Out lazy indolent peasantry must awake by the lash!
A visit to the empty panopticon as devised by Jeremy Bentham will convince the guest of his method’s wisdom, the skylights in the domed roof blinding the guard box and stairwell with several shafts of sunlight, at nightfall the harvest moon descended. A flock of crows visit the powerlines. Irradiated melons growing as large as unlanced boils. So the poete maudit in his night-robes sung to the broken Doric columns and to the trees. When you grow up son, what would you like to be? How’s your report card? Which bacteria can consume both banana peels and coffee-grounds? In the dormitory courtyard he practiced the high-pitched peals meant to shatter glass as in those old Memorex commercials. And glasses of daguerreotypes and plate glass windows. But instead he sounded like a banshee and they wanted to lock him up. The very cover of the book announces an important cultural moment, an arrival. Significance before meaning. I am writing as if English were my second language—this was intended. In the cafeteria the jocks are still drinking two chocolate milks and double scoops of mashed potatoes. Another fight breaks out at Chuck E. Cheese. With the rain the summer vacation at the camp is ruined. A bundle of clothes in the dryer awaits my hand. She wrote entirely about the displaced people she had settled, mixing their dialog with bits from their own language. The skin of smoked trout as if flayed and peeled away.
Let’s face it. When you’re not opening old wounds, you’re opening a new can of worms. You’ll eat some worms since nobody likes you enough to visit you. Worms in compost work. They work through the various foods buried there. I lick the wounds I open clean.
Yesterday I ran part of Lake Morey. Summer camp was in session, and there were two camps. The tents were set up like barracks, their flaps open. One camp was for girls. Many bicyclists appeared, making me wish I’d brought my bike, although the sky had been overcast when I’d departed my house. At the end of my run, I picked a few ripe wild strawberries growing at the edge of the road, then walked upon a footpath that coiled into the woods, scattered with needles. A brook pooled before me. The fallen logs by the brook were matted with moss. The shade was thick, cooling the footpath. At some point, you could barely see the summer houses through the firs.
But before my run ended, a succession of exploding thuds sounded above me from a modernized log cabin on the hill, agitating the beagle led along by a short elfin woman whose face was strained as she upheld her arms almost as if in supplication, the leash in one hand, the tail of the beagle with its white tip waving wildly as the dog turned whichaway seeking the noise’s source—the explosions (M-80s) drowned the music in my ears, played to establish rhythm, boost the runner’s adrenaline level. The old woman’s eyes were turning wildly in her head as the beagle thrashed its tail as she wished aloud for an end to the noise, to the thudding explosions, the percussion shaking the air. When the V-2 dropped, the children died from the evacuation of air from their lungs: the blast was noiseless. The beagle, a pointer, moved in circles, searching for the source of noise, the tips of its white tail swinging. In thunder dogs do not know where to turn. The old woman shook her arms in the air.
The tiny succulents on the rock have bright yellow flowers. Beneath them stands a dwarf arbor vitae purchased on sale at Shaw’s. I filled the bird feeder to the top—that’s why I’m hearing so much bird song—or was there just a squabble? I’m waiting for the time when I can pluck the fruit from the vine without worrying where the rest comes from.
The worm in the compost forms a thread of air behind him. Thus all signs of his work collapse and leave no trace.
Moving in circles, the beagle’s tail wildly flailed as it searched for the source of those booms from the M-80s launched by the household up hill, a modern log cabin atop a lawn made by driving trees and boulders back, made from what must be a thousand trips to Home Depot. A faint memory of the sacrifices of pagan antiquity in the barbeque, lighter fluid and charred meat, fat off the bone sizzling among the embers. The smoke from the barbeques rises to the gods, Mars savoring the smell the most, appreciates the offerings. Would not the crash of a passenger jet smell like that, the fuel tanks torched, the victims twisted and fallen? His nostrils flared wide, Mars appreciates the comparison, not thinking it hyperbolic in the slightest. Offerings of modern life far exceed in number and scale those paltry offerings of the bronze age. Hats off to Vulcan the ironsmith, deft facilitator! Metallurgical advances intensify the event.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
March 26 2011
An elegant algorithm should unfold like an origami plant in the halls of the crisis, a delicate web membrane whose veins you can see. A delicate artifact whose purpose no longer appears above the earth in the enlightened present. Pack in those vowels, those gluten-rich modifiers.
At the camp, I changed my regimen instantly. You could be fast, but that wouldn’t pay. Mammals are not sui generis communal when in families. Had the reptiles advanced instead, imagine the coldness of their reflections, upon their sons and daughters, upon their siblings. Imagine the beetling of their brow in the deep thought required to ice their competitors, the mammals. No Harvard behaviorist highbrow could compare to them in the purely cold courage of their arguments and calculations—sink or swim.
Calculi were small stones, also beads of the abacus. How could they calculate without Arabic numerals? I was driving over the bridge to White River as I thought of this. The sign said SPEED LIMIT 55. We drivers ignored the sign.
In the cleanest most immaculate houses, worthy of the photographic features in Home and Gardens, there is an unlit corner relegated to chaos and abandonment—loose brick, empty paint cans viscera of water-hose and wire. It’s a room full of matter out of place, unlocked only when the residents know that guests would never venture near it, never cross it. But when the house expands, a neighbor’s land bought, the room’s cleaned up, remodeled, and another corner takes its place, but already a dumpster is moored nearby to accept its junk, its records, and its embarrassments. What local weekly, what student newspaper doesn’t print a verse or two about the reliquaries of attics, about faded photograph albums, grandmother’s old photographs, about the continuity of the past from which we were unduly severed? There’s some sincerity to these expressions. But that is not the true subject here, those albums are a digression. Does the visible neglect of these corners come from negligence and exhaustion or from willful forgetfulness? Or is the photogenic order of the household grounded in this disorder? Without it, a quiet and staid inertia, the household a mausoleum, indifferent to fashion.
Surely the last episode of the series must be about aquatic mammals, about the adaptation of mammals to water, whether porpoise, whale or manatee. Meerkats who mount the shoulder of a host, as if a tree from which to peer. Hit the supplicant with that birch switch, while the steam expands in the cabin. In Arkansas, truckers sleep inside their rigs, and the rugs in apartments double as prayer-mats. A fjord holds more than fish roe. Salmon-enriched rivers, the spawn of fingerlings, bifurcates the valleys.
Her mother suffers from allergies, as she does every Christmas. She has a mildly disapproving demeanor. Her taste in art is more advanced than that of her daughter. Her daughter takes no interest, for example, in David Hockney, whom her mother just loves. She loves the pastels, the pinks and aqua-blues, their serene and depopulated blankness. But that’s OK, because the daughter inherited the business, and works long hours managing it. They evaluate distressed property, which means when property goes down, they really make out like bandits, but when it goes up, they make out like bandits too. So they do well. I’m there for the ride. But there’s a daughter out in Los Angeles, and her eyes go strange. I’m no one for scenes.
The oldest daughter takes my mother aside in the kitchen one day, asking her whether she’d ever noticed my pupils dilating or contracting from the influence of drugs. She suspects her sister’s habit, but she doesn’t want to divulge as much.
And another thing: the mother drives her older daughter’s husband to drink or to illness every year.
“Should’ve salted over some money before you were out of work” said Pilgrim when driving Manuel home.
The phrase “to salt over” connotes little interest is earned in the savings, as if the money were being put in a change jar instead of a bank.
Of those untidy corners one always persists.
As if neglect were purposeful, to remind us of the huts in which we lived, or the river side settlements, the houses on stilts falling into floodwaters. Bring your incisors, the means by which to part the meat from the bone. Bring those fabulous triangular back teeth to excavate the marrow. It’s the dentist who excavates the tooth to fill, but where’s the plunger cusp? Loser, you ground the amalgam off. It’s you, said the dentist, who ruined my plunger cusp, the flying buttress I deployed in your mouth. You ground the amalgam into saliva, and I must slave again to put it back.
Thank God there are no spell checks on paper, no red and wavy lines beneath the malapropism or misspelling, no green wavy lines beneath the grammatical error, beneath the lack of agreement especially when the agreement has not been decided upon, the new sentence frankly unfinished. And to be frank is to be free to be incomplete. The condition of writing in the journal is a kind of freedom that is finally unsatisfactory when the faculties are not required to commit themselves to a final work. But laziness is a healthy suspension of the faculties, a necessary indirection. The sun falls outside, but how chilly it will be when I go into the work shed, try to unlock the bikes, untangle the water hoses. The shed needs new florescent lights.
The floor bows when I walk upon it. Nocturnal mice eat the bags of birdfeed or the grass seedling. The floor-boards of plywood are oily. In the recycling center free sand can be had for anyone who wants it to shovel onto their icy driveways. But spring is winning, the winter embodied in snow banks is retreating, but persists in the fields—its officers encourage fortitude against the enemy, saying “if we can only last through the summer our forces can prevail. October is a safe zone. With December’s reinforcements, we can accomplish the mission, return the world to ice. We’ve failed before, but we’ve only learned lessons that make us stronger. Don’t fail us now. Stifle the growth of the grass; Resist the blandishments of the sun to join the plants, the succulents that imprison you. No more water-fairy stories.
Stroke the back of the couch for the dust that entraps you. I’ll tackle and maybe unpack Marvell’s Horatian Ode on Cromwell.
At the camp, I changed my regimen instantly. You could be fast, but that wouldn’t pay. Mammals are not sui generis communal when in families. Had the reptiles advanced instead, imagine the coldness of their reflections, upon their sons and daughters, upon their siblings. Imagine the beetling of their brow in the deep thought required to ice their competitors, the mammals. No Harvard behaviorist highbrow could compare to them in the purely cold courage of their arguments and calculations—sink or swim.
Calculi were small stones, also beads of the abacus. How could they calculate without Arabic numerals? I was driving over the bridge to White River as I thought of this. The sign said SPEED LIMIT 55. We drivers ignored the sign.
In the cleanest most immaculate houses, worthy of the photographic features in Home and Gardens, there is an unlit corner relegated to chaos and abandonment—loose brick, empty paint cans viscera of water-hose and wire. It’s a room full of matter out of place, unlocked only when the residents know that guests would never venture near it, never cross it. But when the house expands, a neighbor’s land bought, the room’s cleaned up, remodeled, and another corner takes its place, but already a dumpster is moored nearby to accept its junk, its records, and its embarrassments. What local weekly, what student newspaper doesn’t print a verse or two about the reliquaries of attics, about faded photograph albums, grandmother’s old photographs, about the continuity of the past from which we were unduly severed? There’s some sincerity to these expressions. But that is not the true subject here, those albums are a digression. Does the visible neglect of these corners come from negligence and exhaustion or from willful forgetfulness? Or is the photogenic order of the household grounded in this disorder? Without it, a quiet and staid inertia, the household a mausoleum, indifferent to fashion.
Surely the last episode of the series must be about aquatic mammals, about the adaptation of mammals to water, whether porpoise, whale or manatee. Meerkats who mount the shoulder of a host, as if a tree from which to peer. Hit the supplicant with that birch switch, while the steam expands in the cabin. In Arkansas, truckers sleep inside their rigs, and the rugs in apartments double as prayer-mats. A fjord holds more than fish roe. Salmon-enriched rivers, the spawn of fingerlings, bifurcates the valleys.
Her mother suffers from allergies, as she does every Christmas. She has a mildly disapproving demeanor. Her taste in art is more advanced than that of her daughter. Her daughter takes no interest, for example, in David Hockney, whom her mother just loves. She loves the pastels, the pinks and aqua-blues, their serene and depopulated blankness. But that’s OK, because the daughter inherited the business, and works long hours managing it. They evaluate distressed property, which means when property goes down, they really make out like bandits, but when it goes up, they make out like bandits too. So they do well. I’m there for the ride. But there’s a daughter out in Los Angeles, and her eyes go strange. I’m no one for scenes.
The oldest daughter takes my mother aside in the kitchen one day, asking her whether she’d ever noticed my pupils dilating or contracting from the influence of drugs. She suspects her sister’s habit, but she doesn’t want to divulge as much.
And another thing: the mother drives her older daughter’s husband to drink or to illness every year.
“Should’ve salted over some money before you were out of work” said Pilgrim when driving Manuel home.
The phrase “to salt over” connotes little interest is earned in the savings, as if the money were being put in a change jar instead of a bank.
Of those untidy corners one always persists.
As if neglect were purposeful, to remind us of the huts in which we lived, or the river side settlements, the houses on stilts falling into floodwaters. Bring your incisors, the means by which to part the meat from the bone. Bring those fabulous triangular back teeth to excavate the marrow. It’s the dentist who excavates the tooth to fill, but where’s the plunger cusp? Loser, you ground the amalgam off. It’s you, said the dentist, who ruined my plunger cusp, the flying buttress I deployed in your mouth. You ground the amalgam into saliva, and I must slave again to put it back.
Thank God there are no spell checks on paper, no red and wavy lines beneath the malapropism or misspelling, no green wavy lines beneath the grammatical error, beneath the lack of agreement especially when the agreement has not been decided upon, the new sentence frankly unfinished. And to be frank is to be free to be incomplete. The condition of writing in the journal is a kind of freedom that is finally unsatisfactory when the faculties are not required to commit themselves to a final work. But laziness is a healthy suspension of the faculties, a necessary indirection. The sun falls outside, but how chilly it will be when I go into the work shed, try to unlock the bikes, untangle the water hoses. The shed needs new florescent lights.
The floor bows when I walk upon it. Nocturnal mice eat the bags of birdfeed or the grass seedling. The floor-boards of plywood are oily. In the recycling center free sand can be had for anyone who wants it to shovel onto their icy driveways. But spring is winning, the winter embodied in snow banks is retreating, but persists in the fields—its officers encourage fortitude against the enemy, saying “if we can only last through the summer our forces can prevail. October is a safe zone. With December’s reinforcements, we can accomplish the mission, return the world to ice. We’ve failed before, but we’ve only learned lessons that make us stronger. Don’t fail us now. Stifle the growth of the grass; Resist the blandishments of the sun to join the plants, the succulents that imprison you. No more water-fairy stories.
Stroke the back of the couch for the dust that entraps you. I’ll tackle and maybe unpack Marvell’s Horatian Ode on Cromwell.
Monday, November 28, 2011
From September 12 2009
Do I hear the vibration of crickets throughout the house or could it be the much higher-pitched buzz of the waking cicadas? The same buzz you’d hear among the elms and beeches in New Jersey and Manhattan?
A drone not to be confined with those mystical varieties reported to put the id and ego to rest, and connected the soul to those larger dependencies communed with without the interference of thought or any presupposition? A buzz that becomes a variety of silence just as one trains one’s ear not to hear the whinging drones of power stations, transformers, furnaces, a sound like a bed of leaves or bed of nails or equal height or a field of stones, neither transporting nor to be transported? Hum of the dynamo, murmur of the idling engine, a breathing machine’s exhalation of bubbles?
A TV binge: luminescent jellyfish umbrellas in dark water, the Iron Chef doing Kung Fu chicken with prunes, consumption of a fistful of grubs in Survivor, the new American Idol disqualified, dethroned, the shoot-out, all that glitters being not gold among those watches on Home Shopper’s Network, CSI Las Vegas, New York, Miami, Denver, DeMoines, but Real Housewives of Atlanta, New Jersey, etc., some change back from Pizza Hut.
_________________________________________________
What gets spoken does not get read
What is spoken remains unread—such a shame.
A confidential exchange of words with no one in earshot
Cannot be done justice.
As I depopulate the marshes
No one at home would seem to reward me.
The medal remains within its velvet casing,
The marching band remains out of tune
As I dry the swamps up
The light slanting into the studio
Because you can’t unpack these conceits in logical strands
The statement made cannot be simple
Among the cords and fibers and fasces of the brain-stem
Where thoughts both contradictory and related come together
Where one conceit becomes unwound from another, an improvisation
That once engendered among those tiny electrical impulses
Can thrive or perish, just as some seeds catch and increase.
The cliffs on which saplings clutch, whether birch or pine,
Doomed to be stunted among those slate or granite crevasses
Where stone grinds and softens enough for roots to grab
Reminds me of the fragility of tangents, these sallies-forth
On which my modesty depends. May you notice how sincerely
I try not to be prolix, try not to act as if I had to
Prove something. Yet my resume is available to all.
“He isn’t someone I would call prepossessing. Alone I wouldn’t
Seek him out, or someone like him.
Chance alone brought us to the same room,
But the more we learned about the other, the less we wished we knew.
These are not people who I find attractive—they’re not one of us.
“Someone with integrity is what I am seeking. I had an idea…”
Deliberately vague trail off to repel unwarranted attention.
A drone not to be confined with those mystical varieties reported to put the id and ego to rest, and connected the soul to those larger dependencies communed with without the interference of thought or any presupposition? A buzz that becomes a variety of silence just as one trains one’s ear not to hear the whinging drones of power stations, transformers, furnaces, a sound like a bed of leaves or bed of nails or equal height or a field of stones, neither transporting nor to be transported? Hum of the dynamo, murmur of the idling engine, a breathing machine’s exhalation of bubbles?
A TV binge: luminescent jellyfish umbrellas in dark water, the Iron Chef doing Kung Fu chicken with prunes, consumption of a fistful of grubs in Survivor, the new American Idol disqualified, dethroned, the shoot-out, all that glitters being not gold among those watches on Home Shopper’s Network, CSI Las Vegas, New York, Miami, Denver, DeMoines, but Real Housewives of Atlanta, New Jersey, etc., some change back from Pizza Hut.
_________________________________________________
What gets spoken does not get read
What is spoken remains unread—such a shame.
A confidential exchange of words with no one in earshot
Cannot be done justice.
As I depopulate the marshes
No one at home would seem to reward me.
The medal remains within its velvet casing,
The marching band remains out of tune
As I dry the swamps up
The light slanting into the studio
Because you can’t unpack these conceits in logical strands
The statement made cannot be simple
Among the cords and fibers and fasces of the brain-stem
Where thoughts both contradictory and related come together
Where one conceit becomes unwound from another, an improvisation
That once engendered among those tiny electrical impulses
Can thrive or perish, just as some seeds catch and increase.
The cliffs on which saplings clutch, whether birch or pine,
Doomed to be stunted among those slate or granite crevasses
Where stone grinds and softens enough for roots to grab
Reminds me of the fragility of tangents, these sallies-forth
On which my modesty depends. May you notice how sincerely
I try not to be prolix, try not to act as if I had to
Prove something. Yet my resume is available to all.
“He isn’t someone I would call prepossessing. Alone I wouldn’t
Seek him out, or someone like him.
Chance alone brought us to the same room,
But the more we learned about the other, the less we wished we knew.
These are not people who I find attractive—they’re not one of us.
“Someone with integrity is what I am seeking. I had an idea…”
Deliberately vague trail off to repel unwarranted attention.
From April 18 2009
A bar torn down in the Bowery
Brick by brick, has been rebuilt in Las Vegas,
Each grafittied brick, each toilet stall exposed,
Bared to what it was, unbarred, doorless.
Tribute is paid to bands that once played there,
The members having overdosed or moved on.
Three times I’ve been down to the Bowery.
The first time, a handsome prostitute approached me.
Second time, a bum who mimicked Robin Leach,
His carnival barker’s East London accent
In Lives of the Rich and Famous: and the rich
And famous live on! And for a third time
I’d been to the bar cum clothing emporium
Where business until recently was booming,
And fourth around the corner I’d been in McSorley’s
Just long enough to notice the pressed tin roof
Of the fin de siècle, and in a former maritime chapel
Or meeting-hall south of the atomized bar,
Reconstructed brick by brick on the Nevada flats
Where’s they earlier rebuilt Berlin worker housing
Down to each clapboard, each die-pressed curtain,
Importing each timber piece from Siberia
To hose the whole thing down and burn it
To approximate the feuersturm to come
But I have more than just a picture postcard
Of encounters that if not entirely satisfactory
Were at the very least inconclusive.
First, I didn’t buy the velvet-voiced hooker’s services
Who would’ve done better mid-town as a receptionist.
I didn’t praise the mimicry of the vagrant
Who could’ve passed as an East Londoner,
A Dickensian voice sparkling with chapel-bells
As it narrated through the mahogany cabins
Of the yachts of the stars reclined in lounges,
Stars who watched their money grow on trees
Before their final bypass or trip to the cancer ward
As deeply brown meanwhile as Palmyrian figs.
The bar is gone but the toilet reconstructed to the letter.
I can Google the corner from McSorley’s to CBGB
And navigate through the doors of the maritime hall
But every face in daylight has been smudged.
Who’s there now? No one I can get close to.
Brick by brick, has been rebuilt in Las Vegas,
Each grafittied brick, each toilet stall exposed,
Bared to what it was, unbarred, doorless.
Tribute is paid to bands that once played there,
The members having overdosed or moved on.
Three times I’ve been down to the Bowery.
The first time, a handsome prostitute approached me.
Second time, a bum who mimicked Robin Leach,
His carnival barker’s East London accent
In Lives of the Rich and Famous: and the rich
And famous live on! And for a third time
I’d been to the bar cum clothing emporium
Where business until recently was booming,
And fourth around the corner I’d been in McSorley’s
Just long enough to notice the pressed tin roof
Of the fin de siècle, and in a former maritime chapel
Or meeting-hall south of the atomized bar,
Reconstructed brick by brick on the Nevada flats
Where’s they earlier rebuilt Berlin worker housing
Down to each clapboard, each die-pressed curtain,
Importing each timber piece from Siberia
To hose the whole thing down and burn it
To approximate the feuersturm to come
But I have more than just a picture postcard
Of encounters that if not entirely satisfactory
Were at the very least inconclusive.
First, I didn’t buy the velvet-voiced hooker’s services
Who would’ve done better mid-town as a receptionist.
I didn’t praise the mimicry of the vagrant
Who could’ve passed as an East Londoner,
A Dickensian voice sparkling with chapel-bells
As it narrated through the mahogany cabins
Of the yachts of the stars reclined in lounges,
Stars who watched their money grow on trees
Before their final bypass or trip to the cancer ward
As deeply brown meanwhile as Palmyrian figs.
The bar is gone but the toilet reconstructed to the letter.
I can Google the corner from McSorley’s to CBGB
And navigate through the doors of the maritime hall
But every face in daylight has been smudged.
Who’s there now? No one I can get close to.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
From Sept 20 2008
A journal entry compact as some Joseph Cornell box, each one with a lot of unorganized clutter inside it—stuffed birds, ping-pong balls, clocks and feather-dusters. The tail feathers of a golden pheasant. I missed the Tunbridge World’s Fair. Sickness befelled me. I would have gone on Sunday; perhaps the expulsion of drunks and girly shows has only done it good. As to philosophical meditation, nothing pricks me to a higher exponential level: I remain concretely minded. Of this week, what observation did I have? In this apartments, I have at least one den or inner sanctum without windows in which I can withdraw without awareness of what’s outside, whether the wind in the trees or the traffic out the window, whether of cars, pedestrians, or bicyclists. This inner sanctum can be made completely dark, without a crack of light, only the blinking LEDs of the computer like beacons into space, so that the inner space of this den or chamber mimics the vacuity surrounding the earth, vacuity through which the planets hurl without creating a wind so rapid it not only whips the leaves off the trees, but the trees from their roots, and the roofs from the houses with their inner sanctums like this one, until there’s no mediation, no protective barriers between the self and the heimarmoine (harmony)that created it in the first place, no barrier between the prime mover or law of motion and the eye that can perceive it. An inner sanctum that incubates conceits both insupportable and serving as fictions necessary for sustaining life outside, just as saline deprivation tanks nurse the patient to an inner strength. The blinking comes from the pulse of veins in the temple, the headache that seems to occur in the brain produced by the tightening of muscles around the scalp on both sides until the pain feels as if it came from the center of the brain, as if the pain were a holographic projection, not emanating from the place where it is felt. What blinks inside the sanctum comes from outside, the sign of an immaterial magnetic connection: Dr. Mesmer thought his magnetic bed encouraged physical alignments leading to better conjugal relations, that the alignment of the nervous and circulatory systems resulted in the alignment of the spirit.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
From 3/6/11
Container cargo paused on the B&M rail tracks, broadcasting the odor of decayed fish before it shipped to the feed processing plants. Often, even in mid-summer, the cars would stop for hours, sending the odor through every city street. The promenades were the only neighborhoods excepted, the elderly and the already mortally ill wheeled along the sidewalks on the western promenade by the hospital, within sight of the nuanced pallor of the White Mountains as they towered very faintly over tenements and motels. From this vantage, you could see a gloom lift from the airport landing-strip, or a passenger jet rise or land with a thunder you’d almost think could vibrate the roots of the oaks or the granite foundations of the mansions built to overlook the west and the setting sun.
The more intensely you appreciate the cold and precise starlight of winter, the crueler your attitudes towards your fellow men, towards their infirmity and their imperfections. Their lack of aspirations lies at your feet. And the social and political spheres become smaller, more distant globes in the entire cosmogony your unfailing attention dwells upon, heedless of the excessive kinks and pockmarks of the surfaces, the devil being in the details that seem to obstruct the sublime, which is all coldness and symmetry as you gaze at them in a field. And as you drop your eyes to the field, the galactic sprays of wildflowers appear to repeat the constellations—until you step on a bedewed pad of cow-flop, a smell you can barely scrape from your shoes when you enter the safety of your clean and square house.
Because I dressed in rags, no female would regard me. I habitually disrespected the elderly, fretting every time I was in a grocery line when one of them was before me, counting change so carefully from her purse as I rolled my eyes. Whenever in offices, I moved to make way for others only begrudglingly, making it appear as if I were going out of my way for them, when in fact doing so would only be common courtesy. I chainsmoked without regard to those around me, in theaters, buses, and bars.
The more intensely you appreciate the cold and precise starlight of winter, the crueler your attitudes towards your fellow men, towards their infirmity and their imperfections. Their lack of aspirations lies at your feet. And the social and political spheres become smaller, more distant globes in the entire cosmogony your unfailing attention dwells upon, heedless of the excessive kinks and pockmarks of the surfaces, the devil being in the details that seem to obstruct the sublime, which is all coldness and symmetry as you gaze at them in a field. And as you drop your eyes to the field, the galactic sprays of wildflowers appear to repeat the constellations—until you step on a bedewed pad of cow-flop, a smell you can barely scrape from your shoes when you enter the safety of your clean and square house.
Because I dressed in rags, no female would regard me. I habitually disrespected the elderly, fretting every time I was in a grocery line when one of them was before me, counting change so carefully from her purse as I rolled my eyes. Whenever in offices, I moved to make way for others only begrudglingly, making it appear as if I were going out of my way for them, when in fact doing so would only be common courtesy. I chainsmoked without regard to those around me, in theaters, buses, and bars.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
From Sept. 18 2010
The white clover on the lawn is always sweet, there’s a field of it I can approach from the brush and weed-filled hillside in which I can also hide whenever necessary.
And there’s a garden bed to which I might burrow at the end of that driveway, but I would have to fight through too many stones and chew through a layer of plastic and mulch before I’d arrive at the entangled roots of the spiny cucumbers, the lank green beans, and the prize of all, the lettuce-leaves, a pale green of the grape but with frilled edges when stunted as these are.
But the garden bed is in the middle of the yard of this detestable biped intruder, a damnable species of which we, the woodchuck folk, have no use, our numbers indifferently pruned by their various devices, their poisons, their steel traps, and their projectiles, whether bullets or arrows. They sick their wolves on our brethren, those compradors of the mammalian kingdom in cahoots with the bipeds, choosing provender and luxury over hardscrabble deprivation and liberty.
Still, to be fed those bales of lettuce in one of their cages is a temptation, the easy life of comestibles over the hard life of scavenging and burrowing, lacking the agility of our cousins the squirrels, or the mobility and power of our other cousins the beavers, those natural builders and occasional nemeses.
I live to see the day when we can usurp the biped’s place on earth, turn his cities into meadows, into nothing but miles of lettuce and clover, our descendants gigantic, reaching the tops of the apple-trees, eating the tenderest leaves in the tree-tops until they become colossi, our descendants nestled warmly in the burrows of their mothers.
The homeowner spots me, and yells indistinguishable sounds. In this grinding routine, I run into the brush, leaving the ripened white clover to be mowed by this most unsympathetic and inarticulate creature. Who can make out what he mouths, all bipeds deprived of the universal language of the beasts?
Blessed by youth and agility, I dodge the stones the biped throws. I do not envy my older heavier brethren, who would struggle, waddle back to the woods or their burrow. They perish from laziness or self-satisfaction, gassed or smoked from their holes. Of them, I am oddly unsympathetic. You’d think it would be otherwise, that of my elders I’d be more caring.
####
The clouds return after a spell of sunshine, the breeze shifts, passing through my window until the air cools. The noise of the refrigerator recalls the buzz of cicadas unhatched in heat-waves. When the buzzing ceases I am returned to fall. And then the sun returns.
And there’s a garden bed to which I might burrow at the end of that driveway, but I would have to fight through too many stones and chew through a layer of plastic and mulch before I’d arrive at the entangled roots of the spiny cucumbers, the lank green beans, and the prize of all, the lettuce-leaves, a pale green of the grape but with frilled edges when stunted as these are.
But the garden bed is in the middle of the yard of this detestable biped intruder, a damnable species of which we, the woodchuck folk, have no use, our numbers indifferently pruned by their various devices, their poisons, their steel traps, and their projectiles, whether bullets or arrows. They sick their wolves on our brethren, those compradors of the mammalian kingdom in cahoots with the bipeds, choosing provender and luxury over hardscrabble deprivation and liberty.
Still, to be fed those bales of lettuce in one of their cages is a temptation, the easy life of comestibles over the hard life of scavenging and burrowing, lacking the agility of our cousins the squirrels, or the mobility and power of our other cousins the beavers, those natural builders and occasional nemeses.
I live to see the day when we can usurp the biped’s place on earth, turn his cities into meadows, into nothing but miles of lettuce and clover, our descendants gigantic, reaching the tops of the apple-trees, eating the tenderest leaves in the tree-tops until they become colossi, our descendants nestled warmly in the burrows of their mothers.
The homeowner spots me, and yells indistinguishable sounds. In this grinding routine, I run into the brush, leaving the ripened white clover to be mowed by this most unsympathetic and inarticulate creature. Who can make out what he mouths, all bipeds deprived of the universal language of the beasts?
Blessed by youth and agility, I dodge the stones the biped throws. I do not envy my older heavier brethren, who would struggle, waddle back to the woods or their burrow. They perish from laziness or self-satisfaction, gassed or smoked from their holes. Of them, I am oddly unsympathetic. You’d think it would be otherwise, that of my elders I’d be more caring.
####
The clouds return after a spell of sunshine, the breeze shifts, passing through my window until the air cools. The noise of the refrigerator recalls the buzz of cicadas unhatched in heat-waves. When the buzzing ceases I am returned to fall. And then the sun returns.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
From 7/3/10
It feels almost effeminate to return to the house, to stay in one’s room during the summer weather when it’s roaring, with everyone headed to the coast or to the lakeside, crowding into boats, hurling themselves into the water, the water crowded with bodies, bodies agitating water into spray in almost helical formations, boats racing from the shore, the skipper subjecting his crew to the mercy of the elements, the wind at the stern, all sight of the coast abandoned, the whole crew silent and aghast among the churning waves.
To avoid heatstroke fifteen minutes have passed.
At summer’s peak, the bodies hurling into water
Broadcast to cloudless air a nearly helical spray—
Remember never qualify. Be absolute. Send the boats
Into the sky then, quit your pen, nothing easier.
Easy to quit the pen, harder to find a substitute,
The rest of your life being many rooms to fill,
The future unoccupied, the present overcrowded.
This skipper who approaches the world
With utter confidence.
**
Adult films, cartoons, popcorn, binge-drinking, kleptomania, beer-kegs, bottled bludgeons.
A red-winged blackbird perched at the very top of the bare branch of a dying maple.
A young black cat played with a blackbird
The size of a robin, flapping its wings,
While the cat stared at me with golden eyes,
Wondering I’d guess if I’d advance on him,
But I turned my back on him instead
And let him take the bird away, the wings still flapping,
Into a tangle of bushes where unwitnessed
It must have gouged out the beating heart
And viscera from the ribcage. When finished,
The cat nodded back at me as if in gratitude—
Far too late in the day to save the blackbird’s life,
Pry its mangled wings from the claws.
At the very top of the bare branch of the dead maple perched another red-winged blackbird.
To avoid heatstroke fifteen minutes have passed.
At summer’s peak, the bodies hurling into water
Broadcast to cloudless air a nearly helical spray—
Remember never qualify. Be absolute. Send the boats
Into the sky then, quit your pen, nothing easier.
Easy to quit the pen, harder to find a substitute,
The rest of your life being many rooms to fill,
The future unoccupied, the present overcrowded.
This skipper who approaches the world
With utter confidence.
**
Adult films, cartoons, popcorn, binge-drinking, kleptomania, beer-kegs, bottled bludgeons.
A red-winged blackbird perched at the very top of the bare branch of a dying maple.
A young black cat played with a blackbird
The size of a robin, flapping its wings,
While the cat stared at me with golden eyes,
Wondering I’d guess if I’d advance on him,
But I turned my back on him instead
And let him take the bird away, the wings still flapping,
Into a tangle of bushes where unwitnessed
It must have gouged out the beating heart
And viscera from the ribcage. When finished,
The cat nodded back at me as if in gratitude—
Far too late in the day to save the blackbird’s life,
Pry its mangled wings from the claws.
At the very top of the bare branch of the dead maple perched another red-winged blackbird.
Monday, November 7, 2011
From 8/14/11 Sunday
Clashing diction shifts
Szechuan chilis
Cubical watermelons
Spherical cucumbers
Cucumbers into sunbeams
(Swift) sashimi tuna, two blocks
In the closet are singing-robes
The closet stores singing-robes
the slender frames of Somalis
rivals those of the Swedes
or the descendants of Vikings
who inhabit County Antrim
On the walls of Mussenden Castle
Across the quote from Horace
About bucolic life that bands
An Augustan tower in a pasture
Someone scrawled OZYMANDIAS
On the roofless castle’s walls
And no one bothered erasing
A platform of riders straddled a tower from which they were dropped every few seconds spasmodically. The pier terminated at a bar with a cover charge. A pretty blonde sat in a ticket booth, outside of which a bald and muscular bouncer folded his bare anaconda-thick arms, the scene suggesting several B-movies at once. Each time the crowd walked the pier, or what had been left of it since storms had sunk the ballroom at its very end, I was forced to reverse course while another crowd surged forward. We followed two blonde teenage girls speaking Quebec French. Canada sounded expansive, the voice of Arctic winds blowing through the wheat fields from the tundra.
Once, in April 1977, I was in a seaside ballroom on Salisbury Beach that dated from the 40s. With two punk rock bands, the ballroom was mostly empty. The room was huge and circular, the ceiling a dome nearly fifty feet in height. Who knows whether that ballroom hasn’t been torn down or washed to sea, while the ballroom at the end of the pier in Old Orchard was swept away in the early 1970s, by a storm that shattered all concrete break walls along the entire southern Maine coast, making coastal travel nearly impossible. Boreas estranging Venus from Neptune. And so the southbound traffic crept.
As I am accustomed to do in city crowds, I kept my hands near my pockets, although at country fairs I am less guarded. I go to see the livestock and the fowl. I don’t expect to meet robbers among the yeomen.
Who hangs around when the whole scene folds, well past the children’s bedtime. A woman in her early thirties wore a t-shirt that exposed one shoulder, like the women’s t-shirts of the 80s. As we passed the Old Orchard Beach synagogue on our left, traffic crawled. Would Ocean Park prove to be as large as Kearny or Gutenberg in Hudson County, the latter consisting of two rows of ten blocks apiece between Weehawken and Union City?
I get the sense that outside is darker
From the vantage of this track-lit room.
But the brown-outs on the lawn refuse to change color.
From the lawnmower blew a fine but scratchy dust
Of weeds and stems hosed down with poison,
Which takes a day to reach the root system
And – boing! – destroy the species and benign ones with it.
A tennis ball seeped in ammonia drives away critters
Before they settle in a certain space as home, a nook or cranny.
Having written the above while half-asleep has not helped
The dubious merit of all this, these numerous baby-steps
That fail to improve with age. I am thankful for a sprinkle
Of rain, not wishing to watch weeds rise from the ditches
Or wind to blow away the mailbox and its contents, mailings
Of many charitable organizations who offer me wads of address labels
As sweeteners for contributions in increments of 20 to 50,
After which I am offered a canvas shopping bag.
*****
I would have given anything to walk upon a promenade at the turn of the century before this one,
to witness the gilded age, the gas lamp, the hoop-skirts, the horse and carriage,
or the palatial residences on which peacocks unfold their fans before fountains.
I could have played the gramophone behind chintz or velvet curtains,
viewing from a distance the Calabrian stonemasons raise a castle in imported limestone,
near perfect imitation of the one in the possession of an Austrian count,
or witnessed the sparking of the first dynamo or magnetic induction coil,
watched the amber-gray stillness of a Mars-like desert through a stereopticon,
the flying machine already a rumor of Bleriot’s monoplane soaring above the English Channel,
inspiring Guilliame Apollonaire to write sun/slit throat at the end of Zone.
Meanwhile with my silver-tipped cane I thrash the malefactor.
With eyes excited, pupils dilated, I read about Custer’s exploits.
Of the southern hemisphere, I think of blurring paddle-wheels,
coon-songs, pythons entwined among cypresses.
If I put this ambiance in a piece of music accompanied by tom-toms,
the usually decorous white-gloved audience will riot and shriek for my blood.
My penchant for local color, my very prejudices and fears, marks me for am man of my time.
I am a Sunday painter of watercolors, my domestic life strewn
among a box of silver-coated glass negatives. At home among cheroots,
golden tie-clasps, and pince-nezes. Yet I lack the Bohemian temptation.
The sea-shore attracts me, not the hunting lodge so much.
All my country walks are taken with a lacquered birch-stick.
Szechuan chilis
Cubical watermelons
Spherical cucumbers
Cucumbers into sunbeams
(Swift) sashimi tuna, two blocks
In the closet are singing-robes
The closet stores singing-robes
the slender frames of Somalis
rivals those of the Swedes
or the descendants of Vikings
who inhabit County Antrim
On the walls of Mussenden Castle
Across the quote from Horace
About bucolic life that bands
An Augustan tower in a pasture
Someone scrawled OZYMANDIAS
On the roofless castle’s walls
And no one bothered erasing
A platform of riders straddled a tower from which they were dropped every few seconds spasmodically. The pier terminated at a bar with a cover charge. A pretty blonde sat in a ticket booth, outside of which a bald and muscular bouncer folded his bare anaconda-thick arms, the scene suggesting several B-movies at once. Each time the crowd walked the pier, or what had been left of it since storms had sunk the ballroom at its very end, I was forced to reverse course while another crowd surged forward. We followed two blonde teenage girls speaking Quebec French. Canada sounded expansive, the voice of Arctic winds blowing through the wheat fields from the tundra.
Once, in April 1977, I was in a seaside ballroom on Salisbury Beach that dated from the 40s. With two punk rock bands, the ballroom was mostly empty. The room was huge and circular, the ceiling a dome nearly fifty feet in height. Who knows whether that ballroom hasn’t been torn down or washed to sea, while the ballroom at the end of the pier in Old Orchard was swept away in the early 1970s, by a storm that shattered all concrete break walls along the entire southern Maine coast, making coastal travel nearly impossible. Boreas estranging Venus from Neptune. And so the southbound traffic crept.
As I am accustomed to do in city crowds, I kept my hands near my pockets, although at country fairs I am less guarded. I go to see the livestock and the fowl. I don’t expect to meet robbers among the yeomen.
Who hangs around when the whole scene folds, well past the children’s bedtime. A woman in her early thirties wore a t-shirt that exposed one shoulder, like the women’s t-shirts of the 80s. As we passed the Old Orchard Beach synagogue on our left, traffic crawled. Would Ocean Park prove to be as large as Kearny or Gutenberg in Hudson County, the latter consisting of two rows of ten blocks apiece between Weehawken and Union City?
I get the sense that outside is darker
From the vantage of this track-lit room.
But the brown-outs on the lawn refuse to change color.
From the lawnmower blew a fine but scratchy dust
Of weeds and stems hosed down with poison,
Which takes a day to reach the root system
And – boing! – destroy the species and benign ones with it.
A tennis ball seeped in ammonia drives away critters
Before they settle in a certain space as home, a nook or cranny.
Having written the above while half-asleep has not helped
The dubious merit of all this, these numerous baby-steps
That fail to improve with age. I am thankful for a sprinkle
Of rain, not wishing to watch weeds rise from the ditches
Or wind to blow away the mailbox and its contents, mailings
Of many charitable organizations who offer me wads of address labels
As sweeteners for contributions in increments of 20 to 50,
After which I am offered a canvas shopping bag.
*****
I would have given anything to walk upon a promenade at the turn of the century before this one,
to witness the gilded age, the gas lamp, the hoop-skirts, the horse and carriage,
or the palatial residences on which peacocks unfold their fans before fountains.
I could have played the gramophone behind chintz or velvet curtains,
viewing from a distance the Calabrian stonemasons raise a castle in imported limestone,
near perfect imitation of the one in the possession of an Austrian count,
or witnessed the sparking of the first dynamo or magnetic induction coil,
watched the amber-gray stillness of a Mars-like desert through a stereopticon,
the flying machine already a rumor of Bleriot’s monoplane soaring above the English Channel,
inspiring Guilliame Apollonaire to write sun/slit throat at the end of Zone.
Meanwhile with my silver-tipped cane I thrash the malefactor.
With eyes excited, pupils dilated, I read about Custer’s exploits.
Of the southern hemisphere, I think of blurring paddle-wheels,
coon-songs, pythons entwined among cypresses.
If I put this ambiance in a piece of music accompanied by tom-toms,
the usually decorous white-gloved audience will riot and shriek for my blood.
My penchant for local color, my very prejudices and fears, marks me for am man of my time.
I am a Sunday painter of watercolors, my domestic life strewn
among a box of silver-coated glass negatives. At home among cheroots,
golden tie-clasps, and pince-nezes. Yet I lack the Bohemian temptation.
The sea-shore attracts me, not the hunting lodge so much.
All my country walks are taken with a lacquered birch-stick.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
From 5/29/11 - 5/30/11
He let himself go they said
Or asked whatever happened to him.
He had they said potential
But it was potential wasted.
Someone thought they’d seen him
Outside his modest house
No one could vouch for that claim
There being no supporting evidence
For his very existence
Only rumor, which you know
As well as I do is unreliable
But can also be a sign of life
And often the only sign
Whereas the lack of rumor
Suggests life’s absence
No longer being on the map,
Not merely incognito,
No just not there.
From 5/30/11
My glottal stop betrays that I was a dockworker once.
Follow it if you may—ideas fly all over the place without being finished, without an adequate playing out of their consequences.
Around the lake I’d like to coast
A maddening succession of non-sequiturs.
The chaos of poverty is not a subject worthy of public exposure—take it from me.
Our will and resolve having been sapped by cliques
An iron gardener with an iron fist whose fingers serve as rake and testament.
After my conversion to light, I followed my new creed to the letter, upbraiding the overly tentative and feeble-witted with an attention to detail that was trivial to some, assailing the entire population of Vermont, my former home, as half-wits.
To my new mentors I soon displayed my inclination to the blooding on talk shows and editorial pages, taking this to the people in a charmed celebrity hunt in which I wielded my hunting rifle with the dexterity of an old hand, never hesitating to fire although quite often I missed. My stubbled countenance, now solidified to leather, beamed from the covers of Fortune and American Sportsman.
A pile of carrion stained my fingers once calloused from typing on old Remingtons and Olivettis as if I were some haruspex telling financial fortunes in the Julio-Claudian era. And alas, an estate-holder would become nearly enriched from the spice trade or from his olive groves in Spain or tanneries in Gaul. My hand blessed the powers that supported me as I thoroughly repudiated many of my old divisive and nihilistic beliefs, choosing instead to fashion those golden auras that glorified the personal embodiments of the imperium, never hesitant to trample the grapes of the harvest.
To the self-appointed elites, my appearance on the Hollywood Squares was the last nail in the coffin; to myself, it was a culmination and embrace of the joyous popular culture in which self-celebration is married happily to prosperity and self-esteem, both humbling and elevating at once. It meant that I wasn’t afraid to get my fingernails dirty.
Or asked whatever happened to him.
He had they said potential
But it was potential wasted.
Someone thought they’d seen him
Outside his modest house
No one could vouch for that claim
There being no supporting evidence
For his very existence
Only rumor, which you know
As well as I do is unreliable
But can also be a sign of life
And often the only sign
Whereas the lack of rumor
Suggests life’s absence
No longer being on the map,
Not merely incognito,
No just not there.
From 5/30/11
My glottal stop betrays that I was a dockworker once.
Follow it if you may—ideas fly all over the place without being finished, without an adequate playing out of their consequences.
Around the lake I’d like to coast
A maddening succession of non-sequiturs.
The chaos of poverty is not a subject worthy of public exposure—take it from me.
Our will and resolve having been sapped by cliques
An iron gardener with an iron fist whose fingers serve as rake and testament.
After my conversion to light, I followed my new creed to the letter, upbraiding the overly tentative and feeble-witted with an attention to detail that was trivial to some, assailing the entire population of Vermont, my former home, as half-wits.
To my new mentors I soon displayed my inclination to the blooding on talk shows and editorial pages, taking this to the people in a charmed celebrity hunt in which I wielded my hunting rifle with the dexterity of an old hand, never hesitating to fire although quite often I missed. My stubbled countenance, now solidified to leather, beamed from the covers of Fortune and American Sportsman.
A pile of carrion stained my fingers once calloused from typing on old Remingtons and Olivettis as if I were some haruspex telling financial fortunes in the Julio-Claudian era. And alas, an estate-holder would become nearly enriched from the spice trade or from his olive groves in Spain or tanneries in Gaul. My hand blessed the powers that supported me as I thoroughly repudiated many of my old divisive and nihilistic beliefs, choosing instead to fashion those golden auras that glorified the personal embodiments of the imperium, never hesitant to trample the grapes of the harvest.
To the self-appointed elites, my appearance on the Hollywood Squares was the last nail in the coffin; to myself, it was a culmination and embrace of the joyous popular culture in which self-celebration is married happily to prosperity and self-esteem, both humbling and elevating at once. It meant that I wasn’t afraid to get my fingernails dirty.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
From 6/20/10
Our enemies, the lower creodonts, were ruled by a god whose anal secretions killed clans older than ours. Our god, the cave-bear, battled this creodont, and drove the creodont and his clans into the underworld, among granite and the geodes and veins of marble, far below the pits that hold our ochred bones.
**
A house cat befriended a chipmunk who’d only begun a nut store such as his family had done. His family members had dispersed or vanished as the baby had become the adult. There were for chipmunks as for squirrels no transitional adolescent years, only material dependency, then adulthood and age.
“Let’s check out that bole above that toppled tree there—you go first” the housecat spryly said.
But the chipmunk had never witnessed the fear in the eye of the chipmunk seeking escape from the clutches of the feral cat racing after it, nor the unexpected dilation of the eye of the member of his species, nor his species’ inability to escape from the racing cat as it grabbed the terrified rodent in its jaw, severing its backbone, elastic and half-coiled like a spring beneath the chipmunk’s stripes. Innocently the chipmunk leapt upon the tree-bole. His eyes jumped from one scene to another, from shrubs to spiders who dangled from the tops of branches to caterpillars crawling on the leaves, chewing holes into them. And in the background, from that negative space of human life, came laughs and shouts and mechanical noises that sounded like the diminished noises of thunder, novel sounds, from metallic creatures of which he was barely aware, wrinkled bipedal creatures entering the belly and leaving the bellies of these other creatures that spewed small rainclouds as they made persistent muted thundering sounds, rainclouds that smelled of fires almost. His eye darted about in the febrile electrically quickened manner of his kind.
The housecat twitched its tail below the toppled tree on which the chipmunk leaped. But through its paws, ears and feelers, it sensed the movements of moles and field mice beneath, and began to scratch the ground, distracted from the creature it hadn’t made up its mind about, bored by the mush its master indifferently spooned daily upon a chipped and unwashed enameled dish.
**
“Cuff her if dinner ain’t ready, that’s what I’d do” the jailbird-co-worker lazily allowed to the other jailbird.
“Just a cuff” he repeated, swiping his hand. You couldn’t see his eyes directly under the faded denim dude-cap.
When he’d ask for a little sip from my Coke can at every break, I’d agree reluctantly because I knew he was trouble, and whether he carried a knife there was no telling. When he approached someone he shuffled slowly, never looking them in the eye, his eyes concealed beneath his dude-cap’s bill. Returning to prison for assault or for something worse seemed always possible. During the sorely needed break I began to sit at other places. But I imagined that after work he’d follow me with that same very slow but determined shuffle, right and then left, his face never showing itself beneath that beaten up 1970s denim cap. As a sign of anger and displeasure, he’d swallow his Adam’s-apple, tighten the muscles of his throat.
When the subject of conversation with his jailbird friend wasn’t beating up women according to degree and rightful occasion, it was about getting women, and which seamstress was worthy of attention. Lucy, a younger college drop-out from Long Island, was the apple of their eyes..
**
A house cat befriended a chipmunk who’d only begun a nut store such as his family had done. His family members had dispersed or vanished as the baby had become the adult. There were for chipmunks as for squirrels no transitional adolescent years, only material dependency, then adulthood and age.
“Let’s check out that bole above that toppled tree there—you go first” the housecat spryly said.
But the chipmunk had never witnessed the fear in the eye of the chipmunk seeking escape from the clutches of the feral cat racing after it, nor the unexpected dilation of the eye of the member of his species, nor his species’ inability to escape from the racing cat as it grabbed the terrified rodent in its jaw, severing its backbone, elastic and half-coiled like a spring beneath the chipmunk’s stripes. Innocently the chipmunk leapt upon the tree-bole. His eyes jumped from one scene to another, from shrubs to spiders who dangled from the tops of branches to caterpillars crawling on the leaves, chewing holes into them. And in the background, from that negative space of human life, came laughs and shouts and mechanical noises that sounded like the diminished noises of thunder, novel sounds, from metallic creatures of which he was barely aware, wrinkled bipedal creatures entering the belly and leaving the bellies of these other creatures that spewed small rainclouds as they made persistent muted thundering sounds, rainclouds that smelled of fires almost. His eye darted about in the febrile electrically quickened manner of his kind.
The housecat twitched its tail below the toppled tree on which the chipmunk leaped. But through its paws, ears and feelers, it sensed the movements of moles and field mice beneath, and began to scratch the ground, distracted from the creature it hadn’t made up its mind about, bored by the mush its master indifferently spooned daily upon a chipped and unwashed enameled dish.
**
“Cuff her if dinner ain’t ready, that’s what I’d do” the jailbird-co-worker lazily allowed to the other jailbird.
“Just a cuff” he repeated, swiping his hand. You couldn’t see his eyes directly under the faded denim dude-cap.
When he’d ask for a little sip from my Coke can at every break, I’d agree reluctantly because I knew he was trouble, and whether he carried a knife there was no telling. When he approached someone he shuffled slowly, never looking them in the eye, his eyes concealed beneath his dude-cap’s bill. Returning to prison for assault or for something worse seemed always possible. During the sorely needed break I began to sit at other places. But I imagined that after work he’d follow me with that same very slow but determined shuffle, right and then left, his face never showing itself beneath that beaten up 1970s denim cap. As a sign of anger and displeasure, he’d swallow his Adam’s-apple, tighten the muscles of his throat.
When the subject of conversation with his jailbird friend wasn’t beating up women according to degree and rightful occasion, it was about getting women, and which seamstress was worthy of attention. Lucy, a younger college drop-out from Long Island, was the apple of their eyes..
Thursday, October 27, 2011
From Feb. 26, 2011
I’m not really a ginger and lemongrass guy I guess replied Der Fuhrer,
More inclined I’d say to mushrooms and loam and maybe dead leaves
From black oaks and white birches in the smoky and purgatorial fall,
The musty and damp odors of humus when scratched and paved.
No bunny rabbit am I munching flowers upon the natural proscenium of a rainy hillside.
Let me at our indigenous roots pulling their nourishment
From the blood of the tortured hemophiliac bludgeoned and dragged deep into the woods.
A man of earth, to earth I go, no bright and sunny flavors for me,
Having few foodie appetites, although not disinclined
To your raw oyster bars, your chili-chocolate moles, but hold off
On the skate and sashimi though and the citrus infusions
As if you could grow your scrota into the size of a grapefruit
Or honeydew melons before your tete-a-tetes with strippers
Or Girl Fridays, your taste for meat as louche as Kim Il Sung’s
Faith in the homeopathic properties of the reproductive organs of freshly slaughtered dogs.
I see the kids today abuse shabu the ruby dragon. As you know
As to a daily dose for performance enhancement, we both can agree
On the need for artifice I the service of beauty.
But things have gone too far for even words to steer
Back onto a median where we stay within our limits.
Upon the sight of Sigrid rose a lump in my throat
And I thought of the sturgeons in the fjords
And the cleanliness of the ducts and canals and tracts
Nothing unclean in the water nor in the circulation of the fish
And that the luster of her skin was a rainbow on the skin of the trout
The very shape of Sigurd brought the lump to my throat
This was not a crush this was a thrust upstream
At first sight she had a look of mischief
Sigrid’s first look of mischief on the studio brought a lump to my throat
In the battle of the bots, the winning robot is the one flattest on the ground, with the fewest appendages to pull or overturn the robot and render it helpless, like an overturned horse-shoe crab that cannot right its balance in the wet sand, or a turtle that cannot rock itself upright on the roadside while a speeding car approaches it.
But when the time comes for the winning robot to strike, it overturns its foe by thrusting an arm or physical extension that is both decisively powerful and tactfully positioned to avoid any engagement that is unnecessary, and thus potentially fatal.
The terrible resplendence of nuclear blast or a flak battery is not part of its arsenal. An ability to turn rapidly in any direction is a part.
In the documentary about Plato’s Retreat (Swinger), someone described the mat room in which the group orgies were conducted as smelling like a bucket of worms. While I go to jail for tax evasion, please hold the fort. We’re trying to save our marriage, rolling on a met with a guy with one of those unsightly combovers, a pile of limbs that cannot be identified as individual bodies. She swam in a small pool whose water was so infused with bodily fluids that it carried the savor of a thin broth, and as she rose above the waterline a fountain of ejaculations greeted her, from a half-dozen accountants and advertising executives, but she breathed deeply with relief, feeling as she did emancipated from the enlightened suburbia of her youth, from her domineering and rather Puritan albeit socially conscious father. And when the city shut down the baths and glory holes, the tracks and avenues through which she could explore her own thresholds she knew would be silted up forever like some ancient canal built by some dispersed people whose language and ideograms could no longer be deciphered, or some cave the floor of which was encrusted with the waxy looking and glossy beiges and off-whites of long-dripping stalagmites, now impermeable and hardened above whatever ritual had been performed by the cave’s Paleolithic inhabitants, whose life was surely as polymorphous and free of boundaries as the one she sought among all those often ugly but essentially sweet men in their polyesters, jew-fros and unsightly combovers and bracelets, often just good family men out for a night of off-color fun.
From March 5 2011
The turtles swam the depths of the tanks displayed in the Chinatown restaurant. Light from the neon signs of red and amber and from the streetlamps and traffic played upon the silty tank water, sometimes sandy yellow, other times legume-green, but rarely clear, uninterrupted. Above the tanks must have been curtains, screening the customers from the street. Nearby the San Gennaro festival roared. Tim bought a Mussolini t-shirt he could show to his punk-rock friends. Nowadays I see snappers in the late spring crawl across some rural dirt road. If they haven’t been overturned, I stop and pick them up when theirn head and feet retract, and place them on a bank above a ditch or culvert. On Academy Road, a rivulet, a tiny stream is cut through fieldstone. When it rushes, it is a sign that the hillside is thawing, a sign of spring. But there’s no thaw now.
When snappers grow large, they can break a broom-stick with their jaws. They can bite your index finger off, and retract their head into the shell, which in adulthood is more than two feet long and as hard as a helmet, and you can never do anything about ti, the snapper being merely indestructible and disinclined to crawl on dangerous rural roads.
In Chinatown the turtles climbed the sides of tanks, their bellies exposed to the revolving lights of traffic, a pale reptilian green, not unlike frog’s bellies, the frogs of the vernal ponds, their nocturnal chirrups in cow pastures.
The sound of music is soon succeeded by the sound of bullets. The sound of bullets is a fast whizzing sound, whereas shells whistle, at least the kind of World War I on the Belgium front, and music precedes these sounds, bullets whizzing, shells whistling, music in a home f ront dance-hall, music in an aircraft carrier, sound track music. Think of songs that trigger melodies like sonic madeleines, and descend like the Flight of the Valkyries, or hammer-lock like the Anvil Song. Music accustoms the preparation for battle, and soothes like the grandmother’s lays. Like the lays of the grandmother recounting the unavenged wrongs of the hereditary enemy, a tear in the singer’s eye concluding this lullaby.
To such a tune, a man girds his loins, if he be a man.
As if beneath the architecture of a fugue or sonatina collected a pile of blood and ordure.
What explains the frieze of horses or the domination of black oxen on the cave walls, or the stag in full-throated mating call? Salmons with its ochre pigment rubbed from the relief. The ochre on the salmon almost rubbed away by moisture.
A bird on a post, a victim of the bison’s charge reclined with a bird’s head, the bison speared beside the victim, a stick-figure.
The igloo that I could have built in my yard has already melted. Too late.
In the clearest wintry day I can see the ehavens almost perfectly—
I can locate both dippers and perhaps Orion, his shoulder and breastplate, even the arrow he fires seems at least implied.
I wish I had a map, or a circular map with a brad in the middle to hold the map together
So that you could turn it in a 360 degree direction and locate the bodies
In the night sky that became so apparent away from the streetlamps and town centers.
Yet I could barely locate the college in Lyndonville, circling a traffic loop running through the middle of town without lights or arrows or signs pointing to the college on the hill-top, driving lost on a sandy residential road on the hillside, the drop very steep, lights of the town going off as the evening wearied away until only a single bar downtown was open. A bar for locals and for lushes, even the students asleep, a concentration of lights on the empty interstate exits, until a snow-flurry blurs the view.
Being lost feels so much like a permanent state it feels like the end of the story that is true, although beginning with the sight of the right sign or entrance, the story is either untrue, or another story begins that nullifies the ending that you felt in your panic at missing the event, although in the long run all you missed was a puppet show which even as a child you never enjoyed, and your reserved seat was good, not warmed by someone else, although the unsought and unfamiliar warmth of another’s body would have comforted, seeping up from the upholstery and the enameled steel of the armrests and the chair’s frame.
More inclined I’d say to mushrooms and loam and maybe dead leaves
From black oaks and white birches in the smoky and purgatorial fall,
The musty and damp odors of humus when scratched and paved.
No bunny rabbit am I munching flowers upon the natural proscenium of a rainy hillside.
Let me at our indigenous roots pulling their nourishment
From the blood of the tortured hemophiliac bludgeoned and dragged deep into the woods.
A man of earth, to earth I go, no bright and sunny flavors for me,
Having few foodie appetites, although not disinclined
To your raw oyster bars, your chili-chocolate moles, but hold off
On the skate and sashimi though and the citrus infusions
As if you could grow your scrota into the size of a grapefruit
Or honeydew melons before your tete-a-tetes with strippers
Or Girl Fridays, your taste for meat as louche as Kim Il Sung’s
Faith in the homeopathic properties of the reproductive organs of freshly slaughtered dogs.
I see the kids today abuse shabu the ruby dragon. As you know
As to a daily dose for performance enhancement, we both can agree
On the need for artifice I the service of beauty.
But things have gone too far for even words to steer
Back onto a median where we stay within our limits.
Upon the sight of Sigrid rose a lump in my throat
And I thought of the sturgeons in the fjords
And the cleanliness of the ducts and canals and tracts
Nothing unclean in the water nor in the circulation of the fish
And that the luster of her skin was a rainbow on the skin of the trout
The very shape of Sigurd brought the lump to my throat
This was not a crush this was a thrust upstream
At first sight she had a look of mischief
Sigrid’s first look of mischief on the studio brought a lump to my throat
In the battle of the bots, the winning robot is the one flattest on the ground, with the fewest appendages to pull or overturn the robot and render it helpless, like an overturned horse-shoe crab that cannot right its balance in the wet sand, or a turtle that cannot rock itself upright on the roadside while a speeding car approaches it.
But when the time comes for the winning robot to strike, it overturns its foe by thrusting an arm or physical extension that is both decisively powerful and tactfully positioned to avoid any engagement that is unnecessary, and thus potentially fatal.
The terrible resplendence of nuclear blast or a flak battery is not part of its arsenal. An ability to turn rapidly in any direction is a part.
In the documentary about Plato’s Retreat (Swinger), someone described the mat room in which the group orgies were conducted as smelling like a bucket of worms. While I go to jail for tax evasion, please hold the fort. We’re trying to save our marriage, rolling on a met with a guy with one of those unsightly combovers, a pile of limbs that cannot be identified as individual bodies. She swam in a small pool whose water was so infused with bodily fluids that it carried the savor of a thin broth, and as she rose above the waterline a fountain of ejaculations greeted her, from a half-dozen accountants and advertising executives, but she breathed deeply with relief, feeling as she did emancipated from the enlightened suburbia of her youth, from her domineering and rather Puritan albeit socially conscious father. And when the city shut down the baths and glory holes, the tracks and avenues through which she could explore her own thresholds she knew would be silted up forever like some ancient canal built by some dispersed people whose language and ideograms could no longer be deciphered, or some cave the floor of which was encrusted with the waxy looking and glossy beiges and off-whites of long-dripping stalagmites, now impermeable and hardened above whatever ritual had been performed by the cave’s Paleolithic inhabitants, whose life was surely as polymorphous and free of boundaries as the one she sought among all those often ugly but essentially sweet men in their polyesters, jew-fros and unsightly combovers and bracelets, often just good family men out for a night of off-color fun.
From March 5 2011
The turtles swam the depths of the tanks displayed in the Chinatown restaurant. Light from the neon signs of red and amber and from the streetlamps and traffic played upon the silty tank water, sometimes sandy yellow, other times legume-green, but rarely clear, uninterrupted. Above the tanks must have been curtains, screening the customers from the street. Nearby the San Gennaro festival roared. Tim bought a Mussolini t-shirt he could show to his punk-rock friends. Nowadays I see snappers in the late spring crawl across some rural dirt road. If they haven’t been overturned, I stop and pick them up when theirn head and feet retract, and place them on a bank above a ditch or culvert. On Academy Road, a rivulet, a tiny stream is cut through fieldstone. When it rushes, it is a sign that the hillside is thawing, a sign of spring. But there’s no thaw now.
When snappers grow large, they can break a broom-stick with their jaws. They can bite your index finger off, and retract their head into the shell, which in adulthood is more than two feet long and as hard as a helmet, and you can never do anything about ti, the snapper being merely indestructible and disinclined to crawl on dangerous rural roads.
In Chinatown the turtles climbed the sides of tanks, their bellies exposed to the revolving lights of traffic, a pale reptilian green, not unlike frog’s bellies, the frogs of the vernal ponds, their nocturnal chirrups in cow pastures.
The sound of music is soon succeeded by the sound of bullets. The sound of bullets is a fast whizzing sound, whereas shells whistle, at least the kind of World War I on the Belgium front, and music precedes these sounds, bullets whizzing, shells whistling, music in a home f ront dance-hall, music in an aircraft carrier, sound track music. Think of songs that trigger melodies like sonic madeleines, and descend like the Flight of the Valkyries, or hammer-lock like the Anvil Song. Music accustoms the preparation for battle, and soothes like the grandmother’s lays. Like the lays of the grandmother recounting the unavenged wrongs of the hereditary enemy, a tear in the singer’s eye concluding this lullaby.
To such a tune, a man girds his loins, if he be a man.
As if beneath the architecture of a fugue or sonatina collected a pile of blood and ordure.
What explains the frieze of horses or the domination of black oxen on the cave walls, or the stag in full-throated mating call? Salmons with its ochre pigment rubbed from the relief. The ochre on the salmon almost rubbed away by moisture.
A bird on a post, a victim of the bison’s charge reclined with a bird’s head, the bison speared beside the victim, a stick-figure.
The igloo that I could have built in my yard has already melted. Too late.
In the clearest wintry day I can see the ehavens almost perfectly—
I can locate both dippers and perhaps Orion, his shoulder and breastplate, even the arrow he fires seems at least implied.
I wish I had a map, or a circular map with a brad in the middle to hold the map together
So that you could turn it in a 360 degree direction and locate the bodies
In the night sky that became so apparent away from the streetlamps and town centers.
Yet I could barely locate the college in Lyndonville, circling a traffic loop running through the middle of town without lights or arrows or signs pointing to the college on the hill-top, driving lost on a sandy residential road on the hillside, the drop very steep, lights of the town going off as the evening wearied away until only a single bar downtown was open. A bar for locals and for lushes, even the students asleep, a concentration of lights on the empty interstate exits, until a snow-flurry blurs the view.
Being lost feels so much like a permanent state it feels like the end of the story that is true, although beginning with the sight of the right sign or entrance, the story is either untrue, or another story begins that nullifies the ending that you felt in your panic at missing the event, although in the long run all you missed was a puppet show which even as a child you never enjoyed, and your reserved seat was good, not warmed by someone else, although the unsought and unfamiliar warmth of another’s body would have comforted, seeping up from the upholstery and the enameled steel of the armrests and the chair’s frame.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
From 6/26/11
Here’s the microclimate as imaged in the satellite photo,
That swirling white spot
Among the grids a city makes.
I am as far from you as if you were there in the very center
Of the screen capture
But you might as well be up above
Where I cannot reach you
A celestial place the ancients couldn’t see
making it more vivid to them. But observing anatomy
By sketching it failed to ward off those ailments brought about
By defilement, never be washed away with soap and water,
A damned spot with intangible surfaces ablutions
Failed to cure, the appliance of ointment only burning the spot more.
Void of maternal affection the mammal gnaws the bone.
The full-grown adult devouring leftovers
Stocking the refrigerator before he proceeds to weeds and tubers.
After the flowers have been digested
With the acorns, this homo maximus roots among
The rusty leaf-springs buried in garbage fill
And fake plastic Faberge eggs, their yolks pilfered. But it’s
The shoeboxed dead parrot or guinea pig he leaps upon
As entrees, before the gooey pap of desert
Dripping from the rim of a yogurt cup.
Let me see—it’s Greek yogurt that wasps love
when you pour the honey on top.
And now that scientists have mastered
The formulation of faux Portobello mushrooms
From sewerage. Maximus envisages a future
Eked from the garbage mound on which he’s lived
Without thriving exactly, just staying above water.
The problem doctor
Is that my appetites exceed
A single body to be the apple for its eye.
##
Boom boom to the beat Lapeste better off dead—
Our first art school exercise beside the Charles,
Which would be an excellent place to jog or people-watch
Brainy professors or students. This would include
Our current president and several Goldman-Sachs advisors.
But I only knew a cab-driver squatting off Cleveland Circle.
The heat of the summer of 1978 seemed infernal
Kenmore Square was not cleaned up with Gaps yet.
Home of abolitionists, transcendentalists, suffragettes,
No doubt a few mesmerists and quacks and Lyceum speakers,
And home of the fireside poets outside of Concord
Approached by bridges still presently under construction
Rattle of jackhammers and rusty plates above the Charles
Always visible the obelisk of Bunker Hill.
###
But dog-paddling will not escape the sharks
With a bag of garbage in his teeth, a black bear runs up the tree
This afternoon, for maybe three hours, I weeded, watered, raked. And planted another arbor vitae on the eastern border. And afterward napped, although briefly, maybe an hour or so. A rainstorm approached, the wind picked up, the sun set, and the air cooled. I’m sitting in my backyard, a rare occasion. Usually I sit in the study to write, read in bed, eat in the living-room. When I’m here I’m preparing the lawn to appear inviting yet private, or creating a privacy to which at the end of the day I do not return. Only cats run across it when neighbors chase them off their land. The cats I like. I make it clear that I don’t mind them. If they’re near, I stand still. They’re cautious though, sniffing near the freshly watered hemlocks or dwarf Bosnian pine, or sniffing the invisible line where the sumac starts and my scent markings ward off skunks and woodchucks (my “watering of the huckleberries”). They stalk the place, but don’t stay. My goal is to create an Edenic enclave of conifers and lawn, populating the trees with song-birds. A minute ago a cedar waxwing shot across the sky above the backyard, a shady lawn I neither have to cultivate nor water. But the entrance around the white mailbox looks seedy and destitute, the soil no good for more than wild-carrot and mullein, or very tough strains of grass too stringy to make hay or mulch with.
That swirling white spot
Among the grids a city makes.
I am as far from you as if you were there in the very center
Of the screen capture
But you might as well be up above
Where I cannot reach you
A celestial place the ancients couldn’t see
making it more vivid to them. But observing anatomy
By sketching it failed to ward off those ailments brought about
By defilement, never be washed away with soap and water,
A damned spot with intangible surfaces ablutions
Failed to cure, the appliance of ointment only burning the spot more.
Void of maternal affection the mammal gnaws the bone.
The full-grown adult devouring leftovers
Stocking the refrigerator before he proceeds to weeds and tubers.
After the flowers have been digested
With the acorns, this homo maximus roots among
The rusty leaf-springs buried in garbage fill
And fake plastic Faberge eggs, their yolks pilfered. But it’s
The shoeboxed dead parrot or guinea pig he leaps upon
As entrees, before the gooey pap of desert
Dripping from the rim of a yogurt cup.
Let me see—it’s Greek yogurt that wasps love
when you pour the honey on top.
And now that scientists have mastered
The formulation of faux Portobello mushrooms
From sewerage. Maximus envisages a future
Eked from the garbage mound on which he’s lived
Without thriving exactly, just staying above water.
The problem doctor
Is that my appetites exceed
A single body to be the apple for its eye.
##
Boom boom to the beat Lapeste better off dead—
Our first art school exercise beside the Charles,
Which would be an excellent place to jog or people-watch
Brainy professors or students. This would include
Our current president and several Goldman-Sachs advisors.
But I only knew a cab-driver squatting off Cleveland Circle.
The heat of the summer of 1978 seemed infernal
Kenmore Square was not cleaned up with Gaps yet.
Home of abolitionists, transcendentalists, suffragettes,
No doubt a few mesmerists and quacks and Lyceum speakers,
And home of the fireside poets outside of Concord
Approached by bridges still presently under construction
Rattle of jackhammers and rusty plates above the Charles
Always visible the obelisk of Bunker Hill.
###
But dog-paddling will not escape the sharks
With a bag of garbage in his teeth, a black bear runs up the tree
This afternoon, for maybe three hours, I weeded, watered, raked. And planted another arbor vitae on the eastern border. And afterward napped, although briefly, maybe an hour or so. A rainstorm approached, the wind picked up, the sun set, and the air cooled. I’m sitting in my backyard, a rare occasion. Usually I sit in the study to write, read in bed, eat in the living-room. When I’m here I’m preparing the lawn to appear inviting yet private, or creating a privacy to which at the end of the day I do not return. Only cats run across it when neighbors chase them off their land. The cats I like. I make it clear that I don’t mind them. If they’re near, I stand still. They’re cautious though, sniffing near the freshly watered hemlocks or dwarf Bosnian pine, or sniffing the invisible line where the sumac starts and my scent markings ward off skunks and woodchucks (my “watering of the huckleberries”). They stalk the place, but don’t stay. My goal is to create an Edenic enclave of conifers and lawn, populating the trees with song-birds. A minute ago a cedar waxwing shot across the sky above the backyard, a shady lawn I neither have to cultivate nor water. But the entrance around the white mailbox looks seedy and destitute, the soil no good for more than wild-carrot and mullein, or very tough strains of grass too stringy to make hay or mulch with.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
From 6/12-6/18/11
Poem without paraphernalia, without a cloud
Or sky for the cloud to appear, without a tree
And without a bird in or out of the tree,
Without species, poem without earth,
Without buildings on the horizon, houses on the hill,
Without centers or cross-roads or turning-points,
Without walls or signs on them, or squiggles
For signs or smoke trails, without a beach in sight,
Sans color, texture, odor, taste, sight or sound
Or their confusion in the device of synaesthesia,
No color smelled or vowel seen, no comparison
Or part to stand for the whole, no imperial purple
Or empire, no crown nor thorn, no dynastic house
Nor hierarchy, anthill, cairn, cross or pinnacle,
No horizon for the mainmast and no watch
Nor weather to watch for—wouldn’t that be just perfect,
Neither analogy nor elevation, no assertion that like
Equals unlike, no diverging from the straight line,
Neither compass needle nor signal. No ornament
Nor eye-candy, no higher ground, no
Neither high road taken nor box from which to think
Outside of, no place, nor preposition to the place.
From 6/18/11
A lipstick -- candy orange -- matched Kathy’s dress color,
Behind her mid-town Manhattan across from Penn Plaza,
late morning or mid-afternoon. Did anyone frequent
39th Street unless they were attending a show
At the Garden? I was always in the office those hours,
The work tedious, editing ring-bound volumes
Or accounting journals, coding newsletter typography
Saved on a disk that I spirited to the layout editor
Who used Quark for the camera-ready copy, years?
Before Adobe Acrobat. I’m supposed to be at work
Sometimes I think in my sleep.
**
Surely a true Luddite would lecture before his disciples,
Not commit his own words to print? Unless he was judged
Loudmouth. The electronic bridges for commerce,
The severance of those signs from their local base,
May prove them false in the long run, delusion
Of universal understanding embodied in smart bombs
That dismember the wedding in the desert,
Or impoverish the villagers in bread lines,
Dividing winners from losers with a shrug.
In our sunset, we will be paupers anyway.
Another Weimar awaits. What’s to be done?
**
Embedded, embodied, incarnation in physical being, encarnada is Portuguese for red, as in incarnadine in Macbeth. Globalism embodied in debris-patterns, light embodied in matter, as in fireflies.
Sudden thunder-showers, ascending pea-plants, leaves perked up. But why the silence? And no birds sing (La Belle Dame sans Merci). No, there’s one now, an irregular melodic outburst that I cannot identify. I am always pulling weeds that hug the spinach plants and choke the life from them. Am I pulling out pokeweed?
A candy-orange lipstick matched Kathy’s dress, as did her fingernail polish. The rich kids get to go to summer-camps where the counselors marry one another.
Would she fix me up? Across the bar this prospect looked doubtful, her three friends so inhospitable they recalled the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, what they’d be were they nurses from New Hampshire. To them I must have appeared an older man chatting up a much younger woman, thus an opportunist, a lecher, no matter that she started the conversation.
You can never be careful enough (some crucial detail escapes you) nor careless enough to experience a surprise encounter or some happy accident that turns your life around, turning it in another direction entirely, even enlightening you. Too careful for experience, too careless for lengthy well-being, for life-giving foresight. Too careful to risk cold rejection from the other party, nor careless enough to encounter luck, financial, romantic or otherwise. Toss care aside to be receptive to good luck, become impoverished instead. Can risks all be calculated? If playing a nickel slot machine for more than ten minutes, the answer is yes. You’re in a Las Vegas airport during a holdover. Who knows what would happen were you to wager all you own, mental faculties included, all powers of volition abandoned, the body squandered. At my instrument, I could not improve—I’d peaked.
In Norwich is a road called Turnpike Road without a junction to a commercial road that leads you to pastures then meadows not yours to touch or lie on, beside the dry stone walls followed by barbed wire fences no house cat sniffs for prey or signs of territory, among houses that sprawl in the countryside to satisfy the wanderlust and wish for relaxation by the squire as he considers the lie of the land from his patio or study.
Turnpike Road narrows to a switchback ending at a fire tower on a far off hill-top. Considering how so few answer the doorbell it would be an easy neighborhood to rob, if not for the alarm systems networked among the doors and beams and joists. But for you the gods do not divert either verbal arrows or bullets.
Or sky for the cloud to appear, without a tree
And without a bird in or out of the tree,
Without species, poem without earth,
Without buildings on the horizon, houses on the hill,
Without centers or cross-roads or turning-points,
Without walls or signs on them, or squiggles
For signs or smoke trails, without a beach in sight,
Sans color, texture, odor, taste, sight or sound
Or their confusion in the device of synaesthesia,
No color smelled or vowel seen, no comparison
Or part to stand for the whole, no imperial purple
Or empire, no crown nor thorn, no dynastic house
Nor hierarchy, anthill, cairn, cross or pinnacle,
No horizon for the mainmast and no watch
Nor weather to watch for—wouldn’t that be just perfect,
Neither analogy nor elevation, no assertion that like
Equals unlike, no diverging from the straight line,
Neither compass needle nor signal. No ornament
Nor eye-candy, no higher ground, no
Neither high road taken nor box from which to think
Outside of, no place, nor preposition to the place.
From 6/18/11
A lipstick -- candy orange -- matched Kathy’s dress color,
Behind her mid-town Manhattan across from Penn Plaza,
late morning or mid-afternoon. Did anyone frequent
39th Street unless they were attending a show
At the Garden? I was always in the office those hours,
The work tedious, editing ring-bound volumes
Or accounting journals, coding newsletter typography
Saved on a disk that I spirited to the layout editor
Who used Quark for the camera-ready copy, years?
Before Adobe Acrobat. I’m supposed to be at work
Sometimes I think in my sleep.
**
Surely a true Luddite would lecture before his disciples,
Not commit his own words to print? Unless he was judged
Loudmouth. The electronic bridges for commerce,
The severance of those signs from their local base,
May prove them false in the long run, delusion
Of universal understanding embodied in smart bombs
That dismember the wedding in the desert,
Or impoverish the villagers in bread lines,
Dividing winners from losers with a shrug.
In our sunset, we will be paupers anyway.
Another Weimar awaits. What’s to be done?
**
Embedded, embodied, incarnation in physical being, encarnada is Portuguese for red, as in incarnadine in Macbeth. Globalism embodied in debris-patterns, light embodied in matter, as in fireflies.
Sudden thunder-showers, ascending pea-plants, leaves perked up. But why the silence? And no birds sing (La Belle Dame sans Merci). No, there’s one now, an irregular melodic outburst that I cannot identify. I am always pulling weeds that hug the spinach plants and choke the life from them. Am I pulling out pokeweed?
A candy-orange lipstick matched Kathy’s dress, as did her fingernail polish. The rich kids get to go to summer-camps where the counselors marry one another.
Would she fix me up? Across the bar this prospect looked doubtful, her three friends so inhospitable they recalled the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, what they’d be were they nurses from New Hampshire. To them I must have appeared an older man chatting up a much younger woman, thus an opportunist, a lecher, no matter that she started the conversation.
You can never be careful enough (some crucial detail escapes you) nor careless enough to experience a surprise encounter or some happy accident that turns your life around, turning it in another direction entirely, even enlightening you. Too careful for experience, too careless for lengthy well-being, for life-giving foresight. Too careful to risk cold rejection from the other party, nor careless enough to encounter luck, financial, romantic or otherwise. Toss care aside to be receptive to good luck, become impoverished instead. Can risks all be calculated? If playing a nickel slot machine for more than ten minutes, the answer is yes. You’re in a Las Vegas airport during a holdover. Who knows what would happen were you to wager all you own, mental faculties included, all powers of volition abandoned, the body squandered. At my instrument, I could not improve—I’d peaked.
In Norwich is a road called Turnpike Road without a junction to a commercial road that leads you to pastures then meadows not yours to touch or lie on, beside the dry stone walls followed by barbed wire fences no house cat sniffs for prey or signs of territory, among houses that sprawl in the countryside to satisfy the wanderlust and wish for relaxation by the squire as he considers the lie of the land from his patio or study.
Turnpike Road narrows to a switchback ending at a fire tower on a far off hill-top. Considering how so few answer the doorbell it would be an easy neighborhood to rob, if not for the alarm systems networked among the doors and beams and joists. But for you the gods do not divert either verbal arrows or bullets.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
From 6/4-6/5/11
I hear the washer churn, and hear the birds sing too. Some sing in tight explosive outbursts of melody, others sing in declining repetitive patterns (as I wrote this last sentence, my ballpoint pen flew apart, the spring propelling the clip to fly from the inkwell). And hear crickets in between the sounds of birds.
In my old garden I vied with red slugs who killed the crop until I filled the lid of a microwavable container with Narragansett, positioning it among the rosebushes one evening to find upon the following afternoon that the method had only worked too well—the slugs drowned in the lid had half-dissolved, leaving a slimy, gelatinous mass inside, a mass that I threw away with great care with repellence. No wonder that among the birds and beasts they have no predators, not even crows touching them.
The two green peppers I plucked had ripened to a stage in which red was admixed with green until they nearly made a third color neither brown nor the medium among all three. The color of dirt or feces does not appear upon the spectrum anymore than the amber color of this plywood board I use for writing in this dull green of a chair of an almost corduroy fabric the wales of which are sun-bleached and threadbare, like the furniture in the studio of an alcoholic painter whose skylight is smoky from dust and tobacco stains. And the sofa in the studio is likewise dusty and almost threadbare as the comforter on the sofa is bleached from the sun through the skylight. Still-life? More Nature morte. None of these dull or sun-bleached colors or colors faded from the fabric to which they were attached appears on the spectrometer either. But everyday life isn’t as vivid as the devices by which the visual and its brightness is measured and conveyed. Few too much slips between the cracks for the spectrum to capture in its calibration of brightness.
Persistence is often the endless application of the burin to no good end.
A burin can burn through the marks you made before back to the nothing behind every inscription.
From 6/5
It’s from the highest of the dead trees
So stripped of bark by now
I can’t tell what kind of tree it was
That the songbird lets go
His most compressed melodic outbursts,
Envy of flautists and woodwind players.
From where he’s most exposed
To sky-predators, the sharp-shinned hawks,
He sings the most, as if all depended on his song,
Although he sings from a dead tree-top,
All blasted from above to the very roots
On which the carpenter ants climb
To start colonies. How soon
Do you think they take
To corrupt the tree, bring it down?
The songbird does not need to know
How devils hide behind the details.
Besides, the details are all below.
He feeds on some of them himself
For the time and chance to sing above them.
***
For once, I said, I’m going to hang my clothes, not pack them in the dryer, as clunky as some Victorian machine of transport, a machine that bores tunnels for the old steam trains, for the cast-iron boilers to glide through. There is a light at the end of this tunnel where the clothes are dried, as if they’d hung on the clothesline shaking off their colors as the wind takes them -- those are the trade winds I believe, that pick up the ships. They will deliver the goods to the steam trains with the cast iron boilers fired up to go through the tunnel bored by the same tumbling Victorian machine that recalls the dryer that bores to light at the end of the tunnel in which the self-same clothes are clean albeit a little faded. And through the space the dryer made a smell of light from the clean clothes lifts, becomes alas aloft.
***
The caveman tires of the sight of his hand-prints
Impressed upon the rough calcites of that cave wall.
So with his paint-sticks he carves out a trapezoid,
Then the little squares inside the first trapezoid.
Soon the new piece begins to resemble a game board
For which the caveman lacks pieces and the understanding
Of the rules behind the new game,
Nothing like this can he see in all nature
Sprawled outside his cave, no trapezoids,
No squares found inside them. The squares
He idly engraves came from boredom
Between invoking the shadowy bestiaries of the ceiling,
The spotted cows, the thick-maned stallions,
The wooly bison with delicate nimble feet.
[The delicate nimbly-footed wooly bison.]
***
Holes in the lawn patched with new seedling,
not sink-holes as in Guatemala,
So deep as to cause incredulity.
Cats roaming the yard but never finding prey.
The lilacs have dried up into brown bunches.
By their long taproots I pull sumac,
by their fuzzy leaves the mullein,
before it can tower eerily by this rough access road.
I shovel carefully so as not to upstir
The animal spirits beneath.
Cats glide by to fishing grounds or games.
But it’s words that separate the hand from the plough.
In my old garden I vied with red slugs who killed the crop until I filled the lid of a microwavable container with Narragansett, positioning it among the rosebushes one evening to find upon the following afternoon that the method had only worked too well—the slugs drowned in the lid had half-dissolved, leaving a slimy, gelatinous mass inside, a mass that I threw away with great care with repellence. No wonder that among the birds and beasts they have no predators, not even crows touching them.
The two green peppers I plucked had ripened to a stage in which red was admixed with green until they nearly made a third color neither brown nor the medium among all three. The color of dirt or feces does not appear upon the spectrum anymore than the amber color of this plywood board I use for writing in this dull green of a chair of an almost corduroy fabric the wales of which are sun-bleached and threadbare, like the furniture in the studio of an alcoholic painter whose skylight is smoky from dust and tobacco stains. And the sofa in the studio is likewise dusty and almost threadbare as the comforter on the sofa is bleached from the sun through the skylight. Still-life? More Nature morte. None of these dull or sun-bleached colors or colors faded from the fabric to which they were attached appears on the spectrometer either. But everyday life isn’t as vivid as the devices by which the visual and its brightness is measured and conveyed. Few too much slips between the cracks for the spectrum to capture in its calibration of brightness.
Persistence is often the endless application of the burin to no good end.
A burin can burn through the marks you made before back to the nothing behind every inscription.
From 6/5
It’s from the highest of the dead trees
So stripped of bark by now
I can’t tell what kind of tree it was
That the songbird lets go
His most compressed melodic outbursts,
Envy of flautists and woodwind players.
From where he’s most exposed
To sky-predators, the sharp-shinned hawks,
He sings the most, as if all depended on his song,
Although he sings from a dead tree-top,
All blasted from above to the very roots
On which the carpenter ants climb
To start colonies. How soon
Do you think they take
To corrupt the tree, bring it down?
The songbird does not need to know
How devils hide behind the details.
Besides, the details are all below.
He feeds on some of them himself
For the time and chance to sing above them.
***
For once, I said, I’m going to hang my clothes, not pack them in the dryer, as clunky as some Victorian machine of transport, a machine that bores tunnels for the old steam trains, for the cast-iron boilers to glide through. There is a light at the end of this tunnel where the clothes are dried, as if they’d hung on the clothesline shaking off their colors as the wind takes them -- those are the trade winds I believe, that pick up the ships. They will deliver the goods to the steam trains with the cast iron boilers fired up to go through the tunnel bored by the same tumbling Victorian machine that recalls the dryer that bores to light at the end of the tunnel in which the self-same clothes are clean albeit a little faded. And through the space the dryer made a smell of light from the clean clothes lifts, becomes alas aloft.
***
The caveman tires of the sight of his hand-prints
Impressed upon the rough calcites of that cave wall.
So with his paint-sticks he carves out a trapezoid,
Then the little squares inside the first trapezoid.
Soon the new piece begins to resemble a game board
For which the caveman lacks pieces and the understanding
Of the rules behind the new game,
Nothing like this can he see in all nature
Sprawled outside his cave, no trapezoids,
No squares found inside them. The squares
He idly engraves came from boredom
Between invoking the shadowy bestiaries of the ceiling,
The spotted cows, the thick-maned stallions,
The wooly bison with delicate nimble feet.
[The delicate nimbly-footed wooly bison.]
***
Holes in the lawn patched with new seedling,
not sink-holes as in Guatemala,
So deep as to cause incredulity.
Cats roaming the yard but never finding prey.
The lilacs have dried up into brown bunches.
By their long taproots I pull sumac,
by their fuzzy leaves the mullein,
before it can tower eerily by this rough access road.
I shovel carefully so as not to upstir
The animal spirits beneath.
Cats glide by to fishing grounds or games.
But it’s words that separate the hand from the plough.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
From 4/3/11
Palpitated Bruce’s heart. She rubbed her legs together when she spoke of how cute he was. He stared through the screen door, while he clutched a fistful of invoices in his hand. He tried to piece together the boards of his garden bed that the plow-man had dislodged on his first December visit. She fed the chipmunk from her hand. Mockingly he brandished the whip the previous tenants had left him. Be writing these disconnected sentences, what am I adding to the storehouse? Would not time be better spent taking the recyclables to the woodshed?
The stalagmitic gray matter dripped from the subway ceiling as Deborah kissed me on the cheek. Stalin’s subway chandeliers outshined the automotive lights in Piccadilly. The flutter the black emperor butterfly makes unbalances its vernal equilibrium when the hummingbird homes to the nectar in the flower-bell or the flyswatter waves against the window screen without swatting the fly. But if swatted it only adds to the ordure flowing to the cesspool, whose sidewalls already swell from water-pressure. The wind upon the plain is the very same wind that threatens to blow the house down, and how it creaks, one erroneous misapplied layer added to another, then another, until the whole squat edifice settles comfortably upon the promontory. Our editorial policy tends toward the edgy.
Weathered driftwood withstands storms best, having a chance to petrify among the ferns. Amber coats the Paleolithic dragonfly just as Plexiglas the steel penny or golden dollar. Cave bear skull, elongated unlike the grizzly, calcined over like those sugar skulls in the Mexican Day of the Dead.
Mexican sugar skull, snapped apart and consumed in a handful of bites, hollow chocolate bunny likewise pried apart to melt in the mouth. Shells from secretions ground into masonry. Volutes crushed, the fretwork.
Garden plot, busted up, bougainvillea pot upturned above the soil, elevated trapezoid the roots and vines have held together for several months. Does my silence speak mouthfuls? Must you opine? Sunday shining through the windows a certain slant of light.
The stalagmitic gray matter dripped from the subway ceiling as Deborah kissed me on the cheek. Stalin’s subway chandeliers outshined the automotive lights in Piccadilly. The flutter the black emperor butterfly makes unbalances its vernal equilibrium when the hummingbird homes to the nectar in the flower-bell or the flyswatter waves against the window screen without swatting the fly. But if swatted it only adds to the ordure flowing to the cesspool, whose sidewalls already swell from water-pressure. The wind upon the plain is the very same wind that threatens to blow the house down, and how it creaks, one erroneous misapplied layer added to another, then another, until the whole squat edifice settles comfortably upon the promontory. Our editorial policy tends toward the edgy.
Weathered driftwood withstands storms best, having a chance to petrify among the ferns. Amber coats the Paleolithic dragonfly just as Plexiglas the steel penny or golden dollar. Cave bear skull, elongated unlike the grizzly, calcined over like those sugar skulls in the Mexican Day of the Dead.
Mexican sugar skull, snapped apart and consumed in a handful of bites, hollow chocolate bunny likewise pried apart to melt in the mouth. Shells from secretions ground into masonry. Volutes crushed, the fretwork.
Garden plot, busted up, bougainvillea pot upturned above the soil, elevated trapezoid the roots and vines have held together for several months. Does my silence speak mouthfuls? Must you opine? Sunday shining through the windows a certain slant of light.
4/23/11
If I broadcast a handful of grass seedling over the plot of dirt scraped bare by the snow-plow, a flock of birds will fall on each seedling before it can germinate, settle inside a furrow. Who can tell when the next frost will come, whether planting spinach or swiss chard is worth the bother, throwing down or casting seeds aside, hoping for the happy accident when the taproot catches. The vibration of tires on the paved road unsettles the stones and even rattles the storm windows if the passing semi weighs enough.
Once, from the railing, hurled a whole ambulance sliding off black ice, a six-wheeler nose-diving onto the state road. That all survived seemed a miracle, no patient on board. To the sunset a slickening rain freezes, and reifies, from becoming to being. Cease to exist commands the sunrise. But ice laughs last, hours before the sunrise happens. Between this hour and the next I do not know who I am.
When it happened I was untangling the dessicated vines of the pickling cucumber from the stems of fruitless pepper plants. Or untangling egg-tomato vines from the soil on which, along with frail lettuce-leaves, they’d matted, layer of dead tan vegetation. The word loam I learned when six from a story of someone my age who’d been buried in a murder case. Was loam beneath these reed-colored wet remains of a garden planted weeks too late to yield foison ready for the tongue, nothing but green egg-tomatoes, a handful of beans, fibrous stalks, a root system, or more than one of them, holding the garden bed together, while the radiator of the nose-dived ambulance released a cloud on the horizon thicker than a storm-cloud or cloud of vapor from a soup tureen, or from a chimney stack, nearly as thick as the liquid element from which the cloud exhaled.
Loam was in the nostrils of the boy they’d found in the news I’d learned about when I was six. Loam was not only finer than the soil in which I’d tried to plant these prickly cucumbers and fibrous hard tomatoes, it was more fertile than compost, and the breath that had been stopped may have been thicker than the cloud of steam that rose from the ambulance with such abundance I thought it was the ambulance engine that would never lose its life or stop its exhalation. I thought the ambulance engine would not dive before I reached for the cordless. When I ran for the cordless headset, my hands were dirty with the work of digging up what hadn’t really grown enough.
Loam the word I learned at six. With my tongue I taste the word, roll it around a little, as light as foam. After the season, I regard this little garden bed, a quilted fabric roots hold together/quilted fabric whose particles roots bind together. Ahead, a six-wheeled ambulance hurls from the highway guardrail, glare ice the verdict. With hands folded from unplugging the roots and matted vines, dessicated and flat, cucumber from egg-tomato, bean stalk from shriveled lettuce-leaf, I draw my cordless to report news already minutes old.
The loam that stopped the nostrils of the schild-victim sounds finer and more fertile than the soil that lies beneath me.
From the crushed radiator unfurls a column of steam as thick as foam, thicker than the clouds from chimney-stacks, joining rain-clouds and jet-trails above the south-bound overpass.
Loam that is finer than the soil whose purls and chunks break apart in my hand whenever I weed or plant, more fertile than this compost, and much like foam can, permeate and plug airways.
Any engine releasing such a column of steam for so long must have much life within it, more life than my hapless garden planted late, as much life as the loam that stops the breath but in which the taproot finds succor.
As I dropped the cordless in its cradle a crew arrived to cut the survivors from the half-crushed cab.
That’s a sign of life in how the engine breathes a column of steam, which broadens as it rises beneath the underpass, thicker than the clouds from chimneystacks or vapors from soup tureens—
But as thick as foam forcing me to think of loam, finer and far more fertile than the garden-bed I’m planting.
How do our engines move without a life inside them. How close to us must the spark inside them be, explosion, spasm?
Fingering through the garden bed for dead vines as I watched the steam pour from the crushed radiator.
A composted apple, porous and almost terra-cotta or incinerated orange, comes apart in my fumbling hands.
In the Gospels, Christ speaks of some broadcast seeds flowering, others not.
From the cab the crew cuts out drivers while I drop the cordless back into the cradle with my compost-stained fingers,
Soil far coarser than the loam of French gardens and burial mounds.
The life on this bluff is monotonous, but not boring—
With books along with my yardstick I can stay busy.
Each year I seek to rehabilitate some corner.
By fall most of the lawn has been repaired.
There is a stark difference between monotony and tedium.
Routines are monotonous, but not tedious.
Immanuel Kant walked through the same public square,
Passed beneath the same clock at the same hour
Most of his adult life, except for the storming of the Bastile,
The single day when Kant did not pass beneath the clock at the appointed hour.
This is called monotony, not tedium.
Tedium spends human energy without reward.
The only compensation for a tedious job is money.
But the more tedious position the less financial compensation
To the more tedious position goes the less money.
Even in cases in which more money is rewarded to
The worker with the most tedious job, the expense of spirit
Is rarely compensated by money alone.
To the grave goes this postal worker whose obituary
Can barely relate any detail more memorable than
That he fished or was a member of a VFW post.
The time he had from tedium of labor was just enough
To rest, regain his bearings from another tedious week.
Once, from the railing, hurled a whole ambulance sliding off black ice, a six-wheeler nose-diving onto the state road. That all survived seemed a miracle, no patient on board. To the sunset a slickening rain freezes, and reifies, from becoming to being. Cease to exist commands the sunrise. But ice laughs last, hours before the sunrise happens. Between this hour and the next I do not know who I am.
When it happened I was untangling the dessicated vines of the pickling cucumber from the stems of fruitless pepper plants. Or untangling egg-tomato vines from the soil on which, along with frail lettuce-leaves, they’d matted, layer of dead tan vegetation. The word loam I learned when six from a story of someone my age who’d been buried in a murder case. Was loam beneath these reed-colored wet remains of a garden planted weeks too late to yield foison ready for the tongue, nothing but green egg-tomatoes, a handful of beans, fibrous stalks, a root system, or more than one of them, holding the garden bed together, while the radiator of the nose-dived ambulance released a cloud on the horizon thicker than a storm-cloud or cloud of vapor from a soup tureen, or from a chimney stack, nearly as thick as the liquid element from which the cloud exhaled.
Loam was in the nostrils of the boy they’d found in the news I’d learned about when I was six. Loam was not only finer than the soil in which I’d tried to plant these prickly cucumbers and fibrous hard tomatoes, it was more fertile than compost, and the breath that had been stopped may have been thicker than the cloud of steam that rose from the ambulance with such abundance I thought it was the ambulance engine that would never lose its life or stop its exhalation. I thought the ambulance engine would not dive before I reached for the cordless. When I ran for the cordless headset, my hands were dirty with the work of digging up what hadn’t really grown enough.
Loam the word I learned at six. With my tongue I taste the word, roll it around a little, as light as foam. After the season, I regard this little garden bed, a quilted fabric roots hold together/quilted fabric whose particles roots bind together. Ahead, a six-wheeled ambulance hurls from the highway guardrail, glare ice the verdict. With hands folded from unplugging the roots and matted vines, dessicated and flat, cucumber from egg-tomato, bean stalk from shriveled lettuce-leaf, I draw my cordless to report news already minutes old.
The loam that stopped the nostrils of the schild-victim sounds finer and more fertile than the soil that lies beneath me.
From the crushed radiator unfurls a column of steam as thick as foam, thicker than the clouds from chimney-stacks, joining rain-clouds and jet-trails above the south-bound overpass.
Loam that is finer than the soil whose purls and chunks break apart in my hand whenever I weed or plant, more fertile than this compost, and much like foam can, permeate and plug airways.
Any engine releasing such a column of steam for so long must have much life within it, more life than my hapless garden planted late, as much life as the loam that stops the breath but in which the taproot finds succor.
As I dropped the cordless in its cradle a crew arrived to cut the survivors from the half-crushed cab.
That’s a sign of life in how the engine breathes a column of steam, which broadens as it rises beneath the underpass, thicker than the clouds from chimneystacks or vapors from soup tureens—
But as thick as foam forcing me to think of loam, finer and far more fertile than the garden-bed I’m planting.
How do our engines move without a life inside them. How close to us must the spark inside them be, explosion, spasm?
Fingering through the garden bed for dead vines as I watched the steam pour from the crushed radiator.
A composted apple, porous and almost terra-cotta or incinerated orange, comes apart in my fumbling hands.
In the Gospels, Christ speaks of some broadcast seeds flowering, others not.
From the cab the crew cuts out drivers while I drop the cordless back into the cradle with my compost-stained fingers,
Soil far coarser than the loam of French gardens and burial mounds.
The life on this bluff is monotonous, but not boring—
With books along with my yardstick I can stay busy.
Each year I seek to rehabilitate some corner.
By fall most of the lawn has been repaired.
There is a stark difference between monotony and tedium.
Routines are monotonous, but not tedious.
Immanuel Kant walked through the same public square,
Passed beneath the same clock at the same hour
Most of his adult life, except for the storming of the Bastile,
The single day when Kant did not pass beneath the clock at the appointed hour.
This is called monotony, not tedium.
Tedium spends human energy without reward.
The only compensation for a tedious job is money.
But the more tedious position the less financial compensation
To the more tedious position goes the less money.
Even in cases in which more money is rewarded to
The worker with the most tedious job, the expense of spirit
Is rarely compensated by money alone.
To the grave goes this postal worker whose obituary
Can barely relate any detail more memorable than
That he fished or was a member of a VFW post.
The time he had from tedium of labor was just enough
To rest, regain his bearings from another tedious week.
Monday, September 19, 2011
draft (9/14/11?)
Had he been an architect,
Free to [emboss] the skyline
With Chippendale keyholes,
He wouldn’t have needed
To become the seventh seal
Or next apocalyptic angel.
The St. Vitus’ dance of his mind,
Among all the blue-prints,
Could have been satisfied
Just with marring the skyline
With towers and glass walls.
Or thrusting an expressway
Through a tenement
Or maybe circumscribing
Some crony’s golf course.
But that would be just courting power,
And that would be charming.
But myself am hell
Covertly inside himself he said
Gobbling more Seconals.
Then a chunk of silly-putty
Pressed against the funnies
He turned to cancer exorcised
Just to stun the farmers
And their corn-fed daughters.
The snakes that mythology
Had sought to tame returned.
He’d hacked the psychic jungle
Back to size, but his brain
Was snakes he couldn’t tame.
Hadn’t he redeemed this jungle,
[this bug-infested hinterland?]
But what sweetens the grape
Makes the venom more potent
And sharpens the thistle or spine.
As [Jim Jones] thought in the latrine.
Time to bring the shithouse down.
Free to [emboss] the skyline
With Chippendale keyholes,
He wouldn’t have needed
To become the seventh seal
Or next apocalyptic angel.
The St. Vitus’ dance of his mind,
Among all the blue-prints,
Could have been satisfied
Just with marring the skyline
With towers and glass walls.
Or thrusting an expressway
Through a tenement
Or maybe circumscribing
Some crony’s golf course.
But that would be just courting power,
And that would be charming.
But myself am hell
Covertly inside himself he said
Gobbling more Seconals.
Then a chunk of silly-putty
Pressed against the funnies
He turned to cancer exorcised
Just to stun the farmers
And their corn-fed daughters.
The snakes that mythology
Had sought to tame returned.
He’d hacked the psychic jungle
Back to size, but his brain
Was snakes he couldn’t tame.
Hadn’t he redeemed this jungle,
[this bug-infested hinterland?]
But what sweetens the grape
Makes the venom more potent
And sharpens the thistle or spine.
As [Jim Jones] thought in the latrine.
Time to bring the shithouse down.
Adapt
A cat stalks the porch, just to check out my dry food.
Not good enough—being bored, he taste-tests but leaves
To stalk blackbirds. Bet you he won’t catch one though,
Unless it’s very sick, a burden, on the brink of death,
Its broken wing no good for its tribe, thick as storm-clouds
Or almost tactile plague over that wind-blasted maple.
In the cracks of my unsightly marble-brick- concrete patio,
Thrusts one coarsened grass stalk, one saw-toothed leaf,
And maybe something radial or almost tropical-looking
Or spiny thus exotic shudders also from the cracking grout,
Something feeding on dislodged concrete and shavings
Much as saplings of white birch drink from those cliff-sides
Road- crews blast through the hill-slope for the interstate.
Whenever the cats don’t stalk the neighboring plot
A mother-skunk snorkels through the hay-waves.
She is foraging for grubs or burrowing mammals.
The cats prefer live game to dry food in a bowl
But being house-cats, they don’t catch too much,
Although neither do they care for my dry offerings
That spoil in rain, bleeding like kid’s cereal in milk.
Each sapling that hangs from each vertical face of shale
Sends a trunk into the air nearly vertical as the cliff
sustaining it, many taproots prizing many cracks,
Fumbling soil moistened by runoff or a spring’s leeching,
Saplings that are everywhere every Federal highway is.
But whatever tells that sapling not to grow more, its source
Of soil and water spent? Stunted growth assures survival,
Thus no shattered cliff-side, no roots among rubble.
Thicker trunks or longer taproots take the cliff-side with them,
Finish a job begun with dynamite and Caterpillars.
Against this outcome weeds don’t grow so high the patio
Splits and the grass-stalk doesn’t spend itself in fissures
That break apart the masonry and dislodge more weeds
Into other rearrangements of stone that fracture already
As do demolished buildings or abandoned industrial sites
That rainwater enriched with ferrochemicals saturates
While the quicksilver of the mirror or looking-glass
Pools for opportunities through which to sink
Through buckling concrete honeycombed into offices,
Their rolodexes dumped, their files empty, empty the sockets:
Note the steady unfailing adaptation to circumstance
Of cat’s paw, weed. Note a dwarf tree’s cautious taproot.
Not good enough—being bored, he taste-tests but leaves
To stalk blackbirds. Bet you he won’t catch one though,
Unless it’s very sick, a burden, on the brink of death,
Its broken wing no good for its tribe, thick as storm-clouds
Or almost tactile plague over that wind-blasted maple.
In the cracks of my unsightly marble-brick- concrete patio,
Thrusts one coarsened grass stalk, one saw-toothed leaf,
And maybe something radial or almost tropical-looking
Or spiny thus exotic shudders also from the cracking grout,
Something feeding on dislodged concrete and shavings
Much as saplings of white birch drink from those cliff-sides
Road- crews blast through the hill-slope for the interstate.
Whenever the cats don’t stalk the neighboring plot
A mother-skunk snorkels through the hay-waves.
She is foraging for grubs or burrowing mammals.
The cats prefer live game to dry food in a bowl
But being house-cats, they don’t catch too much,
Although neither do they care for my dry offerings
That spoil in rain, bleeding like kid’s cereal in milk.
Each sapling that hangs from each vertical face of shale
Sends a trunk into the air nearly vertical as the cliff
sustaining it, many taproots prizing many cracks,
Fumbling soil moistened by runoff or a spring’s leeching,
Saplings that are everywhere every Federal highway is.
But whatever tells that sapling not to grow more, its source
Of soil and water spent? Stunted growth assures survival,
Thus no shattered cliff-side, no roots among rubble.
Thicker trunks or longer taproots take the cliff-side with them,
Finish a job begun with dynamite and Caterpillars.
Against this outcome weeds don’t grow so high the patio
Splits and the grass-stalk doesn’t spend itself in fissures
That break apart the masonry and dislodge more weeds
Into other rearrangements of stone that fracture already
As do demolished buildings or abandoned industrial sites
That rainwater enriched with ferrochemicals saturates
While the quicksilver of the mirror or looking-glass
Pools for opportunities through which to sink
Through buckling concrete honeycombed into offices,
Their rolodexes dumped, their files empty, empty the sockets:
Note the steady unfailing adaptation to circumstance
Of cat’s paw, weed. Note a dwarf tree’s cautious taproot.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Shuddered to Think (from 1/2/11 notes)
“Arched in air,” first line of a poem
Lonnie handed me in the bookstore,
one I’ve never seen in print,
and honestly cannot recall.
Except it was about a deer
Before the lines stepped down.
Past the caesura I draw a blank.
Could there be other friends
who could recall the lines that followed,
who could be brought together
to bring together the earnest poem,
reconstitute it from thin air
in which the deer was arched once,
then transcribe it whole to typescript --
line by line, they’re far too scattered.
Next year, when Lonnie’s bookstore
Was rubble, a dead man staggered
from the charred frame in black-face,
frizzy haired in a harbor-front village.
That was Doug, who played guitar,
Strummed Tommy verbatim on a twelve-string
then perished from alcoholic poisoning
in a beach-front motel, the haunt
of defrocked mill-town priests.
His girlfriend had jilted him
And music was harder, had become work,
Which was hard if you were delicate,
Which Doug was, but he had a talent
As my parents would say,
Although the talent left him .
Here’s to you, those like you,
disenchanted with the outcome
but once lit up so much by life
you could have lit up the beachfront
with its pinwheel umbrellas
its tired sunburnt families
dragging their kids around
the weekend, its night-time drunks,
lecherous broken queers—
First I think of the galleries,
then their paintings in velvet,
and crying clowns in the paintings,
red sunsets behind the clowns,
sky a tincture of ripened mango.
Then I think of hackneyed landscapes
So much I build them in my head
The brush-work’s sincere turbulence
As if the artist’s hand shuddered
From thoughts of where his work would land
What basements whose garbage dumps
and then verses of defrocked ministers
who damn those notions of penance
among so much lachrymal feeling,
a vague sadness behind a performer’s face.
Every minister, even defrocked, must perform,
Even sitting a scandal out in some beachfront motel.
Like Wings Biddlebaum, hands once too free.
Then from the black rubble of post and beam
That Doug had cast out, had rearranged
In a pile that seemed to smoke still
In the middle of the quaint square
near the base of the memorial statue,
I retrieved this lightly damaged copy
of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
while no one looked.
[While no spectator looked.]
Then from the blackened pile
Of smouldering post and beam
Doug had helped to cast out,
In the middle of the quaint square
underfoot the wreathed memorial statue,
[and the bronze soldier’s vigilance]
I retrieved this lightly warped and damaged copy
of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
While no still-shocked spectator bothered to notice. [noticing]
_______________________________
Little caveman, half our size with half our brains, why should we trust you?
With half our cranial capacity, what have you to say for yourself?
Your cousins lost among the bamboo forests, foraging for shoots and peccaries.
_______________________________
To Charlene’s consternation, the shop owner sang hoarsely “The Mess Around” (Ray Charles) upstairs as the seamstresses ran their Singers in a steady humming vibration, not comparable to the vibration of motorboats in the harbor, or herring-boats all set to ply remoter waters, cutting the trap-lines of the lobstermen. Charlene was prematurely gray at 38 and fair to her subordinates. The duffel-bags they made collected in the closets of their retired owners.
The melting of snow in the yard exposes the scars of the snow-plow as it drives the snow into banks shaped on one side by the plow’s dirty convex imprint. Now even the efforts to keep the way clear have melted among a driveway cleared for passage. The efforts of the snow-plow have almost melted entirely in the objective that the plow-man sought.
A scary old man in a dirty overcoat who must be ushered from the coffee-shop by the paramedic unit or beat-cop. Whose dentures are lost. In despondency and madness. How’s that for a future.
The view of Los Angeles could not help but startle, a grid of lights among whose single filaments the eye could track a single point or node of light shuttling at an impossible speed, from one end to another. A Mondrian electrified and animated by the spirit of recreation and commerce.
The firing-pin, the controlled burn on the hillside, the ignition.
Lonnie handed me in the bookstore,
one I’ve never seen in print,
and honestly cannot recall.
Except it was about a deer
Before the lines stepped down.
Past the caesura I draw a blank.
Could there be other friends
who could recall the lines that followed,
who could be brought together
to bring together the earnest poem,
reconstitute it from thin air
in which the deer was arched once,
then transcribe it whole to typescript --
line by line, they’re far too scattered.
Next year, when Lonnie’s bookstore
Was rubble, a dead man staggered
from the charred frame in black-face,
frizzy haired in a harbor-front village.
That was Doug, who played guitar,
Strummed Tommy verbatim on a twelve-string
then perished from alcoholic poisoning
in a beach-front motel, the haunt
of defrocked mill-town priests.
His girlfriend had jilted him
And music was harder, had become work,
Which was hard if you were delicate,
Which Doug was, but he had a talent
As my parents would say,
Although the talent left him .
Here’s to you, those like you,
disenchanted with the outcome
but once lit up so much by life
you could have lit up the beachfront
with its pinwheel umbrellas
its tired sunburnt families
dragging their kids around
the weekend, its night-time drunks,
lecherous broken queers—
First I think of the galleries,
then their paintings in velvet,
and crying clowns in the paintings,
red sunsets behind the clowns,
sky a tincture of ripened mango.
Then I think of hackneyed landscapes
So much I build them in my head
The brush-work’s sincere turbulence
As if the artist’s hand shuddered
From thoughts of where his work would land
What basements whose garbage dumps
and then verses of defrocked ministers
who damn those notions of penance
among so much lachrymal feeling,
a vague sadness behind a performer’s face.
Every minister, even defrocked, must perform,
Even sitting a scandal out in some beachfront motel.
Like Wings Biddlebaum, hands once too free.
Then from the black rubble of post and beam
That Doug had cast out, had rearranged
In a pile that seemed to smoke still
In the middle of the quaint square
near the base of the memorial statue,
I retrieved this lightly damaged copy
of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
while no one looked.
[While no spectator looked.]
Then from the blackened pile
Of smouldering post and beam
Doug had helped to cast out,
In the middle of the quaint square
underfoot the wreathed memorial statue,
[and the bronze soldier’s vigilance]
I retrieved this lightly warped and damaged copy
of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
While no still-shocked spectator bothered to notice. [noticing]
_______________________________
Little caveman, half our size with half our brains, why should we trust you?
With half our cranial capacity, what have you to say for yourself?
Your cousins lost among the bamboo forests, foraging for shoots and peccaries.
_______________________________
To Charlene’s consternation, the shop owner sang hoarsely “The Mess Around” (Ray Charles) upstairs as the seamstresses ran their Singers in a steady humming vibration, not comparable to the vibration of motorboats in the harbor, or herring-boats all set to ply remoter waters, cutting the trap-lines of the lobstermen. Charlene was prematurely gray at 38 and fair to her subordinates. The duffel-bags they made collected in the closets of their retired owners.
The melting of snow in the yard exposes the scars of the snow-plow as it drives the snow into banks shaped on one side by the plow’s dirty convex imprint. Now even the efforts to keep the way clear have melted among a driveway cleared for passage. The efforts of the snow-plow have almost melted entirely in the objective that the plow-man sought.
A scary old man in a dirty overcoat who must be ushered from the coffee-shop by the paramedic unit or beat-cop. Whose dentures are lost. In despondency and madness. How’s that for a future.
The view of Los Angeles could not help but startle, a grid of lights among whose single filaments the eye could track a single point or node of light shuttling at an impossible speed, from one end to another. A Mondrian electrified and animated by the spirit of recreation and commerce.
The firing-pin, the controlled burn on the hillside, the ignition.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Oct. 3 2010 Skins (draft)
Oct. 3 2010 Skins
A seed and suet block swings
From a lichened maple branch
The song-birds will attack
As leaves from trees drop
Raked before they kill the turf
Outright I had to plug
To repel grubs and moles
From breeching the lawn
I keep tidy, thinking suburban.
With skin smooth like whales
Moles like whales lack real ears:
unless you think skin can hear
being all tympanum, all drum
That a seamless body can listen
For both, taut skin [evolved] to ear—
[Moles who hear the lawnmower’s thunder]
And the thunder from plows
The city sends through side-streets
And whales who hear the ocean
Boom like public pools underwater,
all thrashing inner tubes and limbs.
To trolling bull or pregnant cow
The known world is vibration -- to her,
sound brings the whole sea home.
No wonder flensing whale-skin
For its blubber was thought an art,
Earning its very own verb, to flense,
Take that border town Flensburg,
Danish Flensborg, HQ of the last week
Of Admiral Karl Donitz’s Reich,
Swallowed plot of ground
Where Lord Ha-Ha, arch-traitor,
Was captured as he pissed or carried tinder—
Truculent, half-drunk in the sign-off
Of his final shortwave broadcast.
Now that same burg’s renowned
for slick lucrative Euro-porn
Violations of bodily sovereignty
brands of which a jaded European
audience listlessly yawns through,
every orifice probed in 3D,
Every hole, every skin-grid pierced
With parts cribbed from chop-shops
For nothing cheaper than a Maserati,
High-toleranced piston-rings,
Stainless gleaming shafts. Mortified
Must emerge that flensed actor,
Less oldest profession, more bio-machine.
Briefly I caught Flensburg’s outskirts
As the sun poured above the North Sea,
Near Beowulf’s swamps, war by pikes
In those evening bogs slick as amber
Or skin that shudders from the sea- wind,
To be thrashed by Roman broadswords
And join their scapegoated ancestors
Allowed their crowns and bracelets,
Their hammered gold handiwork
That one blow to the skull sank,
And it’s taken all this time,
All this digging trenches
To unearth them, all their skin
Smooth as the amber saddle-bags
Of the scalped pioneer mailmen.
[until when they were (at last) unearthed].
[Their skin smooth as saddle-bags
After their unearthing.]
A single blow to the skull could sink.
I had to plug the turf
To repel grubs and moles
From breeching the lawn
Punching stars through the lawn
A seed and suet block swings
From a lichened maple branch
The song-birds will attack
As leaves from trees drop
Raked before they kill the turf
Outright I had to plug
To repel grubs and moles
From breeching the lawn
I keep tidy, thinking suburban.
With skin smooth like whales
Moles like whales lack real ears:
unless you think skin can hear
being all tympanum, all drum
That a seamless body can listen
For both, taut skin [evolved] to ear—
[Moles who hear the lawnmower’s thunder]
And the thunder from plows
The city sends through side-streets
And whales who hear the ocean
Boom like public pools underwater,
all thrashing inner tubes and limbs.
To trolling bull or pregnant cow
The known world is vibration -- to her,
sound brings the whole sea home.
No wonder flensing whale-skin
For its blubber was thought an art,
Earning its very own verb, to flense,
Take that border town Flensburg,
Danish Flensborg, HQ of the last week
Of Admiral Karl Donitz’s Reich,
Swallowed plot of ground
Where Lord Ha-Ha, arch-traitor,
Was captured as he pissed or carried tinder—
Truculent, half-drunk in the sign-off
Of his final shortwave broadcast.
Now that same burg’s renowned
for slick lucrative Euro-porn
Violations of bodily sovereignty
brands of which a jaded European
audience listlessly yawns through,
every orifice probed in 3D,
Every hole, every skin-grid pierced
With parts cribbed from chop-shops
For nothing cheaper than a Maserati,
High-toleranced piston-rings,
Stainless gleaming shafts. Mortified
Must emerge that flensed actor,
Less oldest profession, more bio-machine.
Briefly I caught Flensburg’s outskirts
As the sun poured above the North Sea,
Near Beowulf’s swamps, war by pikes
In those evening bogs slick as amber
Or skin that shudders from the sea- wind,
To be thrashed by Roman broadswords
And join their scapegoated ancestors
Allowed their crowns and bracelets,
Their hammered gold handiwork
That one blow to the skull sank,
And it’s taken all this time,
All this digging trenches
To unearth them, all their skin
Smooth as the amber saddle-bags
Of the scalped pioneer mailmen.
[until when they were (at last) unearthed].
[Their skin smooth as saddle-bags
After their unearthing.]
A single blow to the skull could sink.
I had to plug the turf
To repel grubs and moles
From breeching the lawn
Punching stars through the lawn
Fall 2010 misc
From Sept 26 2010 Sunday
In the documentary, the arthropod, a primitive scorpion, flexed itself to remove its orange-tinted exoskeleton, having grown a new one. The surrounding landscape resembled the Mojave Desert, with mesoliths in the background. The continent was Pangea. Small plants bifurcated into yellow bulbs that served as light receptors.
An arthropod has no memory, but a fish memorizes. It remembers the more dangerous straits and the safer water-lanes. The dragonfly fails to remember, but the lizard does. The raccoon remembers the tasks it performed for three years; dogs remember who I am. The fish remembers where to spawn. A young wolf learns how to spread its scent by pawing the earth from older wolves. Apes gouge grubs from the ground with dead branches. The abrupt thud in the background I recall as ice cubes falling into a bin in the freezer. Can feet discontinue swelling when entirely still? Follicles send shoots of hair post-mortem. A worm impaled becomes a double worm. The ape in the zoo who sees a cat may call the cat “ball.”
From October 10 Sunday
A workman-like clarity can be worth aspiring towards
Instead of willfully inflated rhetoric
not to be confused with that of Dylan Thomas.
Sunflower who twists as it aspires to the sun,
its multiple eyes plucked out, the kernels chewed.
Bitter lettuce leaves, their stems lifting them
From the bed of humus and manure and loam
From which they sprang, shaped like mouse-ears
The palest green of a liebfraumilch grape
Or the unripened egg-tomatoes that burden the stem
In a flurry of spiky complicated leaves.
So far the frosts fail to bow them entirely,
Their modest heights unsupported by splints.
The vines of the cucumber resemble the umbilicus
But have dried to the consistency of flower-stalks
And their leaves, once spanned to father sun
Like an outspread but webbed hand
Are crumpled-up and delicate as ash, and with the bellows of a mouth,
Could be blown away like ashen particles.
The leaves of the cucumber are as dry and as fragile as ash
As an ember that has cooled in the fire.
From September 12, 2010 Sunday
At first, my left ear was blocked, but now, it’s my right ear, which also rings. I pour the balm-like oil into the ear, until it begins to tickle the canal somewhat pleasantly as it turns out. And then a fizzing sound begins, first the sound of carbonated water poured into a glass, but amplified into a sound of muted thunder as the ear-wax dissolves and loosens from the walls of the ear canal and the tympanum, the latter accounting for much of the thunder. Then as I turn to my other side I hear a hole form through the canal in the air outside my ear, from which arise a range of higher-pitched noises that had until now been excluded from me—until the hole itself collapses, and the ringing begins and the ear is blocked again, despite my efforts to unblock it.
Fingers on piano keys fly while the fingers on the keyboard stumble in errors more difficult to unravel to fix than execute.
The composition on the sheet of music sings and moves ships to sail and airwaves to march and is also played in concert halls with balustrades of marble as pink as a seashell’s interior.
But the composition of the email, as hastily composed, never appears to the eyes of its intended reader, and for its typos, is relegated to the folder for junk.
Console yourself that the junk swelling the basements of museums across the globe is uncountable.
You must be the scribe who dictates to the believers. Staying in one place for days on end, the same backyard greeting you, cannot be justified.
The half-drunk family man in the men ‘s room of the sports bar pissing down his leg while cradling his cell phone tells his wife in alarm: Do not I repeat leave your daughter alone, she’s only ten. Then he’s asking her the score. Is he betting? This is not, I tell myself, an hospitable environment in which to be, nor was it when I met co-workers for the happy hour.
In the documentary, the arthropod, a primitive scorpion, flexed itself to remove its orange-tinted exoskeleton, having grown a new one. The surrounding landscape resembled the Mojave Desert, with mesoliths in the background. The continent was Pangea. Small plants bifurcated into yellow bulbs that served as light receptors.
An arthropod has no memory, but a fish memorizes. It remembers the more dangerous straits and the safer water-lanes. The dragonfly fails to remember, but the lizard does. The raccoon remembers the tasks it performed for three years; dogs remember who I am. The fish remembers where to spawn. A young wolf learns how to spread its scent by pawing the earth from older wolves. Apes gouge grubs from the ground with dead branches. The abrupt thud in the background I recall as ice cubes falling into a bin in the freezer. Can feet discontinue swelling when entirely still? Follicles send shoots of hair post-mortem. A worm impaled becomes a double worm. The ape in the zoo who sees a cat may call the cat “ball.”
From October 10 Sunday
A workman-like clarity can be worth aspiring towards
Instead of willfully inflated rhetoric
not to be confused with that of Dylan Thomas.
Sunflower who twists as it aspires to the sun,
its multiple eyes plucked out, the kernels chewed.
Bitter lettuce leaves, their stems lifting them
From the bed of humus and manure and loam
From which they sprang, shaped like mouse-ears
The palest green of a liebfraumilch grape
Or the unripened egg-tomatoes that burden the stem
In a flurry of spiky complicated leaves.
So far the frosts fail to bow them entirely,
Their modest heights unsupported by splints.
The vines of the cucumber resemble the umbilicus
But have dried to the consistency of flower-stalks
And their leaves, once spanned to father sun
Like an outspread but webbed hand
Are crumpled-up and delicate as ash, and with the bellows of a mouth,
Could be blown away like ashen particles.
The leaves of the cucumber are as dry and as fragile as ash
As an ember that has cooled in the fire.
From September 12, 2010 Sunday
At first, my left ear was blocked, but now, it’s my right ear, which also rings. I pour the balm-like oil into the ear, until it begins to tickle the canal somewhat pleasantly as it turns out. And then a fizzing sound begins, first the sound of carbonated water poured into a glass, but amplified into a sound of muted thunder as the ear-wax dissolves and loosens from the walls of the ear canal and the tympanum, the latter accounting for much of the thunder. Then as I turn to my other side I hear a hole form through the canal in the air outside my ear, from which arise a range of higher-pitched noises that had until now been excluded from me—until the hole itself collapses, and the ringing begins and the ear is blocked again, despite my efforts to unblock it.
Fingers on piano keys fly while the fingers on the keyboard stumble in errors more difficult to unravel to fix than execute.
The composition on the sheet of music sings and moves ships to sail and airwaves to march and is also played in concert halls with balustrades of marble as pink as a seashell’s interior.
But the composition of the email, as hastily composed, never appears to the eyes of its intended reader, and for its typos, is relegated to the folder for junk.
Console yourself that the junk swelling the basements of museums across the globe is uncountable.
You must be the scribe who dictates to the believers. Staying in one place for days on end, the same backyard greeting you, cannot be justified.
The half-drunk family man in the men ‘s room of the sports bar pissing down his leg while cradling his cell phone tells his wife in alarm: Do not I repeat leave your daughter alone, she’s only ten. Then he’s asking her the score. Is he betting? This is not, I tell myself, an hospitable environment in which to be, nor was it when I met co-workers for the happy hour.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Gihon
For spider, read weaver, from Sanskrit.
For purling stream, read braided (also knotted
As in purls of sheep dung). This brings us
Back to pearl, and returns us to weaver,
As in purling of the selvedge of the vest.
Gihon braided beneath its foam and spray
Cannot be sundered as can turbine from axle,
axle from purling stream, finger from shuttle.
For purling stream, read braided (also knotted
As in purls of sheep dung). This brings us
Back to pearl, and returns us to weaver,
As in purling of the selvedge of the vest.
Gihon braided beneath its foam and spray
Cannot be sundered as can turbine from axle,
axle from purling stream, finger from shuttle.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Butterfly Effect (7/24/10)
Behind the tacky mailbox sways a stand of Queen Anne’s-lace
craning above the pothole only deepened by the mail-truck.
Car-keys have scratched out most of the purple appliquéd butterflies,
no longer idealized outlines that dance above the digits,
antennae brushing numbers feebly re-emphasized with magic-marker.
You’ll never rid the hillside of those clutches of sumac:
now they are yours, touched with choke-cherry bushes and nightshade,
berries crimson as a blood-drop that oozes from a pricked fingertip.
Emperor butterflies were supposed to feed on these weeds.
When the Queen Anne’s lace makes brown and broom-like bundles,
the caterpillar was supposed to crawl the stems
feed on dead lacy flowers. And once hatched from the chrysalis,
they’d flock the land the mailbox represents,
settle above the lawn, cool the sky with just wings.
That doesn’t happen. Not a single black emperor butterfly
hatches. Nothing climbs the wild carrot to feed on the flower.
After the dog-days, the lace is clutched and unmolested.
This scene makes the lakes a carriage ride away feel remote as Arabia,
mocking-birds among the wind-stripped oaks and maples.
The neighboring mailboxes are uniform and standard-issue black.
The remaining vinyl butterflies become an embarrassment.
The Emperor butterfly is said to feast on Queen Anne's Lace,
wild carrot flourishing in soil as poor as this, and weed-pleated.
The caterpillars were said to crawl the stems of the weed,
To metamorphose among the late no longer lacy flowers
That neither beautify nor hide this hillside of shale.
Neither one thing exactly or another: only unwanted mullein
Rival the wild carrot and the cones of sumac:
So beware of theories, of things heard about, of hope itself.
craning above the pothole only deepened by the mail-truck.
Car-keys have scratched out most of the purple appliquéd butterflies,
no longer idealized outlines that dance above the digits,
antennae brushing numbers feebly re-emphasized with magic-marker.
You’ll never rid the hillside of those clutches of sumac:
now they are yours, touched with choke-cherry bushes and nightshade,
berries crimson as a blood-drop that oozes from a pricked fingertip.
Emperor butterflies were supposed to feed on these weeds.
When the Queen Anne’s lace makes brown and broom-like bundles,
the caterpillar was supposed to crawl the stems
feed on dead lacy flowers. And once hatched from the chrysalis,
they’d flock the land the mailbox represents,
settle above the lawn, cool the sky with just wings.
That doesn’t happen. Not a single black emperor butterfly
hatches. Nothing climbs the wild carrot to feed on the flower.
After the dog-days, the lace is clutched and unmolested.
This scene makes the lakes a carriage ride away feel remote as Arabia,
mocking-birds among the wind-stripped oaks and maples.
The neighboring mailboxes are uniform and standard-issue black.
The remaining vinyl butterflies become an embarrassment.
The Emperor butterfly is said to feast on Queen Anne's Lace,
wild carrot flourishing in soil as poor as this, and weed-pleated.
The caterpillars were said to crawl the stems of the weed,
To metamorphose among the late no longer lacy flowers
That neither beautify nor hide this hillside of shale.
Neither one thing exactly or another: only unwanted mullein
Rival the wild carrot and the cones of sumac:
So beware of theories, of things heard about, of hope itself.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
From Oct. 23 2010
Nature is a shop casting out more prototypes than it keeps.
Its factories and foundries, its offices and exhibition rooms are among the clouds.
Its numerous divisions cannot be counted.
Its designers contemplate a species in a conference room the boundaries of which are never fixed.
It is the most generous of employees to a fault.
And its modular business model, rhizomatic and infinitely adaptable management structure the object of envy of any multi-national enterprise.
Its campus and its branches are everywhere.
But the location of its officers is a difficult question to answer.
Its factories and foundries, its offices and exhibition rooms are among the clouds.
Its numerous divisions cannot be counted.
Its designers contemplate a species in a conference room the boundaries of which are never fixed.
It is the most generous of employees to a fault.
And its modular business model, rhizomatic and infinitely adaptable management structure the object of envy of any multi-national enterprise.
Its campus and its branches are everywhere.
But the location of its officers is a difficult question to answer.
12/6/10
The nurses belly-dancing in their group exercise class. Among them an overweight woman purses her lips. Each dancer sports a belt of golden tassels at her hips that the exercise instructor handed out.
When I rose from the dentist's chair, the hygienist handed me a day-lily. I placed it on my car's dashboard. They spend the afternoon excavating caries from a human cave. On the dashboard, the day-lily dried, not leaving any fragrance.
In the clan the shaman was the weakest member of the group, the one most prone to outsider status, helpless at felling the macroceros or wooly mammoth with a spear. The rest let him stay by the hearth and hallucinate. Was mama the first word uttered from the mouth of the human species when it could shape vocables, or was it a hissing mnemonic sound meant to represent the snake? Whether you're inclined to the former or the latter reveals whether you are Lockean or Hobbesian in outlook. If of the latter stamp, like Dr. Moreau you believe the human species must be tamed, his toenails clipped, his excess hair removed by electrolysis, his impulses medicated to the grave. From womb to tomb, the species can only be constrained. Only harsh lessons lead to the learning necessary for the tribe's survival.
What at first sounds like a woodpecker driving its beak into the already hollowed out and rain-softened trunk of a dying maple tree must instead be the sound of a hammer as it either breaks up concrete or drives a stake into the ground, perhaps hammering a post where a highway guardrail had once been.
With the arrival of winter acoustics are crystal clear, but the sunlight is harsh and blinding, as on the facade of the new library, all picture windows and brushed aluminum siding. The characters that grace the glass panels nearly vanish in the winter sun's reflections. They spell library in several languages. But the ring of hammers is as bright as if they struck the rim of a crystal flagon, or piece of solid quartz whose molecular alignments were so straight the minutest light-beam could travel far within the blink of an eye. Now I hear the chainsaw taking down the dead tree at last. In languages other than our own, library means biblioteca, bibliotek from Biblos, Greek port city that supplied all the papyrus strained from the bulrushes among which Moses' barque drifted, lost.
A glass and metal wall of words forcing passersby to crane their heads to view completely, only for them to be blinded.
When I rose from the dentist's chair, the hygienist handed me a day-lily. I placed it on my car's dashboard. They spend the afternoon excavating caries from a human cave. On the dashboard, the day-lily dried, not leaving any fragrance.
In the clan the shaman was the weakest member of the group, the one most prone to outsider status, helpless at felling the macroceros or wooly mammoth with a spear. The rest let him stay by the hearth and hallucinate. Was mama the first word uttered from the mouth of the human species when it could shape vocables, or was it a hissing mnemonic sound meant to represent the snake? Whether you're inclined to the former or the latter reveals whether you are Lockean or Hobbesian in outlook. If of the latter stamp, like Dr. Moreau you believe the human species must be tamed, his toenails clipped, his excess hair removed by electrolysis, his impulses medicated to the grave. From womb to tomb, the species can only be constrained. Only harsh lessons lead to the learning necessary for the tribe's survival.
What at first sounds like a woodpecker driving its beak into the already hollowed out and rain-softened trunk of a dying maple tree must instead be the sound of a hammer as it either breaks up concrete or drives a stake into the ground, perhaps hammering a post where a highway guardrail had once been.
With the arrival of winter acoustics are crystal clear, but the sunlight is harsh and blinding, as on the facade of the new library, all picture windows and brushed aluminum siding. The characters that grace the glass panels nearly vanish in the winter sun's reflections. They spell library in several languages. But the ring of hammers is as bright as if they struck the rim of a crystal flagon, or piece of solid quartz whose molecular alignments were so straight the minutest light-beam could travel far within the blink of an eye. Now I hear the chainsaw taking down the dead tree at last. In languages other than our own, library means biblioteca, bibliotek from Biblos, Greek port city that supplied all the papyrus strained from the bulrushes among which Moses' barque drifted, lost.
A glass and metal wall of words forcing passersby to crane their heads to view completely, only for them to be blinded.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Select All in Flow
Airbrushed catalogue model, imaged in black pixels,
flies to Arizona from the coast, her splayed pattern
gaping exit wounds through which a crow could fly.
[Arizona’s where the alphanumeric information]
is construed, input and returned to said machine.
Licking an envelope, or batting an eyelash in a windstorm.
a woman in lingerie swells with acupuncture points--
O fudged Noguchi autopsy. Black isn’t color of my true love,
only being where the holes meet, front to back.
Granny’s catalogue lost, she didn’t want the items.
As the pages pass through the postal belt,
shiny form tears from its content. The OCR
[form that shines tears away from content. The OCR]
could not recognize the address (the video screen
displays someone’s autopsy darned with needle-point).
But the person keys her interpretation of the number
bounced to the sorting machine, when the catalogue,
tears and all, drops in the mail tub, labeled correctly.
But to residents of our address in question,
All mail is bad news, and no mail is certain,
re-affirming countless ties, invisible dog-leashes.
Toilet arm-rests, dahlia-patterned shower-curtains,
the TV tray, the recliner, the pillow for posture,
and ultrasonic denture cleaner fitting a hand bag,
say marked for death: you bought that? Why
do you think they sell that stuff at cut-rate prices?
Just wait and try to get replacement parts.
flies to Arizona from the coast, her splayed pattern
gaping exit wounds through which a crow could fly.
[Arizona’s where the alphanumeric information]
is construed, input and returned to said machine.
Licking an envelope, or batting an eyelash in a windstorm.
a woman in lingerie swells with acupuncture points--
O fudged Noguchi autopsy. Black isn’t color of my true love,
only being where the holes meet, front to back.
Granny’s catalogue lost, she didn’t want the items.
As the pages pass through the postal belt,
shiny form tears from its content. The OCR
[form that shines tears away from content. The OCR]
could not recognize the address (the video screen
displays someone’s autopsy darned with needle-point).
But the person keys her interpretation of the number
bounced to the sorting machine, when the catalogue,
tears and all, drops in the mail tub, labeled correctly.
But to residents of our address in question,
All mail is bad news, and no mail is certain,
re-affirming countless ties, invisible dog-leashes.
Toilet arm-rests, dahlia-patterned shower-curtains,
the TV tray, the recliner, the pillow for posture,
and ultrasonic denture cleaner fitting a hand bag,
say marked for death: you bought that? Why
do you think they sell that stuff at cut-rate prices?
Just wait and try to get replacement parts.
At Best Buy (11/18/06)
Post-boomer couples rebound from their Elements
If from Vermont or from New Hampshire Hummers
to buy boom-boxes, or home entertainment tuners
or high-def liquid crystal wall-screens on which
to view in Blu-ray these untamed animate bestiaries.
From the Best Buy demo leap out luminescent
elastic-limbed cartoon zebras, to the naked eye
as detailed as bas-relief or mosaic tile.
After the party Dad with his sportshirt untucked
forks out plastic, the kids rebound in the backseat,
all that equipment squeezed inside the van.
They had to wear matching shirts and ties
as sales personnel. They were his friends,
suburban post-boomers whose children bound
from the SUV to browse screens and double woofers,
fill each freezing McMansion with light and sound.
If from Vermont or from New Hampshire Hummers
to buy boom-boxes, or home entertainment tuners
or high-def liquid crystal wall-screens on which
to view in Blu-ray these untamed animate bestiaries.
From the Best Buy demo leap out luminescent
elastic-limbed cartoon zebras, to the naked eye
as detailed as bas-relief or mosaic tile.
After the party Dad with his sportshirt untucked
forks out plastic, the kids rebound in the backseat,
all that equipment squeezed inside the van.
They had to wear matching shirts and ties
as sales personnel. They were his friends,
suburban post-boomers whose children bound
from the SUV to browse screens and double woofers,
fill each freezing McMansion with light and sound.
Some minute particulars
And when he spoke, he specified a polarized visor, bullet-proof vest,
Hollow shells, balaclava, and Kevlar helmet, he specified
Fragmentation bombs burning magnesium at 2200 degrees Fahrenheit,
Also a 9 mm Glock and Lee-Enfield with scope and serial number
Filed off the registration plate. He specified a leather-sheathed
Bowie knife and two pearl-handled snub-nosed pistols
To fit inside a pair of winterized Cabelas hunter’s boots
And six potassium cyanide capsules stuffed inside the breast pocket
Of a camouflaged surplus army jacket of the 10th Mountain Division
And he specified ampules of pure meth for he also specified fire,
And he specified two cell phones from two separate carriers
And a portable hand-held with frequencies for fire and police
And for every baby monitor in a twelve to twenty-five mile radius.
He specified a tablet computer with built-in Wi-Fi, enough MREs
Pilfered from neighboring commissaries to hole up in a bell tower
For three weeks; he specified canned water and sucrose tablets
For he who is willing and able to raise the cudgel against the evil
In this world on behalf of the Lord. He specified laser tracking,
And a fifty-meter perimeter of invulnerability and free-fire
On behalf of his messengers. He specifies the tiny logics of the drone
To elevate the righteous, drive the Amalekites from hearth and home.
He is specific, and he is literal. He doesn’t leave the details to you.
It’s His plan that He specifies and you are its vehicle and vessel. The book is open.
Hollow shells, balaclava, and Kevlar helmet, he specified
Fragmentation bombs burning magnesium at 2200 degrees Fahrenheit,
Also a 9 mm Glock and Lee-Enfield with scope and serial number
Filed off the registration plate. He specified a leather-sheathed
Bowie knife and two pearl-handled snub-nosed pistols
To fit inside a pair of winterized Cabelas hunter’s boots
And six potassium cyanide capsules stuffed inside the breast pocket
Of a camouflaged surplus army jacket of the 10th Mountain Division
And he specified ampules of pure meth for he also specified fire,
And he specified two cell phones from two separate carriers
And a portable hand-held with frequencies for fire and police
And for every baby monitor in a twelve to twenty-five mile radius.
He specified a tablet computer with built-in Wi-Fi, enough MREs
Pilfered from neighboring commissaries to hole up in a bell tower
For three weeks; he specified canned water and sucrose tablets
For he who is willing and able to raise the cudgel against the evil
In this world on behalf of the Lord. He specified laser tracking,
And a fifty-meter perimeter of invulnerability and free-fire
On behalf of his messengers. He specifies the tiny logics of the drone
To elevate the righteous, drive the Amalekites from hearth and home.
He is specific, and he is literal. He doesn’t leave the details to you.
It’s His plan that He specifies and you are its vehicle and vessel. The book is open.
Jan 23 2011
Friends fall away,
A camel crosses the Sahara.
They buy in the suburbs.
We reach a gorge
Where water cuts rock.
The potted bougainvilleas
On the front porch freeze.
Pine saplings swamped by snow
Cannot block this wind
Stripping the flower bushes,
Making the abandon
Of the English garden
Less likely.
Stony land-spit,
Sharp slopes, the drive up
Far too steep
For most four-wheelers.
Weeds on the banks
That thrive on poor soil,
Erect saffron ropes of mullein,
Wild-carrot, the stems up
From tough roots.
Thinking butterflies
Eat the Queen-Anne’s Lace
When dead and clutched,
Black emperors fly
From the broken cocoons
Nestled in the corymbs
Only in your dreams.
Hardened faces of housewives
Who live near stigmatized trailers.
[Housewives’ faces harden
Near the stigmatized trailers.]
Dairy farmers fix their fence
Before yawning ditches
Once filled with rain.
Who are you demands their looks.
But I’m just passing through.
To your face I won’t tell you
How ugly your house is,
Put you on the spot.
City slicker, how far
Are you above us?
And to what station
Do you aspire?
Put your boots
In manure
With us. Get real.
Beige concrete blocks
Of the shower stall
As waterproof as enamel,
An enameled tooth splits.
A camel crosses the Sahara.
They buy in the suburbs.
We reach a gorge
Where water cuts rock.
The potted bougainvilleas
On the front porch freeze.
Pine saplings swamped by snow
Cannot block this wind
Stripping the flower bushes,
Making the abandon
Of the English garden
Less likely.
Stony land-spit,
Sharp slopes, the drive up
Far too steep
For most four-wheelers.
Weeds on the banks
That thrive on poor soil,
Erect saffron ropes of mullein,
Wild-carrot, the stems up
From tough roots.
Thinking butterflies
Eat the Queen-Anne’s Lace
When dead and clutched,
Black emperors fly
From the broken cocoons
Nestled in the corymbs
Only in your dreams.
Hardened faces of housewives
Who live near stigmatized trailers.
[Housewives’ faces harden
Near the stigmatized trailers.]
Dairy farmers fix their fence
Before yawning ditches
Once filled with rain.
Who are you demands their looks.
But I’m just passing through.
To your face I won’t tell you
How ugly your house is,
Put you on the spot.
City slicker, how far
Are you above us?
And to what station
Do you aspire?
Put your boots
In manure
With us. Get real.
Beige concrete blocks
Of the shower stall
As waterproof as enamel,
An enameled tooth splits.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
draft summer 07?
Heal your decrepitude in this whirlpool
Of the Fountain of Youth, in which mendicants drop
After their struggle among the ropes and weights,
An elderly couple, a man with cuprous hair and skin
And his wife, a bombshell once. Whirlpool
At the bottom floor of the fountain of youth
Never cleaned enough but roiling with water
For the old man with few teeth among his children.
Waters that break up the tennis court
Overlooking the Econolodge and the highway
Into loosened green chunks of concrete,
Shredded basketball net and gutter of foam
Above the crumbling footpath.
Swimming’s free of charge, the weight-stacks rust.
Two body-builders man the building.
Weights as fragile as crockery.
A whirlpool in the Fountain of Youth
in which rested an elderly man with few teeth
among his children, the water-jets roiling green currents.
Upstairs the broken machinery among which a man
and his once bombshell wife struggled among weights
as breakable as crockery with seats of foam or sponge.
The waters have broken up the tennis court
overlooking the Econolodge, where you can swim for free.
In the Fountain of Youth a whirlpool promises life
but who’s young enough to gain from it.
At the bottom of the Fountain of Youth
stirs the whirlpool.
Chunks of green concrete with stripes
loosened on the tennis court; the basketball nets shredded,
as if someone had hung from them.
A gutter poured a foam-like liquid on a patch of lawn.
Chunks of weathered wood and shingle lay
beside a crumbling concrete footpath and chain-link fence.
Two body-builders manned the building.
Two elders struggled with the Nautilus, black iron
with chunks of foam ripped from the back rests.
The foam was pink and covered with Naugahyde.
The man, with coppery hair and skin, was for his age youthful;
and at a younger age, she might have been a bombshell.
Few others frequent the broken strength machines,
the frayed cables barely holding the weights in place.
Spots of rust appeared on the weight-stacks.
No one was paying for the upkeep, or so it looked.
Where are the investors who will renovate
this Fountain of Youth, the whirlpool
at the bottom floor in the men’s room,
the shower heads that do not stop?
The whirlpool at the bottom of the world
is water from the white River, the water recalculating
by means of water-jets.
Of the Fountain of Youth, in which mendicants drop
After their struggle among the ropes and weights,
An elderly couple, a man with cuprous hair and skin
And his wife, a bombshell once. Whirlpool
At the bottom floor of the fountain of youth
Never cleaned enough but roiling with water
For the old man with few teeth among his children.
Waters that break up the tennis court
Overlooking the Econolodge and the highway
Into loosened green chunks of concrete,
Shredded basketball net and gutter of foam
Above the crumbling footpath.
Swimming’s free of charge, the weight-stacks rust.
Two body-builders man the building.
Weights as fragile as crockery.
A whirlpool in the Fountain of Youth
in which rested an elderly man with few teeth
among his children, the water-jets roiling green currents.
Upstairs the broken machinery among which a man
and his once bombshell wife struggled among weights
as breakable as crockery with seats of foam or sponge.
The waters have broken up the tennis court
overlooking the Econolodge, where you can swim for free.
In the Fountain of Youth a whirlpool promises life
but who’s young enough to gain from it.
At the bottom of the Fountain of Youth
stirs the whirlpool.
Chunks of green concrete with stripes
loosened on the tennis court; the basketball nets shredded,
as if someone had hung from them.
A gutter poured a foam-like liquid on a patch of lawn.
Chunks of weathered wood and shingle lay
beside a crumbling concrete footpath and chain-link fence.
Two body-builders manned the building.
Two elders struggled with the Nautilus, black iron
with chunks of foam ripped from the back rests.
The foam was pink and covered with Naugahyde.
The man, with coppery hair and skin, was for his age youthful;
and at a younger age, she might have been a bombshell.
Few others frequent the broken strength machines,
the frayed cables barely holding the weights in place.
Spots of rust appeared on the weight-stacks.
No one was paying for the upkeep, or so it looked.
Where are the investors who will renovate
this Fountain of Youth, the whirlpool
at the bottom floor in the men’s room,
the shower heads that do not stop?
The whirlpool at the bottom of the world
is water from the white River, the water recalculating
by means of water-jets.
Friday, March 18, 2011
June 26, 2010
Taxonomy and the evolution of primates teaches the relation of fingers to intelligence, the more articulated the finger the greater the dexterity, until vocables come next. Symbol-making, what distinguishes humans, results from hands, not the tongue. What were the symbols? Cairns, crosses, fertility objects, painted herds of deer or bison, geese effigies above altars. Not the symbol but an image to invoke one creature, the image being the creature until the creature comes of its own accord. For the sake of shorthand, the symbol arrives, maybe the synecdoche.
A French prisoner, his face tattooed, had killed his cell-mate to eat his lung—I can’t recall if he’d consumed both lobes. Maybe one was enough. Was a sexual impulse involved, the desire to consume the beloved, just as a man might bite the shoulder of a woman during the act? On that sunny arid day I’d taken my Claritin D and was as high as a kite. I was jogging slowly besides a drainage ditch choked with wildflowers—buttercups, white-petalled daisies, and purple vetch. As I breathed deeply and looked at the flower-filled ditch and the lowlands around it, so suitable for a vernal pool the size of a large cow-pond, nearly as wide as some playing-field for an aboriginal sport, I thought of the lungs as a sieve pulling in waves of air as the ditch and the nearly level swampland breathes in water, filtering the nutrients from these elements through wild plants or capillaries until the whole field bursts into flower or the running subject rejuvenates, witnessing the actions of weeds comb the rainwater and the runoff untilo the sun comes out and the eyes and pistils of the wildflowers burst into irregular nebulas of color. Ahead was an access road of unusually red soil with the spruce on either side cut down, looking as if an expansion of housing developments into the woods were being planned, descending into the woods in sharper, more rutted steps. I was taken by the odor of sap, but as it became clear that the road would be harder to negotiate, I about-faced. Once in sight the aquatic center resembled a secure block of semi-clear glass or burnished steel, reflecting the sky and its sparse clouds.
Lebanon, an old mill town, quiet in summer evenings, deserted almost, the largest crowds beneath the lights of the ice-cream stand. Otherwise the parking spaces around the darkened commons free, a handful of boys in their early teens in the commons, others either home or by the lakeside with their families; the families have left their roomy white Colonials for the weekend.
………………………….
Those engineers are going to steer the course of the stars someday, re-route the gorges, merge rivers.
And after flooding their ancestors’ hamlets,
Maybe colonize Mars, and drive canals between craters.
How the salesmen with that frosted hair would like a little piece of their magic.
They’ll colonize the castles made among the stars
They control like some stage machinery.
The perpetual shift of stage sets revealing their machinery.
Certainly I won’t have the key to this sideshow
Half-infatuated by Lindsay Lohan in her backless dress
In transit to the courtroom on the MS network dot-com—
Let me read my messages. Rather, I don’t get much mail.
Come to think of it, that dress looks made of mylar foil,
A fabric that can be propelled through pure space
By sunlight alone. Lift it from the figure,
Lift your skirt and fly.
…………………………..
Six pots of nearly withering Romaine lettuce leaves, three other potted plants, two peppers, one tomato, bought at the Price Chopper on sale, about to dessicate on the vine. Two bags of dessicant in the basement, deemed not enough by the housing inspector. A bag of poison boken open, a bucket of antifreeze, a dead mouse. Old clay pots with dried up stems still inside them. Cobwebs on all the beams and joists. Why does this side of the house sink from the other side, as if it wished to fall? Weeds of an especially tenacious dandelion not flowering yet that I most deftly tug from the root ball to remove the plant, a plant thriving in the most granitic of soils, where the dirt drive meets the street among rubble almost too stony to walk upright, better to crawl or coax your car above the first abrupt hump before the splash of tiger-lillies that conceal the incertitude of the storage shed’s foundations.
A French prisoner, his face tattooed, had killed his cell-mate to eat his lung—I can’t recall if he’d consumed both lobes. Maybe one was enough. Was a sexual impulse involved, the desire to consume the beloved, just as a man might bite the shoulder of a woman during the act? On that sunny arid day I’d taken my Claritin D and was as high as a kite. I was jogging slowly besides a drainage ditch choked with wildflowers—buttercups, white-petalled daisies, and purple vetch. As I breathed deeply and looked at the flower-filled ditch and the lowlands around it, so suitable for a vernal pool the size of a large cow-pond, nearly as wide as some playing-field for an aboriginal sport, I thought of the lungs as a sieve pulling in waves of air as the ditch and the nearly level swampland breathes in water, filtering the nutrients from these elements through wild plants or capillaries until the whole field bursts into flower or the running subject rejuvenates, witnessing the actions of weeds comb the rainwater and the runoff untilo the sun comes out and the eyes and pistils of the wildflowers burst into irregular nebulas of color. Ahead was an access road of unusually red soil with the spruce on either side cut down, looking as if an expansion of housing developments into the woods were being planned, descending into the woods in sharper, more rutted steps. I was taken by the odor of sap, but as it became clear that the road would be harder to negotiate, I about-faced. Once in sight the aquatic center resembled a secure block of semi-clear glass or burnished steel, reflecting the sky and its sparse clouds.
Lebanon, an old mill town, quiet in summer evenings, deserted almost, the largest crowds beneath the lights of the ice-cream stand. Otherwise the parking spaces around the darkened commons free, a handful of boys in their early teens in the commons, others either home or by the lakeside with their families; the families have left their roomy white Colonials for the weekend.
………………………….
Those engineers are going to steer the course of the stars someday, re-route the gorges, merge rivers.
And after flooding their ancestors’ hamlets,
Maybe colonize Mars, and drive canals between craters.
How the salesmen with that frosted hair would like a little piece of their magic.
They’ll colonize the castles made among the stars
They control like some stage machinery.
The perpetual shift of stage sets revealing their machinery.
Certainly I won’t have the key to this sideshow
Half-infatuated by Lindsay Lohan in her backless dress
In transit to the courtroom on the MS network dot-com—
Let me read my messages. Rather, I don’t get much mail.
Come to think of it, that dress looks made of mylar foil,
A fabric that can be propelled through pure space
By sunlight alone. Lift it from the figure,
Lift your skirt and fly.
…………………………..
Six pots of nearly withering Romaine lettuce leaves, three other potted plants, two peppers, one tomato, bought at the Price Chopper on sale, about to dessicate on the vine. Two bags of dessicant in the basement, deemed not enough by the housing inspector. A bag of poison boken open, a bucket of antifreeze, a dead mouse. Old clay pots with dried up stems still inside them. Cobwebs on all the beams and joists. Why does this side of the house sink from the other side, as if it wished to fall? Weeds of an especially tenacious dandelion not flowering yet that I most deftly tug from the root ball to remove the plant, a plant thriving in the most granitic of soils, where the dirt drive meets the street among rubble almost too stony to walk upright, better to crawl or coax your car above the first abrupt hump before the splash of tiger-lillies that conceal the incertitude of the storage shed’s foundations.
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