Frogs And Princes

Frogs – an endearing species.
Princes and Princesses – are there any left?
Prince – from Latin for first or foremost.
The Princes and Princesses (female foremosts)
went first. Are they missed? Princess Grace,
perhaps, and Anastasia. But nobody is kissing
frogs – even the once-Princess-and-
thoroughly-prozac’d Di (di anu!)
no longer kisses Charles
(who has always been more frog than Prince).

Alas! Who will detect the peas beneath our mattresses?
Who will trade places with paupers, thereby
teaching paupers that they aren’t so bad off?
Who will assassinate vile Claudius (a toady!)? Species
and ranks blunder off into the swamp, muttering
“to be or not to be”. “BRACK!” The frogs
are disgusted – “BRACK! ACK! ACK!” they choke out
their endless dry heaves, a zillion Lucys
licked by a zillion Snoopys.

In our own universes, we are kings
and queens, but our own universes
have been polluted. After each vision,
we await the credits. My universe
and television’s are not of the same species;
hence this child of their union that I miscall
my own is impotent. No Princes, no Princesses.
Artificial gardens with artificial frogs.

The choice is between something real
and something not unpleasant – an unreal choice.
For a time, one could still turn around
and be faced, merely, by decay, swamp, brackishness.
Lies assimilate even that. What’s left to face
is increasingly unfaceable – heaps of mangled
bodies, knowledge of responsibility, and when
we’ve turned that, too, into ornaments,
turning in our gray flickering garden light,
do you think we’ll ever turn to face
what’s left? No – soon, I think,
we will be safe forever.

–Dean Blehert

Lost and Found

Words begin to fail me, become hard to find —
not that at 56 I’m fading fast, but I notice
because I’m so used to having words come easily,
anticipating my needs, mobbing me with possibilities,
synonyms, interconnections. Words are my oldest friends.
When they hesitate or frown even slightly,
I notice. Thus already I can watch in slow motion
the “dreaded ravages of age,” and this pleases me,
this slow fading of known brain cells, because

it confirms that this dying brain is not what
I am, as I hang here waiting, KNOWING the word
I cannot quite catch the tail of, waiting as one
waits with swatter or cup for a fly to alight
on a cold window, waiting for this flit of knowing
to hold still long enough to be seized, waiting
for a word to arrive, no doubt by long labyrinthine
alternative nerve-pathways that by-pass ruined,
blasted cells — here I am suspended, knowing (but
unable to voice) what the brain refuses to
give me — THIS is the divine frustration, this

tip-of-the-self-ness, this certainty (even now
I can’t find the word for it), this knowing that
I damned well SHOULD know and DO know what persists
in remaining a total blank: It’s like looking
in the mirror and finding no reflection, this
hanging between knowing and data, this simple
knowing (here separated out for purest scrutiny)
that, spoiled by long reliance on brain gadgetry,
is at last of necessity coming to know itself.

–Dean Blehert

Butterfly flashes inside out
the gold inner lining
of blue sky.

–Dean Blehert

Giving

The featherbed, we say, “gives,” meaning
it accepts one’s shape. Water gives
(ice doesn’t). Air gives. The givers
give way, wrap themselves around us,
shape themselves to us, receive and
release us easily with a sigh or kiss
of gentle suction or a rustle of sheets
or a smile in brimming eyes. What
can you be given? Apparently yourself,
or your own form shaping another,
apparently the right to be part of and
separate from another. What you can be given
depends on the gentleness of your asking:
If you hit the water too hard, it becomes
stone. If you force yourself through air
too fast, it shudders, splits, jolting you,
claps together behind you (BOOM). Violence
shatters whatever opens to embrace you;
splinters stick to you; the violent never
have anything whole, never leave anything
wholly behind.

–Dean Blehert