May 15 2010

As you fly west, from Boston to Dallas, squares of wheat fields,
The bends and hooks of the Mississippi indicate you are above the Delta,
Nearing Memphis, and the scows or freight boats that ply the river
As miniscule as needles or microscopic probes, and when in Dallas,
Each roomy suburban row house features a swimming-pool,
A small kidney shaped spot of chlorinated blue
You’d give your eye-teeth for the spectacle of a cloud-bank
Lit up by tiny squiggles of lightning at their base
As you pass the turbulent zones and enter a clear sky
A crescent moon lights in gradations of blue and crimson
As the sun sets as your plane pursues it over the deserts
The gambling dens and brothels below surrounded by dry empty tracts and missile silos
A blaze of lights of small cities in the dark swiftly approached and passed
In Nevada no evidence of urban sprawl
The descent above large row-houses, each with a kidney-shaped swimming pool
On the monorail among Texas preachers and high school football coaches
The airport’s cozy microclimate, its air-cooled gargantuan lobbies
Branched and alphabetized

August 16 2010

The weight of the suet-cage dangling from the dying branch
May be just enough to drop the precarious maple tree.
The movement of the dandelions scatters the spores to more fields.
The wings of the dragonfly derive their iridescence and vibrancy
Of color from the volatility of the Pleistocene, the infernal climate,
The bacterial vapors of the swamp, and eruptions of seas,
The same eruptions that hurled
Fish to shore to become amphibians,
Amphibians dinosaurs, dinosaurs birds.
The bloom of Queen Anne’s lace folds itself into
Dun-colored broom caterpillars devour to become the black winged
Emperor butterfly, not the monarch or the admiral.
The shadow of the emperor butterfly that shadows
And overlords the world of the ant, laboring
With its fragment of leaf between mandibles
Whose strength when expanded to the scale of one
Entire man could throw a Mosler safe like a shot-put
Or boulder or compact car into a concrete wall,
Break the wall into separate jagged chunks
Bending those corrugated steel rods holding the wall together.

From Broken Prisms (January 30, 2005)

The flavor of the month
comes in concrete chunks and pyrites.
with an aftertaste of bonding adhesive.
The bitterness assures the palate of its strength..
It comes in colors, feldspar, cherry, citronella.
But it’s also brown as rust, the water in a well
whose surface only you can see. Its murkiness
belies medicinal properties. The nausea
is a purgation, even as it shreds your guts
into metal coils a machine ejects
to bind, or blow apart, or to communicate.
Tear stains and fallout filtered through concrete,
years of weather, their turbulence apparent
in tiny steel-backed mirrors embedded in the chunks
of concrete thudding to the floor. A taste
of jet exhaust, slightly bitter albeit bright bouquet,
a white rainstorm in a tunnel, a vortex
of jet exhaust funneled into a plastic wineglass.
Can I dip a cracker into this?
Drink it from a slipper? Water my flowers
until their colors mutate to blood-reds
no Ralph Lauren nor architect has visualized?
The lining of paint can also eat my stomach.
The lining that girds my stomach cannot kill me,
can only make me stronger.
It drips down closet walls, gets into things,
seeps into carpet and drywall sturdy
as the baths of Caracalla, its basilicas
arching over bathers, generals and gigolos
whipping their backs in abandon with poplar switches
as the rain cracks an arch to tell them
nothing is so solid that it cannot bend
or break outright, yet hang together afterward.
Stick your tongue out for the sacrament.
It’s bitter, so mixed up you can’t tell
one source from another, but it’s earth and sky
so surely it should be innocent and common
as trees in the yard with songbirds in them,
snow flecked with bird-lime and nuclear fallout
iron-enriched once-coursing streams overstocked
with fish, the undulations of their fins entrapped
in this concrete roof alleged to be enforced
with tempered steel. You can depend on this
they claim, landlord and roofer extraordinaire.
How many inhabitants in this industrial corridor

owe their heads to him, their lack of hats,
their empty hat-racks, their indifference
toward weather-stations, umbrellas, carports?
Parasols remain in glassed-in exhibition cases.
What clouds? They ask, never having tasted
a roof seeping down closet walls into buckets.
Not inspiration, but perspiration,
a symphony or poem sweated from the pores
until the magnum opus pours from open orifices,
dripping cool impurities in blithe ignorance of the hours,
or cracks the surfaces to which we were accustomed.
We thought we’d lean against the same wall all our lives.
It was an idea they allowed to fall through the cracks,
which are tiny, then wide enough to let the old construction fall,
the safety and solidity it promised, a dwelling
with window that properly opened and closed, a view of heights
to which the dwellers were immune. Now all floats in a vortex,
rubber toys and memoranda, urgent once but ignored mostly,
and how many family effects swirl inside the new holes in the earth:
they open and close, and no one really knows why. So when
the roofer comes to tell you nothing’s solid, perhaps he knows
from whence he comes, from floods alone. Which hole
in the sky will open? Can we forecast our fall?

July-August 08

July 13, 2008

Dome

Isn’t there a conflict between the floor or foundation of a house
and the surface of the earth upon which the house rests?
Doesn’t that surface approach the middle of the floor
since the earth’s surface is circular (discounting irregularities
of topography, such as those of mountains, floodplains, or deserts).
But the dome, made of tiny isosoles triangles, danced upon the earth
it mocked, a little planet skirting the big one, all the while it leaked,
all the while the voices of its inhabitants echoed, beamed back to them
with a clarity that was too truthful to the listener, who would have had
nothing else to listen to except the drip-drop of rain leaking into the
dome because a panel, a thin piece of plastic that could be molded
into any shape in nature, was cracked or leaking. Pray that the frame
of this Mundane Shell doesn’t break as its owner hangs from it
with guy-wires, caulking the leaky triangle with a compound of silicon
or gutta percha, or some such substance, for window frames.

8/3/08

What will the weather do? The rhythms of the seasons. Thunderstorms nocturnal, wind in the trees, deer crossing, crickets singing, birds chirping, flies buzzing, dogs barking, dogs replying to other dogs with more barking, the rare passing of a vehicle, a call and response and counterpoint between the birds, and then between the birds and the crickets or the frogs in the pond, or between the birds and the beeps of the idle fire alarm low on battery power. Seek not to perceive the world through musical terms.

Looking at her, pert and buxom and compact and coy, you could see how he attracted her: he was lanky, naïve, expert in mechanical things. He could fix her car to begin with. So he complemented her—naïve and practical hands-on knowledge of machines suited keenly observant ambition coupled with an appetite from luxury, for cars and houses in vogue.

The density of vegetation in the valley a river makes before it has been dammed—a floor of ferns, a cloud of spores among the vines that crawl the sides of dead trees, seasonal wildflowers on the roadside, grass blades, reeds, cat-tails, hollyhock bushes, the fattened leaves of white oaks and maples pulling the very branches that support them down with their dampness. The park ranger has an easy job—he mows the path to the bird feeder, he feeds the birds.

8/9/08

Age should make a place for youth. I return to trudging through the city of Portland, as apartment complexes are raised along the arterial to the interstate, a maze of concrete thickening with time. I drove to the Oceanside to submerge myself in seawater for a few seconds before I drove back to the mountains. I bought a ticket for Richard Branson’s spacecraft soaring out of the atmosphere into the blackness of space for a few more seconds or enough time to photograph the space before the craft descends. The hell or heaven in a handful of seconds.

Wet and sticky hermaphroditic child, wiping the albumen on his belly to dry in webs. A layer of lithium molecules bonds above the treated surface, protecting the surface from abrasion. I lack depth although I ruminate, and the past for which I cannot exercise retribution angers me. I float or my memory does in slights to which I cannot respond. If anything, I lack enough surface to apprehend the absolute present, or live in the moment, or be the moment. Unexplained shifts in thought become new sentences the connections of which are even less likely to be made the more the future becomes the present. The metaphor of depth or profundity—depth implies scrutiny? Why can’t the shallow scrutinize? Sure they can scrutinize someone other than themselves. Could what we are accustomed to call shallow be a virtue, this word meaning an aptitude to be fruitful and to prosper, not so much admirable self-abnegating behavior void of an effect upon some part of the world? To the shallow the spoils, to the deep nothing or next to nothing, only reputation at best, if others even notice the virtue of the deep, who are too reflective to communicate either virtue or vice, who do not have the horse sense to advertise their virtue when it would benefit them most, who do not, in other words, bring it to the marketplace.

The auspices of the skies
Point to a dry and sunny day.
How could the forecasters
With all their indicators
Be so wrong?
All their instruments
To foretell so faulty?
Faulty all the indicators
Of weather.
They were not the word of God.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was God,
More Greek, more logos.
All began
In some ineffable place
Not with the organs
And fertilizers in the ground
Nor with lightning
And the initial violence that followed
When lightning hit the ground.
Later, the planners said:
What a mistake.

Rash Measures Deemed Necessary

Raze Persepolis.
Burn the libraries.
Trash the museums.
Take no prisoners.
Do it, or else.

Every time I hear
the word culture
I loosen the safety catch
on my Browning--

but sometimes the gun
just -- boom!-- goes off!


De-acquisition the rest,
sell them on Amazon.com.

Search all apartments
for books. But make sure
every school child
has a laptop and Ipod.

Nov. 22 2009

The CIA-Opus Dei-Illuminati consortium
Doggedly preserved their secret weapon, the umbrella man.
On a day such as this on Dealey Plaza, an umbrella an encumbrance,
Unless used expressly to avoid the sun.
Because the sun was out nearly a half century ago.
An umbrella can shade one from the sun that shone upon Dallas
As it does upon White River on this very day.
The illuminati lights the dark, a light within a tomb, sarcophagus.
An umbrella and a sewing machine make music together.
More than a Lincoln Continental, an umbrella,
And yellow rose petals strewn upon the hood of the Lincoln.
An umbrella fails to contribute to the poetic juxtaposition known today as surrealism.
So much depends upon the juxtaposition of the umbrella to the sewing machine,
Whether positioned across the table but below the machine itself,
Passing through the arch made by the sewing machine,
As if it sought to pass through the needle’s eye, but missed.
Or leant to the side of one of the sewing machine’s iron legs.
So much depends upon the dispersal of yellow roses across the red leather seats of the Lincoln,
Upon which waxen rose petals stick to the body of the car by viscous drying blood.
So much depends upon the trolls assigned the job of doctoring evidence for the Illuminati—
Furtive little troll who does not think about what he does,
Little two-foot troll whose amateur verses lampoon the efforts
Of those who seek to disclose the Illuminati-Opus Dei membership.
Little troll who toys with umbrellas and sewing machines,
who knows next to nothing about surrealism or Dealey Plaza.
It is upon you alone, little troll, that I place the onus.

Now (9/26/09)

The Neolithic peoples in Iraq buried their elders in clay jars in separate rooms,
And about the bodies bent in fetal position wrapped reed mattings sealed with bitumen,
but the bones of others were haphazardly piled in other rooms or unmarked jars.
The children buried in jars were given cups of clay for drinking in the afterworld.

In the larger rectangular houses in which rooms of gypsum walls and clay floors
Embraced courtyard or stable, the dead were buried beneath the floors themselves.
Some hamlets threw pottery with geometric decoration; some cultivated emmer wheat
Or gathered wild lentils and stored them; some made sickles and cutting-tools from volcanic glass

Or the obsidian scattered on hillsides. Some butchered gazelles and aurochs, tanning the hides;
Some fashioned rams’ horns or bones into sewing needles or spoons for soups of legume and acorn;
some strapped their flint sickles onto handles that were branches of sumac or oak;
Others wedged arrow-heads onto spears of ash; some stabbed away at the neck arteries

Of plentiful red deer with knives of horn; above their altars hung the skulls of wild oxen
Who’d bellowed at them from an open field before. The eyes of their statues resemble coffee-beans;
And the pornographically grotesque fertility idols, their limbs striped and ornamented,
were amulets that presided over child-bearing or fertility; another hand was always needed

For scything wild grain in the fields or grinding it; for who else would water the asses or feed
the subjugated wild hogs? Near marshes, a hand waved in air a moment might bring down
Game birds that darkened the sky with their clattering wings, thus the squiggling of drakes
Animating the decorations of clay jars the shards of which are tripped upon in this battle-space,

The ostrakons beneath the treads of Abrams tanks. No harps, no tabors or cymbals then,
no libraries to burn, only naked human voices ossified in the open mouth of a diorite statue.
(Black jongleur, court singer, scribe?) Beneath the tells, monumental alabaster jars
Withstood the pressures of the earth and sky. But that was then, and this is now.

11/21/09

About the winter constellations, about the horizon and the hillsides,
About the end of the foliage, then about rivers and the nearby lakes,
And the canoes and the barges and flotation rafts and sailboats,
And waterfall and the mills and about the space between them,
And the main street and the local businesses, about the local eateries
And the hardware and thrift stores, about a row of unkempt Victorian houses
Lining the northern thoroughfare until you approach the left turn
To the garbage dump and the recycling center.
The constellations, above the wisps of clouds, look cold, their light
As cold as the helping hand of the deceased, as the water pouring
Through springs below the earth. As the time that no one has to give to the needy,
As constellations reflected on the surface of some off-season lake,
As the surface of the lake as undisturbed as by a paddle.
The clarity of constellations to the naked eye in the countryside,
The nimbus of the street-lamps that blurs the constellations.
From the hilltop, they shout at you from above, each single star
Of which you must sadly admit you are not adept at identifying.
My blankets have become a sweat lodge in which I wrap myself
Until I begin to sweat profusely through my bedclothes as the sun
Breaks above the White Mountains. Of abstractions
Or of conceits have I little awareness unless they are contiguous
To the concrete and quotidian, such as household chores.
And of rubbing sticks to make fire I am well aware of the associations.

9/12/09

Back in the ‘seventies, in the laundromat off Longfellow Square,
an old man passing me offers parting words, Never get old.
And the absence of teeth around those words I can recall
as if that laundry Sunday were just last weekend.
Gloomy Longfellow Square, ghosts shuffling around the centerpiece,
Longfellow’s statue around which traffic streams.
Ghosts are beginning to outnumber the living pedestrians.
There will always be a sex shop across from the smoke shop.
The people crossing the intersection slow down as watch-parts do.

Now you cannot purchase a decent wind-up watch without
a cheap quartz chip embedded in the circuitry, from Taipei or Shanghai,
Circuitry waffled and delicate as a kanji character that speaks
of several conditions or dependencies that all begin at once:
a certain seasonal green and a mood that goes with that green:
alertness, acceptance, quietude, hopeful disposition toward the future,
order of lower and higher magnitudes, harmony in arrangement,
balance of complementary attributes, ducks in a row.

But no more watches, no watch springs, no brass gears or casings or teeth.
Where are the orreries mimicking the planets in lovingly cast parts?
No longer can you buy a cheap hooker or a flask of 20/20,
Drink it sitting on a milk crate at the base of Longfellow.
I blinked and thought I saw the pedestrian traffic slow,
Their faces no longer familiar, been there once before.
All bums have been expurgated from the book of life
Along with the testimonials of the sons they wanted.

prose of Sept 5 09

Surely this would be a day to sail upon the open sea,
a day to be a skipper on one’s own sea craft. Who are these people
who decorate their houses from ships and the ships chandlery,
who this pipe-smoking patriarch who mutters to his guests
about floor-boards retrieved from what antebellum schooner
of which he thought he found a print in a second-hand shop?
Who are these people, nearly immobile, among so many instruments
for movement, polished in their disuse to shine, but once tarnished
by exposure to the elements, use? Who presides over the local
historical society, which would-be seaman has lost his mind
among these maritime artifacts, whose mind has halted
among the chandlery items, muttering about the places on the globe
from which they came? Which port of call? The cocoons in the trees,
wrapped in silk, among oaks, don’t sway, the air so still.
A river pushes through a dam, water ground through turbines
Into threads of silky water — the old man who mutters, leaning on his mantle,
has lost his mind to thoughts of water’s power, relating
the history of floorboards as a schooner’s deck beneath the feet
of teller and those to whom the tale can yet again be told.
But for the listener, the tales sound rehearsed, about the compass,
astrolabe and floor-boards, as if the house were the ship,
this somnolent teller the captain, and the arrows in the artifacts
could move, ship sunk in earth, ready to sail, its crew spellbound,
the listener as neccessary to the tale as the teller himself,
leaning there, all the the paintings maritime, old sailboats, stormy moons,
lulling voyages, whose itineraries lull their passengers into stone.
Of the shipman who stands before the mantle, house guests before him
—well his mind stopped long ago.

Sept 5 2009

Surely this would be a day to sail upon the open sea,
A day for being on the ocean for a very long time,
This is a day to be a skipper on one’s own sea craft.
But who are these people who decorate their houses
From the ships and the ships chandlery, who is this
Pipe-smoking patriarch who mutters to his guests
About the floor-boards retrieved from what
Old antebellum schooner of which he thought
He found a print in a second-hand shop, where?
Who are these people, nearly immobile themselves,
Among so many instruments for movement,
Polished in their disuse to shine, once tarnished
By their exposure to the elements? Who among them
Is the matron of the local historical society, which
Old would-be seaman has lost his mind among
These maritime artifacts, whose mind has come
Almost to a complete halt among the items
Of the chandlery, among the brass instruments,
Muttering about the places on the globe
From which they came? Which port of call?
The cocoons in the trees, wrapped in silk,
Among the white oaks, don’t even sway,
The air so still. A river pushes through a dam,
Water ground through turbines to threads
Of silky water—the old man who mutters,
Leaning on his mantle, has lost his mind to thoughts
About water’s power, relating to his guests
The history of the floorboards as a schooner’s deck
Beneath the feet of the teller and of those
To whom the tale can yet again be told.
But for the listener, the tales sound rehearsed,
About the brass instruments, the compass,
Astrolabe and floor-boards, as if the house
Were the ship, as if this somnolent teller
Were the captain himself, and the arrows
Inside the brass artifacts could really move,
A ship sunk in earth, ready to sail inside
With its spellbound crew, the teller
Necessary for the tale with the listener.
And all the paintings are maritime,
Old sailboats and stormy moons,
Lulling voyages, whose itineraries
Lull their passengers into stone. Of the shipman
Who stands before the mantle, house guests
Before him—his mind stopped long ago.

August 22 2009

I bought a new desktop with a flat screen. The flat screen is a black mirror that is staring back at me, like a pool of oil or of negative space, making you think negative space is what you have when you subtract all of nature—landscape, flora and fauna and men and women and their dwellings and their interiors, nature recombinant , or artifice. Or the negative space, or the space void of light, millions of particles of light, like the signs held in Pyongyang stadiums composing the face of the great leader as he stands with his father on Mt. Paektu. But just as the stands of that stadium can be silent in the time between festivities, so is the screen when dark, almost as dark as that vacant interlunar cave in which stares Samson in Gaza, eyeless.

It wasn’t an Achilles heel so much as a swollen toe that brought me low, so that I could neither walk nor run, nor barely stand, just soak in the bath or bind a truss around my foot. You must be as old as I am said a gym club member I’d crossed in the supermarket, either on his way there, which he praised for its Jacuzzi, or on his way back from the same place. Once there, he circles between the strength machines and the men‘s room, day after day. This infirmity stops me from making a similar path, so do the hours of the day, so does time, to which there are limits, as many limits as a box has sides. We’re bound to cross one another again, if not in this place, than in another.
Moisture in the atmosphere clings to the skin and so conducts heat. The spirit congeals and cools in the body. Various jellies with various degrees of hardness. Indian metaphysics devised a way for the metempsychosed self to escape the humid and entangled world; moisture entangles the self in a weather it never wanted. Spiritual planes, metaphysical tiers, skies populated with after-lives and over souls and thrones and archons, orreries and post-lunar spheres are means of turning consciousness away from the humidity of the body. Space is the ultimate clean and cool environment, a vacuum filled with colorless and intangible forms, Emerson’s transparent eyeball of detached and bodiless omniscience, narrator of the beginning and end.

Wild

The land that you neglect to trim away,
sumacs and spiny weeds, grows back.
The class, if you don’t shout stop! I say!
Return to chatter and laws of the strongest,
the bully, the gang-leader, form a tribe
to steal candy from the weaker children,
carrying coats and wearing colors of the strong.
Children ushered into tribes by bullies
in the weeds engulfing lawns, cracking curbs open,
breaking into gas stations, then Seven-Elevens,
handguns concealed: a world gone to seed.
Pack now before the neighborhood turns, to brush,
then forest, when the sidewalks crack open,
offering sink-holes, maelstroms, to drop in.
The children who refused to listen are feral,
blaming you for what the world’s become.
Among the weeds and lots they rampage.
Or wait in weeds, with knives and maces
and rusty shanks culled from bedsprings,
no longer schoolchildren. The weeds are wild,
are woods again. You recollect the first sumac
shoots on the lawn, the first back-talk.

August 15 2009

Heaven help the warrior, Santa Claus
Come from the sky. From a million washroom mirrors,
One simple and novel idea shall save the day,
Making cranberry muffins from belly-button lint.
But that’s the fearless spirit of enterprise at work,
Which redeems the backwards steps taken.
Ornery aunts shall not dampen the lampwick,
Not with a bigger bang or whimper,
Nor with deeper pockets nor bigger feet.
Australopithecus shall be his name.
The bathroom jokes loosened up the ambiance
And cleared the air of any highly regimented
Mannerism so redolent of the last century.
To straddle the cup that embraces the world
Rather than clean one’s own giant room,
Extending from the hilly verdure in the shadow
Of the St Lawrence Seaway to the Arabian deserts
And steppes and archipelagos where dwelt the red paint people
Spearing the blue whale with a stone harpoon in a blue sea
Or the wide-open Pacific on which waft those temperate winds
Driving the inhabitants of Hokkaido onto the coast of Peru.
It’s all yours, you can tell yourself with no small right—
How convince the inhabitants of your big room with its blue ceiling
That what you claim is yours, that you are the first man
That you know of, the sense of right from the seat of your pants.
How do you close the door of this room that is all of you
And all of them? You have a deed and title
For the moon’s illuminated hemisphere, you speculate
On the vacant temples of Atlantis, you plant your finger there.


The circulation either flows or the circulation’s blocked
But the circulation moves with the tide.
The tide of a land-bound continent, of the body locked in land.
Knows only the arteries in which to flow,
To swell or to retreat from the extremities,
Intuits the sea-lanes, bound in its current envelope,
Restrained by the body that moves and inhales.
What if the swelling of the tide upon the banks stopped cold,
When the absence of pain became numbness?
The sea-leaves that sway to the throb of current,
The sea-floor for which you’ve composed a claim—
No treaty can take the unexplored space from you.
You’ve composed a flag from linens and tea-leaves
To mimic the sway of those underwater herbages you’ve never
Grazed nor viewed with binoculars or stethoscopes.
The owner tells her barking dog it doesn’t own the world.
And the numbers don’t lie.
Let’s review the numbers after we crunch them,
Then I can create or claim a space in which we can see
These current affairs differently, not as losses but risks,
Ways to sally forth into an immaterialized future
Of rewards that are both fountain and wellspring
To gush until the end of time, visualized as a box
With a single opening or playpen for the spirit.
One’s infirmity enforces spontaneous practice.
Jarring notes, summer traffic works both ways.
Roars the daylight, the sun leonine.
The full moon ursine, hiding behind
Low-slung rain-clouds nearly rubbing these rivers
Whose banks are choked with weeds?
Past a rusty bridge and a yard of pine pallets,
Silver smokestack and a clinic. Know thy neighbors.
How lively the library, an example of gilded age architecture,
Copper turrets, terra cotta rosettes, oaken doors as thick
As some medieval fortress, crystal windows curved
Precisely, as if chiseled by lens-grinders.
Overlooking the waterfall, and the mill become spa.

7/28/10

Break up lines, fill space,
shuffle words, don't add to them.
There is always a surplus,

The empty space as costly
as the space occupied.

Cost-effective is the line
zoned in by space around it.
Be terse, name your price,

then make yourself scarce.
Pennies per word multiply.
Each sentence unwritten

another zero on the check,
hole up, count the money
they owe you already.

from 1/4/10

To mimic, to mirror is not a reward in itself--though nothing
to sneeze at either. I've admired the tenacity of the wild grape
climbing the still unsturdy maple saplings behind the work-shed,
not the rambling of the sumac. What I would give for bamboo,
an invasive wall of bamboo growing everywhere and restoring
the silence before time, to which I feel as entitled as my neighbors.
__________________________________________________________________

Well before the two world wars was an interest in bringing two or more disparate sounds together,
Witness Charles Ive's father conducting two bands marching around a single square,
or playing trumpet from the lakeside as the bands circled an empty gazebo.
And stereoopticons brought an artificial depth to the eye.

How I'd rather watch the wild grape thread the maples than the sumac

sprout those flowery cones and stringy pinnates of ruddy however
invasive pepperoncini-colored leaves whose tannin smothers

the lawn surely as the leaves of the maple in the fall.

Don't let the local setting down. Do you need a yard on which to sprawl,

or a garden of geometrically trimmed hedges?

Verses (6/27/10)

Jeff didn't die in a blaze of fire,
Nor did Candy in her slow demise.
We learn upon the tightrope wire.
Age fails to make the old man wise.
____________________________________

Water-hyacinths crawl down river,
choke swift passage to the trading-post.
Aboriginal poison arrows quiver
once before they strike the host.

____________________________________

Fiefdoms built on garbage piles
walled in concrete and barbed wire
can repel the wannabes for miles,
all to suffer cancerous internal fire.
___________________________________

Sargasso seas and private junks
large as islands, with online banks,
Ski resorts in hotel lobbies:
Artists' colonies requiring tanks.

From Jan. 10 Sunday

Timmy must smile to himself because he's solipsistic--
rolling canvas to the floor and cutting it with scissors,
a private room in his head, to which we are never invited.

Although he can respond to questions, sooner than later
he retreats into a world that we can never guess about.
No one of us would not rather be somewhere else than here.
We are the reason others can sail the bays and harbors
that we travel by imagination dimmed these coastal winters.
We cut the sails for those who can afford to be elsewhere.

On his own power Tim travels out of this space-time continuum.
And no one else in the sail-shop can see what Tim can see.

Eventually the super lets him go. We would have to continue
our vicarious journeys without him, sliding our padded knees
along the floor with a T-square and some colored pieces of chalk
so that the seamstress can bring together the parts of the sail.

Brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth spill from shelves
in treacherous elastic folds. It was not hard to see them
as bright geometric shapes on water filling with wind
like the resplendent bladders of exotic birds and fish

for enticing the opposite sex. And a spinnaker
made of such a cloth might do such a thing as well
to female homo sapiens. What woman wouldn't
be smitten with the skipper during such an outing?

We'd leave this hole as soon as we could said we to ourselves,
no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.

Those brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth
spilled their slippery and treacherous light from locked up cages.

From Jan. 9-17 2010 (in progress)

Heart of gold in gruff exterior
Describes the old man cycling the back lot
Of his bike shop neighboring the museum
Featuring taxidermized owls and foxes
And sundry things culled from others' attics.
They are having a dispute, this gruff old man
And the museum director whom to reporters
Has frequently catalogued the other's isdeeds.
But things observed change according to observer:
When on guard, he seems pensive
As he applies his wrench to one more used machine,
Renewing its life, releasing a lever,
And lowering the bike onto the concrete,
For a needy kid quotes the cub reporter,
Which makes the usually pacific museum director
Fume! Leading him to relate the man’s misdeeds:

No one knows the old man like I do.
All they can see is that he potters in the back lot
With the broken bikes he claims to fix for kids.
The reporter writes about the heart of gold
Behind the gruff exterior, the old man and his bike shop.
I’m the one who knows just what the old man’s like.
I overhear the things he says, on skin color,
sexual preference, gender. Who hasn’t heard him
When someone parks in the back lot of his shop?
He fools you by circling there to test a bike.
But a citizen found her stolen bike in their shop once.
And he goes along, just pottering around, who knows
What he does there? Whose stolen bike he fixes?

But the reporter who’d written gruff exterior
With heart of gold never returned my voice message.
As the woman who’d lost her bike had said “In Maine
I was used to gruffness followed by genuine helpfulness.
But this is a saltiness to which I am not accustomed.
Among those curses I failed to hear any heart of gold.”
So I’d like to get the story straight with the media tonight.
Who knows how many innocent ears he has bent
In the back lot from which he drive away my customers
With curses when you choose not to be around?
Name the children whom this Santa has given a bike.
Name the beneficiary. Where’s the heart of gold, the sainthood?
REPLY
Well first, we’re a small paper, with few resources, less time.
And time, which is money, we never had for such a feature,
What with the wires giving us the features of the day,
and just ourselves to edit it. Oversights happen, OK?
But of the reporter of which you complain, we can say,
And with no small amount of empathy for how you feel,
That we put credence in his judgment, so if his judgment
Is that the old man is good, that his heart is made of gold,
But his exterior gruff, then we are swayed and have no choice
But to trust him, because those who sense gold hearts have
Gold hearts themselves, and as professionals and citizens,
We believe in the good instead of the worst, choose also
Not to overturn the stones in the field to see what they hide.
So we choose to trust the merits of our intrepid reporters,
Whose jobs are by the way are not easy, who are buffeted
By multitudes of voices with frequently contrary claims.
*****************************
Look. This guy’s bad news. Just hear him rant.

When he got wind of what they'd said of him
he oiled up his ancient rusty Remington
and drove across the border for his shells.
He joked with the cashier, who couldn't smell
his liquor breath, the flask stuffed in his jacket,

who had he known, could’ve cared less anyway.
He'd a coy-dog problem and people problem too,
with peaceniks and tree-huggers, had a problem
with rats and cats and creatures of the field
blasting rock salt through the stars could not cure.

In his daydreams, he'd crash past the ticket-taker
Of the Museum of Relics in White River Junction
shatter the glassed-in displays with his rifle-butt
and topple the stuffed animals, all foxes and owls,
nocturnal beasts of the field you never see

in deer season, spent half-drunk dressing them,
a buck strung against the barn of the family dairy farm,
the premises gone since to a lawyer or a surgeon,
deer-blood dripping to fertilize the white clover
that dotted the tire-tracks of the tractor or horse-cart.

Where a hunchbacked farm-hand might settle
On a plank bench on his coffee-break to drink
The pure and unpasteurized milk from which
He’d have to brush the flies from the pitcher.

Damnit he'd never seen so much junk in his life,
not even among his old lady's rich relatives.
At least in his bike-shop he used the salvage up,
At least he didn’t frame it for eternity--
and if this was the last thing that he ever did,

he'd rebuild another butterfly-handled bicycle
equip it with an unrusting brightly-ringing bell
for another poor kid who'd otherwise be getting by
Christmas and Easter on Catholic Services
Which, to confess all, was mostly his story too.

But no one was going to park in his lot,
Not even the ticket-taker, fetching as she was.


Yes he'd charge into the shop and overturn the stuffed animals,
the screech owl in flight, the red fox coiled as if about to spring,
or recoil from ground that was only a pedestal with a brass plaque.
He continued to stumble through the museum of relics and curiosities
smashing glass with the stock of his rusty but newly oiled hunting rifle.
Christ he'd seen better things in neighbor's homes, hunting trophies,
the heads of eight-point bucks pinned above fireplaces, not butterflies
trapped in glass bells lined with pool-table velvet, nor ticket stubs
to side-shows or to old steam trains he'd known but never missed,
like the one in the back yard they'd cover in Plexiglas if they could.
His mother'd flagged one down across the road from one address
when his father had been drunk for whom he hadn't shed a tear
when he passed away, a violent drunk and a woodsman.

No he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.
He didn't care how much glass in the museum of curiosities he'd break,
his organs on the mend. When the ticket-taker would ask him
what he'd like he'd sweep past her, go to the heart of the problem,
this was the Director of the Museum of Curiosities and Relics.
Who’d ratted him out (he heard) to the newspapers.

[All politics is local my friend]

1/9/10

The guests would pay, and the hotelier would feel like a fool,
what for insulting his wife before the post office like that,
although then he wouldn't know just who dumped
a gallon of kerosene into the hotel pool.
Anyway, the fat man could always drain his damned pool.
But as to his wife, no one would get away insulting his girls.
Returning home he reeled with gratification
you’d get punching out an army buddy who'd been too big
[you’d get during a punch-out with an army buddy who’d been
Too big for his britches]
for his britches, then after showing him just who you were,
make up by buying him another frosty at the Eagles' Club,
then beat him silly and afterward laugh it up in a cramp

but the old man was a screwball alright and as sure as shit
was his old man too. His old man was just a piece of shit,
never an hour without him being on the sauce. Or was nothing,
just a pile of waffle batter, who just sat there, the old man
just sat there, he was as useless as a pile of waffle batter,
he'd sit all day complaining and was useless, just a nobody
mean as a guard dog people would feed cups of liquor to,
a toothless guard dog chained to a fence, trained to bare

his absent teeth to the first passerby. But a dog
that in its day and cage had been as frightful as a baited bear.

before he'd gone in the service when it was a sure thing she wouldn't return,
no he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.

Many know him as a gruff old man test-riding his bicycles in the back-lot of the shop where he fixes bikes the old-fashioned way, one by one. Some know him as a shop owner with a heart of gold, dispensing free bikes to needy children in the neighborhood. Others only know his salty tongue and gruff demeanor as he upbraids drivers parking in his lot, which he shares with a museum of freaks and oddities. The museum director spoke to us briefly of the troubles he'd experienced with the shop owner. I also spoke with the mother of one of the recent beneficiaries, who claimed there were many like her who'd received bikes gratis from the old man, whose pleasure in life seemed to be to fix old bikes and then to make them shiny new again.

See the wedding photo.
She’d been warned
He had a screw loose—
My father’s eye was wild.

namby-pamby

chewtoy
 
aerofloat
 
table
 
 
 
Well, won't that get me into the annals!
 
rather than suffering a lesser fate such as
 
holding down a regular job while participating
 
 
in the cottage industry of the mimeo cooperative
 
as quaint and antiquated as pet rocks
 
or that Mr. T puzzle I continue to keep
 
stashed in its original cellophane in a shoebox!
 
 
 
Only a glutton devours two helpings of Chinese food
 
in a German resturant (how's that for multiculturalism!)
 
and leaves without feeling like he could conquer the world
 
although again the feeling shall pass within an hour!

March 7, 2010

How long since I've seen marbles, noticed veins in them,
schist and mica rubble trapped inside a serene and milky sphere?
And yet I live in the town where globes for libraries and schools
were broadcast to the rest of the world, with borders
a satellite photo falsifies. What is committed to ink,
what dries upon the page to become writing, may be merely
a record of words circulated in memory nearly a week
separate from the thoughts they contain, the chaff from wheat.
Thus the final justice when all comes out haphazardly.

A ladybug settled inside the lampshade instead of a fly.
But the fly that sits inside the lampshade is a ladybug
once in a while. The spotted helmet flares into multiple wings
aflurry, as it flies. A small fly not in its prime
lands on the ceiling, then against the wall, then bumps
between lightbulb and lampshade, and touches you.
It lets itself be swatted away, not juvenile but weak,
enough time to be swatted with the local newsweekly,
in which you'd never know that it was here
where the drafter's hand transposed the mercator projections
to cloth and paper globe with the thickness of this lampshade,
in which the fly finds respite in warmth but insufferable confinement
in its circumference, beating its head against it and circling the lightbulb,
what it knows of the sun that it seeks to crawl within by force alone:
open up, and let me in, a little fly, enter your hot singularity.
The lightbulb is a sun on the center of the earth, the place they
made the globes and sold their projections to themselves, until the
industry expired, leaving these houseflies to circle small suns.
Myself I must be hundreds of feet from where the globes were made.

Jan. 9-17 2010

Mixed nuts lightly salted spilled can recall a Fibonaccian sequence
If you observe a single nut at the center, the others in a spiral
That in theory embraces the world if you posit this cashew as a center
And the others in spiraling formation only increase in size and embrace
Until no more mixed nuts are left from the sequence to continue this progression.

The Fibonaccian sequence can drive you nuts in conjunction with time-cubes
when you spill the nuts from the can, unlike cereal, no prizes nor miracles,
only nuts on the floor or the counter-top shaping themselves into a Fibonaccian sequence,
as how the bounty of picked flowers spills from a cornucopia of straw.
Only the numbers accumulate in greater progressions than you can follow.

Why not just eat mixed nuts from the counter-top until the sequence reverses
Or return them to the can that has become a Pandora’s box of thought for you?
The traits you attributed to yourself that made you special only multiply.

12/12/09, 12/20/09

Flip through Death in Venice:
note the old pansy in hipster's attire
with hair dyed and lips rouged
foreshadowing/mirroring/foreshadowing
protagonist Von Aschenbach in his demise,
tansy in his buttonhole, youth restored
by the glib barber, wandering in mazes,
feverish, lost at career's finale.

But this pansy treats you to a frown
no matter what you tip him.
You thought your visits would be kind,
knowing that his partner was sick.
Who is he to seek your straight charity?

So for hair you go to girls instead,
a half-dozen housewives out of town,
their spouses cops or firemen.
One of them doesn't mind pressing her hips
against your knuckles as they grip the leather armrests--
hers are curved as in Rubens or as Charytyn
among her circle of Afro-Caribbean dancers,
animated Venus of Willendorf.
You wonder what her love life's like.

Is the husband, so small in the photograph
taped to her mirror, touching her?
Does she take more interest in male customers
than in children whose hair she cuts
customarily before the baseball season?
She's talks about her old bedroom.
I don't get what neighborhood it's in.
Who does she bring there, her parents gone?
How old is her offspring,
also in the snapshot on the mirror
another stylist will take over
when she leaves, starting her own business?
My knuckles memorize the her jeans

as taut as skin around her hips,
although she'll go to seed, not eating right.
As if I were swayed by rhythm and undulation,
waves within the tides all lunar push and pull.
Nor should she bare her midriff now.
Still I'd enter Shannon without effort,
bathe with her, let friction build.
But inside, I'd make a remark
so ridiculuous or laughable,
the act would become(see Marcus Aurelius),
rubbing of innards and spastic extrusion of slime.

The aftermath feels like a meth crash,
this coming to one's senses. Among bedsheets,
the sated body feels indented as fieldstones or concrete.
O Hold it: she's a barber with a son,
her husband's municipal, her extended family
large as some Irish-Yankee mukhabarat.

Venus' gravity can grind stone
into plate-shaped fragments.
What is the likelihood of bumping
into another woman built like her,
the curves just tracks or trajectories
on which bodies and elements hurl?
Like a rolling stone, begin with the drum-beat, don't end with one.

12/20/09--6/7/10
_____________________________________________________

Last night's blizzard missed Vermont entirely,
but it snowed in Boston and most of the eastern industrial belt,
until there were flight delays clear to Chicago and down to DC.

I've never eaten a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen.
According to the Larouchies, the Queen of England runs
the heroin trade and is the force that drives the Kyoto protocols.

Said Jerry Garcia once, heroin is a great drug for old people.
And old people such as myself, without children to support them,
and with a hard time finding shelter. Heroin will be a great temptation.

Once at an airport such as Idewilde or Logan, I search
for a bus shelter as soon as I am outside the flight gates.
Someone stole the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from the gates

to Auschwitz, or was it to Bergen-Belsen, or was it both?
When the sign says STOP my instinct says do the opposite and GO.
However if my instinct entertains murder, I do not follow the lead.

When again I fish on Lake Morey, I will use lead weights
to hold the bait down below the waterline.
Were people to disappear, fish would overcrowd the sea.
When people overcrowd the planet, the fish will flounder, prices rise.

Surely all airports and stations will be overcrowded during this season.
And a sigh of relief will escape once the season ends.
But from the imprisonment of family, there is neither escape nor relief.

Could you row into the middle of the lake, without friends or family,
would that bring a quiet although lonely respite, satisfactory
to those who are used to being alone, although one hankers for a dog
as a companion, who looks up to you, depending upon you for sustenance,
for food and for shelter, wagging its tail, hanging its tongue out.

Only the weekends, unextended with vacation or personal days,
bring you respite now, your furloughs and holidays spent.
For my furlough week this year, I chose the week before Labor Day,
while the sun still warmed the lawns and gardens,
spending no small amount of time trimming my lawn and weeding my garden,

some weeds with milky pods or stems, some with thorns
or velvet-textured pulpy leaves and impossibly tenacious roots,
ensuring the plant's recurrence next season, suggesting
those eastern resurrection gods who submerge in winter but
in summer ascend before Phoebus--who knows what
poisons or medicinal properties they offer, conceal?

Among the gates of airports in post-industrial cities
and between the broken tarmac and the faded traffic stripes,
rise weeds to a nearly human height, scattering their spores
to the winds that are borne from the Arctic.

Terrorists don't need to hold such airports under siege,
all they need to do is tie up outbound traffic.
Counter-terrorists besiege the post-industrial airports.
It's ideas that are the poisonous weeds rooted in the minds
of both, scattered among the winds like so many spores

that refuse to acknowledge borders or the gates of airports,
the weeds are bringing the wild back to entwine among the ingenious
structures, a field already reforested, repopulated with vines
entwined among the video terminals and concession stands

where Milk-Duds rot among and feed the milkweed
bursting through the summer with the frequency of incendiary devices
released from the hand of the fighter egged on by imam or Bakuninist,

although there remains nothing to conquer but unregistered space
of weeds among perennials I cannot claw from soil, once on my knees, enough.

7/20/08

The descent of rain into flower gardens and bushes
The turning of the overhead fan, audible from the friction
between the ball-bearings and the wheel upon which the fan turns
pushing colder air down until the living room is as cold as a tomb

I brushed the incipient mildew from several books that were in storage

A pamphlet for an experimental prototype of a helicopter or airship
whose wings are modeled on the dragonfly skirting the surface of a pond

A broadside declaring the imminent arrival of doomsday or the crisis
in capitalism, impending, according to the sundry voices

The tapering off of rain in early afternoon attended by the
weighting of the maple-leaves and the sodden branches
Would you putter around the garage if you had your own garage?

The drenching rains that visit us from the Canadian north

You must explain to the salt of the earth the ways of God to man
Another very green and wet Sunday afternoon as traceable as
the passage of youth into age or into ages of work into retirement
or the reification of one entire life into a plexiglass cube for family photos
and a selective eulogy--the rain thickens as the sky darken.

Mother told me there'd be days like this, the thickening of rain
among the branches results in moods of relaxation and abandonment
as if the toy ship were tossed among storms: toy boat, toy story.
Toy poem in which each word defers to a common and
ceremonial practice such as the phrase a month of Sundays
of rain and red slugs and the washing out of man-made roads
and trenching of new water--paths and furrows down watery banks
and flowery waters and watery flowers that could be called
a realignment of forces such as when finance dislocates careers
thought certain as the ground beneath one's feet and the
rock-bed beneath the ground. The flood plains by the riverbed
are a pre-Cambrian field of fern and dragonfly,
trees refuse to root in the sediment beneath. The potting soil
abandoned in a bag appeared black, bacterial and fecal
as it poured upon the freshly tilled soil, beneath which lies
fragments of a slate bed. From a shelf of slate rest garter snakes
when the sun is out, fattened from licking silverfish and spiders
from holes in the slate. The skunk's tail flung in the air,
each white fur strand a warning-barb, behind the uncut grass
rimming a ditch. In Sweden, a hill cannot be blasted for a new road
because residents have protested that it houses gnomes.
Elves however are forest-dwellers, gnomes are subterrranean,
living in kingdoms beneath the mountain. When black tar turns silver
and the air you breathe is saturated with water-droplets,
and rain drips from the roof and the porosity of tar-paper
holds the rain. Rims of wineglasses emitting a tone peculiar to it.
The reduction of life into granitic material, into coal from tar,
the apparition of silver when the tar is wet from light,
of surfaces on the paved road, the burden of leaves on the tree,
of fruit about to drop from branches. The absorbant surface of
thos Darth Vader fighter-bombers dropping their payloads upon
parched villages with mud huts and underground cells sniffed out
by satellites. Ignorance is bliss at such an altitude.

But the redneck said the will to win was sapped. Were he young
he'd spy on the back-stabbers. The voices of elites declared
him simple. That criticism was an inner voice that rankled
his insides.

The yellow warbler darted into a hedge along the road
of the industrial park.
The porta-potties on the cul-de-sac worked fitfully.
A gas main protruded from the ground.
Compactors had flattened the patio.

5/5/09

After his manly sonorous outburst, he abandoned verse
and resorted to journals, but having mastered the form,
realized they could only be completed when he passed away--
nothing of their occasional flashes of beauty
could be extracted and reshaped into another form.

Many would not relish his remarks about restaurants or movies,
nor lend a reading eye to his tireless minutiae.
Here was truth with all its warts, no lacquer nor varnish.
Inspiration had flickered then died among their pages.
Then a pertinacious realism was born, a living testament
to how people are shaped by the ride of their underwear,
the fit of their shoes, how drink or food poisoning shaped them.
He'd held the lyrical mode in suspicion and grown fonder of satire,
and though he didn't revile past influences, grew suspicious,
settling for photographically accurate laundry lists.
Who'd know how far he's walked from his career and old beliefs,
not so much to be in a monastery as in the Idaho woods
among trailers on dirt plots -- or did his scathing rejectionist
contrarian cant reverberate from the pages of the Financial Times
or some other august organ of the finance-military-industrial complex,
or did he merely sulk at home and snort cocaine from a silver-mirrored
Army knife -- or was it a Bowie he'd been given by a Special Forces sargent
who was in league with his beliefs about the pernicious influence
of the Counter-Reformation on daytime children's TV shows.
Late environmentalist visionary who'd advocated the cultivation
of flesh jello in vats and the systematic bombing of overpopulated
equatorial countries, along with an abandonment of green technoligies
for a retrenchment into sub-Arctic latitudes abandoned by harpoon-wielding
impossibly tall and proto-aboriginal Red-Paint people?

4/4/09

Vernal pools

Slushy, muddy, watery, not flowery waters nor watery slush yet.

Resident seeker, desert sunset

The sunset, in his desert fastness, is the red
of the foundry, molten iron poured from the crucible
into the casting. The face that looks at the sunset
is a burnished obsidian mask drenched by fire.
Who knows what this lifelong seeker thinks
outside his desert home, before the spectacle
he shares with no one -- what he'd wanted all along.
Ruddy invulnerable mask of a man of iron.
Roll from his pen those iron sonorities, blunter.

5/10/09

Everything you touch or taste or listen to or see,
according to this blowhard, has been compromised.

Tell me about the last freshly-slaughtered game you caught and tasted
before the hearth-fire spoiled the taste,
of acorns before you had to roast them.

Talk about the fruit from the trees that dropped in your mouth

about the fish roe and the seeds

about the whitest apple-flesh and the fish in the stream.
How about the place from which you were estranged
about the roadhouses and the charismatic churches
and the commune in which you rolled about among others
the opening seconds of Beatlemania and the years
before the great war when your mother's arm
only got stronger from tugging the milk cow
across the dirt road where the brick library
or wax museum was
the statuettes so real in facial tones you thought the figures
moved, such are the lost arts and the carved
Hummel figurines of the local Gepetto
about grander thoroughfares and greater aspirations

3/22/09

How many dead things and barely opening buds and stiffened forked branches
And rusted beer-cans can one account for, how many more engine-blocks
And harvesters sunk among the weeds? How many weeds and cat-tails
Sprung from marshy landscape, runoff winding in rivulets and courses
The naked eye cannot trace, as it can trace how the crow leapfrogs
Toward another spot of carrion after the cars pass? How many
Stiff, forked, twiggy, branched, and budding things
And how many cold winds crossing unlovely flats before
The hospital dump? How many more biohazard vials unsealed,
How many Coke bottles by the river bed beside the tampon strings?
What crawls from culverts other than the rainbow of an oil-slick?
Where lies the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? How much longer
Can one write about the brush of clouds above the orange landscape
And desert sunset juxtaposed beside the rusty Roto-rooter
And sundry collapsed machinery, about old beercans,
Or forked and spiny desert flora. A snow flurry during early spring
Is winter’s stiff answer to the coming thaw, as if to reiterate
I’m still around. How many spare tires, rusty axles? That’s the kicker.
Chew more than you bite off. Time to stop. The snow flurry,
No more than half an hour, thickened air before it went away.