Poems for Persons of Interest

Promenade 1 The poodle to the right of the small group has the look of a benign, elder statesman. The people want us to believe they’re moving forward in uncertain times.   2 Olga has seen all too clearly how they’re out of time: the boy with the grey cap, clinging to his mother’s hip, his face like a boiled sweet.   3 The other woman, taupe dress, holds a creature, a marten. Notice the limp front legs.   4 Olga has been kind – their eyes, the tops of heads are hidden below the black umbrella. The man is left-handed, a failed bureaucrat. The woman in blue may be in disguise. We can’t know. If she is a woman, she’ll have taken on the role of governess.   5 We’re meant to think they’re out in nature, that they’re there to search the shade for snakes. More likely, they’ve met the snakes and failed to kill them.   6 The young girl has her own umbrella. It’s not raining on her either.   7 It’s a relief to know it’s a canvas. The rumbling of cannons is somewhere ...

  Hunger Strike Blood is on the table, the mouths are choking But I'm going hungry… —Temple of the Dog   Offer me all the blandishments of Spain, the lure             Of wine poured out like blood in gold carafes, And platters heaped with pomegranates, dates, and pure             Delicacies. Instead of epitaphs, The bitter herbs of faith and truth, let me compose             Delicious panegyrics, and report From moonlit gardens where the breath of Heaven blows             That all is well within this heathen court. Turn me aside from stricken thoughts of home, where Ruth             Once gleaned amid the rough Judean hills, As Layla's warm caresses, and the raven pith     ...

An Argument for Apocatastasis Assuming sentiment does not misplace Itself upon a sleeping infant’s face Or co-opt reason doubtfully to find Within the womb a thing of the same kind, At least it is not of the same degree, That much is clear. Having begun to be, Other things equal, we would see it live And where it fails to, spare some time to grieve, But not as much as if it had advanced As far in life as otherwise had chanced. Assuming then that which seems presupposed: That though those little eyes as yet be closed, A soul, immortal, individual Takes residence behind them, and that all The chance it has of a lifetime in our world Is actual already, lying furled, To be no more than just this once incarnate— And one more thing, as messengers will warn it, That sins it will commit right from the start Will be engraved upon its little heart In letters God has promised to erase From those hearts only that accept His grace, (Which many won’t, or won’t know how to do In this age where the ...

Polari Catullus 78B Infamy, infamy: a fragment   …………………………………... But see now, what pisses me off is you’ve soiled with yer filthy kisses the purest of the pure, my treash, my ducky. But don’t think you’re in the clear. I’ll make sure all the world will hear, make you a byword for all that’s mucky.   Polari glossary: treash – treasure [a frequent term of endearment]; ducky [a term of endearment]

Good Night This library is colder than I like. My shoulders, sore today from too much rowing, Shiver a little for dramatic effect. I have no audience, except my pen.   I want to write something about a night— Or maybe many nights—compressed in one Symbolic evening that will redefine Night in my memory. I think of you.   And then I think, this paper is too white, My line of ink inadequate, too blue. Nothing is as I remember it. Maybe It never was that way. In life or art—   Except this once. I write your name by mine. Then add, “Good Night.”                                     Then, I put down my pen.

To a Sycamore Of course, there have been times my ripples bridle Against the grip of your strong patchbark roots, Times when the litter of your rusty leaves Stymies my rush and muffles my recital Of imitation birdsong. But, in turn, You brace the bed where my curved current weaves Around you. From your rootedness, I learn To flow in channeled force by sweetspire shoots. Reach up above me with your whispering limbs. Splinter the sunlight into shafts that flash Brilliantly off my eddies when I laugh. With your night branches, cut the moon in half And drop it in my dark pool. Where it swims Unanchored, you can hear a cool, soft splash.

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.