Six poems.(Poem) - The American Poetry Review

 six poems  Leavings  Foolish, frugal Mrs. Mousie, why would you accept our generous offer, why trust our least word ever, why take these green crumbs from our bait trays bit by bit and bite by bite for a safe deposit here in our Romanian black clay vase of things already too good to be true?  How long were you abuilding, how long since, this unnumbered Swiss account, your private, smack stash, closed portfolio of Nourishment and Security, of Sound Ideas for an Easy Mind? Poor pirate! With no chart or map's X we've stumbled onto your best treasure.  No trace of you, though, or your pink nurslings; our fierce thirsts drove you back out into fields whose hungers you'd already fled, where if you became some fox or coyote's scrap of protein, you can pass on this Pharaoh's curse-- our taint still seeping through the territory.  Invitation  Come live with me and be my last Resource, location and resort, My workday's focus and steadfast Distraction to a weekend's sport.  Come end up with me, close my list; Blank my black book, block every e-mail From ex-loves whose mouths won't he missed; Let nothing else alive look female.  Come couch by me mit Freud und Lust As every evening's' last connection; Talk to me; prove the day like Proust; Let what comes next rise to inspection.  Come, let old aftermaths get lost, Let failures and betrayals mend, Cancel repayments; clear the cost; Once more unto the breach, dear friend.  Come lay us down to sleep at least, Sharing this pillow's picture show; Who's been my braintrust and best beast? Who else knows what I need to know?  A Separation Anthem  You can say you've downsized, pink-slipped each other, trimmed back to fighting weight. It's no less a catastrophe and nothing in the world teaches you otherwise. Or more. All the crises are midlife' crises and restore you to your teens, rheumatic, rebellious, at loose ends. You could sit beside each other at diplomatic dinners only if you arrived on others' arms. The sentence smoking on your wall means what all graffiti mean: that your favorite theories have just disproven and revoked themselves. Whatever you've, learned from each other is to be turned from, turned against-- against each other: in the new curriculum. Whose pillowtalk, now, can substantiate the day done, the day that's still to do? Love's bornagains, you re on the lookout for a new obsession. With the best luck and happy hunting, it's no less a catastrophe--one that may not kill you and we wish you every wonder of it.  Sitting Outside  These lawn chairs and the chaise lounge of bulky redwood were purchased for my father twenty years ago, then plumped down in the yard where he seldom went while he could still work and never had stayed long. His left arm in a sling, then lopped off, he smoked there or slept while the weather lasted, watched what cars passed, read stock reports, counted pills, then dozed again. I didn't go there in those last weeks, sick of the delusions they still maintained, their talk of plans for some boat tour or a trip to the Bahamas once he'd recovered. Under our willows, this old set's done well: we've sat with company, read or taken notes--although the arm rests get dry and splintery or wheels drop off so the whole frame's weakened if it's hauled across rough ground. Of course the trees, too, may not last: leaves storm down, branches crack off, the riddled bark separates, then gets shed. I have a son, myself, with things to be looked after. I sometimes think since I've retired, sitting in the shade here and feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled with a child's dread you could catch somebody's dying if you got too dose. And you can't be too sure.  Farm Kids  Our neighbor's slim rag doll of a daughter (not, we're told, of his own getting) breathed out: 'You've got so many cookbooks!'--each eye a startled O as it skimmed our kitchen shelves--'And so much food!' Later, straight-faced, she said her mother lives now with her new boyfriend in another county. Hard up for farm jobs, her 'Dad' has to drive 60 miles to the factory, getting up at 5 AM to leave them where his folks watch after them until he gets back home--sometimes 5 PM.  We go for long Walks every evening. If we pass their trailer, they all tumble out shouting, 'Snodgrass! Snodgrass!' The slim, straight-faced one is thought slow by her teachers. There's much she'd do well not to know. The cool offspring of our city friends are driven to special schools, sports dates, parties, given phones, computers, cars, the insatiate stuff that will guarantee they can't ever get enough. Our neighbors' less keen hungers and kinder drives make sure they'll make nothing of their lives but lives.  On High  As the day-laborers in our loft pried loose the hand-split, slivery lath, the gray, unpainted plaster, it all came cascading over their bent heads like Yahvesh's judgments or Zeus's showers on the naked Danae: dead flies, snakeskins, bat shit, a boy's clodhopper, The Christian Messenger for Nineteen-O-Two, sex magazines, a gnarled cane, then a cat's carcass--a tattered fur sack flapped around the bones and fanged skull, all fat and tissues gone. Heavy, heavy what hung over, long years, like an angel's perch or sniper's blind, bare inches from our heads! Prowled, say, into some dark cranny, snarled tight, the dead flesh nibbled off by mice, its past prey? Or battered by some farmchild, sparing his rough parents, buried where no one could know? No; a tramp cat, crept in out of whetted winds, snow-clotted woods, then frozen in its shelter, soon one part of our insulation. The workmen, smirking, must have wedged it back in overhead--their deterctor watchcat for cold forces, for hungers that go along with us--thou castoff cat of catastrophes, calvaries, scapecat, lar and caretaker spokescat, O be kind!-- sealed into our new ceiling's 2X4s and plywood to which we do not lift our eyes.  W.D. SNODGRASS is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995); Each in His Season (1993); After Experience (1968); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in upstate New York.