Master the filibuster,
for it will wear out the sentries
of heaven. Cultivate horticulture.
Marry after forty. Outlaw basketball.
Outlaw school buses. Outlaw
the manufacturing of transistors.
Outlaw jive-talk and rhythm.
If you intend to be re-elected
certain moods must be abolished,
it goes without saying. Remember
your duty. If you must apologize,
let it be in a language no one comprehends.

PINE

PINE

I still had two friends, but they were trees.

—Larry Levis

In the dark we lugged someone’s farfetched bounty
From a truck’s black cab and it was a bad idea
And a bedevilment better than the rocks we’d thrown

At the dogs behind each low fence, the branches we’d torn
From saplings barely rooted to the fields, Boomie and I,
Our heads in a swivel of trouble, our two tongues

Swigging distractions, a few hour’s worth of wrong turns
Behind us, we were restless and miles from home,
Dark boys roaming in the dark. We found a pickup truck

Unlocked outside a small hotel and in its cab: trash bags
Fat with clothing and housewares, a toaster and vacuum,
Waiting to be used again by someone checked in for the night,

Maybe a runaway wife reversing her dreams, a streak
Of red wine sleeping on her tongue while elsewhere
Her husband was in the dark because he didn’t know yet:

She was gone, she was gone. For no good reason
We took the bags from the truck and propped them
Below the pine trees which like everything in the dark,

Belonged to us. And to anyone approaching, our laughter
Must have sounded like the laughter of crows, those birds
That leave everything beneath them trampled and broken open,

Those birds dark enough to bury themselves in the dark.
But we were not crows, and we were not quiet until it was too late.
I was thrown against a tree as if I weighed less than a shadow,

A hand clutched the back of my neck as if it wasn’t a neck.
Cuffed later inside the break-proof glass, I watched
The policemen nuzzling everything we’d touched,

Slithering, their faces calculating absolutes while the trash bags
Shimmered in a fiasco of light. When I looked up,
I saw Boomie nearly twenty feet high in the arms of a pine,

Almost nothing visible, but his white shirt and white shorts.
I could feel him feeling as sorry for me as I felt for him,
And I said nothing. Think of what the tree might have said

If it could speak: Hold me for a moment then, let me go . . .
Something an unhappy housewife might say
To her husband on the last night of their marriage,

Or a boy to policemen when he’s locked in a squad car.
I heard a voice between their voices issuing numbers,
Codes or uninterpretable verses, addresses in a bewildered city.

I was to be taken somewhere and given a name
More bona fide and afflicted, I was to be shot
Through the knee and then shot through the jaw,