**Poem: Donald at Boughton Place**

 Donald at Boughton Place

A small dog darts out in the highway,

but not a dog, a red fox,

drags a grey-furred mass off to the side,

glances back at me when he's safe,

ears, tail pointed black.

Black geese, down for the night,

cluster in twos and threes

don't pay attention as the fox

drags his prey past them.

It's not clear what he's got,

but if it's goose, they don’t care,

engaged as they are in discussions

of weather, direction.

At the reading, on a circular stage

layered like a wooden wedding cake,

Donald Lev is the feature.

He reads love poems for Enid,

ever regretting his choice to leave

the hospital that night and who

knew it would be her last?

Donald, eyes of snow, four separate seasons,

reads Enid's own lament for Sari,

lost biblical sister moved to suburbia,

remembering her desert commune.

Donald won’t be mistaken for a fox,

this lazy-haired poet alone

in a cottage of lemon balm and books.

Thunder rattles the theater.

Donald is undisturbed.

Red wine trembles in our glasses,

and already Donald has tried

to wipe a spill from his large, white heart.

Too late, it's already stained through.

CAR  7/31/09

*Poem: "No Songs, No Packages"*

-On Sylvia Plath's 68th Birth Anniversary

No cake, no candles, no flames to burst open
with the blow of a matronly sigh,
she has long been missing these affairs,
our jelly glass oracle,
frozen in the oily panic of youth
for almost forty winters now. Look,

she has done it again, and made it stick,
since fox let the secret out,
a stench no clove stab can cover. Look!
Even her husband, who bore the weight of
those cold candles, waxy tears stuck
in that moment, even he has gone where
no song is celebrated, skull moldering next to hers,
bright now with forty years grub fest, Daddy in fist, how

could you? After the roar has subsided, look!
No hats, no crepe paper carousel roofs,
the show is over, the exit is out, you can go
with your painted bricks, your sobbing crocodile slaves,
crow feathers pinned to your bosom in black recall.
The ending, unfit as it is, is theirs,
details of potatos and bees and

babes, milk gone sour is
all we have, all we are allowed.
Let us close up the cottage on that fairy scene.
They are happy there, before the fall, hives full,
thatch tight with blue promise.
It is not for repair, for figuring.
It is to close, like a book of bad dreams,
leaving the dreamers to sleep at the last.



CAR 10/27/00