Booshwah (July 04-05?)

Somnolent, suburban, and decent,
no extraordinary tastes or peccadillos
or pretense to be among the lesser ranks,
no purposeful bohemian self-exclusion,
the last novel finished on a string of grants
the academy bequeathed, who have been nothing
if not generous, showering accolades and dollars
like ticker-tape confetti dropped on spacemen
who only last week were taking urine tests
and walking into pressure chambers barefoot
or crawling into hardened, spinning pods.
Along the way to work he nods to all
and reads the entertainment section on the train:
is there nothing more unnatural than ballerinas?
Have you seen their faces done in pancake makeup?
He’ll bring his wife to Ralph Vaughan-Williams
or go to Tuscany or to the south of France
and likes to twist his endings up with paradox,
a trope he can’t exhaust: it can't go wrong.
Sobriety, that deity wisely guiding him,
surely has a name. But he doesn’t know it.
The merits of his performance are so many.
How he grasped the moment of the everyday:
watching his daughter skip-rope above roadkill
leads him to a meditation on all creatures,
how the paperboy tosses news on the steps,
what cows look like in sunset (healthy ones!),
and how they ruminate as with a wisdom
they don't convey, never biting more off than they chew.