YOUR FACE WILL STICK

However bland we all

begin when picked

from the common

stock of cherubim,

your face will stick.

There will be

a spot at which

you hear the click.

Your baby ears—

pink shells—will

prick, your look grow

pixieish or dour,

fixed upon the

inner notch or

catch you can’t resist,

like clocks set up

to strike the hour.

SURVIVAL SKILLS

Here is the virtue

in not looking up:

you will be the one

who finds the overhang

out of the sun

and something for a cup.

You will rethink meat;

you will know you have

to eat and will eat.

Despair and hope you keep

remote. You will not

think much about the boat

that sank or other boats.

When you can, you sleep.

You can go on nearly forever.

If you ever are delivered

you are not delivered.

You know now, you were

always a survivor.

AND ALL BECOMES AS BEFORE

—The Legend of the Baal-Shem,

Martin Buber

So why do we want to go

if this travel is

so without profit

if not even a souvenir pebble

lodges in a boot waffle

or a half ticket sticks

in the corner of a pocket

if it is so perfect

that it takes every tick

of its private clock back

patting us down at the exit

like a bank dick

pushing us back into traffic?

TWO MORE, AND UP GOES THE DONKEY

An old cry at fairs, the showman having promised his credulous hearers that as soon as enough pennies are collected his donkey will balance himself on the top of a pole or ladder. Always a matter of “two more pennies,”the trick is never performed.

—Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

Old men

who were boys then

continue to imagine

how it would have been

to see a donkey

balancing above them.

Some see all four

small hooves

compressed on

the post top;

some see one.

It depends upon

which penny

wasn’t spent,

which trick

wasn’t done.

THE CATCH

Among nets

some are stout

and cast by

rubber-clad

sailors who

venture out

in boats and

talk of knots

and floats and

diesels and

gruesome accidents

to decent people.

Whereas the

nets approached

by birds and moths

and set by

Nabokovs in white

are lighter stuff

tied by threads

to branches

as though for sport.

. . .

A bird catches

like a shuttlecock.

In both events

what they get

only partly matches

what they sought

plus the problem

of the innocents.

One can admire

the common sense

it makes for sailors

who desire the

hardest, the most

backbreaking work,

the way you’re tired

and broken to dispatch

by the time it’s time

to justify the catch.