Your Name Here: Poems Read Free

of the intrepid, the universe is paying a courtesy call, God has us on hold, and there’s not much we can do except spin like dervishes, human tops. Hair climbing upward to a point, a kind of spire, and all I’d done was brush down the sides.
    Can we do it that way now?
    Not exactly. The village is walking toward us, we are becoming its walls and graffiti-sprayed cement bathrooms, its general store, the tipsy taxi driver. If I told you where we were going it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, and yet it would ...
    Sounds like my friend Casper, the girl said.

RAIN IN THE SOUP
    Raindrops fall on the treetops. A rainy day.
    Yes, it’s that kind of a day. Some human suffering.
    A number of malcontents. If Mr. Soup
    will stay in his bowl, I’ll blow on him.
    Elsewhere stockings are being darned.
    The darning egg is as big as a house.
    All this less-than-great happiness
    may be doing good to life somewhere else,
    off in the bayou. Maybe. But we see it
    from the top, like a triangular dome,
    so it looks okay to us.
    Unicyclists are out in force,
    leading to the Next Interesting Thing
    that’s sure to be gone by the time you and I get there.
    I don’t count ivy climbing a chimney,
    that’s reached the top and is waving around, senselessly.
    I’d like to push a raft down the beach,
    wade into the water waist-deep, and get on it.
    But clearly, nothing in this world was made for me.
    It’s sixes and sevens, the chimes go out
    into the city and accomplish something valid.
    I can stand to stand here, standing it, that’s all.
    Good day Mrs. Smith. Your daughter is as cute as anything.

BLOODFITS
    As inevitable as a barking dog, second-hand music
    drifts down five flights of stairs and out into the street,
    adjusting seams, checking makeup in pocket mirror.
    Inside the camera obscura, jovial as ever,
    dentists make all the money. I didn’t know that then.
    Children came out to tell me, in measured tones,
    how cheap the seaside is, how the salt air reddens cheeks.
    Violently dented by storms, the new silhouettes
    last only a few washings.
    Put your glasses on and read the label. Hold that bat.
    He’d sooner break rank than wind.
    He’s bought himself a shirt the color of Sam Rayburn Lake,
    muddled ocher by stumps and land practices. Picnicking prisoners
    never fail to enjoy the musk that drifts off it
    in ever-thickening waves,
    triggering bloody nostalgia
    for a hypotenuse that never was.

IMPLICIT FOG
    We began adulating
    what we were staring at
    too:
    I was following the paths in the music.
    Might as well have been patting myself dry
    under a toadstool.
    Winter came on neck and neck
    with spring, somehow.
    The two got tangled up for reasons
    best known to themselves.
    By the time it was over
    summer had ended
    with a quiet, driven day
    out under the trees
    in folding chairs:
    troops ejected from a local bar.
    It got lovely and then a little hirsute.

DREAM SEQUENCE (UNTITLED)
    Yes, she chopped down a big tree.
    We could all breathe easier again.
    It wasn’t the hole in the landscape
    that gladdened us, it was the invitation to the weather
    to drop in anytime.
    Which it did, in proportion to our not growing interested in it.
    After a third mishap we decided
    to throw in meaning. No dice.
    Our tapestry still kept on reviving itself
    athwart the scary shore. You could look into it
    and see fog that had been dead for years,
    cheerful hellos uttered centuries ago.
    Worse, we were going somewhere;
    this was no longer the bush leagues, but a cantata
    nature had ordered from the celestial caterer,
    and now it was being delivered.
    There were only a few false notes; these mattered less
    than a cat in a cathedral. Suddenly we were all singing
    our diaries of vengeance, or fawning thank-you notes, or whatever.
    The hotel billed us by the hour
    but for some reason the telegraph wires weren’t included
    in the final reckoning. Too, the water-tower had disappeared
    as though deleted by a child’s blue eraser.
    It was then that the nets