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Uncle History has a goiter
He begs ravens for help
They’re busy eating the nestlings
Of other birds—its not easy
Being history and even when
It is, one has to be goiterless
Which means
Plenty of iodine
As any schoolchild knows
But its early days
Books haven’t yet been written
Words come from the raven zone
They’re eating from a carcass
And clicking their beaks

Uncle History is hungry
But people give him dust
If they’re especially generous
He gets broken glass
All he wants is a clean, unpolitical snack
The zoo keeper mob tosses him
Hair and fingernails
For 300,000 years
He’s been famished
Thinks: “homo habilis
Never deprived me”
The problem is the “sapiens”
Thought is cruelty
Oh he’s hungry alright
He watches
As they polish off the planet

Aunt History has to remind her husband
There are births to be celebrated
He’s so preoccupied with death
She names the big ones
Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus
But that’s just to wake him
Then she gets to the miraculous blastulas
“They’re unborn but on the way” she says
“They will keep us in business”
He’s been reading “Notes from Underground”
(His favorite)
“I say let the world go to hell
But I should always have my tea.”
He’s a needle nosed sourpuss
Births happen anyway
He recites more Dostoevsky:
“It is better to be unhappy
And know the worst
Than to be happy
In a fool’s paradise.”
“You see how it goes” his wife says
“As always,
You leave me to do all the thinking…”

Uncle History likes to invite the dead to parties
Think Titanic before the berg
Ice cream in champagne, fois gras
And a whiff of doom…
Unlike in the movies
The deceased are just like
You and me
Though they laugh more
They laugh and laugh
All because they don’t fear death
The backwards parturition
Stays with them
And like Pablo Neruda
They cry out for more wine
More lobster
Its a once a year affair
Of course they wear masks
The dead must be equal

Uncle History has always hung around hospitals…

Before they discovered ether
Patients screamed their lungs out
(From “patiens”
One who suffers
And the verb “patior”
Which means I am suffering)
He saw how non-transactional it was
Everyone suffered
Tuberculosis for the doctors
Women bleeding out
Asklepios with his snakes
No one emerged alive
Which was and is
The source of history
Uncle carries a stalk without blossoms
Inside his coat…

Uncle History murders his darlings
But he never uses the eraser
He inveigles young writers
And they, quite properly
See new patterns in the wheat
Losing the past
All the old torched houses
Are forgotten
This is how he stays fit
Tricking generations
With novelty—
Lyric keyholes
Joining dreams together
To a single reality
A longing
And so much longing there is…

You can’t use the word “longing” in poetry anymore…

But leaves continue to fall
They whirl under street-lamps
“Death’s butterflies”
As my friend Jarkko
Called them—and
He’s gone too.

Try speaking about life
Without clean desire
Also known
As tenderness—also
Called yearning
Aching, pining,
And all for what?
The day holds meanings,
We feel accomplished,
We sweep up the children’s hair.

You can make all the jokes you want
About Uncle History—he’s heard them all
Which is another joke
Though he won’t tell it
Shakespeare heard it
The joke history won’t tell
And its no special distinction
To have heard it
You just need the ears
Of a church mouse
When its deep winter
And she wants to gnaw
The piano’s felt
While keeping alert
For the cat
It’s the sneaking up joke
You only hear it
When you’re doing something wrong

Uncle History is like an undertaker with OCD
A corpse lies before him
He dreams of fixing it
Patching the skin
Then he spots a spider
And has to chase it
In this way he fixes nothing
The spider always escapes
He secretly wants to control the sky
It was he who whispered in Ben Franklin’s ear
More than once he’s killed inquiring people