From 6/26/11

Here’s the microclimate as imaged in the satellite photo,
That swirling white spot
Among the grids a city makes.
I am as far from you as if you were there in the very center
Of the screen capture
But you might as well be up above
Where I cannot reach you
A celestial place the ancients couldn’t see
making it more vivid to them. But observing anatomy
By sketching it failed to ward off those ailments brought about
By defilement, never be washed away with soap and water,
A damned spot with intangible surfaces ablutions
Failed to cure, the appliance of ointment only burning the spot more.

Void of maternal affection the mammal gnaws the bone.
The full-grown adult devouring leftovers
Stocking the refrigerator before he proceeds to weeds and tubers.
After the flowers have been digested
With the acorns, this homo maximus roots among
The rusty leaf-springs buried in garbage fill
And fake plastic Faberge eggs, their yolks pilfered. But it’s
The shoeboxed dead parrot or guinea pig he leaps upon
As entrees, before the gooey pap of desert
Dripping from the rim of a yogurt cup.
Let me see—it’s Greek yogurt that wasps love
when you pour the honey on top.

And now that scientists have mastered
The formulation of faux Portobello mushrooms
From sewerage. Maximus envisages a future
Eked from the garbage mound on which he’s lived
Without thriving exactly, just staying above water.

The problem doctor
Is that my appetites exceed
A single body to be the apple for its eye.

##
Boom boom to the beat Lapeste better off dead—
Our first art school exercise beside the Charles,
Which would be an excellent place to jog or people-watch
Brainy professors or students. This would include
Our current president and several Goldman-Sachs advisors.
But I only knew a cab-driver squatting off Cleveland Circle.
The heat of the summer of 1978 seemed infernal
Kenmore Square was not cleaned up with Gaps yet.
Home of abolitionists, transcendentalists, suffragettes,
No doubt a few mesmerists and quacks and Lyceum speakers,
And home of the fireside poets outside of Concord
Approached by bridges still presently under construction
Rattle of jackhammers and rusty plates above the Charles
Always visible the obelisk of Bunker Hill.
###
But dog-paddling will not escape the sharks
With a bag of garbage in his teeth, a black bear runs up the tree

This afternoon, for maybe three hours, I weeded, watered, raked. And planted another arbor vitae on the eastern border. And afterward napped, although briefly, maybe an hour or so. A rainstorm approached, the wind picked up, the sun set, and the air cooled. I’m sitting in my backyard, a rare occasion. Usually I sit in the study to write, read in bed, eat in the living-room. When I’m here I’m preparing the lawn to appear inviting yet private, or creating a privacy to which at the end of the day I do not return. Only cats run across it when neighbors chase them off their land. The cats I like. I make it clear that I don’t mind them. If they’re near, I stand still. They’re cautious though, sniffing near the freshly watered hemlocks or dwarf Bosnian pine, or sniffing the invisible line where the sumac starts and my scent markings ward off skunks and woodchucks (my “watering of the huckleberries”). They stalk the place, but don’t stay. My goal is to create an Edenic enclave of conifers and lawn, populating the trees with song-birds. A minute ago a cedar waxwing shot across the sky above the backyard, a shady lawn I neither have to cultivate nor water. But the entrance around the white mailbox looks seedy and destitute, the soil no good for more than wild-carrot and mullein, or very tough strains of grass too stringy to make hay or mulch with.