Artisanal cheese (Jaw Lock)

The public radio commentator du jour
complained about those country kitchens
through which his designer dog would run
during another afternoon soiree
in which the guests would mob
the selfsame drafty country kitchen
the roomiest room in the whole
renovated Home and Garden sort of home.
He'd flagged wedges of artisanal cheese
on the butcher-block table
of that drafty country kitchen,
but the dog had toppled them.
It was a big designer dog
furry and lovable in its way
but neither did it recognize

Thus moaned the commentator du jour
on public radio through locked jaws,
one who denies owning the world
exercising his privileges within it.

Air Guitar

He'll be sought after by the quarterlies
and asked about his days in the wilderness
among the lumberjacks and stumps

Now he plays among the stars, and stretches

Before he goes, he'll get his parcel of the glory
a warm bed and socks and absolute power

News from the guru

Don't have much to offer this month except old material dating from the 80s and 90s.

Imputed reader, enjoy.

Cauliflower (84?)

I.

A boy exorcises morning with a cauliflower,
swinging it baton-like, lashing air as with a whip.
I watch the exorcism from a bus, the motor idling,
the windows bottle-green. I’ve had my fill.

The drooping, dusty underblades of leaf
guard off-white convolutions afternoon will blacken
when it brings me to Seville’s Moorish limits.
His flower falls like a careless judgement on the town:

walls of swank marinas spooled with razor wire
behind which the coast glitters fitfully
contaminated by a German joint concern,
then dusty corner shopfronts, their comestible signs

tilted over mottled picture windows, in back some tapas,
seafruits, exorbitant beside undusted nectarine cartons,
peach, pear, pina, the winds from Africa.

II.

Wanderlust led them to Andalus
where aqueducts totter by orange mounds.
The Roman concrete is turning into sand.

Unmoved when advertisements peel from walls
or whitewash from imitation Moorish arches
gypsies mob the train station

in which a fretwork of schedules
wrinkle like seersucker fabric under glass --
dismissed by a single hand, a wrist-flick,
the flower-head, rolling like a planet -- benedicite.

III.

Rosettes in cathedral limestone
flowers that last, like stained glass

petals tracking limestone floors
regime upon regime,

unlike a cauliflower
in the hand of thief or farmer--

blacker convolutions
framing off-white effulgence.

IV.

It must be a beauty then -- why otherwise whistle
at world's-end, off-season Malaga, the apex
of this hotspot a park where black swans float
through reflections of public flora, coarse, orange,

beyond which hotels lean into the Costa del Sol
like stacks of beige cafeteria dinnerplates--
as if reflected by trick mirrors, or mirrors
in hotel lobbies, reclining from Torremolinos,
a coastline of drab, overpriced clipjoints,
tattoists, false oracles.

He leaps above
the virgin's sidewalk portrait
Euro-hippies chalk in, her lids marbly arcs
ephemeral as greasepaint. Her mantle's azure
fills the grid in. No one's invited to follow.

Between ('94)

Who knows who you will cross in a library
other than schoolkids eager to scan microfilm
or transients who use the chairs to doze
because they're padded, or lapsed academics
attempting to find more time in which to learn
or the wealthy widow looking for a mystery?
Often they're people who just don't know what to do
with all time on their hands, too curious to sleep,
too tired to read, amorous enough to cut the pages
from Esquire perhaps. For them life lacks secrets
while for the schoolkids it promises. So curiosity
moves them to read about dinosaurs without
the first thought being the cause of extinction.
After all that grazing prehistoric grass, no matter
how many flowers on the prairie they scattered--
by comets stoned, weather starved, dinosaurs were passé.
But the kids are too busy to mock regulars who snooze
on mounds of dailies, or crackpots whose theories
academies refuse to confirm. Surrounded by chances
for a better life they cannot use, better they rest
as if a bed of news features and stock market reports
were a tarpit, a place for bones to lie
between destinations, one meant, but one approaching.

Clay (89?) (ancient, in confessional mode)

Your father's wet, hamlike thumb-pads still press dough
as if to say, on pizza's clayey texture, paddy-cake,
his palms welted from the lobster traps he's never made

a living with. Barely he swims the tide of business now.
Since pizza doesn't make a fortune, he kneads more crust,
impressing it with scars as buried as you are, wafers

wolfed up without ceremony, just by someone hungry,
who wouldn't know your father's recipe from sawdust.

If you think of the crust he bakes daily as his coinage
then the scars on his hands become all he has, except
a favorite son inheriting your albums, your Goodwill clothes,
as he was given all the better presents, things for sport.

And your father bequeaths nothing else to the ground
that you lie in, while it treats you as a rent healed by rising.
As the palms he retracts from flour seem youthful,
those chubby hands undissolved yet in sink-water,

think how strong someone becomes from what he sells:
his thumb-prints and lesions from trap-cable talced by flour
look as if nothing had happened but childhood, clay.

Icehouse ('94?)

A bank of snow that overreached my head
I hosed to make a surface hard and icy
and tunneled through the icy mound I'd made
dumping pails of water to smooth the surface more.
First it was hard to squeeze through the entry.
But I hollowed an inside for myself with a spade
until the floor was glass, and heat exposed
dead grass at my shivering, blue-jeaned knees.
The walls were translucent as glass cubes
on the sides of kindergartens or clinics
and while light might be allowed to flood
the lobbies through that warped translucence
no pedestrian could tell what moved inside
those ugly institutional buildings where bodies
were probed, incised or pruned in right directions.
This house of ice, where I could hide, was like
the frosted glass of the offices of the important.
Sight itself is a portal through which are misread
dilations or brows raised, as if they were kind --
but in the pupils' black, truly we are in the stars
where a motion is a portent -- just as my body
moved through its slick house, this glass house
no stone had yet been turned against.