Edwin Zimmerman's Poems
The Poetry Group
They sit in a circle in the room
And fuss with one another’s words.
They are almost like lawyers
What with their love of specificity,
Their nominal calm while dealing
With grave matters, their calculated
Ambiguities. They could be
Negotiating clauses in a contract
Except that they cock their heads for music,
Except that the business they transact—
In dreams, panging sensibilities, deaths—
Is more elusive than any lawyer’s,
And except that they always assume the risk
Of being their own clients.
Bulls
The farmer down the road put two
Black Angus bulls into my pasture
Where they were in residence for a month.
Big as freight cars, shoulders bursting,
With black bullocks the size of soccer balls
And complex pouches hanging underneath
From which a pizzle read as a torch
Forayed from time to time, they vacuumed up
The grass and sometimes tried to hump each other
But gave up quickly. They were indifferent
To my presence: they waited for but one thing
And I was not it.
They were taken off one afternoon
And in their place nine Black Angus cows
Come to stay, some ready for love.
They wandered about,
Splattered with their own flop
Wearing clouds of flies, sprouting orange
Tags from each ear and wheeling
Like a flock of birds as I walked in their field.
I did not think they were particularly
Attractive. And yet I know those bulls would kill
To be where I was—
Those black haunches! That Paradise!
The Klezmer Trio
One WASP pokes the drums, another
Thrums bass fiddle, while a clarinetist
Of indeterminate antecedents cantillates
On his black reed in the nearly dark drive
Where, swaying in the shadows, patrons
Ecumenically dance in their chairs as though
They wore earlocks, fringed prayer vests,
Black wide-brimmed hats, as though
Nothing had happened to those other tootlers
Whose music, after all, had not been thought fit
For notice by encyclopedists of music
And is now performed by strangers
For the delectation of strangers.
