AN OLD-FASHIONED

A good teacher instructs by swatting flies.

An elephant never forgets an excuse.

What made the tick choose anthropology?

Try this: repair a hubbub.

Studies suggest people who speak in tongues never eat with you again.

And that pieman once thought to be a berry (now a wooden boat)

died of seahorse strokes.

He used to baby-sit Leadbelly.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

The father in exile stripped of his sundial borrows the equator for a belt.

All his life his life had yet to start, coming of age was the end.

You think about genetics, would think, well,

maybe a whole other life is possible. Maybe noon would rather be midnight.

The humble Hellebore becomes a rock star thanks to intelligent design. Coziness
cradles him like rage. “He hid under his bed when he lived with his mother!”

One branch of the family is antiseptic, another a lecture on prickers.

Everything else is made up.

HOURS DISMEMBERED

Two nightcaps at the Schola Cantorum and suddenly we’re on sleeping terms. A cow
cut into calves.

True or false: Infantilism is a kind of anorexia of the soul symptomatic of the grownup
desire for a second childhood.

What are the roots of enchantment, that resinous substance in which our chauffeur
performed the trick of lowering one eyelid?

On the whole, sinking in poetry fills a hole.

There was even talk of a cave — no one’s life was safe. Let’s face it gesture is one
of the pleasures of having sex, like gathering rosebuds for a clear complexion.

Slumming with his coy mistress he felt a sudden idleness and went into the
gingerale business.

LORELEI

A wandering thought in the dreaming brain of a Rhine maiden murmurs
a poem to Heine.

Look at the words the siren brings: silk-hosed simpers, libations, “on the rocks”.

The drowned are always the same, despite their number. If only one could put
some order to it.

A Rhenish enchantress whispers enticements discolored by rain,
the same nightmare that unites us with four walls all above us, perspiring.

May you keep this memory, the one you’ll never see.

—

MICHAEL GIZZI is Professor of Creative Writing at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. His most recent volume of poems is My Terza Rima (The Figures). He has a book forthcoming from Burning Deck in spring 2009.

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