Chinese Whispers: Poems Read Online Free Page A

delta, made of some rubbery satinlike
    material. It was New Year’s Eve
    again. Time to get out the punch bowl,
    make some resolutions,
    I don’t think.

HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING
    Quietly the first hours left, amused.
    We were in a quandary at first then wet our whistles
    in some neighborhood bar. The throng came on strong.
    It’s too far off to hear the people over there,
    someone said. Perhaps we should move,
    another one said. Perhaps. But we were way off
    and the rut in the sand only led to one place.
    When the sand closes over our ease
    we’ll know it done.
    The morose driver wept, represented his case
    as somehow more urgent. Than other passengers’.
    Some of them we got out.
    Vanilla ice cream, I quaffed,
    for it seemed good, for a little time at that.
    The poet wanted to introduce us to his suite.
    But what he really wanted to do
    was play for a little time. Well, that’s natural—
    I mean, who among us hasn’t tried?
    Few, it’s true, have succeeded.
    Another morn he would lie in shock
    over the state of poetry. “None could penetrate
    the recesses of the human mind like Major Pendennis,”
    he opined. We saw it coming,
    or should have:
    a big empty cape
    on the shoulders of the oldest,
    who seemed to be advancing.
    He wasn’t ancient, but he struck us that way.
    If we’d never been to town, and heard the lights
    sometime, we’d be all over a neighbor, licking,
    passing out free samples of dude. But it was like
    too cagey for them, none of us wanted to retire.
    Since that day the memory of recognition beats
    at my template. I don’t know what to do with all my acquired knowledge.
    I could give it to someone, I suppose. Wait, no then
    they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
    I suppose I could be relaxed.
    Yes, that’s more the ticket we smiled.

CHINESE WHISPERS
    And in a Little while we broke under the strain:
    Suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
    though it’s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,
    like any tree in any forest.
    Mute, the pancake describes you.
    It had tiny Roman numerals embedded in its rim.
    It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,
    always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.
    It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.
    The governor-general
    called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,
    knew it was going to be around for a long time,
    even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees
    onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again
    when all memory of it had been expunged
    from the common brain.
    Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.
    A boyfriend in the next town had one
    but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.
    Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:
    I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,
    so dense
    not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.
    What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,
    yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides
    and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,
    blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.
    Camera obscuras,
    too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people
    who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?
    All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
    pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
    less noticeable things. The past is forgotten till next time.
    How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
    careless of being touched. Some took each other’s trash out,
    put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
    before anyone noticed, it was like a chiaroscuro
    of collapsing clouds.
    How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
    or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
    the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering