August 30 2009 Sunday

Today doesn’t feel like Sunday—the stores were open wherever I went, the sky bright, and I bought a pair of shade and a steel rake for a pittance (because plastic tynes do not perform as well on unmowed lawns, which demand teeth, steel teeth, to pull up the hay). I lose my shades routinely. I can’t keep a single pair for more than six months at a time. Then they’re lost or broken or misplaced, or the lenses pop out until I find a half dozen lenses in the wells of the car door, all dusty and cracked, the scalloped layers of shellfish still sharp. They go like windshield wipers or vacuum cleaner bag. But I can’t go without sunglasses for very long. Some aging starlets conserve their remaining beauty by avoiding the sun entirely, as if they must travel incognito among the populace for impossibly attenuated periods of time under canopies of banana leaves, umbrellas, or straw sun-hats, sans floral or fruit decorations balanced upon cones of filigreed wire, but some of us, mostly hoi-polloi, mind you not hoity-toity, must wander through life with our heads exposed to those vissisitudes of weather that would drive the most patient hermit-monastic to extremes of behavior unheard of among the lordliest surviving ecclesiastical orders in the western world. Land-O-Goshen: the sun peeps from its hideout of parted clouds. Of the news you might say there is so little you couldn’t place it in a thimble-sized container for news, which is a manner of dismissing metaphor albeit in a rather hectored willful style as if our author wished to actually prove not merely competence but virtuosity as well among these vocatives, exclamations, embellishments, and diminuendos, as if her were desperate to secure an audience, having lost rapport with them once, determined to clutch them fast to his heart once again, an uncertain occasion for which the clouds appear to break before the sun hides behind their flotillas once again. The news was neither bleak nor did it promise. The news was incomplete—only a slice of it appeared at the collectively designated time, too much to ignore, too little not to say with Chou En-lai far too soon to tell.

*************************************************************

The mistake was to wake far too late to use the morn to advantage,
but the dew is dried from the grass enough to mow. Mow, sleepyhead!
Otherwise be grass. The grass will engulf you in silky strands.
Are they not pleasant to the touch of bare feet? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,
what golden nugget can you extract today from the dross
of the common tongue? All demands to be written, not read.

*****************************************************************

The passing of interstate traffic, the buzz of cicadas
In the dead branches, the shadow the weathered fence makes,
The birdhouses nailed on the fence without birdfeed, tendrils
Of wild grapes climbing among sugar maple saplings as they graze
The corrugated roof in the shed’s rear, a recollection
Of town lights extinguished by midnight, the winding
Of Wells River among wetlands abutting the public golf course,
Spiderwebs bearding the wild grapes bunched on tendrils
That twine among finger-wide branches of maple saplings,
A broken pallet, one waterlogged and lichened, leans against the rear
Of the shed beneath the shade the saplings and the grape vines make
Even in the middle of summer at the peak of day, with the sun
In the meridian, all pistons running on the interstate,
You might intuit all travelers make the destinations they intended.
Some straggling perennials, some garish flowers wilted to their stems,
Spiky weeds that break loose concrete, grass-blades among
Marble chips in the drainage, thankfully the motion lights
Remain off with the arrival of dusk—only domestic cats
Criss-cross the backyard searching for cardinals
Or song-birds perched above in the branches of a dead willow.
The rusty corrugated shed roof on which they land.
The peak heat of the day in which the fruit would ripen,
The blush upon yellow deer-apples shot with worm-holes and a brown blight,
The brambles shorn of their blackberries bow on the edge
Of landscape, the whole town terraced and built on tiers—
Who will dive from the steel bridge near the furniture mill.

***********************************************************

A Fort (Aug 25)

Families wind around pay-to-view telescopes.
Bunkers with light fixtures stripped from ceilings,
the sockets hanging. Warped cast-iron doors,
iron bars bent in windows, the frames removed.
A tour bus circles the cul-de-sac before the lighthouse.
And the smell of lighter fluid fills the trees.
At land’s-end, a footpath wanders through poison ivy
yielding to a lookout or a gun brace, but the area’s pacified,
its weakness transformed to pacific strength,
the gutted interior cleaned of debris, except bricks
dropping from walls with tiny ceiling tiles. Grass snakes
wind around the weeds among foundation cracks.
Temples with recombinant winged hermetic dragons,
bearded men with wings and claws or serpent’s tails.
Here, the deity doesn’t have a graven image other than
the drop of masonry, the iron bars that made
a holding-pen for the unruliest of soldier-sailors.
You’d almost think they did the damage,
impossible children, or whirlwinds.
How quickly ruins become shrines, the bolts bent.
And what was costly to demolish slowly sunk.
Local deities expose the weakness of their self-image,
layered and mortared and always cracking,
but the people wind around the erosion and picnic
and the lighter fluid floats.
With the old names fallen away, they’ll find new ones in the grass.

Crap, etc. (6/8/03--11/30/03)

Vanishes in mirages of mirrors this sandy beach,
whose holes fill with sky, flat cloudless ones
that fit no better than the families. Umbrellas
would blow away with the storm, were it not
for sand-dunes. Alas, the coolers in the sky

melt with empty selzer bottles among mounds
of evaporating ice, and the beach blankets,
magic carpets without power, fill with families that fall
to the quotidian of a rim of debris on the sand,
sea-gull feathers, unbraided rope and braided sea-weed.
How hard to rely on things inseparable and solid,

yet already Baby thinks about Christmas.
And what refuses to melt away is snapped apart.
Soon his makeshift potty is an artifact.
Who, while sunning themselves, wants to read
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Part 2:
that’s for dummies! or read about Constantine

greased with sun-block number 45,
or split capitals, the unbroken expanse of orchards
halved and halved-not: this lifeguard lacks jurisdiction
beyond the Do Not Trespass: Private sign.
And there they are, homes stately in the main,

shingles stained or painted. They’ve seen it all,
rounds of crocquet, and dreary afternoon parties.
How flimsy the fences keeping them from people,
rickety, buckling to the whim of each wave.
And before you can get acquainted
they fall apart, and like that, are wheeled away!

But the kids don’t make it better with their shovels
slapping each imperial edifice together, no thought
for tricolor or patois, to be kicked apart impudently
by destroyer Little-Boots, water sluicing the foundations
to take each castle out in tiers, each delicate parapet

molded by a tiny water-cup smashed like cake decoration,
every aquiline nose for every new Octavian
broken before its liberation from the medium--
as when you stare at a splash of semen in
a handkerchief bunched like a rose, and watch

future Hitlers and Einsteins before you flush.
Think of that potential wasted, a no-brainer!
Console yourself that worse could come.
They don’t make castles like they used to, no chains
in the summertime, no moats or black Marias--

The last republic lost in the dissolution of laughter
brings relief, nothing left to defend or fortify,
only mirages on the beach wavering from land at eye level.
Blooms and thorns before the traveler.
This rim of debris will sit on the sand [another millenia]?.

from 07

If there weren't metaphors or movies, we'd die by our own devices,

Analogies are the house of cards that hasn't been blown down yet.

1/28/04

An older man with a rucksack of clothes
tried to strike up conversation with girls—
The sand castles were monolithic blocks
With moats and parapets of buckets,
the couples occasional visitors. The breeze
Toppled umbrellas, gimcrack regimes.
Their tendons snapped, they fluttered.
Two girls tried to avoid the old man
Who looked as if he’d brought all his belongings
In the leather rucksack soaked in salt water.
They avoided him by entering the water.
Abandoned, he moved toward the rocks,
near a level formation where the beach ended.
Elsewhere people frolicked, took photographs,
Picked up polished stones if they weren’t too tiny
Or ground into pebbles or less than that,
Attached themselves to the familiar by spiking
their umbrella poles into slicker sand.

10/22/05

Since we’re afraid of death, we crave company.
Food provides that warmth. Don’t let the roast bleed
and take the diaper off the chicken when it’s time.
Helene said nice to see you, and I’ve been thinking
about you too, which is the problem, not the solution.
Business have solutions, some which are permanent,
but some diseases no private contractor can cure.

Food is affection, heaven and hell express the fear of death.
Dogs interpret offerings as affection. That carcass
they lick with the same eyes they flash their master
when he comes home. Dog food is just ground-up carcass
in a can. But they're coprophagic by nature, not nurture.
Death drives our activities to earn. Our desires

crave the food our desires create for us. We eat
from fear of death, and feel more affection
when the meal is hot. Heat conducts taste and affection.
Also, be sure to bless the blade by which the butcher
severs head from body. Fish rot from the head first
unless they’re iced. Sunk in ice their heartbeat slows
to hibernation. Cold-blooded, fat protects them.

Fish guts are recyclable as fertilizer and sulfurous odor
in sewer farms and mines. But resurrection originates
from mundane observations. Putrefaction drives the bean-stalk
to heaven and the trumpet of the yellow squash flower
to lift from the freshly laid mounds of compost.
Otherwise, dead fish would be matter out of place.
Compost festering in the sun, even dead phrases
and all forms of triteness revive in new makings.

Nov. 29 03

Hold onto that thought awhile, you may lose it.
And management asserts we can’t be bothered
With your prima donna complaints, consider
Yourself lucky. Were there jack-hammers
The rent would be worth it.
*************************************
The windstorm and the banging of the pipes,
The galestorm cooling the surface of the earth,
And the pipes heating the rooms against the storm,
The stormclouds dispersed but then reappearing.
The rhythm of the pipes unpredictable, a whim
Music has a pause you can anticipate, not this

The pipes banging, as if someone hammered them
A valve admitting the steam into the plates
Of the radiator, banging, while piano works
Play on the stereo, Satie’s special instructions
To the pianist to play with gusto and vehemence

Cannot stop the wind from whistling or the pipes
From whistling while the steam is admitted
When the galestorm doesn’t whistle it howls
Or it clears the storm formation, cooling
The earth as it whistles, but the medium
Of spaces between alleys is required for this

You should hear them, the pipes that bang
As if metal parts shifted and unlocked, the howl
Of the wind requiring the surface of earth be close
Enough to be on the verge of being torn apart
The pressure of the steam as it enters the radiator

How much time, what language would it take
To classify the varieties of shapes and clouds
And the space between them, exactly how rays
Fall from them and from what slant

They’re playing tricks with faces, not midwinter yet,
Not fall anymore. They’d rather wait and rain
Above the sea toward which they seem to blow.
Nothing meanwhile is battened down enough
Not to howl or to whistle, a noise prior to music,

Prior to chants and invocations for rain to fall
Or for clouds to disperse so what we need to grow
Can grow again, prior to that first of syllables,
Ma, a howl prior to the calls of the beasts
In a forest crowded with pines as cities with towers

Or moralized landscape with high-tension wires,
Whistling from the wind that strikes the strings,
From the messages than hum inside the wires
They are refusing to yield to me a message.

May 31, 04

You’ll find less here, dear reader,
Than you’d find in the works of Joe Gould,
strung out among several composition books
Left among old friends, who could not read them.
But unlike those works, you’ll find my hand
Was steady enough in periods of excitement,
To write legibly, that in my closest approach
To Mt. Parnassus, my penmanship
Did not fail me, as it failed Joe Gould
Whether he wrote about a certain restaurant
Or the most important things in his life.

And there’s something to be said
About the penmanship lessons
Of my third grade teachers
dressed in the faded, floral-print
dresses of the Depression,
who, to inculcate against laziness,
Claimed, against agreed-upon laws of gravity,
That the descent was harder than the ascent,
That it was easier to rise than to fall.
We had to slant the letters right
So we turned the blue book diagonally
As Mrs. Bagley lorded over us.
How hard the soles of her shoes were
Against hardwood flooring or mosaic tiles.
We rewrote the alphabet in our blue books.
We were improving the look of the letter,
Our heads cocked, our hands aslant.
We embellished the same words the same way.
The scaffoldings of capitals had to lean
In identical directions with the sun
With the angle of light on tilted fenceposts
That told the most infirm that it was afternoon.
They leaned with the fenceposts
Of dairy farms, with milk-cows tails,
With mailboxes planted in sodden earth.

Left to our own devices, our penmanship
Would scrawl. Mrs. Bagley, born
Over a century ago, is less than dust.
Her point was, why should no one read you
From bad penmanship. You’ll disappear,
Like I have. If your signature
Has no rosetta stone, it isn’t special.
When agitated, your scrawl
Will be the flat line of polygraph
And the subject matter forgotten.

The coroner blinks at the autopsy,
And the graphologist scratches his head—
What made him angry, happy, disturbed,
Whatever he was, what kind of casualty.
He didn’t straighten his capitals,
He preferred to walk downstairs than up.

5/24/05 (mostly worthless)

Snow turned to drizzle last night,
The form the precipitation might take uncertain—
Wet snow, very cold rain adhering to the undergarments,
Rain that penetrates the tightest weave of fabric,
Insinuates itself among synthetic fibers even,
impossible to remove without evaporation
or hanging the wash on a line in the showers’ aftermath.
Rain that clings to a network of stitches
Alternating with another color at a level either
Microscopic or invisible to the healthy human eye:
And I beg you, don’t go there. Let the selvedge unravel
From the rain and the expansion and stretch that it causes,
Throw away the old clothes when they refuse to fit—
Who's going to need to know your laundry list?

In that time of yore when they didn’t know how to wash in cold water,
That time bereft of top-load agitators, high-speed spin cycles
And automatic release cartridges for fabric softeners—

Before perfumes could be dispersed in the cloudy waters of the rinse cycle,
Before the miracle of lemon-scented bleach, or the later brands
With the scent of Tyrolean valleys contained inside them,
When you could almost smell the mountaineer’s horn and blue-bells
He probably crushed beneath his laced-up mountain jack-boots!
Then you taste the aftertaste of muesli lingering on his mountaineering lips—
In you suck his chilly mountain breath as does the bee.

Or before the old crones
slapped the tunic the freedman carelessly tossed
Against a rock near the riverside,
The chief principle tributary down which lived
The hereditary enemy or pariah clan,
Before wreaths or skins of predatory animals
Were wrapped around the reproductive organs
Not perhaps from shame so much as a wish to decorate.
There was the same precipitation, not snow not sleet,
That soaked the ferns or funneled into streams
Or spent itself as it saturated spongy mother earth
Which was lightly packed, mealy, which was ready
For rain to stretch its talons across every grain
Or ferropyrite crystal or lifted broken, once shiny piece
Or magnolia leaf that would grace some garden party
Yet unseen. Meanwhile, from ether itself, a ball of ether shuddered.

11/10/07

In the obituaries the batman, descendant of Emerson who decried the foolish consistencies of clerics, although his descendant, a frequent recluse who summered on a South Pomfret hillside although he also taught at Harvard, had become a Unitarian minister, and this a cleric of a church his ancestor might have also decried as corpse-cold as the Congregationalists, descendants of the Puritans from which he sprung.

The batman had been a scientist at Lawrence Livermore when he changed fields to study the echolocation of bats, proving there are second acts, contra F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The descendant of Emerson was nicknamed batman because he’d studied bats for nearly all his adult life. Where was the foolish consistency?

When he drove to the end of the road in South Pomfret, barely anyone saw him. To the end of his life there he lived, unmingling, an unmingled substance in his integrity, a reader of bats teasing the mysteries of echolocation from the creatures so that they could be applied to the manufacture of stereo headphones, an application that he never sought to help nor hinder, who himself owned no stereo headphones, too acquainted with the real things to be interested in their mechanical approximation.

I walk a rural road in darkness and the bats gingerly dart above my circumference that they sense and skirt, never landing as I fear, on my shoulder, from the muscle-knowledge and the laws the batman teased away from painstaking observation, requiring the consistency his more famous literary ancestor decried when it sat on the corpse-cold pulpit of the Congregationalists. I like to think that Fred Webster the batman informs those turnings/wheelings, but he’d be too modest to claim as much.

Bats in the belfry circle to find just where they are. They are all along in place, where they were meant to be.

For Fred Webster, 1908-2007

7/28/07

Those austere thin silver fonts of the Chevrolet dealership and Rooms to Let signs
Painted on brick buildings, when dirty old men posed as small-time producers
With portable casting-couches, when farmers’ daughters changed careers
And stripped for lucre, were immortalized in scratchy color-faded one-reelers.
Where medallioned cheesy directors mattered, where unctuous bare-chested
Medallioned director cum analysts with their casting-couches mattered,
Where back-lot 3-reelers made or broke careers. Where bilingual bank interpreters
Cast off old careers and wardrobes. Where cheesy shirts baring medallioned chests
were cast off where shirts were recycled, where medallions were melted into bronze,
where toupees worn by bare-midriffed group-grope participants were rewoven
into synthetic palls. Where miniskirts or lacy underpants were returned to rag content paper,
where paper turned to trash, where dust became dust. Where the hair on the chest
on which a cheesy medallion of bronze is draped becomes a toupee, where the president
of the company is not only the client, where the customer becomes the president
and where the last becomes first, where the group-grope participant who hugged
a co-participant in the bath became the president, where the waters of the bath
were Babylon’s, where they were life, they were a watery stalk from the ground.

old, very old (early 1980s to 90s?)

When you see cities in ponds, say Portland in the Oaks,
all the buildings are unusually smooth at first, apartments
on Park Avenue. one brick band: a stroller swings in sky,
antennas are dishes whose pistils are trained on murmurs
but someone spoils this by tossing fragments of lunch to ducks
who have waited for them all along. An apparition of city
you thought you saw are broken, involved by wavelets radiating
from food-bits, Cheesits, waffled cones and hot dog rolls
ducks tumble and swim for, flashing the orange of their duck feet,
the city shattered into arcs, blue or calico, water licking walls.
I tried to read the Crito by the pond once when this happened
and was stuck on the page that whispered (Socrates to Crito)
of the city-state: how can you shake its burden off your back?
Especially as she raised you? How can you look yourself
in the mirror after you've refused to serve her, so generous?
roomy units nestled in austere trees there, and shattered

as the birds dropped on government buildings in the pond.
I was curious about the liver-spotted minnows at the bottom,
schooling through decomposed oak leaves, glittering pyrite arrow-shafts.

July 2, 2003

When the pollen lands in the water, the water looks soupy,
like pea soup with green and yellow peas, with the seaweed floating
between its green and gold cloud, a tangled vegetative island,
small Sargasso sea bobbing to the waves. The waves are indolent,
the water warm in the heat wave, the landscape unusually lush,
the reeds wave by the cove, the petals of the rose hip flowers blow which away,
the children sleep as they’re carted along the footpath in their carriages
by parents who are dreaming of palaces, of sitting in an easy chair by the fireplace,
their child pushing the calculator’s keypad before the maple roll-top desk,
family heirloom or a real find at a flea market. Of a sandcastle in Falmouth
with lions’ heads by the entrance which needs to be destroyed because of the cost of security–
to protect it from destruction the sand castle needs to be demolished.
Why not invite the would-be hooligans in to do the job?
The grandeur of the fantasy spires invites its own destruction,
although the castle doesn’t have an interior for books or treasure.
The leonine faces melt as of made of wax. A shovel undoes the design,
a boot imprints a tread upon its minaret-like dome that in the mind of its maker was gilded,
like domes in St. Petersburg, like Hagia Sophia, the spires beneath which pigeons
might have coasted choked by the medium, a coarse sand mixed with gravel and pebbles.

July 8, 2003

There aren’t any maps. There isn’t any consolation.
There are no guided tours tonight around the parapet
or the base of the statue. Over the moat
goes the bridge, but the alligators don’t snap.
Caught within a sappy fairy tale take your nap.
Once upon a time they sold a diamond
to a feudal lord or handmaiden. They trench
the embolism with nothing but a thin wire.
You can see into the hole but you can’t get out of it.
The light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t brush your face.
Once you marched into the void with your fishing pole and flashlight.
Now the sign of a financial prospectus makes you tremble.
Your vampiric predilections dissolve in a vat of fire.
The whip[-shaped clouds of the jet trails have stopped appearing.
An excrescence of the sun resolved itself yesterday in the form
of a pink gelatinous blob that landed on the coast of Chile.
Scientists are attempting to discover the exact nature of the mass.
They do find corpses floating in the Fore,
lone fishermen before the harbor master.
The grey seals leave them alone to drift. That way
they ventured too far out. What was out there,
mackerel, porgies? To do the dead man’s float
requires you relax, relent. Perhaps I was greedy
so I overreached, but what I reached for wasn’t worth it.
There’s too much damage done for an open casket.
The job of a harbor master makes you matter of fact.

January 2005

Last night, a man without arms
dived in a pool on TV. His daughter attested
to his love for her: he can squeeze me
with his legs. How organs compensate
for the absence of others. So the blind hear
more acutely the ghostly vanishings.
As to the deaf, how can their eyesight
compensate for their lack of ears?
Read my lips instead. They read
the conductor’s baton. Each fluctuation
they interpret, even wind in the trees.
Do whitecaps presage storms? The smell
from an exhaust betrays a make and model,
and possible mechanical failure.
From others come their doings, from breath,
the meals they ate, from their bodies, cases
of nerves. As those whose lungs fail them
develop the pecs of Olympic swimmers;
those without arms wear legs as sturdy as oaks.
***********************

A rain-cloud passed before the sun and darkened the sky.
And after the cloud passed, suddenly it was very bright.
When it’s dark, I too feel dark. And when it’s bright, I feel bright again.
I’m walking over the pedestrian bridge at the college as if I were approaching a precipice.
But then I’m leaning over the precipice on the college pedestrian bridge for the sun,
and I’m as happy as the sun is bright.
But sometimes it’s a solar eclipse over the precipice
and there’s nothing of any immediate value to be viewed that I can think of.
So I spit upon the bald pate of a passerby with pure impunity
and curse the world with a tear in my eye that beclouds the very sun
that I was looking for.
and the assault charge pressed upon me by that bald passerby
hangs in a legal cloud from which I can never ever escape
so I lean upon the precipice of the pedestrian bridge at the college
as if I wished to fall in, but I don’t yet.

worthless notes.old stuff

June 4 02?

Wealth is not extracted without lamps or canaries–
gold perspires in the cracks of stone formations–
value is perpetually internal, the further sought,
the more it evades our overtures, our drills.
Solid matter opens to a microscope or cloud chamber
as space that gapes derisively at the seeker,
not only young Americans wandering Katmandu
unaware of the casualties in the palace,
all those gilt chambers for proper diplomatic reception
echoing the guards' boots, or closed to visitors,
as the crown prince, wounded mortally, sighs.

Dec. 1 02?

Think about the photographs in which unwittingly you appear
but only in the background. From where come their takers,
and the loved ones they had meant to photograph, in which you
take up negative space, though you never meant to be in their story?
Can you give a precise account of the places where you were
caught as a bystander, the cities, the sundry countries and parks,
among public fountains, or caught among a burst of pigeons?
Your are scattered as those pigeons and their bread-crumbs.
Can you collect the images that they have taken from you,
erase them as if nothing had happened but wind that eddied
in the pockets behind the intended subjects of the snapshots,
rain-clouds or half-emptied postcard racks? Those hinges
squeak when turned by someone who posed behind you once:
too bad you never had the chance to put your best face forward.

[anonymous, you are everywhere, a face without divinity]
[as ubiquitous as a god, among records, affections of others]
Who knows how many places your captive image has been taken.

July 4 (01?)

1.

Perihelion blooming to their finish in a waste of water

the giant umbrels that circle
in the sewerage treatment plant
weeds around the small-gauge railroad

clusters of purple vetch hugging the tracks

smaller rocket that are satellites
dissolve in crimson points, a single woman
leans on a pole dispensing phosphorescent purple
to anyone who sees, which she wears on her fingertips–
passersby are too distracted to notice

The empty centers of these heavenly bodies
high for a moment and down in ash and vapor
mimic him, the secondary bursts in a sphere now.
From what vantage? What wall of weather.

The damp start of the day is unpromising.
The gunpowder packed in paper tubes could fizzle
or be fired at impossibly low altitudes–
a squandered chance at wealth, those potential explosions.
To view from the top one must ride a helicopter,
like arriving at a ground war with a soft landing.

But with nightfall the coast begins to sputter.
The re-enactment of a siege begins with spasms
rippling through the limbs of the crowd,

arrhythmia that stems from conflicting impulses,
not systole-diastole so much as several tugs,
to move in more than one direction, yet to rest.
The crowd relaxes on the ground, and barely stands,

except the less fortunate. The lucky rest
with their shoes off and legs entwined, allow
surprise to glitter above them and their hooded carriages–
they can’t keep themselves from doing this each year.

2.

Now it’s over I can normalize my life,
take the trash out, read accumulated mail.
Recollections of multiple bursts in cloudy sky
evaporate, like fire enfeebled by mist.
Star-bursts, the mimicry of satellites,
die with the recollections of weather.
Only an idiot savant could recall the details.
Consider the erect posture of the grass,
that it is not accident that it be that way.
A man walking on an aluminum roof
has more to do than harvest dead sparklers
or these wastes of Saturn
re-born in rose and daisy yellow,
spinning in a rush of clouds very fast
to consummation over ocean.

3.

In the center of the ruby corymb
a locus of fire, in the fire geometrical dead center,
target of air surviving fire as an incident,
to which the fiery points owe their being.
In the planet -- ruby, brass, or emerald,
a fiery core resides already in the past,
an evaporation condensed from its trace,
snuffed before the sputter reports across the bay–
how the crowds loved it, more than a flower-festival.
Look at the perennials on the harbor, look
at the soft descent of ash over the fishing boats,
hear the faint hiss ebb on the water
that bathers touched their toes in only yesterday.

August 15, 2003

You break the berries in your hand
And snap the branch from the tree—
so crude! Now the tree is hurt,
It will weep its gums and resins
to thin air. The berries are poison,
Also bright and delicious-looking.
Perhaps an animal will eat them,
But to a dog, even candy is poison.
Or the animal is used to the berries—
Its system understands them,
Can ingest them, without a system failure.
It would hurt to see the animal die.
I don’t want anyone to die really.
I broke the branch because it suited
My highly formalized grief.
But I don’t keen like a mother would.
Light or Lucidas is an abstraction,
A piece of molding that tracks the sky
Apart in blue and purple segments.
When he rises in the east next time
The branches on the bush will heal.
Perhaps a dog will sniff around the roots,
Sensing that its foe, a giant mastiff, nears.

10/17/03

A high school pal, now local restaurateur,
Twirls in a pdf a serving-tray.
The resolution isn’t very good.
You see the background, not the face.

They specialize in surf ‘n turf
While the ocean washes the curb.
In waves the tourists pass the picture-windows.
The menu hasn’t changed much.

*********************************

How often the children surpass me.
They know codes I can’t even find.
The florets of their tiny logics
Are stanched and cut by their overlords
in long, deep-pocketed coats.

***********************************

As a boy, my handwriting was crooked
And my teacher wanted to straighten my back-slant
With an iron maiden. She wore the floral dresses
of the Depression and claimed that those who wished
to walk downstairs were lazy. From the sarcasm
of my blue-collar father I defended myself
with conspicuous disdain, and the children
picked on me for being short-sighted, my eyes
too close, and for my bad performance in gym.

But in the farmers’ fields I talked to God
And later earned an engineering degree. I cast it away
With the first storm after I cursed him.
They say I shine like someone isolated,
My natural exuberance at cross-purposes with my awkwardness.
Revelation doesn’t fill you up. It’s fire either way.
Must I be so close to this double-edged sword?
The perfume and mothballs in my mother’s closet reassured.

Social Realism (10/15/03)

Sparrows weaving this recycled plastic fiber into nests
hide the stuff inside hedges decorating the office entrance,

a kind of lint that can cup water surely as a sponge.
Clumps of carded plastic litter the lawn, fledglings

pecking crumbs and unexploded popcorn kernels at their feet.
It's the older sparrows who pluck the fibers out

and fly into the hedges, twining nests more closely knit
than those of any songbird. And when they're done

an outgoing shift will shake more from their shirts
and stamp the rest from their work-boots on the off-ramp.

Some strands float briefly, suspend lightly as pollen.
But the settled fiber that these parent sparrows stitch,

was never meant for birds-nests perched in holly-bushes,
a blend of shredded plastic grocery bag that goes pop,

that touched by fire, could stick to skin like napalm
before the looms [transform] it into (mostly automotive) carpet.

With hedge-clippers how happily the custodian shreds
the birds-nests shaped into down-scaled versions

of things in yard sales, ear-muffs, old catcher's mitts or couches.
With the nest and shells in the trash, the sparrows

scatter to a stand of scrawny poplars neighboring the warehouse exit.
A fleet of forklifts parked to bring refuse-bundles in, product out.

Utility shines each lift-fork to the polish of a battle-sword,
no thought about of anything so nebulous as aesthetics.

April 2 03

Quarters beneath a traffic overpass, all tarnished green,
on some, persistent white spots, texture of plaster--
I dropped them in bleach only to blacken them.
Once washed, some corrosion also washed off.

Discolored, they rolled through the coin-slots
of the washer-dryer, green as verdigris
on the valuables of merchant ships or busts
of the most benign of despots
or some provincial Cleopatra,
ushered into being with perfect skin-tones.

Other items under the overpass: Yoo Hoo bottles,
plastic covers for directionals on Superduties,
grills giant as the cow-catchers of trains
flying through the 19th century,
striking the wayward sheep so swiftly
their carcasses flew above the prairie
to be impaled on Western fence-posts.

Cattle looked dumb, unsure what they’d seen
beneath their large black lashes, which on humans
are associated with the Celts,
whereas the Anglo-Saxon eyelash is dwarfed
by an eyebrow as large and unruly
as a fox-tail or a cleaning brush,
thought indecorous to trim--
a sign of thought and cold command
for bankers, dons, and proconsuls.
Beneath such brow the eye sweeps away its adversaries.

No matter which brush I scrub with,
Washington refuses to appear beneath this one.
The lip and jaw of this terse hardened
yeoman farmer has been utterly oxidized,
the sweep of his look across the horizon,
his disapproval of the lost tribes of Israel
in animal skins and cowrie necklaces,
people of Abraham and people of Ham
dropped in the same deciduous valley.
How strong the trees look there.

A rubber ring around its lid brittle,
this change jar was better for grain.
The silver has inched up slightly.
In months it will brim to the top,
piled for each denomination.

Repose (June 99?, some revs., 9/8)

On the plaza’s granite steps
beside the gearbox of a glassed-in clock
its gears of brass stilled for
Return of the Jedi

But in the museum
how fares the spirit of Henry Moore
his nativities fused in gleaming bronze
their surfaces round or sharp as spear-heads
or stone fertility idols

and buried in the figurines
the principle of airstream in a car
new models that hearken to the 30s
with bumps, no fins, nostalgia for the future.

The present condemned to repeat the past
the past condemned to mimic the future.
On a very flimsy screen
wobble dated haircuts and the heroine’s
vestal robes, mercurial, liquified.

Even Darth Vader in Dyna-flow SS helmet,
was once a child who may have played here
snapshot in a department store
with a pea coat and a little Dutch Boy haircut
beside a pinafored, beribboned sister

in which time no transparent clock
had been constructed, in wax or plywood,
time a phosphorescent flow, the museum
matchsticks and broken water mains.

Until a paper flow engendered a spark
a vague idea of plexiglass and granite
sunk in what were deemed ruins, a donut shop
now quasi-amphitheater, by the whorehouse
with a clock propped in its corner.

And what of the scaled-down bronzes
of Rodin and Degas, their repose on each pedestal
like wave mechanics seized in plaster casting?

The plaza is standing room only.
But neither is the museum empty.
The movie is the childhood of the audience,
the haircuts, the flowing robes the future.

Downfall (rough draft)(real crap now)

Dowdy pleated cotton batting tacked on walls of this revival theater
brings attention to the faces staring from a tattered photographic blowup
audience visibly impatient with the camera stationed on the proscenium
that sees what I can see, slight restless shift in 1977 inside bucket seats--

the men in flannel and mufti, the women with tents of hair
entangling their shoulders as it might some Neolithic Venus
engaged in the currents of the lazy and altruistic seventies,
the black and white devoid of post-boom chromes and silvers
later splashed conspicuously on Walkmans and imported compacts.

During showtime, Berlin gets hammered, worse than cut-backs,
grey city blown to chunks, the equally grey coats of the Reichswehr afire.

The dusted uniforms in the cinema lack the color of the stones
to which Berlin has been reduced, as their picture is taken,
and as they watch their picture being taken in their present,
a generation passes and we watch them watch the generation previous.
But we will be watching the movie, not them, they're gone.

A failed state shrinks to an interim period wide as a soccer-field.
Our hairier predecessors stare toward a future revival house,

video not having killed theater yet,
nights out not yet confined to the mortgaged living-room,
surplus reels of minutiae abandoned in hot warehouses,

[the extra pockets of their work-shirts stitched with buttons of pearl]
although they’re empty of plastic money and phone cards---
their goatees middle-European like those of emigre professors,
people without the distractions of sinking junk bonds and cable.

How closer they've come to these Downfalls than to us.
As if they were friends who lost touch with us when they moved away, but grew needless of our mutual good wishes or sympathy.
Nested in the blowup, their image muted,
do their semblances gaze beyond their self-embarrassment

at time squandered? How often did they let their majors change,
these lapsed oceanographers or social workers draped in chambray?
Did they fly to suburbs, flee the noise of real-time Downfall?

Time to wave a white flag above rubble. Soon the theater seats
will stop creaking from the bodies that dropped on weakening springs

space enough to miss the space between wars,
to watch one war start one stop, another linger in an interim.
The interim is always with us.

Blisters (draft) (11/02-04)

Maybe my palms blister,
but this woman has stigmata
in the center of her palms
looking like cherry-red bruises,
for which she must anoint herself.

After she spreads her hands
out for hours at a time,
hoping that the sun and air
dries away whatever ails her.
Hope plays a part in this repair.

My palms however sweat
so much I won’t shake hands,
and the creases in my palms
that cross and split like faults
seem indelible as orbits.

What sutures outlast surgery?
What stitches do surgery leave?
What configurations await
palm readers to interpret?
This is how my faults appear.

Praise no need for ointment
to rub and revive them
until they can smile,
with cheeky, pink complexion
like that of one who works
hardly using hands.

Creasing where the hand folds,
The palm is where shame hides
spare change is concealed
where handles are gripped,
for umbrellas or weapons.

An ointment suppresses
the wound in the center,
as if the palms could bleed,
stigmata that cannot clear,

too late to shed the marks
that have become our brand,
no sun can bleach away.

Next Door, September (ca. 2002?)

The sound chimes make once the door opens
by the dad who tunes his car or mows the lawn
or the wife who cuts hedges with audible fury
in the snip of the power hedge-clipper
or the two children, bright and classifiable
as slightly precocious. The parents don’t say no.
The chimes ring in the afternoon. It’s a holiday.
The dad goes in and out, and the chimes ring
as he re-crosses the threshold. One of them
must be driven to a destination: doctor?
Again the chimes ring. She will visit her sister
with the hedges clipped and leavings gathered
in nice symmetrical piles for the kids to stuff
in two-ply garbage bags with lining so strong
you could sail to the moon with two of them.
The chimes ring in rake-tines scraping the drive.
Dad’s in and out. It’s going to rain in buckets.

Untitled (draft, ca. 2003)

Her ballerina’s foot
dropped on a manhole cover
Con Ed had wired mistakenly.
Ample sums were paid the family.
But what psychologist
can rewire the brain,
bring the subject back to life?
How much rewiring
can one clinical psychologist do,
she the electrician
we rely upon
for our ground fault?

Hers was a brilliant career,
rewiring children
to work again.
When her slipper,
silk or synthetic,
arched on the manhole cover
in the East Village
she'd abandoned the dance,
according to friends.
Volts in thousands
could not bring her
to leap again.

A manhole cover,
waffled for water
to flow through aqueducts,
was wired,
though inadvertently
by Con Ed,
a brilliant career perished
when the foot,
housed in a dancing slipper,
conducted volts
in the thousands–
as if the sun
had sought a hole
to pass through
en route to Dis
or other depths
for which she was too good.

Currency moves traffic,
drives the Dow up
sends kids to college.
Current, pushed through wrong paths,
drives vital numbers down,
and being lightning without revelation,
bruises the heart but leaves
each hair on the head untouched.

Who will rewire the children
she'd left behind,
the street that felled her
now rewired right?

02/02/04 notes. Warning: first draft, pretty wretched, and verbatim

Landscape devolves into the purity of the bare and level,
no mountains, no valleys, no canyon dentata
or mesoliths or redwoods borne before
the temple was razed or the Nazarene arrived,
or the execution site enshrouded in (eclipse) nightfall,
a cross-cut ring a section of what the giants ate.
Now everything's flat and severe. A line divides the land
from sky like the perfectly flat one on an oscilloscope of the dead,
the tone that says peace. Dormant matter is at peace with itself.
Please do not disturb. Two streaks at peace with one another
who cut diagonally across the sky and swiftly depart.
At first I thought they were meteors, but I was wrong.
And since I laid the last sentence down, they are gone,
fighter jets who follow the air lanes to Europe,
the Viking route, over Newfoundland and across
so little vegetation the hunters stare the hapless elk in the eye
before they fire, a denuded Ardennes.
In an earler day there might have been robbers
in teh woods. They kidnap children and diamonds.

"I don't seek necessarily to write a correct language"
said the don, "espacially when extremely pie-eyed
and afloat in the sky among clouds assuming the semblance
of my favorite animal crackers, my reward for decades
of scholarship an amnesia self-induced beclouding
roseate exactitude" so he muttered to the Dean of Arts
as he flapped his wings before the punch-bowl His eyes
popped out of his head at the stellar appearance of a protege
and when he skipped and danced around the crows someone
was reminded of Nijinsky in his mad phase, others thought
he was simply unsightly and tragic. There were naturlich followers
who saw him as flipping his bird at the establishment
but they were in a small minority and had never attended
the orgies he'd held at his suburban ranch when the kids
were packed away at summer camp, whiling away their days
frolicing on inner tubes in some Vermont lake or singing
folk-songs around a roaring campfire after nightfall's inauspicious advent.

The Don tripped upon a charcoal brazier and fell on his face.
the people around him feigned humor, surprise, and concern.
The host finally helped him on his feet and patted his shoulder.
"I liked the zebras the most" he said when erect again,
The ridges of the stripes impressed upon his tongue. He stuck it out
(cavities in his brain-mad-cow-disease-filled-with fluid
from which fat serpentine worms began to drink freely). His brain must be
full of absesses (he thought) until the interior assumes
a sublime appearance of gaping caves, deep unlit distances
that if illuminated, would recall the landscapes of Kaspar
David Friedrich, and he must have (so he speculated once
he was on his two feet) those twisted and unobserved
cypresses of early Romantic painting inside too. There must be valleys
that drop into abysses (his cortex, the whole spine, or his
windpipe) but once explored, interiors open to frontiers,
just as when you travel a desire to see a landmark when sated
opens up a space of regret for places contiguous yet unseen.
So I must be more of a nebula than an ocean he thought
as he emptied a succession of plastic champagne glasses
he'd procured from a servant's tray and re-deposited there.

The belly-lint, the feed-towers, the wives sorting the lint
into strands the sparrows like (they build their nests with it
inside the bushes). They hop on the driveway, which
was recently repaired, the yellow stripes, the fire-lanes.

[note: where it begins to go wrong must be at the beginning itself...]
**************************

The Hermitage: It's massive, daunting, meant to intimidate,
its multiple windows, its galleries and ballrooms. You can eat a cream tea in perfect silence hours before the place is stormed. Girls as nymphs
run through the hallways. a detail-an El Greco, or an Italian
master? A cat and chicken in accord beneath the Savior. The cat bows before the chicken pecking fed grain. But satirists place little dogs beside personified abuses of power, the legs on which they piss.
Stray dogs, their history obscure, no masters, no monuments for.
In big rooms, beneath ceilings too high to touch or to observe
the molding with anything other than field glasses, you can breathe,
not bump into someone awestruck. A meal far too cloying to consume.
What's wrong with coffee-table books? In a museum, among old masters,
you haven't a clue. You stare at a statue until its silhouette
becomes a statue-shaped hole in your head, until you notice
surroundings, blind as you are to the piece that brings them through
these doors in droves, three graves, a virgin, whatever. Who can read
the writing on such decorous walls? Inside the gold frames,
their moulding crashed neoclassically like waves on breakweaters, every motif goes black, the back side of some trick mirror, the side of an interrogator who cannot see the suspect, great works that melt away replaced by new ones, pigments that lose their fiery colors more slowly
no doubt than maple leaves just as the hardest glass
seeks a center of gravity inside its core.

[This concludes Feb. 2 2004 entry.]

Invisible Ink (7/15/070 (revd. Jan. 09)

"Scatter thy pearls"

Dips in his Capri bathhouse could not cure the open sores
that spotted the cheeks of the Emperor Tiberius.
Rain is trenching through the flower beds, red slugs are blooming
on the leaves of the garden like pustules or blood-blisters.

At his villa Tiberius raised babies to suckle milkless breasts,
old man with the unrejuvenated mammaries of old men.
The bean-stalks' broken stems nod upon the splints,
the pods tough, not sweet, the closest thing to children

that I nurture with water laced with crystals blue as Zyklon B,
blue food more crystalline than the highest Alpine summer skies,
airless blue glimpsed by mountain climbers, jet pilots, ascetics.

The plant-food I broadcast from my hand stimulates the roots to life.
But too soon my carelessly scattered pearls fill this journal,
not with crystals, but the pearliness of water and mucus, the lining of shells.

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Entertainer's Ward

In Hell’s ward for artists Andy Warhol sits on his bunk bed thinking about James Brolin in Hotel and the Village People. “Even if there were a TV, even some wallpaper would be nice, “ Andy Warhol said. “I’m lonely here” he said aloud. “I don’t have anything to do.” An obese Oscar Wilde lying in the bunk across, his face ravaged by his syphilis, stares at flies on the wall. “I never really did decorate” Andy continues. “How about a bowl of carnations, a lace doily on a nightstand? Doesn’t anyone have any parties? Why is everyone so glum? Ever spent a night at the Chelsea? I had friends there. Some of them died in the rooms.” Candy Darling never talks to him.

**********

In the ward for entertainers, Rip Taylor and Avery Schreiber do not get along, having spent their last days above earth in nursing homes penniless. Rip however was more the raconteur, metamorphosing handkerchiefs into pigeons, tossing confetti made from shredded memoranda among the senior citizens in the lounge while tooting a plastic trumpet. On the operating table, he pulls out swatches of handkerchiefs from his tunic, producing from his armpits tiny incendiary devices that bring the Swat teams. When this lord of misrule is lowered into middle earth, the funeral attendees half-expect him to pop the coffin lid and throw firecrackers at the pastor as he reads the last rites. But Avery Schreiber
reacts as if he’d had his heart torn out! Because he was the silent one in the act. Who then would have guessed that he had talent? Physical comedy of the Chaplin-Keaton mode was not the order of the day. All the children remember of him on earth is munching Doritos in commercials. And so his art was lost along with that of Wheeler and Wolsey and Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle. He looks among the inmates for commiseration. Jim Jones and Koresh wish they had Rip Taylor on their team.

Rip has the bad taste to set a smoke bomb off among the high command of hell. Some of the Rat Pack out the window pick weeds to distill into a crude fermented beverage or to roll into a kind of cigarette that emits a stench so pungent and evil-smelling that a sulfurous whiff of it occasionally wafting above to earth will asphysixiate livestock. As the inmates defecate, their waste bubbles up into tar pits. Their gas paralyzes rats and deposits itself among tyrannosaurus rex or flying reptiles, their bony wings, more webbed than feathery, unrecognizably contorted by mother earth’s thousand-kilo-fold pressure, which is
the lid on hell.

There's a Pattern

Not that it was an unproductive day,
just not as productive as the day before.
Cindy sends thank-you notes to interviewers
on fine paper cards, not on legal-sized paper.

She frets about the gold trim on the cover
and won’t use a stamp with a Stanley Steamer.
Next door Mandy writes self-help books.
The pattern of your life is there for you to find.

They seem to need the plow to clear the drive.
You don’t often see golf courses covered in snow.
A little dog on a porch yaps at a big one.
It’s everyday events like this that charm me.

The manure was overturned in the spring.
The old boy’s train set was gutted.
In the golden age, how it could clear tunnels.
But a hobby shop outside of town was iffy.

They used to clear the train tracks just for fun.
John-boy never wanted to be in the business.
He kept raising the stakes when he gambled.
–so your husband was a peace officer in the next town?

That’s funny! Mine was the fish and game warden.
–so he arrested two teens on an Oxycontin charge?
That’s funny too! My husband caught two poachers.
They stupefied the deer with their headlights.

--Isn’t life crazy? There are so many incidents
that don’t coincide but happen in parallel fashion.
You could be arranging flowers on the screen porch
while I could be raking leaves or doing dishes,

or while you knit I could be taking a nap
and dreaming that I was in a long corridor
with a sibling while you shake a carpet outside
or I could feed the cat while you’re in your Subaru

admiring the cathedral pines bearded with icicles
on the way to Home Depot while I wrestle with a problem.
And to think our neighbors do things as well
while we do other things! I can’t account for that!

They may divorce, may reconcile, may be on their way
to their houseboat or to the ski resort
and we can’t keep count of the deeds they do
while we perform these other deeds. There’s this thing

called Time I used to think was discontinuous
but actually it flows and contains all of us, our neighbors
and other people unlike us. I read about it
in Parade. No, that’s not it. The History Channel.

If time is a place where we all do things at once,
then why have I never heard about it all my life?
I feel I’ve missed the boat, this time flowing about me
like water flows around the boat to reconvene

at the stern. I feel like the last passenger at the station,
but that if I learn any more I will explode
and an entirely different form of energy will be created,
one no scientist can understand or barely fathom.

For my eyes (03?)

This helmet is hard
try falling head-first
from your high-rise
and live long enough to tell all

this suit so heat-resistant
you could swim on the sun
which is liquid and nuclear
with intermittent flare-ups

These wrap-around shades
polarize so much light
when you put them on
the world becomes composed

in the quattrocento
every fleck and fiber
virginal blue robe
every straw in manger

dandruff flake on shoulder
as if beneath microscopes
before your blindness
This bungee cord so elastic

you'll drop miles
before you'll hit a rock
and live to tell about it
How you'll sink

before these bands of care
can lift you to ground zero
But how many times
must you bounce back?

The poison in this bottle
is so child-proof
you'll take a decade
to prize the cap off

but the time-released caps
take forever to dissolve
and the slo-mo hemlock
coincides with your life-span.

Sangillo's (May 2007)

Where a one-armed man
sought a one-legged woman
among the blacklights
trained on Zodiac posters,

Afro'd couples kama-sutrad
while women brawled
rolling over floor-boards,
skirts up as they clawed

to the delight of seamen,
one of whom confided
you are the only person
who is not on the take.

On the exact corner
is an upscale restaurant.
The poor have vanished,
rising in the world.

Those homeless men
with their hands out
make me bristle--
once I helped them.

Fishing, 1907

I.
Before the immobile Okhrana, police-guards
whose epaulets glitter, whose walrus moustaches
gather snow like train-tracks rust or trees wind,
who have witnessed the fragility of my thoughts
fly into snow-drifts blowing back like locusts ....

Fish approach the hole the day-watch lets me gouge
in the lake with my little shank or walking-stick.
Scales are to fish what dumbness is to peasants.

We cannot see the pearl within,
and don't know if it’s there. Do they wonder
what we make of them? A dorsal quivers,
making ice water, shuddering the hole to life.

II.

How did the rank-and-file get through days
at those oil-fields I organized in Baku?

To a worker's state
they shut half-Asiatic eyes, answering my handbills
with the ruddy enigma of Tamurlane.

Robberies were better, letting me travel--
far cry from being a seminary student
in a dusty town of crippled muzhiks and stale tea
and the latticed windows of the shopkeepers whose hands
jabbed like the forepaws of an organ-grinder's monkey.

I could only watch the sweat stiffen
the beard of the Metropolitan Archbishop.
But secretly I admired his gold and crimson habit,
sticks of incense fogging the chapel (mostly in funerals),
candle auras spinning before bronze tapers could snuff them,
all smoke and mirrors, even better than parades or cinema.
I even thought a cruse of oil could burn a mendicant to ash!

III.

How that bishop's intonations ravished though.
His verse offset my taste for local colorists,
all surfaces diversions, true life being underneath.

My suet-bait sinks through water painful as acid.
And when the fish scare, and new ice webs older water,
holes appear the size in which a man could fit,

through which my mother squints,
a kerchief tucked around her face,
rutted property of whore or saint.
Put out the light of the eye she tells me.

A Draft to Look At (05-06?)

The ruling elites needed to re-route the rivers.
Strange nations became acquainted with another.
Now the Yellow River poured into the Rhine
and the Orinoco looped into the Hudson
as the Nile poured in the Colorado, and the Mekong
merged with the Fore. Still the elites were sad
and their crystal balls cloudy, and their statistics
communicated messages at cross-purposes–
the sludgy backwash pouring from a culvert
marbled like chunks of quartz in granite
spills back into the Gulf that was its source.
They reconverted all the rivers and their sources
but don’t apologize: so the Orinoco croc
caught in the snow won’t catch his meal
but will be a dinosaur. Already hockey teams
play in the Sun Belt. Trust what creeps
can crawl and find its way. Exceptions linger.
The planners of the world refuse to think
what the world would be like if left alone
but neither do they like retrospection:
what’s done is done. Can we move on?

How the routes of the world were changed.
So that cheap appliances arrived in Beijing,
coffee flowed to Colombia, medical instruments
glutted Germany and fighter jets Sweden.
Tiger fish followed the Connecticut, crocs swam
the Hudson, and orangutangs found themselves
amazed among Florida orange groves, and lemurs
among the Dakotas, and arctic foxes in casino dumpsters,
while the Congolese great apes gamboled among the rhubarbs.

In other climes locals shot anything that moved,
and whatever moved moved rapidly as the eye
could sort woods from the intruder, trees from woods,
until they could enumerate each leaf and the lobe on the leaf,
after which a dissatisfaction would rise in the gullet,
an acidic taste at the back of the throat, and the viewer
wished to rearrange the lobes on each leaf,
and the leaves on each tree and each tree in the woods.
Such imbalanced views cried out for rearrangement.

In strange ways came together tributaries,
as if hands of different sizes were laced together.
Not like compatible male and compatible female,
hands of Barbie and Ken, Napoleon and Josephine.
Piranha gorged bottom-feeders, penguins enveloped
in the barely visible umbrellas of jellyfish.
Hybrids popped their heads from the waves.
But for the think-tanks, business boomed.
The therapy of re-routing the world had just begun,
the cutting up of maps again and rearranging them.
Think of all the readjustments needed:
already psychotherapy booms. Come stand in line with us.

1/30/04 to 1/31/04(more worthless crap)

You take the test among the ferns and rosebushes
and breathe the aroma as around the pond the music plays,
the piano sonatina that propels your thought patterns
to the speed of turbochargers. Happily your nerve-ends
do not fuse as they might had you been attacked with nerve-gas.

The rapidity with which the manuscripts
will be returned, the envelope flipped open
and the pages stuffed into the self-addressed
stamped envelope supplied with the manuscript.
How often does this take place at a given hour.

Whenever the light turns green, not most of the time.
The flowers in the park more often bloom than
someone finds fault with what you've sent them.
O sorry, this doesn't suit us now, good luck elsewhere.
A police car flashing lights at a southerly exit.
They're catching reckless drivers. Yesterday, two days ago,
an accident occurred, with at least three vehicles
near the sign shop on a corner across from this place,
and they swept the curb after the cars were towed,
no evidence of teh safety glass that broke into even,
predictabler fragments, like oversized sand-grains
and from a vantage of four stories the bent hoods
looked like the parts of Marx toys or folded tinfoil,
not the kind that would be used on foil cylinders
for recording brass bands (piano in those days, the 90s,
was impossible). In fact, the curb where the accident was
has never been cleaner since. Happy accident then.
Without the accident, the curb wouldn't have been so clean.
They missed the ink jet printer with the eight-foot carriage in the shop,
which can print giant signs and billboards or decals
at the customer's specification. A medium without the message.
Idleness, apathy, envy, contempt--these are the emotions.
Scorn engenders indifference. Bad fortune engenders envy.
People can live together, even understand one another in conditional ways
when they're relaxed, watching television or arranging flowers.
A man with an earring and gray hair discusses the war
with my mother at the check-out counter and mentions how
his masters degree in science cannot get him a job.

In which ear did the gray-haired man with the masters
degree in computer science wear the ring?
What kind of ring did the man wear? Was the hair
a salt and pepper gray or did it border on shocks of white?
Mountains of mail that accumulate like corn-stalks
which belong in the compost. A compote being
suspended between a gelatin dessert and a jam.
An opium compote a variant of dessert
distilled for paragoric or cough medicine.
The redness of poppies on the Aegean from the blood
spilled for them.

As the gold of the ears of wheat that carpet the plains
and make the people, descendants of pioneers armed with little more
than spelling primers, wary of the ten-diollar word.
Don't let them infect my garden, no sir. Get the Raid
from the shed, which will outlive me, as the equity will climb
sky-high.

What the counselor wished to say was
all the effort leading to sterile or negative results
plainly resolves itself into something good eventually
that you can tell your grandchildren if you have them
as I do. Make sure to insert the term successful everywhere.
Fill the larder with canned goods before the siege.
Water the wine. Draw buckets from a well.
Don't touch your bank account and freeze your assets.
Of course she is free to say that brighter skies are coming.
A journal exercise reduced to spleen-venting.
The ponderous writer whose face seemed frozen in a frown,
even as he disembarked from a motorbike, and whose characters
when lost in thought bit their upper lip--
a housewife, her father, the newspaper boy with the Huffy bicycle flinging Grit over the fence--
when confronted with a moral dilemna (shall I tell or no?)
they bite their upper lip as if they came from the same family, a family of men perhaps,
who in a remote past clubbed one another, pillaged the caves and groves of the enemy,
stomped demonstrably upon their hunting grounds, but now, almost hairless and refined,
their skin like alabaster or parchment and their brains enlarged,
bite their upper lip when in anxiety, whereas others, from other planets perhaps,
scratch their heads or wring their hands. But those gestures are for other authors, other tribes. Swig the glass by the pool, Henry, and bring me another one too.
She's just a kid but she's sure sweet and delicious, I'd like to get a hold of her and squeeze, he said, under the influence of another double bourbon.
He love wrecking his brain and blurring the detail, breaking into a sweat
adn losing eyesight and hearing wouldn't detain him--he loved the feeling as the numbness and the warmth crept over him so he could sink into himself like an anumal will sink into his burrow, having eaten either his offspring or his feces.
God damnit, it sure feels good--don't knock it until you've tried it, son.
Innumerable subplots murmur here for the asking. Tireless kobolds can be faintly heard,
cobbling the plots together--crises, seizures, sweaty rages, monologues of love or agitated set speeches. A smell of soup, cologne, and musty body odor.
Let me drink kerosene from a glass slipper: let every liquor that burns my throat purge me of my hubris.

Clusters of fragmented glass swept carefully
towards the curb from teh same street

A cotton wad, a long cloud frowning

the unsightly lavender of the setting winter sun

.....................
1/31/04

How dry the weather has been; my fingers crackle from the static electricity: there hasn't been snowfall in over a month. The salt and mud on the vehicles has become clay-like, kaolin-white dust. The clouds are elongated, icy looking. In the sunset they turn lavender. Fewer starlings appear on the ledge: one or two I shoo away. But fewer than last year. Nightfall must arrive at 4:30, or even later? Mars looks like desert without the amenities of the prickly cactus. Before I begin work I must watch a film on safety. The mid-winter doldrums. An uneventful stasis.

Landscape, the human figure dethroned, decentered. On Mars, an undifferentiated flatness, dust, some bedrock, more often miles and miles of iron-ruddy rocks smaller than the ones stonesmasons call dog-killers. So in that case there aren't even geographical landmarks unless the explorer probes a mountain or the ridge of a large crater or perhaps that canyon that lashes across the surface like a scar. So the landscape available is even more denuded of possible focal points such as nymphs, dryads, shepherds, crotches of streams, groves, single trees, cattle, fences for cattle, things that cross or intervene, or mark a threshold, or suggest a possible direction to be taken, say a road or valley.

Mars is the ultimate landscape because the eye isn't being called to attention towards anything, and thus it looks computer-generated-- a band of sky, a band of red soil with small rockss with little to distinguish one from another, their fractures random, uncalled for, there only because they can be there, just as those desktop screen-savers generate uncountable geometrical shapes from an algorithm, Rube Goldberg pipes or Piranesi rooms or Rubik's cubes that gradually fatten into parti-colored basketballs.

(Two complete journal entries dating from late January 2004.)

1/24/04 (more worthless crap)

The conductor had a reputation for a salty tongue
which he used to lash performers on occasions.
Andante, the violinists were as busy as bees,
African ones, crawling up the noxious corridors
of Galveston or Louisiana, or straddling derricks,
the multiple shafts pounding the soil to agitated
molecules resembling those upon a tea-cozy.
He ripped the ornaments from the cheap suit of this fantasia
and for free! From the goodness of his heart. Are you
kidding? Think of the emotional-psychological price paid.
That nothing has happened doesn't mean that nothing
will happen. Disappointment is unmet by pleasant surprises.
Check the hardness of the coin by clamping it with your teeth.
The faint canine markings will indicate a counterfeit.
Night music that ushers in a weekend afternoon. You've slept
too late for all your life. The sun's been up, the shoots sprouted.
People have come together: they own and don't rent. A blob
of semen seems to become ash within seconds (meditations).
The manure becomes the fragrance of perfumes and aerosol sprays.
Soon the flower garden's a salad strewn upon
someone's flagstone steps. Keep out, says the white sign,
the picket fence beside the sign. But I hardly go
there anymore anyway. All your life the sun's been up
and you never knew it. When did you leave the yard?
When did you ever have one?

Mar. 27 03 draft nota bene

Christine Amanpour

Real-time mastery of battle-space
segues to glittery, bejeweled beauty
of green auras around the dimmest lights
exploded views of incendiary devices
concealed in cane-brake, depth charges
that bring the river-trout to surface

a fountain without exactitude
of spigots trained on one illuminated point.
Reporters aren’t poets armed with Guggenheims
to write about Italian fountains
or art that tames the wild

rocking on flat-bottomed boats,
their gear intact among the bulrushes,
the satellite dishes
pinging their missives to the anchorman
in invisible binary bits and bleeps,
a dish that trains all scattered impulses
into glowing ash-heaps or emerald brilliance

An ice queen with a faintly Persian resonance
to her surname, but still assimilated
to Occidental values, opposes Ostrogoths
below the tan-line, their Hammurabic practices–
From whence comes her faint smirk
other than from scorn for those satrapies
who blew their rams'-horns or sacrificed their sons.

Feb. 20 03

(In Other Words, Everything I Touch Confirms My Flaws)

Power cables leap above access roads upon which live the pious
among yards of rusting flat-bed trucks brushed by ferns in early spring,
the ground beside them spongy with spaghum moss or pine needles.
The wind through the trees is very damp, and deep within the woods
are conceived yearlings that will leap into the roads by June,
while cables that pylons bolster cross rural counties
connecting to transformer stations coils of lovely copper wire
wound more precisely than buns of hair on fastidious church ladies
from which the cables travel to and fro above the humble abodes
with their canoes and rusting trucks with plastic pools or swings
or abandoned school buses with windows broken and punctured tires
slanting into bogs or marshy soil. You also think of spring
as you watch those vehicles corrode, the layers of paint
unpeeled by neglect or fire, surfaces scaled and coruscated
as walls of abandoned foundries on which constantly trickle
from corrugated tin roofs and rotted beams the aftermath
of rain or melting snow. It’s already spring in one’s head:
you melt as does the snow. But the thaw has been postponed,
the salty flats [covered] with a layer of half-ice, half-slush,
the pylons leap-frogging one another above grass either
golden as Illinois wheat or dull-brown as an unwanted mutt
baying at full moons in a junkyard, its proprietor lost
in deliriums of drink inside a shack concealed behind empty barrels
and the zinc-scaled disconnected parts of a ventilation system
that in its prime breathed upon its tenants the mold-laced air
and dust of space that, regardless of origin, swirls desultorily
before the faces of matrons with someone over for tea and fruit-cake,
the woollen chair-backs trapping dander beneath ancestral portraits
and die-stamped seascapes in which the breaking waves defy physics
as they race the land, a promontory absent picnickers bedecked
in 19th century finery and toting baskets more suitable
for balls of yarn and darning needles than the food one takes
to the seaside. Someone has painted himself in a corner here,
and wishes a window could be cracked, that the radiator
wasn’t adjusted so high, wilting the wild-flowers and Joe Pye weed
on the windowsill, the junkyard dust spinning in discrete columns
of sunlight, more than several motes instead of dried-up apples
to the eye. So one has written oneself into the circumstances
one has begun and filled in to the very last detail.

1/31/05

1.

Dorothy, lost as Ruth among the alien corn,
weeps beneath a sign that points to Oz or Kansas,
Toto in her arms. In this generic city background
of building blocks, every window-ledge is blank--except
that flower-pots sprout generic flowers without leaves.

2.

The lion metamorphosed into some gentle-giant biker,
a golden mop standing in for his lion’s mane.
His beer can crushed in one paw, he sports tattoos
on the uniformly golden skin of his human forearms.
Lions are nothing but miserable in their cages.
What leonine eye in a zoo is not rheumy?

3.

The gold that blows away
with stocks and bonds becomes the straw
that fills the scarecrow in the cornfield
who is the artist and whose name sprawls
across the brick road in the painting
scuffed with the feet of pilgrims.

Jokers in cornfields have hoisted
ski-masks on scarecrows in Freddy Kruger pranks.
Real guignol theater begins with the animals:
the Orinoco croc that chews on gator

down-scales to mites infesting honeybees to death.
Take the Serengetti then. Take real-time lions
who cannibalize their dead once downed
by gunshot wounds or greed that drives them into trees
to steal an eland a solitary leopard caught rightfully,
then fall to break their backs. All that effort.

Property-as-theft's the way of gods and wizards.
Get the blood and body of another, consume its virtue.
Across from the Oz sequence, a giant lobster
drops tinier humans in a roiling pot:
kill the meat yourself. Why not drag children
through abattoirs after the field-trip to the dairy?

4.

Lions kill, don’t eat hyena. Not a hyena in sight.
Scary shit-eaters to this day, the oldest creodont,
whose grin is our human smile's remotest ancestor,
their stomach acids eat through cartilage and watch-spring.
Their grin reminds, and flashes teeth back.
Try to find the stuffed hyaenid in Toys ‘R Us.

5.

?

9/1/02

He wakes at night to write his verses down,
and then he shares them with the Rotarians.
His rhyming ineptitude can still amaze.

The local papers do a feature on him.
From this he gets more engagements, opines
on Catcher in the Rye (just about a spoiled brat).

The notebook in which he scribbles
his verses is pocket-sized. He memorizes quotes,
telling his students to do the same,

but do you think they really listen?
Sometimes he's forced to take the dolts from shop class
and make them do a proper business letter.

There is little hope they will ever leave
a roughly ten-mile perimeter.

Sure, the quarterback will get a break
and live to sell cars at the local Ford dealer.
Otherwise everyone is a total disappointment.

Backward Masking Unmasked (11/27/01)

3.
How many messages have I missed, beamed back to me,
because I haven't been here, and the answering machine
wasn't plugged in? Systems of the leaf, of powerlines,
unmediated woods beaten back. Why do they pipe the milk
to dairies like lymph? Wouldn't that be easier
than trucking it in? Where are those rivers of milk
we were promised? Fruits that surprise us
dropping into our hands? finding themselves there,
which never need to be peeled, or plucked from the vine?
How almost voluntarily the flesh segments itself,
allows itself to break with hardly a tear of tissue
or slicing of rind? as if surgery could be done with bare hands,
every ailing organ manipulated to re-assume its harmonious
position in the system? Rivers of milk supposed to pour
above us--we can bathe in it. Look how it breaks on rocks
on which maybe a grey owl peeks, looking for rats or voles,
fanning out in counter-currents on the other side to rejoin itself.
The reign of felicity is when all this will happen.

2.

With an audible crack I slap the receiver in the cradle
whenever the taped message repeats itself about the time-share
or the lakeside two God's-little-acres. I crack the headset
in the cradle when the taped message repeats itself about
the time shares, two weeks a year for the rest of your life.
I calculate what this time-share would be like could I live forever
then dream that I have come for my time-share at the end of time.
And haven't I paid for the privilege? The lodge has gone through several managers.
Only I was left, amid the ice and mist, or was it after fire?
For two weeks of the year I'd made plenty of friends there.
We kidded the live ones about health scares, or said how good we looked.
I'd gone through enough, seen a city vanish in a plume of water,
witnessed its facades become unrecognizable, and the friends
who'd been strangers became familiar ghosts from lengthy unacquaintance,
but at least I had lived in a world of constants, a single high-rise here,
a hillside with well-groomed paths there, the same hedges or their descendants,
or two brothers, one who followed the other a polite distance during anger
but walked abreast in reconciliation, no matter how long had lasted the grudge,
love must have lasted longer. Would they die in one another's arms?

1.

I am somewhere on a high hill, counting the daisies, and am happy,
happy that I count the daisies, and that I live on the high hill.
Sometimes I go to my friend's house to play. Sometimes they are gone.
Or they are in their house at dinner time, but are not friends anymore.
Sometimes they are there, and when they are, they tell me go ahead and eat.
I will work on a dairy farm someday although I am afraid of cows.
In the road around the house is a deer, some bulldozers, and the sun
telling everyone to be happy, and plants that are special
just as I am special. Special is to not be with the others.

10/13/01

You were something of a village outcast, but you were sweet,
and brought me figs in the morning and grapes and cakes in the evening.
We watched the river undulate through apple orchards and overstep the canals.
Once,you handled a little toy elephant and made its trunk move with your fingers.
I suspended my disbelief until it seemed the real thing, lurching down to me
through the canebrake. But you just giggled and threw yourself into my arms.

We knew the old religion had died into embers barely aglow,
that the severity of its terms had fought the silver-haired apostates to a standstill.
Once, with a rifle, a gift from the most high, I charged a parapet on my own
and stumbled into a gaggle of mice. Pink and almost blind, they had nested in the gun-mounts.

There were little cubbies in the walls where the prisoners were taken
and doused with brine and crabs, as in the old days: the more
it changes, the more it stays the same. I can only guess
how many casualties we had. I saw the wheelbarrows and the trenches.
A limping elder dressed in brown rags touted firewood in a wheelbarrow,
the amazing thing: it had no wheels upon it.

The premium for peace I thought was a paper flower in a buttonhole
not wads of cash. Surely a phase of collective incrimination will follow.

Offerings (8/3/09)

A conference room doubles as a tomb for public offerings. You'd think there'd be an altar where the victim-initiate-corporate counsel-or-principal stockholder would have his commodious member pierced with the quill of a porcupine, his blood to flow down a groove in a pink granite trough to pool into an inkwell for the final signing, the fainting victim ushered on a stretcher to recuperate in the finest of hospitals, assuming trauma from excessive blood loss didn't kick in, impairing the faculties of the man-god. No fear: before the ceremony he was well-feted, wined and dined.

His bold decisions and thoughts-outside-the-box were advertised in several self-help books, and in paler imitations and one-offs that are the highest kind of flattery. His name had been attached to a weight-loss and exercise book, and a cookbook for quick but healthy nouveau cuisine. The Aspen Institute had contracted him to utter platitudes about saving the African poor via market innovation; Charlie Rose had stared across the roundtable like the maitre'd he was.

Yet nothing had prepared him for this ultimate challenge. Now he lay in his hospital bed, blanched and withered violet, such an unsuitable end to this executive-cum-corporate raider-cum mountain climber-sky diver-daredevil-philanthropist. In the semi-retirement he'd thought he'd been entitled to enjoy, he'd opened a chain of gyms and a discount furniture store.

Where was the mystique now? his member swaddled in cotton gauze changed all too seldomly by the male nurse practitioners chosen to preclude any life-threatening tumescence. Here he was, Prometheus without a liver to peck. Then yes: idea, light in brain! A personal memoir about his crawl to recovery, although some details, the more embarassing ones at least, would need to be suppressed quietly.

Untitled (8/28/09)

These harmless spindly winged creatured
dance and scuttle on the bathroom walls
lacking pincers or appendages for harm --
would be better off among the plant kingdom.
Alas there's bath-water, but where's food?
A mystery how they dance about, their legs
barely landing on tile, machines more intricate
than any time-piece, but bound to pass
within the hour, ephemerids after all
spawned among dank stones of the crawlspace--
too swift to be identified in a field guide
before they're flushed limp down a drain.

Yes, you that's who (8/29/09)

Your computer sound is on
and I can hear its voices
or perhaps they do not come
from your machine at all

you are writing some code
that to me is cryptic
I can hear the speakers beep
as you press ENTER

and press several times
in the space of a minute
how many events occur
in a single space alone

one encounters insight
another great dejection
as an ephemerid crawls
cut are the grass-blades

that fall on the ephemerid
and that lawnmower noise
drowns out the one next door
until the lawn care stops

and the bus rolls to the curb
as you bite into a sandwich
and alas the ride is free
alack you've missed it.

C (8/29/09)

Carol Secunda, wasp-waisted,
where are you? Do you perform
in public school plays,
or after-dinner theater?
Are there car commercials
where you stand in lots
with a sign that claims
insane price cuts, act now?
And do you smile in them,
or scowl insatiably,
lights and cameras off?

Din (8/29/09)

Remember S&H Green stamps? I won a toaster
but haven't picked it up yet. Not a gambler by nature,
I lose in lotteries, at Bingo, even get hammered
at Scrabble. By the way, is "Din" a word alone?
Useless knowledge come too late in life.
Who in this world will let me win something--
spare change, free balloon-festival tickets,
discount coupons to shop in creative economy zones:
which chamber of commerce can I call, cajole?
What literary prize can I reward myself
for writing half prose about losing, not loss alone,
but a way of life, will to power buried in a will to lose?

Neverland/Neuschwanstein

One can only wonder what they might have said to one another.

Would Ludwig assume an avuncular role, become a good listener, assure Michael that he too was acquainted with the mismatch of idea and execution, the loftiest aspiration against the philistinism of bankers and predation of the masses?

Weren’t Disneyworld’s castles modeled on Neuschwanstein's spires?

Should such a meeting happen, might there not have been a throb of recognition?

How alike barbarian/Bavarian, shackled to flesh they would have liked to crawl from as a butterfly from cocoon or snake from skin, all transparent, collapsed, and crinkled.

Ludwig, however, was no performer, nor did he love the circus, nor get the chance to watch that Melies film about the moon, or Fritz Lang’s Nibelungenlied, or for that matter, even Steamboat Willie.

The oceanic feeling of Wagner’s music could not compare to Disney's metamorphoses. A hint of self-deprecation when calling his daily bottle of pricey French wine his Jesus juice.

Could wine be called back to water, might not the King of Pop rise with Lazarus to moon-walk, re-animated with electric charges?

Ludwig couldn’t have heard the first Library of Congress field recordings, wouldn’t know what to make of those lamentations from the swamps.

More likely he studied some hale and hearty Harz mountaineers slap liederhosen in unison as they performed in some rustic tavern. Deep in the night he might have been spirited to that rough-hewn door by landau.

Michael would’ve remained unmoved by Parsifal had they watched this gesamptskunstwerk together, would’ve pined for his Disney movies in his chateau, alone with his joy-juice, his boy-guests, and his pharmacopeia, which had Ludwig partaken, might have opened the doors of perception very wide indeed.

Might not the King of Bavaria marveled at the King of Pop’s silver glove and cast-off marching-band waistcoat?

Might not the king of Neverland have marveled at Ludwig’s Turkish baths and swan-shaped boats, sailing artificial streams?

Just as Ludwig might have been puzzled then astonished by Neverland, shedding a tear for the albino tiger sulking in its golden cage.

Jan 9 03

Imagine different ways the world presses down on a quarter,
how many palms, how many pocket linings, how many times
drops the quarter, until it's almost lost, among grass-blades
after jarring descents down concrete stairwells on campus
or apartment blocks, until it moves at a snail’s pace,
and then totters. And there, someone discovers it, inserts it
in the slot of a vending machine, all bells and whistles,
bells at once! While it falls to its side among the weight
of its semblances, pressed to clover, thistle or bluebird.

Draft 04?

Ask forgiveness. You have complained about others
To yourself, silently. You never vented publicly.
Nevertheless, your thoughts about them are too real.
You can touch your bad thoughts, and you suspect
That others divine them.
The boon of writing when half-asleep, when sleeping tempts.
When drowsy, you visualize the shape your sentences take—
They slink, wind and wrap down the page as a vine
Winds through a trellis or a water-snake writhes
Down a rocky bank to take a drink. The shape
Uncoils behind closed eyelids. The reading-lamp
Disperses the shape conceived in sleep, one foot
In sleep and one in short-term memory. Whatever
Did I eat for lunch—the answer remoter from
Your waking life than your first childhood memory.

Andreas, Ltd.

Upon landing at his private airport outside Palm Springs, a valet slapped a carpet on the landing-stairs. God forbid the valet’s timing should be off, thought Andreas Baader, remade and remodeled: he’d lose his job. He was in town to open a chain of exclusive unisex spas, dedicated to total wellness, a “natural extension of the joy through strength programmes of the Old Reich,” he’d quipped once to a local New York fashion journal, not too much to his detriment, however, since the primarily fashion-conscious readership could have cared less about that cross-reference. “How about guerilla chic” he thought, appearing pensive before his host, the Donald, “bandoliers, old army clothes, hair unkempt in bangs? Can a joint venture with Karl Laagerfeld be far behind? Can you imagine Ulrike Meinhof’s mug shot at all the point of purchase centers, above display cases, brightly lit, Laagerfeld’s logo beneath this so iconically charged image? How about the wanted posters?” thought Andreas Baader as the Donald pointed out key landmarks on the Florida coastline, a luxury hotel here, a hotel there, another place where stars watch other stars?

The Egyptians built tombs with this in mind, Andreas had wanted to say, but didn’t, letting this rather self-important and garish fellow with a bad toupee expostulate about the benefits of cash flow. Donald turned the radio down to “Feeling Stronger Every Day” so he could be heard. And to be heard was to be king. No ordinary stiff can speak to the crowd, you know. First-rate hotels were private prisons if you didn’t supply that special touch, he reminded his guest. But it takes a magic wand to bring that about, sometimes more than one, and not just Daddy’s money, which no doubt helps some. “An empire of gold and glass does not by fiat raise up on its heels and bark like a poodle.” It takes that special touch, the Donald insisted, his finger pointed in the air.

It’s true the toupee ill suits him, Andreas Baader thought. To have admitted baldness would have been better (besser). But he guessed it was a trademark, what his admirers expected of him, a man who’d built more towers than Nimrod, whose fleet of private jets could smash them into mounds of masonry, jumbo serifs and gold dust, who had the power to destroy what he’d created with a word whispered to his cellular, and who could view the resulting debris with his trophy model by his side, a woman whose face displayed at once blank incredulity and calculated intelligence.

But the revolutionary apocalyptic subsided with one martini stirred and shaken at the limo bar. Andreas Baader remembered his remodeling, his remolding from mounds of funereal clay. He was an experiment more interested in a hieratic play of signs than in some half-baked foco theory. Flows of cash could expire after all.

Andreas Baader thought he’s be wasting time talking to any of the maids or barkeeps at the hotel triplex. What menial worker wouldn’t be completely suffused with the facts on the ground that generous tips and false consciousness had created? Yes, false consciousness had created facts on the ground. Who could resist? Who would willingly choose otherwise, say the bleak little picnic of the GDR under barren trees? He flipped through a packet of his gold-rimmed business cards on the glass elevator. Each one said WELLNESS in stretched capitals of silver, and beneath wellness, his Christian name only: Andreas, LTD.

“Check this out” said the Donald at the amphitheatre entrance, grabbing a handful of pistachios at the concession stand and munching them as he continued to talk. “Tiles” he said, pressing a control that swept back a grey and regal velvet curtain with his initials emblazoned in each corner. The screen was larger than an ordinary movie screen. It was segmented into tiles, as the Donald called them. Each tile contained a scene. Several scenes could be played at once the Donald smiled at Andreas Baader expectantly, handing him the control. “Posse” the Donald said in bad French, an affectation he reserved for Europeans only. When pushed the buttons unleashed barrages of noise and visual spectacle: 20 channels appeared on the screen, one per tile. But he could adjust the screen so that fewer appeared. Four channels among the twenty screens, one channel among four screens, then one channel only. “You can preview, then select” added the Donald as Andreas Baader somewhat unwittingly segued between the Home Shopper’s Network and Carson Daly’s show.
Andreas Baader had derived the idea of using only his Christian name for his business from Dr. John, the advocate of whole-brain learning who sold a series of mail-order meditation tapes. Andreas had tried to call Dr. John for more of his tapes, but kept getting disconnection messages. He carries some of the earlier tapes with him however, as well as some CDs in case he didn’t have his Walkman. The tapes he felt had made a difference in repairing his disconnected synapses, in allowing the brain to heal itself, as well as to conceive of its lost segments, irretrievable since the prison incident, but reparable using the meditation techniques of Dr. John, at least to the extent that the remaining parts of his brain constructed among themselves a ghost image of the lost parts, which they seemed to agree upon consensually through the exchange of data. Andreas Baader’s full physical reparation however was inconceivable; he would always be a somewhat diminished version of his previous self. And thankfully, he had no memory of the prison incident. But Dr. John’s method was essential to recovery. The old canals and channels that made association and recollection possible were unclogged; the plaque or residue material flushed from memory forever, all so that he could work in his new career as a wellness expert among the rich and famous. Even Robin Leach had threatened to profile him: Andreas, therapist and life coach of the stars, in that East London carnival barker’s voice he’d used for segments on both the Donald and the Don as with others. After the shower, the luxury and suite's long silences sent him into a nap without dreams.

With his Great Dane straining on a studded leash, Don almost walked into the office of the Donald but the security guard stopped him with a hand held before the great aspen and birch veneer doors. But then, alas, the Donald crashed through them with a hand extended toward Don, his good friend from Idaho. They’d do a ski resort together. The Donald waved away the security guard with a sweep of his hand while the mouth of the security guard tightened and his eyes swept the carpet with its giant Donald logo wreathed in laurels. He bowed and fled to his regular position at the cloakroom, walking backward all the way. “Very conscientious new guy” apologized the Donald.

“Andre, meet Don” said the Donald, after which Don said “meet my mutt Dan.” “Sometimes I think he was Scooby-Doo’s understudy,” Don laughed, while the Great Dane drooled on the alpaca carpet, the white strips upraised to spell the Donald logo. Andreas Baader did not enjoy how the Great Dane licked his face, his knobby front paws pressing Andreas against the wall, the cotton batting of which he did not wish to strain with his carefully slicked down hair, his barely concealed bald spot. “Get off Dan” Don urged, pulling the leash until the dog relented and sat as trained in his plush obedience school. Don dropped the dog a treat that looked like a turd. The great Dane gobbled with a lubricious loud chomp. Only then did the Donald introduce Andreas Baader to Don Johnson, lately of Nash Bridges, CEO of Don Johnson Enterprises, Inc., currently developer of a number of ski resorts in Sun Valley, real estate investments primarily for high rollers, guys who’d designed miniature geographical positioning systems for snowboards, gals who’d pioneered alternative herbal medicines for pets. This is what he did, when he wasn’t developing some TV pilot or some made for TV movie starring Yours Truly.

“I want to talk about your spas, Andreas, as soon as I can get Dan to his professional walker.” A winsome Asian woman whose hair concealed her eyes walked into the room as if on cue, and took the leash from Don, who grinned as he surveyed her vertically. But her loose diaphanous robe layered with tangerine and rose revealed little. The logo fluttered on her back as if it were written on clouds in an evening sky with a searchlight. The giant designer dog walked eagerly, his huge frame bowed. As they walked a pedestrian thoroughfare in the hotel triplex between swimming pools, some Olympic and long and rectangular, others for the family bladder-shaped, Andreas Baader felt slender, boyish, but also vulnerable before Don. He let him talk.

The sum of what Don said to Andreas was as follows:
“I’m impressed by your roster of investors….”
“I have a little difficulty, however, with…
“But maybe the test run could be made at this one select little spot about an hour from Denver….”
Where the biggest target audience just might be…”
“the new agers, the professional ski-bums, the finance people and the techies, who, from my market analysis, have not been completely decomated, anyway…..thank goodness for the Dod and the airbases….”

And it all boiled down to the following as the dog was being walked:
“Andreas, I think we can pull it off!” Don pivoted and extended his hand to add, after theatrically pregnant silence: “partner.” Andreas himself didn’t quite catch the connotation of the word.

His hand felt weak in the hand of Don. His knuckles felt as if they were crumbling, like porous stones in upturned clay. Don reminded him of those giant tomatoes of Southern California that Brecht wrote about (he’d a vague memory of reading it in gymnasium) tasteless, bulked up with water, unreal in its dimensions. He was also a man who could fornicate his way out of a grave.
[Insert?]

What Andreas had in mind was a synergy of Wiccan festival, Marat/Sade with switches of birch instead of whips, as in a sauna bath. Also disciplinary Shinto rites combined with the nudity of the Berlin communes, a touch of Wandervogeln even: where ideology and praxis met to melt among bodies. It was a reconstruction of the Neolithic culture of the forest Tacitus had documented and it wasn’t the exclusive property of any ideology anymore!
The baths were heated by submerged grills of nichrome that seared your feet if you didn’t wear the special shoes that he supplied. Some conspired to take them home so they could walk coals for their askance friends. When hot, on snow or vinyl tile they spelled, in capitals that burned brighter than even the initials of the Donald: Andreas, Limited.