Robert Farrell
November
The women ride out to the meadows
To dig through the middens.
Their hands are brown with mud.
They stoop like readymades.
With all the lawlessness of the law
Steel silhouettes of dogs were spotted
Standing in the field this morning.
A suicidal impulse held the nation.
The snows return then melt again.
The geese are left to feed on the grasses.
*
The children await their disposition
Homeless on the sidewalk,
Dozens of them laid out
Like tambourines and banjos.
The gigs suspended above them,
They sleep uneasy in the lamplight.
There is a flower that grows wherever
Pilgrims rest shoulder to shoulder.
The snows return then melt again.
The dogs are left to feed on their souls.
*
Unmanned by the situation
We forget to powder our wigs.
Now we must pay court to our masters
Unshaven and soiled.
We choose not to escape the banquet,
But remain before our hogget.
They will love us more, you tell me,
If our words are of the moment.
The snows return then melt again.
The ghosts are left to feed on our hearts.
Robert Farrell is the author of Meditations on the Body (Ghostbird Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and elsewhere. Originally from Houston, Texas, he lives and works in the Bronx, where he’s a librarian at Lehman College, CUNY.
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