dickerson, robert, 9 may 2013
Tokyo toyota
mitsubishi kyoto
teriyaki sake.
translation:
September jonquil
you're a little late, here, pal,
the party's over.
dickerson, robert, 5 july 2012
If you see a man of a certain age,
still slim, hair determinedly dark
but having some time ago switched to khakis
striding Eastern Parkway Plaza,
professionally proud,
a bit self-absorbed, but unmenacing,
fireworks past,
backdropped by friezes of the Brooklyn Museum,
its reassuringly old-fashioned pantheon
despite the heat, still reassuring,
and wearing a T-shirt a lighter shade of red than blood
blazoned with a baby, white but black-outlined,
palisaded with hatch-marks, black, indicating radiance,
or kineticism or both--which?
that would be me, for you see
I have just been to the Keith Haring show--
the Keith Haring show which closes soon.
What did I think of it?
You will want to know the opinion of a man
who wears exactly that shade of red.
'it brought back the era well--
the era to end all eras,
but, now, a little Keith Haring goes a surprisingly long way.'
dickerson, robert, 27 june 2012
1,3,2,4,1,3,2,4,1,3,2,4,1...
3....2.....4......
stop,sit,scratch,slip,
under the fence and disappear.
dickerson, robert, 24 june 2012
If you thought them rare, or worse, extinct,
think again. Assure yourselves
there is a land where they abound
like birds on a telephone wire at enormous dusk
preening and pleasuring in each other's presence.
And you are almost there--
just another hundred miles or so to paddle
before that shore where you reach the beach the boat,
drag it over hot, pink sand, inverted, toward a stand of trees
near where rears a strangely quiet headland.
Out they slip, delighted to greet you
from between trees, singing songs in Portuguese
hands clasped behind them,
thin silks blowing like line-dried octupi, the golds
of their Olympian ideals slung about their necks.
E-mail home you have seen them
in short, terse phrases; cc
everybody. Say, yes, of course, you want to be in their number.
But for heaven's sake, delete the expletives.
Yes, delete the expletive.
dickerson, robert, 23 april 2012
Into the purple waves, feet first,
along a whale's back
stuck with barnacles and whorls of worms
slips the man from the boat
who used to be a priest, then a rabbi,
buttoning his macintosh.
kersplash!
the whale glides off, laughing and spouting
the boat drifts off, the sun comes out
the atolls drift and shift, the heaven popsicle green.
'Isn't it lovely?' sputters the man
(who has lost his stove pipe) emerging
back into the air. 'Isn't it lovely?'
dickerson, robert, 10 april 2012
Yes, she was a countess, she said,
but being of a mind concise and thrifty
sniffed 'that and a dollar fifty
will get you on the subway---'
A long time ago, clearly.
She rode to harriers
not like a lady, side-saddle,
she claimed, but daringly astraddle,
following the yelping, fanned-out pack
over the hills and back.
Later, she studied Medicine at Trinity
after getting a 'dispensation'
and became a gynecologist-obstetrition.
'Leave from the crown?' I frowned, expectantly.
'No, from the bishop', she replied.
But she never practiced--
first, there was the war; later the AMA
back home dealt her the no-way
so if you didn't ask, she would frankly say
'I spent my life in marine-salvage.'
And she did. Comfortable with card-readers,
as superstitious as pragmatical
once at dinner she told me she'd seen Michael
the Archangel behind a choir stall. I just kept eating.
What he was doing there I didn't ask.
Was she ever married? Surely you'll want to know.
Yes and no being the precise answer.
Yes, to a man who died of colon cancer--
to him she proved a good and prudent wife.
But, no, it was all remedial; the actual love of her life
was a viscount who vanished
during a bombing mission over the continent--
or was it the Pacific? It was him who lent
her life it's strange trajectory--
it's sad 'sic transit Gloria' quality;
She couldn't forget her lost aviator--
wrote, you might say, till she was blue
the world over, for a clue
to his whereabouts. Was he tortured?
Was he ever, mangled, found? Succumb to some
Lonely impulse to leave his life behind,
including among it's jetam her?
She doubted it but never could be sure.
His was the true, the one love of her life--
can one, at heart, be wed to any other?
Each Thursday she served
lunch at the Center to people she called 'old',
some younger than her, if the truth be told,
Age for her being a mere tendency to dependency.
In return she got discount tickets to shows.
A doctor suggested warfarin
for her heart's tribulation
'I appreciate the recommendation--'
she sniffed, 'but I'll take no rats bane,
and what's more intend to outlive you.'
So she compromised wih aspirin,
dying at home, at ninety, years later.
Annoyingly she'd say 'See you later, alligator'
each time we parted, but I understood
how folks get used to the idioms of their times.
She was cremated. At her uptown memorial,
arms crossed on an odd upsurge in the table linen,
I asked her cousin Ellen
'So where's Rose?' 'You're leaning on her,' she replied,
slightly taken back.
And so I was. 'See
you later, alligator,'
I cried, and again, 'see you later'.
'It was nice to know you',
adding, and so, so it was.
dickerson, robert, 31 march 2012
Breathless, in a net we captured you--
Ring around the yew tree
and threw you, bright-eyed, in a gilded cage
watched to see what would happen next: surprise!
you thrived and seemed happy enough.
At night you fluffed your feathers
and made yourself eggbig
for insulation--it was a nice trick:
warmth to your remotest toes.
The kitchen light suddenly turned on,
late, you'd be found head wedged
under your wing, asleep for a sec,
till you awoke, vigilant as ever.
Singing was not your forte. All day
instead, you belted out your one, sole note.
We'd hoped for better, but this was the
way you registered your will in the world.
That human obsession, Liberty, for you
meant, not unbridled skies
but freedom from assuault, which
though you never suffered, believed
eternally in the possibility of.
So day after day you sat tight
depending on a cuteness you didn't even know
you had to impel your keepers to
fill your twin cups with canary seed and tap water
till the moment you unaccountably
fell off the perch, dead, your rubber band
snapped or unwound or something like that,
to the gravel floor of the cage,
your belching days done,
there being no heaven for sparrows.
We fished you out, rolled you up
carefully in cheesecloth, little mummy,
and buried you in the back yard,
marking the site, never, with a cross, theless.
dickerson, robert, 11 march 2012
Years've passed. Hate and distrust have expired.
Your synapses turn to something akin to wood
Your motor's slowing nicely, as it should.
Frankly, you're more or less healthy, love, but tired,
Tired, having seen so many kinds of folly, learning as you
Did all spring from the same rood:
Genuine Greed, imaginary Need--
Awful, loving, now, all points of view
Awful, loving all, now, clothed or nude
Necessary, illness, now, and good,
Even your teeth's, which presently grow forward--
God, an indemnity, as you trudge death's doorward.
All you wanted you now have, indeed,
But having, now, admit, no longer need.
dickerson, robert, 5 march 2012
She lived in a bowl
on the kitchen countertop
at the end of a shaft of light
in the company of a waterwheel.
Between the frill of the rim
where the glass thickened to a lip
and the bowl's bottom, carpeted
with Perl mutter shingle,
aligned, more or less,
to cosmic north and south
yellow bead-jeweled alongside
like the windows of an airbus.
balanced in her heaven
by fins that dimly beat
mouth gulping water in as
if fueled by a rubber band.
her eyes like ebony pinheads
her inchy form striped blue--
occasionally emitting a single bubble
or grazing at the water line
she was a vertebrate all right
highly evolved and alone--
little fish, little pond, big name:
Antigone--what became of you?
dickerson, robert, 27 february 2012
The moon leant down, her fingertips kindling
the pursed lips of each little wave of the pool
blue O, with watery fire, til it said 'oh' or 'oh'.
Tight in the grip of its meniscus the water bound
the drowned forms of tigerish moths, that wings
outflung, soddenly stalked our gleaming abdomens.
We beat them back in fear and sluggish disgust.
From somewhere in the yard there came a light.
How our feet were magnified in the depth's glass!
There, by the hose head the underwater wrinkled.
Another, striped and flattened like a snake run over,
pricked like arteries themselves, shot its piddling arcs
and the night ran on and we ran back onto the stoop
ankles stuck with blades of sticky, green grass, as
a new-moon colored band of pale convolvulus
white and yellow bells, a-swinging, un-ringing,
raced slyly around the cornice of the house and
anywhere the lawn was alive with little frogs
'Let us in, let us in', everywhere shouting.
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