American Mouse Cartoons

A nation born of some Masonic prank
can only get so far in serenade
of glass harmonica on plywood planks
that Steamboat calls Democracy. He played
the cops against each other Wednesday night
as Walter wandered shirtless to the war
a-callin’, “Captain!” No one came to light
the bar at intermission.

But before
we knuckle in the mustard of our grief,
remember that we bought a mouse with zip
for personality to pump belief
into the engines of our voided ship
(where in the hold, subversive, lurks the prick
whose sticklike fingers hold the founders’ brick).
_________
Photo: Vanx

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Hopper

Hopper paints monotonous haiku, empty
bedrooms, light and curtains in midday breezes,
awkward figures over and over, surely
getting at something

pure and true. America. Midnight diners,
tiny brownstone Brooklyn apartments state his
premise. Spotlit aliens touch the rigid
hand of a student.

Ochre walls in cadmium daylight build a
gabled house suggesting the Bates Hotel in
Psycho. Railroad sidings and lonely phone poles
resonate longing.

He endows interior landscape: T-shirt
zombies, grasses rendered in opaque yellow.
Collie sniffs the whippoorwill’s sundown echo.
Infinite distance.

Separation Anxiety

With haploid days and chiral nights ahead,
still basking in our novel enzymes, why
traverse a simulated moving bed
or acquiesce as columns liquefy
and separate our racemates? The yin
and yang go left and right with no regard
for God or nature. Peptide ringlets spin
unhooked from awkward ligands limp and scarred.

But chemists in discovery have passed
this process to development where scads
of geeks will scale it up til we’ve amassed
the fingerprints of fifty undergrads.
And symmetry is such that, pulled apart,
one always gets the brain, and one the heart.

Lutetia

I might stumble on the flagstone quay
and slip the black embankment to the Seine,
or clutch my coat and amble on my way
envisioning your face. I’d count to ten,

inhale the rain and press my face on yours,
disolving in your scarf, your red embrace.
In either case, I’m lost. The night detours
of Paris take the ghost and leave no trace

but visions and a vignette cast in time–
a kir royale, rouge lipstick on the glass,
a street in Montparnasse, a petit crime
of conscience, call it love and let it pass

for city lights reflected on a wave,
for worms that twist like cables in the grave.