From the top of
my inverted bucket
I’m falling—good news!—
into water too shallow to reflect
this poem or the face
of its author who’s been eating
something sticky like pussy or cotton
candy I do declare
it’s cooler in water languidly
to spread one’s fingers and toes
and float like a cloud or
Samuel Taylor Coleridge pretending
in his head to be Wordsworth
on a soft autumn day
assisted by laudanum
climbing into a daffodil cup
and snoozing away the day late for dinner
who cares it’s the dream of STC
meanwhile Dorothy Wordsworth’s
a better writer than anybody as everybody
knows she’s too smart to confine
herself to flowers or buckets
the sky is maybe big enough for her
fleecing over Grasmere
same sky with a difference over me
in Chicago Lincoln Park on a bicycle
did the Romantics have bicycles and if not why not
can you picture Keats yes Shelley yes
Mary and Percy both but Byron not so much
Southey sold bicycles
the Lambs rode a tandem
in later years Mary rode a Dutch model with a bucket up front
in which to tumble hearts of lovers
like Percy and myself and also
her MFA we’re back to buckets
comedians call that a callback
but I’m not being funny when I ride with my head in a sky
discolored for once by ardor I can’t say ardor
when what I really wrote was carbon
if we could see how we’re cooking up the earth
the way my dad grilled burgers how mesmerizing
to watch him the yard growing up in New Jersey
the charcoal heat rippling
the very air the air that makes things visible
that makes possible speaking or laughing
when you don’t have air you can’t smoke opium
or one of my mom’s Salems
she’s dead now so’s
the 20th century of poems that look like this
poems of the future will be for sharing
poetry will be truly free like
water or money
because the alternative is truly terrible
and people have better sense
than to go soak their heads in buckets
individual pails of supercooled air
just because other people told us to
oh well good night New York School
good night Chicago
good night Christine
this is my self-portrait wearing a bucket
smiling mysterious as Mona Lisa
and if the sky resembles human skin
of the face maybe above the cheekbone
that registers trauma most easily feeling
it too well what can I do
