The Hybrid

           He’s still got hooves in back;
there’s still a market for those pickled feet.
The market decides what’s poison and what’s meat.
The market is why he’s got no twisty tail,
no swinging sack.

           But you can tell he’s male;
we left that there so he can urinate.
(He’s even toilet-trained!) No need to mate.
We clone them, so instead of sows, there’s just
a paper trail.

           Those peons eat his dust;
look at him work. We gave him human hands,
and brains enough so that he understands
how to assemble circuit boards. He works
because he must;

           devoid of human quirks,
he thinks of working, and of working only.
He’s never restless, angry, sad, or lonely.
We’re hoping soon to breed a whole new line
of super-clerks,

           then, educated swine:
economists, or even presidents.
The market will decide if that makes sense.
And when they’re plump enough, they’ll taste divine
with the right wine.

Famine Ship

Sweet was the smell that wafted from the hold
six weeks ago, when we were hauling rum
and sugar from Havana: goods we sold
for twice their worth in Dublin. Now we come
bearing cargo no one wants to buy,
these rank paupers headed for Québec.
When fever hits, the old are first to die.
We bury them at sea, then swab the deck.

“...the house of the Lord forever.” Sunlight streams
down on the lightweight corpse. It almost seems
that God is smiling on us from above.
But then that cursèd wailing from below,
where scores are burning up, reminds me of
the freight we carried twenty years ago.

Heart’s ease

Helen, remembering something she’d learned from a woman of Egypt,
land of the healers, crumbled the brittle, dry stems of a flower
into the wine-bowl:

heart’s-ease, a magical herb with the power to soothe a man’s sorrow,
freeing his spirit and body of pain, and dissolving his anger.
No one who drank of it deeply, in wine, could remember his troubles—
let him look on as his brother was killed, he would not even feel it.

Now Menelaus, her husband, and everyone else at the table
could sleep without grieving.

Heart’s-ease, flower of forgetfulness, nodding and dropping its petals—
surely it can’t be this pansy that purples the cracks in my driveway
(not where it’s needed, in borders where tulips have died). Johnny Jump-up,
Three-faces-under-a-hood, Love-in-idleness, Herb trinitatus,
Trinity Violet.

Where are the magical properties now, that Helen relied on?
Maybe Apollo, peevish at seeing his temple neglected,
took them away with a wave of his hand, saying, “Let them remember.” 

Old School

I see him now: the old-school formalist
moored in a leather wing chair in his study,
half-lenses lowered. “Young lady, I insist
on perfect rhyme...” A handsome fuddy-duddy
who puffs a pipe and writes like Thomas Hardy,
he grades me with a grim parade of X’s,
doubling my demerits when I’m tardy.
His strictures are as sure as death and taxes.

I see him then: his Latin master flexes
the cane before him as he conjugates.
He trembles, then remembers, and relaxes;
relieved, recites, and sits. Today he breaks
the rules but rarely, taking pleasure in
the piquant joys of English discipline.