CELESTIAL DISCHARGE AND OTHER POEMS

“Celestial Discharge”
                        in memory of Hannah (1918-2003)

Behold: “’Celestial Discharge,’” inexplicable,
neither nocturnal emissions, nor pollution, nor
the sudden appearance, low in the Eastern sky,
of a profoundly obese, fiery dragon, with Persian
Ohrmazd and Ahriman, ur-terrorists, tottering,
on opposite wings, like stand-up comedians
at the edge of laughs, each brandished a heft-ax
in one hand, in the other, a rune-staff with Chinese
Banalities after Schwitters cut on it, legible only
“Flies have short legs” and “Red raspberries are red.”
They grunched dry-points in coffee-stained teeth
and, in discordant English, spit inane jeremiads.
Hissing rancid flames, the dragon flopped,
like a shy, pendulous breast, or a neurotic,
flaccid penis, onto my small pond at daylight.
Extinguished, the diapered trio released
spumes of green algae and bile over
crooked fields of Spring dandelions on
a pair of courting geese, more reminiscent
of Crumb’s 1968 comic cover, “Fritz The Cat,”
than Durer’s 1495 engraving, “The Ill-Assorted
Couple or The Offer of Love,” and over
a barn of orgasmic pigeons in full-throat.
Sparrows exploded out of willows, and
flew away upside down; red-wing blackbirds
fumbled in bunches from birches, and ran
up the side of my house backward; cocksure
chipmunks contredansed an adagio.
I, with the strength of thirty men in each hand,
remained phlegmatic, until the town Elders,
absent Suzanna, repeatedly demanded of me,
a lapsed Thomist, the meaning of the dragon
and its par-boiled Zoroastrian attendants.
The stench of their decay swaddled my farm
and hung, in griseous clouds, over the town.
In answer, I offered:  “’Celestial Discharge.’”