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.