Day moves to its conclusion
but the spacing is still uneven
Dangled a bird feeder from a fencepost
a block of suet in a steel cage
but no bird appeared
a rumble of terrain vehicles
that shall inherit the earth
I “watered the huckleberries”
beds of brown pine needles
invited me – a good chance
marshes would block my progress
but it was a lunch break
so I returned to work
beneath the power lines to Saco
above the natural gas mains
yellow pencil heads that studded
a swath that thrust to the south
a service truck in the distance
defined some rural road.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Gonzalo(02)
A bit rubish, his clothes ill-fitting,
with the stigma of the provinces upon him
bookish, with a dated but formally correct
and ponderous dissertation to his credit
he disappears in the mountains to emerge
to kill not so much his enemies
as those who are not his friends enough,
then topples power lines
that course through valleys dwarfed
by the cold of mountain ranges
with atmosphere so thin the fox refuses
to chase the viscacha before him
and condors drop obtusely like oddly-shaped rocks
of uncanny buoyancy.
Then villages are seized in altitudes
in which children duly sacrificed for crops
mummify crouched in fetal positions
in egg-shaped sarcophagi planted
upon impossibly distance ridges,
and in that thinned-out atmosphere
Their skin becomes smooth as copper.
Footpaths that tangled
with the local constabulary
lead to his arrest in a safe-house.
Then he is exhibited in a cage like Bigfoot
having evaded both capture
and the camera's soul-theft.
The movement of his thought
forks in capricious directions
he cannot corral: language put him there,
a prison tunic hanging loosely from his frame.
with the stigma of the provinces upon him
bookish, with a dated but formally correct
and ponderous dissertation to his credit
he disappears in the mountains to emerge
to kill not so much his enemies
as those who are not his friends enough,
then topples power lines
that course through valleys dwarfed
by the cold of mountain ranges
with atmosphere so thin the fox refuses
to chase the viscacha before him
and condors drop obtusely like oddly-shaped rocks
of uncanny buoyancy.
Then villages are seized in altitudes
in which children duly sacrificed for crops
mummify crouched in fetal positions
in egg-shaped sarcophagi planted
upon impossibly distance ridges,
and in that thinned-out atmosphere
Their skin becomes smooth as copper.
Footpaths that tangled
with the local constabulary
lead to his arrest in a safe-house.
Then he is exhibited in a cage like Bigfoot
having evaded both capture
and the camera's soul-theft.
The movement of his thought
forks in capricious directions
he cannot corral: language put him there,
a prison tunic hanging loosely from his frame.
May 2002
the membranes of the Chinese lanterns
veined and diaphanous as an eyelid
maintain their delicate architecture
dried up and dead at your doorstep
veined and diaphanous as an eyelid
maintain their delicate architecture
dried up and dead at your doorstep
April 18, 2002
There were rocks with waves on them.
There was a little old man with a corncob pipe and an oilskin cap on his head.
There was a restaurant with a waitress who poured you strong coffee, very very strong.
There was the smell of bear – no, the hint of bear, and not just any bear, just bear.
You could take the scenic route or you could decry the scenic.
But a series of color-coded dots defined the scenic for you.
If you followed the dots, you apprehended the scenic in a fashion adequate enough to pass a quiz written according to state-mandated standards for the scenic, a true revenue multiplier.
And if you passed the quiz, you could write a poem with the scenery inside it.
You could take bits of scenery – the rock, the pines, the old man, his rainslicker, his corn-cob pipe, the waitress (dressed any way you wish), the diner’s 50s decor – not, mind you, reconstituted in a lab, but the real, unspoiled thing – place them in a bag, shake the bag, take the pieces out, add extraneous comment or customized personal dilemma or psychological crises, or believing things have a life of their own, leave the personal stuff out entirely, and boom, you will storm the periodicals.
The old man, the waitress, among the pines, outside the diner, the old cafeteria soup bowls with blue Saturnine rings unwashed, or among the rocks with waves on them, or the old man alone, smoking his corn-cob pipe, or the waitress alone, or waiting tables in the restaurant, with news featuring rocks and waves and boats or maybe a corncob pipe or two, always by the seaside, or among the pines. They’re waiting for you, every one of them.
There was a little old man with a corncob pipe and an oilskin cap on his head.
There was a restaurant with a waitress who poured you strong coffee, very very strong.
There was the smell of bear – no, the hint of bear, and not just any bear, just bear.
You could take the scenic route or you could decry the scenic.
But a series of color-coded dots defined the scenic for you.
If you followed the dots, you apprehended the scenic in a fashion adequate enough to pass a quiz written according to state-mandated standards for the scenic, a true revenue multiplier.
And if you passed the quiz, you could write a poem with the scenery inside it.
You could take bits of scenery – the rock, the pines, the old man, his rainslicker, his corn-cob pipe, the waitress (dressed any way you wish), the diner’s 50s decor – not, mind you, reconstituted in a lab, but the real, unspoiled thing – place them in a bag, shake the bag, take the pieces out, add extraneous comment or customized personal dilemma or psychological crises, or believing things have a life of their own, leave the personal stuff out entirely, and boom, you will storm the periodicals.
The old man, the waitress, among the pines, outside the diner, the old cafeteria soup bowls with blue Saturnine rings unwashed, or among the rocks with waves on them, or the old man alone, smoking his corn-cob pipe, or the waitress alone, or waiting tables in the restaurant, with news featuring rocks and waves and boats or maybe a corncob pipe or two, always by the seaside, or among the pines. They’re waiting for you, every one of them.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Bamiyan Buddha (2002)
1. The progress of sculpture
Unarticulated segments of a tale
sprawl upon a shop floor, like the litter
of body parts in Rodin’s studio, his desks
crammed with fingers. Whole wrists
cluttered the work-bench, connected
to forearms, sometimes not so connected.
An injection mold was a handy device.
You could trap the shape of an object
and watch its essence burn away.
And as it burned you seized its shape,
the plaster casting crumbled off,
life replaced with a bronze exterior.
But what about carving the god in a cliff?
How do you write Sanskrit in sandstone
as if within the word were inherent already
and you traced it in eroding, porous rock.
Watchmaker, deity--whatever-- how much
have I admired how you end things, the parting
of your plaster halves. And which is thesis
and which antithesis and what is synthesis
when you carve the sandstone from a wall
and leave the god, not bare, but barely solid,
his cold eye overscanning villages,
the bray of pack animals, the muezzin’s call,
the rifle’s whip-crack: so far all is scenery.
2.
And the sentry stys amazed
with bits of finger-tip or eye-lid
as he overturns them with his rifle-barrel.
And the infidel from which they came
towers overhead still, albeit imperfectly,
his sensors broken off from cannon-practice.
That many guns have been molded from an idea
he can figure. Nomadic, he leaves details to others.
But who wrought this? feminine, apercanthine folds
a turbulence he can’t smooth out
in a spot called his heart? This detail was meant
to be a quiet space between two costly campaigns.
The sooner they do the statues in, the better.
3.
I’m tired of meals and prayers,
of scooping rice with stones from shell-heads,
equipment rusting before it’s touched
and the halter straps that chafe my back,
and the bandolier lashing it,
of huddling in ditches or drinking cloudy water.
I’m twenty-six, and never been kissed,
feel forty-five, the age my father made.
He’s the one who told me God
refuses to measure life in hour-glasses.
I raise a standard among the sand-mounds.
I split a landmine like an interred skull,
march miles a day, live on chaff, not wheat.
3. Crossroads
Najibullah, the last secular leader,
dangles, an effigy under a traffic box.
Yellow melts upon his puncture wounds
while his circuitry is snapped by girth.
(Liberators dragged the corpse for hours.)
He’s the medium for the message:
beware. But yellow lights
on four sides flash, for departures
and arrivals. Gautauma Buddha
gets a headache from this flashing.
How disengage yourself from caution,
from all corners? How declutch?
What if the corners are the elements?
A space between the red and green
was outside time and matter. This is new.
4.
Buddha's stone detachment cannot pity
wounds and desecrations, hideous as Christ.
Only the bodily envelope perishes.
Isolated as a subject for study, blood is mystery–
besides, who doesn’t have a common parent?
their daily sign the weather slapping his cheek...
So how can those with gut-shots utter
for their last word, mama, crawling, anyway?
5.
At the zoo, captive birds escape
through rusty holes in the aviary’s steel mesh.
6.
False paradise he doesn’t bother to contemplate,
pain a kind of speculation he expects to overcome,
a shroud of fire he can peel from sandstone guts
that shouldn’t change: wasn’t he hollowed into being
by an incessant chipping off of the formless
until in deep relief he jutted from this keyhole,
another pharaoh, stiffly brushed by wind-storms?
7.
What sorcerer or scientist could augur
the many ways his shot-off extremities
connect to landscape once they’re fractured--
small parts usurped by wind for rain to melt
or ice to rub: more careless than unkind, karma
lets everyone eventually through the door...
but overturns first, overturns and overturns ...
8.
...that is, if he can think upon that salient, far
from caravanserai, rescue. Getting over it,
perhaps he muses that in their truthful moments,
lounging on his toe, the guards talk of love,
disinclined to notice striations and water-cuts
from ricochets and rare torrential rains,
8.
or thanks whatever cosmic dispensation
forged him from prima materia so porous, compliant
with weather, that when it comes, it’s with the shudder
of a patient under gas. Of all models to imagine,
he settles on pregnancy. Why not rocks from boulders,
chips from old blocks? What goes around, after all, comes.
To think he started as a mound of shells,
a chalk through which the ocean percolated.
Unarticulated segments of a tale
sprawl upon a shop floor, like the litter
of body parts in Rodin’s studio, his desks
crammed with fingers. Whole wrists
cluttered the work-bench, connected
to forearms, sometimes not so connected.
An injection mold was a handy device.
You could trap the shape of an object
and watch its essence burn away.
And as it burned you seized its shape,
the plaster casting crumbled off,
life replaced with a bronze exterior.
But what about carving the god in a cliff?
How do you write Sanskrit in sandstone
as if within the word were inherent already
and you traced it in eroding, porous rock.
Watchmaker, deity--whatever-- how much
have I admired how you end things, the parting
of your plaster halves. And which is thesis
and which antithesis and what is synthesis
when you carve the sandstone from a wall
and leave the god, not bare, but barely solid,
his cold eye overscanning villages,
the bray of pack animals, the muezzin’s call,
the rifle’s whip-crack: so far all is scenery.
2.
And the sentry stys amazed
with bits of finger-tip or eye-lid
as he overturns them with his rifle-barrel.
And the infidel from which they came
towers overhead still, albeit imperfectly,
his sensors broken off from cannon-practice.
That many guns have been molded from an idea
he can figure. Nomadic, he leaves details to others.
But who wrought this? feminine, apercanthine folds
a turbulence he can’t smooth out
in a spot called his heart? This detail was meant
to be a quiet space between two costly campaigns.
The sooner they do the statues in, the better.
3.
I’m tired of meals and prayers,
of scooping rice with stones from shell-heads,
equipment rusting before it’s touched
and the halter straps that chafe my back,
and the bandolier lashing it,
of huddling in ditches or drinking cloudy water.
I’m twenty-six, and never been kissed,
feel forty-five, the age my father made.
He’s the one who told me God
refuses to measure life in hour-glasses.
I raise a standard among the sand-mounds.
I split a landmine like an interred skull,
march miles a day, live on chaff, not wheat.
3. Crossroads
Najibullah, the last secular leader,
dangles, an effigy under a traffic box.
Yellow melts upon his puncture wounds
while his circuitry is snapped by girth.
(Liberators dragged the corpse for hours.)
He’s the medium for the message:
beware. But yellow lights
on four sides flash, for departures
and arrivals. Gautauma Buddha
gets a headache from this flashing.
How disengage yourself from caution,
from all corners? How declutch?
What if the corners are the elements?
A space between the red and green
was outside time and matter. This is new.
4.
Buddha's stone detachment cannot pity
wounds and desecrations, hideous as Christ.
Only the bodily envelope perishes.
Isolated as a subject for study, blood is mystery–
besides, who doesn’t have a common parent?
their daily sign the weather slapping his cheek...
So how can those with gut-shots utter
for their last word, mama, crawling, anyway?
5.
At the zoo, captive birds escape
through rusty holes in the aviary’s steel mesh.
6.
False paradise he doesn’t bother to contemplate,
pain a kind of speculation he expects to overcome,
a shroud of fire he can peel from sandstone guts
that shouldn’t change: wasn’t he hollowed into being
by an incessant chipping off of the formless
until in deep relief he jutted from this keyhole,
another pharaoh, stiffly brushed by wind-storms?
7.
What sorcerer or scientist could augur
the many ways his shot-off extremities
connect to landscape once they’re fractured--
small parts usurped by wind for rain to melt
or ice to rub: more careless than unkind, karma
lets everyone eventually through the door...
but overturns first, overturns and overturns ...
8.
...that is, if he can think upon that salient, far
from caravanserai, rescue. Getting over it,
perhaps he muses that in their truthful moments,
lounging on his toe, the guards talk of love,
disinclined to notice striations and water-cuts
from ricochets and rare torrential rains,
8.
or thanks whatever cosmic dispensation
forged him from prima materia so porous, compliant
with weather, that when it comes, it’s with the shudder
of a patient under gas. Of all models to imagine,
he settles on pregnancy. Why not rocks from boulders,
chips from old blocks? What goes around, after all, comes.
To think he started as a mound of shells,
a chalk through which the ocean percolated.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Dirt-eaters(02?)
1.
They did the living room in Ralph Lauren Suede, spread
unevenly across the walls to look like terra cotta. They found
new cabinets, and scattered the living-room with toys. The daughter
tossed her dolls around the room, heaped beneath the fireplace
like carcasses. There there (she’d say): it’s not a human child.
With blue translucent eyes all-too-human, the Siamese mix
watches for the little girl’s whims with the silver spoon
in her mouth. Maybe when she grows she’ll build a house
of scorched earth for her parents, just as they conceived
these ochre walls of blood from which she could emerge.
2.
What would the color of tubers be if you were blind?
What would they taste like in the place in which they root,
their fibers probes? To which sense would their colors appeal?
To see them in their element, what kind of eyes are required?
But above the ground, if you could see, not taste them?
Many different carrots, many shapes of carrot, not the carrot.
In the farmer’s field or produce section, you see parsnips
and even if the soil in which they grew cakes up your fingers
or is rough to your palate as you rub a clod of dirt upon it
you are as close to parsnips or to roots as you are to stars
expiring as soon as you try to catch them above you.
3.
You hope the dirt you stoop to eat will grow inside you
with mirrored facets going to your eyes and the hardness of flint
to your bones, you hope the life expressed in the sheen
of the kernel of corn or the fatness of leaf will flow directly
to your organs, you want the things that breathe in dirt
to breathe through your pores, you want the life of dirt
to expire through them, as if your actual skin could leaf.
What else do you hope for when you clutch dirt in your hands,
and swallow it after the harvest, the corn cut from the stubble?
What seems constantly underfoot is constantly in motion–
bacterium, seedling, ground-up rock, these little mica mirrors.
All that is solid melts into air or dissolves before scrutiny.
4.
Newspapers, dry as blades of corn, the old news brought
to woodsheds, or shredded by the field-mice for bedding,
the dry sheets rattling like snakes entwined in skeletons
in other dry fields. Dirt has little to do with what’s above.
But with a powerful microscope, the news appears in dirt.
A spoon of dirt takes more than a year’s worth of paper
to report – how do you condense the overturning of dirt
in paragraphs as squat and dynamic as this one?
When I examine dirt beneath a lens, I think how things
are out of scale, and how much time it must take
to recover the scale, so that I see the dirt as more
than under my heel, than what is packed between the treads
so that I know as much about the dirt as about words
bled away or blotted by watermarks or blanched by sun
from the paper. More likely than not, these lines
will share the paper’s fate: the punditry imprinted
on paper already matter less than dirt beneath their feet
or in their eye: may they, with the paper, rest in peace.
5.
For Anthony, a sign of strength to drink the gilded puddle,
pooled in the bulkhead after rains, the soiled leaves
floating without lobes or autumnal blush, the groundwater
wetting the window frames, chunks of masonry
tumbling into the hole from which they came --
pocked concrete meteors, simple intifada projectiles --
what doesn’t seek the level, least challenging altitude?
And where does gravity begin except with soil,
its magnetism and ponderous weight sexy, engendering?
A serial killer thinks he is a god whose seed will bring
the dead to life, although the victim doesn’t rise
from a shallow grave bedecked with worms and shoots
like the winding of hair upon a Botticellian Venus,
doesn’t quite confirm how blood fattens the fields
in the summertime of the world. An ochre stain,
a foot of clay upon the statue, says we’re alive.
They did the living room in Ralph Lauren Suede, spread
unevenly across the walls to look like terra cotta. They found
new cabinets, and scattered the living-room with toys. The daughter
tossed her dolls around the room, heaped beneath the fireplace
like carcasses. There there (she’d say): it’s not a human child.
With blue translucent eyes all-too-human, the Siamese mix
watches for the little girl’s whims with the silver spoon
in her mouth. Maybe when she grows she’ll build a house
of scorched earth for her parents, just as they conceived
these ochre walls of blood from which she could emerge.
2.
What would the color of tubers be if you were blind?
What would they taste like in the place in which they root,
their fibers probes? To which sense would their colors appeal?
To see them in their element, what kind of eyes are required?
But above the ground, if you could see, not taste them?
Many different carrots, many shapes of carrot, not the carrot.
In the farmer’s field or produce section, you see parsnips
and even if the soil in which they grew cakes up your fingers
or is rough to your palate as you rub a clod of dirt upon it
you are as close to parsnips or to roots as you are to stars
expiring as soon as you try to catch them above you.
3.
You hope the dirt you stoop to eat will grow inside you
with mirrored facets going to your eyes and the hardness of flint
to your bones, you hope the life expressed in the sheen
of the kernel of corn or the fatness of leaf will flow directly
to your organs, you want the things that breathe in dirt
to breathe through your pores, you want the life of dirt
to expire through them, as if your actual skin could leaf.
What else do you hope for when you clutch dirt in your hands,
and swallow it after the harvest, the corn cut from the stubble?
What seems constantly underfoot is constantly in motion–
bacterium, seedling, ground-up rock, these little mica mirrors.
All that is solid melts into air or dissolves before scrutiny.
4.
Newspapers, dry as blades of corn, the old news brought
to woodsheds, or shredded by the field-mice for bedding,
the dry sheets rattling like snakes entwined in skeletons
in other dry fields. Dirt has little to do with what’s above.
But with a powerful microscope, the news appears in dirt.
A spoon of dirt takes more than a year’s worth of paper
to report – how do you condense the overturning of dirt
in paragraphs as squat and dynamic as this one?
When I examine dirt beneath a lens, I think how things
are out of scale, and how much time it must take
to recover the scale, so that I see the dirt as more
than under my heel, than what is packed between the treads
so that I know as much about the dirt as about words
bled away or blotted by watermarks or blanched by sun
from the paper. More likely than not, these lines
will share the paper’s fate: the punditry imprinted
on paper already matter less than dirt beneath their feet
or in their eye: may they, with the paper, rest in peace.
5.
For Anthony, a sign of strength to drink the gilded puddle,
pooled in the bulkhead after rains, the soiled leaves
floating without lobes or autumnal blush, the groundwater
wetting the window frames, chunks of masonry
tumbling into the hole from which they came --
pocked concrete meteors, simple intifada projectiles --
what doesn’t seek the level, least challenging altitude?
And where does gravity begin except with soil,
its magnetism and ponderous weight sexy, engendering?
A serial killer thinks he is a god whose seed will bring
the dead to life, although the victim doesn’t rise
from a shallow grave bedecked with worms and shoots
like the winding of hair upon a Botticellian Venus,
doesn’t quite confirm how blood fattens the fields
in the summertime of the world. An ochre stain,
a foot of clay upon the statue, says we’re alive.
August 21 (02?)
How cold the breeze over the footbridge
making the railings hum. How reassuring time
on the bank clock, the highest thing on the skyline,
higher than buildings – open for business,
with customers and tenants, their mirrored worlds
concealing secretarial pools from the [ street ].
And the clock, above them, I see from an angle
when I run the bridge: and every mile traversed
extends my life-span an hour, so I’ve learned!
How much more time will the bridge provide me
if I take my time to run it? How much more time
can I gain once I have used the time I have earned
running circles? The bridge is a segment of a circle,
just a segment, but without it, where would the circle be?
From a bank of earth I could fall, before the impact,
my legs dangling over sea-water, above which
thick metal grills slap concrete as cars roll above them
to polish their edges. A harvest moon behind the clock
is big and golden, the numerous seas gray as pockmarks
on a Mercury dime, the entire image faint in the dusk.
How much more vivid time on the clock
rendered in lights upon the black marquee.
How much more self-evident the spectacles
made for ourselves, the lights, the humming wires.
making the railings hum. How reassuring time
on the bank clock, the highest thing on the skyline,
higher than buildings – open for business,
with customers and tenants, their mirrored worlds
concealing secretarial pools from the [ street ].
And the clock, above them, I see from an angle
when I run the bridge: and every mile traversed
extends my life-span an hour, so I’ve learned!
How much more time will the bridge provide me
if I take my time to run it? How much more time
can I gain once I have used the time I have earned
running circles? The bridge is a segment of a circle,
just a segment, but without it, where would the circle be?
From a bank of earth I could fall, before the impact,
my legs dangling over sea-water, above which
thick metal grills slap concrete as cars roll above them
to polish their edges. A harvest moon behind the clock
is big and golden, the numerous seas gray as pockmarks
on a Mercury dime, the entire image faint in the dusk.
How much more vivid time on the clock
rendered in lights upon the black marquee.
How much more self-evident the spectacles
made for ourselves, the lights, the humming wires.
Resolution (02-03?)
They don’t understand each other, the shopkeeper,
the schoolboy. Apples and oranges, can they mix?
Some like one better than the other, that’s a fact.
Do you want to explore the space between two things?
That’s not so far from seeing between rings,
all the rocks and debris shining when struck by the sun.
They build these big machines by which to do this
that go bang. The rings are wobbly and concentered.
But what did you expect, to be on your seat awhile.
Let others do the talking. A photograph of space,
such weak resolution. That’s stuck between
two things that both go bang. You can buy
all the fireworks you want just over the border,
you just can’t buy them here. This is not,
in any case, the place for you. That place
shines when struck by the sun -- debris alright --
but it shines like the rim of a glass, a glass harp,
a wine glass, its pitch tuned by water.
That’s your place (think about it): among debris.
If you can catch the right angle, it’s beautiful
although grainy, although the resolution isn’t right,
but wavy, and the rings are scalloped and braided
by intervening bodies uneven in themselves,
pocked moons, deformed like dust the size of fleas.
They come across as blips upon a radar screen.
All that information coming off bodies like a scent,
the white noise on the short wave: it’s information.
And they want to catch someone with it,
so it’s been withheld from the public.
Who can taste the rim of a wine glass
when it’s struck by the sun (its resolution
high contrast, so you can see the rings around the planet)
and the rings that strike out from the storm-tossed planet,
from the eyes around which streams of ammonia rejoin
they know. They test the clouds in the wind tunnels.
All I know flows from the evidence of my eyes
but they don’t tell me something I can use . . .
Upper turbulence shreds the clouds before they shape themselves.
The stairs you’d like to walk have more holes in them
than working parts, the illuminated engines fail,
forged from the elements they should discharge.
I don’t have words for what goes on,
so often documented, ad infinitum.
What kind of conscience throws them all about,
the rings around a discarded can as slippery-shiny as around Saturn.
Thus mutability changes into what is no longer useful.
I discard this can of worms into the sky.
They photograph the bumps and braids of the surface.
The radio waves by which the images come to us
are themselves too wavy to be seen with any concretion.
the schoolboy. Apples and oranges, can they mix?
Some like one better than the other, that’s a fact.
Do you want to explore the space between two things?
That’s not so far from seeing between rings,
all the rocks and debris shining when struck by the sun.
They build these big machines by which to do this
that go bang. The rings are wobbly and concentered.
But what did you expect, to be on your seat awhile.
Let others do the talking. A photograph of space,
such weak resolution. That’s stuck between
two things that both go bang. You can buy
all the fireworks you want just over the border,
you just can’t buy them here. This is not,
in any case, the place for you. That place
shines when struck by the sun -- debris alright --
but it shines like the rim of a glass, a glass harp,
a wine glass, its pitch tuned by water.
That’s your place (think about it): among debris.
If you can catch the right angle, it’s beautiful
although grainy, although the resolution isn’t right,
but wavy, and the rings are scalloped and braided
by intervening bodies uneven in themselves,
pocked moons, deformed like dust the size of fleas.
They come across as blips upon a radar screen.
All that information coming off bodies like a scent,
the white noise on the short wave: it’s information.
And they want to catch someone with it,
so it’s been withheld from the public.
Who can taste the rim of a wine glass
when it’s struck by the sun (its resolution
high contrast, so you can see the rings around the planet)
and the rings that strike out from the storm-tossed planet,
from the eyes around which streams of ammonia rejoin
they know. They test the clouds in the wind tunnels.
All I know flows from the evidence of my eyes
but they don’t tell me something I can use . . .
Upper turbulence shreds the clouds before they shape themselves.
The stairs you’d like to walk have more holes in them
than working parts, the illuminated engines fail,
forged from the elements they should discharge.
I don’t have words for what goes on,
so often documented, ad infinitum.
What kind of conscience throws them all about,
the rings around a discarded can as slippery-shiny as around Saturn.
Thus mutability changes into what is no longer useful.
I discard this can of worms into the sky.
They photograph the bumps and braids of the surface.
The radio waves by which the images come to us
are themselves too wavy to be seen with any concretion.
Primitif(02?)
I.
Mackworth Island, sign (in paraphrase):
natural materials for the fairies’ houses only.
Do not bring materials from outside the island
(that means plastic bags, cans, and bottles,
things that won’t decompose among nettles
or things, like tin or gold, that stay.
That means pooper-scoopers, soy milk
quart containers, the waffled aluminum lining
of cigarette packs--and that means you.)
--What woodchuck cannot overtip the teepees?
II.
A slate wall, a mossy ring among cathedral pines
where Governor Baxter’s hell-hounds were buried,
a place with more-than-slight folkloric connotation
perhaps in how the light slants from the tree-tops
to be a center for a sword’s unsheathing, plunge
on tabula rasa, tree-trunk: local materials only.
A slant of light lands theatrically on headstones.
Take your materials with your problems.
Here everyone is deaf to them.
The banshees peal to their delight alone.
III.
In Brian Boru’s bar, from head to toe a girl tattooed
with motifs carved in the granite lintels overhead--
warriors and magi on drinking benches all squat and grim,
and in the down-curl of their mouths a nascent realism.
Every other word in this brave new world
she utters on the harbor is a curse to friend or lover
over the din to the cell-phone.
(And runic letters, red as if written in rivulets
of gore, announce: drinking consultants only.)
Mackworth Island, sign (in paraphrase):
natural materials for the fairies’ houses only.
Do not bring materials from outside the island
(that means plastic bags, cans, and bottles,
things that won’t decompose among nettles
or things, like tin or gold, that stay.
That means pooper-scoopers, soy milk
quart containers, the waffled aluminum lining
of cigarette packs--and that means you.)
--What woodchuck cannot overtip the teepees?
II.
A slate wall, a mossy ring among cathedral pines
where Governor Baxter’s hell-hounds were buried,
a place with more-than-slight folkloric connotation
perhaps in how the light slants from the tree-tops
to be a center for a sword’s unsheathing, plunge
on tabula rasa, tree-trunk: local materials only.
A slant of light lands theatrically on headstones.
Take your materials with your problems.
Here everyone is deaf to them.
The banshees peal to their delight alone.
III.
In Brian Boru’s bar, from head to toe a girl tattooed
with motifs carved in the granite lintels overhead--
warriors and magi on drinking benches all squat and grim,
and in the down-curl of their mouths a nascent realism.
Every other word in this brave new world
she utters on the harbor is a curse to friend or lover
over the din to the cell-phone.
(And runic letters, red as if written in rivulets
of gore, announce: drinking consultants only.)
Semi-detached (03?)
Balmy, with breezes, no one walks the drive
of the industrial park, the dust unsettled
near the work crew. After the layoff
everyone who works wears sunglasses–
at a leisurely gait, little surprises
in the syntax wake you up, like that.
I have a routine: I eat and walk after.
Sometimes this doesn’t work
such as when it rains or when it’s hot.
It’s too hot. I watch nondescript fields
from the cafeteria: a power station,
some high trees, not blushing yet.
The weeds and saplings are unshaken
as of now. The new structure
gives the illusion of boundless space
in the middle of the day. To take
advantage of the situation, you must own
a car, complete shaving kit
and several changes of work clothes
with spotless shirts. How hard it can be
to get the spots out. You can scrub,
you can soak, they will stay there.
Often several solutions will not work.
But there is never a final solution,
a permanent storage facility, corrugated
as I like it, enduring but semi-detached.
of the industrial park, the dust unsettled
near the work crew. After the layoff
everyone who works wears sunglasses–
at a leisurely gait, little surprises
in the syntax wake you up, like that.
I have a routine: I eat and walk after.
Sometimes this doesn’t work
such as when it rains or when it’s hot.
It’s too hot. I watch nondescript fields
from the cafeteria: a power station,
some high trees, not blushing yet.
The weeds and saplings are unshaken
as of now. The new structure
gives the illusion of boundless space
in the middle of the day. To take
advantage of the situation, you must own
a car, complete shaving kit
and several changes of work clothes
with spotless shirts. How hard it can be
to get the spots out. You can scrub,
you can soak, they will stay there.
Often several solutions will not work.
But there is never a final solution,
a permanent storage facility, corrugated
as I like it, enduring but semi-detached.
Maypole
A mildly pornographic movie with dead actors
apocalyptic floods and philosopher-king figures
no attendance in the dingiest of grind-houses
no one in the audience who understands the formulae
of floods, rosy crosses, coprophilia, carnevalian loony-bins
old men who move in cul-de-sacs, wheeled by nurses, or play with themselves, vacantly.
Sets of leopard-skin, papier-mache, brass rings, and gossamer
cul-de-sac gardens, group-gropes of street extras in the summertime
This is the day on which memorial day is celebrated
a day for the fallen
Shot on the prairie, the sunlight at its peak heat close to sundown
some enclave known to pioneers but far from BMW dealers
out-of-synch hands flailing upon multiple keyboards
stilted dialogue among currently out-of-work actors
modern high-rise office scenes shot through convex-mirrors
hippies dressed as executives frantically smoking cigarettes
bad color separation, the edges of the film stock breaking
into rainbows, the discoloration of faces, the ghostly white backs
and buttocks as much a function of age as cheap production
the pornographic episodes with half-naked nurses dyed blue
a behaviorist in grey wig reciting stilted dialogue from a helicopter
overlooking a satyr festival on a prairie or on dry chaparral
floods, a burlesque stage in the Tenderloin, a bump n grind ritual,
men in lab coats, liberation theology, hackneyed counter-cultural statements
shot on the cheap, bad film stock, horny priests, template
of repression, hypocrisy, paper-mache gossamer phallus raised
in the middle of the desert among Anabaptist hippies congregated
around it, with the protagonist strapped to its base, cheesy graphics,
enough quality or the grind-houses however, old men asleep in the seats
with their zippers down at three o’clock in the morning, the lights on.
apocalyptic floods and philosopher-king figures
no attendance in the dingiest of grind-houses
no one in the audience who understands the formulae
of floods, rosy crosses, coprophilia, carnevalian loony-bins
old men who move in cul-de-sacs, wheeled by nurses, or play with themselves, vacantly.
Sets of leopard-skin, papier-mache, brass rings, and gossamer
cul-de-sac gardens, group-gropes of street extras in the summertime
This is the day on which memorial day is celebrated
a day for the fallen
Shot on the prairie, the sunlight at its peak heat close to sundown
some enclave known to pioneers but far from BMW dealers
out-of-synch hands flailing upon multiple keyboards
stilted dialogue among currently out-of-work actors
modern high-rise office scenes shot through convex-mirrors
hippies dressed as executives frantically smoking cigarettes
bad color separation, the edges of the film stock breaking
into rainbows, the discoloration of faces, the ghostly white backs
and buttocks as much a function of age as cheap production
the pornographic episodes with half-naked nurses dyed blue
a behaviorist in grey wig reciting stilted dialogue from a helicopter
overlooking a satyr festival on a prairie or on dry chaparral
floods, a burlesque stage in the Tenderloin, a bump n grind ritual,
men in lab coats, liberation theology, hackneyed counter-cultural statements
shot on the cheap, bad film stock, horny priests, template
of repression, hypocrisy, paper-mache gossamer phallus raised
in the middle of the desert among Anabaptist hippies congregated
around it, with the protagonist strapped to its base, cheesy graphics,
enough quality or the grind-houses however, old men asleep in the seats
with their zippers down at three o’clock in the morning, the lights on.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Nov. 02
....How enthralled we are to cracked teacups,
broken fingernails and wash stands, cementing these parts in place
before we can even try to breath, pulling the tiny impurities in
before we can exhale them, particles that catch the sun and flash
distinctly as tiny astronomical bodies amplified by telescopes–
they began as quirks, little folds of molecular proportions, then matter,
carpet dust, ground-up crumbs, who knows – collected around
irregularity, unlike the others, with its tiny logic, its own angles
and how it registers whatever surrounds it, or buoys it, air currents
you could map and color-code, has been entirely its own business.
Because couldn’t there be an especially solipsistic piece of dust,
couldn’t a piece assert that no -- in fact it doesn’t move -- rather
the world moves around it, the apartment in which it was trapped,
the starlings on the sill who peered in one direction, the flies
that gestated through late winter to debut a blue-green iridiscence,
the window opened and closed so often, and look outside:
the glass terminals around which are wrapped the power lines–
couldn’t the energy bound upon this terminal be a bit much,
scattering an electron field that flusters the sensual world
down to a handful of items, an unmade bed, a sleeping bag
pinned behind the headstand with a pup tent and a guitar–
a dust particle apparently obedient to whirls that in fact
sets its own terms and allows itself to be buffeted. Maybe
disintegration will remake it – when do the elements in matter,
after all, go away completely? How the building-blocks of life
not rise from the ground, another manifestation, earth re-arranged,
whether by bombs that upend earth or a time that excruciates?
broken fingernails and wash stands, cementing these parts in place
before we can even try to breath, pulling the tiny impurities in
before we can exhale them, particles that catch the sun and flash
distinctly as tiny astronomical bodies amplified by telescopes–
they began as quirks, little folds of molecular proportions, then matter,
carpet dust, ground-up crumbs, who knows – collected around
irregularity, unlike the others, with its tiny logic, its own angles
and how it registers whatever surrounds it, or buoys it, air currents
you could map and color-code, has been entirely its own business.
Because couldn’t there be an especially solipsistic piece of dust,
couldn’t a piece assert that no -- in fact it doesn’t move -- rather
the world moves around it, the apartment in which it was trapped,
the starlings on the sill who peered in one direction, the flies
that gestated through late winter to debut a blue-green iridiscence,
the window opened and closed so often, and look outside:
the glass terminals around which are wrapped the power lines–
couldn’t the energy bound upon this terminal be a bit much,
scattering an electron field that flusters the sensual world
down to a handful of items, an unmade bed, a sleeping bag
pinned behind the headstand with a pup tent and a guitar–
a dust particle apparently obedient to whirls that in fact
sets its own terms and allows itself to be buffeted. Maybe
disintegration will remake it – when do the elements in matter,
after all, go away completely? How the building-blocks of life
not rise from the ground, another manifestation, earth re-arranged,
whether by bombs that upend earth or a time that excruciates?
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