Kiplingesque; Our Workshop at 3 a.m.; Some Laundered Zephyrs

Kiplingesgue at the Bunda Street Traffic Light

’Ee up ears thisside, ’ee the uvver.

You’d wreck on ’ow they shared a muvver.

Their faeces ’ad bin on the teev,

both pee-etched ease, would Jew believe?

Oy arsed ’em when they last ’ad Eden …

For they wuss limb,

more ’aired than trim,

but took some care where uvvers wooden.

Oy slipped a grand. “Uav agooden.”

Alan Gould

Our Workshop at 3 a.m.

Soft rumble and soft axle-squeals

mean Annie’s turning earthenware—

my darling with her once black curls

now leans to art with steely hair,

who in our thirty years has made

three gardens for three houses where

the mind can follow pathways laid

like the intaglios of her hair,

and at each turn find star or urn,

the deft extensions of her hands

where blooms will sprawl in unconcern

from work along dark’s borderlands.

Some Laundered Zephyrs

Blue as lagoon, light as elsewhere,

my darling’s summer blouses

show the insouciance of air.

Her skirts sway lightly in their ruses

of zebra white and black,

while mowers raise among the houses

their cut-grass aphrodisiac.

My darling is not anyone.

Right now she tramps some hillside track

with our small dog and lofty son,

while here her finery

shifts half-embodied, half-undone

in pastoral scenery.

On blood-warm nights of summer moons

my darling’s blouses

show blue like vertical lagoons

among these hillside houses.

Alan Gould