AMERICAN SPEAKING

Pressure of what you’d hear
if you really heard
the findable pressures
of finite things—

you’d be concussed, actually,
by the carpenter
a Catalan or South Miami Cubano
60-something years old

and carrying a ladder
with inordinate care while complaining
in curses yelped
Spanish-style about the

hardening of his arteries,
his legs ready for the go-round
still, being on the make—
only, in this country

it’s your money or your life,
and we don’t want any
of those who slide into the pew these
Sunday summer mornings

to think the bedmaker
we call Jesus
has really died—after all, the sheets
so neatly & finally tucked-in

on all our beds
are clean, are they not?—so speak
American, says the crew boss,
speak American, OK?

and then shut the hell up.

HERE HOME BETWEEN

By the river—
out of which a white stag or inebriated
Pakistani taxi driver might step

to wet us down—
I have been given three distinct
not to mention

cloudless
dimensions to walk inside
the visible—

with a sparrow to my immediate right—
and the bird coptering

as it wishes
above a bread crumb almost

too big
for its beak;

            this sparrow being a clarification too,

it shivers there,
like a fat, blacklisted worker bee

the bird
hovers, inches above grass blades,

just ten feet
from a cat clued-in

but so benevolent
it chooses not to attack.

And that’s it—
that’s all—

this clarification was
absolutely all that it took:

            it’s perfectly all right now,
            it’s all right to soak through every surface
                       and divvy-up earnings—

how could it not be?—

there is this threshold
each of us must step across

if we wish to
stand before the crippled choirmaster

and sing.

SUGARTOWN

Sweet & lowdown,

you do
have a tongue
on you tho,

and it’s nice, what it’s doing
                       what it’s done too
to that popsicle stick
            it’s licking.

                       But what it said earlier,
                                  it hurt,

I can’t remember the words
            exactly,
                        but they hurt,
            and had
on the undercasing of their circuitry
                                  the phrase
                       “patent pending”
stamped in dark blue ink.

                       You hurt all manner of beings alive,
                       without knowing,

            as a wind would
descending out of storm cloud
                                  like a bejeweled hand
                       to swat & rip

                                  all the
                                  bunting hung on the brownstone
                                  City Hall—

it was tacked-up
by Mr. Jesseaume the janitor

                       in this part of the world

where his mother thinks she’s dying
but wants to wait for one more moment now
by a yellow kitchen chair.

From Sugartown. Copyright 2006 by David Rivard. All rights reserved.