July 21 2012

Henry Kravis, of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts,

Known corporate Nabisco raider

[Famed for raiding Nabisco, the hostile takeover king,]

Twirling his drink inside a party scenario

Admires from a chilled distance Tracy Emin,

An artist no stranger to money

Who’d pull the sterling string

From the pound note to behold:

Yes I am wed, my wife runs the Guggenheim,

No we are proud and shameless,

Art and money’s marriage most natural.

But for this I’d make an overture.

Are you real? Like a cookie?

I’ve seen your cohort’s bovines split

Inside tinted amber picture cubes

Been astounded by his diamond skull’s

Pockmarked empty stare.

What moneyed insouciance at play!

What  gold-plated middle finger to conscience!

How I love John Galt and good jokes!

I’ve a sweet tooth also,

Sated by the white trash

Squeezed between two manhole covers

Like peanut butter jammed

Inside a human asshole

All to fool the Selective Service board,

all shite and beef fat twice-run through a blender.

What have you, riot girrl

That I have not seen yet

Other than the names of your tumbles in the hay

Emblazoned on the walls of oh-so tony galleries?

Just what do you have for me

That Damian hasn’t got?

From where comes your fire

Never to be equated with talent?

Hey Donald! Drop by for a bit

Navigate your combover to this port

As respite for your storm

And meet Tracey, Tracey Emin.

Your accent among London haunts

I  cannot locate so long since

I’ve passed above Gravesend in transit

Or in Barclays shaken hands with directors

To finalize the deal that is an art

And is Art, but yes how are you

Doing and yes I do admire

All the belletristic brassiness

Of  your catalogue of hookups

Check out the fonts that spell me

Baby, any day! My tower! (Echo!)

I am woman whose art is therapy

In my total branding I scuttle

The working-class badge/bondage gear

As deep blot upon escutcheon

All roads are ladders

To a plutocratic hub.

All roads are leading

To a Fortune 500 list,

No longer the boys club.

Just watch me move in.

All roads are golden ladders

Of plutocrats and wisemen

Joining hands with consorts

Art and commerce

Patron and art-worker

Fat commissions and placemats

Emin rhyming with Neiman

Leroy, descending gilt clouds:

Ahoy, doll! Love your hustle,

You smasher of paradigms,

Though you’re not my style.

No labels, Leroy, I insist upon,

Though brandings do not stigmatize

Let the world flourish with them

From table napkin to billboard

Or the screens on city buses

Advertising Pan de Bimbo

Brandished as to say I have arrived

The hipster couple shed

Of their bohemian accoutrements

For commute from Great Neck

Or to Mayfair from Swindon.

Donald to the late Leroy:

Among my Louis the XIVth

Gold-flaked banisters helixing

To the cozy breakfast nook

Of my priciest of suites

Your laminate placemats

[on which could spill

Buckets of Tang and not wilt]

Of splashed paints crudded up

Into thrashing polo sticks and helmets

Have become both passé [or louche]

[or whatever] and incongruous:

Leroy, you’re truly fired.

(A thud, as a heart sinks

In an absent uneasy chest.)

Plutonian depths no longer

Apply  to hell we represent below

This is a bad heartburn

And the fire is above.

Besides guarding Dis,

Pluto guarded gold-hoards.

Where was the interest,

Where the returns?

Like Timon, he folded

And cradled dinars in his arms

Feeling them melt from flesh

Fed on acorns and tubers

Void a world of exchange,

Cash stuffed in the mattress,

Whatever regent or personage
Stamped on bills or change unnoticed.

Tracey’s shift of balance on high-heels

Clicking like those of adjutants
On floors of hardwood or composite tile
Of lobbies or throne rooms
Signals her delight in this attention.

Your sense of fun’s infectious

You monopolize the fun virus,

The virus of fun that informs

The toons, toons one to three.

I am the sartorial toon

And she the toon of crisis.

We both like getting tattoed

To show in cool vibrant bars.

She excels as weeping witness

While I hold the fort down.

A toon that acts as she does

Becomes a self-spinoff.

And there are many spinoffs,

Not all of them successful.

From July 31 2011 Sunday

To wear a uniform and to bear arms converges
if one also wears a bandolier, which in a manner of speaking
is bearing arms also. Hear me out, bear with me.
In the parade, the constable is proud, his moustache waxed for the event.
His family he displays like trophies in a glass case,
His lovely children, his wife, fleshed out for maternity,
Obedient by nature. The burghermeister credits him for much,
For keeping the peace, not the best of men but not the worst,
And affable besides, a real sport and Rotarian.
They are riding little trains in the square,
An event the town captures on its Facebook page,
But in his dungeon, he becomes a different creature.
Whose work is dirty yet necessary. The fingernails
Of an inmate are pulled, behind a thick wall
Someone screams. No one upstairs needs to know,
Certainly no one marching in the parade, among the floats
Of wedding-cake on which a beauty queen balances.
No doubt a young spectator has the time of her life
Watching the whited spectacle on the main thoroughfare,
The excitement captured in a letter to her mum.
She’s an au pair from the provinces after all.

No end to the white t-shirts at the summer camp,
No end to the chain of supply and demand.
If the sentence is no longer parallel, there’s been a mistake,
Where is the root of the mistake that has derailed
The natural order of the sentence. Around the corner,
Improvement is fragile, culture is precarious,
While teeth can become carious at a late age,
No end to the rotten teeth-rows, to kids just out of school,
The crowds walking in different directions,
To the variety of white uniforms fashioned in a sentence


Bold, disembowel, trowel, pitchfork, mallet
The strength of the sunlight fails to grace the lawn
I passed who knows how many rows of horse-corn riding to Fairlee.
But the seed dries in the husk, the pith hardens as the husk splits, and when the rail falls, it furrows above the dried-up soil until it finds drainage, so it doesn’t soak anything, it only flows over everything it touches, hard soil, dried blades. It only passes.

From January 2 Monday

Which is the whole point, the still point
You watch the curving world vanish
Behind the weather, you watch
The slightly curved world you do not own
Nor can ever
vanish behind the weather,
your privilege to witness empty space,
the proportion between the space
and the world beneath it
compressed into a gentle curve,
a blink of lights,
the silent vehicles beads of an abacus,
farms that don’t seem to grow things anymore.

++++
Earn the view shouted the descending bicyclist
Who passed me while I peddled upward.
As the dog barked at anything that kept moving
His owner said, you don’t own the world boy,
As I was about to begin my mountain bike ride.

I am a term between these statements.
A ride uphill is work, the wages are the view.
The view is an empty sky, the world beneath it
Shrinking. The harder I pedal, the higher I go.
What else does all this work buy me?

Because I do not own the world I see
I must work for the things inside it
As they vanish beneath the weather,
A gentle curve.

No doubt behind that curve
Arrives a boat to harbor,
No doubt a vehicle, abacus-bead
Homes to its destination.
I have earned the right
Not to observe closely.

Earn the view! The downhill peddler said
As the bicycle beneath me became heavier
Until all thought about the view was out of mind.

At the foot of the hill, her hound barked madly
At whatever moved, until she told her dog
At whatever moved, until she told him,
Hand gripping leash, you do not own the world.

You have earned what is out of range
No doubt you’d earn at equal price.

4/12/11 Sat.

I don’t know if a doting mother made me what I am, an embarrassment to the rest of the family who refuse to speak to me so far. I flinched and joined with one woman who was made ill by my preferences. I tried to drink myself into happiness. To an early grave I go. My deformities made me stronger. The bloodline is polluted from the start. That’s politically incorrect of course to say. My doting mother tanned herself the texture of a saddle-bag. She’d been a shop-girl when she made the wrong choice by wedding into it. You can’t shed the bloodline like a skin. The civil charges I escaped by running to the city, my new life before the eyes of my children’s’ mother. But there was no time to cry above the spilled milk. Only a dog eats affection. A dog also returns to its own vomit. But I am not a dog. I smelled like the barn I entered with him, anonymous. Anonymous, with two children and a half, was never caught with pants down, nor was he moved to blush.

I am walking with a cane on a Florida beach with my escort holding me up for my final days. I spend most of them expectorating, spitting out the past in blood. I wear my mother’s tan like a glove, which belies my rotten metastasized internal organs. My sins I insist stem from that first pollution, the commingling of attributes never meant to mix in one man, who would be a girl, a girl who enjoyed being held down, who enjoyed the roughness of the sport in a barn off the beaten track, a track of Burma Shave signs. Yet the Japs melted those cans into Zero planes that flew above the Philippines when the traveling salesman escorted me to my happy undoing.

To his silent accusers he would deny his queerness. He was the first, but I have no thought of him, or his postwar nuclear family the novelty of the television in his living room. Half-crippled on this dismal beach with its arcades and rotting piers and drunken fishermen visited him with boils and goiters, as if booze or pestilence had swelled them, no picture of Dorian Gray for me to consult these late hours. There’s no bringing together the polar bear and alligator to copulate. What was I thinking?

That was a good storm, and though we are experiencing setbacks against the onslaught of the spring, when the lie of the land seems to lose its admirable rectilineality and the mud puddles reflect the blue as much as a thawed lake, we can still roll back the world to an ice age, we can cover the world in snow only if we redouble our efforts. Not all is lost. When you think about what you are trying to do, close your eyes and see the glaciers and caves of ice you’ve become. Think when you descend slowly, eyes closed.

When every sentence seems an ending anew, until another sentence replaces the sentence that came before. When every sentence that comes is the last step, until what follows becomes what precedes it, as if each step were a brick or a fieldstone in a wall, but a wall that is unfinished, spiraling to a chimney without smoke or a parapet mortared with the broken helixes of the sea-shell, the Fibunaccian mathematics crushed into shards that the foe cannot clutch without bleeding very badly, invisible fortress wall that cannot be scaled or knocked apart by means of the true bucket or cannot, the coil spring never tight enough to hurl a projectile of pitch into the enclosure with its familiar and comforting odors of hearths and bed sheets, no matter how foreign or repellent they might be to another. This half a page feels like years condensed into minutes if not seconds, but once you look up you will disabuse yourself of any distortions of scale, no magnum opus regarding you, just a paragraph.
But what does the paragraph see? Someone makes me or unmakes me, each line another limb or prosthetic. The themes of the day: insomnia, sunrises, hillsides, outcasts, family closet skeletons, cripples, final days, conclusions. But beginning with observations of weather, bird behavior, the budding of tulips in the snow, the bills paid, the errands and chores done.

An hour and a half of piano music, first Bach suites, then short pieces by Satie in which the composer deploys counterpoint along with the rhythms of ragtime among more pensive sections. Imagining incidents, that changed the course of more than one life unfamiliar with the initial violation or surrender to inclinations later hushed up and repressed. Is this merely an exercise in subjectivity when committed to paper? An event that was the undoing in other words of more than one beginning with the wife who learns of it first, but too late to break up the family or avoid the misery that followed. When reflecting upon such incidents and the misery that followed, who can inhabit the absolute present, incidents for which no therapy is possible. No therapist can run to the bedside with a cure. Confession of sins, then life-long penance?

From Dec. 25 2011

In the Dollar Store they are going to build, the knock-off GI Joes
Have deformed faces die-stamped upon the clay in China
Their arms move too awkwardly in their sockets to be useful
And their combat uniforms are melted with the skin they wear
Their stubby fingers cannot find the trigger or the gunbarrel
They have been given, their heads are smothered in cellophane

The combs you can buy for a dollar cannot be run
Through the blonde hair painted upon their soft skulls
The GI Joe knock-offs you can buy at the Dollar Store
Are often in one piece except for the arms
That can be broken off at will, except for the head
Without expression that can be unscrewed or pried off
From the rest of the vulcanized body

And the doll is best played with in back-lots
Or dirt craters without greenery without grass
And the children who play with these knock-offs
Are better dirty also, better without clean clothes,
Their hair mussed, snot running down their noses

And best the GI Joe you can get at the Dollar Store
Can take a beating on the dirt track
Can take the heat of the day and stay whole

The Dollar Store also has videos of fishermen
Said to have been broadcast on the major networks
Although at three in the morning not on prime-time
And though the fishermen cast their lines into a stream
Out west in Wyoming or elsewhere
These fishermen catch no fish on the pirated DVD transfer
Nor can they be fishermen of souls
And their DVD is nonrefundable
Their fly-rods gripped in sleeveless
Muscular arms that do not help them
Catch the fish—they are a bad dream

And another thing in the Dollar Store
You can get are these porcelain creations
Of pink madchens in flower-bells
Designed by mad ex-communicants
The excitement of Hummel figurines
Blazing in their long [sequestered] eyes [incarcerated?]
Nearby piles of clay pots and pocket calculators

From December 26 2011 to January 3 2012

From December 26 2011

Adjunct as a word makes me think of a decoupled train car,
orphaned on the B&M track. I think it means to be contingent upon,
And adjunct is no way to be, a parasitic connection to a campus,
Never among the college of priests, the flamen dialis, never among
The vestal virgins, never tending the eternal flame in the temple,
Never being made, always to schlep from one place to the next,
Condemned to an eternity of self-help seminars as they stretch
another century or decade, or the tailings of the new long one.
When I watch the sky when clear from this bluff, a light falls
And extinguishes itself above the line where the streetlamps
Illuminate the town in a frosty aura to the highway junction 25,
What appears to be a halo independent of a single light
Even those among the combination truck stop corner store.
Where the center is everywhere but the circumference nowhere
Where the rural highway plunges into the country side
A town with a single-staged rocket in the town center
But without the liquid fuel engine in its fuselage
A rocket grounded as the town inhabitants scrambling for work
Unless they have a summer home with furniture draped with bed-sheets
For three out of four seasons with the shutters drawn
Once you can walk on the lake you might as well ice-fish
If you don’t fall in, provided you can drill into the ice.
The section that you pull tells a story but not for as long
As the rings of a redwood lasting two thousand years
But instead of an archeology lesson you are ice-fishing
Not delving into the recent past as frozen over on the lake
Anyway the summer on the lakeside is quiet and uneventful.

From January 2

I wanted to dissolve
crushed walnuts in a glass
Thinking I could cure
My persistent headache

The convolutions of the nut
Matching those of the brain
The wine it mixed with
Turning to new blood

To water those mazes
Those rivers of thought
Capricious furrows
Like all medicine, bitter.


From January 3

In the city centers the stadiums and water-parks are immaculate

and so is the frozen-over water fountain.

But in the hinterland families eke out their living from grass and seeds,

and from January branches disappear all songbirds

along with the barn-swallow and the solitary finch.

From a concoction of ether and scarcer antihistamine, or from diesel fumes

comes a numbing intoxication much of the population depends upon,

distilled into mist breathed from a makeshift mask and piece of hose.

While fog shrouds the City, its auditoriums are bright until the power-outs.

And their dreams are filled with white-masked deities and rivers of treacle.

Through the thawing permafrost still cleaves the ox-driven plow.

The value of the paper currency is flatter than a paper upon which it’s
printed.

As are the merits of this work, all meant to flatter.

Last lines

The value of blank paper at the butt-end of a marbled composition book

Is greater than the ink spilled upon them, taking the form of hastily-written sentences

Of even less value than the ink spent to committing them on scarcer paper.

Soon the leaves of the book and the lines that wrinkle their surfaces

Can be counted on a single hand and on just more than one digit

And since more is less according to the laws of value,

As every shop-keeper knows, and since conversely less is more,

Filed leaves are cheaper, blank more costly

The further down I go upon the remaining pages

Until the last blank line in the whole book is priceless,

And the marbled cover less valuable on the market

Than the mill of the Great War or the funny money

Of the five and dime, or the money of Monopoly

When the other pieces of the board game have been lost

Which simply means you can neither win nor lose.

From Aug 28 and Sept 10 2011

From August 28 2011

The roof of the Apthorp building in the sun—
Seen from Columbus Circle, the rounded mansard rooftops,
Like domes of a cathedral, the renaissance, [Venetian Atlantis],
As if the sky were sunlit water, the Apthorp drowned.
What must it cost to rent, or even buy.
So what that Zabar’s was a tourist trap.
To the Plaza you can walk from this corner.
This is what is called a hot corner.
A tall, gaunt man in 1982 was practicing
Electric bass by the subway stop,
Picking out the tune to If you could read my mind—
But stopped on what a tale my thoughts could tell.
You can walk to the Plaza through Central Park,
Dodging the horse-drawn carriages and taxis,
In the year after the same man had lost his bass.
He swayed on the same spot, a change-cup in his hand.
Nothing happened much in the field of music.
You must witness how those rooftops shined
After the last rain, through the mist the sun is parting,
The curved pastels of slate or copper flashing,
The caryatids holding storeys up, the Moorish ornament,
How Venuice fused with the East, all that Apthorp improted,
Unaffordable on normal salaries, except for the view.

From September 10 2011

As the fall sun peeks through the slats of my bamboo roll-up blind—
As the crickets pause and the traffic resounds in longer intervals
And the garden bed dries, full-grown stalks of grass and pokeweed
Leaning into the direction of the withered tomato vines,
As nothing happens new under the shining of the sun in the yard,
The other side shady, the sun-dried currents of air running through
The attic, aerating the rafters, aerating the over-crowded vegetable garden
One man could not live upon if his life depended upon it.

From October 1, 2011

Behind me, behind my tail, is a murky green that is the stable element
And the world I understand. A few rocks, seven exactly, some sand
That flies to catch the light from all sides, the food from above,
Some flashing bubbles, many illusions on the walls around us,
Shadow from approaching bodies, creatures with different apparitions
And of different sizes, all with eyes and mouths and limbs,
Creatures who can neither swim nor even float. Their vibrations
Barely disturb our place, no turbulence. My fellows have risen
To another state, plucked from the surface. Nothing jars the glass.
I am still the sole cause of the turbulence around me.
See how my fins stirs the sand, how flecks of pyrite shine.
Outside, ungainly creatures pay tribute with offerings.

****

As you move above among the upper ranks, the more you know just who your friends, who might be foes are. Among the upper tiers, the fewer the numbers. The higher the tier, the fewer who circulate. In the very highest tier mingle a handful. The most high, the one who can afford to spurn the company who brought him here, sits behind black velvet curtains and doors so thick they could take bullets. No one knows what the most high does with his time, no one knows who the most high is. The most high knows by divination what is to come. He knows just who to watch.

Could I just ingratiate myself to the residents of the upper tiers, only half a dozen souls would get me into the sanctum sanctorum. Could I get a peak among those hallowed halls. The busts of elders, all emeriti by now, line those halls. Actually, their busts lie in dimly lit alcoves, their names in brass. Also written in stone the gaffes you made in youth, gaffes that nonplussed the master practitioner when he was about to confer his blessing. When he retracted his proverbial hand from your brow, when he retracted the laurel branch from your crown, he thought, too bad the loss for him, but after all is said and done, it’s for the better, otherwise no lesson learned. Fame’s bony finger that had beckoned now curled into a fist pulled back into a sack-cloth sleeve you once thought silk. [sleeve of sack-cloth you once thought silk.]

Those among the upper tiers are ghostly in their pure magisteriality, but they pride themselves in how low they can come down to earth as they pride themselves on the low places from which they have arrived. They can pepper their speech with profanity with the best of them, knowing when to be circumspect, when to be cautious and balanced in tone, and when to stop. It’s their forbearance after all that earned them their place. Don’t change into the china shop like an 800-lb. gorilla was the best advice they ever received. The vernacular is the blood they must vampirized in the places to which they descend.

Lay a wreath at the foot of the eminence grise, speak your flowery encomium on the stage, and keep your thoughts to yourself.

Never forget that the effusions of the hapless are like the lines cast by novice fly-fishermen in all directions, catching nothing, getting no attention, piquing no interest from the fish-folk.

From the phone booth he rushes waving, to the upper balcony he walks, waving in acknowledgement as well, barely knowing these are his acolytes calling him from the streets, the city traffic drowning the greetings they utter.

A wave of people in a throng pushes admirer from admired, the master practitioner in his suite, his assistants attending to his needs.

“I fly from a place where flattery reigns” Purcell, Indian Queen (librettist Dryden).

Life at the top is not all eh dreamed he thinks as he mails the alimony check or tries to connect with his kids, who have lived in his tall shadow all their lives, for whom he expressed little affection. The memoirs they will write will drag his saintly visage through the sewers: how cold and how small, how small-minded he will seem. Don’t go there he ejaculates in the interview, puzzling the earnest cub reporter.

To stay in touch with the plebs he descends to the crowd, both hands in the pockets of his of his funky unwashed loosely fitting jeans.

The shaggy tendrils of the beets, the farmer’s soil still caking them, he fondles after getting them at the produce stand. How long has he let the hired help do all his shopping, after all?

How he points at the antiques in the window reveals his shrewdness, how he fingers his chin in firm examination as he lends an ear to the dealer. It turned out to be a good day. He soaked himself in the vernacular of the bazaar.

Finally, the fall has arrived in more than name, the air chilly, the day wet, rain dripping from the eaves, the summer vapors blown away, dead leaves sprawled on the grass, their dampness attaching them to the car’s windshield, bright red the sumac leaves among the maples, deceiving us with promises of oriental spices and color, of schooners aloft, their cannons blazing against Caribbean or African pirates, the newly forged chains rattling below deck, the forequarters empty, Boreas puffing away, no sight of land yet, the turbulence of sub-tropical waters matching the turbulence of wind propelling the barely sea-worthy craft southward, away from the cabins and chimneys, the glowing fireplaces of the colonials on this most august and calm of side-streets, in whose cupboard is a biscuit-tin decorated with the cat-folk, the cat mother bonneted, her arms wound in a shawl, her cabin behind her, no mouse-folk in sight, not today, not ever, never, where did the father-cat part from her, her brood swaddled in rocking cradles and bassinets, rumor telling us of the ship making its destination, among the bazaars or the spice hills, of red chilies the sumac false evokes, a funerary whiff of mold and ashes inching into the house.