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.