The New Croesus
Just like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
Astride the golfers’ well-groomed eighteen holes,
Here, in a once disease-infested swamp,
An orange hubrid with a coif whose flame
Is Just for Men (under-timed), and his name,
Make Us Great Again. Here, his tiny hands
Waive the world’s contempt; his rheumy eyes lase
The Beltway’s lair of red-tied suits and wealth.
“To hell with treaties, powers, rights,” tweets he
From his sleepless den. “Come—you comfy rich,
You one-percenters Dow-Jonesing for more,
You brash elitist kleptos of the world,
Come, you entitled oligarchs—to me.
I’ll quench this country’s lamp to glut your store.”
The Woman Who Read This Book Before Me
printed in hard lead, No. 1 pencil, tiny letters
next to phoenix, “mythological bird that lived in Arabia”
our improbable meeting was in The Pages of Day
and Night; she arrived like a new character in Act III
when Adonis compares the earth to a pear or a breast,
she hesitated, wondering especially about the pear
she circled damp asphalt and New York
is Harlem, later New York is Wall Street
halfway through the odes, she started to underline
the names of trees—palm, date, cedar—but not plants
some of her comments were enigmatic: one line was decorated
with a five-pointed star, two were fenced-in with braces
in the ode to love, she put a checkmark
each time the poet wrote let there be weddings
let there be weddings . . .
let there be weddings . . .
let there be weddings . . .
in an image / with breasts and thighs and all the rest:
she could not see Mohammad hurling goddesses from the Kaaba
somewhere between the poems and the essay at the back,
she lost her pencil; from there her comments were in ink
when she finally underlined poetry does not become poetry
unless it frees itself from the easiness and obviousness
that is demanded of it, all her marginalia
should have trembled in their chains, eager
to disappear like scorpions and jerboas
frantically seeking shade before the rising desert sun
And So Each Lover Is Both Greek and Trojan
responding to Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Pattern for Future Dirges, No. 20”
And so each lover is both Greek and Trojan,
Both deceiver and deceived. It’s love’s contract,
The price we pay when we tie abstract
Pleasure to reality’s heartless, daily motion.
And in exchange for what? Meeting in the rain,
A common destination, conversation
Over a meal and drinks, a certain reservation:
How much dare we share, now, of our joy and pain?
And then we feign a scuffle over the tab:
Who will get to show he loves this moment most?
The last of the wine, one final, lingering toast . . .
(Do we part at the doorway, or share a cab?)
Yes, there’s a dream world that we can only feel,
And through love alone can make it almost real.
John-Michael Albert has been active in the Portsmouth, NH, poetry community for the last 25 years. He has served on the board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and hosted many open mics in Portsmouth, Dover, Durham, and Rochester. Mike edited The Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire (2 vv., 2008 and 2010). His latest published collection is Collected Animal Poems (Portsmouth, NH: Marble Kite Press, 2024).