gall beetle's bite

Take, for instance, this maple:
a fine tree, south-leaning.

Take this gall beetle.
He scrapes and digs

and leaves a bit of poison
in its sap under the bark.

It's a hidden wound the beetle leaves,
and very small, the tree still lives.

Take this girl, who knows the tree
as a child knows a tree:

by climbing it to its top,
by clutching the rough bark,

by tossing its late summer whirligigs
up so they helicopter down.

Even this girl who knows the tree
doesn't see the injury.

Take this red-faced distiller.
He cuts a fine line diagonally

and hammers a gutter-shaped spike
and hangs a bucket there.

He doesn't taste the beetle's gall
in the boiled maple sap at all.

Take the gentle woodcutter's son
a hundred years hence

who finds the ugly tumor
sprouted from the gall beetle's bite.

It has festered for a century.
And he squints at the monstrosity.

Take the woodcutter himself
led there by his son.

He begins to cut the burl from the trunk
with a sharp-toothed saw

and stops to smoke his pipe
in the autumn cool.

The saw is hanging there
halfway through the lump.

And the boy is already preparing tar
to paint across the saw-torn scar.

The woodcutter lights his pipe
and watches the boy and says,

"Take, for instance, this maple, son:
a fine tree, south-leaning."

Mephisto

After waves and quakes and fires,
The lands and seas are still intact.
And all that cursed stuff, the blood of beasts and men,
Is too tenacious to be shaken.
Think of the multitudes I buried!
Yet there is always fresh new blood in circulation.
-Faust, Goethe, trans. Peter Salm (ll. 1367-72)


Mephisto, with your war machine
you lay waste to the delicate earth.
It has been poised,
and you are aware of the fact:

of it being poised between
the rude clamor of animal birth
and the quiet ruin of animal death.
We creatures die. And the things

we make also waste and winter.
The mountain spews its fire,
our Pompeiis cease their glowing,
and your blanket of white descends.

"Ash of Hell, or snow of winter?"
we timidly ask each other.
But the curse of it is that we, knowing,
invite you in, Mephisto. You knock.

"Come in," we say in chorus together.
"Three times, three times!" you beg,
so we sing it. And thus you become
Earth's and ours, a forever guest.

Ah, but we become yours, also forever.
Do not forget: forever the delicate dead;
forever the worms making soil of the dead;
forever the Spring, and the small seeds of Spring.

Odysseus' dog

On the heap of dung is Argos,
ancient, weak-limbed, patient,
with the dog-ticks now burrowing
into the skin of his ears,
the soft skin below his jaw.

It has been nineteen years
since he last saw his master
or smelled his wine-heavy breath,
two decades since Odysseus
went off to war, or just went off.

And now a beggar approaches
smelling exactly like the master.
There is no question to Argos.
It is the master. It is no matter
that he wears rags and stoops.

Argos has only strength enough
to lift his head. Pointing his nose
he tries to shift his weight
to stand with front paws
but finally can only breathe, heavily.

The master in rags stops
and watches the dog strain
and point his nose upward.
The dog chuffs and breathes,
and his eyes show white.

He is no longer Magnificent Argos.
He drops his chin back down
and watches Odysseus
who is watching him. Two flies hop
near the wetness of his nose.

And Odysseus, disguised in rags,
hiding, even from his wife, must shuffle
as if oblivious, past his dying dog.
Argos' eyes now glow with patience
and now lessen in their glowing.