Baron Wormser

Carthage and Airplanes

Carthage likes to ride in airplanes.
Up in the sky he can forget
About the schedules of earth.
It is almost like thinking,
Gazing out the window at the clouds.

He likes to ponder.
“We’re pretty high up,” he says
To his aides.
“I wonder if we could go much higher.”
Everyone looks thoughtful.

Back on earth ten-year-olds heft Uzis,
People drop dead on sidewalks,
Friendship sours like old milk.
How much better it is in the sky!

Too bad you have to be going somewhere.
Too bad the endless limo will appear
And some suit or turban or daishiki
Will greet you and start
Telling you about what’s going
To happen soon or happened yesterday.

“Why don’t you fly around more?”
Carthage would like to say to them.
If you live in the sky, nothing happens.
You don’t even see the rain.
It is almost like thinking.

Of Small Towns

It is not so much gossip that absorbs
Them as a fondness, to be found
Even in the children, for measuring lives:
The noting of how many years some wife
Has outlived her husband and how each of the road
Commissioner’s four children quit high school
In the middle of the eleventh grade and how
It was twenty years to the day (they are
All addicted to anniversaries) that
A black spruce fell on a one-armed man.
Comparison is insistent—the father who
Is a better shot but not as good a card
Player as the son; the sister who
Writes poems while the other two clean house.
Here, people want to live to learn
Who the next President will be, how many
Games the World Series will go,
Whether the trains will ever come back.
Ceremonious and dutiful to national symbols,
Too many of the sons die in the wars.
The coffins show that faraway places exist,
That you can die quite forcibly elsewhere.
Those who have hoisted themselves up
And fled will say that the finitude
Of small-town life breeds idiocy, that
The imagination turns upon itself, chews
Its substance over and over until it is worse
Than nothing. The surmises that the metropolis loves
To make, the crushes of people whose names you will
Never know, the expansive gestures made
Among incoherent buildings—all that is
Peculiarly urban and self-aware is lacking.
Instead, you have a hodgepodge:
Legends hovering, dreams that lapse into manias,
Characters ransacked like cottages in winter.
Each random movement would become an event.
It is no surprise that every now and then
The attentiveness becomes too great
And some hamlet spawns a horror
Of the first degree. As is to be expected,
The émancipé’s letters home are blunt:
“You are all like those vile canning jars,
Lidded and sealed and put away for endless winter.”
And yet—it is these towns that dignify the slimmest
Of lives with a history, remembering even dogs
With an earnest pleasure, a rush of anecdote and regret.

Buddhism

It’s about not-about. I’ll start again
And stop there—which is more like it.
The Via Negativa goes Nowhere
And that’s a lovely place—the empty lake

In front of the barren hotel where some timeless,
Karmic habitués look past one another.
Better five minutes of Zen than
A hundred books about Zen. Poems

Are another story. They too inhabit
No place gracefully, dwell
Offhandedly in mini-eternities.
They too welcome oblivion. Authorship’s
A ruse but that fades. Sit still again.
No nothing. You can feel it. Approximately.