Four Poems by Bill Nelson

 

A Mess of Things

 

A young man goes around 

in clothes too big for him. 

An impediment he surmounts 

through fit and trim, 

 

hip-hoping over obstacles, 

dosi-do-ing weaving streets 

fancy-strutting stately straights, 

never lost, never falls.   

 

While his clothing, barely keeping pace, 

weaving with a drunkard's grace, 

caroming off walls, 

gets caught on things and falls. 

                * * * 

. 

An old man in a darkened room, 

weary from these struggles 

hugs his bedding and snuggles, 

and longs for sleep to come. 

 

Strewn across the floor 

the clothes too tired to dream, 

all arms and legs like a crime scene, 

sleep without wherefore. 

 

Stark awake and lucid, 

unwinding his wanderings: 

How could I have been so stupid, 

and made such a mess of things?

 

 

Eden Again

 

I came across two lovers on a lawn,   

looking very hard at one-another 

and the one said to the other 

and the other to the one 

 

and silence reigned between them; 

and they laughed for sheer delight; 

and kissed so beautifully the earth stopped spinning 

and history itself gaped in surprise. 

 

Then the serpent slithered up, 

its cold against my ankle. 

Yesss! it hissed, well done! 

a singularity. Another 

 

fucking singularity. Once again, ad nauseam, 

when the sun warms these two 

it warms the world. Nothing else is 

or ever was since the discovery of human lips. 

 

Let's disabuse them. 

But before I could shout run for your lives! 

a soft hand cupped my face, 

chin to forehead and practiced fingers 

 

plied my jaws and cheeks until 

the clever tendons that manipulate 

my eyes, my lips, my tones, my emphases, 

conveyed the snake's understanding. 

 

Suddenly, horror-struck, the lovers 

turn to bronze and marble, 

and to this day they populate 

our parks, boulevards and greenways.

 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

 

First I googled her hair.  I hit 

a starry night, honey and sardines packed in oil. 

 

I googled her eyes: quicksilver, 

whirlpools, moons, proof of God, head-shops. 

 

When I googled her smile, 

one Proto Indo-European website, 

illegible to modern minds, 

wise beyond lovers' dreams. 

 

While I was at it I googled her instep: 

mangoes, asafoetida, even a lambchop. 

 

And her breasts 

in their oleo of moods: shy breasts, 

fervent breasts, jokey, preening, 

faux-tut-tutting, waves 

 

of leaping salmon, gasps of breaching whales 

a polevault's parabolic float, defibrillator outlets. 

 

Then I googled her heart, 

but Google came up empty 

empty as a punch in the stomach, 

Did you mean “hurt”? 

 

Not a thousand know it alls end to end, 

not Anima Mundi, 

not the oracle, 

not the Answer Man. 

 

God Omniscient shrugged his bony shoulders 

Not a thump, not a murmur.

 

 

The Things I Almost Said but Didn't

 

1. 

Lazing on my back shade-bathing 

under the twinkling skirts of a Norway Spruce 

on a blazing, unbreathable day in August. 

 

A vast, empty cathedral, 

cool, and dark and silent as stone, 

no rituals, no commandments, no Book, 

 

there under the floating buttresses 

and the high groined ceilings, 

I arrive at the place 

 

where thoughts and dreams, 

forgetting to be this or that, 

play indistinguishably in the gloaming. 

 

 

2. 

A flare of sunlight, 

out as soon as seen. 

another there, there, 

 

and slipping under, crashing through 

the pendant shadows, 

muttering, malodorous, en masse, 

 

everything I almost said but didn’t, 

that never made it past my teeth 

out to the land of the living. 

 

You wanted us, we wanted to help, 

we would have set you free, 

you sewed our lips together, 

 

you buried us in the brainstem, 

your cave of roars and groans, sobs, hilarity, 

millennia before a human word was spoken. 

 

3. 

At which point the press shows up 

with mics on booms, go-pros 

coolers of soda and beer, satellite trucks 

make-up artists and lawn chairs. 

 

Geraldo Rivera, mustachioed, 

peering down at me, supine, 

recaps the accusation, 

illustrating with examples. 

 

Mr. Nelson, do you have any regrets? 

Any justifications, alibis, mitigating circumstances, etc. we haven't heard yet? 

America needs an answer, 

now’s your chance.

Bill Nelson is a retired lawyer living in Vermont. He won poetry prizes in college and in law school, and has published a book of poetry (Implementing Standards of Good Behavior, L'Epervier Press, 1972) and poems in various magazines. He returned to poetry after a career as a public defender and is posting some of his current work on a Substack page, https://williamanelson.substack.com/archive