Solving for X. Robert B. Shaw
indoors. With skin awoken
to June so pointedly,
we’ll settle for one token
of such phlebotomy.
A Field of Goldenrod
Midas, your fabled gleaming touch
would be hard put to burnish much
that ocher crop across the road —
like some erupting mother lode,
proliferating uncontrolled
back to the treeline, solid gold.
In truth, I doubt you could enhance
one August field’s extravagance
by any glitter you could lend.
This is the wealth of summer’s end;
an alchemy within the weed
will flaunt itself to scatter seed,
and summer, in a mood to splurge,
will outdo any thaumaturge.
Anthology Piece
Why, I sometimes wonder, out of all
the spirited conceptions of my Maker,
am I the chosen one? Reprinted ceaselessly,
misprinted sometimes (I have had death appear
in place of dearth, and yes, there is a difference),
memorized by the multitude — why me?
Something in my unmistakable rhythm
seems to have taken readers by the ear;
or could it be my undemanding scenery,
dusty road pointing ahead to sunset?
Woven snugly together with accustomed
sentiments toward all that’s transitory . . .
What could be simpler? By this time I might
be sick of it myself, were I not bound
to bless my access to eternity.
As for the man who set my sky ablaze,
he grew to loathe my popular appeal,
but of course wasn’t able to disown me.
Once I was plumper: seven lines, some good,
didn’t survive the last slash of his pen.
(You’d never know: he didn’t save the drafts.)
Now I am all that keeps his name alive,
pressed by hundreds of pages front and back.
Saffron pyres flicker on my horizon.
He’d have pissed on the embers if he could.
The End of the Sonnet
A word was missing from his fourteenth line.
He mused on how much easier it would be
if one could still wedge an apostrophe
in “over,” or if cattle still were kine,
when he was yanked away from his design:
his daughter’s kitten, too far up a tree,
had to be rescued. Undelightedly
he undertook to grapple with white pine,
up in whose jutting plumes of needles clung
that tiny fright incarnate and enfurred.
He got it down. His daughter’s satisfaction
was ample, quick, and real. His forearm stung
with scratches, but his brain hummed with a word
found on a high branch, fathered by distraction.
Dec. 23
He’s finished tacking up the Christmas garland
so it arrays the Parish Hall at one end,
loops of glistering tinsel off a rafter.
Nagged by Sunday School teachers, none of whom
could reach to do it, he brought up his ladder
and hammered through their bicker of suggestions
to pin the swags the way he damn well wanted.
Under this job tomorrow an eight-year-old
boy, a seven-year-old girl will cradle
a large, diapered baby doll between them,
while shepherds of the same age, some of them
notorious brats, stand burlap-clad with canes,
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