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.