William Logan

From Vain Empires (1990), exemplary of the smooth postmodern style of that time. Decadent inhabitation of the encyclopedia of western culture. late 20th c. sneering at Christianity?

[must spell check]

JOSEPH BANKS AND THE BOARD OF LONGITUDE

One might in youth concede to investigate

such practices of the cod as require the French

to creep within their bark-lined suits

and split the fish in woolen gloves,

not touching the violet entrails,

or take ship to observe the transit of Venus,

to crawl along a caterpillar of coast

where among the fray of moral appetites

vast cabinets might be filled with skins

as rare as scrolls, and eggs whose translucences

were not inferior to the morning star.

Bligh suffered for his breadfruit trees.

a nicety not recognized at feasts

where the tropical Pacific changed to wine

and natives traded frail songbirds wrapped in net

for the hand-carved crosses of the gods.

These gods take breakfast on the flying fish

or such idle and unprofitable specimens

as would exempt themselves from human company

and might enamor the queen who should not cluise

to encumber herself with the stuffed animals.

Against those who in the European disease

would place geometry in distant suns,

one would rather stand within the homely science

of gears, escapement, of the movement of hands.

Pears in Solitude

A blackbird vacantly delouses the hedge,

yellow beak pointing like the weathercock,

now west, now east, but having heard

of infestations elsewhere, he takes his leave,

too sadly, perhaps, to be believed.

The weathercock turns his back on us,

and on the slates the last gale cracked.

His old pretense—he’s nowhere else to turn.

We turn our backs on him. No matter the weather,

rusty sun or bright scholarly rain,

his sullen demeanor must be maintained.

Even the pears turn inward, according to

the demands of saintly meditation.

Gathered in twos or threes they might

whisper against the apples of South Africa

or unripe limes from the generals of Brazil.

Alone, they cannot contrive

a change—but look! The weather is changing.

Those rags of cloud that all afternoon

threatened to wipe the sky with a murderous rain,

the fifth this week, have torn themselves up,

the yellow scraps ol forsythia, so savagely pruned,

are blooming in the brushpile, and on the river

mallards argue fluid mechanics.

Now the blackbird is back, mouthing a shred of reed,

a belated peace offering, but not to us

nor to the regal crocus rising from earth.

There’s an unsaintly gleam in the weathercock’s eye.

Florida Pest Control

The blonde unlocks

her daddy’s Firebird,

blood-red as a tropical fish.

Privilege, that old bete noire^

shakes its head in her exhaust.

Her rear lights swim

in a fantail’s glide.

The South exists,

I write my liberal friends,

with its wage slaves

and Burger King estates

in burning, frivolous pastels.

No one can dream it away,

though plasma centers drain

the blood of black and white,

our ball and chain.

The houses turn to dust

beneath us, gnawed by termite,

beetle, or the fear of God.

Only the past can’t be exterminated.

Down the street Christo’s men

sheathe a house in red plastic

and pump three days of poison in.

Last year two hapless thieves

broke a lock and wandered through

a termite-ridden house in Tallahassee.

They choked to death

in twenty minutes. Christ!

The Shadow-Line

A shadow loon flies from the glassy lake

over mangroves and the freshwater pond

where a lone canoeist casts between the fronds

lying along the shore like broken rakes.

He shatters the inky lacquer where the stars

are scattered like a pinch of cooking salt

in the old recipes. It’s no one’s fault.

The red dot on the tree line must he Mars,

or just a radio tower blinking, blinking

messages two lovers might overlook.

Night fish are rising to the maggoty hook.

I can’t tell any longer what you are thinking.

The shadow of the loon will soon embrace

the shallows of the continental shelf

as night becomes a shadow of itself.

Another shadow passes over your face.

We used to spend summer nights listening to jazz

rude subtleties of the horn! Now we discuss

surrendering to what will happen to us,

or ought to, or perhaps already has.

Nocturne Galant

She stalked like a goddess on carpet

through our two-star rented room,

indifferent to her hare bottom

or the cruelties of perfume

that drifted up from the whores

who kissed on the neon walk

the Marines who gave nothing but money

and got nothing back but talk.

Our argument lasted till midnight,

the right of it nothing but wrong.

I laughed in my borrowed tuxedo.

She cried into her sarong.

True love would climb the Himalayas

or drink the Amazon dr\'

and promise to promise forever

but never ask a girl why

true love has the tongue of a tyrant

who makes the traitor confess

to treasons he has not committed.

The poet knows little or less.

And no one remembers the reasons,

the boring and terminal sighs,

the casualties of inbreeding,

the crocodile tears in her eyes.

1 promised her that Td be faithful

with all my faithless heart

for a month or until next Tuesday.

Love lies, and so does art.

-

Raison d’Etat

The daffodils have pierced the crust of April

like spears gripped in the hands of Roman soldiers

still buried in the fenland’s ancient marshes

where ravens starved of corpses tear each other.

Decay can never penetrate the bodies

of soldiers who have fallen in the marshes

or morning papers casually recording

that in a dusty Middle Eastern schoolroom

a man was wired naked to a chair back,

his legs spread open like a pregnant woman’s

to let a boyish Christian flare his lighter

again and again upon the prisoner’s skin

while outside dirty children heard his screams.

The soldiers failed to gain what information

had led them to the village and the schoolroom.

In England there are villages and schoolrooms

where children learn by rote the information

that king by king will pass examinations

while yellowed charts display their fathers’ empire

whose altered names by rote they have remembered,

the climate, population, and chief products,

the photographs of charming native customs:

the doctors stand in feathers and regalia,

the chieftains cure incurable diseases.

They are not taught the politics of reason,

why doctors in their white coats gently handle

the sleeping prisoners they’ve strapped to gurneys

to ease into their arms the sterile needles

and drain each body of its quarts of blood.

The blood is shipped to save the lives of soldiers

who are not soldiers but are school-age children

sent unarmed to clear paths through enemy minefields,

to lie across the ribbons of barbed wire

and let their bodies serve the feet of others

who fly like cuckoos to nests of machine guns

where if they die they die official martyrs

who in their heaven will be singing warriors

and will not need the sterile bags of blood.

The doctors now are running out of needles.