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.

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.