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.