LEN KRISAK - POEMS

With work in the Hudson, Sewanee, Antioch, and Southwest Reviews, Len Krisak is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes. His books include three works of original verse and translations of Ovid, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Rilke, and Prudentius, He is also a four-time champion on Jeopardy!

AT THE FACILITY:
AVIARY

Behind six feet of glass and perched above
The case’s floor of parti-colored grains,
The thumb-sized finches flit. They take no pains,
It seems, to twig to what we’re thinking of
Who watch them hop and dart from branch to branch
To tiny dowel-trapeze. Though on display,
They pay no mind, but will in mid-swing launch
As if it were all one—hard work or play.
The back wall like a cliff of shredded wheat
Props up a cup of cuttle here and there.
The circus chirps, the fluttering finches tweet,
As fine-fletched greys and crimsons streak the air.
So with impassive patience they perform
Their act each blessèd day. It is the norm.
​

​AT THE FACILITY:
SOLITAIRE WITH CREDIT CARDS

The dark green simulacrum of a baize
His bedspread offers muffles any chance
Of snap or snap. He sorts and deals the cards
So-many-odd concerns have sent his days:
A passport to the wide world at a glance;
A deck of revelations dealt in shards.
Post-sharper’s shuffle, down the plastic comes
In stacks, a parody of solitaire
Enacted at the bedside. Nothing sums
To anything. He hunches from his chair,
Dealing the hand his creditors have dealt
Him as the colors fill the cover’s felt.
“Don’t cheat,” they joke—the nurses and the aides--
As all his wealth pours down in bright cascades.

​

​AT THE FACILITY:
SOLDIERS

​In the sun’s post-reveille they sit
Where he will fall in with them, wheelchair bound,
At ease until the digits start to twitch.
About his lap, gnarled fingers bounce and flit;
Waking island-hops with drifting, dozing,
Until the well-worn numbers, come around
Once more, recite themselves without a hitch,
And midway through his nap, the lids snap to
A form of lax attention-by-unclosing:
“33345839,” he reels
The number off—which he can always do,
When where he sleeps and eats, and who he is
Are long a forlorn hope. The RN wheels
Him to the mess he knows at least is his.

​BATHROOM REMODEL

Back-buttering the tile, he slaps and smears
The mortar to an AM beat. There is
No song whose words he doesn’t know. They’re his
Completely, as he pins the spacers in
And sings along to everything he hears,
His reedy tenor a surprising fit
With almost any designated hit.
To call his twenty-year-old’s moustache thin
Would smutch the memory of Errol Flynn
(And Jason’s cheerful giggle doesn’t help).

His partner at the wet-saw, Russ, is Shrek
In Carhartts: gruff (but more than competent)
And given, as the slurry pelts the deck,
To little more than hummed accompaniment.
With each precision cut, he hands tile on
To Jason pressing each square into place.

When will they finish, working at this pace?
For I am thinking even now what grade
To give this pair on some consumer site
That means to lend my neighbors vital aid
In their eternal home-remodeling plight.
How shall these two be rated soon on Yelp?
How will they shine on Angie’s List as shower-
Stall men? One more day and they’ll be gone;
Two more and I’ll have my echo-chamber-
Quality recording studio--
Reverberating to my vocal power,
Lending it an operatic timbre
Jason, I’m convinced, will never know.
​