Sample Poems by Jerry Roscoe
Letters
If all the poems in the mail at any one time flew off
In a flock, would the earth become heavier or lighter?
And the ensuing V, would it remind me of Peggy Demos,
The V of her at my neck, chicken fights, coed swim, Friday nights
At the Y? She, of any of us, knew where she was headed:
Valedictorian, Vassar. And if said flocking verse
Disappeared, would we await its return each spring
Like turkey buzzards to Hinkley, Ohio? At the reunion
Peggy introduced me to her husband, a novelist.
She'd chosen chapter over verse; life as a series
Of destinations & arrivals, if fictional, with Peggy,
The best of us at the wheel, while in another car I'd tumbled
Into the backseat looking out the wrong windshield following a V
In the sky wheeling, feeling gain & loss & between them, connection.
S-E-X
There would be a certain logic to it:
Having run out of letters, out of fluent conversation,
The zzzz of the long zipper in the back of a dress,
Then the white slip like tissue paper around the gift.
So you were left with the armature of a brassiere
To be uncoupled, snaps & a girdle wriggled
Out of while up top doing something
To increase the inclination. Of course there'd be nylons
Peeled--heels, we assume, kicked off--
Panties, either sophisticated silky or homespun cotton
& you're free, bare, ready for the journey,
In fact, halfway there. In our moment, however,
Rather than impose incremental sense, we're without
Local stops to visit, expressly, in the present tense.
Bee
Our neighbor had a pear tree, which along with
Tomato plants in several old men's gardens,
Was the only agriculture in a poor polluted neighborhood.
But he'd pick the fruit while it was still hard
So we wouldn't get any, leave it to ripen & rot
In his cellar. Down there on a dare,
I had I think what they used to call a vision,
Feeling myself grown physically sick in the ripening
Sweet scent, seeing them, in separate wooden baskets,
Loosening their dark skins. Overhead was a single
Bee--the mind, I knew. One mind (sort of like
The internet.) You couldn't escape the fact
In a cave in Tora Bora, or in a recessed factory town
In northwestern Connecticut, even in an age of innocence.
The Unexamined Life
"The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates in Greek
& he took the poison. His view was echoed in a couple millennia
By Thoreau, who practically invented political correctness,
Borrowing Bronson Alcott's ax & setting out into the woods.
So I moved to the suburbs & am holed up in my basement
Rec room writing when I'm not killing spiders, silverfish
& those lobster-like creatures which remind us we're at
The bottom of a vast ocean of air, waging war on insects
Who will eventually win, experts predict, given their superior
Organization. They're team players like the Yankees,
While we're a collection of free agents after the fat contracts.
Which of us would sacrifice, dive on the explosives like the late
Steve McQueen at the end of "Hell is for Heroes," featuring
Bob Newhart in a serious role? I couldn't stop laughing.