Le Monde C’est Terrible
Whenever someone asks, what do you recall
about that time just before they were born,
what they mean isn’t the messy verge of the present
nor clocks ticking toward the same midnight.
I remember tweekers bickering at each other
on a park bench on Queen Anne Hill,
their faces like carved masks.
It was the same then as now, only rats
divide their cache equally among themselves
without a court ruling or a coup.
That’s the feeling I remember, afloat
in an intimacy we were fools enough
to say we’d arranged that night
to stay in the house of another couple
we never met, friends of a friend,
out of town over the holiday.
Our business done there the next day,
the house we slept in overnight
received its couple home from the coast
and the man on whose pillow
I lay my head, went into the garden
with a rifle and placed the barrel in his mouth.
Afterwards no one knew why. The sky
that morning we departed was clear,
the Sound glassy and the city, a towering mirror.
The next day was Obama’s Inauguration,
the beginning of a new world.
The rest it of since, you know.
The Persistence Forecast
We didn’t know our host
nor anyone else, much less how
we got invited to the party—
in fact, we were the first to arrive!—
but the persistence forecast called for
our catching Covid after that isolate year.
We were eager for it and wanted to hear
the Ladino singer from Beersheba.
And what a view from that suburban living room—
a case of wine and the entire 19th century
expanse of thunderstorms and lightening
branching over the Big Belts, miles high
beams of Bierstadt light sweeping east
over the capitol dome and Scratch Gravel Hills—
an entire world inside that room besieged
by tinder dry juniper, rabbitbrush and sage.
And I almost forgot about the trombone
the singer soloed on between verses of “Landarico”
sung in our medieval mother tongue
about the king’s golden pride
and his sleeping wife’s folly, mistaking his
for her lover’s pride that she gripped
in her dream only—the words never change,
only the answers change
and only as many as we can bear.
David Axelrod teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana and founded Bear Scratch Press. His 10th collection of poems is Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems.