Poems for Persons of Interest

the deer blind i am doing my best to not become  the deer blind i learned to hate myself in.  dawn has a way of illuminating  the ugly violence of a man.  i am forever trapped in the carvings  of our names in the blind’s wood siding. the cycle ends and repeats again:  the waiting,  the cradle of an eye in the scope,  the finger twitching against the trigger,  the lifeblood staining the missouri clay,  the anguished sobs of a mother. i am at the mercy of your sights even when death doesn’t wink  in my direction.  my fingers hook into your belt loop.  the hook of me in the eye of you. a hook in an eye.  a bullet piercing a buck's eye.  being tethered to you  is the only way i know  the barrel won’t come to take me.  one of these days, you say  as your free hand finds my hook,  i’ll mount your head like a trophy on my wall. i love you so m...

Kyoto, 2019 Cicada din that August weighted trees along Imadegawa Street like fruit too thick for branches. Walking to the train we hunched beneath the screaming canopy as sidewalk cyclists ripped among us mute and morning traffic swelled the silent lanes, pressed past as if through water. Sighted sound unraveled at the Kamo Bridge: again the engines and sometimes a bell. The brute rail cavern roar when we got underground                         soothed like rain.

Pantoum of the Money Changers It startled us to think He’d die for you. Forever disproportionate and strange— He showed us righteous anger, it is true, But on His part it was a poor exchange.   Forever disproportionate and strange— We couldn’t tell if He was rich or poor, But on His part it was a poor exchange: He asked for nothing and we owed Him more.   We couldn’t tell if He was rich or poor. We couldn’t understand Him: too sublime. He asked for nothing and we owed Him more. We still remember Him from time to time.   We couldn’t understand Him: too sublime. He had to pay the bill when it was due. We still remember Him from time to time. It startled us to think He’d die for you. 

Robin Hood (#1) Sing, Mary, our lady of lilies and lays, of Robin whose arrows sang clean from Norse neck to Norse neck, who beat his plow to a blood-tinged blade and with it splintered spines and severed souls until he laid it to its rest, sunk deep in English dirt. So sing, lady who wept beneath the three rude trees.   Now among the vast-trunked Wessex trees, laying in leaves and shielded with shade, Robin waits, his mind stained with vengeance, and the dirt beneath him damp with the blood of slaughtered Norse and Englishmen alike—Alfred’s men’s unshriven souls mottled with the icy Danes who lived by their blades   and died. The Norse serpent ships cut like blades through the whale road. Their axes cut the English trees like a scythe through water. They hoarded Christian souls— souls and altar dressings were their loot, and Robin’s  kinsmen, hall, and hope all fell to ash beneath the Norse raiders’ greed. Robin returned from hunting, but dirt   was all they left, s...

Swans at Lake Como Someone’s breakfast hits The surface of a lake And sharp Alps buckle, warp: an orange beak Spears a croissant and lifts   It up. Gulp: it’s gone. Kids with backpacks throw Leftovers. Opportunist gulls and smews Hustle around two swans,   Risking a razor peck, But that’s the price of food. The minor birds are seasoned gamblers, good At ducking white-snake necks,   Wings like snow tornados. Nothing gets rid of them. From time to time the two mute spouses swim Apart, as if they chose   To be alone, when it’s Fatigue at the froth of theft Around them, desperate battle right and left To have what others eat.   The two mates can’t rehearse What was or mourn what is, Trained handout addicts looking for a fix, Two more scavengers   Of many. Nothing helps. Scraps fly. The two swans smell More food, swim back, dependent, beautiful Among the wavering Alps.

Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan My mom was never one to keep in tune but she still sang the song that we all knew from Red Sox games. My dad, who died a week before, had watched until the bitter end, complained of crappy calls and Yankees fans, Terry Francona’s coaching—thought that he knew better since he was so close to death and thus had God’s omniscient baseball knowledge.   Holding the mic, my mother stood alone beside a TV screen at our friend’s house where mourners gathered after the funeral. My weary mother wailed and we all howled and pitched past pitch our voices rose together. The lyrics stole across the screen as we were led into the fade by love, by grief, by her: The good times never seemed so good …

Ogba River at Noon Now the river has rounded the stones, smothered their luster with shadows; calm the beseeching feet, whispering grass. We have come mudding the wending corridors.   Black, the emotionless face stealing in and out of dark ripples: shadows are flinging their arms into the distance thronging with egrets and lilies. Calm the beseeching feet, tender with pleas. We have come: cockerel, drink, coconut and cowries.   River bosom slapping the paddle beat of lapping canoes from their hands, the restless hips of nymphs are wandering into the dance. Calm the beseeching feet, steeped with toes. We have come to lay praise on your lips.

Ode to Periquito Reason dictates that this doesn’t matter now—if ever it did. If I’d done right, if I’d nothing to forgive, if you were not rendered with hack twists of tongue so slight.   You weren’t small, not to me. It wouldn’t take courage to speak what I do know, just sense enough to carry what belief you make through my teeth. Such hope needs no great defense.   I wish you were still here. This is an exercise of what I didn’t say till it was too late. Remains, stuff I won’t let go of, things that live in my eyes. history won’t remember you, so supposed, but I will. Fragments of your book still hold. Like, “stay gold.”

Three Portraits of Man I–Judas It started on a Tuesday after work. Not much, but more than nothing. He’d been fine and when examined said they both were happy. But things had started breaking at the time, small tremors, hairline fractures, silent days that turned to silent nights that turned to weeks, all covered with a gloss of pleasantries. A life that hardly merited complaint, or so he told himself each passing month which made his hell of heaven so much worse. The brunette millstone hanging round his neck, the office secret everybody knows that makes him an adulterer by nights when “work has kept me late again” cannot begin to hold the kind of love he holds for her, the one for whom he weaves this crown of thorns she doesn’t know that she will wear six months from now when all will be revealed by one loud shot, a cold scream and a note. For now, it only creeps up like a whisper, when staring at himself in bathroom mirrors and wondering how it ever came to this.   II–Peter It ha...

Hands 1.         Outside, the air sounds of javelinas jostling in fear and stringing cries across the sharp January wind. This is death music — hunters’ hymns groaning an artificial throat-clear before dropping from a silent sky. Dogs bark before the splash, and red blooms against the backdrop of stars eking a low light across the air strip’s sands. Necks buckling under the crunch of a thoughtless falcon’s thump outside the tower. As the bombs arrive, a truck peels off to relieve the controllers and a man with a Boston lilt orders the planes to take off. I watch and hold the cooling barrel of a gun like I grip my niece’s hand at the park.   2.          Youth is green stick awe trapped inside a vigour that compels risk and impatience. His freedom was found at night taking in the fire that perched on dark clouds divorcing themselves slowly from sentine...

After Home is Not a Place: A Collaboration by Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2023   1 A door, its official green diluted to a smeary blue by time and dis-appointment. A handle, vertical, cold, the negation of welcome. ‘ Refugee and Migrant Justice Please Pull to Enter ’ Please pull. It is against the law to smoke. Please enter your details. Enter the next paragraph, the next page, the next door, the next justice. Please pull. Please close the door.   2 Snow, seven boys in a huddle, laughing into the photographer’s lens, sleet-streaked, warm in their black jackets, black gloves, black hats, black hoods. Which of them will remember this: the snow, the photographer, the wet flags flying from windowsills, the vague wintry trees?   Gallery notes: “In 2021, photographer Johny Pitts and poet Roger Robinson […] circumnavigated the British coast clockwise in search of Black history and...

Day after dish runs away with spoon We wake up at Les Deux Magots in Paris. We take selfies for the china cabinet back home.   Then, as a nod to fashion, we lay nude on the best place setting at Café de Flore.   We say we hate silverware puns. The worst, you say.   Yeah, I say. Like what’s better than good silverware.   Good silver here, you say. I stare. You’re sharp as a knife I say.   A cut above the rest, you say. Some say I’m cleaver.   You got a point, I say. Cutting edge, you say. You are   the fork in the road. I grit my teeth, smile.   You pull out a knife. Do you want a slice of the action?   I hesitate. Then, ok I say. Keep ladling it out.   You pick up a butter spreader. Do you want to, you ask.   I pick up a fork. You smile. Oh yes, you say. Oh yes.

March 18 A skink has taken up in the new wall. I saw its blue tail vanish into a chink just now. It’s cold for March, but the courses of slate are basking in midday sun. I think I’d like the wall if I were born a lizard; I’d like this unkempt corner of my yard.   Periwinkle blooms through the leaf litter. Clumps of hellebore raise their Lenten blooms. (The honeysuckle stubbornly bloomed all winter.) The Muhle grass flaunts its sunlit plumes. Perhaps my gray hair silvers in the sun, metal refined by age before I’m done.

Monkeys The three monkeys: don’t listen, don’t look, do not speak. That kind of learning lives with memories in your wrist, small arm:   Chinese burn, sticks and stones. It’s wise to arm yourself while crawling. An infant can look away or down, leave its body, learning   to float from pain to a far cloud; learning stillness, silence; to hide the black-and-blue arm, stare at grown-ups with an empty look.

  Lacrimae sunt rerum Summer is the most nostalgic time, Remembering how once the blood ran hot, Regretting every hill I have not climbed, Recalling what I was and now am not. But then again, I was not often good. I seldom had a motive that was pure. I did what I liked because I could, And what I did not like would not endure. I dreamed and did not care that it was day. I laughed and did not care that others cried. Still, the sun was warm upon my face, Though now I’m shamed by its all-seeing eye. On Zeus’s threshold always stand two urns: Remembered pain and pleasure. Each one burns.

Personal Library A book pulled off the shelf shows yellowed pages dirty brown at their thumb-scalloped edges, the binding makes a crackling sound—dried glue releases first a single page, then two, then more fall, an accordion unrolled— when did all my books become so old? 

  The Stalin Epigram, Osip Mandelstam We subsist, without sensing beneath us the state, Our exchanges inaudible ten feet away; If we ever scrape up a half-banter, We’ll allude to the Kremlin highlander. His fat fingers are pinguid like corpulent worms, And his words like to pood-weighing dumbbells are firm, His cockroach’s mustachios titter, And the calves of his leather boots glitter.   There surrounds him a canaille of captains, neck thin, He toys with obsequiousness of half-men: Some are whistling, some meowing, some sobbing, He alone does the braying and prodding. Like a horseshoe he smithies decrees by-the-bye — To the groin, or the skull, or the brow, or the eye. Executions — as berries refreshing, And broad chest of a thickset Ossetian. 

Swamp Fiend In the thick sticks of Honey Island Swamp, Between Louisiana and the border Of Mississippi— hell-patch wetlands here — There lives, supposedly, a beast, man-like And covered in hair, standing eight feet tall. At least that’s how the story goes, my dear. And it’s an old one, too. As I recall, The first reports of something monstrous roaming The swamp began to surface in the sixties. Accounts from fishermen and hunters detailed Bizarre, unnatural findings: fearsome growls, Mysterious footprints, the mangled carcass Of a black bear, and odd displays—in clusters— Of the remains of alligator gar Along the outer banks. Perhaps the most Disturbing find was partial human remains: A female femur and two toothless skulls. The rest? Who knows? Eyewitnesses are few. It’s sad. And it’s unfortunate for you. At times, some sportsmen do still come to visit This place. In fact, a Mister Harlan Ford, In nineteen-seventy-four, captured what’s The only photographic evidence: A short and grai...

August Summer descends through tiers of light and shadow, Coolness and warmth, like a falling leaf. Today it slides sidewise, along the window; I grab it, hold it, add it to my sheaf Of days, as if collecting passing pleasure Or pain could make it pass more slowly. Fast Or slow, the days are gone, and hoarding treasure Chests of memories won't make them last. Let summer fall as it decides to fall. Let that bright cloud pass by or darken. We Are only watching, waiting, hearkening To the divine pageant of the sky  And earth, and all of our internal Weather, and as we watch, we float, then fly.

After Saving a Life I always thought I’d mess it up. Some part of me believes I did. “The game,” they say in baseball, “will Come round to you. Be ready.” I Was not, was taking out the trash – “José. Hello.” I waved. But he Did not wave back. He always does. I stepped across the street as at Some signal, and I guess it was: Hands at his face, in the wrong yard. His next word – “Sangre” – made me swim, Feel for bottom and find none. His dishcloth, carmine, fell to show A face of blood; two blood streams fell Thick, unbroken, from nose to earth. From then on not myself, I took His elbow, found the bloody tracks Across his doorway, up the stairs. The kitchen looked as if a birth Had happened everywhere. “José, Put pressure on. Don’t stop. Your head … Tilt back … and spit, don’t swallow.” He’d Tried to find help. No-one around. “How long?” I shouted. Eighty, he Said, “Una hora, más o menos.” I could have panicked, maybe did. The phone was dancing in my hands Slick from the blood. A voice...

At Last You’re a chunk of clay, and I’m a bit of bone, grown by a God who could not leave well enough alone.   And darling, look at what we’ve made, in an earth barely subdued: three of our kind, flesh of our flesh, all pink and earthen-hued.   Now a knowledge great and terrible lingers overhead: the soft spectre of Death above our marriage bed.   And I wish I could remember exactly what He said: work and pain, fruit and grain, heels and serpents’ heads.   At any rate, I’ll kiss you beneath your cloak of figs (a woman cannot help but sow the rows her husband digs).   Now in our little garden where our sin-struck children play, where you toil and I labor to keep that Death at bay,   past the flaming sword, where you put your plow to rest, pluck with me the thorns we’ve spat into each other’s flesh.   At night we’ll count the spaces between your blessed ribs (a woman cannot help but fill the ditch her husband digs),   and if you should find a gap ...

Sonnet to Sleep After Salomon Certon Who composed it while suffering from insomnia, attempting to avoid the letter e Jason, who’d run so much to snatch that wool, Finally caught it without any harm From flaming dragons; but not by his strong arm, Nor fatal ship, floating in Colchis’ pool! No, without you, mild child of night, to cool A burning brow with soft and artful balm Things fail; Our champion floats through Styx’s calm Although so grand, so good, so spiritful! But his companion, you, with dark charm, laid that dragon down to curl its lit-up tail away. Happ’ly, through you his trophy’s won! And so, O you who sprang such crucial aid at such an hour, with soothing hands’ avail, may adorations always spur you on. Original: Pour ravir la toison quand Jason courut tant, Il y parvint pour vray, l’arrachant hors du sort Aux dragons flamboyans : mais non par son bras fort, Non par son bac fatal à Cholsos loing flottant. Car sans ton fort pouvoir qui luy ...

Self-Doubt Is it that I am simply growing old, Halfway to ninety, blood pressure a mess? I hate my nervous sexual address. A few thrusts and I often have to fold And on my knees admit I was too bold, Or leave it to tongue and fingers to confess. Sometimes a mental image works to bless My efforts and to thwart the spreading cold.   Would it be different if she were one I loved when I was virile? One of those The others didn’t want to hear about, Who made me feel like nature’s only son, Who chose me for a while and whom I chose? I’d need a time machine to put by doubt.  

After Rome Snow peaks the feeder’s dome, a soft aedicula— blank pediment, the plastic curve its weather-stained entablature.   Birds winging to the edges of the tray, leaning in to feed, then launching back shake their little temple with a worship innocent of ruins. 

Polari Catullus 50 A double act? We agreed to fool around, have a little fun, the other day, toss off some gags, craft some jokes, not for any show but just for play. How utterly fantabulosa! What fun and games we two had, coming up with quips, drinking cheap red wine, round your bachelor pad, and as time went on, the punchlines became more and more outrageous – heartface, your dirty mind and dirtier laugh were quite contagious! And then when I went back all on my tod to my lonely old ken, all I could think was how I needed to be with you once again – my dear, I was so very fired up by your wit and your talent, I couldn’t manage even a single wink, I swear I couldn’t, tossed and turned about on my single letty ‘til ever so late. And today so as to let you know all about my two and eight, I’m dropping you a line. Be a bona pal, don’t be a meanie: Miss Karma can be a terrible bitch – you’d better believe me!   Polari glossary: fantabulosa – wonderful;...

There’s no angel tastes like the groundfall apricot   Met brick and sun one perfect afternoon   I didn’t miss you so much as rolled the pit in my mouth   And spelled your name 

  A Spider Poem I cannot bring myself to write a love poem. at least not the mushy romantic stuff my friends write and read aloud when we gather for wine and dip and literature.   Nothing is pure enough for me. The marble fountain is scuffed with dirt. The water from my tap clouds up on release.   I just don’t respond to another’s eyes the way they do. I can’t just hear what I want to hear but what a guy actually says.   I don’t even write “like” poems. Mine are of the “be wary” variety. Or the “don’t make a fool of yourself again.”   My friends look up and see a starry sky. I keep watch on a spider crawling across the ceiling.