Read A Pretty Sight for Free Online Page B

points and spreadsheets
    on every bailout,
    g8 summit, profit bonus
    and offshore bank we ever had.
    Doo-lang, doo-lang
.

How I Wrote
    You must change your life, but first,
    wait a few minutes. After all, Rilke couch-surfed
    from castle to château for a decade before
    his internal mood ring shifted to purple
    and signalled the muse. He finessed this later
    as creative possession: an impulse so focused
    he’s said to forget the time of day,
    though Wikipedia claims he never missed
    a meal at Duino. Big deal. Whatever
    it was, he could direct the spirit’s surges
    and knew how to work a crowd in its wake.
    Imagine him on Facebook. LOL .
    Precious, yes, but how not to be
    when you’re born in Prague and write
    about angels. In any case, you won’t catch me
    mooning along parapets and sea walls;
    not because I wouldn’t, but so far
    there’ve been no offers. I booked a week
    at Banff in a forest studio,
    ate scones, startled a ground squirrel,
    kept forgetting to bring a jacket,
    and one night heard blues harmonica
    drift from the aboriginal arts lodge nearby.
    I texted a friend who’s Ojibwa. WTF ?
    He wrote back ‘Why don’t you go
    over there and ask them what they’ve got
    to be blue about?’ Touché.
    So I managed some edits, and through
    the skylight watched yellow leaves
    parachute the branched heights to amass
    as ground cover. No thought-fox
    raised its rusty snout, or gifted prints
    across the page, though a few fingers
    of cask-strength Scotch made
    the waiting a little easier. Paradox:
    to be perfectly here, you must
    stop thinking about it, then it’s on.
    Most days I leaf around trying to sidle
    out of the peripheral sight of myself,
    so when I focus again, I might
    be astonished, do something real, feel
    like Jarrett at Köln, overtired
    and saddled with the wrong piano,
    forced to work the corners we get
    backed into. It might be a thunderbolt,
    but mostly a mule I keep thinking of
    when I picture myself in the grind between
    the start of some work and its end result,
    but like an apprentice before the koan,
    I’m afflicted by the absent revelation,
    never sure if it’s better to change the light bulb
    or stare into the dark.

Memento Mori
    A mariachi band has just begun;
    the
cantinero
muddles lime, ice and mint.
    Is it industry, folly or perverse fun
    to lounge here, behind my glasses’ darkly tint,
    reading elegies in the sun?

Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn, 1886
          (Boston Beaneaters)
    Crouched in the back, the official team
    portrait, his gesture above a teammate’s shoulder:
    who is he giving the finger to?
    Players, those fielders from New York
    maybe, who taunt their league rivals with snorts,
    bored with delay in the April
    dugouts while waiting to pose for their own team
    photo. Or maybe it’s Radbourn’s
    scorn for these ‘pictures’ that’s lifted his digit so
    snidely, irate at the tripod and bellows
    holding the game from its opening pitch. Or
    managers maybe, or press who reported drunken
    brawls and philandering.
    Maybe it’s time with a capital T that faces Radbourn’s
    finger, a signal he’s sent from his age to ours,
    showing he knows we’re all stuck in a world
    made by palookas who dream the fast buck while
    playing each other for suckers,
    so why not break the measure this once
    just to say Fuck You
    and So What, it might be the only
    thing that’s left worth doing,
    the only thing we’re any good for
    in this unexamined life.

Fruit Fly
    So slight, no weight, a non-bug,
    it wafts past
    like an ash flake bobs
    above a bonfire’s heat,
    its shape
    an ephemeral asterisk.
    Do fruit flies ever die of old age?
    At what moment are they living
    and then they’re dead?
    The only times I’ve seen them die
    were flat between hands,
    or dialing out their limits of energy
    in a glass of stale beer.
    When Voyager 1
    was scheduled to clear
    the solar system,
    NASA signalled its onboard camera
    to