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Eros
around the world
the eyes have it
Stars
what of these stars
that line our flowers,
pale against blue,
some brown on red,
have a message for us,
but don't leap
nor shout, don't flicker
call attention, but not
for our sake
what in them disturbs
the bees to stimulate
then tweak the dust
that bears more stars,
ingests our blues,
our reds, our flesh
Horoscope
reads "nobody" born this day
has a hand in it
"pep"
virgo
all her life destined to no
body
Mary
mope
handling it like so
and so
all her
dolor
sour
as the lemon flower
Vermont Summer
Over the summer, Ida made Bob chop seven
cords of wood for winter. Every morning
Bob went to the outhouse to hide from Ida's
brothers and her. He read the funnies or drew
on the walls. Soon he would have to mow
the fields, too--the brothers would be off
fixing roofs. By August, we stopped
in to fix chicken curry for them on their
Franklin Stove. That wood stove heated
their water, too--a tank hung on the stovepipe
and hot water funneled from that tank
to all bathrooms and to the kitchen sink.
News
"So I'm tough to work
with?" our friend asks
and pretends this is
news to him
--though people the world
over have been trying
to tell him this, and year
after year they line
up on the first Wednesday
of November to shout
over our town's only
callbox to his ear:
"Hard, damn hard"
--we don't know why,
but when it's meet
we'll treat each other
to bagels and coffee,
and he'll ask us again,
"Am I tough?"
"Tough like a horn,"
we'll say, "Tough like big
freaking cow horns
with that strap of leather
down the middle, so tough
the cowboys piss when
they see you
stampede their way
--you're so tough
you don't know."
Non Sequitur van Dam
"When kids say,
'Is there going to be a job for me
when I graduate?'
I essentially have to laugh,"
says Andries van
Dam, professor at Brown
where he has been
teaching intro computer science
since 1965.
"That's like saying,
'When Maxwell discovered the rules
of electromagnetism,
was physics over?'"
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