The Usefulness of Genetic Alteration
                                           (Pace Ovid)

Genetically Altered Salmon Get Closer to the Table
                                New York Times, June 26, 2010

With genetically altered salmon
that play backgammon
we could draw up a chair
and have a game.

Altered cod
so close to God
would make fine ministers.

Altered whales
with shells like snails
could finally stop those Japs from whaling.

Altered trout
could learn to shout
so we’d know where to find them.

Altered bass
would have more class
if hatched with black ties and tuxedos

but snappers
would be
even more dapper
if they came in ruby-red dinner jackets.

Now I won’t harp
on clams or carp
for I think I’ve said enough
to show the usefulness of
genetic alteration.


June 27 – July 4, 2010

The First Day of Summer

The clouds are white impasto on the sky.
The brightness strains the eyes.
The heat is like July.
A family is having lunch
at a picnic table in the park.


June 20-27, 2010

Dunes

When I was a boy I often visited
the dunes along the Lake Michigan shore,
hills of sand taller than trees
half covered with tenacious grass and pines
but opening on the water side
like puddings
their insides spilling out in long sandy slopes
down which you could run and slide
with avalanche abandon
and come up clean,
nothing more than sand in your clothes
and laughter in your mind.


June 13-20, 2010

The Road

       I

The Road isn’t a way of getting somewhere
so much as of getting away,
an opening onto a world
free from order and obligation,
a realm of quests and wanderings,
a place where you find
that which you create,
or never imagined,
a trail leading nowhere,
yet anywhere,
and that’s the grace of it.

       Doggerel

   I - Dog Pastimes

My dog is into weaving.
It’s the woof he likes.
He doesn’t know from warp
but he can woof all day.

Go forth Young Graduates

I went to a graduation today,
heard the talk of achieving ideals,
saw the young graduates, lean and nimble,
and their parents thicker and slower,
no longer dancing the way they used to,
and clothed in compromise.
And I thought how the young smile, or sneer,
at the failings of middle age
not conceiving that they too will pass that way,
and of how we collude in their fantasy
needing it as much as they.


May 23-30, 2010

A Perfect Day for Chasing Bubbles.

Our neighbors’ granddaughter
is chasing bubbles in the yard
running barefoot over the grass
squealing
and batting the bubbles
as her mother blows them.
The weather couldn’t be better
neither too cool nor too warm,
a perfect day for bubble chasing.


May 16 - 23, 2010

Pemaquid Point

You feel the force of the ocean here,
the wind driven waves
pounding the water white,
fraying the land’s rocky edges,
even holding the season back,
the leaves still small and pale here,
now in this middle of May.

You feel the water’s weight and breadth,
filling the deep Atlantic basin, 
stretching to far-away continents
under many-hued skies.


May 9-16, 2010

Christine Peck

There was a very short poem
I liked very much
in our college paper
sixty-two years ago.
I quote it here in full.

Eretz Yisrael

Spoils of war among the clover
Lies my tender, bawdy lover.
Between his thighs let there be grown
flowers that would crack a stone.

That was the time of the first Israeli war,
1948, about this time of year.
Reading the poem
I wondered admiringly
about this young woman
who eulogized her lover’s bawdiness,
not the sort of virtue one would memorialize
in synagogue or church.

Not long ago I sent for an alumni directory
and looked her up, without success.
I tried authors on barnesandnoble.com and amazon.
No better luck.

I wonder what has become of Christine Peck.
Did she go on to write more?
Did she find another tender, bawdy lover,
or many?
And what of the life she lived
and looks back on,
in her eighties now…
if still alive?

I wondered too how many remembered her poem
(Was I one of a handful?
Surely not alone.)
and how many who remembered it once
are alive to remember it still.


May 2-9, 2010

The Road by the Lake

The road by the lake
where I spent my childhood summers
was here again
when I stepped outside tonight,
a faint odor perhaps,
something in the feel of the air,
the lights beyond the trees…
It visits me from time to time,
a ghost of summers past.


April 25 – May 2, 2010

Scary Waters

We had a pond where I used to swim
when I was a boy.
No sand on its bottom
just muck.
I’d plunge into the pond
from the dam at its lower end
and climb out the same way
to avoid setting foot
on the murky bottom
where sharp objects might lie in wait
and slithy, even poisonous, creatures loiter.

Then there was the lake where I spent my summers
and sometimes swam the mile across,
danger in the mere distance,
and after the water deepened a bit,
carp big as a man’s thigh
hovering like sinister blimps over the sunlit bottom. 
I only saw them when in a boat,
never when I swam,
though the thought lurked in my mind
that they might not be vegetarians after all
or that they might be tempted nonetheless
by the sight of a succulent youth.

Then, as the water deepened,
there was tentacled seaweed
its stems disappearing into shadow,
and after the water became too deep
for even the tallest weeds,
the dark depths
threatening to pull me down
to a bottom so far a body wouldn’t rise for days.
I tried not to think as I swam
what lay below.

And almost anywhere alligator gar
menacing as their name,
some longer than a boy.
Once my father caught half a bass
the other half bitten off by a garfish
while the twice unlucky catch was being reeled in.
Would the bigger ones attack a human?
I’d never heard of such a case
but could see the headline in the local paper
“Boy Attacked by Man-eating Gar.”

Yes, life has its scary waters,
and I’ve swum in some.


April 18-25, 2010

There’s Something About a Lake

There’s something about a lake:
the mysteries
beneath its surface,
its alien inhabitants
in their alien world;
its changing moods and dress,
vivacious blue,
tranquil green,
somber gray;
garments plain
or ornamented
with wind whipped lace
or sequins of sunlight;
calm as a monk in meditation,
contorted with stormy anger,
or performing its glad dance
under a sunny sky.

There’s something about a lake
that plays on our hearts and minds.


April 11-18, 2010

Li Po

The poet Li Po,
the story goes,
trying to embrace the moon
while inebriated,
fell into a lake and drowned.
If this is so
the water would have splintered
as he struck it
into a multitude of moons.
What more fitting apotheosis
for a poet?


April 4-11, 2010

Here Comes the Parade

The forsythia bloomed yesterday
yellow sprays everywhere
flying the flag of spring,
leafy regiments coming on behind
the birds piping them in.


March 28 – April 4, 2010

Truth or Poetry

Once we thought
all things consisted
of earth, air, fire and water
a lyrical notion, it seems to me.
Now we know they’re truly made
of bosons, leptons, quarks
and other products of pedantry,
which goes to show
that being right isn’t everything.


March 21-28, 2010

I Like a Woman with Wrinkles

being of wrinkled age myself.
It’s as if we were fellow immigrants
in the country of the young,
the fresh faced
and so often self-absorbed,
with their new enthusiasms
which they fancy
set the standards for all time.
No, give me a woman who knows
how fashions come and go
who’s earned her wrinkles
with toil and grief
with whom I can empathize,
and compare notes.


March 14-21, 2010

Miep Gies, Died January 11, 2010

This was the woman
who sheltered the Franks,
brought them food
on a bicycle loaded with bags,
brought high heeled shoes
for adolescent Anne,
kept Anne’s diary
after the family was taken away—
it was months before
she could bring herself to read it—
and every year
on the day the Franks were marched away
drew her curtains
and shut off her phone.
She lived a hundred years.
May she live for hundreds more
in the minds of men.


March 7-14, 2010

Inching up on the Equinox

It comes a couple of minutes closer
every day,
the fiery notches
in the ridge across the valley,
where the sun rises,
each one farther north,
the snow,
so long on the ground,
reduced to patches,
and the path where I walk by the river
soft again, ready for grass to sprout.
In a few weeks
the starkness of winter trees
will be laced with budding leaves
and the woods,
silent today,
will ring with the songs of birds.


February 28 – March 7, 2010

Built of Words

Let’s kiss and make up, we say,
putting our lips together
to mend a breach,
as if they were a bridge
between the islands we can be.
An embrace can serve as well
but words
are the most enduring of all,
bridge or wall.


February 21-28, 2010

Love and Death

Romeo and Juliet
had a great love
because it was so brief.
Had it lasted
they would have squabbled
about his leaving the toilet seat up
and why dinner was late
and who would do the dishes.


February 14-21, 2010

Married Life

You have a husband.
I have a wife.
We know what conjugal life is like,
the united front
the tug of war
the complementary anatomy.


February 7-14, 2010

Calendar

The progress of the seasons
is marked on my study wall
like pencil lines in a kitchen
charting a child’s growth.
Each morning
in this frigid February
the sun’s warm tide
washes farther into the room
illuminating another book
in the bookcase on the north wall,
slowly scanning the rows of volumes,
counting the days of my years.


January 31 – February 7, 2010

Here’s to You Mr. Robertson

Pat Robertson says the earthquake in Haiti
was God’s punishment,
for the Haitians, he says,
made a pact with the devil
to get their freedom from slavery.
And what of all the innocents killed?
Is God a terrorist
or was that just collateral damage?
And who has Pat Robertson made a pact with?


January 24-31, 2010

Earthquake, Port-au-Prince, 2010

If we could hear all the cries from Haiti
we’d clap our hands over our ears
our faces twisted in pain.
If we could hear all the cries
from around this world
on almost any day
we’d be pressed to the ground
as if by a raging hurricane,
but we’ve learned not to listen
or maybe never learned to hear.


January 17-24, 2010

The Intellectualization of Almost Everything

You can’t just enjoy wine anymore.
You have to be an oenophile.
We used to be content to like a tune
or a performer.
Now you have to be a connoisseur.
And, so it was with modern jazz
while classical music
became a theoretical construct,
the serial murder of melody.
Painting and sculpture,
conceptual recently,
were abstract before that.
You needed a Clement Greenberg to interpret it.
Then there were the architectural allusions
of postmodernism.
The novel wasn’t novel enough,
so we have Ulysses and the nouveau roman.
And poetry,
not least, poetry,
the double acrostic of the arts.
You may think you appreciate it on your own
but you can’t.
You need a college course.


January 10-17, 2010

The Inner Child

I know I’m a different person than I was
       in my youth
but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.
It’s as if all my mistakes had happened yesterday
and could happen again tomorrow,
as if I were like a tree
growing by adding layers
with all previous versions nested inside.
Am I unusual in this?
I doubt it.
We always think our faults unique
when actually they’re common as grass.
There’s been much talk in recent years
of the inner child
as if this were a part of us
that’s still spontaneous and pure,
when in fact it is, like the original,
full of needs and insecurities
and clamoring for gratification.


January 3-10, 2010

Lost in Space

We cannot see the Milky Way
that disk of countless stars
one of which is ours.
We are electrified.
We have cities that glow in the night.
Our messages move as fast as light.
We can travel as far in an hour
as our ancestors could in days.
We have countless libraries with more books
than that once matchless one at Alexandria.
We know what matter is made of
and many of the secrets of life.
But we cannot see the Milky Way.


December 27, 2009 – January 3, 2010

Cosmic Questions

Arcturus, Canopus, Alpha Centauri.
When I was a boy
looking up at the night sky
and an older cousin
gave me those names
I was glad to have them
and wondered
what it was like for the men,
bearded and strangely garbed,
who first named those stars
and spun theories about them,
and if beings like us
circled them
and gave them names and stories,
and whether the universe ended
and if it ended
what was outside
and how that could end,
or go on forever.
Sixty years on I still have few answers
and these are the least of things
of which I’m ignorant.


December 20-27, 2009

December Dawn

A dim glow of snow
on fields and houses
still in Earth’s shadow,
but overhead
clouds shine
like sandbars in a shallow sea.


December 13-20, 2009

Their Jungle Gym Is Overgrown with Vines

In the house
there’s a bedroom, I imagine,
or more than one perhaps,
preserved as a museum,
on the walls posters of decades past,
surfaces otherwise uncluttered
beds always neatly made,
and those who remain behind,
their hair gradually turning gray.


December 6-13, 2009

December 7, 2007

Scarcely a word in the media today
about the anniversary.
We’re too absorbed, I suppose,
in our latest war.
But I wonder if pearls are forming again
in that harbor of sunken ships.


November 29 – December 6, 2009

Giving Thanks, Conservatively

I am thankful that my health isn’t un- or underinsured
and that they can’t take my insurance away,
that I’m not unemployed, or underemployed,
that I don’t have to live on the minimum wage,
that my home isn’t being repossessed,
that I’ve never been homeless
or lived in a house with rats,
that I didn’t grow up in a ghetto or Appalachia,
that I didn’t have an absentee father
and that my mother wasn’t a high school dropout,
that I never went to a school
where reading scores were low
or went to bed hungry.
As for those who can’t say the same,
tough luck.


November 22-29, 2009

Carriage Horses

lined up at Central Park,
waiting with equine patience,
or melancholy,
heads hanging,
day dreaming perhaps
of racing across the steppes,
powering a chariot in the Hippodrome
or, splendidly caparisoned,
bearing the flower of knighthood
into the lists,
now waiting for tourists
at 59th and 6th.


November 15-22, 2009

November Afternoon

The scene’s in black and white
this November afternoon—
patches of dark cloud,
silhouettes of leafless trees,
galvanized gray sky—
save for a few gold streaks
squeezed from the hidden sun
and a faint spangling
of yellow and red,
the few remaining leaves.
An afternoon for crows. 


November 8-15, 2009

What’s in a Name

I’ve never cared much for my name.
It’s always seemed prissy to me
suggestive of well scrubbed little boys
in brown velvet rompers with Eton collars
or short pants and glasses,
or middle aged men whose trousers are always
       freshly cleaned and pressed.

The name echoes too my mother’s sharp “Richard!”
when I’d misbehaved
or wasn’t paying attention,
and its subtly pejorative ring,
in the mouths of other boys,
real boys not being called by their proper names.
(Hank or Jim, not Henry or James.)

Lord knows
there’ve been enough macho Richards,
the Lionhearted for obvious example,
or Wagner.
But somehow the name has become
associated with propriety.
Who was the model?
Was there any?
What sort of fate did parents suppose
they were spinning for their offspring
when they gave them this name?

In recent years I’ve taken to using Richard
as a distancing device,
a formal appellation
like the name on a business card.

I don’t like Dick much better.
Though it may have been suave in the twenties,
it’s always seemed hard edged to me
and, aside from its other connotations,
it was what my father was called,
for I suffered the additional indignity
of being a junior,
and my father was one
with whom I didn’t identify.

His was an easy case.
His parents, old world Jews,
wanted a new world name.
What could be more remote from the shtetl
than Richard?

As for Rick
that seemed to me like a name affected
by denizens of the society column,
the sort who play polo
with playboys named Raoul or Lance.

Maybe Dickie was the attraction,
a little boy one could willingly embrace.
My wife calls me Dickie,
as my Mother did in good times.


November 1-8, 2009

Rainy Evening Near the Hudson

Rain runs black on the street
down to the river
through a fringe of trees.

On the far bank
lights glitter
on the gray of evening
twined in the branches and leaves,
and lamps send yellow streamers
up the pavement.


October 25 – November 1, 2009

The Beach in Autumn

I like the beach best in autumn
late October, say,
on an Indian Summer day
when the vacationers have gone
and most of the shops are closed
(still displaying summer clothes),
the sand untrampled,
the sun at midday nowhere near overhead,
so you’d know it was off-season
even if you’d lost track of time.
It’s being as close to alone as one can
in a place so often encumbered with crowds,
as if one had traveled back
to a time before people flocked to the shore
when coming from inland one would find
only the open sea
and gulls and sand.

October 18-25, 2009

If Husbands Did the Laundry

If husbands did the laundry
it wouldn’t be the same.
Our minds would be off somewhere
thinking of golf or game.
We’d put in too little soap
or too much,
get the timing or temperature wrong,
put shrinkables in the dryer
or make it too hot,
and after we took the clothes out
they’d stay a rumpled mess
never get folded
not to speak of ironed.
Whereas when a woman does the wash
we think of neat nests
of houses with built in vacuums
of even dirt floors swept.

So our wives should consider themselves lucky
that we don’t insist.

October 11-18, 2009

Misogynistic Mutterings

Remember those pubescent girls
who screamed for Frankie or Elvis
hands pressed to cheeks
mouths agape with ecstasy?
It’s hard for me to imagine
what sort of carnal thrill
could have caused so much delirium
among maidens touched by no more
than the sight of a pompadoured youth
switching his hips in syncopation 
or a skinny one
clutching a microphone,
as if it were a piece of anatomy.

Svelte virgins then
stout ladies now,
middle aged or blue haired,
coupled countless times,
with children of their own
or grandchildren
next in line to scream
for some aphrodisiac celebrity,
some brimming with disappointments
others quite content
some sadly disaffected
others romantics still
but all knowing now that life is,
if you’ll pardon the expression,
no bowl of cherries.


October 4-11, 2009

This Is My Church

Grand columns of oak and maple
rising to a leafy vault,
the sky for windows.
Sparrows, finches and squirrels
the congregation.
Preacher we need none,
for in the leaves and grass,
if you listen well,
you can hear the wind
whisper its sermons.


September 27 – October 4, 2009

Late September.

There’s seasonable chill in the air
as I go out for the morning paper.
The grass casts long shadows
and glistens with dew.
Squirrels bound across the lawn
in joyful arcs
miming the exuberance I feel.

September 20-27, 2009

The River

We don’t often think
beside a small stream,
a brook we can straddle,
of the great river
in might become,
the ocean
into which it might empty,
flowing away clear
over its pebbled bed,
white flecked
down a perseverant slope,
over falls
through forests
gathering bulk and muscle
through farmlands
past towns
becoming broader
and darker,
past cities
that bridge and bind
yet cannot fully tame it,
then free
into the welcoming arms
of bay or estuary
and at last to the ocean,
like a son
come back from long wanderings.


September 13-20, 2009

To the Source

I’ve lived near the river’s end,
where its wide waters slide
into bay and ocean,
and watched ships ride the deep water.
Often I’ve dreamed
of tracing it to its source
past the farthest reach
of ocean vessels,
past stretches where the silken flow
is trimmed with frothy white
and you can see the mountains’ bones
beneath the water,
climbing, ever climbing
through field and forest
at last to the place
in a watery meadow perhaps
or hidden under trees
where the great river is born
issuing from the earth
in a stream so small
you could cup it in your hands.


September 6-13, 2009

Surrounded by the Universe

In these early morning hours
in this room
it begins
stretching outward
from the circle of lamplight on my desk
to the leaf-dappled streetlight across the way
to the moon’s chalky mirror
to the distant incandescence of the stars,
from the scratch of my pen
to the scrapings of insects in surrounding fields
to the faint but ceaseless aura of traffic sounds
through the intermittent silences of space
to the obliterating but unheard stellar roar,
and so to the dead-quiet edges of this universe
where starlight thins to blackness,
from the small circle of lamplight
on my desk.


August 30 – September 6, 2009

Listening to Ravel

Playing a recording
of Ravel piano works
as I do paperwork,
I only half listen,
but my mind is wafted by the music
like a sailboat in a shifting breeze,
as if the sky were summer blue
tufted with clouds, 
and I were somewhere off the coast
       of Normandy,
or inland perhaps
in a sparsely furnished room,
sunlight falling through arched glass doors.


August 23-30, 2009