Sour Grapes 

That fall we were always 
out of wine, and that night  
especially we knew we had  
to have something and I threw on  
a tee shirt and ran downstairs  
while you waited in the apartment 
where we'd already polished off  
the last two bottles of 99c Montepulciano 
d'Abruzzo, one down the gullet  
and one gone off into vinegar 
then down the drain, end of our first-ever  
case that taught us the term 
bottle variation. Street lights  
glowed white while fall starved  
the city trees leafless as telephone poles  
but the shop was closed and I could see– 
through the window where the lights  
had dimmed–the wine guy whose name  
I can't remember had already locked the door  
and was gone. There was the '82 Margaux  
I had promised myself when you said yes 
gleaming in the window like an ornament, 
before all that came later, the kids and the divorce  
and the second lives,  all the wine  
gone down the drain into the sad lights 
of that city which doesn't exist  
any more if it ever did outside  
of movies and our illusions. 
  Later we found out some guy  
had been forging a lot of high-end wines 
by pouring plonk into dusty bottles 
and artfully arranging labels and corks,  
and the Margaux we never had 
was probably, in the window of that store 
whose name I still can't remember, a fake.  

Assessment 

In Las Meninas it's either the dwarf 
or the self-portrait that burns through the frame-- 
the Infanta with the foofy pink dress seems like  
the cause of the painting but that's just the way  

with art and magic--the misdirection that earns 
the paltry pesetas of survival. What would Velazquez  
have painted if he didn't need commissions and patrons 
or the satisfaction of anyone but himself? Even the worst painters 

aren't paid what they're worth. Someone once estimated  
only about five poets in America  
can live off poetry. Maybe  
I'm making that number up. It could be  

too high, as Stevie Wonder sings. The rest of us  
live off it, too, poetry, I mean,  
but in a different way. Tomorrow I will have to read  
twenty-eight student essays on a Keats poem,  

split firewood for an hour, drive to Brattleboro for milk and wine,  
do a load of laundry, respond to an already forgettable 
professional development workshop, zoom with deans, 
pay a mortgage, write to my son in Spain. None of these-- 

as Elizabeth Bishop writes in "One Art," a poem in which she disguised 
if not misdirected from the generating subject, which is  
her alcoholism--will bring disaster. Probably because 
there are so many other disasters rising 

around us like the sea level from an overheated earth  
being denied by overheated rhetoric. Yesterday a colleague 
said, "There are only two grades at this school, 
A and Not-A." That colleague was me. I try not to wonder 

what grade this poem might receive, or any poem. "Dear Mr. Keats,  
your Hyperion has some interesting images  
and nice language though it fails ultimately  
to cohere, B minus." Van Gogh didn't even wait around 

to find out what grade “Crows over a Wheatfield” 
might earn, but shot himself in the field 
the next day, a C minus suicide. The real subject  
of that painting was neither birds nor grain 

but the angular blue-black strokes of lowering sky 
just like the one even now on this sill 
bearing down on the strangled thrum 
of these failing pigeons here like the blazes.  

At the Fencer’s Club 

The masks turn these tots 
into houseflies or bees, 
faces meshed and stingers  
turned outward, partnered up 
in practice to stab 
with bated foil and breath 
into friends. Only connect 
indeed. Dressed and buckled in 
like chefs or psychiatric patients,  
they shuffle and lunge. 
Shouting coaches 
trail their own medals  
behind them, a history 
of silver and bronze ages,  
teaching a new generation  
to keep their right distance, 
--steely arguments unpacked  
of all their metaphor— 
but still, with their bent  
and blunted points, to touch.  

Offer 

North of the strip where my daughter climbs  
glaciers of clouds alone on her first trip abroad,  

I steal along the choked labyrinths of Queens, potholed parkway 
I have made of love and self, traffic of distance  

that is our company and destination. Tires crackle  
like the irritation of applause no one has the taste or faith  

to cut from live recordings. The heater chuffs against a cold  
that fills the membrane of March like a zeppelin.  

What a blessing to imagine we can fly through 
the winter wind of a piled up sky  

and under the mirror of constellations, 
peel open the grammar of another world,   

to plunge so confidently into the ether,  
betting everything on the instruments’ 

parable of the runway, a point to touch down. 
I remember my own first flight, the muse of altitude 

laying her cool palm on the back of my neck, hollowing  
my bones until I was weightless as a sparrow  

with the savor of being aloft and between,  
an exalted nowhere, and so believed  

I could transcribe like a native the ancient dialect 
of clouds or gloss the lexicon of atmospheres,  

a time when the opaque wall of the universe seemed  
to break into the articulate cool of a spring morning. 

Now in the quiet tumult of stop and go on  
a crumbling expressway, here is what I can give,   

O my daughter–a few syllables between us strewn  
like crumbs along the cracked pavement of the way home. 

Harry Bauld is a writer, translator and painter who was educated at Columbia University. His poems have won prizes and appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included in Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and has performed in New York and elsewhere as a magician and jazz pianist.