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
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
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.
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?
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?
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
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.
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.
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