Three Poems by Leonard Nathan

 

Progress Report

The trees won't talk; but we've got instruments
To get the truth. Old omens of the air
Mean birds are hungry, here as everywhere,
And speak, if forced to, in present tense.
This took eternity and some expense
To verify. Gods, never really there,
Reduce to heros dying for a share
In prospects disconnected and immense.

Symbols, like homespun drugs, were handy things,
But facts are good as guns. And then there's you --
No priestess circled by sacramental wings
From Cythea, but a girl well suited to the act;
And what's to be done with nature? Nothing new.
We'll dream in symbols, wake up in cold fact.

Complaint

Fleets sank, horses went up in smoke,
When you curved around the corner
Of the building, leaving the world flat.

Two dimensions are left. The other
Has run off with a salesman from Cockayne
Where they sip their amber dew from goblets.

This is a book of cut-outs. Im waiting
To be cut out, stood up, then blown over
By the first wind bearing your scent.

Straight talk misses you. So I've bent it.

Ah

Through an open window of late summer evening
a woman cries, Ah-ah-AH!

Neighbors pause, blush perhaps, then go on
with their homely chores, smiling to themselves.

What do you do with this—another’s shameless,
lonely ecstasy? Or your own? I put

a tape of Mozart on to cover our confusion.