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.