During the Years of Lead

after hard-liners crushed a gentler dictator, citizens who’d demanded a crackdown on crime cheered, marching with balloons through big-money districts.

Whenever humans stampeded through zoos, hippos watched impassive from their pools.  Giraffes chomped acacia leaves.  Chimps, clinging to their cage bars, screamed.

Any touch felt across the buttocks suggested the presence of a pickpocket, albeit a ham-fisted one.  Cries from real or imagined victims began stampedes.

Information passed between stampeders, such as the criminal fled thataway, could become corrupted amid the rush to rhinos are running toward us.

Citizens were expected to stalk criminals.  No one knew if the shadowy figures they tried to corral were guilty of anything, other than being shadows.

Unable to capture shadows, citizens sought easier targets:  grizzled men haunting city sidewalks,  college kids who dared wear it’s forbidden to forbid teeshirts.

People disappeared daily.  According to one theory, they sprouted wings and flew away.  Militias  tested this, tossing many from aircraft over the Atlantic.

Radio God Mystery                                                                   

Janet and I below the rain-gray rose window greet

Father Almo, orca-like in his cassock,

who leads us up to his study

 

trailing the scent of not unpleasant pipe tobacco.

He spills Earl Gray from a glass globe,

its steam brighter than air

 

into our cups, and switches on an ancient shortwave.

Listen:  the next voice you hear may be His.

Students, steel yourselves.

 

We try to.  Father dials up a storm of static,

a wailing wall of heavy metal.

Can that be His voice?

 

It’s our planet’s magnetic poles in motion, Janet says.

Soon there will be compass chaos.

Father tries again,

 

reaches higher frequencies—solar wind harps,

bands of wild bell-ringing,

deep sea sonar.

 

Janet, frantic, calls us, hurry to the window.

Father shuts off his set, bumps a chair.

East, over the row houses,

 

above districts I haven’t traveled through,

the sky darkens.  It’s rush hour.

Traffic on the interstate

 

forms slow-motion columns of red and white,

a ladder of light between the Alleghenies

and the clouds.

 

Tenured

You shiver through your seventh decade,

losing hearing, keys, a few memories,

and your work calendar,

and wander

the library stacks, students brushing past

in tees and hoodies saddled with backpacks.

You step by chance into a faculty meeting

you’re due to lead, falling

into the Chair’s chair,

more geezer than ruin, more ghost than geezer,

thatched hair with spires hiked by static,

threadbare turtleneck collecting flakes,

too hoarse to grouse.

How sad the others

can’t soften their façades, curb their dogma,

alter their awful karma or stop crowing

over their links to colleagues in the Ivies.

 

Your assistant Eva, who’s Swedish or Russian

or both, texts that you should smell the approach

of snow by 4 p.m.

So you gavel this meeting

dead over protests, and slip out to breathe

the air mass moving toward the campus quad.