Playing Chess with Confucius

I do not understand his moves.
They are random, his queen
traipsing across the board
like a streetwalker looking for tricks
with a lusty bishop or a knight
behaving like a Calaveras jumping frog.
He throws the I Ching before every move,
looking at the random yarrow sticks
before pushing a pawn into slave labor.
He smiles a lot and says he can’t lose.
“It is what it is,” he says with a sigh.
“Be good, be kind. Drink rice wine
and make love in moderation.
Study art, politics, and religion.”
I move a rook two squares to the left.
“You’re a stereotype,” I say. “Checkmate.”
He scratches a whiskered chin.
“Ah,” he says. “Just as it should be.
The Mandate of Heaven prevails."
He is full of wind and words,
a puffy cloud with too many followers.
He puts a stick in each of his nostrils
and twitches his erudite nose.
“I am a walrus,” he laughs.
“Ah, just as it should be,” I say.
“The laughing toad gathers no moss.
A stitch in time saves nine. Etcetera.”
He snores while I sneak away
with his college coed courtesan.

~William Hammett

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Praying to the Gods and Saints for Good Weather and Gold

Fishermen cast wide nets for mackerel
and trout, the wide-eyed captives
flipping and smacking in the mesh,
silver and gold coins reflecting
sun scales, rainbow tarnished
and plucked from the novenas and votives
at the four a.m. fisherman’s mass.
Mumbled words disappear in the flames.
Multiplied wafers no longer offer the balm.
Let there be fair weather and calm,
no thunderheads or Satan spawn
to tilt the sea or rock the sailor’s brain.
Let market and monger be paid in full,
the gods appeased, the papal bull
from Peter’s boat absolving the sky of rain.
Let drachmas in the fish’s mouth
pay the temple tax and bribe old Triton
to blow his conch and the anchor weigh.
Are we even now? Am I free to go?
It is time to cast off with spinnaker spin.
The mariners are shrived, the widows grieved
because husbands are lost in the Galilee.
Let us be done with canonized feet
that walk upon the rumpled sheet.
It’s over, gone, and done, this hope
for cloud and coin and copper tin.
The wide-eyed fish and flock are the ones
who are always nailed with the Savior’s sin.

~William Hammett

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The Titty Bar

The stripes and spots and speckles
of lions, leopards, and tigers
rise and spin and fold under the disco ball,
turn upside down, legs splayed,
delayed by fingers stroking chrome
as the roving lights lick the carousel
with beams on seams of skin-tight silk,
of tawdry fur and feather boas
constricting the neck and nexus
of the gyre, the gyration well-lubricated
with gin and rose oil rhymed, timed
to make the fluid hemispheres revolve
around the son of man who has come
to call this flock to savannah’s trial
in a kingdom where the many mansions
are in the back, red velvet and black lights
ushering in a rapture of Midwest conventioneers
walking the midway between the breast of dawn,
between the gasp and lickety leers
and twilight’s last suckle of a naked gleam.
The ups and downs exist but in a dream.
All are actors, and all who enter here are sprites
who may have given you to slumber for a while.
Stuff the greenbacks into the collection plates,
the order of the garter and the snakes,
and you shall find yourselves at home again,
the wife and kids, asleep, bringing the ship to rights.

~William Hammett

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