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merely a contusion.
    Broadway is kneeling next to my building. Christ
    Mounts the ass to go into town.
    Gautama is teaching on Seventy-ninth at the corner.
    Muhammad rides through Harlem in a white convertible with the top down.
    God the stallion and God the gelding is sliced
    Into bite-sized portions, they put out a contract on him, iced,
    Into the river in cement shoes, ends up at the coroner
    Astronomer who is looking for complicity,
    For sympathetic understanding from a universe
    Turning violently into verse.
    A poem should not mean but be.
    Oh really?
    My poems have the cedar simplicity
    Of a shoe tree.
    Picture me in front of the TV
    Staring at a mirage.
    The events of the week in the world break the flat-screen surface like fish.
    They are caught and cleaned and cooked and given a massage.
    I’m climbing the dunes of the Sahara with a mermaid swimming toward me
    Talking away, as if she were afraid she’d already bored me.
    I hear her emphatic politics, spoken in English English,
    Part of the TV panel of pundits in Washington, D.C., on this Palm Sunday.
    When I escape to the window for a moment to breathe New York,
    Something white is flying through the sky that is not a stork.
    I think about people who have died and are dead.
    I don’t think they have gone somewhere else instead.
    I don’t think I will see them again one day.
    I don’t think China will overtake the U.S. before Monday.

THEY’RE THERE
    IN MEMORY OF FRANK KERMODE (1919–2010)
    At least the dead don’t have to die.
    Everyone you see is dead, but it’s the Hamptons, so get over it.
    Edward, and next Dick—and now Frank—all dead. Boys, goodbye.
    Frank, at ninety, said on the phone he didn’t particularly want to die.
    Don’t try to tell Frank that his charming work won’t die.
    The dead don’t give a shit
    About their work once they die. Frank is the newcomer:
    I look around the lawn and there is everyone.
    Poirier and Said and Kermode are sipping white wine and it is summer.
    The fancy world of dead is having fun.
    Everyone is wearing summer light.
    They can’t tell wrong from right.

ONE LAST KICK FOR DICK
    IN MEMORY OF RICHARD POIRIER (1925–2009)
    Old age is not for sissies but death is just disgusting.
    It’s a dog covering a bitch, looking so serious, looking ridiculous, thrusting.
    The EMS team forces a tube down your airway where blood is crusting.
    Imagine internal organs full of gravel oozing and rusting.
    An ancient vase crossing the street on a walker, trudgingly trusting
    The red light won’t turn green, falls right at the cut in the curb, bursting, busting.
    You’re your ass covered with dust that your dust mop was sick of dusting.
    The windshield wipers can’t keep up. The wind is gusting.
    A massive hemorrhagic bleed in the brain stem is Emerson readjusting.
    Why did the fucker keep falling?
    I’m calling you. Why don’t you hear me calling?
    Why did his faculties keep failing?
    I’m doing my usual shtick with him and ranting and railing.
    You finally knocked yourself unconscious and into the next world
    Where Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the ballroom of the mind, whirled and twirled.
    Fifty-three years ago, at the Ritz in Boston, we tried one tutorial session in the bar.
    You got so angry you kicked me under the table. Our martinis turned black as tar.
    And all because your tutee told you Shakespeare was overrated. I went too far.

WHAT NEXT
    So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see.
    It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty.
    The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees
    In a shirtsleeves summer breeze.
    But daylight saving is over.
    And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover
    Is over. And it’s altogether November.
    And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.

RAIN
    Rain falls on the Western world,
    The coldest spring in living memory everywhere.
    Winter in mid-May means the darling