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.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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.
Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television (Spring 2004)
In Idaho, a freshly-tilled field told Philo Farnsworth
seeds of light could be broadcast through pinholes,
a picture reconstructed at the other end, by someone
who wasn’t your neighbor. His Christian name was love,
the surname he wanted was knowledge. He wanted
to reconstruct the pattern at the other end, so knowledge
could issue green tongues of flame lapping kernels of fire.
A tilled field, a team of horses through the field,
the soil blonde from sun that caught its tousling.
On the other side, maiden knowledge ascending
in a green leafy robe, golden-skinned, Hagia Sophia,
but here, he strained his sight beyond the field:
seeds were broadcast into furrows, each industrious valley
leafy, electrified, with eyes. The telephone lines were harnesses
that swung between the sea-green bells of glass
when hailstorms came. But voices in the lines
leapt oceans he hadn’t seen. How lonely and studious
he would become (qualities not always rewarded).
As they sputtered in his laboratories, induction coils
failed to spark sometimes, and his pilgrimage
did not turn out as he had hoped.
When he did see the ocean, habit dictated
it was fields of water -- no different in fact from a cornfield,
each wave another furrow in a pattern. What was written
on that field though? He felt exhausted after seeing it,
as if he’d plowed through miles of earth to get there
to find his swimmer’s arms fallen, his body prostrate,
the maiden deflowered in sunspots, black cores in searing coronas,
green blades broadcast like the pages of some discredited theory.
Force yourself to think of the world of matter against him.
seeds of light could be broadcast through pinholes,
a picture reconstructed at the other end, by someone
who wasn’t your neighbor. His Christian name was love,
the surname he wanted was knowledge. He wanted
to reconstruct the pattern at the other end, so knowledge
could issue green tongues of flame lapping kernels of fire.
A tilled field, a team of horses through the field,
the soil blonde from sun that caught its tousling.
On the other side, maiden knowledge ascending
in a green leafy robe, golden-skinned, Hagia Sophia,
but here, he strained his sight beyond the field:
seeds were broadcast into furrows, each industrious valley
leafy, electrified, with eyes. The telephone lines were harnesses
that swung between the sea-green bells of glass
when hailstorms came. But voices in the lines
leapt oceans he hadn’t seen. How lonely and studious
he would become (qualities not always rewarded).
As they sputtered in his laboratories, induction coils
failed to spark sometimes, and his pilgrimage
did not turn out as he had hoped.
When he did see the ocean, habit dictated
it was fields of water -- no different in fact from a cornfield,
each wave another furrow in a pattern. What was written
on that field though? He felt exhausted after seeing it,
as if he’d plowed through miles of earth to get there
to find his swimmer’s arms fallen, his body prostrate,
the maiden deflowered in sunspots, black cores in searing coronas,
green blades broadcast like the pages of some discredited theory.
Force yourself to think of the world of matter against him.
This dud's for you (06?)
They did it with trick mirrors, behind the grassy knoll,
Their secret decrees were concealed in pocket umbrellas
on a sunny morning around Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
The second plane didn't crash, and there was no footage.
The puppeteers cobbled together a crisis they could use.
And they were housed in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
angry they couldn't corner the market in mind control.
The puppeteers needed a crisis on which they could prey.
Because it wasn't going to be tax cuts or social security.
Their hold on power was slipping without a crisis at hand.
So they deployed shooters at various points behind the grassy knoll,
and detonated the second building with surplus depth charges
While the second plane was diverted and the jets never scrambled.
They deployed the shooter with an umbrella on Dealey Plaza,
Lee Harvey their patsy. From that distance, he couldn't shoot
a circus elephant zonked out on fucking tranquilizers.
His rifle couldn't graze a trained bear rolling a beach-ball
While a Lincoln Continental with a woman in a pill-box hat
Circled round and round, while one plane crashed the tower
And the second tower was blown into, poof! smoke and mirrors
Like some mascarad stadium rock and roll joker sticking a tongue out
While the signal flares announce the coming of the Antichrist,
To ramp up the urgency of the crisis and distract the masses.
There were actors in that black Lincoln circling the cul-de-sac,
The Book Depository behind them, the second plane not crashing,
And it was done with detonators, with smoke and trick mirrors
they could have lifted from the wreck of the Pacific Ocean Palisades.
Why were the remains and personal effects spirited away so soon?
Where were the ballistic tests, where the dummy with the umbrella?
The umbrella could fire off a couple rounds and still be concealed.
A depth charge, no jet, opened the fifth wall of the Pentagon,
And the second passenger jet never flew into the second tower,
and the towers disappeared in puffs of smoke and trick mirrors,
and the astronauts never walked the moon: a virus was hatched
to eradicate possible troublemakers over the globe before
they could even get started. But they couldn't get the people
who could bend spoons with their minds or see in the dark.
The second plane was diverted from landing, and the fuse was lit.
Lee Harvey couldn't shoot a trained elephant from his perch.
Five or ten shooters were focused on the grassy knoll that day.
In lovely weather the second plane didn't crash but the fuse blew.
The puppeteers fabricated a crisis to get a grip on the populace
through burning buildings that were unholy furnaces.
Six shooters were staged at various points on the grassy knoll.
The man in black umbrella and raincoat stood incongruously
On the curb as the Continental passed, raising his umbrella a hair.
You can see this in the Zapruder film: but they
Clipped the frames that show him as he fires.
The second plane didn't crash. The moonwalk
By the way was staged in a basement theater.
Six shooters fired on Kennedy's skull-cap:
one had to be right. They stained the petals
of the yellow roses on the hood of the Lincoln.
One plane crashed, and the cosmonaut
Treaded in a saline Murmansk water-chamber
like a giddy baby, and one plane crashed,
while the cosmonauts didn't walk the moon,
and the shooters who fired from the grassy knoll
were going far too fast for Mr. Zapruder.
Their secret decrees were concealed in pocket umbrellas
on a sunny morning around Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
The second plane didn't crash, and there was no footage.
The puppeteers cobbled together a crisis they could use.
And they were housed in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
angry they couldn't corner the market in mind control.
The puppeteers needed a crisis on which they could prey.
Because it wasn't going to be tax cuts or social security.
Their hold on power was slipping without a crisis at hand.
So they deployed shooters at various points behind the grassy knoll,
and detonated the second building with surplus depth charges
While the second plane was diverted and the jets never scrambled.
They deployed the shooter with an umbrella on Dealey Plaza,
Lee Harvey their patsy. From that distance, he couldn't shoot
a circus elephant zonked out on fucking tranquilizers.
His rifle couldn't graze a trained bear rolling a beach-ball
While a Lincoln Continental with a woman in a pill-box hat
Circled round and round, while one plane crashed the tower
And the second tower was blown into, poof! smoke and mirrors
Like some mascarad stadium rock and roll joker sticking a tongue out
While the signal flares announce the coming of the Antichrist,
To ramp up the urgency of the crisis and distract the masses.
There were actors in that black Lincoln circling the cul-de-sac,
The Book Depository behind them, the second plane not crashing,
And it was done with detonators, with smoke and trick mirrors
they could have lifted from the wreck of the Pacific Ocean Palisades.
Why were the remains and personal effects spirited away so soon?
Where were the ballistic tests, where the dummy with the umbrella?
The umbrella could fire off a couple rounds and still be concealed.
A depth charge, no jet, opened the fifth wall of the Pentagon,
And the second passenger jet never flew into the second tower,
and the towers disappeared in puffs of smoke and trick mirrors,
and the astronauts never walked the moon: a virus was hatched
to eradicate possible troublemakers over the globe before
they could even get started. But they couldn't get the people
who could bend spoons with their minds or see in the dark.
The second plane was diverted from landing, and the fuse was lit.
Lee Harvey couldn't shoot a trained elephant from his perch.
Five or ten shooters were focused on the grassy knoll that day.
In lovely weather the second plane didn't crash but the fuse blew.
The puppeteers fabricated a crisis to get a grip on the populace
through burning buildings that were unholy furnaces.
Six shooters were staged at various points on the grassy knoll.
The man in black umbrella and raincoat stood incongruously
On the curb as the Continental passed, raising his umbrella a hair.
You can see this in the Zapruder film: but they
Clipped the frames that show him as he fires.
The second plane didn't crash. The moonwalk
By the way was staged in a basement theater.
Six shooters fired on Kennedy's skull-cap:
one had to be right. They stained the petals
of the yellow roses on the hood of the Lincoln.
One plane crashed, and the cosmonaut
Treaded in a saline Murmansk water-chamber
like a giddy baby, and one plane crashed,
while the cosmonauts didn't walk the moon,
and the shooters who fired from the grassy knoll
were going far too fast for Mr. Zapruder.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Lucifer
1. In wandering mazes lost
I was a father once who watched his boy
fashion from his building blocks whole temples,
increase the burial mound of a chieftain of straw
into ziggurat, skip from pyramid to corporate tower
and like miracles incarnate master grids and mirrors
that rose above a Lego-litter in the play-den
and our little builder unaware of that first motive:
just to keep the jackals off the chieftain’s corpse.
I shattered one, refusing to follow this with a moral
and thought promiscuously about DeSade’s remark
how greater innocence brought double pleasure
in its bruising. Or was this schadenfreude?
Did I not describe the complex in some journal article
to create afflictions that demanded cures of money,
all those green or gold-plastered poultices? Surely
it’s on microfiche, and in its narrow field, famous,
as memory is long, too long, or art is long or short,
depending on one’s pleasure. (As bumper stickers tell:
commit random senseless acts of--.) That afternoon
I rambled, kicked backyard leaves, read philosophy, plotted.
2. Satan & Sin, Not Satan & Son
Dark continent, place I can’t reach: daughter
I don’t understand. Her double-coiled hair
looks, oddly enough, like horns of a cuckold,
or are they the induction coils for thunder,
and what will thunder say? Let’s hope
it proclaims an anger vaguely dispersed
and enfeebled, spread across a tepid sea
to look more beautiful, pearly or pink.
Ages apart, we seldom talk. But never
does she raise the question of mother.
Her boyfriends feature body piercings and tattoos.
New metal I don’t understand, chains timeless.
Milton got it wrong alright: when was I ever
squat like a toad? More like a chimpanzee
I watched the first couple in congress.
Pods of something like milkweed
and curly shoots broke under me, and oozed.
How I envied their fumbling incompletion.
How miserably complete I had become,
this assigned address an Alpharetta parking-lot,
from which our house architect, Mulciber,
molded magnificence, from pitch alone.
They even played with it, my underlings.
3.
How simpler to snap together labor camps or prisons,
supermarkets or university systems for Silicon valleys.
How much harder architect Mulciber’s craft, rococo
fashioned from all that Midas would have fled from
for whom nothing ever turned to shit, his life not stalled.
Tears come to my eyes when I think, and freeze.
I was a father once who watched his boy
fashion from his building blocks whole temples,
increase the burial mound of a chieftain of straw
into ziggurat, skip from pyramid to corporate tower
and like miracles incarnate master grids and mirrors
that rose above a Lego-litter in the play-den
and our little builder unaware of that first motive:
just to keep the jackals off the chieftain’s corpse.
I shattered one, refusing to follow this with a moral
and thought promiscuously about DeSade’s remark
how greater innocence brought double pleasure
in its bruising. Or was this schadenfreude?
Did I not describe the complex in some journal article
to create afflictions that demanded cures of money,
all those green or gold-plastered poultices? Surely
it’s on microfiche, and in its narrow field, famous,
as memory is long, too long, or art is long or short,
depending on one’s pleasure. (As bumper stickers tell:
commit random senseless acts of--.) That afternoon
I rambled, kicked backyard leaves, read philosophy, plotted.
2. Satan & Sin, Not Satan & Son
Dark continent, place I can’t reach: daughter
I don’t understand. Her double-coiled hair
looks, oddly enough, like horns of a cuckold,
or are they the induction coils for thunder,
and what will thunder say? Let’s hope
it proclaims an anger vaguely dispersed
and enfeebled, spread across a tepid sea
to look more beautiful, pearly or pink.
Ages apart, we seldom talk. But never
does she raise the question of mother.
Her boyfriends feature body piercings and tattoos.
New metal I don’t understand, chains timeless.
Milton got it wrong alright: when was I ever
squat like a toad? More like a chimpanzee
I watched the first couple in congress.
Pods of something like milkweed
and curly shoots broke under me, and oozed.
How I envied their fumbling incompletion.
How miserably complete I had become,
this assigned address an Alpharetta parking-lot,
from which our house architect, Mulciber,
molded magnificence, from pitch alone.
They even played with it, my underlings.
3.
How simpler to snap together labor camps or prisons,
supermarkets or university systems for Silicon valleys.
How much harder architect Mulciber’s craft, rococo
fashioned from all that Midas would have fled from
for whom nothing ever turned to shit, his life not stalled.
Tears come to my eyes when I think, and freeze.
flotsam, jetsam
The end of the solstice, the end of the world
Starts where you stand, the border
Between this world and the next one
Is where you stand, the threshold
Through which you lift the bride
Of the sun. She was getting a tan
Upon her legs sitting in the plaza.
She was waiting to be carried away.
The carnality of the sun no more
Ebullient than when it bleeds
Into an ocean, yolk-like, heard in the slop
Waters make against a lifeboat.
Where is rescue and potable water.
Here, as you imagined it.
In your dreams. You couldn’t
Get yourself arrested if you tried.
But you can drown in a scoop
Of ice cream: that snowy globe
On which you rest your head
Is half the world, the half that matters.
Starts where you stand, the border
Between this world and the next one
Is where you stand, the threshold
Through which you lift the bride
Of the sun. She was getting a tan
Upon her legs sitting in the plaza.
She was waiting to be carried away.
The carnality of the sun no more
Ebullient than when it bleeds
Into an ocean, yolk-like, heard in the slop
Waters make against a lifeboat.
Where is rescue and potable water.
Here, as you imagined it.
In your dreams. You couldn’t
Get yourself arrested if you tried.
But you can drown in a scoop
Of ice cream: that snowy globe
On which you rest your head
Is half the world, the half that matters.
New Leaves (04)
1.
It’s too late not to start a brand new page
on which new lines have been cancelled.
A pen-stroke settles fates of the displaced.
Guns to butter cannot bring them back.
2.
Sheaves of bank-notes heaped
in safe-deposit vaults move mountains,
get the desert, mosquito-style, side-drilled.
A Bedouin child tosses stones for a border
Gertrude Bell chases on her dromedary.
Sand buries a perforated line of stones.
On maps, this cancellation fails to apply.
3.
As I cancel bad lines, making them
no longer history, I exercise a power
over life and death. Think of pages
miles long and wide, trekked
by dromedaries, surveyed by vultures.
What if my poem were a treaty?
Would it be a broken pie-crust (Lenin)?
Its revision changes nothing,
the capitals bumpy as braille
despite a trench of lines across them.
4.
A mosquito-bite can be a message,
like Marconi’s transatlantic S
beamed from the dunes of Wellfleet.
Sand nearly buried his contraption.
Fire is a message without a verb.
Marconi bettered the performance
when he transmitted a sentence:
greetings, from Teddy to Edward.
5. Marconi Centenary
Sand sways one place to the next--
erosion isn’t absence, it’s displacement.
Which is why the message can’t be sent
from the same sand-mound in Wellfleet.
To paraphrase likewise displaces
and retells what the event was like.
A century was far too long to wait for it.
6. Vicksburg Battlefield, Arabian Peninsula, etc.
Memorials are holes in the ground–
the ironclad shell, the Mississippi
as she shifts west of Vicksburg
(her trenches marked by guidon flags),
or burning wells among sands and tribes
with two-piece suits, kafiyas, cell-phones.
Every cell is replaced in our bodies
until none of the originals are left
until we paraphrase ourselves
and greet ourselves with valedictions--
ciao, our presence cancelled. The ironclad,
its boilers intact, is the semblance
of its fearful self: its crew
were prisoners who fled to tell.
It’s too late not to start a brand new page
on which new lines have been cancelled.
A pen-stroke settles fates of the displaced.
Guns to butter cannot bring them back.
2.
Sheaves of bank-notes heaped
in safe-deposit vaults move mountains,
get the desert, mosquito-style, side-drilled.
A Bedouin child tosses stones for a border
Gertrude Bell chases on her dromedary.
Sand buries a perforated line of stones.
On maps, this cancellation fails to apply.
3.
As I cancel bad lines, making them
no longer history, I exercise a power
over life and death. Think of pages
miles long and wide, trekked
by dromedaries, surveyed by vultures.
What if my poem were a treaty?
Would it be a broken pie-crust (Lenin)?
Its revision changes nothing,
the capitals bumpy as braille
despite a trench of lines across them.
4.
A mosquito-bite can be a message,
like Marconi’s transatlantic S
beamed from the dunes of Wellfleet.
Sand nearly buried his contraption.
Fire is a message without a verb.
Marconi bettered the performance
when he transmitted a sentence:
greetings, from Teddy to Edward.
5. Marconi Centenary
Sand sways one place to the next--
erosion isn’t absence, it’s displacement.
Which is why the message can’t be sent
from the same sand-mound in Wellfleet.
To paraphrase likewise displaces
and retells what the event was like.
A century was far too long to wait for it.
6. Vicksburg Battlefield, Arabian Peninsula, etc.
Memorials are holes in the ground–
the ironclad shell, the Mississippi
as she shifts west of Vicksburg
(her trenches marked by guidon flags),
or burning wells among sands and tribes
with two-piece suits, kafiyas, cell-phones.
Every cell is replaced in our bodies
until none of the originals are left
until we paraphrase ourselves
and greet ourselves with valedictions--
ciao, our presence cancelled. The ironclad,
its boilers intact, is the semblance
of its fearful self: its crew
were prisoners who fled to tell.
undated and untitled
The gunfights began in the street but ended in back alleys.
There were no surgeons nor were there seconds.
The last century began upon the shoulders of the railroads.
But the new century already suffers from faulty design standards.
What I love about poetry is how you can make a statement
You quite literally know is patently untrue!
In the west, all was desert, a vast waste, so very western.
A handful of natives burned grass or tumbleweed.
The few inhabitants hollered. And the settlers cowered,
Wrote letters to their parents, gentlemen farmers.
The town crier announced their abnegation from a stockade.
A bell was pulled in a steeple, a clapper clanged.
All evacuated and moved to a bog somewhere.
The ice was from Indiana, they were on principle
Opposed to deposit bottles. Liquor flowed like water.
Money grew on trees. The empty land parcels
Sprouted new developments, Sears homes shipped
Part by part to your absent door.
You are free to use the railings as a bludgeon.
There were no surgeons nor were there seconds.
The last century began upon the shoulders of the railroads.
But the new century already suffers from faulty design standards.
What I love about poetry is how you can make a statement
You quite literally know is patently untrue!
In the west, all was desert, a vast waste, so very western.
A handful of natives burned grass or tumbleweed.
The few inhabitants hollered. And the settlers cowered,
Wrote letters to their parents, gentlemen farmers.
The town crier announced their abnegation from a stockade.
A bell was pulled in a steeple, a clapper clanged.
All evacuated and moved to a bog somewhere.
The ice was from Indiana, they were on principle
Opposed to deposit bottles. Liquor flowed like water.
Money grew on trees. The empty land parcels
Sprouted new developments, Sears homes shipped
Part by part to your absent door.
You are free to use the railings as a bludgeon.
02-03?
So Ted Serios peered into a camera,
some said) dropping images within.
A cathedral glanced in childhood,
A spacecraft—from memory alone.
His gizmo, so-called, burned them
Into polarized film. His eye-beams
(they claimed) pierced the aperture.
And then when he squeezed that eye
Like Popeye before Brutus,
Boom! Another Polaroid,
Blurry, like from a baby’s eye,
Some bell-hop's art brut.
Embers, phantasmal facades,
Bits of news he channeled
Into blurred shapes kindling film:
tenement or charity hospital,
Though it all turned out untrue.
He was exposed, a charlatan.
So much for his impressions
on a twisted plane, his pop-art.
Where did his phony pictures go,
What basement? Who hears
About these actors past their exits?
Speak what he really saw.
some said) dropping images within.
A cathedral glanced in childhood,
A spacecraft—from memory alone.
His gizmo, so-called, burned them
Into polarized film. His eye-beams
(they claimed) pierced the aperture.
And then when he squeezed that eye
Like Popeye before Brutus,
Boom! Another Polaroid,
Blurry, like from a baby’s eye,
Some bell-hop's art brut.
Embers, phantasmal facades,
Bits of news he channeled
Into blurred shapes kindling film:
tenement or charity hospital,
Though it all turned out untrue.
He was exposed, a charlatan.
So much for his impressions
on a twisted plane, his pop-art.
Where did his phony pictures go,
What basement? Who hears
About these actors past their exits?
Speak what he really saw.
Let's see what sticks (04?)
When it happens, when the time comes,
when it happens to me, when it is a visitation,
let it come naturally, let the visitation come without a shot,
let it be a velvet revolution, a peaceful acquiescence,
the whole army folding its field cap into its back pocket
and discharging all its back rounds into the sky
above a stubble-field or the no-man's land of a frontier,
and let the uniforms be moth-balled, those of the ancien regime,
their shoulder blades quaint and even stylish so that children
can wear them at costume parties years after the troubles
have died down, the gates to the palace unlocked,
the architects, once summarily dismissed now honored,
flowers on their tombstones, freshly cut ones from the florist,
and only because they knew the key code to the sanctum sanctorum
where the jefe may have only eaten cottage cheese with a peach
in his silken bathrobe and looked at his uncut toes on the Ottoman
or perhaps indulged his taste in gurrelieder or American musicals
or maybe watched moderately salacious videos in the screening room–
but aerate the hidden rooms, open the larder, lighten the place,
box up the magazines, bag them in plastic, keep the dog-ears
on the pages where the jefe kept them.
when it happens to me, when it is a visitation,
let it come naturally, let the visitation come without a shot,
let it be a velvet revolution, a peaceful acquiescence,
the whole army folding its field cap into its back pocket
and discharging all its back rounds into the sky
above a stubble-field or the no-man's land of a frontier,
and let the uniforms be moth-balled, those of the ancien regime,
their shoulder blades quaint and even stylish so that children
can wear them at costume parties years after the troubles
have died down, the gates to the palace unlocked,
the architects, once summarily dismissed now honored,
flowers on their tombstones, freshly cut ones from the florist,
and only because they knew the key code to the sanctum sanctorum
where the jefe may have only eaten cottage cheese with a peach
in his silken bathrobe and looked at his uncut toes on the Ottoman
or perhaps indulged his taste in gurrelieder or American musicals
or maybe watched moderately salacious videos in the screening room–
but aerate the hidden rooms, open the larder, lighten the place,
box up the magazines, bag them in plastic, keep the dog-ears
on the pages where the jefe kept them.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
from February 07
And rubbed the surface of the bookshelf with the unguent of linseed oil,
and since the weather was sunny, the polyurethane dried like a web of egg-white
or hot metallic surface. The wood soaked the oil inside so the surface
didn’t gum up, the maple by nature so knurled that when oiled, it glows
wavy as holograms, as if the wood grew in irregular waves or turbulence.
The knot creates turbulence, the grain of wood, glowing now from being polished,
ripples around ovals. But the pine has more knots, yet the grain
doesn’t ripple like maple, turbulence brought to light by oils rubbed in.
Maples block my view of the house and stable; the woman rode the white horse
who lives in the stable this morning; the horse with large mane and long tail
and musculature of the horse of Caesar Augustus or Hadrian; an old horse, it didn’t show its age;
her daughter wears white cotton skirts cut at modest length, but when she runs,
her shorts reveal a tan, the legs not plump but vigorous. You can tell the
effects of weather on the hill
by the cutting of the stream through a bank of slate at the edge of the forest;
when there’s lots of rain a torrent of foamy water runs into the culvert beneath
the road to flood the water-meadows, blooming with ferns, then bushes,
before which a doe or two will stand, frozen at any human presence
as if they could blend into background, a reaction that might work
in the dusk, but not in day, as if they could see without being seen,
until man gets too close, after which they are in flight,
their white tails betraying them. The deer would be dressed
on the sides of barns as horse-flies buzzed. The horse fly lives
on blood of horse or other host. A bumble-bee bumps into the window pane,
wilfuly it seems, at least once this late morning or already afternoon.
and since the weather was sunny, the polyurethane dried like a web of egg-white
or hot metallic surface. The wood soaked the oil inside so the surface
didn’t gum up, the maple by nature so knurled that when oiled, it glows
wavy as holograms, as if the wood grew in irregular waves or turbulence.
The knot creates turbulence, the grain of wood, glowing now from being polished,
ripples around ovals. But the pine has more knots, yet the grain
doesn’t ripple like maple, turbulence brought to light by oils rubbed in.
Maples block my view of the house and stable; the woman rode the white horse
who lives in the stable this morning; the horse with large mane and long tail
and musculature of the horse of Caesar Augustus or Hadrian; an old horse, it didn’t show its age;
her daughter wears white cotton skirts cut at modest length, but when she runs,
her shorts reveal a tan, the legs not plump but vigorous. You can tell the
effects of weather on the hill
by the cutting of the stream through a bank of slate at the edge of the forest;
when there’s lots of rain a torrent of foamy water runs into the culvert beneath
the road to flood the water-meadows, blooming with ferns, then bushes,
before which a doe or two will stand, frozen at any human presence
as if they could blend into background, a reaction that might work
in the dusk, but not in day, as if they could see without being seen,
until man gets too close, after which they are in flight,
their white tails betraying them. The deer would be dressed
on the sides of barns as horse-flies buzzed. The horse fly lives
on blood of horse or other host. A bumble-bee bumps into the window pane,
wilfuly it seems, at least once this late morning or already afternoon.
The 80s (06?)
The 80s
Everyone must've read The White Hotel. A glittering exterior,
soft and saccharine center, some silver chiclet.
Gew-gaws on cars, stick-shifts for quadrophonic sound,
chrome or silver cars, and silver the Walkmans.
Boom-boxes large as the coffins that'll carry you
on shoulders of teens propped before telephone booths.
Spangled silver butterfly handle-bars on children's bikes.
Silvery VCRs, their easily broken carriages,
giant Advents in the sports bars with their diluted,
unsaturated, washed-out colors, the murky echoes
of drums on 80s records, as if the footpedal
were buried in purple video mist, mad towers
of Jeri curls, mad King Ludwig's castles of mousse
and metallic sheen, the wash of synthesizers,
the echo-plexed baritones and fake British accents,
the long dark cloth coats and flips of pompadours:
flocks of seagulls on feet. A one-hit wonder
admits in silhouette to career derailment from coke,
shaggy hair intact. What's Dana Plato's fate?
Cheesy sitcoms (thank God!) can't be re-run.
Hipster paintings, charcoal splotches aping Otto Dix
or some police report, in the trash outside once-trendy
storefront galleries deemed insolvent. Club-kid killers,
dopers with shoulder-parrots waving Mein Kampf
in Tompkins Square Park, newly deboned
his Swiss ex-dancer-girlfriend, fed to homeless men
not far from Peace Eye bookstore apprehended
and soon, the Dow-Jones drops, a feather is plucked,
then a single hair, an airfoil in silent descent,
and big hair is deflated, the voice restored to the windscreen,
and not all is wind and the silver mist of videos
generated by dry ice. Note that artist-as-poseur
is not a question of antagonism. We'd bleed you,
but you already have ice water in your veins.
Everyone must've read The White Hotel. A glittering exterior,
soft and saccharine center, some silver chiclet.
Gew-gaws on cars, stick-shifts for quadrophonic sound,
chrome or silver cars, and silver the Walkmans.
Boom-boxes large as the coffins that'll carry you
on shoulders of teens propped before telephone booths.
Spangled silver butterfly handle-bars on children's bikes.
Silvery VCRs, their easily broken carriages,
giant Advents in the sports bars with their diluted,
unsaturated, washed-out colors, the murky echoes
of drums on 80s records, as if the footpedal
were buried in purple video mist, mad towers
of Jeri curls, mad King Ludwig's castles of mousse
and metallic sheen, the wash of synthesizers,
the echo-plexed baritones and fake British accents,
the long dark cloth coats and flips of pompadours:
flocks of seagulls on feet. A one-hit wonder
admits in silhouette to career derailment from coke,
shaggy hair intact. What's Dana Plato's fate?
Cheesy sitcoms (thank God!) can't be re-run.
Hipster paintings, charcoal splotches aping Otto Dix
or some police report, in the trash outside once-trendy
storefront galleries deemed insolvent. Club-kid killers,
dopers with shoulder-parrots waving Mein Kampf
in Tompkins Square Park, newly deboned
his Swiss ex-dancer-girlfriend, fed to homeless men
not far from Peace Eye bookstore apprehended
and soon, the Dow-Jones drops, a feather is plucked,
then a single hair, an airfoil in silent descent,
and big hair is deflated, the voice restored to the windscreen,
and not all is wind and the silver mist of videos
generated by dry ice. Note that artist-as-poseur
is not a question of antagonism. We'd bleed you,
but you already have ice water in your veins.
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