Redirecting (11/17/07)

When the glue seam itself is stronger than the material that it binds, when hair has clogged the drain, when it has bonded with the soap to form a substance both malleable and firm upon which you would wish only your worst enemy to slip, when the cattle of the sun turn away from the sun itself, when the various opposing schools experience a spell of heart-felt reconciliation after you have been excommunucated from their meeting-halls and guest rooms and apartments, when everyone seems to be getting mail but you, and when mail means good luck, and no mail means not oblivion because that word is inflated and grandiose; when the IT department doesn't answer your email although they've glanced at it in passing, when we complete a deed, whether good or bad, we stand and hug one another in the conference room, when we bedeck the room with deadly nightshade adn thistles.

It's not how much money you make, it's how much you handle that gets you kicked to the top. Once there, you can boogie to the African drummers under Calder or Frank Stella in the corporate plaza or lecture on the color green at the campus. And what can be said for green? Green is either renewal or being dead; green is the new branch, green is envy. The green of teh jihadist flag or the Green Party. Green is the emerald isle and green are the mountains in the Green Mountains except in winter, although the White Mountains can be green as well. Turning green couls be thought of as gangrene;green shoots, green algae, although benign, signals that water stagnates. Wheat grass so green it is black. Man must wean himself from grain and starchy carbos. Green Bay surely is not green always. Other than Ireland, what tricolor has green on it. Green signifies fruition in its beginning, red its completion; green envy, red anger, purple rage and stoppage. Among humors, green is unpleasant. Purple is the first color the newborn infant can see; that's why Dr. Cooper painted his waiting room purple. That swimming-pool when unclogged of lily-pads can be a rebirthing pool if I can soak the heiress of her cash. After divinity school, multiple paths appeared.

Shepherd to Swain

Shepherd:

Hey dumb-bell, you’re life’s a hoax,
You, box-head who strings bows,
Your music a mimicry of screech-owls
Or simply howls.
You mope about the woods too much.
Soon I’ll bring news of more than woods—
So my hollow reed resounds.
Don’t dope yourself with kerosene and lard.
The sky’s the limit, says my flute,
My shepherd lays less rustic with each day.

Swain:

Flake off, coonhound.
I’ll carve my six-point buck upon a cross,
Then brand your ass.
What business have you bringing news of shores
Or Latin gangsters hitting pay-dirt,
My woods the model for their Janus-temples,
Their columns cheap copies of my oaks.
To own some fancy-dancy trellised estate’s
no match for uncleaved commons.

Shepherd:

Soon hicks like you will disappear
In canneries or cubicles of call centers.
Outsourced, you’ll all take dirt-naps.
What can compare to the squire’s life,
The hubcaps of his SUV so shiny
The migratory birds revolve in them,
View as panoramic as a battle-sheld.

Swain:

Piss off, haute bourgeois ape.
Try bench-pressing tree-trunks with me.
You’re like a bear too used
To feeding on steaming garbage-mounds
Of dukes who’ll put you down
Without a second thought,
Your perfumed locks phony.
Why sniff for trouble, French poodle?
Trap your feet in sheep-dip.

What’ll happen when
your city-slicker patrons
pull the plug on you?
Will you hawk your hollow reed for nickels then?

Jingle Man (05)

The fish-tank can do it, even motors can.
In some timeless continuum purrs the adman
to an air-pump, like Tennyson in his garden
mesmerized by "innumerable murmurs of bees"
or chanting his surname until he was mindless.
Soothing? Gurus answer their own questions,
in another life composing jingles for perfume,
Windsong, the lyric cooing, on my mind.

Great landscape swathes or ashen deserts
viewed faintly through bottle-green windshields
can be spent by humming cross-country to tires.
And as you hum you become attuned to them--
perhaps suspensions hum as much as any apiary.
Murmur your name and your syllables melt
into roadside mirages, one abstract time ago,
your memory the more vivid when imagined.

And machines can stitch these memory gaps
into seamless continuums gurus get to sooner
as when Charlie murmurs to the fish-tank
in this Mount Desert Island greasy spoon.
Windsong: you're on. Perfume I can’t smell
connects me to canals, to corruption beneath
the palace of the Doge, to sewerage flowing
beneath the opulence of domes and spires,
to heaps of flowers rotting in a distillary first.

When artist-adman Charlie Morrow hummed
his jingle, who didn’t buy? Whether humming
aum or nevermore to sump pumps or aquariums
he could connect himself, while participants
tuned into infancy they thought all joyful noise
without libretti or commercials. And who listens
to the lyrics anyway? Humming among others

only drops me into casual abysses or Babels
so quick I can't connect to clear directives or letters.
So, soothing? guru-adman-artist Charlie asks.
But adman, how come mama never warned me
that when I lost semantics in your mantra,
memory would be this much acuter, feel true?

So when you mumble under your breath
you hit the same timbre as your ancestors
when they toyed with hymns or torch-songs
between their similar abdomens or tongues,
whether from contentment or from boredom
in some garage or hospital waiting room.

While I'm Away

I’m going to an enclave on an island
They’re going to apply crystals to my spine,
A single crystal for each vertebrae
And when I’m back, I’ll be realigned,
And, rubbed with ointment, centered.
Please take care of the cat in the meantime.
Thanks, Frank. Food’s in the cupboard.

They pluck the ailment from the trepanned skull,
Those Filipino shamen, wow! I’m going there
So they can work on me, and when my chi-energy
Is finally released, I’ll hatch new projects
That’ll have ‘em weeping in the board room.
But remember Dave, never ever double-cross me.

I’m off to see the wizard: to be baptized
In blood. It’s a communal feeling in the woods.
As our fists pound hollow logs in basso profundo
Resonance, our hoarse cries harass the moon.
While I’m gone Joan, please water the flowers.
They mean so much to me, my anima mundi.

I’ll be in Aspen a week, getting rolfed.
If there are office issues, please address them.
And when I’m back, I’ll be unwound completely
and pound the desk with double fists in ways
That will astound Support. And by the way,
Don’t let the cat out, and never ever fuck with me.

Deserted Village II (Willowbrook) (01/06)

How spoiled I was to the buzzing of these summer fields,
the roadside vegetable stand abandoned by the daughter
overburdened with tomatoes and the heartiest of cucumbers
and across her folding card table, a nineteenth century graveyard,
with the slate headstones chased with weeping willows,
and how many Wentworths or Tarboxes lay below the sod
while my co-worker slumped in his chair or stayed glum
as the company for which we worked fell deeper in debt.
That wouldn’t stop corn from growing, stop the millstream
From trickling water from its dam, stop swimming turtles
Who relax and expand their flippers once in their element,
Coast by rusted cable-strands or hubcaps flung in as a prank.
In the barn, the old machinery was still intact, depression-era tractors
With chokes no one in our day and age would know how to adjust,
Some quixotic silver seaplane a magnate flew above his field once,
its wings clipped, its fuselage stored after having flown a hundred feet or so.
Sat in repose the brass machinery from the turn of the century
In an antique museum seldomly patronized over the weekdays
where the film strips from a silent theater had been threaded
without a sprocket broken, and the art-nouveau lily-trumpets
Of the Victrolas could play you a song if you only wanted to listen
to muted horns accompany the words mama, home, remember.
You imagine the sorrows those mawkish songs released in their time
because the confidence of the present leaves you cold, so you come
To see how the elders mastered distance, their homesteads sprawling
with cracked-plaster hallways leading to tinier bedrooms or spinets
untuned or deal tables draped with doilies pinned down by Beethoven’s bust.
Their cities on the hill, population migrated to other coasts,
were connected by the cast-iron machinery of this merry-go-round
peeking through the tractors or an ironside’s Pantagruelian engine.

What I did on my grant

(To Gauleiter Forster)

I bathed with water-oxen in the Ganges,
sky-dived somewhere above Anatolia,
at Ephesus kissed the chapel steps Paul of Tarsus
must have trod: what fun, to spread art’s gospel.
After swimming with luminescent plankton
off the coast of New South Wales
after shimmying with hula dancers on Oahu
(one of whom had even been to Mississippi)
after dodging spears of cannibals in New Guinea
or rowing dugouts in darkness for a wedding
in which I held a splintery torch to night
(or tried my Cantonese before the poets of Shanxi
who sang to me the merits of the Xinjiang poets)
I lugged my trusty, multi-volumed edition
of The Man Without Qualities to the poolside
to read a long, sinuous catalogue of qualities
the man lacked, then asked myself (gingerly)
whether by Vol. 4 he would get them, sensing
for the afternoon at least, the muses had departed.
As Robert Musil’s masterful prose engine
chuffed through qualities the man lacked
I wolfed a blood orange down, and pondered.
Poems gestated internally like uninvited guests,
or slept like babies in bassinets, reluctant still
to open their webbed eyes to the sun.
I was that sun. Later, in some white-washed
cottage topping the Aegean, I would cook up
something very very special in the study.