LONELY CROW

My depression to my relief isn’t yet in the Internet age

but still works from notebooks file cards post-its

so when Vivaldi’s Seasons blossoms from the stereo

it doesn’t know how to google junk from my safe-deposit

of failures and funks but blinks herky-jerky like a quasar

suspending albeit accidently the beyond myself miseries

with which it usually inflicts me—you know: war, poverty,

planet murder, power-mad politicians, the insatiable rich —

chomp, crunch, they’re eating us up — but as soon as I cut off

go up to my study my woe’s back in business — envy, greed,

absurd unquenchable ambition, and still is at my desk — sigh —

where I’m scrounging for poems to shake me out of myself.

Who should I be reading? Let’s see. Neruda? No way, too rich.

Lowell and Larkin, good god, we’re already in the pits …

Maybe the ancient Chinese?—Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Li Po —

the whole team whose neat poem packets once brought solace

but that now forgive me seem off the point: plum blossoms,

boring; drunkenness, blah; nada even for poems in a lake …

Curiously unboring though their biographical sketches —

paupers they were zillionaires shits right and left;

comforting they’d be afflicted with madness not unlike ours …

I skim anyway through them again, and find, in Tu Fu,

Song wearing thoughts thin … Wow … Dragon in hibernation—

Yes, exactly — no dragons sleeping near here but, look,

there’s a crow, who with two wing beats and a glide

like that passage in the Hammerklavier I call a tango

though it’s not crosses the sky and about whom I think,

“Poor, lonely crow,” then realize he’s not lonely at all,

more likely on his way home from work or the store,

hardly poor either with all that roadkill to scarf down …

So maybe for once I’ve nailed you, my misery …

Short swoop from one hill to the next, and maybe a tango it is …

Forget gurgle in dragon, forget Vivaldi … Go with the crow!