Academic Retreat
bland ennui
podium drones
chittering cadres
splintering styrofoam
blank figures
tedium’s bones
self-referential
legume enumerators
blunt stylus
medium’s cones
somnolent sputter
dreary enervation
Divine Confection
Once my mother made a big plate of divinity
and I said to my brother, bet you can’t eat just one.
Well, we fell out laughing, thinking about the time when
we bought a bag of chips from the sexy checkout girl
and kept making jokes coming home from the grocery
cracking up and wondering how the Lays lady lays
with a cautious nod to the copyright attorney
and all due apologies to Mister Bob Dylan,
though a man who makes his living from clever wordplay
can hardly complain whenever it crops up elsewhere.
That’s especially true because he dropped his real name
for his birth certificate reads Robert Zimmerman
and I wonder: what if his favorite poet were
Robert Frost instead of the thirsty Dylan Thomas,
unstoppering by a snowy wood when he got dry?
Would he now be Robert Robert, and wouldn’t people
have confused him early on with Robbie Robertson?
Or perhaps to avoid that, he would have a nickname:
not Boss or King or Slowhand, but something evoking
a singer of poetry—maybe Oral Roberts
But, oops, that would be even worse because there is that
pompadoured Oklahoma preacher, once the healer
of arthritic elbows and the occasional plague
of boils afflicting the odd Old Testament martyr
to whom Bildad appeared with a shopping cart laden
with lizards, locusts, and stinging scorpions and said
Take this, Job, and shove it, but the tiny wheels bogged down
in sand, leaving him lamenting to leprous laymen
I’ll bet you this never happened to Jeremiah!
Meanwhile, in the eighties, Dylan found the messiah
But it was floral moral Oral who said he saw
a hundred foot Jesus saying: raise me more geetus.
Now, I’m no dyspeptic skeptic, but I’ve never seen
Jesus at all, though I feel his presence at Christmas
Still, if his standing height in yards was the same as his
age when he hung on the cross, you could get him to hold
up your TV antenna, and I’ll bet you would get
immaculate reception. Of course I’d be cautious,
though I’m not sacrilegious, about standing too close
for fear of the lightning . . . but really I’m not worried
If God hurled thunderbolts like mythical Zeus, He might
take a shot at preachers for profit, who fudge truth and
fiddle the books like Nero selling fire insurance
But God lets us make our mistakes and have some fun, too
Ben Franklin, our frequently foundering father, said
beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us
to be happy, and I would hasten to agree, though
Franklin’s faith was not my own, for he was mere Deist
not a Eucharistic fellow with chips for his brew
and thus never tasted my Mother’s divinity
Dry
boney anorexic soul has no breath
no intake at all, its exhalation
is only the gasp of the punctured corpse
stake in the breast of the vampire yielding
a pitiful puff of fetid staleness
even the putrefaction half-hearted
too little essence for a full-fledged stink
skin like the sun-dried membrane of bat’s wings
stretched out thinly over bones so tightly
that a pinprick, unleashing fierce surface
tension, might fling fleshless flaps skittering
o’er skeleton, ripped cello-wrap beating
hasty retreat from desiccated meat
balloon stuff fraying round a vacuum void
vaporless vault of the leathery shrew
no sweat, no tears, no mucus, no moisture
none of the warm wetness of womanhood
blood congealed, condensed, evaporated
even her venom a fine dry powder
her slithering the sound of sandpaper
scraping crass across a rough surfaced stone
so little like women damp with desire
or kissed with chastity’s milder juices
lachrymal in laughter, languor, or lust
dabbed, licked, lapped up, but never wiped away
unafraid to lactate, expectorate
perspire, no bleached sinews or oil-less hair
breathing visible heat in the chill air
tiny droplets of spirit escaping
ectoplasm distilling its essence
lovers soak up this liquor like sponges
in the meantime, seedless, the arid husk
parches in her non-porous poverty
ethicist
the woman drinks milk
in a Chinese restaurant
says Derrida is
becoming an ethicist
barely touches her
dish of spicy lobster sauce
crawfish and onions
deconstructed for nothing
Shroud
At dusk
in the dirt
near the mouth
of the tomb
lie
the wrappings
of Lazarus
abandoned
in ecstasy
A slight figure
scurries
whisks them
away
scrubbing
in the current
till fingertips
are sanguine
spreads them
on a rock
to dry
in the morning
Later she
laves
her brother’s bowl
rinses
the cup Martha
left
on the table and
sweeps
up the crumbs
spilled
by her visitor
Troubadour
The troubadour has got no horse
so he rides to his gigs on a minstrel cycle
to fortnightly ovations and
all the roast meat he can carry on a dagger
The acrobats hang upside down
tumblers half fool, naked juggler vainglorious
fat clowns send up tight wirewalkers
the ragged trampoline springs a trapeze artist
In the land Budapest controls
at a mineral spa for well-hung Aryans
Dan’s ignoble Lord of Gdansk
shows his steps to ill cons on Lion Tamer Lane
Full tilt a whirling dervish
curves nervously, swerves, observes no perversions but
ecdysiasts in Gaza strip
and Persian rug rats scare Indian elephants
Through the door comes the troubadour
jester in the vesture besmirches the churches
misrule measures its meter but
the inverse poet is averse to reverses
William Robison teaches history at Southeastern Louisiana University; writes about early modern England, including The Tudors in Film and Television with Sue Parrill; is a musician and filmmaker; and has poems accepted by Amethyst Arsenic, amphibi.us, Anemone Sidecar, Apollo’s Lyre, Asinine Poetry, Carcinogenic Poetry, decomP magazinE, Forge, Mayday Magazine, On Spec, and Paddlefish.
