Too Late

The poet-perpetrator’s place
Is now nothing if not disowned.
This is an age that craves the good

If not the actually martyred,
The poems that suggest their poets
Should prove admirable, at least

To a fair-sized tranche of readers
Whose concerns, for themselves, seem fair.
Was it ever any different?

Maybe not. The morals may change
But morality is stubborn.
Even tricksters get makeovers

To show their tricks all to the good
In the long run. In the long run,
Keynes famously cracked, we’re all dead,

Immortal tricksters, too, we’d guess.
But we’re not looking for the sly,
Here, nor the righteously martyred,

Heroic, noble heretics.
Where’s the poet-perpetrator
Who can do something really wrong—

Doesn’t have to be violent,
Better if it wasn’t. Doesn’t
Have to defy a faith or be

A crime of any kind. No tricks.
Just these lines you read one morning
That you resist, that you don’t like,

That make you squint at the ocean,
The waves so calm they’re unsettling.
You can sense something isn’t right.

It’s One of Those Weird Tenses with Perfect in It

The funny thing is, there’s really no way
To prove Pangloss wrong. As awful as things
Are that have been, anything otherwise

Might have been worse. Oh, sure, you’d imagine
Some things would have had to have been better,
But all you’ve got to work with is what’s been.

Past Summer of Shooting Stars

Dog Star over the Watchman,
And although you are human
And a failure, more or less,

As humans go, as humans
Compete, compare, and perish,
You feel contented with this,

For this and these few moments
When the weight of one summer
As a guest under the stars,

When the briefest, silent squibs
In the warm and windy air
Every night for months and months

Added disappearances
To each other, comforted,
As if disappearances

Were somehow cumulative,
And each gout of light and gone
Built up treasure forever.