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.

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

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.