The public radio commentator du jour
complained about those country kitchens
through which his designer dog would run
during another afternoon soiree
in which the guests would mob
the selfsame drafty country kitchen
the roomiest room in the whole
renovated Home and Garden sort of home.
He'd flagged wedges of artisanal cheese
on the butcher-block table
of that drafty country kitchen,
but the dog had toppled them.
It was a big designer dog
furry and lovable in its way
but neither did it recognize
Thus moaned the commentator du jour
on public radio through locked jaws,
one who denies owning the world
exercising his privileges within it.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Air Guitar
He'll be sought after by the quarterlies
and asked about his days in the wilderness
among the lumberjacks and stumps
Now he plays among the stars, and stretches
Before he goes, he'll get his parcel of the glory
a warm bed and socks and absolute power
and asked about his days in the wilderness
among the lumberjacks and stumps
Now he plays among the stars, and stretches
Before he goes, he'll get his parcel of the glory
a warm bed and socks and absolute power
Thursday, December 4, 2008
News from the guru
Don't have much to offer this month except old material dating from the 80s and 90s.
Imputed reader, enjoy.
Imputed reader, enjoy.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Cauliflower (84?)
I.
A boy exorcises morning with a cauliflower,
swinging it baton-like, lashing air as with a whip.
I watch the exorcism from a bus, the motor idling,
the windows bottle-green. I’ve had my fill.
The drooping, dusty underblades of leaf
guard off-white convolutions afternoon will blacken
when it brings me to Seville’s Moorish limits.
His flower falls like a careless judgement on the town:
walls of swank marinas spooled with razor wire
behind which the coast glitters fitfully
contaminated by a German joint concern,
then dusty corner shopfronts, their comestible signs
tilted over mottled picture windows, in back some tapas,
seafruits, exorbitant beside undusted nectarine cartons,
peach, pear, pina, the winds from Africa.
II.
Wanderlust led them to Andalus
where aqueducts totter by orange mounds.
The Roman concrete is turning into sand.
Unmoved when advertisements peel from walls
or whitewash from imitation Moorish arches
gypsies mob the train station
in which a fretwork of schedules
wrinkle like seersucker fabric under glass --
dismissed by a single hand, a wrist-flick,
the flower-head, rolling like a planet -- benedicite.
III.
Rosettes in cathedral limestone
flowers that last, like stained glass
petals tracking limestone floors
regime upon regime,
unlike a cauliflower
in the hand of thief or farmer--
blacker convolutions
framing off-white effulgence.
IV.
It must be a beauty then -- why otherwise whistle
at world's-end, off-season Malaga, the apex
of this hotspot a park where black swans float
through reflections of public flora, coarse, orange,
beyond which hotels lean into the Costa del Sol
like stacks of beige cafeteria dinnerplates--
as if reflected by trick mirrors, or mirrors
in hotel lobbies, reclining from Torremolinos,
a coastline of drab, overpriced clipjoints,
tattoists, false oracles.
He leaps above
the virgin's sidewalk portrait
Euro-hippies chalk in, her lids marbly arcs
ephemeral as greasepaint. Her mantle's azure
fills the grid in. No one's invited to follow.
A boy exorcises morning with a cauliflower,
swinging it baton-like, lashing air as with a whip.
I watch the exorcism from a bus, the motor idling,
the windows bottle-green. I’ve had my fill.
The drooping, dusty underblades of leaf
guard off-white convolutions afternoon will blacken
when it brings me to Seville’s Moorish limits.
His flower falls like a careless judgement on the town:
walls of swank marinas spooled with razor wire
behind which the coast glitters fitfully
contaminated by a German joint concern,
then dusty corner shopfronts, their comestible signs
tilted over mottled picture windows, in back some tapas,
seafruits, exorbitant beside undusted nectarine cartons,
peach, pear, pina, the winds from Africa.
II.
Wanderlust led them to Andalus
where aqueducts totter by orange mounds.
The Roman concrete is turning into sand.
Unmoved when advertisements peel from walls
or whitewash from imitation Moorish arches
gypsies mob the train station
in which a fretwork of schedules
wrinkle like seersucker fabric under glass --
dismissed by a single hand, a wrist-flick,
the flower-head, rolling like a planet -- benedicite.
III.
Rosettes in cathedral limestone
flowers that last, like stained glass
petals tracking limestone floors
regime upon regime,
unlike a cauliflower
in the hand of thief or farmer--
blacker convolutions
framing off-white effulgence.
IV.
It must be a beauty then -- why otherwise whistle
at world's-end, off-season Malaga, the apex
of this hotspot a park where black swans float
through reflections of public flora, coarse, orange,
beyond which hotels lean into the Costa del Sol
like stacks of beige cafeteria dinnerplates--
as if reflected by trick mirrors, or mirrors
in hotel lobbies, reclining from Torremolinos,
a coastline of drab, overpriced clipjoints,
tattoists, false oracles.
He leaps above
the virgin's sidewalk portrait
Euro-hippies chalk in, her lids marbly arcs
ephemeral as greasepaint. Her mantle's azure
fills the grid in. No one's invited to follow.
Between ('94)
Who knows who you will cross in a library
other than schoolkids eager to scan microfilm
or transients who use the chairs to doze
because they're padded, or lapsed academics
attempting to find more time in which to learn
or the wealthy widow looking for a mystery?
Often they're people who just don't know what to do
with all time on their hands, too curious to sleep,
too tired to read, amorous enough to cut the pages
from Esquire perhaps. For them life lacks secrets
while for the schoolkids it promises. So curiosity
moves them to read about dinosaurs without
the first thought being the cause of extinction.
After all that grazing prehistoric grass, no matter
how many flowers on the prairie they scattered--
by comets stoned, weather starved, dinosaurs were passé.
But the kids are too busy to mock regulars who snooze
on mounds of dailies, or crackpots whose theories
academies refuse to confirm. Surrounded by chances
for a better life they cannot use, better they rest
as if a bed of news features and stock market reports
were a tarpit, a place for bones to lie
between destinations, one meant, but one approaching.
other than schoolkids eager to scan microfilm
or transients who use the chairs to doze
because they're padded, or lapsed academics
attempting to find more time in which to learn
or the wealthy widow looking for a mystery?
Often they're people who just don't know what to do
with all time on their hands, too curious to sleep,
too tired to read, amorous enough to cut the pages
from Esquire perhaps. For them life lacks secrets
while for the schoolkids it promises. So curiosity
moves them to read about dinosaurs without
the first thought being the cause of extinction.
After all that grazing prehistoric grass, no matter
how many flowers on the prairie they scattered--
by comets stoned, weather starved, dinosaurs were passé.
But the kids are too busy to mock regulars who snooze
on mounds of dailies, or crackpots whose theories
academies refuse to confirm. Surrounded by chances
for a better life they cannot use, better they rest
as if a bed of news features and stock market reports
were a tarpit, a place for bones to lie
between destinations, one meant, but one approaching.
Clay (89?) (ancient, in confessional mode)
Your father's wet, hamlike thumb-pads still press dough
as if to say, on pizza's clayey texture, paddy-cake,
his palms welted from the lobster traps he's never made
a living with. Barely he swims the tide of business now.
Since pizza doesn't make a fortune, he kneads more crust,
impressing it with scars as buried as you are, wafers
wolfed up without ceremony, just by someone hungry,
who wouldn't know your father's recipe from sawdust.
If you think of the crust he bakes daily as his coinage
then the scars on his hands become all he has, except
a favorite son inheriting your albums, your Goodwill clothes,
as he was given all the better presents, things for sport.
And your father bequeaths nothing else to the ground
that you lie in, while it treats you as a rent healed by rising.
As the palms he retracts from flour seem youthful,
those chubby hands undissolved yet in sink-water,
think how strong someone becomes from what he sells:
his thumb-prints and lesions from trap-cable talced by flour
look as if nothing had happened but childhood, clay.
as if to say, on pizza's clayey texture, paddy-cake,
his palms welted from the lobster traps he's never made
a living with. Barely he swims the tide of business now.
Since pizza doesn't make a fortune, he kneads more crust,
impressing it with scars as buried as you are, wafers
wolfed up without ceremony, just by someone hungry,
who wouldn't know your father's recipe from sawdust.
If you think of the crust he bakes daily as his coinage
then the scars on his hands become all he has, except
a favorite son inheriting your albums, your Goodwill clothes,
as he was given all the better presents, things for sport.
And your father bequeaths nothing else to the ground
that you lie in, while it treats you as a rent healed by rising.
As the palms he retracts from flour seem youthful,
those chubby hands undissolved yet in sink-water,
think how strong someone becomes from what he sells:
his thumb-prints and lesions from trap-cable talced by flour
look as if nothing had happened but childhood, clay.
Icehouse ('94?)
A bank of snow that overreached my head
I hosed to make a surface hard and icy
and tunneled through the icy mound I'd made
dumping pails of water to smooth the surface more.
First it was hard to squeeze through the entry.
But I hollowed an inside for myself with a spade
until the floor was glass, and heat exposed
dead grass at my shivering, blue-jeaned knees.
The walls were translucent as glass cubes
on the sides of kindergartens or clinics
and while light might be allowed to flood
the lobbies through that warped translucence
no pedestrian could tell what moved inside
those ugly institutional buildings where bodies
were probed, incised or pruned in right directions.
This house of ice, where I could hide, was like
the frosted glass of the offices of the important.
Sight itself is a portal through which are misread
dilations or brows raised, as if they were kind --
but in the pupils' black, truly we are in the stars
where a motion is a portent -- just as my body
moved through its slick house, this glass house
no stone had yet been turned against.
I hosed to make a surface hard and icy
and tunneled through the icy mound I'd made
dumping pails of water to smooth the surface more.
First it was hard to squeeze through the entry.
But I hollowed an inside for myself with a spade
until the floor was glass, and heat exposed
dead grass at my shivering, blue-jeaned knees.
The walls were translucent as glass cubes
on the sides of kindergartens or clinics
and while light might be allowed to flood
the lobbies through that warped translucence
no pedestrian could tell what moved inside
those ugly institutional buildings where bodies
were probed, incised or pruned in right directions.
This house of ice, where I could hide, was like
the frosted glass of the offices of the important.
Sight itself is a portal through which are misread
dilations or brows raised, as if they were kind --
but in the pupils' black, truly we are in the stars
where a motion is a portent -- just as my body
moved through its slick house, this glass house
no stone had yet been turned against.
Vet's Hospital, Thomaston (1989-90?)
1.
In contradictory directions march the dying
to their future's absence. Some stumble, grab the wall,
others with cagelike walkers uphold their frailty.
The oldest nearly trip themselves, the more robust
walk with the briskness of someone returning to work
or the bank. But there's hardly anywhere to go
except to the emergency exit of the ward,
the course they walk along this lettered wing
so broad they seldom find the place they came from.
Later they will walk the hall like automatons
while the mind that animates their legs flickers.
Having served their country, surely they deserve
the chance to wander from their semiprivate rooms
until a thoughtlessness can alleviate their pain.
As TV lights his silhouette until it bristles,
a nurse's aide before the dying buoys nutrient in a can.
But if the dead part with one last retinal image
to take to the stars, should it be the blue layer
of the game show, final consolation prize on the eyelid?
Even the best sleight-of-hand artist cannot pass on
that happy endings are against the odds. His job
is illusion only, the buoyancy of the can in a flicker.
Cancer's their baby. The life that blooms inside them
tautens their faces, makes them slender, ascetic
as it trenches through their system, puts
its alternative system there, a strangler vine
that thanks its host with little sprays
of edelweiss through a bloody system, a bluish fog.
2.
This lobby isn't a temple of silence, or meant
for the reverence due a museum -- a regular
who complains about everything under the sun
as it rises on his cancer volunteers as much.
He saves reserves of his hate for the dying,
more than for loved ones who just remind him
he comes too often to deserve as much commiseration,
that the radiation ladled him will curb his death
like a pruned bush that will leaf another season.
But over those about to die in hours
the sky seems to darken, like over Calvary
as the loved ones crowd beside the door.
He imagines how an oscilloscope's scanline
mystically straightens, whistles one mantra.
How superfluous he feels when this happens,
like being the regular in a luncheonette
boring the waitstaff with complaints.
Outside the window, other hospital wings
stretch brick sides to foreseeable landscape
that crowds into these netted panes as residue.
March snow melts in slushy tire-tracks
the color of droplets fogging the windowglass,
the walls and sofas grey as in prisons.
Sings all this scenery to the visitor
we are locked in bodies like in vaults.
In contradictory directions march the dying
to their future's absence. Some stumble, grab the wall,
others with cagelike walkers uphold their frailty.
The oldest nearly trip themselves, the more robust
walk with the briskness of someone returning to work
or the bank. But there's hardly anywhere to go
except to the emergency exit of the ward,
the course they walk along this lettered wing
so broad they seldom find the place they came from.
Later they will walk the hall like automatons
while the mind that animates their legs flickers.
Having served their country, surely they deserve
the chance to wander from their semiprivate rooms
until a thoughtlessness can alleviate their pain.
As TV lights his silhouette until it bristles,
a nurse's aide before the dying buoys nutrient in a can.
But if the dead part with one last retinal image
to take to the stars, should it be the blue layer
of the game show, final consolation prize on the eyelid?
Even the best sleight-of-hand artist cannot pass on
that happy endings are against the odds. His job
is illusion only, the buoyancy of the can in a flicker.
Cancer's their baby. The life that blooms inside them
tautens their faces, makes them slender, ascetic
as it trenches through their system, puts
its alternative system there, a strangler vine
that thanks its host with little sprays
of edelweiss through a bloody system, a bluish fog.
2.
This lobby isn't a temple of silence, or meant
for the reverence due a museum -- a regular
who complains about everything under the sun
as it rises on his cancer volunteers as much.
He saves reserves of his hate for the dying,
more than for loved ones who just remind him
he comes too often to deserve as much commiseration,
that the radiation ladled him will curb his death
like a pruned bush that will leaf another season.
But over those about to die in hours
the sky seems to darken, like over Calvary
as the loved ones crowd beside the door.
He imagines how an oscilloscope's scanline
mystically straightens, whistles one mantra.
How superfluous he feels when this happens,
like being the regular in a luncheonette
boring the waitstaff with complaints.
Outside the window, other hospital wings
stretch brick sides to foreseeable landscape
that crowds into these netted panes as residue.
March snow melts in slushy tire-tracks
the color of droplets fogging the windowglass,
the walls and sofas grey as in prisons.
Sings all this scenery to the visitor
we are locked in bodies like in vaults.
Gang of Four Member, Executed 1980 (1987?)
Who's that one in the Gang who's so quiet?
In a prison cell's ideal darkness
I watch the fingernails of the mandarin grow
until he trims them to the claws of kites.
His courtyard isolates circles of sound
meanwhile, from concentric streets
in which history focuses. (Today I stapled
paper straps on sandals, yesterday
entered clandestine messages on bellies
of toy trains en route to Hong Kong--
fixing the parasol in the hand
of the painted courtesan, however,
is what I hate doing the most,
her feet too small for kanjis.)
In a prison cell's ideal darkness
I watch the fingernails of the mandarin grow
until he trims them to the claws of kites.
His courtyard isolates circles of sound
meanwhile, from concentric streets
in which history focuses. (Today I stapled
paper straps on sandals, yesterday
entered clandestine messages on bellies
of toy trains en route to Hong Kong--
fixing the parasol in the hand
of the painted courtesan, however,
is what I hate doing the most,
her feet too small for kanjis.)
Lake (from 1988, for want of something else to do)
What is at the bottom of a lake (Maranacook)
but crawfish, minnows, white and yellow perch, band-aids
that float above the silt, loosened from the swimmers' limbs
or a gold-plated bracelet with "KAREN: 14K" on its nameplate,
nearly lost where silt or sand concealed its broken chain.
And depth where silt begins from sand, imported from shore,
is slippery as raw life-- why we don't like to tread on it.
Mostly what's beneath this roped-in space are band-aids stripped
from arms that dismiss air, or babies who play dead men
secure in the forearms of their fathers tanned by days of labor.
Snorklers undertake treasure, but soon decide to turn
their visors to fledgling crawfish by stems of aqueous plants
or schools that try to cross the water's agitation.
Swimming instructors, ignoring splashes, backstroke,
breast-stroke, crawl beside a necklace of baby-blue pontoons
that mark what's safe to tread from the rest: that lies beneath
broken motor-oil membranes pierced by loons, where last night
partiers drove Boston Whalers home after a very big party indeed.
That's where plumb-lines of sunlight that would greet a diver
as he surfaced do not penetrate the murk of upstirred silt.
Vague speculation fires curiosity on shore to dive or ponder.
Maybe a handful of Abnaki objets d'art undulate down there--
spearheads or nets maybe, or nothing but loosely-tied flies
cast by amateur fishermen, bass and perch wised-up to glitter
until they just suspend above the silt like tossed jewelry,
or the waterlogged firecrackers dropped to shock snappers
by a teenage incendiary so he could inspect their red bellies.
(Their rinds cannot be distinguished from tree bark.)
Wonder even beguiled me to think a barbeque sauce jar,
its Armor brocaded by soil, and used for baitworms,
was antique. But what memento mori beckons you,
explorer, who buys cheap and sell dear? The lake is filling up
with trinkets, like silver dollars in the bank accounts
of the deceased. How these lakes are inlaid with the limits
of appetite: item: bottles hurled from the shore are messages
without labels, enigmas around which riddles have unwrapped.
[Curiosity would spade and drain this lake to empty basin,
a Pandora's box for excavation-- but better it lie, be this.]
but crawfish, minnows, white and yellow perch, band-aids
that float above the silt, loosened from the swimmers' limbs
or a gold-plated bracelet with "KAREN: 14K" on its nameplate,
nearly lost where silt or sand concealed its broken chain.
And depth where silt begins from sand, imported from shore,
is slippery as raw life-- why we don't like to tread on it.
Mostly what's beneath this roped-in space are band-aids stripped
from arms that dismiss air, or babies who play dead men
secure in the forearms of their fathers tanned by days of labor.
Snorklers undertake treasure, but soon decide to turn
their visors to fledgling crawfish by stems of aqueous plants
or schools that try to cross the water's agitation.
Swimming instructors, ignoring splashes, backstroke,
breast-stroke, crawl beside a necklace of baby-blue pontoons
that mark what's safe to tread from the rest: that lies beneath
broken motor-oil membranes pierced by loons, where last night
partiers drove Boston Whalers home after a very big party indeed.
That's where plumb-lines of sunlight that would greet a diver
as he surfaced do not penetrate the murk of upstirred silt.
Vague speculation fires curiosity on shore to dive or ponder.
Maybe a handful of Abnaki objets d'art undulate down there--
spearheads or nets maybe, or nothing but loosely-tied flies
cast by amateur fishermen, bass and perch wised-up to glitter
until they just suspend above the silt like tossed jewelry,
or the waterlogged firecrackers dropped to shock snappers
by a teenage incendiary so he could inspect their red bellies.
(Their rinds cannot be distinguished from tree bark.)
Wonder even beguiled me to think a barbeque sauce jar,
its Armor brocaded by soil, and used for baitworms,
was antique. But what memento mori beckons you,
explorer, who buys cheap and sell dear? The lake is filling up
with trinkets, like silver dollars in the bank accounts
of the deceased. How these lakes are inlaid with the limits
of appetite: item: bottles hurled from the shore are messages
without labels, enigmas around which riddles have unwrapped.
[Curiosity would spade and drain this lake to empty basin,
a Pandora's box for excavation-- but better it lie, be this.]
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
5/29/06
The younger one, her dirty blonde hair bound into a knot, complained about the washers, which seemed to fail when she used them. “I hate this laundromat,” she said. “Nothing works.” Although the windows were open, the heat was as ferociously as the hottest summer day. The door beside the dryer wasn’t open to disperse the heat each roaring dryer gave off. A few wives from the neighborhood were doing their laundry at once. One middle-aged man wearing a t-shirt for some racing tournament and a tractor cap complained about the malfunction of the soap dispensers. The handle was jammed. I tried to jimmy it, but didn’t get my money back.
I sprayed the bodily stains on the underwear and the bedsheets as if they would stain the world if I didn’t spray them—the kosher mustard on the beige chamois shirt, along with other signs of uncleanliness. Spots of bleach had turned the sandy chinos the color of mustard I was attempting to spray out of existence on the shirt. Elsewhere the salty discolorations on the underwear, the oilspots on the button-down shirts required repeated treatments. I didn’t want to expose my secrets to the mother and daughter or to the rail-thin man with the tractor cap who was about to leave in a garish bright red muscle-car.
I sprayed the bodily stains on the underwear and the bedsheets as if they would stain the world if I didn’t spray them—the kosher mustard on the beige chamois shirt, along with other signs of uncleanliness. Spots of bleach had turned the sandy chinos the color of mustard I was attempting to spray out of existence on the shirt. Elsewhere the salty discolorations on the underwear, the oilspots on the button-down shirts required repeated treatments. I didn’t want to expose my secrets to the mother and daughter or to the rail-thin man with the tractor cap who was about to leave in a garish bright red muscle-car.
Monday, October 6, 2008
10/24/05 (more worthless crap)
The Alpine tunnel entered by a train
Is the space between the sentences on a page
And the difference between the night and day,
And one day and the next. The point of entry
To the day cannot be that of departure,
Cannot be coordinated by science to be the same.
Logic is a kind of madness that claims the space
Between the sentences committed to the page
That no space appears between the weather,
That the sky upon the earth is the same place
To contemplate, no space between them.
Logic dictates the pressure-zones we cannot see,
And dictates the places we can, that the tunnel
Through which the express train runs continues
With night and the mountain with steep faces
Unavailable to earth-movers or to switch-back roads
Or spirals that eventually touch the shining pinnacle,
A plaque bolted to the center of the summit.
Arguments nebulous as rain wash away
The mountain sides, make the shiny weather
Possible, between one sentence and the other.
Is the space between the sentences on a page
And the difference between the night and day,
And one day and the next. The point of entry
To the day cannot be that of departure,
Cannot be coordinated by science to be the same.
Logic is a kind of madness that claims the space
Between the sentences committed to the page
That no space appears between the weather,
That the sky upon the earth is the same place
To contemplate, no space between them.
Logic dictates the pressure-zones we cannot see,
And dictates the places we can, that the tunnel
Through which the express train runs continues
With night and the mountain with steep faces
Unavailable to earth-movers or to switch-back roads
Or spirals that eventually touch the shining pinnacle,
A plaque bolted to the center of the summit.
Arguments nebulous as rain wash away
The mountain sides, make the shiny weather
Possible, between one sentence and the other.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Redirecting (11/17/07)
When the glue seam itself is stronger than the material that it binds, when hair has clogged the drain, when it has bonded with the soap to form a substance both malleable and firm upon which you would wish only your worst enemy to slip, when the cattle of the sun turn away from the sun itself, when the various opposing schools experience a spell of heart-felt reconciliation after you have been excommunucated from their meeting-halls and guest rooms and apartments, when everyone seems to be getting mail but you, and when mail means good luck, and no mail means not oblivion because that word is inflated and grandiose; when the IT department doesn't answer your email although they've glanced at it in passing, when we complete a deed, whether good or bad, we stand and hug one another in the conference room, when we bedeck the room with deadly nightshade adn thistles.
It's not how much money you make, it's how much you handle that gets you kicked to the top. Once there, you can boogie to the African drummers under Calder or Frank Stella in the corporate plaza or lecture on the color green at the campus. And what can be said for green? Green is either renewal or being dead; green is the new branch, green is envy. The green of teh jihadist flag or the Green Party. Green is the emerald isle and green are the mountains in the Green Mountains except in winter, although the White Mountains can be green as well. Turning green couls be thought of as gangrene;green shoots, green algae, although benign, signals that water stagnates. Wheat grass so green it is black. Man must wean himself from grain and starchy carbos. Green Bay surely is not green always. Other than Ireland, what tricolor has green on it. Green signifies fruition in its beginning, red its completion; green envy, red anger, purple rage and stoppage. Among humors, green is unpleasant. Purple is the first color the newborn infant can see; that's why Dr. Cooper painted his waiting room purple. That swimming-pool when unclogged of lily-pads can be a rebirthing pool if I can soak the heiress of her cash. After divinity school, multiple paths appeared.
It's not how much money you make, it's how much you handle that gets you kicked to the top. Once there, you can boogie to the African drummers under Calder or Frank Stella in the corporate plaza or lecture on the color green at the campus. And what can be said for green? Green is either renewal or being dead; green is the new branch, green is envy. The green of teh jihadist flag or the Green Party. Green is the emerald isle and green are the mountains in the Green Mountains except in winter, although the White Mountains can be green as well. Turning green couls be thought of as gangrene;green shoots, green algae, although benign, signals that water stagnates. Wheat grass so green it is black. Man must wean himself from grain and starchy carbos. Green Bay surely is not green always. Other than Ireland, what tricolor has green on it. Green signifies fruition in its beginning, red its completion; green envy, red anger, purple rage and stoppage. Among humors, green is unpleasant. Purple is the first color the newborn infant can see; that's why Dr. Cooper painted his waiting room purple. That swimming-pool when unclogged of lily-pads can be a rebirthing pool if I can soak the heiress of her cash. After divinity school, multiple paths appeared.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Shepherd to Swain
Shepherd:
Hey dumb-bell, you’re life’s a hoax,
You, box-head who strings bows,
Your music a mimicry of screech-owls
Or simply howls.
You mope about the woods too much.
Soon I’ll bring news of more than woods—
So my hollow reed resounds.
Don’t dope yourself with kerosene and lard.
The sky’s the limit, says my flute,
My shepherd lays less rustic with each day.
Swain:
Flake off, coonhound.
I’ll carve my six-point buck upon a cross,
Then brand your ass.
What business have you bringing news of shores
Or Latin gangsters hitting pay-dirt,
My woods the model for their Janus-temples,
Their columns cheap copies of my oaks.
To own some fancy-dancy trellised estate’s
no match for uncleaved commons.
Shepherd:
Soon hicks like you will disappear
In canneries or cubicles of call centers.
Outsourced, you’ll all take dirt-naps.
What can compare to the squire’s life,
The hubcaps of his SUV so shiny
The migratory birds revolve in them,
View as panoramic as a battle-sheld.
Swain:
Piss off, haute bourgeois ape.
Try bench-pressing tree-trunks with me.
You’re like a bear too used
To feeding on steaming garbage-mounds
Of dukes who’ll put you down
Without a second thought,
Your perfumed locks phony.
Why sniff for trouble, French poodle?
Trap your feet in sheep-dip.
What’ll happen when
your city-slicker patrons
pull the plug on you?
Will you hawk your hollow reed for nickels then?
Hey dumb-bell, you’re life’s a hoax,
You, box-head who strings bows,
Your music a mimicry of screech-owls
Or simply howls.
You mope about the woods too much.
Soon I’ll bring news of more than woods—
So my hollow reed resounds.
Don’t dope yourself with kerosene and lard.
The sky’s the limit, says my flute,
My shepherd lays less rustic with each day.
Swain:
Flake off, coonhound.
I’ll carve my six-point buck upon a cross,
Then brand your ass.
What business have you bringing news of shores
Or Latin gangsters hitting pay-dirt,
My woods the model for their Janus-temples,
Their columns cheap copies of my oaks.
To own some fancy-dancy trellised estate’s
no match for uncleaved commons.
Shepherd:
Soon hicks like you will disappear
In canneries or cubicles of call centers.
Outsourced, you’ll all take dirt-naps.
What can compare to the squire’s life,
The hubcaps of his SUV so shiny
The migratory birds revolve in them,
View as panoramic as a battle-sheld.
Swain:
Piss off, haute bourgeois ape.
Try bench-pressing tree-trunks with me.
You’re like a bear too used
To feeding on steaming garbage-mounds
Of dukes who’ll put you down
Without a second thought,
Your perfumed locks phony.
Why sniff for trouble, French poodle?
Trap your feet in sheep-dip.
What’ll happen when
your city-slicker patrons
pull the plug on you?
Will you hawk your hollow reed for nickels then?
Jingle Man (05)
The fish-tank can do it, even motors can.
In some timeless continuum purrs the adman
to an air-pump, like Tennyson in his garden
mesmerized by "innumerable murmurs of bees"
or chanting his surname until he was mindless.
Soothing? Gurus answer their own questions,
in another life composing jingles for perfume,
Windsong, the lyric cooing, on my mind.
Great landscape swathes or ashen deserts
viewed faintly through bottle-green windshields
can be spent by humming cross-country to tires.
And as you hum you become attuned to them--
perhaps suspensions hum as much as any apiary.
Murmur your name and your syllables melt
into roadside mirages, one abstract time ago,
your memory the more vivid when imagined.
And machines can stitch these memory gaps
into seamless continuums gurus get to sooner
as when Charlie murmurs to the fish-tank
in this Mount Desert Island greasy spoon.
Windsong: you're on. Perfume I can’t smell
connects me to canals, to corruption beneath
the palace of the Doge, to sewerage flowing
beneath the opulence of domes and spires,
to heaps of flowers rotting in a distillary first.
When artist-adman Charlie Morrow hummed
his jingle, who didn’t buy? Whether humming
aum or nevermore to sump pumps or aquariums
he could connect himself, while participants
tuned into infancy they thought all joyful noise
without libretti or commercials. And who listens
to the lyrics anyway? Humming among others
only drops me into casual abysses or Babels
so quick I can't connect to clear directives or letters.
So, soothing? guru-adman-artist Charlie asks.
But adman, how come mama never warned me
that when I lost semantics in your mantra,
memory would be this much acuter, feel true?
So when you mumble under your breath
you hit the same timbre as your ancestors
when they toyed with hymns or torch-songs
between their similar abdomens or tongues,
whether from contentment or from boredom
in some garage or hospital waiting room.
In some timeless continuum purrs the adman
to an air-pump, like Tennyson in his garden
mesmerized by "innumerable murmurs of bees"
or chanting his surname until he was mindless.
Soothing? Gurus answer their own questions,
in another life composing jingles for perfume,
Windsong, the lyric cooing, on my mind.
Great landscape swathes or ashen deserts
viewed faintly through bottle-green windshields
can be spent by humming cross-country to tires.
And as you hum you become attuned to them--
perhaps suspensions hum as much as any apiary.
Murmur your name and your syllables melt
into roadside mirages, one abstract time ago,
your memory the more vivid when imagined.
And machines can stitch these memory gaps
into seamless continuums gurus get to sooner
as when Charlie murmurs to the fish-tank
in this Mount Desert Island greasy spoon.
Windsong: you're on. Perfume I can’t smell
connects me to canals, to corruption beneath
the palace of the Doge, to sewerage flowing
beneath the opulence of domes and spires,
to heaps of flowers rotting in a distillary first.
When artist-adman Charlie Morrow hummed
his jingle, who didn’t buy? Whether humming
aum or nevermore to sump pumps or aquariums
he could connect himself, while participants
tuned into infancy they thought all joyful noise
without libretti or commercials. And who listens
to the lyrics anyway? Humming among others
only drops me into casual abysses or Babels
so quick I can't connect to clear directives or letters.
So, soothing? guru-adman-artist Charlie asks.
But adman, how come mama never warned me
that when I lost semantics in your mantra,
memory would be this much acuter, feel true?
So when you mumble under your breath
you hit the same timbre as your ancestors
when they toyed with hymns or torch-songs
between their similar abdomens or tongues,
whether from contentment or from boredom
in some garage or hospital waiting room.
Friday, September 12, 2008
While I'm Away
I’m going to an enclave on an island
They’re going to apply crystals to my spine,
A single crystal for each vertebrae
And when I’m back, I’ll be realigned,
And, rubbed with ointment, centered.
Please take care of the cat in the meantime.
Thanks, Frank. Food’s in the cupboard.
They pluck the ailment from the trepanned skull,
Those Filipino shamen, wow! I’m going there
So they can work on me, and when my chi-energy
Is finally released, I’ll hatch new projects
That’ll have ‘em weeping in the board room.
But remember Dave, never ever double-cross me.
I’m off to see the wizard: to be baptized
In blood. It’s a communal feeling in the woods.
As our fists pound hollow logs in basso profundo
Resonance, our hoarse cries harass the moon.
While I’m gone Joan, please water the flowers.
They mean so much to me, my anima mundi.
I’ll be in Aspen a week, getting rolfed.
If there are office issues, please address them.
And when I’m back, I’ll be unwound completely
and pound the desk with double fists in ways
That will astound Support. And by the way,
Don’t let the cat out, and never ever fuck with me.
They’re going to apply crystals to my spine,
A single crystal for each vertebrae
And when I’m back, I’ll be realigned,
And, rubbed with ointment, centered.
Please take care of the cat in the meantime.
Thanks, Frank. Food’s in the cupboard.
They pluck the ailment from the trepanned skull,
Those Filipino shamen, wow! I’m going there
So they can work on me, and when my chi-energy
Is finally released, I’ll hatch new projects
That’ll have ‘em weeping in the board room.
But remember Dave, never ever double-cross me.
I’m off to see the wizard: to be baptized
In blood. It’s a communal feeling in the woods.
As our fists pound hollow logs in basso profundo
Resonance, our hoarse cries harass the moon.
While I’m gone Joan, please water the flowers.
They mean so much to me, my anima mundi.
I’ll be in Aspen a week, getting rolfed.
If there are office issues, please address them.
And when I’m back, I’ll be unwound completely
and pound the desk with double fists in ways
That will astound Support. And by the way,
Don’t let the cat out, and never ever fuck with me.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Deserted Village II (Willowbrook) (01/06)
How spoiled I was to the buzzing of these summer fields,
the roadside vegetable stand abandoned by the daughter
overburdened with tomatoes and the heartiest of cucumbers
and across her folding card table, a nineteenth century graveyard,
with the slate headstones chased with weeping willows,
and how many Wentworths or Tarboxes lay below the sod
while my co-worker slumped in his chair or stayed glum
as the company for which we worked fell deeper in debt.
That wouldn’t stop corn from growing, stop the millstream
From trickling water from its dam, stop swimming turtles
Who relax and expand their flippers once in their element,
Coast by rusted cable-strands or hubcaps flung in as a prank.
In the barn, the old machinery was still intact, depression-era tractors
With chokes no one in our day and age would know how to adjust,
Some quixotic silver seaplane a magnate flew above his field once,
its wings clipped, its fuselage stored after having flown a hundred feet or so.
Sat in repose the brass machinery from the turn of the century
In an antique museum seldomly patronized over the weekdays
where the film strips from a silent theater had been threaded
without a sprocket broken, and the art-nouveau lily-trumpets
Of the Victrolas could play you a song if you only wanted to listen
to muted horns accompany the words mama, home, remember.
You imagine the sorrows those mawkish songs released in their time
because the confidence of the present leaves you cold, so you come
To see how the elders mastered distance, their homesteads sprawling
with cracked-plaster hallways leading to tinier bedrooms or spinets
untuned or deal tables draped with doilies pinned down by Beethoven’s bust.
Their cities on the hill, population migrated to other coasts,
were connected by the cast-iron machinery of this merry-go-round
peeking through the tractors or an ironside’s Pantagruelian engine.
the roadside vegetable stand abandoned by the daughter
overburdened with tomatoes and the heartiest of cucumbers
and across her folding card table, a nineteenth century graveyard,
with the slate headstones chased with weeping willows,
and how many Wentworths or Tarboxes lay below the sod
while my co-worker slumped in his chair or stayed glum
as the company for which we worked fell deeper in debt.
That wouldn’t stop corn from growing, stop the millstream
From trickling water from its dam, stop swimming turtles
Who relax and expand their flippers once in their element,
Coast by rusted cable-strands or hubcaps flung in as a prank.
In the barn, the old machinery was still intact, depression-era tractors
With chokes no one in our day and age would know how to adjust,
Some quixotic silver seaplane a magnate flew above his field once,
its wings clipped, its fuselage stored after having flown a hundred feet or so.
Sat in repose the brass machinery from the turn of the century
In an antique museum seldomly patronized over the weekdays
where the film strips from a silent theater had been threaded
without a sprocket broken, and the art-nouveau lily-trumpets
Of the Victrolas could play you a song if you only wanted to listen
to muted horns accompany the words mama, home, remember.
You imagine the sorrows those mawkish songs released in their time
because the confidence of the present leaves you cold, so you come
To see how the elders mastered distance, their homesteads sprawling
with cracked-plaster hallways leading to tinier bedrooms or spinets
untuned or deal tables draped with doilies pinned down by Beethoven’s bust.
Their cities on the hill, population migrated to other coasts,
were connected by the cast-iron machinery of this merry-go-round
peeking through the tractors or an ironside’s Pantagruelian engine.
What I did on my grant
(To Gauleiter Forster)
I bathed with water-oxen in the Ganges,
sky-dived somewhere above Anatolia,
at Ephesus kissed the chapel steps Paul of Tarsus
must have trod: what fun, to spread art’s gospel.
After swimming with luminescent plankton
off the coast of New South Wales
after shimmying with hula dancers on Oahu
(one of whom had even been to Mississippi)
after dodging spears of cannibals in New Guinea
or rowing dugouts in darkness for a wedding
in which I held a splintery torch to night
(or tried my Cantonese before the poets of Shanxi
who sang to me the merits of the Xinjiang poets)
I lugged my trusty, multi-volumed edition
of The Man Without Qualities to the poolside
to read a long, sinuous catalogue of qualities
the man lacked, then asked myself (gingerly)
whether by Vol. 4 he would get them, sensing
for the afternoon at least, the muses had departed.
As Robert Musil’s masterful prose engine
chuffed through qualities the man lacked
I wolfed a blood orange down, and pondered.
Poems gestated internally like uninvited guests,
or slept like babies in bassinets, reluctant still
to open their webbed eyes to the sun.
I was that sun. Later, in some white-washed
cottage topping the Aegean, I would cook up
something very very special in the study.
I bathed with water-oxen in the Ganges,
sky-dived somewhere above Anatolia,
at Ephesus kissed the chapel steps Paul of Tarsus
must have trod: what fun, to spread art’s gospel.
After swimming with luminescent plankton
off the coast of New South Wales
after shimmying with hula dancers on Oahu
(one of whom had even been to Mississippi)
after dodging spears of cannibals in New Guinea
or rowing dugouts in darkness for a wedding
in which I held a splintery torch to night
(or tried my Cantonese before the poets of Shanxi
who sang to me the merits of the Xinjiang poets)
I lugged my trusty, multi-volumed edition
of The Man Without Qualities to the poolside
to read a long, sinuous catalogue of qualities
the man lacked, then asked myself (gingerly)
whether by Vol. 4 he would get them, sensing
for the afternoon at least, the muses had departed.
As Robert Musil’s masterful prose engine
chuffed through qualities the man lacked
I wolfed a blood orange down, and pondered.
Poems gestated internally like uninvited guests,
or slept like babies in bassinets, reluctant still
to open their webbed eyes to the sun.
I was that sun. Later, in some white-washed
cottage topping the Aegean, I would cook up
something very very special in the study.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Worthless Crap from Aug. 06
7/20/06
An aqua-blue-green luna moth with white spots on its wings landed on a shower tile before I could drop my quarters into the shower timer, so I hesitated before stepping into the shower stall until the luna moth could leave, the rear of its wings with lobes as huge as fins for aerodynamic guidance, for flying higher than the other moths battering the screens to circle the lamplight or bumping againt the window panes so loudly one is lead to expect larger moths to appear, each wing broader than a single hand-span carrying a body capable of breaking the window glass. Moths who rival monarch butterflies in their replendence, too large for their wings to be inhaled, large enough to suffocate. The singed wings must smell of calico fabric and unused scatter rugs, nestling among old clothes and their secrets.
***
In the rummage sales everyone rids themselves of their old globes, the paper segments depicting quadrants unpeeled from the pasteboard and steel surface, the names of republics dated, the countries smaller and smaller, some of the borders dotted lines, failed states not written off the map yet. The story hasn’t ended, and the globes with their wooden degree rules can be spun idly in the carports or upon folding tables. It’s quaint to have a map of the world as it was, the end of history as we know it.
*****
8/5/06
A lady-bug who fell on the laptop near a green LED unfolded sword-like wings, diaphanous as window-screens or steely as pins or jack-knives, from beneath its innocuous and charming shell, black dots against an orange-red, that splits apart once the lady-bug flies, in Britain lady-bird not lady-bug. They love the attics they infest, but don’t bore through rafters with the persistence of termites.
An aqua-blue-green luna moth with white spots on its wings landed on a shower tile before I could drop my quarters into the shower timer, so I hesitated before stepping into the shower stall until the luna moth could leave, the rear of its wings with lobes as huge as fins for aerodynamic guidance, for flying higher than the other moths battering the screens to circle the lamplight or bumping againt the window panes so loudly one is lead to expect larger moths to appear, each wing broader than a single hand-span carrying a body capable of breaking the window glass. Moths who rival monarch butterflies in their replendence, too large for their wings to be inhaled, large enough to suffocate. The singed wings must smell of calico fabric and unused scatter rugs, nestling among old clothes and their secrets.
***
In the rummage sales everyone rids themselves of their old globes, the paper segments depicting quadrants unpeeled from the pasteboard and steel surface, the names of republics dated, the countries smaller and smaller, some of the borders dotted lines, failed states not written off the map yet. The story hasn’t ended, and the globes with their wooden degree rules can be spun idly in the carports or upon folding tables. It’s quaint to have a map of the world as it was, the end of history as we know it.
*****
8/5/06
A lady-bug who fell on the laptop near a green LED unfolded sword-like wings, diaphanous as window-screens or steely as pins or jack-knives, from beneath its innocuous and charming shell, black dots against an orange-red, that splits apart once the lady-bug flies, in Britain lady-bird not lady-bug. They love the attics they infest, but don’t bore through rafters with the persistence of termites.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
6/17/02 (more worthless crap)
The vestibule of the bedouin tent was large enough to stand upright.
But the pup-tent I raised on the lawn was not high enough to stand in.
Although the cross winds that blew through the flaps inflated it.
Healthy crosswinds keep the apartment cool, by summer standards
Night is cool as day is hot: nothing on the ground absorbs the heat.
Can you imagine actually living in a tent in a KOA campground?
The subject changed to the Ellis Island website.
Somewhere on it were my grandparents in their teens.
I sealed the tent except for the breathing hole, square skein
beneath a sky without the irregularities of cloud, no sunset-pink tinges.
I wondered about the tents of the bedouins embroidered with camel hair, cool as cathedrals with nothing on the ground to orient you
except the sun-track. And unzipped my Coleman pup-tent.
The virgin smell of glue and plastic smelled like pine cones.
The heat made the lawn thick and irregular. A Chinese adage says
no wrong place for grass –
a week of fog, then rain and sun had made it run riot.
It seized the land,filled the desolation with irregularity,
like raiders who prey on oases: grass isn't native.
On the website was a record of my grandparents
and the port of departure through which everyone passed,
unless they passed through Hamburg. Grass seized desolation.
The spelling of their names in the record is irregular.
Closing the tent I inhabit a sterile, geometric form.
The sky without a vestibule is a square net of nylon,
and without clouds, a kind of desolation hangs
like heavens of golden hair decorating a Bedouin’s tent.
On a fair day grass grows with the fury of irregular cells,
raging with the irregularity that thrives on decoration
deserts that were grass, until cattle ate the tender portions
and the goats ate the brambles. If a tent rises there,
it is from your bare hands crossed with bridle marks,
a craft that rests with confidence in desolation
raising a tent woven with the respite of a dark interior and the planets.
But the pup-tent I raised on the lawn was not high enough to stand in.
Although the cross winds that blew through the flaps inflated it.
Healthy crosswinds keep the apartment cool, by summer standards
Night is cool as day is hot: nothing on the ground absorbs the heat.
Can you imagine actually living in a tent in a KOA campground?
The subject changed to the Ellis Island website.
Somewhere on it were my grandparents in their teens.
I sealed the tent except for the breathing hole, square skein
beneath a sky without the irregularities of cloud, no sunset-pink tinges.
I wondered about the tents of the bedouins embroidered with camel hair, cool as cathedrals with nothing on the ground to orient you
except the sun-track. And unzipped my Coleman pup-tent.
The virgin smell of glue and plastic smelled like pine cones.
The heat made the lawn thick and irregular. A Chinese adage says
no wrong place for grass –
a week of fog, then rain and sun had made it run riot.
It seized the land,filled the desolation with irregularity,
like raiders who prey on oases: grass isn't native.
On the website was a record of my grandparents
and the port of departure through which everyone passed,
unless they passed through Hamburg. Grass seized desolation.
The spelling of their names in the record is irregular.
Closing the tent I inhabit a sterile, geometric form.
The sky without a vestibule is a square net of nylon,
and without clouds, a kind of desolation hangs
like heavens of golden hair decorating a Bedouin’s tent.
On a fair day grass grows with the fury of irregular cells,
raging with the irregularity that thrives on decoration
deserts that were grass, until cattle ate the tender portions
and the goats ate the brambles. If a tent rises there,
it is from your bare hands crossed with bridle marks,
a craft that rests with confidence in desolation
raising a tent woven with the respite of a dark interior and the planets.
2/05 (more worthless crap)
The icon of the teddy bear’s a virus.
Delete the teddy bears on the screen.
Search through all extension files for him.
Delete any files with his extensions.
Reboot and run the antivirus software.
Quarantine or fix corrupted files.
Update the antiviral doctor regularly.
Do not open unknown messages
with strange names in the address box.
In the subject box, how familiar they seem.
They pretend they can increase your size.
The girls they offer are made of light.
How their protean aliases change.
Some of them are from the places
You’ve clicked on animated maps,
Your cursor faster than light speed
Channeled in fiber optic cables.
How fast you move above Cambodia.
How much sooner you arrive at home.
The videocam reveals pins of light
Above an ordinary parking lot.
Are the strangers forging their spam
In cubicles nearby, or in strip malls
Abutting the Oriental massage parlor?
Getting them requires your credit card.
Scammers, their fustian phaseology
Tripped on itself, will give you money.
They need your bank account number.
To a folder relegate the unfamiliar.
Scroll through the subject and address lines
Or just empty, or block the address
and wait another day for the next one.
Delete the teddy bears on the screen.
Search through all extension files for him.
Delete any files with his extensions.
Reboot and run the antivirus software.
Quarantine or fix corrupted files.
Update the antiviral doctor regularly.
Do not open unknown messages
with strange names in the address box.
In the subject box, how familiar they seem.
They pretend they can increase your size.
The girls they offer are made of light.
How their protean aliases change.
Some of them are from the places
You’ve clicked on animated maps,
Your cursor faster than light speed
Channeled in fiber optic cables.
How fast you move above Cambodia.
How much sooner you arrive at home.
The videocam reveals pins of light
Above an ordinary parking lot.
Are the strangers forging their spam
In cubicles nearby, or in strip malls
Abutting the Oriental massage parlor?
Getting them requires your credit card.
Scammers, their fustian phaseology
Tripped on itself, will give you money.
They need your bank account number.
To a folder relegate the unfamiliar.
Scroll through the subject and address lines
Or just empty, or block the address
and wait another day for the next one.
10/9/05 draft (more worthless crap)
Were your typos tracked, you’d write lovely, not lonely.
Emphasis on dove, not done. Rock doves, not well done.
Pichon Spanish eat. Rats with wings? Surrounding
Lorn Nelson on his pedestal, his family being Nielsons
Or Nilsens, certainly neither Nissen as in bread or Nissan.
But Nissans were Datsuns. Done and lovely column one,
dove and lovely in another. Between govern and gone,
but sieve and purse-seine? To leave is not to lean,
to love not lone, or lave or lane. Pave the street,
don’t replace the pane. Read one through another.
Oval, not onus, nor anal. Imply the birth canal,
Not colon. Cove, not cone. A shore removed
From central thoroughfares, not a funnel
The diameter of which increases the greater the distance
From a central point of departure or destination,
Not a water-body where most find respite.
But shore or shove, which will it be? Shorn or shone.
Push comes to shove, shove sandbags against the flood,
Levees unlenient. Lavings, not lanes, water shoves,
Sandbags or barriers shore up against what shoves,
Removes, resettles, restructures in arrangements unloved,
Alone. Sand-grain, gravel. Engrave, ingrain, or grate.
Emphasis on dove, not done. Rock doves, not well done.
Pichon Spanish eat. Rats with wings? Surrounding
Lorn Nelson on his pedestal, his family being Nielsons
Or Nilsens, certainly neither Nissen as in bread or Nissan.
But Nissans were Datsuns. Done and lovely column one,
dove and lovely in another. Between govern and gone,
but sieve and purse-seine? To leave is not to lean,
to love not lone, or lave or lane. Pave the street,
don’t replace the pane. Read one through another.
Oval, not onus, nor anal. Imply the birth canal,
Not colon. Cove, not cone. A shore removed
From central thoroughfares, not a funnel
The diameter of which increases the greater the distance
From a central point of departure or destination,
Not a water-body where most find respite.
But shore or shove, which will it be? Shorn or shone.
Push comes to shove, shove sandbags against the flood,
Levees unlenient. Lavings, not lanes, water shoves,
Sandbags or barriers shore up against what shoves,
Removes, resettles, restructures in arrangements unloved,
Alone. Sand-grain, gravel. Engrave, ingrain, or grate.
2/25/05 draft (worthless crap)
Do you teach, paint, travel, preach, or weave?
Or teach privately, or weave stories while you paint,
Or do you travel, weaving yarns based on your itineraries,
Which weaves up the coastline to Peru and Australia.
You vagabondage teaches you about the customs
Of tribespeople unexposed to hair-dryers and cotter-pins.
Your wandering weaves an irregular path about the globe.
Sometimes it is a drunken man’s saunter, a ballerina’s twirl.
You teach privately the methods of releasing chakra-energy
These tribespeople taught you in their palm-leaf shelters
While you collected all their orgone energy on the sly,
And packed it in a little book no thicker than a ring finger.
To the converted alone do you preach these doctrines
Of energy release and of living? With the paint-brush
You weave another itinerary, among the jack-fruit thorns
And the Venus fly-traps. Your own backyard
Is wherever you happen to be standing, a point
On the itinerary, but hardly the end.
Or teach privately, or weave stories while you paint,
Or do you travel, weaving yarns based on your itineraries,
Which weaves up the coastline to Peru and Australia.
You vagabondage teaches you about the customs
Of tribespeople unexposed to hair-dryers and cotter-pins.
Your wandering weaves an irregular path about the globe.
Sometimes it is a drunken man’s saunter, a ballerina’s twirl.
You teach privately the methods of releasing chakra-energy
These tribespeople taught you in their palm-leaf shelters
While you collected all their orgone energy on the sly,
And packed it in a little book no thicker than a ring finger.
To the converted alone do you preach these doctrines
Of energy release and of living? With the paint-brush
You weave another itinerary, among the jack-fruit thorns
And the Venus fly-traps. Your own backyard
Is wherever you happen to be standing, a point
On the itinerary, but hardly the end.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Fratricide (to Wright Express)
The boy who mowed his father’s lawn
becomes a man. His Alfred E. Neuman acne
dries and soon his toothy grin ossifies,
learned for girls and yearbook photographs.
When he mowed his father’s lawn to Styx
little did he know he’d mow the master’s too,
some Boston refugee, away from the rat race
just down the street, tossing a coin at him.
Mr. Moneybags, mutters this adolescent,
seeing red or Daddy Warbuck’s coat-tails.
All summer circling grounds in a tractor mower
he chews away the sweet ends of grass and sneers,
as he – freckle-faced Archie, Alfred E.– behind
the grin (shit-eaten, learned rigor mortis) pondered:
Those secular dukes muttering about emissions
swishing their vintage Chardonnay in their mouths
will be no more. Those diamond-studded emigres
I will depose, squire with trailer-trash,
and mark what’s mine with monotones more pungent
than any piss-stain, rabid strain or pedigree.
Their dreams I’ll fuck up with developments alright
grinned this Archie who let me go from the position.
becomes a man. His Alfred E. Neuman acne
dries and soon his toothy grin ossifies,
learned for girls and yearbook photographs.
When he mowed his father’s lawn to Styx
little did he know he’d mow the master’s too,
some Boston refugee, away from the rat race
just down the street, tossing a coin at him.
Mr. Moneybags, mutters this adolescent,
seeing red or Daddy Warbuck’s coat-tails.
All summer circling grounds in a tractor mower
he chews away the sweet ends of grass and sneers,
as he – freckle-faced Archie, Alfred E.– behind
the grin (shit-eaten, learned rigor mortis) pondered:
Those secular dukes muttering about emissions
swishing their vintage Chardonnay in their mouths
will be no more. Those diamond-studded emigres
I will depose, squire with trailer-trash,
and mark what’s mine with monotones more pungent
than any piss-stain, rabid strain or pedigree.
Their dreams I’ll fuck up with developments alright
grinned this Archie who let me go from the position.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
OLD (A Touch of the Marmoreal)(01)
To bring the chain of being back
and to quell the plant kingdom,
rebel angels soaring over fields
to fructify or ionize in haze,
so that spores and mites
wouldn't rise from basements
with the ease of migratory birds,
that their mandibles and spurs
wouldn’t be so transparent,
as glass-bits, glassine sand-fleas.
To summon the allergens,
and herd them back to Pandora's box,
and to deport them.
*******
Floating dead homunculi,
pollen who seek the proper host,
sprinkled on the candied surfaces of vehicles,
gold alluvium channeling through curb-drains,
thick and crowded as the silt of deltas
with wing-bursts and the bellow of oxen
and from the runoff, a fetid, vegetal smell --
and though I know you are without malice,
nonetheless I was much luckier with water.
******
I watch for their mirages.
My arms thrash the shoreline,
silt scooped by dairy farmers
before they sold the land to Brahmins.
That I leave before the Caterpillars
fill the hole whose side I try to find is urgent.
A hole the size of a pin-head
in airways enlarges for legions
to trespass, by means of this elixir--
microcrystalline, in aerosol, suspended
the label’s print in emergency blurred--
I think of water-agitated friends
who stand around or dare another to jump
while aqua vita soothes the airways
or think about the bronchioles replaced
by poplars crowding human figures out
with the groping histrionics of dancers.
How pitiless the thickening of the trunk,
soft conifers sucking rainwater up,
hardwood holding water life-times.
Had you time to open your eyes
the human figures would have been gilded.
Wave to the dresser mirror while there's time.
and to quell the plant kingdom,
rebel angels soaring over fields
to fructify or ionize in haze,
so that spores and mites
wouldn't rise from basements
with the ease of migratory birds,
that their mandibles and spurs
wouldn’t be so transparent,
as glass-bits, glassine sand-fleas.
To summon the allergens,
and herd them back to Pandora's box,
and to deport them.
*******
Floating dead homunculi,
pollen who seek the proper host,
sprinkled on the candied surfaces of vehicles,
gold alluvium channeling through curb-drains,
thick and crowded as the silt of deltas
with wing-bursts and the bellow of oxen
and from the runoff, a fetid, vegetal smell --
and though I know you are without malice,
nonetheless I was much luckier with water.
******
I watch for their mirages.
My arms thrash the shoreline,
silt scooped by dairy farmers
before they sold the land to Brahmins.
That I leave before the Caterpillars
fill the hole whose side I try to find is urgent.
A hole the size of a pin-head
in airways enlarges for legions
to trespass, by means of this elixir--
microcrystalline, in aerosol, suspended
the label’s print in emergency blurred--
I think of water-agitated friends
who stand around or dare another to jump
while aqua vita soothes the airways
or think about the bronchioles replaced
by poplars crowding human figures out
with the groping histrionics of dancers.
How pitiless the thickening of the trunk,
soft conifers sucking rainwater up,
hardwood holding water life-times.
Had you time to open your eyes
the human figures would have been gilded.
Wave to the dresser mirror while there's time.
11/11/07 (Words for Richard Cohen)
11/11/07
When it couldn’t be more self-evident except to fools or Frenchmen, when a monkey could have painted it, when a monkey painted it but the art dealers swindled us, when there were no longer lies upon which to base one’s heaping calumny upon the numerous actors who it can be granted had not mastered the details although they had grasped the whole vision and its urgency as well, when they don’t deserve the abuse of the rabble, the abuse of habitual complainers and whiners and naysayers who are contesting that all’s right with the world just as the public intellectual crippled in his perch will never fail to do. Because the adversary will never cease, never will the adversarial cease his complaining that no one listens to him, never will no one listening to him cease to be adversarial from a deeply felt need, never in a million years in which time hominids could speak well-rounded and balanced silver sentences and dress in periwigs whereas at the beginning of that time-span they could bash the skulls of the macroceros with large rocks the stonemasons call dog-killers and grunt in monosyllables or make with their narrower mouths the onomatopoiea of babies about when they struggle upward from the crib, never since a visiting alien civilization explored the cooling globe before it congealed into gas and liquid and cells of heat within globes within whirlwinds, never since extraterrestrial storms on the calmer waters, never since the emergence of amphibious species resembling catfish or mud-skippers crawled upon a slime composed of algae and unspecified unicellular creatures possessed with the uncanny ability of inhabiting frozen wastelands of karst and glaciers or tropical swamps crowded with the sword-like blades of primitive sedges rooting far beneath the carboniferous tars upon which the wings of dragonflies struggle to no avail, never since the hardwood forests, uncut and crowded and the tops of trees cloud-like, but green not white clouds, with billows bunched like broccoli, a man-made hybrid of rabe and cauliflower courtesy of Mr. Broccoli who sired the producer of James Bonds films, but who sure wasn’t a member of the new adversarial class who grouse about their lack of power from their academic perches but who fail to breathe in the air of the hoi polloi, only for them the atmospheric nectar of those higher ivory tower attitudes: how powerless, complaining, like baboons from tree-tops, like hominids alienated from monkeys yapping from vines, exposing their big teeth from the tree-tops to ward off a defter adversary, the golden-crested monkeys happy with their continual and unspoiled prospects of cracking nuts and shellfish open, sometimes suspended from branches with their stave-shaped tails—what defter, more masterful instrument, whereas the hominids still struggle with the very digits of their hands, their slender, hairless, double-jointed hands: look, the hominids are complaining in the trees again. It rankles, the proportionality.
I’m a journalist maybe, but a sinner? I hate the sin but not the sinner, but for some, that’s not enough, and for far too long for my taste, I’ve shuttled between the cooling globe and the brooding upon the waters and the creatures isolated among their trees or their towers, but even the arthropod can complain about the sinuous appearance of the mollusc, or the baby bear about the kangaroo rat, and the latter about his truly marsupial counterpart the rat kangaroo, and how symmetrical the ecological niches producing such anomalies that must be stomped out with bovver boots.
When it couldn’t be more self-evident except to fools or Frenchmen, when a monkey could have painted it, when a monkey painted it but the art dealers swindled us, when there were no longer lies upon which to base one’s heaping calumny upon the numerous actors who it can be granted had not mastered the details although they had grasped the whole vision and its urgency as well, when they don’t deserve the abuse of the rabble, the abuse of habitual complainers and whiners and naysayers who are contesting that all’s right with the world just as the public intellectual crippled in his perch will never fail to do. Because the adversary will never cease, never will the adversarial cease his complaining that no one listens to him, never will no one listening to him cease to be adversarial from a deeply felt need, never in a million years in which time hominids could speak well-rounded and balanced silver sentences and dress in periwigs whereas at the beginning of that time-span they could bash the skulls of the macroceros with large rocks the stonemasons call dog-killers and grunt in monosyllables or make with their narrower mouths the onomatopoiea of babies about when they struggle upward from the crib, never since a visiting alien civilization explored the cooling globe before it congealed into gas and liquid and cells of heat within globes within whirlwinds, never since extraterrestrial storms on the calmer waters, never since the emergence of amphibious species resembling catfish or mud-skippers crawled upon a slime composed of algae and unspecified unicellular creatures possessed with the uncanny ability of inhabiting frozen wastelands of karst and glaciers or tropical swamps crowded with the sword-like blades of primitive sedges rooting far beneath the carboniferous tars upon which the wings of dragonflies struggle to no avail, never since the hardwood forests, uncut and crowded and the tops of trees cloud-like, but green not white clouds, with billows bunched like broccoli, a man-made hybrid of rabe and cauliflower courtesy of Mr. Broccoli who sired the producer of James Bonds films, but who sure wasn’t a member of the new adversarial class who grouse about their lack of power from their academic perches but who fail to breathe in the air of the hoi polloi, only for them the atmospheric nectar of those higher ivory tower attitudes: how powerless, complaining, like baboons from tree-tops, like hominids alienated from monkeys yapping from vines, exposing their big teeth from the tree-tops to ward off a defter adversary, the golden-crested monkeys happy with their continual and unspoiled prospects of cracking nuts and shellfish open, sometimes suspended from branches with their stave-shaped tails—what defter, more masterful instrument, whereas the hominids still struggle with the very digits of their hands, their slender, hairless, double-jointed hands: look, the hominids are complaining in the trees again. It rankles, the proportionality.
I’m a journalist maybe, but a sinner? I hate the sin but not the sinner, but for some, that’s not enough, and for far too long for my taste, I’ve shuttled between the cooling globe and the brooding upon the waters and the creatures isolated among their trees or their towers, but even the arthropod can complain about the sinuous appearance of the mollusc, or the baby bear about the kangaroo rat, and the latter about his truly marsupial counterpart the rat kangaroo, and how symmetrical the ecological niches producing such anomalies that must be stomped out with bovver boots.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
5/14/07
Certain tropes or descriptions you don't repeat
because they do not contribute to the meaning,
along with images extraneous and unsurpassing.
There are similes that are dead ends. And metonyms
that are fenceposts without palings to be fences.
And there are lines in print that I refuse to scold.
As if these lines were offspring with a shorter life-span.
Going nowhere, already buried in paper and ink.
Hear whose name who lies in water written.
Here whose water lies his name. Whose name lies.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Here lies water, whose name was writ.
Bludgeon, blunt axe. Eric Bloodaxe--stand up, please!
So all can see you. Your mother would like you to call.
And your papa wishes you well.
He was, however, impaled on a stake,
still sending best wishes from over the Carpathians.
He continually complains of discomfort,
and we're looking for a homeopathic therapist or acupuncturist.
Who that is however should be beside the point
(no pun intended, but what is the point?)
By the time you land a deal, the songs are stale,
as ossified water, if that makes any sense.
Stale as water in which particles of half-digested bone meal
float in ethereal gestures.
We hear he was impaled on a stake
so we are sending our condolences.
We'll be enrolling our grandson in pre-school.
Band practice will not be cancelled.
because they do not contribute to the meaning,
along with images extraneous and unsurpassing.
There are similes that are dead ends. And metonyms
that are fenceposts without palings to be fences.
And there are lines in print that I refuse to scold.
As if these lines were offspring with a shorter life-span.
Going nowhere, already buried in paper and ink.
Hear whose name who lies in water written.
Here whose water lies his name. Whose name lies.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Here lies water, whose name was writ.
Bludgeon, blunt axe. Eric Bloodaxe--stand up, please!
So all can see you. Your mother would like you to call.
And your papa wishes you well.
He was, however, impaled on a stake,
still sending best wishes from over the Carpathians.
He continually complains of discomfort,
and we're looking for a homeopathic therapist or acupuncturist.
Who that is however should be beside the point
(no pun intended, but what is the point?)
By the time you land a deal, the songs are stale,
as ossified water, if that makes any sense.
Stale as water in which particles of half-digested bone meal
float in ethereal gestures.
We hear he was impaled on a stake
so we are sending our condolences.
We'll be enrolling our grandson in pre-school.
Band practice will not be cancelled.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Stones Are Lightning, Gold the Sweat
Are there no stones in heaven
But what serves for the thunder? Othello 5.2, 242-3
Lightning’s the line-graph on the spreadsheet
of the clouds that, down-trending, strikes home
like cannon-shot or stones. It’s a spasm
man tries to anticipate with artillery –
Franklin’s lightning-rod, however, was pre-emptive,
the cheapskate. Secretly he thought
thunderbolts could alchemize the stones,
give each corpse-cold* Puritan his gold-hoard.
Lightning wrecked the house of false composure
descendants built, their daughter’s singsong
shattered as she retracted hands from any metal thing.
Lightning taught the fatality of the touch.
And as he mopeds to the brothel for children,
a tourist judges Ankgor Wat a load of stones.**
Unbeknownst to him are golden thrones and turrets
the Khmer Rouge sought to overturn with thunder,
since gold that neither greased the wheels of trade
nor alchemized the stones beneath could only char.
Gold, thought certain cultures, was the sun’s tears.
Other cultures, wiser, thought it was the sweat.
* Emerson on the Congregational Church, heir to the Puritans
**details digested from an article on child prostitution in Cambodia in The London Independent (on-line)
But what serves for the thunder? Othello 5.2, 242-3
Lightning’s the line-graph on the spreadsheet
of the clouds that, down-trending, strikes home
like cannon-shot or stones. It’s a spasm
man tries to anticipate with artillery –
Franklin’s lightning-rod, however, was pre-emptive,
the cheapskate. Secretly he thought
thunderbolts could alchemize the stones,
give each corpse-cold* Puritan his gold-hoard.
Lightning wrecked the house of false composure
descendants built, their daughter’s singsong
shattered as she retracted hands from any metal thing.
Lightning taught the fatality of the touch.
And as he mopeds to the brothel for children,
a tourist judges Ankgor Wat a load of stones.**
Unbeknownst to him are golden thrones and turrets
the Khmer Rouge sought to overturn with thunder,
since gold that neither greased the wheels of trade
nor alchemized the stones beneath could only char.
Gold, thought certain cultures, was the sun’s tears.
Other cultures, wiser, thought it was the sweat.
* Emerson on the Congregational Church, heir to the Puritans
**details digested from an article on child prostitution in Cambodia in The London Independent (on-line)
To You (03)
It was meant to be tiny,
Which means convenient
And to fit the schedule
For which it was apportioned.
It was meant to be compact
To fit into a space
Smaller than the one required
by the brain to count to four.
It was meant to be didactic
With easily traceable parallels
Hard-wired in its verbal system
So that meaning didn’t overflow
Into uninvited areas
Where there might be problems
Where there might not be tools
or special “plugs” to fix it.
Which means convenient
And to fit the schedule
For which it was apportioned.
It was meant to be compact
To fit into a space
Smaller than the one required
by the brain to count to four.
It was meant to be didactic
With easily traceable parallels
Hard-wired in its verbal system
So that meaning didn’t overflow
Into uninvited areas
Where there might be problems
Where there might not be tools
or special “plugs” to fix it.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Diagnosis: Retinoschesis
In one photograph, they wear sweaters,
and in another, pointy Santa hats.
Poor vision doesn’t make me see them.
Truly doubles, they are reassuring,
on the wall, the twins of the optometrist.
He fires air-jets in my eyes, and spins
sets of lenses while I read the alphabet,
which, he echoes, make vision better.
The tiniest row of letters seem Cyrillic.
Where does the other language start?
Soon the consonants become vowels
then a numerology too remote to count,
except one character, hooked like chaos,
symbol for Saturn, presiding over lead.
He asks me: circle, counter-clockwise, east
to west -- to my right the twins are happy.
They lean in an identical direction.
Wearing matching sweaters and caps,
they’re nested in another like dolls
or cosmonauts packed in a Soyuz.
He diagnoses blisters under my eyes.
They lie beneath each one like chaos
cradles a planet -- a chaos that pools
to sea or teary source or Murine deluge,
space without circumference, a mess.
If the blisters grow, I will see shadows
or blinding white flashes of epiphany
but neither walk nor drive--that’s why
when things are black, the squiggles
reassure me: blood vessels, he urges,
gelatinous, packed, outracing thought
or UFOs in grainy 16 millimeters.
But when I rub eyes, I see sunspots
that augur heat-blasts. And do not look
at sunlight say voices. The flash itself
will float on water -- as creation floats
on a ridge of bone or razor-back of giant,
or a flood of tears, the final source
for this anointment dilating my pupils.
How appealing the steel-rimmed glasses
as walls within the eye-store wobble.
They will hold my head like barrel-hoops.
The assistant reminds me don’t drive,
advice I disregard in open country,
the constellations undisturbed by traffic,
where twins are archetypes, not twins
of the optometrist. I fail to see things
but as dotted lines, suggestive, bare --
too remote to scrutinize, unlike sunspots
my fingers press on this wrinkled microcosm.
The sky suggests a bow, an arrow-shaft,
or limb attached to torso nebulae barely clothe,
or things I can turn off, blanks refuse to fill
like metaphysical things, or like chaos,
which beneath appearance, isn’t really true,
because what’s underneath is really ordered
on a microscopic level -- those squiggles
for which lenses or tea-leaves are needless
make sense, being neither magic, nor UFOs
nor private, like palm-lines, birthmarks or scars.
They’ve been allotted to others as eyes have
or identical twins, those circling peas in pods.
If vision gets too terrible, can’t he lance them
with those ruby lasers used for rifle scopes?
and in another, pointy Santa hats.
Poor vision doesn’t make me see them.
Truly doubles, they are reassuring,
on the wall, the twins of the optometrist.
He fires air-jets in my eyes, and spins
sets of lenses while I read the alphabet,
which, he echoes, make vision better.
The tiniest row of letters seem Cyrillic.
Where does the other language start?
Soon the consonants become vowels
then a numerology too remote to count,
except one character, hooked like chaos,
symbol for Saturn, presiding over lead.
He asks me: circle, counter-clockwise, east
to west -- to my right the twins are happy.
They lean in an identical direction.
Wearing matching sweaters and caps,
they’re nested in another like dolls
or cosmonauts packed in a Soyuz.
He diagnoses blisters under my eyes.
They lie beneath each one like chaos
cradles a planet -- a chaos that pools
to sea or teary source or Murine deluge,
space without circumference, a mess.
If the blisters grow, I will see shadows
or blinding white flashes of epiphany
but neither walk nor drive--that’s why
when things are black, the squiggles
reassure me: blood vessels, he urges,
gelatinous, packed, outracing thought
or UFOs in grainy 16 millimeters.
But when I rub eyes, I see sunspots
that augur heat-blasts. And do not look
at sunlight say voices. The flash itself
will float on water -- as creation floats
on a ridge of bone or razor-back of giant,
or a flood of tears, the final source
for this anointment dilating my pupils.
How appealing the steel-rimmed glasses
as walls within the eye-store wobble.
They will hold my head like barrel-hoops.
The assistant reminds me don’t drive,
advice I disregard in open country,
the constellations undisturbed by traffic,
where twins are archetypes, not twins
of the optometrist. I fail to see things
but as dotted lines, suggestive, bare --
too remote to scrutinize, unlike sunspots
my fingers press on this wrinkled microcosm.
The sky suggests a bow, an arrow-shaft,
or limb attached to torso nebulae barely clothe,
or things I can turn off, blanks refuse to fill
like metaphysical things, or like chaos,
which beneath appearance, isn’t really true,
because what’s underneath is really ordered
on a microscopic level -- those squiggles
for which lenses or tea-leaves are needless
make sense, being neither magic, nor UFOs
nor private, like palm-lines, birthmarks or scars.
They’ve been allotted to others as eyes have
or identical twins, those circling peas in pods.
If vision gets too terrible, can’t he lance them
with those ruby lasers used for rifle scopes?
Amorphous (9/15/03) (revv. Jan 09)
The clouds have accumulated for a storm, as if the sky
Were loaded with potential electricity, with banks
Of storm-clouds and air-currents, wending above and below
One another in ribbons, which the meteorologist’s arrows
Seek to clarify or pass through, but can only confuse.
They are convoluted as brains, have minds of their own,
The cumulus, the cumulonimbus, the thermals, the spaces between them.
How sticky clothes can change one’s mindset overnight,
Continual discomfort breeding the urge to transcendence,
A thought of non-attachment the thought of cool antipodes,
Underground groves, walls of water from a waterfall,
But were you about to freeze to death on the tundra,
You’d curl around hearths, fireplaces would feel huge as cathedrals,
Which are forests you’ve never seen, every column a tree-trunk.
Piss off you declare to the crow who caws on the power-line
The elaborate patrols and surveillance for roadside carrion.
The owls perched on buoys looking for river-rats that joggers
Choose to ignore closing in on their requisite mileage
As men would a hole-in-one on the golf course, a game in which
they are, to say the least, covertly competitive.
Were loaded with potential electricity, with banks
Of storm-clouds and air-currents, wending above and below
One another in ribbons, which the meteorologist’s arrows
Seek to clarify or pass through, but can only confuse.
They are convoluted as brains, have minds of their own,
The cumulus, the cumulonimbus, the thermals, the spaces between them.
How sticky clothes can change one’s mindset overnight,
Continual discomfort breeding the urge to transcendence,
A thought of non-attachment the thought of cool antipodes,
Underground groves, walls of water from a waterfall,
But were you about to freeze to death on the tundra,
You’d curl around hearths, fireplaces would feel huge as cathedrals,
Which are forests you’ve never seen, every column a tree-trunk.
Piss off you declare to the crow who caws on the power-line
The elaborate patrols and surveillance for roadside carrion.
The owls perched on buoys looking for river-rats that joggers
Choose to ignore closing in on their requisite mileage
As men would a hole-in-one on the golf course, a game in which
they are, to say the least, covertly competitive.
My Kenneth Fearing Stab (10/05?)
Self-centered, self-absorbed, euphemism for selfish,
Preoccupied with markets, with new properties, with
Turning the properties over on the markets, with yields,
And with dividends, and with average daily balances,
With deposits and withdrawals, with investment patterns,
With setting oneself up for life and with providing for
One’s future and the future of one’s family and one’s estate—
surely one can counter-argue this is healthy,
Better than being a flagellant or a bomb-thrower
In a crowded theater or pretending to be the last of
the courageous men in the world, a total dope, a blowhard?
He had maintenance issues said the guy with the ponytail
Whose sincerity was undoubted, who didn’t want to impose
Heavy trips on anyone, but wanted to show how caring
He really was, how he’d like to give everyone in the room
A hug, but there isn’t any time what with the schedule.
All I really want to do is show how much I share among
The human community, this circle, me and you, you can call
Me by my first name, I am also executive director, chief
Vision officer of a small firm specializing in enhanced
Digital telepathy, not that I wish to probe, disturb
Your personal space, your circle, which I do not confuse
With the circle that we have—together, us—not one or two.
But I might add, not so much as codicil than as admonition
That like all of us, you also have an issue with your fathers,
So as my young wife has had her first child how deeply
I ponder this, whether at work, or on the way to work, on
My custom-made Italian racing bicycle with its frame of
Pressurized carbon on which I’ve rode to work and cruised
On coastal roads, through cities become consecutively smaller,
Until they are those cemeteries with slate headstones from the past
Fenced in with wrought iron, where the uncut grass waves
Its chaff to the gun-metal sky, and a rain is about to visit
this old mill town, and I lie perfectly awake, day-dreaming
but a voice urges don’t be so indulgent, keep to the ground
for the people, the people here, my audience, mon sembables,
my consumer, target audience, sole patron, mes amis.
Preoccupied with markets, with new properties, with
Turning the properties over on the markets, with yields,
And with dividends, and with average daily balances,
With deposits and withdrawals, with investment patterns,
With setting oneself up for life and with providing for
One’s future and the future of one’s family and one’s estate—
surely one can counter-argue this is healthy,
Better than being a flagellant or a bomb-thrower
In a crowded theater or pretending to be the last of
the courageous men in the world, a total dope, a blowhard?
He had maintenance issues said the guy with the ponytail
Whose sincerity was undoubted, who didn’t want to impose
Heavy trips on anyone, but wanted to show how caring
He really was, how he’d like to give everyone in the room
A hug, but there isn’t any time what with the schedule.
All I really want to do is show how much I share among
The human community, this circle, me and you, you can call
Me by my first name, I am also executive director, chief
Vision officer of a small firm specializing in enhanced
Digital telepathy, not that I wish to probe, disturb
Your personal space, your circle, which I do not confuse
With the circle that we have—together, us—not one or two.
But I might add, not so much as codicil than as admonition
That like all of us, you also have an issue with your fathers,
So as my young wife has had her first child how deeply
I ponder this, whether at work, or on the way to work, on
My custom-made Italian racing bicycle with its frame of
Pressurized carbon on which I’ve rode to work and cruised
On coastal roads, through cities become consecutively smaller,
Until they are those cemeteries with slate headstones from the past
Fenced in with wrought iron, where the uncut grass waves
Its chaff to the gun-metal sky, and a rain is about to visit
this old mill town, and I lie perfectly awake, day-dreaming
but a voice urges don’t be so indulgent, keep to the ground
for the people, the people here, my audience, mon sembables,
my consumer, target audience, sole patron, mes amis.
Post Office Lounge: rough draft from '03
Cookie with a spiral of cinnamon
Sugar crystals planets congealed
From rivers of honey
The cinnamon from jungles
spiraling in the cookie
From plantations watered by rivers
In which mothers launder and unbind
Hair contesting Rapunzel’s
Cinnamon that doesn’t grow on trees,
languid as the air it clouds—
Money more likely from trees
than the spice of a cookie
flotillas carry to your doorstep
And how the cookie crumbles
in the toothless laugh of a package handler
after he dips it in a Pepsi foam
throwing his head back [with a hiss].
Nature abhors a waste of air
[Orpheus taming the beasts]
In a painted bestiary,
the Himalayan tiger lives beside
the eucalyptus-chewing panda
nudging him with a silver paw.
Behind two giant penguins tower,
stare through the vanity mirrors
of the postal handlers’ lounge.
Perspective is generous, peace this window.
She devours microwavable mini-pizzas
at the table across. With her around
no chance to change the channel
from the soaps. She's on contract.
in the washroom, beyond the sorting machines
referred to by four digit numbers, zeros gratis,
farther even than the thousand-yard stare
go beyond the walls containing our life
in epistles or Kraft-paper packages
from loved ones or strangers with gifts
The networks dissolved in a glass,
that's how the cookie crumbles
The one with Afro and the saucer eyes
Sugar crystals planets congealed
From rivers of honey
The cinnamon from jungles
spiraling in the cookie
From plantations watered by rivers
In which mothers launder and unbind
Hair contesting Rapunzel’s
Cinnamon that doesn’t grow on trees,
languid as the air it clouds—
Money more likely from trees
than the spice of a cookie
flotillas carry to your doorstep
And how the cookie crumbles
in the toothless laugh of a package handler
after he dips it in a Pepsi foam
throwing his head back [with a hiss].
Nature abhors a waste of air
[Orpheus taming the beasts]
In a painted bestiary,
the Himalayan tiger lives beside
the eucalyptus-chewing panda
nudging him with a silver paw.
Behind two giant penguins tower,
stare through the vanity mirrors
of the postal handlers’ lounge.
Perspective is generous, peace this window.
She devours microwavable mini-pizzas
at the table across. With her around
no chance to change the channel
from the soaps. She's on contract.
in the washroom, beyond the sorting machines
referred to by four digit numbers, zeros gratis,
farther even than the thousand-yard stare
go beyond the walls containing our life
in epistles or Kraft-paper packages
from loved ones or strangers with gifts
The networks dissolved in a glass,
that's how the cookie crumbles
The one with Afro and the saucer eyes
Sunday, August 10, 2008
12/3/06
I folded the kibbles of rodent poison into foil, then closed it up into a plastic sandwich bag, then placed the bag beneath the kitchen cabinet. And then I washed my hands of the matter. Twice I washed my hands in the evening. How many trees are felled to make these flyers crammed into my mailbox? Peeling content from the envelopes is like shucking corn. Once I was asked to pull the silk from the kernels but to keep the ears on, but I refused because it was too time-consuming. Better to eat the corn raw from the cob than to be precious. It would have suited me to pull the ears back, tear the silken strands from the ear, and toss it naked into the fire.
Serves you right Orville Redenbacher, no little resemblance to Kim Jong Il, only the latter portlier. Whenever that dude writes his autobiography, it'll be bound for Oprah's list. The man who knew when very young why flowers were not black, why streams did not reverse their course and why bees didn't sting when in a swarm around their hive, why cats curled atop the hoods of cars, why crows roosted in the chestnut trees in the dead of winter. He was the son of the sun , and even Il Duce would have had to bow in the sunlight--never was there such a narrrative for the national laureate to labor upon.
Perhaps your emotions clarify, become as light as the air you breathe. Or perhaps you're less morbid in your cast of mind. Cast out, outcast, the die cast, your cast hardens. Casting as in sculpture, outcast as if flung from afar. The die is cast; the dispositions have hardened. So I reify the object of my disdain until the sinner becomes the sin. Economy of resources dictates when this becomes the case. An infinitely patient being would do otherwise; that being would comprehend the failings of a personality without needing to invest itself in any kind of earthly involvement; as long as that being did not possess an individual body locked in a particular place, it could posess an infinite understanding and will to understand more.
But when Neanderthal confronted Homo Sapiens, or before that Homo Pithecanthropus confronted Homo Erectus, was understanding possible, one draped in animal skins and huddled in a cave, the other with elegantly serrated flint spears and trousers and moccasins, their only flaw being the weaker bearskin that covered them, the result of a misguided homeopathy: that what was good for bears was good for those who traveled like bears. But there was no time for understanding between species, no ground for patience. The wind was blowing the fires down, the fuel was harder to find, and the animal wealth was harder to extract from the mammoth, mule deer, or antelope. Eohippus, tiny horse hiding among gooseberry bushes, silently mocked his lumbering descendant on the steppes. The Neanderthal, back from having buried loved ones among beads and ochre, stared at Homo Erectus as he tried to assemble thoughts from fears he could not mouth.
There were no grounds for human understanding, which is based on a sympathy that is bodiless, composed from hte vapors of alcohol during Happy Hour, at the very beginning when no one is in the bar yet.
Serves you right Orville Redenbacher, no little resemblance to Kim Jong Il, only the latter portlier. Whenever that dude writes his autobiography, it'll be bound for Oprah's list. The man who knew when very young why flowers were not black, why streams did not reverse their course and why bees didn't sting when in a swarm around their hive, why cats curled atop the hoods of cars, why crows roosted in the chestnut trees in the dead of winter. He was the son of the sun , and even Il Duce would have had to bow in the sunlight--never was there such a narrrative for the national laureate to labor upon.
Perhaps your emotions clarify, become as light as the air you breathe. Or perhaps you're less morbid in your cast of mind. Cast out, outcast, the die cast, your cast hardens. Casting as in sculpture, outcast as if flung from afar. The die is cast; the dispositions have hardened. So I reify the object of my disdain until the sinner becomes the sin. Economy of resources dictates when this becomes the case. An infinitely patient being would do otherwise; that being would comprehend the failings of a personality without needing to invest itself in any kind of earthly involvement; as long as that being did not possess an individual body locked in a particular place, it could posess an infinite understanding and will to understand more.
But when Neanderthal confronted Homo Sapiens, or before that Homo Pithecanthropus confronted Homo Erectus, was understanding possible, one draped in animal skins and huddled in a cave, the other with elegantly serrated flint spears and trousers and moccasins, their only flaw being the weaker bearskin that covered them, the result of a misguided homeopathy: that what was good for bears was good for those who traveled like bears. But there was no time for understanding between species, no ground for patience. The wind was blowing the fires down, the fuel was harder to find, and the animal wealth was harder to extract from the mammoth, mule deer, or antelope. Eohippus, tiny horse hiding among gooseberry bushes, silently mocked his lumbering descendant on the steppes. The Neanderthal, back from having buried loved ones among beads and ochre, stared at Homo Erectus as he tried to assemble thoughts from fears he could not mouth.
There were no grounds for human understanding, which is based on a sympathy that is bodiless, composed from hte vapors of alcohol during Happy Hour, at the very beginning when no one is in the bar yet.
Spring 07 (draft)
Ducts moved air from beneath or moved air from above,
or from the sides of buildings, or from beneath the awnings.
Rail-cars roared beneath the buildings, stopped and roared again.
The awnings of the shops bellied with wind as if they were sails,
and the banners that drooped from the sides of the buildings
were floodlit and also bellied from the winds underneath them.
And the winds were compressed to an even greater pressure
by the narrowness of the mazes through which the wind had to pass
on their way to the sea -- or were they passing from the open sea?
Were the ducts pushing air underground, or from the ground?
And in which directions were the banners bellying with wind?
How was the traffic? Traffic roared later in the evening.
The winds from the air-ducts roared along with the traffic.
The underground was made of money, the cost of location
passed to the customer. The gold necklace on the velvet-lined collar
is from the underground also. The maze between the buildings
straitens until the wind gains greater pressure, until it howls.
or from the sides of buildings, or from beneath the awnings.
Rail-cars roared beneath the buildings, stopped and roared again.
The awnings of the shops bellied with wind as if they were sails,
and the banners that drooped from the sides of the buildings
were floodlit and also bellied from the winds underneath them.
And the winds were compressed to an even greater pressure
by the narrowness of the mazes through which the wind had to pass
on their way to the sea -- or were they passing from the open sea?
Were the ducts pushing air underground, or from the ground?
And in which directions were the banners bellying with wind?
How was the traffic? Traffic roared later in the evening.
The winds from the air-ducts roared along with the traffic.
The underground was made of money, the cost of location
passed to the customer. The gold necklace on the velvet-lined collar
is from the underground also. The maze between the buildings
straitens until the wind gains greater pressure, until it howls.
10/01/06 (draft)
The bee-sting as if a splinter of glass had pierced the web of my hand,
the web of skin between the thumb and index finger.
The bee crawled into my sock as if to hide, but when I flicked it from the seam,
it curled into a fetal ball, its wings flattened against its furry abdomen.
I swatted the bee to help it along as it lie on the bathroom floor,
amid the bleach and talcum powder compounded into paste.
And tried to suck the splinter from my hand that felt like fiberglass beneath the skin,
which was the stinger that I first felt beneath the apple tree.
Why didn’t it start this way? Eve reached for the apple, or maybe Adam did.
A bee stung as the fruit was plucked; it felt like glass or eisenglass
the first couple hadn’t known before.
Earth hadn’t erupted, although the seas were made.
Rocks weren’t mixed with glassy or metallic things.
No need for gloves to pluck the fruit, the ones He said to take.
But then a little bee died to tell you something, his emissary, no bad guy.
That’s when it started. You felt a shard inside you, however small.
No matter how you tried to salve yourself, things weren’t the same.
You killed the bee for the little projectile you felt in the web of your hand,
the beginning of conflict.
The apples didn’t taste the same. You’d never been stung before.
I am the priest or pastor of the church that rests upon this story, so hand the till to me.
Charity begins not at home, but with my well-being.
Thus bee-stings begin the making of the salve a body needs.
A world could be built upon the remedy for stings, new stings could be made,
could even come from laboratories.
And rock was made to block the plowshare, and so was glass a splinter.
the web of skin between the thumb and index finger.
The bee crawled into my sock as if to hide, but when I flicked it from the seam,
it curled into a fetal ball, its wings flattened against its furry abdomen.
I swatted the bee to help it along as it lie on the bathroom floor,
amid the bleach and talcum powder compounded into paste.
And tried to suck the splinter from my hand that felt like fiberglass beneath the skin,
which was the stinger that I first felt beneath the apple tree.
Why didn’t it start this way? Eve reached for the apple, or maybe Adam did.
A bee stung as the fruit was plucked; it felt like glass or eisenglass
the first couple hadn’t known before.
Earth hadn’t erupted, although the seas were made.
Rocks weren’t mixed with glassy or metallic things.
No need for gloves to pluck the fruit, the ones He said to take.
But then a little bee died to tell you something, his emissary, no bad guy.
That’s when it started. You felt a shard inside you, however small.
No matter how you tried to salve yourself, things weren’t the same.
You killed the bee for the little projectile you felt in the web of your hand,
the beginning of conflict.
The apples didn’t taste the same. You’d never been stung before.
I am the priest or pastor of the church that rests upon this story, so hand the till to me.
Charity begins not at home, but with my well-being.
Thus bee-stings begin the making of the salve a body needs.
A world could be built upon the remedy for stings, new stings could be made,
could even come from laboratories.
And rock was made to block the plowshare, and so was glass a splinter.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Art in America (03)
Jackson Pollock committed to memory Guernica’s canvas back
hung in the Guggenheim circa ‘39, then reproduced the thought
on canvas swathes he freely cut to isolate the best of them
until, by career's end, he could afford to forget those figures,
first occasions for his blobs and paint-whips, wounded peasants.
Morris Louis later witnessed swathes of color wallow on overalls
as droopy gesso rainbows. While Christo wrapped a high-rise
in brown paper, and Damien Hirst aspired to split blue whales,
sink their matching halves in picture cubes. Christo addressed
the package to itself, then whales breached its satin ribbons
to flop in Hirst's abbatoir, gigantic, and televised at that.
What avatar transvalues their values? Chris Burden had himself
wounded in the arm, then laid between power lines and water.
Andy Warhol dropped the lady's pump he'd been sketching
for Redbook, to swish among the socialites with a Polaroid.
Someone jumped from floor five far too fast for him to shoot.
Julian Schnabel busted restaurant crockery to plaster shards
on murals buyers paid hand-over-fist to hang in chi-chi houses.
What's to be done? An Austrian has also sliced his foreskin off
for photographs displayed as art-prints in some high-end gallery.
But all that Arnold Schwarz-Kogler was rewarded for his work
was a portrait--bandaged, head to toe--above a brief obit in Time.
Who however will assemble the firing-squad for our next piece?
Where’s the concept artist who can breath life into art
through needless death? Who will get the genius grant
to displace millions? Manufacture suitcase atom bombs?
Poison whole cities with smallpox, inoculate survivors
for reality TV debuts, inaugurate frenzied religious cults
living by lashes alone? Channel heaps of cash to the drug trade?
Numb latchkey kids with white supremacist sex fantasies?
Work millions into epileptic froths, send kamikaze battalions
to the moon? Drop a thermonuclear bomb into a cheese-hole,
and who will call the bluff? Who will poison whole species
for this month’s Art In America, construct malls of mud
in the Amazon, next door to the rainforest Chippendale’s,
or spread sexually transmitted diseases like wildfire,
invent new mutant strains, clone ubermenschen porn stars,
and plasticate their remains for exhibits in corporate lobbies
or pipeline tongueless child prostitutes raised to be janissaries
on Singaporean ship containers, or bury subliminal messages
in heavy metal, urging prepubescent youth to off themselves
if they can’t kill gratuitously at will? Who can top their act?
There’s a message. Even this poem -- loose and lazy catalogue
of atrocities thought or done, imagery arbitrary as windings
through gutters -- goes on as long as you want: this just came in.
hung in the Guggenheim circa ‘39, then reproduced the thought
on canvas swathes he freely cut to isolate the best of them
until, by career's end, he could afford to forget those figures,
first occasions for his blobs and paint-whips, wounded peasants.
Morris Louis later witnessed swathes of color wallow on overalls
as droopy gesso rainbows. While Christo wrapped a high-rise
in brown paper, and Damien Hirst aspired to split blue whales,
sink their matching halves in picture cubes. Christo addressed
the package to itself, then whales breached its satin ribbons
to flop in Hirst's abbatoir, gigantic, and televised at that.
What avatar transvalues their values? Chris Burden had himself
wounded in the arm, then laid between power lines and water.
Andy Warhol dropped the lady's pump he'd been sketching
for Redbook, to swish among the socialites with a Polaroid.
Someone jumped from floor five far too fast for him to shoot.
Julian Schnabel busted restaurant crockery to plaster shards
on murals buyers paid hand-over-fist to hang in chi-chi houses.
What's to be done? An Austrian has also sliced his foreskin off
for photographs displayed as art-prints in some high-end gallery.
But all that Arnold Schwarz-Kogler was rewarded for his work
was a portrait--bandaged, head to toe--above a brief obit in Time.
Who however will assemble the firing-squad for our next piece?
Where’s the concept artist who can breath life into art
through needless death? Who will get the genius grant
to displace millions? Manufacture suitcase atom bombs?
Poison whole cities with smallpox, inoculate survivors
for reality TV debuts, inaugurate frenzied religious cults
living by lashes alone? Channel heaps of cash to the drug trade?
Numb latchkey kids with white supremacist sex fantasies?
Work millions into epileptic froths, send kamikaze battalions
to the moon? Drop a thermonuclear bomb into a cheese-hole,
and who will call the bluff? Who will poison whole species
for this month’s Art In America, construct malls of mud
in the Amazon, next door to the rainforest Chippendale’s,
or spread sexually transmitted diseases like wildfire,
invent new mutant strains, clone ubermenschen porn stars,
and plasticate their remains for exhibits in corporate lobbies
or pipeline tongueless child prostitutes raised to be janissaries
on Singaporean ship containers, or bury subliminal messages
in heavy metal, urging prepubescent youth to off themselves
if they can’t kill gratuitously at will? Who can top their act?
There’s a message. Even this poem -- loose and lazy catalogue
of atrocities thought or done, imagery arbitrary as windings
through gutters -- goes on as long as you want: this just came in.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
2/24/06
The kraft paper kite plunges into the kitchen garden
but doesn't bruise the bean-stalks or the squash.
The kite of sticks and strings rides the air and ripples
noisily. All edicts against kite-flying have fallen.
You can't disinter mandrake roots or other tubers
or pluck the Turkish fig before it's dried and candied over
enough to settle into a market stall, whether in a bazaar
or the supermarket's whole foods section. Certain names
for the deity may also be off-limits, entertainer's jibes
at El or Alilat. Purple phalloi of some plants are suppressed.
Even the turnip piled in the truck can appear concupiscent,
once the dirt is shaken from its rugged beard. The rhizome,
impossible to find, hops without a central nervous system.
A facsimile sent by email barely squeezes through the lines
of the telephone, reduced to dots and dashes.
The last telegram was sent yesterday,
and the cocaine-fueled raging day-trader ruined the ticker-tape.
Bring a pretty glass bell and someone is bound to smash it.
Treaties are composed to be broken as symphonies to be played.
Silence and random sounds were meant for compositions,
the space between a note is shaped like a sand-dune.
*****************************************************
I could feel the delicacy of the thing in the package
inside the big cardboard envelope, an earring for a fairy
a small fairy whose wings were spread in full flight
a pendant in the shape of a fairy dangling from the ear-lobe
It felt like one earring, maybe two, but not likely
and that maybe fairy-earrings were attached to a chain
a slender chain pouring from the hand that dispensed it
to which the earrings were attached, very delicate fairies of beaten gold
or gold-plated brass that I threw in the shark's cage in the warehouse,
its steel latches beaten into unpredictable shapes that didn't fit well,
and threw the heavier gifts on top of the earrings or whatever they were.
This is what happens to vulnerable children, with weak heads and butterfly stomachs.
but doesn't bruise the bean-stalks or the squash.
The kite of sticks and strings rides the air and ripples
noisily. All edicts against kite-flying have fallen.
You can't disinter mandrake roots or other tubers
or pluck the Turkish fig before it's dried and candied over
enough to settle into a market stall, whether in a bazaar
or the supermarket's whole foods section. Certain names
for the deity may also be off-limits, entertainer's jibes
at El or Alilat. Purple phalloi of some plants are suppressed.
Even the turnip piled in the truck can appear concupiscent,
once the dirt is shaken from its rugged beard. The rhizome,
impossible to find, hops without a central nervous system.
A facsimile sent by email barely squeezes through the lines
of the telephone, reduced to dots and dashes.
The last telegram was sent yesterday,
and the cocaine-fueled raging day-trader ruined the ticker-tape.
Bring a pretty glass bell and someone is bound to smash it.
Treaties are composed to be broken as symphonies to be played.
Silence and random sounds were meant for compositions,
the space between a note is shaped like a sand-dune.
*****************************************************
I could feel the delicacy of the thing in the package
inside the big cardboard envelope, an earring for a fairy
a small fairy whose wings were spread in full flight
a pendant in the shape of a fairy dangling from the ear-lobe
It felt like one earring, maybe two, but not likely
and that maybe fairy-earrings were attached to a chain
a slender chain pouring from the hand that dispensed it
to which the earrings were attached, very delicate fairies of beaten gold
or gold-plated brass that I threw in the shark's cage in the warehouse,
its steel latches beaten into unpredictable shapes that didn't fit well,
and threw the heavier gifts on top of the earrings or whatever they were.
This is what happens to vulnerable children, with weak heads and butterfly stomachs.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
7/3/07 (draft)
Birdsong that I cannot assign to actual birds in birder-books.
Bird-brain who cannot assign the actual song to actual bird.
One song, from a power line (was it a mouse tit?): succession
of disparate melodic bursts, whose form depends upon reply.
When my fire alarm was jogged to sound, emitting three deafening beeps,
it was another bird who answered from the woods.
The fire alarm sounded bird-like; bird-song fire alarm-like, a bird alarm.
To three beeps the bird answered, with three short song-bursts.
The machine called, the bird answered; they beeped three times.
One declaimed turf or mating brag, the other declaimed fire, false alarm,
such as from the boy who cries fire to separate a theater from a crowd.
But outdoors, there's no audience, no reason for alarm.
One can beep, and one can reply; one says FIRE, one TURF,
one declaims I am the most resplendent thing on earth.
My wings are on fire. Check out how loud I sing, all fiery song.
How I'll scotch and scorch the branch on which I'll perch.
Bird-brain who cannot assign the actual song to actual bird.
One song, from a power line (was it a mouse tit?): succession
of disparate melodic bursts, whose form depends upon reply.
When my fire alarm was jogged to sound, emitting three deafening beeps,
it was another bird who answered from the woods.
The fire alarm sounded bird-like; bird-song fire alarm-like, a bird alarm.
To three beeps the bird answered, with three short song-bursts.
The machine called, the bird answered; they beeped three times.
One declaimed turf or mating brag, the other declaimed fire, false alarm,
such as from the boy who cries fire to separate a theater from a crowd.
But outdoors, there's no audience, no reason for alarm.
One can beep, and one can reply; one says FIRE, one TURF,
one declaims I am the most resplendent thing on earth.
My wings are on fire. Check out how loud I sing, all fiery song.
How I'll scotch and scorch the branch on which I'll perch.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
6/23/07 draft
There were scores of fireflies in the air, and one against my windowscreen
glowed greenly, and there were also dozens of fireflies on the hillside,
and inside, one was lit but dying on the carpet, but outside, the fireflies were spinning
like searchlights or beacons or the silent discharge of flak batteries under the clouds,
the constellations out of sight, and some were spiralling into the winter rye,
while the red slugs fastened themselves to the sides of the leaves of the string-bean,
disease-resistant so the package claimed, and chewed the leaves into skeletal frames
like uncompleted aircraft or rusted out spades, but the fireflies were neither
landing on the vegetables nor on the flowers, the shriveled purple irises
or sweet-pea sending their green coils into the air.
glowed greenly, and there were also dozens of fireflies on the hillside,
and inside, one was lit but dying on the carpet, but outside, the fireflies were spinning
like searchlights or beacons or the silent discharge of flak batteries under the clouds,
the constellations out of sight, and some were spiralling into the winter rye,
while the red slugs fastened themselves to the sides of the leaves of the string-bean,
disease-resistant so the package claimed, and chewed the leaves into skeletal frames
like uncompleted aircraft or rusted out spades, but the fireflies were neither
landing on the vegetables nor on the flowers, the shriveled purple irises
or sweet-pea sending their green coils into the air.
11/11/06 draft
Once, when my eyesight was clear enough
to see each discrete vein in each leaf,
I lacked the need for mediums by which to grasp things,
but during a power outage, I was helpless as an infant,
except that my legs carried me from wall to blind wall
and my fingers fumbled for the match and the butane lighter.
That reminds me that balls of methane can be planets,
autonomous and lighter than a feather, weightless but fixed.
In an outage, I flicked a single match upon the floor
and thought about the fires I set in trashcans as a kid,
but as a bank flared up outside a Transcendental Meditation Center
I cowered, and reined the fire in by stepping on the growing flame with a single boot-heel
until only a smouldering column of smoke scarred the hillside.
A ball of methane can become another planet as easily as breathing or blinking,
but within another blink, such a planet disappears from sight.
The purest flame can come from putrifaction, oils that seep from lower earth.
The bluest methane could be the only light in a power outage
against which the lights of candles in blackouts falter.
The bluest orbs rise above the moon from putrifaction.
But a blink can change the earth and moon on their axis,
and in just a blink an orb of blue called a planet can be gone.
Mars is ruddy rock, not a valley in sight.
The faces of moon-men dissolve beneath the clearest glass,
the hollows of high cheekbones become craters and the facial lines canyons.
With the flick of a match in an outage, all becomes fire.
The orange cranes ascend the transfer stations
among streaks from sodium lamps on windshields and traffic stripes
and the planets of ammonia spin rings that freeze what touches them.
And the yellow planets are flammable, and the outages silence the village
but the rings around the planets are freezing cold, and the blue orbs insubstantial but fixed--
their center is as viscous as blue slush, and in a blink a planet can be gone,
can be deemed to be planet no longer, an orb for which a name is required.
I burned the contents of the trash receptacle,
and the flames licked the sides of the pole and blackened it
and leaped from the mesh basket. The trash was fire,
the fast-food wrappers and the empty boxes.
You could smoke in classrooms then, turn your insides black.
If you were busy your insides were dark as a combustible engine.
The linings of your insides as black as empty suitcases or engine blocks.
to see each discrete vein in each leaf,
I lacked the need for mediums by which to grasp things,
but during a power outage, I was helpless as an infant,
except that my legs carried me from wall to blind wall
and my fingers fumbled for the match and the butane lighter.
That reminds me that balls of methane can be planets,
autonomous and lighter than a feather, weightless but fixed.
In an outage, I flicked a single match upon the floor
and thought about the fires I set in trashcans as a kid,
but as a bank flared up outside a Transcendental Meditation Center
I cowered, and reined the fire in by stepping on the growing flame with a single boot-heel
until only a smouldering column of smoke scarred the hillside.
A ball of methane can become another planet as easily as breathing or blinking,
but within another blink, such a planet disappears from sight.
The purest flame can come from putrifaction, oils that seep from lower earth.
The bluest methane could be the only light in a power outage
against which the lights of candles in blackouts falter.
The bluest orbs rise above the moon from putrifaction.
But a blink can change the earth and moon on their axis,
and in just a blink an orb of blue called a planet can be gone.
Mars is ruddy rock, not a valley in sight.
The faces of moon-men dissolve beneath the clearest glass,
the hollows of high cheekbones become craters and the facial lines canyons.
With the flick of a match in an outage, all becomes fire.
The orange cranes ascend the transfer stations
among streaks from sodium lamps on windshields and traffic stripes
and the planets of ammonia spin rings that freeze what touches them.
And the yellow planets are flammable, and the outages silence the village
but the rings around the planets are freezing cold, and the blue orbs insubstantial but fixed--
their center is as viscous as blue slush, and in a blink a planet can be gone,
can be deemed to be planet no longer, an orb for which a name is required.
I burned the contents of the trash receptacle,
and the flames licked the sides of the pole and blackened it
and leaped from the mesh basket. The trash was fire,
the fast-food wrappers and the empty boxes.
You could smoke in classrooms then, turn your insides black.
If you were busy your insides were dark as a combustible engine.
The linings of your insides as black as empty suitcases or engine blocks.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Puzzle-painting (05)
An injection-molded tree is plucked for parts
dressed with concentric tricolored targets,
stars or crosses; if not, the olive-drab splotches
become the heart of the Black Forest.
A numbers-key can never be enough to go by.
To retro-engineer a thing that dimmed the sky
requires exploded views and many cheat-sheets
to make the finished plane hang by a thread.
They take the plane apart to re-assemble it
and suture the landscape in which it flies.
The customer buys a plane to put together,
this machine that dives in oblique bends,
crashing into a picture-puzzle’s stubble-field.
Die-stamped on a card-table in the cottage
lies another post-impressionist landscape
trembling hands maybe pull together, stubble-field
of horse-hair brush-strokes or a shady grove.
They took the place apart to put it together
before water wilts or sun warps the paste-board.
The makers want the customer to lose himself
among the parts to find them, put them together
as if the fighter-plane hadn’t been apart at all,
flying far above the crows or hay-ricks of Arles,
over heads of goat-men in Poussin’s meadows
or parks or wavy post-impressionist stubble-fields.
Imagery rained upon bleeds on the jigsaw pieces,
pointillism ruined by the color-field’s smeared future.
Better to assemble the place before it’s gone.
Someone has made this confusion for you
and it’s a test, they might say, of proper insight,
to figure where the hayricks or the sun might go,
places for each crow above each portion of stubble.
The plane that soars in air over-crowded with wavy
black wings and the mimicry of heat-waves--
fever informing the blue and yellow strokes
and strokes of coal-black standing for crows--
has been reduced to parts on plastic trees
the customer can pluck apart to put together.
A thread today suspends the fighter-plane
from the ceiling that mimics blank sky,
breaking into unrealizable quadrants for seasons
before water blurs the scenery or the glue
adds too many thumb-prints to the fuselage
for the plane to dangle from the ceiling from pride.
dressed with concentric tricolored targets,
stars or crosses; if not, the olive-drab splotches
become the heart of the Black Forest.
A numbers-key can never be enough to go by.
To retro-engineer a thing that dimmed the sky
requires exploded views and many cheat-sheets
to make the finished plane hang by a thread.
They take the plane apart to re-assemble it
and suture the landscape in which it flies.
The customer buys a plane to put together,
this machine that dives in oblique bends,
crashing into a picture-puzzle’s stubble-field.
Die-stamped on a card-table in the cottage
lies another post-impressionist landscape
trembling hands maybe pull together, stubble-field
of horse-hair brush-strokes or a shady grove.
They took the place apart to put it together
before water wilts or sun warps the paste-board.
The makers want the customer to lose himself
among the parts to find them, put them together
as if the fighter-plane hadn’t been apart at all,
flying far above the crows or hay-ricks of Arles,
over heads of goat-men in Poussin’s meadows
or parks or wavy post-impressionist stubble-fields.
Imagery rained upon bleeds on the jigsaw pieces,
pointillism ruined by the color-field’s smeared future.
Better to assemble the place before it’s gone.
Someone has made this confusion for you
and it’s a test, they might say, of proper insight,
to figure where the hayricks or the sun might go,
places for each crow above each portion of stubble.
The plane that soars in air over-crowded with wavy
black wings and the mimicry of heat-waves--
fever informing the blue and yellow strokes
and strokes of coal-black standing for crows--
has been reduced to parts on plastic trees
the customer can pluck apart to put together.
A thread today suspends the fighter-plane
from the ceiling that mimics blank sky,
breaking into unrealizable quadrants for seasons
before water blurs the scenery or the glue
adds too many thumb-prints to the fuselage
for the plane to dangle from the ceiling from pride.
[From 03?]
A place from which to start is where one belongs.
To start without at once belonging to the place
from which one started is to be lost: don’t go there.
Whereas to be lost is to be free to start from anywhere
So that every place becomes the center of a circumference
Even if this circumference amounts to a Mercator projection
Of lines of latitude lightly drafted by electronic tracery
Or the sparkling of holiday fireworks in the sky, smoke trails
That drop their sundry cinders into ocean.
To be scattered is to be parted from the homeland
But not lost. To be oriented continually toward the place
From where one imagined one had begun or arrived,
And from a great distance, or from a tower sunk in mud,
Which in the summer is cracked to fields of hexagonal plates,
hard enough to write upon with a branch pruned to a stylus
from a tree not local to the region, a tree one hears about
Around which sit followers, shepherds enjoying the thin shade,
where the meeting begins innocuously enough, a discussion of weather,
A forecast by one that shades into meanings more ominous
Than anyone had ever intended, words that exhort
Everyone to purify the temple with sword or fire -- yet innocent
Bystanders swore they’d gathered to talk about the price
Of commodities in cowry-shells. Here, one spreads his hand,
And shows one. A delicate ruddy pink smears its ridges
but its core is brown as terra-cotta, like bricks that spiral
Into towers with eroded steps, which can be climbed now,
Albeit with some difficulty, especially when balancing a camera
With a tripod attached, to steady the view -- panoramic, desolate,
trick-mirror mirage of sand reflecting sky, the sky-gods
with their obsidian backs turned from the blast patterns.
To start without at once belonging to the place
from which one started is to be lost: don’t go there.
Whereas to be lost is to be free to start from anywhere
So that every place becomes the center of a circumference
Even if this circumference amounts to a Mercator projection
Of lines of latitude lightly drafted by electronic tracery
Or the sparkling of holiday fireworks in the sky, smoke trails
That drop their sundry cinders into ocean.
To be scattered is to be parted from the homeland
But not lost. To be oriented continually toward the place
From where one imagined one had begun or arrived,
And from a great distance, or from a tower sunk in mud,
Which in the summer is cracked to fields of hexagonal plates,
hard enough to write upon with a branch pruned to a stylus
from a tree not local to the region, a tree one hears about
Around which sit followers, shepherds enjoying the thin shade,
where the meeting begins innocuously enough, a discussion of weather,
A forecast by one that shades into meanings more ominous
Than anyone had ever intended, words that exhort
Everyone to purify the temple with sword or fire -- yet innocent
Bystanders swore they’d gathered to talk about the price
Of commodities in cowry-shells. Here, one spreads his hand,
And shows one. A delicate ruddy pink smears its ridges
but its core is brown as terra-cotta, like bricks that spiral
Into towers with eroded steps, which can be climbed now,
Albeit with some difficulty, especially when balancing a camera
With a tripod attached, to steady the view -- panoramic, desolate,
trick-mirror mirage of sand reflecting sky, the sky-gods
with their obsidian backs turned from the blast patterns.
The Mysteries (fall 03)
Forty four hundred, but you can pay with plastic.
The steps of the process–do you have concerns?
Do you have any questions about the process?
Get the money off your mind Jack, or Ted
or whoever. Trust that our specialists
will get your signing bonus. Did you know
that they have them. Oh yes, they do.
But money comes, money goes: forget
about money anyway. The money you earn
is money gone. And when we talk career
we mean more than money, now don’t we?
Jack or whoever. Apologies for lapses
in this presentation. It’s the process
through which we walk you that counts.
We do so much business with guys like you.
You were looking for us, but you didn’t know it.
*
So I’m not sweating bullets he thought, his forehead
creased with nearly as many lines as he’d sketched
with red felt magic marker among the three circles
that intersected, to be his depiction of the process,
and in the darker space where the furrows met
(each circle had a title, but the titles weren’t clear)
was the client, was what he brought to the table,
red and cross-hatched, bleeding into the notepad
like a butcher’s heart wrapped up in wax paper,
a place where illegible terms were happily married.
The steps of the process–do you have concerns?
Do you have any questions about the process?
Get the money off your mind Jack, or Ted
or whoever. Trust that our specialists
will get your signing bonus. Did you know
that they have them. Oh yes, they do.
But money comes, money goes: forget
about money anyway. The money you earn
is money gone. And when we talk career
we mean more than money, now don’t we?
Jack or whoever. Apologies for lapses
in this presentation. It’s the process
through which we walk you that counts.
We do so much business with guys like you.
You were looking for us, but you didn’t know it.
*
So I’m not sweating bullets he thought, his forehead
creased with nearly as many lines as he’d sketched
with red felt magic marker among the three circles
that intersected, to be his depiction of the process,
and in the darker space where the furrows met
(each circle had a title, but the titles weren’t clear)
was the client, was what he brought to the table,
red and cross-hatched, bleeding into the notepad
like a butcher’s heart wrapped up in wax paper,
a place where illegible terms were happily married.
Monday, July 21, 2008
from 3/16/08
The road to recovery is uphill and spirals the greatest possible distance
around the hill before the destination of the city on the hill.
The sentence that follows the road to recovery winds about the road
among ditches and the brush, the sentence searching for its predicate
as it stretches its object as far from the subject of the sentence as possible,
winds in a fashion as sustained as its artificer can make it, keeping in mind
subject and object and predicate, the sentence predicated itself
upon the thought that there is a city on a hill approachable by a road
of rather steep grade that winds around the hill for as long as possible,
that the sentence can follow the shape and length of the road without getting into a tangle, without forcing us to abandon hope. Could I sustain the length of the sentence,
could I walk that far uphill, the sentence that winds around the hill
until it reaches the very city on the hill.
around the hill before the destination of the city on the hill.
The sentence that follows the road to recovery winds about the road
among ditches and the brush, the sentence searching for its predicate
as it stretches its object as far from the subject of the sentence as possible,
winds in a fashion as sustained as its artificer can make it, keeping in mind
subject and object and predicate, the sentence predicated itself
upon the thought that there is a city on a hill approachable by a road
of rather steep grade that winds around the hill for as long as possible,
that the sentence can follow the shape and length of the road without getting into a tangle, without forcing us to abandon hope. Could I sustain the length of the sentence,
could I walk that far uphill, the sentence that winds around the hill
until it reaches the very city on the hill.
3/23/08
"We make the music that we imagine ourselves to hear." Dr. Johnson, 92nd Rambler.
The explanation of this phenomenon being that neural fibers communicate impulses from the brain to the ear as readily as in the other, more predictable direction. And that the melodies speed up, and are persistent, but could you recite silently to yourself Heilig Nacht, they would disappear. And that the music of the spheres consists of the rubbing together of the surfaces of two crystal spheres at points where there are scratches or tiny, crystalline fragments etching the spheres, or vibrating them until each one vibrates in a single tone like the wineglasses whose edges are stroked by the nimblest index fingers to broadcast a note as pure as any stringed instrument played expertly in a conservatory, a resonance coaxed from wood or glass. The fibers from the brain to ear are as glassine and as sensitive to vibrations as fiber-optic cable. The neural fibers as glass can be shattered as crystal or glass can.
The music that we think we hear we make, and would be true of the songwriter: Mort Schuman’s advice to Ray Davies: find some chords you like, and build a song around them. To build up the song around the chords you like, which were there before you. No words like chords appear around which to build around them. It’s just the medium. Time has passed since I last put words to paper. You can almost hear the sheets of snow melt beneath you as the last icicle drips away on the roof; you can see the heat of the sun as it fills the air. The ledges of snow on the banks melt, the crows are waiting in the trees, the Eighth Symphony ends, a volume is written, but it’s nothing to be valued, unlike Pepys’ diary, or lines crossed out; that were negated but which nonetheless the present embraced. That the author negated but which the present embraced. There were no magic markers then.
******
Benumbed, and numb as a pounded thump. Dump as a thumb, as a pounded stump. Sump, stump, pump, and dump. Liquified assets, liquified gas, a contradiction–such as change of state? A chant of stage, a rant from a cage, my purple prism. Emprismed the core arcs from the manifold. Bore arcs rake me. Rooks white and blue. Crooks impaled in stews. Crews look. Barbequed forks. Tynes impale tots. Le mot juste.
Unlike you, I’m not interested in le mot juste, and I can’t evoke a scene. I myself am preoccupied with other things. It’s all vowels, all speech, not thought. I can sense your indifference to my experiments. I would have thought you would have done this other thing which I was thinking about doing, or would have done had I been you. And though I’m not, I’m more than enough, and for you can stand in, and can stand within your shoes, and can know there, just what you need. I wouldn’t have done what you have done myself, but can imagine what would be good for you: I can stand in your shoes. Inside your shoes I think that this is not the place for you, that this you should not do, and were I you, the other thing I would have done. Of this I sing–dead or wounded pigeons in abandoned buildings or hopping on park benches, abandoned elevator shafts, flags fluttering in breezes, broken wings fluttering. Sour milk in the carton but spilled, half in, half out. Tacky playground swings and mine shafts. The fall of light through milky cataracted window panes in shafts. I home on debris–I can’t describe it though. I break the line to violate convention, to be difficult. Broken glass, studs with rusty nails, gravel or sawdust, guano: standard paraphernalia. Monochrome, restricted vocabulary, including color-words, textures only feathered, dusted, or granular, or surfaces porous, or dry, or disintegrated and crumbling. Public parks the places, not sunny fairgrounds.
The explanation of this phenomenon being that neural fibers communicate impulses from the brain to the ear as readily as in the other, more predictable direction. And that the melodies speed up, and are persistent, but could you recite silently to yourself Heilig Nacht, they would disappear. And that the music of the spheres consists of the rubbing together of the surfaces of two crystal spheres at points where there are scratches or tiny, crystalline fragments etching the spheres, or vibrating them until each one vibrates in a single tone like the wineglasses whose edges are stroked by the nimblest index fingers to broadcast a note as pure as any stringed instrument played expertly in a conservatory, a resonance coaxed from wood or glass. The fibers from the brain to ear are as glassine and as sensitive to vibrations as fiber-optic cable. The neural fibers as glass can be shattered as crystal or glass can.
The music that we think we hear we make, and would be true of the songwriter: Mort Schuman’s advice to Ray Davies: find some chords you like, and build a song around them. To build up the song around the chords you like, which were there before you. No words like chords appear around which to build around them. It’s just the medium. Time has passed since I last put words to paper. You can almost hear the sheets of snow melt beneath you as the last icicle drips away on the roof; you can see the heat of the sun as it fills the air. The ledges of snow on the banks melt, the crows are waiting in the trees, the Eighth Symphony ends, a volume is written, but it’s nothing to be valued, unlike Pepys’ diary, or lines crossed out; that were negated but which nonetheless the present embraced. That the author negated but which the present embraced. There were no magic markers then.
******
Benumbed, and numb as a pounded thump. Dump as a thumb, as a pounded stump. Sump, stump, pump, and dump. Liquified assets, liquified gas, a contradiction–such as change of state? A chant of stage, a rant from a cage, my purple prism. Emprismed the core arcs from the manifold. Bore arcs rake me. Rooks white and blue. Crooks impaled in stews. Crews look. Barbequed forks. Tynes impale tots. Le mot juste.
Unlike you, I’m not interested in le mot juste, and I can’t evoke a scene. I myself am preoccupied with other things. It’s all vowels, all speech, not thought. I can sense your indifference to my experiments. I would have thought you would have done this other thing which I was thinking about doing, or would have done had I been you. And though I’m not, I’m more than enough, and for you can stand in, and can stand within your shoes, and can know there, just what you need. I wouldn’t have done what you have done myself, but can imagine what would be good for you: I can stand in your shoes. Inside your shoes I think that this is not the place for you, that this you should not do, and were I you, the other thing I would have done. Of this I sing–dead or wounded pigeons in abandoned buildings or hopping on park benches, abandoned elevator shafts, flags fluttering in breezes, broken wings fluttering. Sour milk in the carton but spilled, half in, half out. Tacky playground swings and mine shafts. The fall of light through milky cataracted window panes in shafts. I home on debris–I can’t describe it though. I break the line to violate convention, to be difficult. Broken glass, studs with rusty nails, gravel or sawdust, guano: standard paraphernalia. Monochrome, restricted vocabulary, including color-words, textures only feathered, dusted, or granular, or surfaces porous, or dry, or disintegrated and crumbling. Public parks the places, not sunny fairgrounds.
This Place Is Taken (03-04?)
Tit for tat,
this tic-tac-toe,
ex or zero,
one negation,
the other absence
Arabs invented
to complement more.
X is outside,
a letter for suffixes,
cross-road,
not bird’s foot.
to overstrike a space
and say hands off
x precludes
another system,
excludes the zero.
Zero leads to plus one.
X however is off-limits,
the square not for sale
when x lands there,
no-man’s land measured
in the space that zero made.
How level
the playing-field?
No fix possible,
a meager place,
no board like Risk,
no yardage.
Which is larger?
The latter’s promise
never actualized,
the former without clue.
No fixed size
for space for tic-tac-toe,
no city-state, no fortress
or hecatomb for treasure,
no No trespass sign
to nowhere:
Without a clue,
X naysays zero,
and zero denies x
a permanent fixture
in the matrix,
nine squares with borders
only to be assumed,
undrawn: no room to move.
this tic-tac-toe,
ex or zero,
one negation,
the other absence
Arabs invented
to complement more.
X is outside,
a letter for suffixes,
cross-road,
not bird’s foot.
to overstrike a space
and say hands off
x precludes
another system,
excludes the zero.
Zero leads to plus one.
X however is off-limits,
the square not for sale
when x lands there,
no-man’s land measured
in the space that zero made.
How level
the playing-field?
No fix possible,
a meager place,
no board like Risk,
no yardage.
Which is larger?
The latter’s promise
never actualized,
the former without clue.
No fixed size
for space for tic-tac-toe,
no city-state, no fortress
or hecatomb for treasure,
no No trespass sign
to nowhere:
Without a clue,
X naysays zero,
and zero denies x
a permanent fixture
in the matrix,
nine squares with borders
only to be assumed,
undrawn: no room to move.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
On (or The Anvil Song) (11/8/07)
You can hear his hand slide along the guitar neck
as Julian Bream plays a Bach cantata,
you can see and hear the machinations of the stage,
see the turning of the music sheets and readjustment of the stands
and the positioning of the viols between the knees
and then witness the lowering of the lights.
You see and hear the mike booms locked in place
the manual repositioning of snake-like wiring on the stage floor,
see the raising of the painted sets on the desert film-lot
hear the hammer and the saw behind the facade.
You can see the desert is painted but not the paint-by-numbers
you see the stencils on the canvas-backed chairs and equipment lockers
and the wardrobes cast onto the floor.
You can hear commands to raise the boom or put the lights out
you see the painted scenery and hear the grunt of the pianist
which in proportion to the harmony of the piece is atonal
you see the constellations and the scaffolding
and the printing of luminiscent images of morning hung on the passenger bus
and the gears behind the facade of the clock that hangs above City Hall
as the moon hung over the trees and the sun in the west hung over the hill
you can hear the hand creak as the web between thumb and forefinger
rubs the neck of the guitar as the Bach cantata is played
You hear the foot as loudly as the pedal and the string hit by the plectrum.
You see the plywood sets raised on the edge of the desert,
the highway behind the Roman slave revolt
hear the engines of the junked cars in the deserts idle
as clearly as the operations it takes to make the constellations appear on a clear night.
You see the day set raised and the set for night brought down
as clearly as the hand that turns the Open sign to Closed or Occupied to Vacant.
You see the luminiscence of gears behind the clockface and the idling of the engine in the desert.
You hear the intangible become as palpable as a navel orange or an acorn or beer-can tossed in a cow-pond.
********
You can hear the fence palings driven into the soft ground
and the squish of the boot-heel as vividly as the sound
of the CitiCard slipped into the ATM and the rattle of bills
the cash dispenser spits, a slot behind two rubber rollers
fitted with sensors to prevent the dispensation of too much money in bills.
This is the house in a blue state Citicard built in its marketing department
and along with the old folks singing while the old man plucks a ukelele
that is also part of the overall marketing strategy, as if to say,
you don't just purchase a thing with this card, you purchase a life (so get one)
not just the rafters and the roof-beams and the studs and floor-joists
but what happens in the space of living-room, kitchen, bedroom and foyer
the sensibility in addition to the tasteful things that constitute the sensibility
the material that buttresses and shapes the character of the spirit
belief of which can incriminate: not the other way around, kid.
**************
Hear the clink of the anvil over the Atwater-Kent amid the steam of bean sprouts
and the thousand-strong sound of mites chewing into the blades of corn
or Chinese cabbage in the kitchen-garden, or the unctuous squish of red slugs
as they methodically consume the translucently pale green leaves of lettuce
into skeletal remains, like the denuded boundaries of lights on amusement rides.
The kitchen garden is a seething of blonde wings and black eggs and broken tares.
When you close your eyes you envisage worms orbiting pebbles in clods of earth
and you falsely suspect the order of things underneath to be concentric.
The opera music between the clink of anvils could put you to sleep.
Could there be many anvils hit by hammers or is there only one hammer.
You know that after the breaking of hammers, only the anvil remains.
Do not porpoises receive the scars of outboard motor propellers as scores
or half-moons as bears do or manatees, that most distant cousin of elephant
and hyrax, beaver-like in size yet an ungulate with the sheep and alpaca,
chewing its cud while sunning itself on a rock in deserts or among mountains
of the Levant? dreaming of its scarred-up cousins underneath outboards.
as Julian Bream plays a Bach cantata,
you can see and hear the machinations of the stage,
see the turning of the music sheets and readjustment of the stands
and the positioning of the viols between the knees
and then witness the lowering of the lights.
You see and hear the mike booms locked in place
the manual repositioning of snake-like wiring on the stage floor,
see the raising of the painted sets on the desert film-lot
hear the hammer and the saw behind the facade.
You can see the desert is painted but not the paint-by-numbers
you see the stencils on the canvas-backed chairs and equipment lockers
and the wardrobes cast onto the floor.
You can hear commands to raise the boom or put the lights out
you see the painted scenery and hear the grunt of the pianist
which in proportion to the harmony of the piece is atonal
you see the constellations and the scaffolding
and the printing of luminiscent images of morning hung on the passenger bus
and the gears behind the facade of the clock that hangs above City Hall
as the moon hung over the trees and the sun in the west hung over the hill
you can hear the hand creak as the web between thumb and forefinger
rubs the neck of the guitar as the Bach cantata is played
You hear the foot as loudly as the pedal and the string hit by the plectrum.
You see the plywood sets raised on the edge of the desert,
the highway behind the Roman slave revolt
hear the engines of the junked cars in the deserts idle
as clearly as the operations it takes to make the constellations appear on a clear night.
You see the day set raised and the set for night brought down
as clearly as the hand that turns the Open sign to Closed or Occupied to Vacant.
You see the luminiscence of gears behind the clockface and the idling of the engine in the desert.
You hear the intangible become as palpable as a navel orange or an acorn or beer-can tossed in a cow-pond.
********
You can hear the fence palings driven into the soft ground
and the squish of the boot-heel as vividly as the sound
of the CitiCard slipped into the ATM and the rattle of bills
the cash dispenser spits, a slot behind two rubber rollers
fitted with sensors to prevent the dispensation of too much money in bills.
This is the house in a blue state Citicard built in its marketing department
and along with the old folks singing while the old man plucks a ukelele
that is also part of the overall marketing strategy, as if to say,
you don't just purchase a thing with this card, you purchase a life (so get one)
not just the rafters and the roof-beams and the studs and floor-joists
but what happens in the space of living-room, kitchen, bedroom and foyer
the sensibility in addition to the tasteful things that constitute the sensibility
the material that buttresses and shapes the character of the spirit
belief of which can incriminate: not the other way around, kid.
**************
Hear the clink of the anvil over the Atwater-Kent amid the steam of bean sprouts
and the thousand-strong sound of mites chewing into the blades of corn
or Chinese cabbage in the kitchen-garden, or the unctuous squish of red slugs
as they methodically consume the translucently pale green leaves of lettuce
into skeletal remains, like the denuded boundaries of lights on amusement rides.
The kitchen garden is a seething of blonde wings and black eggs and broken tares.
When you close your eyes you envisage worms orbiting pebbles in clods of earth
and you falsely suspect the order of things underneath to be concentric.
The opera music between the clink of anvils could put you to sleep.
Could there be many anvils hit by hammers or is there only one hammer.
You know that after the breaking of hammers, only the anvil remains.
Do not porpoises receive the scars of outboard motor propellers as scores
or half-moons as bears do or manatees, that most distant cousin of elephant
and hyrax, beaver-like in size yet an ungulate with the sheep and alpaca,
chewing its cud while sunning itself on a rock in deserts or among mountains
of the Levant? dreaming of its scarred-up cousins underneath outboards.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Freedom Isn't Free (05)
There the matter ends: a foot forward
pivots you, or you’re up against a wall,
the plywood barrier your sole support.
The riskiest among them graze the novice:
good skaters never crash into another.
If science is embedded in the bones,
freedom is a knowledge of the law,
and laws are circular. Without law,
how things fly, novice families or couples
crashing in the barrier supporting them.
Faster, they fall apart, as marble limbs
shatter from Adonis, or bones rattle,
bones a statue never even knew it had.
Without a law, even ribbons on the cars
can mean nothing. Freedom isn’t free
says science rules. Then the text fades,
then colors, and the stickers fall away.
But the message only means one thing:
even speed and abandon have barriers,
or perhaps there is a price to be paid.
Skaters leaning toward an empty center
cannot stay there. Even the novice knows
enough to stay aside. The expert spins
as close as anyone, yet never hits a center
X marks, marks daubed blindly aqua-blue.
No laws, no freedom, momentum only,
only bodies flung from the systems
to which they consent, sun and sun-king
and groundling leaning from the center,
referees policing the speed-skaters,
retired men as likely as younger ones
with gold chains or celebrity player shirts,
driving cars with ribbons on the trunks.
Some exhort, say freedom isn’t free.
Law twists bows, demands tricolors,
stamps these ribbons saying freedom,
repeating that even freedom isn’t free--
why skaters never bump into another:
science has been buried in their bones.
A body that cannot lean to the center
flies away, outcast from the roller rink.
But neither can you pirouette in place
because true centers lack expanse,
in your dreams a point, unlike land,
which sprawls on every side half-filled
with fender-bent cars with ribbons
reminding readers what they knew,
how good to be shaken by the speed
before you collide and meet your limits,
when you neglected to lean to the center
you could neither reach nor stand upon,
not reach exactly, but neither could ignore,
nor tag, nor pin a flag upon to certify.
pivots you, or you’re up against a wall,
the plywood barrier your sole support.
The riskiest among them graze the novice:
good skaters never crash into another.
If science is embedded in the bones,
freedom is a knowledge of the law,
and laws are circular. Without law,
how things fly, novice families or couples
crashing in the barrier supporting them.
Faster, they fall apart, as marble limbs
shatter from Adonis, or bones rattle,
bones a statue never even knew it had.
Without a law, even ribbons on the cars
can mean nothing. Freedom isn’t free
says science rules. Then the text fades,
then colors, and the stickers fall away.
But the message only means one thing:
even speed and abandon have barriers,
or perhaps there is a price to be paid.
Skaters leaning toward an empty center
cannot stay there. Even the novice knows
enough to stay aside. The expert spins
as close as anyone, yet never hits a center
X marks, marks daubed blindly aqua-blue.
No laws, no freedom, momentum only,
only bodies flung from the systems
to which they consent, sun and sun-king
and groundling leaning from the center,
referees policing the speed-skaters,
retired men as likely as younger ones
with gold chains or celebrity player shirts,
driving cars with ribbons on the trunks.
Some exhort, say freedom isn’t free.
Law twists bows, demands tricolors,
stamps these ribbons saying freedom,
repeating that even freedom isn’t free--
why skaters never bump into another:
science has been buried in their bones.
A body that cannot lean to the center
flies away, outcast from the roller rink.
But neither can you pirouette in place
because true centers lack expanse,
in your dreams a point, unlike land,
which sprawls on every side half-filled
with fender-bent cars with ribbons
reminding readers what they knew,
how good to be shaken by the speed
before you collide and meet your limits,
when you neglected to lean to the center
you could neither reach nor stand upon,
not reach exactly, but neither could ignore,
nor tag, nor pin a flag upon to certify.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
500 Yard Stare
Jimmy Stanley stumble-bummed,
wore those goofy Buddy Holly glasses,
black frames and tape on the bridge,
just another greaser with sideburns.
(But he was unashamed of the glasses:
fashion later came from shame.)
Came Vietnam, and once discharged,
he stared through his former buddies.
Had you asked Jimmy for a cigarette,
he’d give you the pack, and look away.
But when his eye-beams pierced clouds
to seek the serenest of solar systems,
five-hundred yards became thousands.
Although fellow veteran Billy stumbled too,
being a speed-freak and a womanizer,
their commiseration tied him to the ground.
Not Jimmy – less popular, a larger figure though,
far more earnest. To hear galaxies,
he had to be still. He needed the serenity
of vermin, of the river-rat in the sedge,
of the blue-bottle fly on the ceiling,
of all creatures waiting for their day.
To Jimmy, thought was being. To stop
was an escape. That’s what he practiced.
One place on earth on which
he didn’t want to be was just as good
as any other, as good as all of them,
as rooms he found himself in, as good
as any room on earth, or empty square
in some resort town, provided his stare
could plane from the sphere to what
had never been touched or described.
For that he didn’t need glasses
nor bridges, nor seas they straddled
nor land they stretched between
to move from one ship sinking to another.
wore those goofy Buddy Holly glasses,
black frames and tape on the bridge,
just another greaser with sideburns.
(But he was unashamed of the glasses:
fashion later came from shame.)
Came Vietnam, and once discharged,
he stared through his former buddies.
Had you asked Jimmy for a cigarette,
he’d give you the pack, and look away.
But when his eye-beams pierced clouds
to seek the serenest of solar systems,
five-hundred yards became thousands.
Although fellow veteran Billy stumbled too,
being a speed-freak and a womanizer,
their commiseration tied him to the ground.
Not Jimmy – less popular, a larger figure though,
far more earnest. To hear galaxies,
he had to be still. He needed the serenity
of vermin, of the river-rat in the sedge,
of the blue-bottle fly on the ceiling,
of all creatures waiting for their day.
To Jimmy, thought was being. To stop
was an escape. That’s what he practiced.
One place on earth on which
he didn’t want to be was just as good
as any other, as good as all of them,
as rooms he found himself in, as good
as any room on earth, or empty square
in some resort town, provided his stare
could plane from the sphere to what
had never been touched or described.
For that he didn’t need glasses
nor bridges, nor seas they straddled
nor land they stretched between
to move from one ship sinking to another.
Aug. 4 2003
Fogging the mirror-glass in the bathroom
and writing on mist curses or Christian names,
or tic-tac-toe, though misted over at first,
to clean the specks off from sporadic flossings
or foam-spots that fly from the toothbrush
and fingerprints, white whorls that to the forensic examiner
would say enough, silenced with the sponge
swiped across the surface. Now tabula rasa, we rebuild ourselves
before the mirror, according to movies and the deeds
of their protagonists, who manage a flippancy in peril
that would get the rest of us fired. Lotus pads
in rock pools, their leaves reflecting the canopy of jungle
flowers pulverized in fat and packed in tiny alabaster jars
bronze mirrors through which a gauleiter thoughtfully regards his wig
of Jeri curls.... Tiki torches release their firelight in a vertical stream.
Mortification of the razor and lather, eyelashes to be trimmed
or plucked, unwanted body hair removed at a premium,
even the fingers massaged in marble bowls with rose-water
and the sword-hilt polished. A shepherd runs after a girl
down the spine, and a chasing of orchards and sheep...
some stagger into brambles and smell the eucalyptus,
and the running man’s legs fleecy. Were this not in bronze,
the woman would be Rubensian pink and rose tinges
with her sunbonnet off, her pubis sandy, her hips wide as
viola da gambas! But the scene terminates
where the bare sword tapers. Mars on the other side rules.
If he shaved he would have had the rocky pragmatic face
of Titus Vespasian or some wise guy. Beards are good that way,
disguising the blemishes, acne scars, deep pockets
make-up can’t brush off. Around my wisdom-tooth
are pockets that I cannot clean. They need to be removed
is the professional opinion. Tiny as they are,
they push the rest of the teeth in the wrong direction,
with their crowns, their amalgam, disguised as ivory,
the constant metal bridges that run above short valleys
burnished to seem as if they’ve melted into the four humps
of the incisor, or the other teeth that grind and grind.
They are razor-like for biting, the same principle behind
the clam: the shell extends by secretions of calcium
lengthwise, and the mouth is the principle bridge
between the air and the internal organs that are said
to move with the sea. This rumor has been disclaimed.
In their efforts to get underground, the roots of hardwoods
tumble over one another and knot above the soil in bolls
that are not to most unseemly. Toenails can be strong
as coins or cowrie shells, if not cut for art’s sake.
and writing on mist curses or Christian names,
or tic-tac-toe, though misted over at first,
to clean the specks off from sporadic flossings
or foam-spots that fly from the toothbrush
and fingerprints, white whorls that to the forensic examiner
would say enough, silenced with the sponge
swiped across the surface. Now tabula rasa, we rebuild ourselves
before the mirror, according to movies and the deeds
of their protagonists, who manage a flippancy in peril
that would get the rest of us fired. Lotus pads
in rock pools, their leaves reflecting the canopy of jungle
flowers pulverized in fat and packed in tiny alabaster jars
bronze mirrors through which a gauleiter thoughtfully regards his wig
of Jeri curls.... Tiki torches release their firelight in a vertical stream.
Mortification of the razor and lather, eyelashes to be trimmed
or plucked, unwanted body hair removed at a premium,
even the fingers massaged in marble bowls with rose-water
and the sword-hilt polished. A shepherd runs after a girl
down the spine, and a chasing of orchards and sheep...
some stagger into brambles and smell the eucalyptus,
and the running man’s legs fleecy. Were this not in bronze,
the woman would be Rubensian pink and rose tinges
with her sunbonnet off, her pubis sandy, her hips wide as
viola da gambas! But the scene terminates
where the bare sword tapers. Mars on the other side rules.
If he shaved he would have had the rocky pragmatic face
of Titus Vespasian or some wise guy. Beards are good that way,
disguising the blemishes, acne scars, deep pockets
make-up can’t brush off. Around my wisdom-tooth
are pockets that I cannot clean. They need to be removed
is the professional opinion. Tiny as they are,
they push the rest of the teeth in the wrong direction,
with their crowns, their amalgam, disguised as ivory,
the constant metal bridges that run above short valleys
burnished to seem as if they’ve melted into the four humps
of the incisor, or the other teeth that grind and grind.
They are razor-like for biting, the same principle behind
the clam: the shell extends by secretions of calcium
lengthwise, and the mouth is the principle bridge
between the air and the internal organs that are said
to move with the sea. This rumor has been disclaimed.
In their efforts to get underground, the roots of hardwoods
tumble over one another and knot above the soil in bolls
that are not to most unseemly. Toenails can be strong
as coins or cowrie shells, if not cut for art’s sake.
Imported
I orient my eye toward a throne,
some cheap Chinese papasan
propped before the picture window,
sturdied for the fattest potentate,
at left his personal laundry hamper,
his ice cream suit worn only once
to be burned in the wicker vessel
with socks, soiled undies, jock du jour.
And what about el jefe's bath towels?
Are there cubbies enough for a king?
Wicker shelving does the trick (his plebs
covertly drinking bathwater for power).
Grab fistfuls of commodious blue goblets
from that farther aisle for kitchenware,
proper for aqua minerale at state dinners,
also doable for wine, and emptied,
iridiscent as polluted sunsets on bridges
or voids chased with comet trails,
glittering when crushed on a cul-de-sac
on which bare feet could bleed.
Save crystal for his abhorrence of vacuums,
distract him with the frosted scrolls
that masquerade as light released
from the bluest gloomiest glaciers.
However, this is no one-stop shop
without a hospital tunic or a shroud,
no eucalyptus leaves for his innards,
pomade or greasepaint for flash-bulbs
or ceremonial silver spade for ashes
ladled in the urn at the throne’s foot,
straw too, its cover unsecured, floppy--
for dried flower brooms, bric-a-brac.
some cheap Chinese papasan
propped before the picture window,
sturdied for the fattest potentate,
at left his personal laundry hamper,
his ice cream suit worn only once
to be burned in the wicker vessel
with socks, soiled undies, jock du jour.
And what about el jefe's bath towels?
Are there cubbies enough for a king?
Wicker shelving does the trick (his plebs
covertly drinking bathwater for power).
Grab fistfuls of commodious blue goblets
from that farther aisle for kitchenware,
proper for aqua minerale at state dinners,
also doable for wine, and emptied,
iridiscent as polluted sunsets on bridges
or voids chased with comet trails,
glittering when crushed on a cul-de-sac
on which bare feet could bleed.
Save crystal for his abhorrence of vacuums,
distract him with the frosted scrolls
that masquerade as light released
from the bluest gloomiest glaciers.
However, this is no one-stop shop
without a hospital tunic or a shroud,
no eucalyptus leaves for his innards,
pomade or greasepaint for flash-bulbs
or ceremonial silver spade for ashes
ladled in the urn at the throne’s foot,
straw too, its cover unsecured, floppy--
for dried flower brooms, bric-a-brac.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Untitled (Spring 07)
While reading Jude my glasses blurred.
And when I shut the lights I saw the Milky Way.
Space, all scattered with pinpricks, wasn’t black yet.
And when I closed my eyes, a storm erupted on the sun.
Without the light on earth, you could see by stars alone
Only it would be cold, and without light, so’d go the heat.
We’d have to burn the woods much faster to get warm.
Jude’s situation in the book was only getting worse.
I wondered whether Hardy moved his characters
Around like puppets by which children play fatality scenes.
Yes, things could get bad, but is it usually so bad?
That late at night there wasn’t light enough to read,
Half the world darker, but the other half bright,
Just as a water glass is either half empty or half full.
People rose bright and shiny, as others settled down,
A wave of people rose to the dawn or lied down to rest.
The harvesters churned in the field, and a tower blinked.
Night after night, I wondered how flawed my vision was.
Could I learn braille, and learn to read the world by touch?
As pages blurred, lights were going out for Jude and me.
It might be said, with gnostics, bright skies lie behind the dark--
why Heaven’s Gate boarded their Hale-Bopp comet-space-ship,
Leaving their baggage behind, their orcheotomies half-healed,
Their life-paths terminated in some heiress-donated bungalow,
Among clean sheets, all eyes in ascetically cropped and tilted heads
still glazed and serene.
And when I shut the lights I saw the Milky Way.
Space, all scattered with pinpricks, wasn’t black yet.
And when I closed my eyes, a storm erupted on the sun.
Without the light on earth, you could see by stars alone
Only it would be cold, and without light, so’d go the heat.
We’d have to burn the woods much faster to get warm.
Jude’s situation in the book was only getting worse.
I wondered whether Hardy moved his characters
Around like puppets by which children play fatality scenes.
Yes, things could get bad, but is it usually so bad?
That late at night there wasn’t light enough to read,
Half the world darker, but the other half bright,
Just as a water glass is either half empty or half full.
People rose bright and shiny, as others settled down,
A wave of people rose to the dawn or lied down to rest.
The harvesters churned in the field, and a tower blinked.
Night after night, I wondered how flawed my vision was.
Could I learn braille, and learn to read the world by touch?
As pages blurred, lights were going out for Jude and me.
It might be said, with gnostics, bright skies lie behind the dark--
why Heaven’s Gate boarded their Hale-Bopp comet-space-ship,
Leaving their baggage behind, their orcheotomies half-healed,
Their life-paths terminated in some heiress-donated bungalow,
Among clean sheets, all eyes in ascetically cropped and tilted heads
still glazed and serene.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
On Track (2002-2004?)
1.
How much depends upon this thing perspective
when I run the track machine through the stars--
the stars beneath me strung among the saplings,
every tree on the main drag a vortex of light
either silvery white or white gold, meeting
visible constellations on the picture window
(hearsay tells) are filled with gas that keep
away weather -- so stars are gas, and inflammable.
But how much does all this geometry matter,
the light arrived, the gold stars aged the most?
(No mentor to plaster a single one approvingly
upon my bit of third-grade construction paper,
imperial purple backdrop for gold to flash more).
When the sun sets all the insulated windows weep.
Bodies moving on machines to ape earth’s curvature,
how ships have fallen from horizons to rise elsewhere.
So if I run enough, who sees me vanish? Who catches me?
Better yet, how catch myself in medias res, as from myself
I run, a dog who tries to catch the can tied to its tail?
2.
And how this daily work-out sets you back some.
Either blurred or super-imposed upon themselves
in the picture window: the office building’s date,
walls of gold statutes, ribbed alphanumeric spines
single decades fatten until there’s barely room
for stairwells threading offices to the lobby,
and sprawled across their curtains, me -- t-shirt stretched,
running over the heavens. My blurred likenesses
are viewed through Vaseline-daubed lenses,
some B-movie gimmick: silent space-walk
in a sound age. Between the overlaps of the old,
the younger self is wanted, but the apparitions, wisdom
and beauty, don’t join -- my liquid crystal display catches,
nor inches, illuminates: runner’s wall. Were this daylight,
I wouldn’t see myself, since by day you can’t peek in.
By night, all that is missing from your life is revealed
outside this brick parallelogram, the interior broken
to parapets and mirrors, the polish of brass hand-rails,
the elevator shaft a bronze and living advertisement.
Shops for haute couture and photocopies mock you.
Flower-shops recall the time you have to race against.
For whom are the bouquets amassed, lovers or the passed-away?
Once their star-bursts were snapshot through telescopes
that groaned for these moments, many moons ago.
3.
In the apothecary, an apprentice’s washrag
wiped the seething from vials, their frosted glass stoppered.
Back in the day they taught these purgatives
were aqua vitae, despite their sting on application,
as they delivered panaceas or cures, for hysteria,
piles, difficult pregnancies, headaches, mortality.
With nausea or sweats you might expel your ailment,
as demons were cast from swine into bodies of water.
Law relied upon its gutting. The wooden racks
contained an antiquated magic tossed into night
with the blank scrips and ceramic mortar and pestle.
Now that library ladders slide across a finished century,
each year yields another gold book, another ribbed ingot.
How much depends upon this thing perspective
when I run the track machine through the stars--
the stars beneath me strung among the saplings,
every tree on the main drag a vortex of light
either silvery white or white gold, meeting
visible constellations on the picture window
(hearsay tells) are filled with gas that keep
away weather -- so stars are gas, and inflammable.
But how much does all this geometry matter,
the light arrived, the gold stars aged the most?
(No mentor to plaster a single one approvingly
upon my bit of third-grade construction paper,
imperial purple backdrop for gold to flash more).
When the sun sets all the insulated windows weep.
Bodies moving on machines to ape earth’s curvature,
how ships have fallen from horizons to rise elsewhere.
So if I run enough, who sees me vanish? Who catches me?
Better yet, how catch myself in medias res, as from myself
I run, a dog who tries to catch the can tied to its tail?
2.
And how this daily work-out sets you back some.
Either blurred or super-imposed upon themselves
in the picture window: the office building’s date,
walls of gold statutes, ribbed alphanumeric spines
single decades fatten until there’s barely room
for stairwells threading offices to the lobby,
and sprawled across their curtains, me -- t-shirt stretched,
running over the heavens. My blurred likenesses
are viewed through Vaseline-daubed lenses,
some B-movie gimmick: silent space-walk
in a sound age. Between the overlaps of the old,
the younger self is wanted, but the apparitions, wisdom
and beauty, don’t join -- my liquid crystal display catches,
nor inches, illuminates: runner’s wall. Were this daylight,
I wouldn’t see myself, since by day you can’t peek in.
By night, all that is missing from your life is revealed
outside this brick parallelogram, the interior broken
to parapets and mirrors, the polish of brass hand-rails,
the elevator shaft a bronze and living advertisement.
Shops for haute couture and photocopies mock you.
Flower-shops recall the time you have to race against.
For whom are the bouquets amassed, lovers or the passed-away?
Once their star-bursts were snapshot through telescopes
that groaned for these moments, many moons ago.
3.
In the apothecary, an apprentice’s washrag
wiped the seething from vials, their frosted glass stoppered.
Back in the day they taught these purgatives
were aqua vitae, despite their sting on application,
as they delivered panaceas or cures, for hysteria,
piles, difficult pregnancies, headaches, mortality.
With nausea or sweats you might expel your ailment,
as demons were cast from swine into bodies of water.
Law relied upon its gutting. The wooden racks
contained an antiquated magic tossed into night
with the blank scrips and ceramic mortar and pestle.
Now that library ladders slide across a finished century,
each year yields another gold book, another ribbed ingot.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Yellow Book ('98?)
The house’s previous owner
have left her books behind, and a travel diary.
They've eaten their dinner and look up to pose.
Then there is the snapshot of a campesino.
The rim of his sombrero shadowing him, he leans
against the telegraph building in Mexico City,
the serape draped around his shoulders.
He looks at the ground and carries a staff.
The diarist, the wife, comments how thankful they are
for the rule of Diaz -- how quiet he keeps things!
Glossy photographs buckle above the dry paper
breaking into dusty triangles where the pages brown.
Suddenly there’s Egypt, the pyramids of Cheops
and a Nile ferryman, turbaned, background figure
leaning on a barge pole, water grey as sheets of desert
in the pyramidal scenes, with men proceeding on camels
you imagine slowly, in heat that withers all it touches,
until an entry comes: George has done a watercolor
of canals and an oasis, with palms that frame a sphinx--
We are thankful for the king. How quiet he has kept the place!
Our daughter has announced her engagement. We are winding up
our tour, and plan to catch the Hamburg line.
We'll be rowed on the barge to Alexandria, then
ride a gondola for the first time. On we'll sail,
George will sketch places, canals and barges mostly ...
fronds of palm to frame all. The ruler will quiet the mob,
the country sedate where men will glide on rafts all day,
their faces in the shadows of their headgear
and when they don't ride rafts, their donkeys plod
the newly swept back- street of the hamlet, placid too,
as a canal where the ferryman rafts to destinations
impossible to foretell because he moves so slowly ...
When our daughter weds she will spend her honeymoon
on a barge like this, and a man whose face she can't see
will be rowing. Heat prevents you from seeing him.
They will stop to dine and be photographed at the table
and mail us postcards stamped at several destinations.
But the postcards will not get to us for months, watercolors
of a scene that is placid because the king has kept it so
and the marauders have been kept at a distance, and barges
can float on canals without a thought of destinations ...
and affairs move so slowly, and we can eat a late supper...
The rest of the library, Infernos, Sonnets to the Portugese,
was tossed in the trash. And after her stroke,
the previous owner couldn’t fill the blanks in
about her predecessor, who also left the book--
only stone canals like corridors and pink water
lorded over by stilled green bursts of the date palm,
mother and daughter murmuring gibberish as father
paints water-scenes water also bleeds through or bonds,
pink sunsets, pale yellows that bleed into vellum
until the log becomes a single word, becomes yellow.
have left her books behind, and a travel diary.
They've eaten their dinner and look up to pose.
Then there is the snapshot of a campesino.
The rim of his sombrero shadowing him, he leans
against the telegraph building in Mexico City,
the serape draped around his shoulders.
He looks at the ground and carries a staff.
The diarist, the wife, comments how thankful they are
for the rule of Diaz -- how quiet he keeps things!
Glossy photographs buckle above the dry paper
breaking into dusty triangles where the pages brown.
Suddenly there’s Egypt, the pyramids of Cheops
and a Nile ferryman, turbaned, background figure
leaning on a barge pole, water grey as sheets of desert
in the pyramidal scenes, with men proceeding on camels
you imagine slowly, in heat that withers all it touches,
until an entry comes: George has done a watercolor
of canals and an oasis, with palms that frame a sphinx--
We are thankful for the king. How quiet he has kept the place!
Our daughter has announced her engagement. We are winding up
our tour, and plan to catch the Hamburg line.
We'll be rowed on the barge to Alexandria, then
ride a gondola for the first time. On we'll sail,
George will sketch places, canals and barges mostly ...
fronds of palm to frame all. The ruler will quiet the mob,
the country sedate where men will glide on rafts all day,
their faces in the shadows of their headgear
and when they don't ride rafts, their donkeys plod
the newly swept back- street of the hamlet, placid too,
as a canal where the ferryman rafts to destinations
impossible to foretell because he moves so slowly ...
When our daughter weds she will spend her honeymoon
on a barge like this, and a man whose face she can't see
will be rowing. Heat prevents you from seeing him.
They will stop to dine and be photographed at the table
and mail us postcards stamped at several destinations.
But the postcards will not get to us for months, watercolors
of a scene that is placid because the king has kept it so
and the marauders have been kept at a distance, and barges
can float on canals without a thought of destinations ...
and affairs move so slowly, and we can eat a late supper...
The rest of the library, Infernos, Sonnets to the Portugese,
was tossed in the trash. And after her stroke,
the previous owner couldn’t fill the blanks in
about her predecessor, who also left the book--
only stone canals like corridors and pink water
lorded over by stilled green bursts of the date palm,
mother and daughter murmuring gibberish as father
paints water-scenes water also bleeds through or bonds,
pink sunsets, pale yellows that bleed into vellum
until the log becomes a single word, becomes yellow.
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