Oarsmen (Political Poem)
It’s like watching a 12-step program in reverse, he said —
like a theater curtain draped across people walking in the street,
and, as it’s pulled up, they look down at themselves and see …
Gilead. Not the women who sit in taxi cabs with neck furs that grow?
I said. I don’t know what those mean, he said. The “I” and “he”:
we are kayaking on the Charles River at night just to take a nap.
A bear has fallen asleep in a nearby kayak, like me, life vest on,
and dreams not only of a bear trap but a ‘nothing trap,’ too.
How to escape when modern King Lear types become an architect?
Take Goneril, Cordelia, Edmund and others to New Orleans.
Have them speak the book in the running brooks of the speech.
And then — from around the corner — instruct the band to enter,
singing, “My feet can’t fail me now. (My feet can’t fail me now!)”
When they ask why and decry the circular hogwash modernism,
take them to the shore and say, “Like a tree, planted by the water …”
