The public radio commentator du jour
complained about those country kitchens
through which his designer dog would run
during another afternoon soiree
in which the guests would mob
the selfsame drafty country kitchen
the roomiest room in the whole
renovated Home and Garden sort of home.
He'd flagged wedges of artisanal cheese
on the butcher-block table
of that drafty country kitchen,
but the dog had toppled them.
It was a big designer dog
furry and lovable in its way
but neither did it recognize
Thus moaned the commentator du jour
on public radio through locked jaws,
one who denies owning the world
exercising his privileges within it.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Air Guitar
He'll be sought after by the quarterlies
and asked about his days in the wilderness
among the lumberjacks and stumps
Now he plays among the stars, and stretches
Before he goes, he'll get his parcel of the glory
a warm bed and socks and absolute power
and asked about his days in the wilderness
among the lumberjacks and stumps
Now he plays among the stars, and stretches
Before he goes, he'll get his parcel of the glory
a warm bed and socks and absolute power
Thursday, December 4, 2008
News from the guru
Don't have much to offer this month except old material dating from the 80s and 90s.
Imputed reader, enjoy.
Imputed reader, enjoy.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Cauliflower (84?)
I.
A boy exorcises morning with a cauliflower,
swinging it baton-like, lashing air as with a whip.
I watch the exorcism from a bus, the motor idling,
the windows bottle-green. I’ve had my fill.
The drooping, dusty underblades of leaf
guard off-white convolutions afternoon will blacken
when it brings me to Seville’s Moorish limits.
His flower falls like a careless judgement on the town:
walls of swank marinas spooled with razor wire
behind which the coast glitters fitfully
contaminated by a German joint concern,
then dusty corner shopfronts, their comestible signs
tilted over mottled picture windows, in back some tapas,
seafruits, exorbitant beside undusted nectarine cartons,
peach, pear, pina, the winds from Africa.
II.
Wanderlust led them to Andalus
where aqueducts totter by orange mounds.
The Roman concrete is turning into sand.
Unmoved when advertisements peel from walls
or whitewash from imitation Moorish arches
gypsies mob the train station
in which a fretwork of schedules
wrinkle like seersucker fabric under glass --
dismissed by a single hand, a wrist-flick,
the flower-head, rolling like a planet -- benedicite.
III.
Rosettes in cathedral limestone
flowers that last, like stained glass
petals tracking limestone floors
regime upon regime,
unlike a cauliflower
in the hand of thief or farmer--
blacker convolutions
framing off-white effulgence.
IV.
It must be a beauty then -- why otherwise whistle
at world's-end, off-season Malaga, the apex
of this hotspot a park where black swans float
through reflections of public flora, coarse, orange,
beyond which hotels lean into the Costa del Sol
like stacks of beige cafeteria dinnerplates--
as if reflected by trick mirrors, or mirrors
in hotel lobbies, reclining from Torremolinos,
a coastline of drab, overpriced clipjoints,
tattoists, false oracles.
He leaps above
the virgin's sidewalk portrait
Euro-hippies chalk in, her lids marbly arcs
ephemeral as greasepaint. Her mantle's azure
fills the grid in. No one's invited to follow.
A boy exorcises morning with a cauliflower,
swinging it baton-like, lashing air as with a whip.
I watch the exorcism from a bus, the motor idling,
the windows bottle-green. I’ve had my fill.
The drooping, dusty underblades of leaf
guard off-white convolutions afternoon will blacken
when it brings me to Seville’s Moorish limits.
His flower falls like a careless judgement on the town:
walls of swank marinas spooled with razor wire
behind which the coast glitters fitfully
contaminated by a German joint concern,
then dusty corner shopfronts, their comestible signs
tilted over mottled picture windows, in back some tapas,
seafruits, exorbitant beside undusted nectarine cartons,
peach, pear, pina, the winds from Africa.
II.
Wanderlust led them to Andalus
where aqueducts totter by orange mounds.
The Roman concrete is turning into sand.
Unmoved when advertisements peel from walls
or whitewash from imitation Moorish arches
gypsies mob the train station
in which a fretwork of schedules
wrinkle like seersucker fabric under glass --
dismissed by a single hand, a wrist-flick,
the flower-head, rolling like a planet -- benedicite.
III.
Rosettes in cathedral limestone
flowers that last, like stained glass
petals tracking limestone floors
regime upon regime,
unlike a cauliflower
in the hand of thief or farmer--
blacker convolutions
framing off-white effulgence.
IV.
It must be a beauty then -- why otherwise whistle
at world's-end, off-season Malaga, the apex
of this hotspot a park where black swans float
through reflections of public flora, coarse, orange,
beyond which hotels lean into the Costa del Sol
like stacks of beige cafeteria dinnerplates--
as if reflected by trick mirrors, or mirrors
in hotel lobbies, reclining from Torremolinos,
a coastline of drab, overpriced clipjoints,
tattoists, false oracles.
He leaps above
the virgin's sidewalk portrait
Euro-hippies chalk in, her lids marbly arcs
ephemeral as greasepaint. Her mantle's azure
fills the grid in. No one's invited to follow.
Between ('94)
Who knows who you will cross in a library
other than schoolkids eager to scan microfilm
or transients who use the chairs to doze
because they're padded, or lapsed academics
attempting to find more time in which to learn
or the wealthy widow looking for a mystery?
Often they're people who just don't know what to do
with all time on their hands, too curious to sleep,
too tired to read, amorous enough to cut the pages
from Esquire perhaps. For them life lacks secrets
while for the schoolkids it promises. So curiosity
moves them to read about dinosaurs without
the first thought being the cause of extinction.
After all that grazing prehistoric grass, no matter
how many flowers on the prairie they scattered--
by comets stoned, weather starved, dinosaurs were passé.
But the kids are too busy to mock regulars who snooze
on mounds of dailies, or crackpots whose theories
academies refuse to confirm. Surrounded by chances
for a better life they cannot use, better they rest
as if a bed of news features and stock market reports
were a tarpit, a place for bones to lie
between destinations, one meant, but one approaching.
other than schoolkids eager to scan microfilm
or transients who use the chairs to doze
because they're padded, or lapsed academics
attempting to find more time in which to learn
or the wealthy widow looking for a mystery?
Often they're people who just don't know what to do
with all time on their hands, too curious to sleep,
too tired to read, amorous enough to cut the pages
from Esquire perhaps. For them life lacks secrets
while for the schoolkids it promises. So curiosity
moves them to read about dinosaurs without
the first thought being the cause of extinction.
After all that grazing prehistoric grass, no matter
how many flowers on the prairie they scattered--
by comets stoned, weather starved, dinosaurs were passé.
But the kids are too busy to mock regulars who snooze
on mounds of dailies, or crackpots whose theories
academies refuse to confirm. Surrounded by chances
for a better life they cannot use, better they rest
as if a bed of news features and stock market reports
were a tarpit, a place for bones to lie
between destinations, one meant, but one approaching.
Clay (89?) (ancient, in confessional mode)
Your father's wet, hamlike thumb-pads still press dough
as if to say, on pizza's clayey texture, paddy-cake,
his palms welted from the lobster traps he's never made
a living with. Barely he swims the tide of business now.
Since pizza doesn't make a fortune, he kneads more crust,
impressing it with scars as buried as you are, wafers
wolfed up without ceremony, just by someone hungry,
who wouldn't know your father's recipe from sawdust.
If you think of the crust he bakes daily as his coinage
then the scars on his hands become all he has, except
a favorite son inheriting your albums, your Goodwill clothes,
as he was given all the better presents, things for sport.
And your father bequeaths nothing else to the ground
that you lie in, while it treats you as a rent healed by rising.
As the palms he retracts from flour seem youthful,
those chubby hands undissolved yet in sink-water,
think how strong someone becomes from what he sells:
his thumb-prints and lesions from trap-cable talced by flour
look as if nothing had happened but childhood, clay.
as if to say, on pizza's clayey texture, paddy-cake,
his palms welted from the lobster traps he's never made
a living with. Barely he swims the tide of business now.
Since pizza doesn't make a fortune, he kneads more crust,
impressing it with scars as buried as you are, wafers
wolfed up without ceremony, just by someone hungry,
who wouldn't know your father's recipe from sawdust.
If you think of the crust he bakes daily as his coinage
then the scars on his hands become all he has, except
a favorite son inheriting your albums, your Goodwill clothes,
as he was given all the better presents, things for sport.
And your father bequeaths nothing else to the ground
that you lie in, while it treats you as a rent healed by rising.
As the palms he retracts from flour seem youthful,
those chubby hands undissolved yet in sink-water,
think how strong someone becomes from what he sells:
his thumb-prints and lesions from trap-cable talced by flour
look as if nothing had happened but childhood, clay.
Icehouse ('94?)
A bank of snow that overreached my head
I hosed to make a surface hard and icy
and tunneled through the icy mound I'd made
dumping pails of water to smooth the surface more.
First it was hard to squeeze through the entry.
But I hollowed an inside for myself with a spade
until the floor was glass, and heat exposed
dead grass at my shivering, blue-jeaned knees.
The walls were translucent as glass cubes
on the sides of kindergartens or clinics
and while light might be allowed to flood
the lobbies through that warped translucence
no pedestrian could tell what moved inside
those ugly institutional buildings where bodies
were probed, incised or pruned in right directions.
This house of ice, where I could hide, was like
the frosted glass of the offices of the important.
Sight itself is a portal through which are misread
dilations or brows raised, as if they were kind --
but in the pupils' black, truly we are in the stars
where a motion is a portent -- just as my body
moved through its slick house, this glass house
no stone had yet been turned against.
I hosed to make a surface hard and icy
and tunneled through the icy mound I'd made
dumping pails of water to smooth the surface more.
First it was hard to squeeze through the entry.
But I hollowed an inside for myself with a spade
until the floor was glass, and heat exposed
dead grass at my shivering, blue-jeaned knees.
The walls were translucent as glass cubes
on the sides of kindergartens or clinics
and while light might be allowed to flood
the lobbies through that warped translucence
no pedestrian could tell what moved inside
those ugly institutional buildings where bodies
were probed, incised or pruned in right directions.
This house of ice, where I could hide, was like
the frosted glass of the offices of the important.
Sight itself is a portal through which are misread
dilations or brows raised, as if they were kind --
but in the pupils' black, truly we are in the stars
where a motion is a portent -- just as my body
moved through its slick house, this glass house
no stone had yet been turned against.
Vet's Hospital, Thomaston (1989-90?)
1.
In contradictory directions march the dying
to their future's absence. Some stumble, grab the wall,
others with cagelike walkers uphold their frailty.
The oldest nearly trip themselves, the more robust
walk with the briskness of someone returning to work
or the bank. But there's hardly anywhere to go
except to the emergency exit of the ward,
the course they walk along this lettered wing
so broad they seldom find the place they came from.
Later they will walk the hall like automatons
while the mind that animates their legs flickers.
Having served their country, surely they deserve
the chance to wander from their semiprivate rooms
until a thoughtlessness can alleviate their pain.
As TV lights his silhouette until it bristles,
a nurse's aide before the dying buoys nutrient in a can.
But if the dead part with one last retinal image
to take to the stars, should it be the blue layer
of the game show, final consolation prize on the eyelid?
Even the best sleight-of-hand artist cannot pass on
that happy endings are against the odds. His job
is illusion only, the buoyancy of the can in a flicker.
Cancer's their baby. The life that blooms inside them
tautens their faces, makes them slender, ascetic
as it trenches through their system, puts
its alternative system there, a strangler vine
that thanks its host with little sprays
of edelweiss through a bloody system, a bluish fog.
2.
This lobby isn't a temple of silence, or meant
for the reverence due a museum -- a regular
who complains about everything under the sun
as it rises on his cancer volunteers as much.
He saves reserves of his hate for the dying,
more than for loved ones who just remind him
he comes too often to deserve as much commiseration,
that the radiation ladled him will curb his death
like a pruned bush that will leaf another season.
But over those about to die in hours
the sky seems to darken, like over Calvary
as the loved ones crowd beside the door.
He imagines how an oscilloscope's scanline
mystically straightens, whistles one mantra.
How superfluous he feels when this happens,
like being the regular in a luncheonette
boring the waitstaff with complaints.
Outside the window, other hospital wings
stretch brick sides to foreseeable landscape
that crowds into these netted panes as residue.
March snow melts in slushy tire-tracks
the color of droplets fogging the windowglass,
the walls and sofas grey as in prisons.
Sings all this scenery to the visitor
we are locked in bodies like in vaults.
In contradictory directions march the dying
to their future's absence. Some stumble, grab the wall,
others with cagelike walkers uphold their frailty.
The oldest nearly trip themselves, the more robust
walk with the briskness of someone returning to work
or the bank. But there's hardly anywhere to go
except to the emergency exit of the ward,
the course they walk along this lettered wing
so broad they seldom find the place they came from.
Later they will walk the hall like automatons
while the mind that animates their legs flickers.
Having served their country, surely they deserve
the chance to wander from their semiprivate rooms
until a thoughtlessness can alleviate their pain.
As TV lights his silhouette until it bristles,
a nurse's aide before the dying buoys nutrient in a can.
But if the dead part with one last retinal image
to take to the stars, should it be the blue layer
of the game show, final consolation prize on the eyelid?
Even the best sleight-of-hand artist cannot pass on
that happy endings are against the odds. His job
is illusion only, the buoyancy of the can in a flicker.
Cancer's their baby. The life that blooms inside them
tautens their faces, makes them slender, ascetic
as it trenches through their system, puts
its alternative system there, a strangler vine
that thanks its host with little sprays
of edelweiss through a bloody system, a bluish fog.
2.
This lobby isn't a temple of silence, or meant
for the reverence due a museum -- a regular
who complains about everything under the sun
as it rises on his cancer volunteers as much.
He saves reserves of his hate for the dying,
more than for loved ones who just remind him
he comes too often to deserve as much commiseration,
that the radiation ladled him will curb his death
like a pruned bush that will leaf another season.
But over those about to die in hours
the sky seems to darken, like over Calvary
as the loved ones crowd beside the door.
He imagines how an oscilloscope's scanline
mystically straightens, whistles one mantra.
How superfluous he feels when this happens,
like being the regular in a luncheonette
boring the waitstaff with complaints.
Outside the window, other hospital wings
stretch brick sides to foreseeable landscape
that crowds into these netted panes as residue.
March snow melts in slushy tire-tracks
the color of droplets fogging the windowglass,
the walls and sofas grey as in prisons.
Sings all this scenery to the visitor
we are locked in bodies like in vaults.
Gang of Four Member, Executed 1980 (1987?)
Who's that one in the Gang who's so quiet?
In a prison cell's ideal darkness
I watch the fingernails of the mandarin grow
until he trims them to the claws of kites.
His courtyard isolates circles of sound
meanwhile, from concentric streets
in which history focuses. (Today I stapled
paper straps on sandals, yesterday
entered clandestine messages on bellies
of toy trains en route to Hong Kong--
fixing the parasol in the hand
of the painted courtesan, however,
is what I hate doing the most,
her feet too small for kanjis.)
In a prison cell's ideal darkness
I watch the fingernails of the mandarin grow
until he trims them to the claws of kites.
His courtyard isolates circles of sound
meanwhile, from concentric streets
in which history focuses. (Today I stapled
paper straps on sandals, yesterday
entered clandestine messages on bellies
of toy trains en route to Hong Kong--
fixing the parasol in the hand
of the painted courtesan, however,
is what I hate doing the most,
her feet too small for kanjis.)
Lake (from 1988, for want of something else to do)
What is at the bottom of a lake (Maranacook)
but crawfish, minnows, white and yellow perch, band-aids
that float above the silt, loosened from the swimmers' limbs
or a gold-plated bracelet with "KAREN: 14K" on its nameplate,
nearly lost where silt or sand concealed its broken chain.
And depth where silt begins from sand, imported from shore,
is slippery as raw life-- why we don't like to tread on it.
Mostly what's beneath this roped-in space are band-aids stripped
from arms that dismiss air, or babies who play dead men
secure in the forearms of their fathers tanned by days of labor.
Snorklers undertake treasure, but soon decide to turn
their visors to fledgling crawfish by stems of aqueous plants
or schools that try to cross the water's agitation.
Swimming instructors, ignoring splashes, backstroke,
breast-stroke, crawl beside a necklace of baby-blue pontoons
that mark what's safe to tread from the rest: that lies beneath
broken motor-oil membranes pierced by loons, where last night
partiers drove Boston Whalers home after a very big party indeed.
That's where plumb-lines of sunlight that would greet a diver
as he surfaced do not penetrate the murk of upstirred silt.
Vague speculation fires curiosity on shore to dive or ponder.
Maybe a handful of Abnaki objets d'art undulate down there--
spearheads or nets maybe, or nothing but loosely-tied flies
cast by amateur fishermen, bass and perch wised-up to glitter
until they just suspend above the silt like tossed jewelry,
or the waterlogged firecrackers dropped to shock snappers
by a teenage incendiary so he could inspect their red bellies.
(Their rinds cannot be distinguished from tree bark.)
Wonder even beguiled me to think a barbeque sauce jar,
its Armor brocaded by soil, and used for baitworms,
was antique. But what memento mori beckons you,
explorer, who buys cheap and sell dear? The lake is filling up
with trinkets, like silver dollars in the bank accounts
of the deceased. How these lakes are inlaid with the limits
of appetite: item: bottles hurled from the shore are messages
without labels, enigmas around which riddles have unwrapped.
[Curiosity would spade and drain this lake to empty basin,
a Pandora's box for excavation-- but better it lie, be this.]
but crawfish, minnows, white and yellow perch, band-aids
that float above the silt, loosened from the swimmers' limbs
or a gold-plated bracelet with "KAREN: 14K" on its nameplate,
nearly lost where silt or sand concealed its broken chain.
And depth where silt begins from sand, imported from shore,
is slippery as raw life-- why we don't like to tread on it.
Mostly what's beneath this roped-in space are band-aids stripped
from arms that dismiss air, or babies who play dead men
secure in the forearms of their fathers tanned by days of labor.
Snorklers undertake treasure, but soon decide to turn
their visors to fledgling crawfish by stems of aqueous plants
or schools that try to cross the water's agitation.
Swimming instructors, ignoring splashes, backstroke,
breast-stroke, crawl beside a necklace of baby-blue pontoons
that mark what's safe to tread from the rest: that lies beneath
broken motor-oil membranes pierced by loons, where last night
partiers drove Boston Whalers home after a very big party indeed.
That's where plumb-lines of sunlight that would greet a diver
as he surfaced do not penetrate the murk of upstirred silt.
Vague speculation fires curiosity on shore to dive or ponder.
Maybe a handful of Abnaki objets d'art undulate down there--
spearheads or nets maybe, or nothing but loosely-tied flies
cast by amateur fishermen, bass and perch wised-up to glitter
until they just suspend above the silt like tossed jewelry,
or the waterlogged firecrackers dropped to shock snappers
by a teenage incendiary so he could inspect their red bellies.
(Their rinds cannot be distinguished from tree bark.)
Wonder even beguiled me to think a barbeque sauce jar,
its Armor brocaded by soil, and used for baitworms,
was antique. But what memento mori beckons you,
explorer, who buys cheap and sell dear? The lake is filling up
with trinkets, like silver dollars in the bank accounts
of the deceased. How these lakes are inlaid with the limits
of appetite: item: bottles hurled from the shore are messages
without labels, enigmas around which riddles have unwrapped.
[Curiosity would spade and drain this lake to empty basin,
a Pandora's box for excavation-- but better it lie, be this.]
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