ARCHAEOLOGY

You think you know him. What you don’t yet know 

sulks in its crypt, too cryptic to explain: 

Like chipped potsherds of pain, 

earthed in, below 

the asphalt dailiness and the glazed brick 

of fifty years’ routine, 

his hurts lie, muddled as a crockery midden 

down several centuries’ strata, 

hidden, 

 

brooding, till some upheaval 

backhoes into broad day the toothy grin 

of a death’s-head. 

And there you are, untrained for this, alone, 

too pressed by habit to be still and kneel 

with slow, soft patience, brushing the jumbled bone. 

So no retrieval 

takes place, and blacktop steamrolls down again  

over the old unsaid.

 

A CHRONICLE

Many believed it was the end of days. 

 

Churches were tottering on the brink of schism. 

Some priests denied the sacraments to those 

who followed the wrong pope, or the wrong prophet. 

 

Warriors in bright blazons and strict order 

arrayed themselves for combat on the field 

to wild acclaim, great cost, and little meaning. 

 

The poor arose in arms against the rich, 

wreaking destruction on the halls of state, 

following lords who in the end betrayed them. 

 

At any given time, a dozen conflicts, 

dredged from old hates, disfigured the known world. 

 

Those who assessed the times in later years 

found most reportage biased. Rumors festered. 

 

There was a plague. For years, they went on dying. 

 

THE WORLD’S FALSE SUBTLETIES . . .

a bouts-rimés on Shakespeare’s sonnet 138

 

Forget the evening news. The simple truth 

isn’t. And credibility? It lies 

somewhere back in a 1970s youth, 

when things were black and white. The subtleties 

were less entangling then. Well, we were young, 

marching, singing. The chants we belted best 

now deliquesce like snowflakes on a tongue 

snarled in realities, estopped, suppressed. 

Five decades gone, the world’s just as unjust. 

Not “couched in our indifference,” merely old, 

we can’t be sure there’s anything to trust 

since every tale the talking heads once told 

crumbles like old newsprint, reminding me 

what the bad news was always going to be.