened, and matched up with its mate
to read as if a book. She likes the rules, squares,
and marking knives, the sliding bevel gauge,
the trammel points and templates of French curves,
the lines they make for chisels, shaves, and saws.
She likes the hand-stitched rasp, the way its teeth
perfect a shape; the linseed oil and turpentine,
coat after coat, and how the pumice rubs
a luster that invites an eye to look,
a hand to linger. She likes the finished piece
placed in its place, to have it seen, as if
to speak of what it means to be complete.

by Jim Haines

Measure, A Review of Formal Poetry, Volume XI Issue 2, 2016
Reprinted with permission of the poet.

Restoration

I love to recover the quality
of things in decline.
To scour stone, scale paint from brick,
to compel, with wire brush,
the flourish wrought by iron.
To refinish wood, solving for
forgotten grain.
To give, by weeding our stone wall
back its dignity.
To left and right the borders of our lot,
to square the corners of our keep.

I have even dreamed: pushing a pushcart,
I stop anywhere and start
doing what needs to be done.
The first building takes time,
replacing windows, curing the roof.
I know compromises must be made
and make none, a floor at a time.

I work along an interstate
a century after Johnny Appleseed.
A modest people makes me chief.
(They, too, enjoy the hazy shine
of finished work by last light.)
Storm drains relieved, brick walks relaid,
a heritage of dust and wrappers
is renounced. The square square,
trim trim, the town for once
is like an artist's conception of the town.

by John Barr

Three Poems for Labor Day Read More »

Under the Used and Useful Principle a public utility may charge customers only for assets that are used and useful in providing service to those who pay for it: power plants, transmission lines, the sum total of what it takes to deliver power and light.

Most of those with needs for power and light in their lives work from a different principle. Power—prerogative with impunity—is total by nature, not a thing to sell to customers. Those who gain it keep it. Having it befits them, whether used or useful.

Light, on the other hand, is useful when it gives illumination; think how light reflecting off the moon reveals it, renders it. Whether gaining and keeping is the principle or giving is, matters to customers. The one’s cost, the other’s benefit is total.

Can those receiving service unbundle the total, choosing the light, which is nothing if not useful, but not the power which is not for sale to customers in any case? Does having the light without the power offend some principle of commerce? If so, are we compelled to honor it?

We know from history, which is replete with it, that power abhors what it can’t control: total antipathy portends the death of principle. If we take only the light, can it be useful without the power? If not, of what use is the light? That is the quandary for customers.

And face it, our lot is to be customers: Something received, things taken in return for it. Light without power or power without light. How do we keep the dark from turning total when we ourselves would be the used and useful? When giving our lives a purpose is the principle?

Caveat emptor, customers. The game is total, your lives for it: You will be used if you are useful. But as to power and light, let light be principal.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

I know it's in the nature of wonder not to last, but wonder now at your tactile vigilance, the quality of attention in this new leaf– how, learning of light, it unfolds and contorts in the slow acrobatics of your kind.

I am impressed by your tolerance for neglect. Latitudes removed from your Latin roots. you're spared the hazards of the rainforest if not the usual affronts to household plants– overwatered or, worse, left waterless.

You're old enough to have followed the neighbor boys to war and back, but unlike them you self-renew and never know old age. Had Ponce de León, when he lay down to die, only known Eternal Youth bloomed just above his head!

Given modicums of soil, water, air, new meristems will never cease to grow– and death for you need never come. In a world without end you can arabesque, flourish forever as a species of one.

Which makes my duties for your sustenance less the chore of an inconstant gardener than of a monk bringing to the temple quantities of driest sandalwood that the fire of fires may never die.

By John Barr/from Dante in China

I’m a city with a past, a memory of fire. No fear is like the fear of a wooden city on a windy day. Even the people were on fire. “Throw me in the river,” she told her husband. “I’d rather drown than burn.”

I’m Lincoln when he stands for President. I’m the City of Big Shoulders and the World’s Fair. I’m Millennium Park and the long lakeshore, the Magnificent Mile and tallest towers. The Cubs and White Sox, Bulls and Bears.

I'm Baby Face, Capone, and Dillinger; Sandburg, Gwen Brooks, Hemingway; Disney, Orson Welles, and Tina Fey; Oprah, Smashing Pumpkins, Nat King Cole; Jack Benny, Belushi, and Steve Colbert.

I’m “Sunday in the Park” and George Seurat; the Symphony of Reiner and Solti; Sinatra and Chicago, Chicago, they have the time, the time of their life. I saw a man, he danced with his wife!

The world's planes converge on me. Flaps extending, each one flowers as it lands. Astronauts in space see a city rising from an inland sea. My hands are filled with phosphorescent dreams.

John Barr/The Poetry of US/National Geographic anthology

Dante at Shiloh

I.

I found myself in the aftermath. Cannonades had set the woods ablaze, felled whole trees, swept the earth

with canister and grape. From bodies and body parts heaped up by musketry (Aim low and be deliberate, boys.)

a strangeling crawled––Blue or Gray I couldn’t tell––from the Minié balls’ last meal. Straining to break their cannon free,

dead horses, still in harness, hauled. Voices out of the burning undergrowth wept for water as the field fell still.

At the iron dice of war, both sides lost. Wild pigs won, squabbling over their feast.

II.

It started to rain and with it came a troupe of orators––men of God, carpetbaggers of every stripe.

Gingerly, to avoid the mud, they stepped from one corpse to the next, crossing the swamp, slipping on blood.

One started to speak, “Brethren in Christ…” but stopped, perplexed, to see another man wearing his face. This progressed,

speaker after speaker, until soon each searched in panic through the group, and when he found his stolen face, that one

he mounted and buggered, like boar on boar– in self-love or -loathing, I wasn’t sure.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

It takes 500 years for the ocean’s waters to complete one trip around the earth. National Geographic Society

The prodigal returned, a bride running late, it races from the street, climbs the plumbing in the walls to the bathroom tap, then halts.

Water is weather. Pulled from swells out where cyclones make the only news, its vapor ladders latitudes to the pole, refreshes bergy bits, brash ice, floes––

or crosses longitudes to fall as shoures soote upon us all, then drain away to aquifer. Weather is God’s will writ small.

Water is extended metaphor: Its antecedent, alchemic character commonly denominates all things, in compound or by temperature.

4 a.m. Fill the glass. Let the molecule from Christ stand again in human state even as it quenches thirst.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

John Barr/from Hundred Fathom Curve

John Barr/from Measure

Such as there was in the littleness of that dawn could not be this. Not, certainly, the hove of an invasion fleet from Angleterre, flotilla wrought of shipwright, chandler, armorer as if Ice Age breeding stocks were on the move.

The Planners had their weather oracles, haruspices their entrails. All divined the red planet aligned, full-moon visibility, high tides to clear the beachhead obstacles — but iffy weather.

Gulls glean the wakes. Something of a factory — diesel and air and the Jersey spirit spark — of the hydrocarbon Gloriana makes ungainly way in the valleys of the swells. The shore emerges quaquaversally.

A Very pistol throats the air. Battlewagons wheel for the presentation of the agon. Shades of sherry fill the clouds with light. Mike boats enter surf’s unscrolling rolls. Empty jaws agape, the gods take note.

The odors of the offering, so rich they start saliva flowing, must be painful for the gods: not preamble for the meal, the meal itself. Famished they try to gorge the oily cooking smoke.

Amphibious landings to prevail require the triumph of the small; circle in circle perfected on parade grounds of the soul. Committing an empire to the fire calls for just-in-time ferocity.

They eat the savage honey. The boys pound sand. Green eyes gammoning they all pound sand until for the battle there was nothing left that day but what the carrion patrols collect for Paternosterers to sacristy.

They’re strong, these Irish penny whistle songs. Just the one wild tone working alone the registers, trying the proper sound for sorrow. Ours for theirs, theirs for theirs, ours for ours.

So many shouldering forward, enjambed now cross the Styx with the ease of smoke passing through a window screen ... depart the shapes of things continuing for shapes supercooled to the stillness of mortmain.

The business of the flag is never done. It fills in the wind and fails, but never the same akimbo twice. Each snap a fresh report from acres of tended lawn rankled by crosses perfectly plumb.

John Barr / from Poetry Magazine

Saltpeter, to sailors who swore the cooks put it in the eggs to keep their cocks in check; Nitre, to alchemists who dreamed of turning lead to gold; Potassium Nitrate, to the druggist who asked the boy what he would do with that.

The ancient Chinese recipe: Mix with sulfur, charcoal seven parts to one to two. Grind it fine as talc.

What he would do is strike a match, then watch the blaze of self-discovery–– the boyhood burn to master the forbidden and impossible–– choking the basement with smoke from what could sink a ship at Scapa Flow.

John Barr/from War, Literature & the Arts

Three Poems for Labor Day

The artisan as a youth; the artisan as master of his craft; the artisan and his dream.

Hunting For A Tool

I stand by the basement shelves breathing the odor of the mouse who died of love for cardboard, powders or tar. Here is sandpaper with its bite of wood, bottles with labels telling what to do. No carpenter, I go to the bins below.

Early TV's, radios built like chapels, vacuum tubes with silvered skulls. My father accumulated in the dream of hams: to tune the babble of frequencies– Augustan time checks ... the BBC– to make Marconi's leap and travel in the company of light.

I relish the clean-cut teeth of gears, a rheostat devoid of ohms. A magnet feeling steel still pulls. A lump of lead still wraps the hand around itself, expressing heft. Still waiting for its proper use, a light bulb rattles its tungsten tongue.

Muse

Restoration

I have even dreamed: pushing a pushcart, I stop anywhere and start doing what needs to be done. The first building takes time, replacing windows, curing the roof. I know compromises must be made and make none, a floor at a time.

Under the Used and Useful Principle
a public utility may charge customers
only for assets that are used and useful
in providing service to those who pay for it:
power plants, transmission lines, the sum total
of what it takes to deliver power and light.

Most of those with needs for power and light
in their lives work from a different principle.
Power—prerogative with impunity—is total
by nature, not a thing to sell to customers.
Those who gain it keep it. Having it
befits them, whether used or useful.

Light, on the other hand, is useful
when it gives illumination; think how light
reflecting off the moon reveals it, renders it.
Whether gaining and keeping is the principle
or giving is, matters to customers.
The one’s cost, the other’s benefit is total.

Can those receiving service unbundle the total,
choosing the light, which is nothing if not useful,
but not the power which is not for sale to customers
in any case? Does having the light
without the power offend some principle
of commerce? If so, are we compelled to honor it?

We know from history, which is replete with it,
that power abhors what it can’t control: total
antipathy portends the death of principle.
If we take only the light, can it be useful
without the power? If not, of what use is the light?
That is the quandary for customers.

And face it, our lot is to be customers:
Something received, things taken in return for it.
Light without power or power without light.
How do we keep the dark from turning total
when we ourselves would be the used and useful?
When giving our lives a purpose is the principle?

Caveat emptor, customers. The game is total,
your lives for it: You will be used if you are useful.
But as to power and light, let light be principal.

I know it's in the nature of wonder not to last,
but wonder now at your tactile vigilance,
the quality of attention in this new leaf–
how, learning of light, it unfolds and contorts
in the slow acrobatics of your kind.

I am impressed by your tolerance for neglect.
Latitudes removed from your Latin roots.
you're spared the hazards of the rainforest
if not the usual affronts to household plants–
overwatered or, worse, left waterless.

You're old enough to have followed the neighbor boys
to war and back, but unlike them you self-renew
and never know old age. Had Ponce de León,
when he lay down to die, only known
Eternal Youth bloomed just above his head!

Given modicums of soil, water, air,
new meristems will never cease to grow–
and death for you need never come.
In a world without end you can arabesque,
flourish forever as a species of one.

Which makes my duties for your sustenance
less the chore of an inconstant gardener
than of a monk bringing to the temple
quantities of driest sandalwood
that the fire of fires may never die.

I’m a city with a past, a memory
of fire. No fear is like the fear
of a wooden city on a windy day.
Even the people were on fire. “Throw me in the river,”
she told her husband. “I’d rather drown than burn.”

I’m Lincoln when he stands for President.
I’m the City of Big Shoulders and the World’s Fair.
I’m Millennium Park and the long lakeshore,
the Magnificent Mile and tallest towers.
The Cubs and White Sox, Bulls and Bears.

I'm Baby Face, Capone, and Dillinger;
Sandburg, Gwen Brooks, Hemingway;
Disney, Orson Welles, and Tina Fey;
Oprah, Smashing Pumpkins, Nat King Cole;
Jack Benny, Belushi, and Steve Colbert.

I’m “Sunday in the Park” and George Seurat;
the Symphony of Reiner and Solti;
Sinatra and Chicago, Chicago,
they have the time, the time of their life.
I saw a man, he danced with his wife!

The world's planes converge on me.
Flaps extending, each one flowers as it lands.
Astronauts in space see
a city rising from an inland sea.
My hands are filled with phosphorescent dreams.

I found myself in the aftermath.
Cannonades had set the woods ablaze,
felled whole trees, swept the earth

with canister and grape. From bodies
and body parts heaped up by musketry
(Aim low and be deliberate, boys.)

a strangeling crawled––Blue or Gray
I couldn’t tell––from the Minié balls’ last meal.
Straining to break their cannon free,

dead horses, still in harness, hauled.
Voices out of the burning undergrowth
wept for water as the field fell still.

At the iron dice of war, both sides lost.
Wild pigs won, squabbling over their feast.

It started to rain and with it came a troupe
of orators––men of God,
carpetbaggers of every stripe.

Gingerly, to avoid the mud,
they stepped from one corpse to the next,
crossing the swamp, slipping on blood.

One started to speak, “Brethren in Christ…”
but stopped, perplexed, to see another man
wearing his face. This progressed,

speaker after speaker, until soon
each searched in panic through the group,
and when he found his stolen face, that one

he mounted and buggered, like boar on boar–
in self-love or -loathing, I wasn’t sure.

It takes 500 years for the ocean’s waters
to complete one trip around the earth.
National Geographic Society

The prodigal returned, a bride running late,
it races from the street,
climbs the plumbing in the walls
to the bathroom tap, then halts.

Water is weather. Pulled from swells
out where cyclones make the only news,
its vapor ladders latitudes to the pole,
refreshes bergy bits, brash ice, floes––

or crosses longitudes to fall
as shoures soote upon us all,
then drain away to aquifer.
Weather is God’s will writ small.

Water is extended metaphor:
Its antecedent, alchemic character
commonly denominates
all things, in compound or by temperature.

4 a.m. Fill the glass.
Let the molecule from Christ
stand again in human state
even as it quenches thirst.

Such as there was in the littleness of that dawn
could not be this. Not, certainly, the hove
of an invasion fleet from Angleterre,
flotilla wrought of shipwright, chandler, armorer
as if Ice Age breeding stocks were on the move.

The Planners had their weather oracles,
haruspices their entrails. All divined
the red planet aligned, full-moon
visibility, high tides to clear
the beachhead obstacles — but iffy weather.

Gulls glean the wakes. Something of a factory —
diesel and air and the Jersey spirit spark —
of the hydrocarbon Gloriana makes
ungainly way in the valleys of the swells.
The shore emerges quaquaversally.

A Very pistol throats the air. Battlewagons
wheel for the presentation of the agon.
Shades of sherry fill the clouds with light.
Mike boats enter surf’s unscrolling rolls.
Empty jaws agape, the gods take note.

The odors of the offering, so rich
they start saliva flowing, must be painful
for the gods: not preamble for the meal,
the meal itself. Famished
they try to gorge the oily cooking smoke.

Amphibious landings to prevail require
the triumph of the small; circle in circle
perfected on parade grounds of the soul.
Committing an empire to the fire
calls for just-in-time ferocity.

They eat the savage honey. The boys pound sand.
Green eyes gammoning they all pound sand
until for the battle there was nothing left that day
but what the carrion patrols collect
for Paternosterers to sacristy.

They’re strong, these Irish penny whistle songs.
Just the one wild tone working alone
the registers, trying the proper sound
for sorrow. Ours for theirs,
theirs for theirs, ours for ours.

So many shouldering forward, enjambed
now cross the Styx with the ease of smoke
passing through a window screen ... depart
the shapes of things continuing for shapes
supercooled to the stillness of mortmain.

The business of the flag is never done.
It fills in the wind and fails, but never the same
akimbo twice. Each snap a fresh report
from acres of tended lawn
rankled by crosses perfectly plumb.

Saltpeter, to sailors who swore the cooks
put it in the eggs to keep their cocks in check;
Nitre, to alchemists who dreamed
of turning lead to gold;
Potassium Nitrate, to the druggist who asked
the boy what he would do with that.

The ancient Chinese recipe:
Mix with sulfur, charcoal
seven parts to one to two.
Grind it fine as talc.

What he would do is strike a match, then watch
the blaze of self-discovery––
the boyhood burn to master
the forbidden and impossible––
choking the basement with smoke
from what could sink a ship at Scapa Flow.

I stand by the basement shelves
breathing the odor of the mouse who died
of love for cardboard, powders or tar.
Here is sandpaper with its bite of wood,
bottles with labels telling what to do.
No carpenter, I go to the bins below.

Early TV's, radios built like chapels,
vacuum tubes with silvered skulls.
My father accumulated in the dream
of hams: to tune the babble of frequencies–
Augustan time checks ... the BBC–
to make Marconi's leap
and travel in the company of light.

I relish the clean-cut teeth of gears,
a rheostat devoid of ohms.
A magnet feeling steel still pulls.
A lump of lead still wraps the hand
around itself, expressing heft.
Still waiting for its proper use,
a light bulb rattles its tungsten tongue.

I have even dreamed: pushing a pushcart,
I stop anywhere and start
doing what needs to be done.
The first building takes time,
replacing windows, curing the roof.
I know compromises must be made
and make none, a floor at a time.