les plombeurs
Christopher Mulrooney
les plombeurs
it is in fact still
this story
you have read about
in books
but never glimpsed in
all its glory
for all your peering
probing looks
behind the arras rich
and hoary
codswallop
the old surveyor tends
his instrument his old wife
examines the
testament of the surrounding countryside from her turret
in the main kitchen
well let us consider the staff
come hot from the
great stove unto smart ladies in the drawing room
who sip their tea and
admire the nearly antique loom
manufactory
well if it isn’t and
it ain’t
you’re ‘ell if I am t’other
no that’s really ‘tis
and so forth the
colloquy
of a certain
certainty
scene
crowd scene tenement
district
ebb and flow of
little stinkers
on callow bits of
green
the brownstones
lightening in haze
the gross effrontery
of the poor
survey
from this office desk
overlooking
the city at the
height of a second-story man
blinkered somewhat
hastily by tinted glass
one would say a rajah
in his palace
never commanded such a
view
sour apples
there is all the muckheap
drained of its
nutriments
a chaff pile an
ordure bin
ready for the
scattering
to nutrify the fields
savvy
one is to sign on the
dotted line
with a leaky-beaked
office pen
and affix the date
per V.N.
a certain shower a
certain rite
and then the waking
night
circumfixion
let us have him
pinned
as it were to the
article in question
and the question so
to speak
put to him roundly
this were sufficient
to answer
the forest for
the trees
it is a convenient sort
of shambles
for the music in the
leaves you see
and then the
characters you meet
fat-haunched squirrel lucid owl
batch of woodpeckers
in their nest
solemn orders
how to wangle into
the deal
parlay that and fry
an egg
on the Manhattan
sidewalk come midsummer
they just don’t teach
that folks
not even at Columbia
and Bard
wherewithal
the solemn book
closed no not that
simply the accounts
at the end of the day
which
cannot be read in more than one way
else there is danger
of dehiscence
and still worse of
defalcation
baggage claim
everywhither
Poe’s demon serves his turn
why he’s never meet
to himself even
let alone me if he
only would
for an instant even
oh if he could
dispute the field and
withdraw but no
at every venture he
is there and so
alma mater
old frou-frou she is
quite a load of baggage
take her temperature
feel her pulse ah no
back to your
schoolbooks says the cadaver
well study is not
fruitless take my old professor
please to rattle on
about the P.R.B. oh boy
bluebonnet
down Texas a way and
a means
cow ate my bluebonnet
Sir
pard
why do you mean to say
I don’t see how I
come in to it
she just up and well
I never
inspection
why Sally they say he
is
yes Nancy you can see
that he is
oh Tracey it hardly
bears thinking on
no Susan it would
pass the time no more
like tossing a piñata
in a blanket
the little
finger
oh it went hard all
right the edict was read out
as war and the
confines of a terrible threat
he would have us ten
times worse than his sire
he was but a little
gnat beside him who came forth now
contemptuous beyond
all measure of his hearers
sup
such the organization
of the display
it was worth the cost
per plate
and this was a
dispensation unto the people
for though you spake words of introduction
and ate what you were
served with some dilection
it went no more
beyond the doors than odor