You’re Only
Dead Once
(Odyssey Book XI- Nekuia)
Farming not at all
we like,
the pasture boggy and
the day dirt-long with toil.
In the kingdom of the dead
Achilles’ flap
about working a live sharecropper
than ruling the death-house-
he must have been kidding.
He was.
Toil is lady luck’s backside,
unfurnished and smelly;
give me ghosts and
the rest of eternity.
Michael the
Paphlagonian
Michael’s fingers
were big as his arms,
riding in from
a good war;
sick as a dog,
he won acclaim.
A long disease does more
to our souls
than our bodies;
the fretful blood
and flesh accept.
God called,
Michael answered
at the last;
the crown of gold
exchanged for
the white robes
of the anointed,
the helmet of salvation.
At the sacred font,
omphalos of
God’s mother,
Michael stands;
dipped in the
watery hole
Michael emerges,
waiting on death
like a good servant.
The mystic waters
close again,
unbroken
as Christ’s belly.
Take, O take
these bleeding guts
away, whispers Michael
to his servants.
Tottering off,
he remembers Zoe
betrayed in her palace,
a moment’s pleasure repaid.
He has gone to
his reward,
they say,
looking skyward.
In a golden halo
he smiles from
his beautiful picture;
art for life.
Psellus told too much
and not enough about
those troubled times;
again and again
never to touch
the groping fingers
find the reins.
The
Persistence of Beatrice
Yes, then I kissed you
behind the barn and
in the barnyard things
went on and on.
You quacked
like a duck and
I honked like a goose
behind the barn and
then you went to heaven
and we all cried.
At your grave
the birds
sat on the ground
and blinked.
But soon the
grass grew in
behind the barn and
in the barnyard
you crowed on and on.
Playing
With Fire
In the hills and dales
of some southern state
the doves eat luscious
Daisy Mae alive;
I wouldn't mind a bite,
but I'm not there.
The gorgeous belles,
attentive at Sunday church,
later in downtown hotels
develop tremulous leaks of sound
getting poked by their beaux;
the pampered fairways of Heaven
lapse back to brambles,
closed for the duration,
but I don't care.
I'm bored as hell,
looking for something to do,
something to kill the time.
In the midst of discovery
I crouch over an ant hill,
magnifying glass in hand,
watching the orderly hysteria
of the ants.
Science, my eye,
I want to kill.
Magnified out of proportion
by my thick round lens
the ants move on their correct paths,
oblivious to impending doom
focused in a deadly point of light.
Unalterable law, my foot,
under the ranging roaming needle
of searing heat, random as Roderick,
they burst out of instinct and
blind against the fates,
spread out against me
in black perimeters;
unconcerned as a Lucretian god
I burn legions of them to a crisp.
Unafraid and afraid
of divine vengeance
I walk on.
What a heartless
sadistic story this is,
telling on myself a nasty tale;
the grasshopper, the ant
and the tertium
quid.
A timeworn fable becomes
destructive and horrible;
pharisaical morality
against the grain transmuted
and to the ants' sudden dismay
the grasshopper's fiddle
sounds a fearful woebegone note.
If winter comes,
and it will,
it comes too late
for ants untimely dead
to get off a line
at the grasshopper's expense;
lost forever the cruel retort
in the sun's concentrated rage
brought to bear
by a bored colossus.
Sometimes that's how it goes
and best to go along with it
and rightly so; learning
what we really are from
the bare bones
of a tale unadorned
with humanity or compassion.
Melissa
In spring you touched me
like a newfound flower,
kissed me with your rose-red mouth,
caressed me with your hands;
you said wait till summer,
write it down, write it down.
Now the river grows hot
and slows under the sun,
the path
along its bank clear and bare
as a swept palace corridor;
the sky above
immense blue dome
ominous, empty of life.
The grey mallard floats alone
under the wooden bridge,
forever fixed in place,
a Chinese painting;
nature rises in disgust against it,
its stillness, its careful art;
do we care that captured
now is really now?
When the time is right,
cut the two of us open,
see our hearts,
supposed lovers,
surprise the living flowing world
that so long we waited
in the same place,
withdrawn and empty,
still as the willows along the path,
still as the stones.
Our fire has gone out,
the days long past,
but this time together
will never end;
lost in our own bower
we need no faith in the morrow,
no newfound continents looming;
just the two of us
in one embrace,
static, eternal,
like an unbroken ring,
like a distant star's
unperceived swing
around the heavens;
only here, only now,
in one moment abiding,
under the light of our own sun
love's fulfillment is complete.
For purposes of
attribution, You're Only Dead Once and The Persistence of Beatrice first
appeared in Zombie Logic Review (according to Duotrope, this magazine is
kaput), Michael the Paphlagonian first appeared in Mediterranean
Poetry, Melissa in RavensPerch and Playing With Fire in Fleas On
the Dog. I retain all rights to these poems.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York, USA. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.
