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.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
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.
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