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.
Monday, November 28, 2011
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..
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