1.
Really we were stitched from aliens, Kent claimed.
And drugs, especially hard ones, the ones the state abhors,
Are the means we reacquire the lost unity of other planets.
We can’t see them normally, Kent added. But we sense their turnings
Among the spaces that have been incorrectly dubbed vacancies
When many asteroids and solar winds populate what we call space
As krill and coral in the sea. But, Kent admonished, we can’t see it
Unless we open our eyes very wide, only possible by means
Of artificial stimulants: oxy, ecstasy, or crack. The state
maintains its legitimacy by repressing this portal to knowledge!
Which, were it available to all, would vaporize its edifices
Into air! Buildings and beliefs seen through. The drug lords
Should be canonized. From whence does this energy come?
From the kids with piercings. Every junkie was a visionary once,
But stigmatized. Even my jeremiad evaporates into air.
A full professor of comp. lit once, now branded. The state derives
its sovereignty through such repression, as incapable
Of thinking outside the box as the box can think
Outside itself, or think about other boxes outside itself.
Hooray for the dealers, hooray for the drug lords: they keep it real.
2.
So our eyes are Saturnine, our fists Martian, and all else
Below the girdle Venusian. Our sixth sense comes from Pluto,
Its ice caves so acoustically matched to the sounds they capture.
Pluto is the numbness of the palate after the taste of the powder.
Our neural networks the streaks of meteors, the heart a segment
Of a sun that dies into an ember in the next thousand millennia,
The liver, spleen, intestines lunar, along with grey convolutions
Of the brain and medulla oblongata, seas of tranquility or choler,
The blood a magma from some planetary body liquefied by contact
With the sun, the ears vortices of anti-matter or collapsed stars,
But the emotions themselves from other planets. And each planet
Produced a race that only knew no more than two of them,
sensible because that way they didn’t conflict. But with dope
emotions fuse into a white-hot metal in the brain’s alembic:
Thus our innately mongrelized interplanetary nature coheres
Into a post-human species without fences or boundaries..
O that Dionysian knowledge that frees us, from shopworn
Notions of "rights" or sovereignty of the body, from ideology too!
Why? Useless. People fall into place, their nature, from
Other planets—not from themselves. Selves interpenetrate
In a white-hot collective intersubjectivity for which we haven’t names.
A visionary views one like himself through the rags he wears.
So If you see a prophet dressed in anything but sackcloth, run.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Figuera da Foz
1.
Salazar jailed people
who weren’t friends,
flooded their cells with brine
and crabs. They swallowed
or screamed. Who knows what heresies
were hatched there? Fledglings
wobbled on the parapet, burdens
to their soaring parents,
their feathers useless as pillow stuffing.
Until their cannulae toughened,
infancy would last. They clambered
the heights or dropped on the tide,
or waddled the two roofs of the island,
never busy with the inmates gone,
limp as newborns, their muscles atrophied,
dumbfounded by sunlight and water,
but possibly grateful enough to forgive.
And maybe Salazar died quietly too,
his dependents beside him, forgetful
of this mid-coast island, the inmates,
their special crimes, their politics.
Or if he dreamt, he dreamt of fledglings:
had he awoke, no doubt
he would have called the Holy See.
What else was there to dream about
rowing toward an island without a name
to trip upon your tongue.
2.
Only prairie grass
keeps the hills from erosion,
tufts of feathers snagged
on its tares, the eye disinvited
to latch onto detail,
the seedling and shells
blown into ocean,
no more indigenous than flesh–
no ledge or niche, just beach
on which to sunbathe,
the treeless penal island conquered.
They preened,
pecked their neighbors,
replaced themselves.
The down that never grew
beyond the stubble shuddered.
Speckled egg-shells
littered the hillsides
without riches from
navigadores,
beached for repairs.
Stepping-stone to Madeira,
no place for roots to fork.
Why covet attachments?
3.
In the General’s dream
a beak awled an oyster,
the shell dank as parapet walls
down which water trickled
cloudy with cement from stones.
The shell cracked,
the gull bolted down the meat.
This disconcerted him.
The fortress was raised
against such portents,
yet everything you kept in a box
oozed out the seams.
Salazar jailed people
who weren’t friends,
flooded their cells with brine
and crabs. They swallowed
or screamed. Who knows what heresies
were hatched there? Fledglings
wobbled on the parapet, burdens
to their soaring parents,
their feathers useless as pillow stuffing.
Until their cannulae toughened,
infancy would last. They clambered
the heights or dropped on the tide,
or waddled the two roofs of the island,
never busy with the inmates gone,
limp as newborns, their muscles atrophied,
dumbfounded by sunlight and water,
but possibly grateful enough to forgive.
And maybe Salazar died quietly too,
his dependents beside him, forgetful
of this mid-coast island, the inmates,
their special crimes, their politics.
Or if he dreamt, he dreamt of fledglings:
had he awoke, no doubt
he would have called the Holy See.
What else was there to dream about
rowing toward an island without a name
to trip upon your tongue.
2.
Only prairie grass
keeps the hills from erosion,
tufts of feathers snagged
on its tares, the eye disinvited
to latch onto detail,
the seedling and shells
blown into ocean,
no more indigenous than flesh–
no ledge or niche, just beach
on which to sunbathe,
the treeless penal island conquered.
They preened,
pecked their neighbors,
replaced themselves.
The down that never grew
beyond the stubble shuddered.
Speckled egg-shells
littered the hillsides
without riches from
navigadores,
beached for repairs.
Stepping-stone to Madeira,
no place for roots to fork.
Why covet attachments?
3.
In the General’s dream
a beak awled an oyster,
the shell dank as parapet walls
down which water trickled
cloudy with cement from stones.
The shell cracked,
the gull bolted down the meat.
This disconcerted him.
The fortress was raised
against such portents,
yet everything you kept in a box
oozed out the seams.
Yazidi (Feb. 03)
The rebel angel, Melek Taus, who made the world.
The god’s propitiation with incense at a cave mouth.
We may debate the name of the rebel angel,
who may not care for the creation
which he released into the void
like a falcon from his hand-perch
to soar above post-diluvian waters.
On a single continent mingle placental
with marsupial mammals, the possum
that much later cowers by the interstate
is concealed gracefully by giant ferns.
Melek Taus, the rebel angel, has doubts
about creation, but in his lassitude, lets it stand.
The flick of wrist inherent in artistic hands
can surprise him. Division is inscribed
in migrations of eider-ducks and geese,
forked like the first words flying from the tongue.
They’ll have to propitiate him in groves
and better yet in caves. From its unlit throat
groans an oracle: the worshipers have learned
the pitfalls of literal translation.
The god’s propitiation with incense at a cave mouth.
We may debate the name of the rebel angel,
who may not care for the creation
which he released into the void
like a falcon from his hand-perch
to soar above post-diluvian waters.
On a single continent mingle placental
with marsupial mammals, the possum
that much later cowers by the interstate
is concealed gracefully by giant ferns.
Melek Taus, the rebel angel, has doubts
about creation, but in his lassitude, lets it stand.
The flick of wrist inherent in artistic hands
can surprise him. Division is inscribed
in migrations of eider-ducks and geese,
forked like the first words flying from the tongue.
They’ll have to propitiate him in groves
and better yet in caves. From its unlit throat
groans an oracle: the worshipers have learned
the pitfalls of literal translation.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Daylight Savings Time Blues
I stared through the window as the sun fell
and only read my magazine sporadically.
How much time I had to contemplate the view.
There wasn’t much of one, but it wasn’t raining.
And there was lots of time and little water.
From rehab a man stumbled to cross the path
of a black dog being led on a long leash,
while the sun was dropping: daylight savings time
had just begun the other week: the bounty
was time concentered in my blue fists by ocean.
Time slipped through the furrows of my palms
as money or water. If money, it had passed
or was about to come. If water, it was under me.
Puddles were frozen mirrors dusted with gravel,
the sight of which Narcissus would have spurned.
What is the dirty aspect wedded to the ground?
He left the rehab center in tatters: the future
was clear, it could be moved like mounds of dirt.
My stare rose through a picture window to the sky
to fall onto an old address, the end of the street
where my neighbor talked despairingly of economics
to the passing cars on the new arterial.
The ferry station’s glitter hadn’t happened yet.
The porch sagged as it oversaw the tankers.
A drive-in bank took the place of a tavern
(Rex and His Fingers Three played weekly).
And above the piers rose the oil-derricks,
detail busy as overturned horseshoe crabs,
their ancient fretwork looking terribly new,
their heliarc lights dusting what they touched –
broken keels, brass chronometers
leaning into gravel-pits. You’d think in the mist
the lamps would make spontaneous gas
and spark another dawn among the dew
that clings to I-beams and to blue tarpaulins
where spider-webs suspend among their eyelets.
Nov. 3 2002--Feb 04 rev’d
and only read my magazine sporadically.
How much time I had to contemplate the view.
There wasn’t much of one, but it wasn’t raining.
And there was lots of time and little water.
From rehab a man stumbled to cross the path
of a black dog being led on a long leash,
while the sun was dropping: daylight savings time
had just begun the other week: the bounty
was time concentered in my blue fists by ocean.
Time slipped through the furrows of my palms
as money or water. If money, it had passed
or was about to come. If water, it was under me.
Puddles were frozen mirrors dusted with gravel,
the sight of which Narcissus would have spurned.
What is the dirty aspect wedded to the ground?
He left the rehab center in tatters: the future
was clear, it could be moved like mounds of dirt.
My stare rose through a picture window to the sky
to fall onto an old address, the end of the street
where my neighbor talked despairingly of economics
to the passing cars on the new arterial.
The ferry station’s glitter hadn’t happened yet.
The porch sagged as it oversaw the tankers.
A drive-in bank took the place of a tavern
(Rex and His Fingers Three played weekly).
And above the piers rose the oil-derricks,
detail busy as overturned horseshoe crabs,
their ancient fretwork looking terribly new,
their heliarc lights dusting what they touched –
broken keels, brass chronometers
leaning into gravel-pits. You’d think in the mist
the lamps would make spontaneous gas
and spark another dawn among the dew
that clings to I-beams and to blue tarpaulins
where spider-webs suspend among their eyelets.
Nov. 3 2002--Feb 04 rev’d
Booshwah (July 04-05?)
Somnolent, suburban, and decent,
no extraordinary tastes or peccadillos
or pretense to be among the lesser ranks,
no purposeful bohemian self-exclusion,
the last novel finished on a string of grants
the academy bequeathed, who have been nothing
if not generous, showering accolades and dollars
like ticker-tape confetti dropped on spacemen
who only last week were taking urine tests
and walking into pressure chambers barefoot
or crawling into hardened, spinning pods.
Along the way to work he nods to all
and reads the entertainment section on the train:
is there nothing more unnatural than ballerinas?
Have you seen their faces done in pancake makeup?
He’ll bring his wife to Ralph Vaughan-Williams
or go to Tuscany or to the south of France
and likes to twist his endings up with paradox,
a trope he can’t exhaust: it can't go wrong.
Sobriety, that deity wisely guiding him,
surely has a name. But he doesn’t know it.
The merits of his performance are so many.
How he grasped the moment of the everyday:
watching his daughter skip-rope above roadkill
leads him to a meditation on all creatures,
how the paperboy tosses news on the steps,
what cows look like in sunset (healthy ones!),
and how they ruminate as with a wisdom
they don't convey, never biting more off than they chew.
no extraordinary tastes or peccadillos
or pretense to be among the lesser ranks,
no purposeful bohemian self-exclusion,
the last novel finished on a string of grants
the academy bequeathed, who have been nothing
if not generous, showering accolades and dollars
like ticker-tape confetti dropped on spacemen
who only last week were taking urine tests
and walking into pressure chambers barefoot
or crawling into hardened, spinning pods.
Along the way to work he nods to all
and reads the entertainment section on the train:
is there nothing more unnatural than ballerinas?
Have you seen their faces done in pancake makeup?
He’ll bring his wife to Ralph Vaughan-Williams
or go to Tuscany or to the south of France
and likes to twist his endings up with paradox,
a trope he can’t exhaust: it can't go wrong.
Sobriety, that deity wisely guiding him,
surely has a name. But he doesn’t know it.
The merits of his performance are so many.
How he grasped the moment of the everyday:
watching his daughter skip-rope above roadkill
leads him to a meditation on all creatures,
how the paperboy tosses news on the steps,
what cows look like in sunset (healthy ones!),
and how they ruminate as with a wisdom
they don't convey, never biting more off than they chew.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
ZOOS, ETC. (moldy oldy 1980s through 90s)
1.
Like he's been told, a circus bear (retired) paws some sky,
and gathers to his mouth like more honey some space.
Since his mismatched hand-claps cannot summon food,
it's wise he stops the trick -- even while the slack-jawed
gather to the barrier of chainlink. Make them pay
thinks a bear, if we can credit to him words as tasty
as what he balances in his half-clutched paw.
Perhaps with summer's arrival he will drop the sky,
which then will roll on concrete in a bundle. Maybe
he will not retrieve it, his forgetfulness defiance.
The paws that will clap to absent trainers push
against bars or try to maul the over-adventurous,
or in the absence of an easy target slap himself
like an angry, clumsy child who can't win a game.
In a tumult of standing water he will drop himself
and shatter algae membranes that heave with him.
If only he could crawl into his cave completely
then he could die awhile, shut eyes, and disappear
like children think when they play hide-and-seek
to find that sight is not their own: the recess
of rock blown into Prospect Park is bright as day.
2.
Off-white, from his water-hole, surges the polar bear
one borough away, revealing through slick fur
a squandered musculature. He should be chasing
the arctic seal who leaps a water slide
to roars, then noses a beach-ball on an island,
a little plexiglass glacier no bear could mount,
and which the sun converts to gem-like fire
refractory, cold and blinding, white--
as if syntax had to shatter into facets of fire
to describe it. But the arctic seal slips off
the island shyly, after applause has died.
Old people in wheelchairs shoved by daughters,
children wheeled too, the ages in-between walking--
what interests them in this soiled spectacle,
boredom ebbing into age, power unpracticed, lost
in excrement and melting ice and dead fish
while Ursus Major noses carrion of light through space?
On nearby beaches later, mounds of jellyfish
toes touch by the waterline are condoms, really.
Only in the Bronx Zoo dangles the Kodiak's tongue
like that of a sled-dog. Having, post coitus,
rolled from his mate, earthward he staggers
to his reconstructed habitat: a seeded field
surrounds a plastic maypole that from tiny pores
oozes honey that is oxidizing into foam.
Like he's been told, a circus bear (retired) paws some sky,
and gathers to his mouth like more honey some space.
Since his mismatched hand-claps cannot summon food,
it's wise he stops the trick -- even while the slack-jawed
gather to the barrier of chainlink. Make them pay
thinks a bear, if we can credit to him words as tasty
as what he balances in his half-clutched paw.
Perhaps with summer's arrival he will drop the sky,
which then will roll on concrete in a bundle. Maybe
he will not retrieve it, his forgetfulness defiance.
The paws that will clap to absent trainers push
against bars or try to maul the over-adventurous,
or in the absence of an easy target slap himself
like an angry, clumsy child who can't win a game.
In a tumult of standing water he will drop himself
and shatter algae membranes that heave with him.
If only he could crawl into his cave completely
then he could die awhile, shut eyes, and disappear
like children think when they play hide-and-seek
to find that sight is not their own: the recess
of rock blown into Prospect Park is bright as day.
2.
Off-white, from his water-hole, surges the polar bear
one borough away, revealing through slick fur
a squandered musculature. He should be chasing
the arctic seal who leaps a water slide
to roars, then noses a beach-ball on an island,
a little plexiglass glacier no bear could mount,
and which the sun converts to gem-like fire
refractory, cold and blinding, white--
as if syntax had to shatter into facets of fire
to describe it. But the arctic seal slips off
the island shyly, after applause has died.
Old people in wheelchairs shoved by daughters,
children wheeled too, the ages in-between walking--
what interests them in this soiled spectacle,
boredom ebbing into age, power unpracticed, lost
in excrement and melting ice and dead fish
while Ursus Major noses carrion of light through space?
On nearby beaches later, mounds of jellyfish
toes touch by the waterline are condoms, really.
Only in the Bronx Zoo dangles the Kodiak's tongue
like that of a sled-dog. Having, post coitus,
rolled from his mate, earthward he staggers
to his reconstructed habitat: a seeded field
surrounds a plastic maypole that from tiny pores
oozes honey that is oxidizing into foam.
Chas Codman, Minor Landscape Painter
1.
The lack of glazes that might have deepened
lake scenes or the pearly tinges of his clouds
more suitable to South Seas than New England,
like whorls in the ear of a woman in Fragonard
her skin nothing but pink, alabaster, and butter.
The brace of women, one twirling a parasol --
repeat in paintings for public places and estates --
then tiny sloops confront identical directions
whether painted on canvas or wood.
2.
The boulders transparent as clouds behind them
Figures who camp on river islands tiny as ones
in microscopes or dioramas, who beckon or stretch
beneath white tarps that are leaden hair-fine strokes.
A smoking of game beneath torrential background.
A few feathers in the hair, not strokes enough
to designate clans or nations. As bricks dissolve
in mud, so mountainsides dissolve in pearly skies
that are mental refuges, barriers to real ones.
As I move to actual landscape alas it’s picturesque
as swirling half-moons rendered on black velvet
at some country fair or sidewalk art show.
3.
An estate-holder wanted his lands graced
with swans and the template of women with parasols
and tiny sloops to try the barely agitated water.
The wind moved, but water wouldn’t move by wind.
The water reflected the trees, which were not poplars,
the water reflected the women with the parasols
and white Hellenic dresses, and the swans were reflected.
The scene would be rendered on wood, with cornucopias
around the scene itself, in which the features were reflected:
scattered acorns, fruit and flora in commemoration--
tiger lillies and pine cones, more fruit to be identified.
4.
Already, I think in Piranesian castles
that double as dams on the Androscoggin
where people skinny-dip in familiar places
with the unfamiliar tints of pearly skies
and pearly clouds doubling as pearly gates.
The dream is a grain of sand in an hourglass
but within sprawls a time of infinite extension
that the shifting gears of a milk-truck interrupt
as the Anabaptists, skinny-dippers in a cove
in peasant dresses tell me that the water’s fine.
The lack of glazes that might have deepened
lake scenes or the pearly tinges of his clouds
more suitable to South Seas than New England,
like whorls in the ear of a woman in Fragonard
her skin nothing but pink, alabaster, and butter.
The brace of women, one twirling a parasol --
repeat in paintings for public places and estates --
then tiny sloops confront identical directions
whether painted on canvas or wood.
2.
The boulders transparent as clouds behind them
Figures who camp on river islands tiny as ones
in microscopes or dioramas, who beckon or stretch
beneath white tarps that are leaden hair-fine strokes.
A smoking of game beneath torrential background.
A few feathers in the hair, not strokes enough
to designate clans or nations. As bricks dissolve
in mud, so mountainsides dissolve in pearly skies
that are mental refuges, barriers to real ones.
As I move to actual landscape alas it’s picturesque
as swirling half-moons rendered on black velvet
at some country fair or sidewalk art show.
3.
An estate-holder wanted his lands graced
with swans and the template of women with parasols
and tiny sloops to try the barely agitated water.
The wind moved, but water wouldn’t move by wind.
The water reflected the trees, which were not poplars,
the water reflected the women with the parasols
and white Hellenic dresses, and the swans were reflected.
The scene would be rendered on wood, with cornucopias
around the scene itself, in which the features were reflected:
scattered acorns, fruit and flora in commemoration--
tiger lillies and pine cones, more fruit to be identified.
4.
Already, I think in Piranesian castles
that double as dams on the Androscoggin
where people skinny-dip in familiar places
with the unfamiliar tints of pearly skies
and pearly clouds doubling as pearly gates.
The dream is a grain of sand in an hourglass
but within sprawls a time of infinite extension
that the shifting gears of a milk-truck interrupt
as the Anabaptists, skinny-dippers in a cove
in peasant dresses tell me that the water’s fine.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Bard in the Square (old, 02)
1.
At your back the bard feels the vibration of traffic
unloosen its granite base and the plaque
on which his bronze self rests, his back turned,
stone-deaf, possibly humming Evangeline.
2.
You were eviscerated, eucalyptus and saffron
stuffed into the cavity of your chest.
You spent your day looking amazed,
your new sight agate or turquoise.
A broadcloth folded above your loins perfectly.
3.
How could your brass feet intercept flights
of bobcats to the darker pockets of the woods?
You sensed how bogs in April buoyed the freshest shoots.
4.
The book on your lap, your hands relaxed
upon the lion’s-heads of the armrests
of throne or plush Victorian easy chair
in which are burned effigies, its backseat padded
with cracked leather, stuffed with straw from savannahs
in which shallow freshets the river-horses munch.
5.
Your poems were weighty copper ingots
in a sailing vessel headed from Cyprus,
until the ship sank in deep waters, no survivors known.
In the effort to retrieve you steel nets snap,
sharks circle the rescue team, which abandons
the project to nature’s whims. But your poems
are not nature. What has grown around them
is vivid, green, and ambergris.
6.
Words for the placidity of swamps,
not experienced but daydreamed,
are less important than how the book has closed,
as if its many pages were so overtaken by mildew
you couldn’t make out letters -- useless the indices.
The book is the Apalachafaya bog.
The pages are glued to the chair,
the arms of which only look like lion’s-heads,
not stags who have disguised themselves,
leaping from the red gule or the bend sinister.
7.
Streaks of copper oxide deform the flesh-tints
that can only be imagined at nightfall.
8.
The words you deploy so weighty
they nearly throw you off the stool,
polysyllables or blunter, Anglo-Saxon monos
you picked up for a song at the flower-shop.
They didn’t want them anymore.
Now you hurl them at the crowd
like so many battle-axes, so many slippers of glass
rescued from cow-ponds.
At your back the bard feels the vibration of traffic
unloosen its granite base and the plaque
on which his bronze self rests, his back turned,
stone-deaf, possibly humming Evangeline.
2.
You were eviscerated, eucalyptus and saffron
stuffed into the cavity of your chest.
You spent your day looking amazed,
your new sight agate or turquoise.
A broadcloth folded above your loins perfectly.
3.
How could your brass feet intercept flights
of bobcats to the darker pockets of the woods?
You sensed how bogs in April buoyed the freshest shoots.
4.
The book on your lap, your hands relaxed
upon the lion’s-heads of the armrests
of throne or plush Victorian easy chair
in which are burned effigies, its backseat padded
with cracked leather, stuffed with straw from savannahs
in which shallow freshets the river-horses munch.
5.
Your poems were weighty copper ingots
in a sailing vessel headed from Cyprus,
until the ship sank in deep waters, no survivors known.
In the effort to retrieve you steel nets snap,
sharks circle the rescue team, which abandons
the project to nature’s whims. But your poems
are not nature. What has grown around them
is vivid, green, and ambergris.
6.
Words for the placidity of swamps,
not experienced but daydreamed,
are less important than how the book has closed,
as if its many pages were so overtaken by mildew
you couldn’t make out letters -- useless the indices.
The book is the Apalachafaya bog.
The pages are glued to the chair,
the arms of which only look like lion’s-heads,
not stags who have disguised themselves,
leaping from the red gule or the bend sinister.
7.
Streaks of copper oxide deform the flesh-tints
that can only be imagined at nightfall.
8.
The words you deploy so weighty
they nearly throw you off the stool,
polysyllables or blunter, Anglo-Saxon monos
you picked up for a song at the flower-shop.
They didn’t want them anymore.
Now you hurl them at the crowd
like so many battle-axes, so many slippers of glass
rescued from cow-ponds.
In Skopje (02?)
1.
Either the wrong time hangs over that station
or the earthquake shattered the wrong clock
and time toppled. On three tectonic plates
grind three continents--Europe, Asia, Africa.
Geology teaches how much time we spend
on earth is superficial: we live on crust alone
(soils only ossified lava, snows coagulated steam.)
This is the background for the wrong time,
its cupola still tipped, its number stilled,
the names for snowy peaks no longer Latin.
But when they are dormant volcanoes,
how do you name their eruption, their flow
before your loss of words or proper names?
2.
Even the thinnest of veneers cannot explain
our tongues, between them and the teeth
air sculpted to syllables, exhalations from the core
deeper than any habit that can be unlearned.
Romania gave the station to the Macedons:
what did Bulgaria care about its upstart cousin
whose South Slav tongue, dialect without navy,
is the same, spelled the same Cyrillic?
The gift shattered, the train diverted,
contested regions are smudged on paper globes
that fray in classrooms, a world moving faster
than dots can be connected for its proper facsimile
or tricolor sewn--if even from glad rags.
3.
Geologic crusts may grind, but the sky is clear.
And since I’ve arrived, little or nothing has moved.
Skopje nestles in a valley like a fleet of tiny ships
with concrete hulls -- its two-tiered mosques,
apartment blocks and latticed-windowed silversmithies
tied by viaducts that leap above dry streams.
These waves of earth are snow-capped mountains
luring emigres to California to make wine and dobros,
National Steel guitars christened Pan- Slavic for good,
a word that sounds so wrong for blue notes
but where is right? Even the dead swim
in a medium of shifty earth, too busy dog-paddling
to judge a bunch of mountain bandits
who (so the natives tell) take the gold
for their dowries from the jaws of the dead
surprised at the mountain pass, beating them
into the lovely new constraints of wedding-bands.
4. Concept Art [tacked on, left off]
The gallery didn’t feature boy-meets-tractor themes:
a burlap bundle speared on a post with bailing-twine
the centerpiece, a giant makeshift body bag or bandage.
As new friends tell me: it hasn’t been ‘48 for years.
Plenty of room conceded to the objet d'art,
more than for the movement of peoples outside,
pantalooned Turkish women and Macedonian Slavs
trotting pedestrian bridges. (Genuine-article ‘41
partisans locals isolate for me as monuments moving
with hesitation at crossing lights before they topple.)
Call this a Care package the artist sent himself
to confirm his place. Who needed stamps, return addresses
when what departed returned to the same station?
The post that balanced the parcel also drove
beneath to hold the continents together. Art tried
to do what shiny stitches of rail couldn’t,
their splintered ties, their dried out creosote
an infernally hot pitch through the summer.
Either the wrong time hangs over that station
or the earthquake shattered the wrong clock
and time toppled. On three tectonic plates
grind three continents--Europe, Asia, Africa.
Geology teaches how much time we spend
on earth is superficial: we live on crust alone
(soils only ossified lava, snows coagulated steam.)
This is the background for the wrong time,
its cupola still tipped, its number stilled,
the names for snowy peaks no longer Latin.
But when they are dormant volcanoes,
how do you name their eruption, their flow
before your loss of words or proper names?
2.
Even the thinnest of veneers cannot explain
our tongues, between them and the teeth
air sculpted to syllables, exhalations from the core
deeper than any habit that can be unlearned.
Romania gave the station to the Macedons:
what did Bulgaria care about its upstart cousin
whose South Slav tongue, dialect without navy,
is the same, spelled the same Cyrillic?
The gift shattered, the train diverted,
contested regions are smudged on paper globes
that fray in classrooms, a world moving faster
than dots can be connected for its proper facsimile
or tricolor sewn--if even from glad rags.
3.
Geologic crusts may grind, but the sky is clear.
And since I’ve arrived, little or nothing has moved.
Skopje nestles in a valley like a fleet of tiny ships
with concrete hulls -- its two-tiered mosques,
apartment blocks and latticed-windowed silversmithies
tied by viaducts that leap above dry streams.
These waves of earth are snow-capped mountains
luring emigres to California to make wine and dobros,
National Steel guitars christened Pan- Slavic for good,
a word that sounds so wrong for blue notes
but where is right? Even the dead swim
in a medium of shifty earth, too busy dog-paddling
to judge a bunch of mountain bandits
who (so the natives tell) take the gold
for their dowries from the jaws of the dead
surprised at the mountain pass, beating them
into the lovely new constraints of wedding-bands.
4. Concept Art [tacked on, left off]
The gallery didn’t feature boy-meets-tractor themes:
a burlap bundle speared on a post with bailing-twine
the centerpiece, a giant makeshift body bag or bandage.
As new friends tell me: it hasn’t been ‘48 for years.
Plenty of room conceded to the objet d'art,
more than for the movement of peoples outside,
pantalooned Turkish women and Macedonian Slavs
trotting pedestrian bridges. (Genuine-article ‘41
partisans locals isolate for me as monuments moving
with hesitation at crossing lights before they topple.)
Call this a Care package the artist sent himself
to confirm his place. Who needed stamps, return addresses
when what departed returned to the same station?
The post that balanced the parcel also drove
beneath to hold the continents together. Art tried
to do what shiny stitches of rail couldn’t,
their splintered ties, their dried out creosote
an infernally hot pitch through the summer.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Top of the East (the east is red)
For a novel approach to the scenery, I envisaged the river afire, from the mouth of the Fore to the Million Dollar Bridge, and how the city’s features would have been lit up. From the remodeled Top of the East I look to the optometrist’s storefront – under the marquee’s patina of age and dusted over letters, the retired couple who ran it reduced their hours to a handful a week until it was impossible to get an appointment, even of you threatened to become blind without their learned intervention in the form of reading glasses or the fluid for contact lenses. And do not place alcohol in the container that holds them because they will most certainly burn, and the light your eyes experience will be an artificially induced burning light, like bringing your unshielded eyes to the sun on a beach day. The arsonists on the other hand enjoyed themselves as I imagined them, touching a naphtha and kerosene-laced oil slick over the Fore. As boys, they had lit up garbage cans on the street after prowling the bars. But in their advanced careers they needed to do something spectacular, something that they could brag to their grandchildren about in the nursing home, nudging them with their elbows while they are on their lap, offering them candies their mother had forbidden, thanking them for the flask refills they had snuck past the nurses at the psychiatric hospital for old folks. Lord, don’t let me be identified by a tag tied to my toe: let me be recognized for something big, for the moment when a city is on fire, when the fumes race up the side streets from the burning river, when the wooden framed houses are enveloped in fire and all you see of them are charred frames and beams and rafters, the domestic items tossed on the scorched lawns and curbs by the trash pickup or consumed in seconds, the likely fate of raincoats, slippers, and lacy nightgowns along with Playskool houses and round pegs and square holes and dad’s stacks of Field and Stream and Playboy.
The waitress breaks the daydream with the bill. How dry the air sifting in the cracks of the cords of firewood beside a house in Windham in which the inhabitants feel they have felicitously escaped the blandishments of Sodom-by-the-sea.
Perhaps they daydreamed a slightly different version, perhaps with the narrative kinks removed. Surely their pastor fervently prays for them, but throws his hands in the air with thoughts about the rest, and who are we to confront him, busy with his convocations for businesses going bankrupt, their inheritor cooped in some asylum, bleary from his medication and unable to read the codicils the attorney has placed before his eyes, on which plays a film of fire on the other side of my daydream, which has ceased as soon as I noticed how cold weather makes the lamplight look different, crystalline if you will, not blurred as through a haze, in radial points instead of in auras with indefinite outlines. But as I write an obscene song travels through the window, a curse repeated in the chorus over twenty times, like a rosette in a decorative motif or a song hook that insists that you insert the CD in the tray for an eternity!
The waitress breaks the daydream with the bill. How dry the air sifting in the cracks of the cords of firewood beside a house in Windham in which the inhabitants feel they have felicitously escaped the blandishments of Sodom-by-the-sea.
Perhaps they daydreamed a slightly different version, perhaps with the narrative kinks removed. Surely their pastor fervently prays for them, but throws his hands in the air with thoughts about the rest, and who are we to confront him, busy with his convocations for businesses going bankrupt, their inheritor cooped in some asylum, bleary from his medication and unable to read the codicils the attorney has placed before his eyes, on which plays a film of fire on the other side of my daydream, which has ceased as soon as I noticed how cold weather makes the lamplight look different, crystalline if you will, not blurred as through a haze, in radial points instead of in auras with indefinite outlines. But as I write an obscene song travels through the window, a curse repeated in the chorus over twenty times, like a rosette in a decorative motif or a song hook that insists that you insert the CD in the tray for an eternity!
Adonis+ (2/29/04)[pedestrian exercise, etc.]
Adonis wasn’t a sun-god either. Six months of the year
He stayed downstairs, far below enough it was infernal
In Persephone’s boudoir, big four-poster with hanging rugs
And lots of jewelry in the armoire, blood-red ruby drops,
Onyx, and emerald (for the hinterland at least, unseasonable).
She looked good in them, at banquets and receptions,
But at harvest time she shined, so bronzed and laughing.
After he wintered there, among that lazy oriental luxury
too Bohemian for a race of sailors, he moved above
To summer with Aphrodite, who despite her reputation
Was for his taste a tad maternal. But wherever he was,
His heart was elsewhere, in the boles of the evergreen,
In the knots no mountaineer could chop to their heart,
Wood you could only burn to find what was inside: him.
He stayed downstairs, far below enough it was infernal
In Persephone’s boudoir, big four-poster with hanging rugs
And lots of jewelry in the armoire, blood-red ruby drops,
Onyx, and emerald (for the hinterland at least, unseasonable).
She looked good in them, at banquets and receptions,
But at harvest time she shined, so bronzed and laughing.
After he wintered there, among that lazy oriental luxury
too Bohemian for a race of sailors, he moved above
To summer with Aphrodite, who despite her reputation
Was for his taste a tad maternal. But wherever he was,
His heart was elsewhere, in the boles of the evergreen,
In the knots no mountaineer could chop to their heart,
Wood you could only burn to find what was inside: him.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
8/29/01
A few CDs in the mail, an Atlas with three-dimensional mapping and virtual joystick control
by which the user can barrel through valleys with their mountains of enhanced scale,
their blue wire-frames iridiscent before the heavens, simple negative space.
After enumerating the ethnicity, customs, and languages
of populations clustered by deltas and tributaries,
a narrator rattles off statistics between the mouth of the Rhine
and the Black Sea -- Rotterdam to Sevastopol.
So many things about which to be voyeuristic –
a fat cop napping in his cruiser at a barren crossroads,
a young hulk with zaftig sweetheart locked beneath an apple-tree in a meadow, barely perspiring in the fall, branches aweigh
with apples that appear as healthy as human organs,
a teenager probing rivers of rage moving toward his boss in the food service industry
before the bedroom mirror, a pistol with cartridge – nowhere to go.
If I could fly closer, I could leap with grasshoppers
instead of dance with the daffodils.
If closer, I would be free of windows I must navigate on the screen
and free of the physical windows of my house,
and of the software that presents me with topographical models
around which I can twirl without restraint,
as if there were as many eyes as limitless visual models
implicit in the algorithms. If closer,
I could resort to prose, not verse, and as in a buffet
a customer can build his own salad, people could create from my prose
verse, breaking lines of text like honeycomb, arranging words at will.
If I could fly closer than the navigational model allows me,
I could fly directly through a single cell of the honeycomb of words, empty or dripping with honey.
Geese home in the opposite direction in which my virtual instrument points.
by which the user can barrel through valleys with their mountains of enhanced scale,
their blue wire-frames iridiscent before the heavens, simple negative space.
After enumerating the ethnicity, customs, and languages
of populations clustered by deltas and tributaries,
a narrator rattles off statistics between the mouth of the Rhine
and the Black Sea -- Rotterdam to Sevastopol.
So many things about which to be voyeuristic –
a fat cop napping in his cruiser at a barren crossroads,
a young hulk with zaftig sweetheart locked beneath an apple-tree in a meadow, barely perspiring in the fall, branches aweigh
with apples that appear as healthy as human organs,
a teenager probing rivers of rage moving toward his boss in the food service industry
before the bedroom mirror, a pistol with cartridge – nowhere to go.
If I could fly closer, I could leap with grasshoppers
instead of dance with the daffodils.
If closer, I would be free of windows I must navigate on the screen
and free of the physical windows of my house,
and of the software that presents me with topographical models
around which I can twirl without restraint,
as if there were as many eyes as limitless visual models
implicit in the algorithms. If closer,
I could resort to prose, not verse, and as in a buffet
a customer can build his own salad, people could create from my prose
verse, breaking lines of text like honeycomb, arranging words at will.
If I could fly closer than the navigational model allows me,
I could fly directly through a single cell of the honeycomb of words, empty or dripping with honey.
Geese home in the opposite direction in which my virtual instrument points.
Rest Stop, Pittsfield (03)
There’s no there there. -- Gertrude Stein on Oakland
Be here now. -- Various sources
I am on the map, and my name is the red star
that tells the driver where the rest-stop is,
a star that says: here you are. And so I am,
between one there and another. A red line
traces routes there too – where’s the blue?
But I digress again. Hardly anyone is there
when I stop. Most all the time the restroom
is blocked with yellow signs that warn you off:
and no one is there who can explain to me
the warnings, why the restroom is so closed.
In summer, the fountain drips and drips
and by fall dries. By winter, it’s all boxed up
(unless the water-flow has frozen into shapes
around the concrete column persistent as wax),
a plywood top secure above the spigot like a coffin-lid.
A water-fountain is another node, an oasis
around which grows: this outhouse, potted plants,
state road map, forked stripes for parking cars,
pine groves shading picnic benches, distance.
A node’s an accident on a surface that attracts.
I am still in my center, red star on a public map.
Another line can trace a point of departure,
a destination there. But hardly anyone is here
to appreciate from whence we came or went.
Half the time the restrooms here are closed.
And there’s never an attendant to be seen
although his radio blares--a very tiny radio
with a very very big speaker. The air-vents
in the rest-room broadcast music to the stalls.
And also there’s graffiti in the toilet stalls.
Did someone make the telephone numbers up?
Are the exchange codes faked, or authentic?
What is at the other end of this number?
The rest-stop’s in the middle of the state,
but there are no easy answers on the map
or on the panels of the stalls--lesson being
don’t read in maps what you can’t get from them
or never find a meaning that cannot be there
or do not read into these layers of topography
defaced with loops gouged in Plexiglas with keys
as if their maker could include the state with them
or in the stall, the message: for good times, call:
what friends of friends know friends who call this way?
How small the line between me and my object.
I am always in the center of the state, my center.
Were I nowhere, I would be a cloudy substance
without a center, without a fixture in space.
The map will be lit every night, a wad of gum
stuck to its buffed-up front of Plexiglas.
Anyone could be beneath the wad of gum --
an addressee for a number in the stalls
or friends of friends, real breathing acquaintances.
The fountain anyway is frozen overflow
like the first volcano, first geyser on tundra
or on empty steppe, first thing on flat earth
declaring corners, here or there, direction.
Be here now. -- Various sources
I am on the map, and my name is the red star
that tells the driver where the rest-stop is,
a star that says: here you are. And so I am,
between one there and another. A red line
traces routes there too – where’s the blue?
But I digress again. Hardly anyone is there
when I stop. Most all the time the restroom
is blocked with yellow signs that warn you off:
and no one is there who can explain to me
the warnings, why the restroom is so closed.
In summer, the fountain drips and drips
and by fall dries. By winter, it’s all boxed up
(unless the water-flow has frozen into shapes
around the concrete column persistent as wax),
a plywood top secure above the spigot like a coffin-lid.
A water-fountain is another node, an oasis
around which grows: this outhouse, potted plants,
state road map, forked stripes for parking cars,
pine groves shading picnic benches, distance.
A node’s an accident on a surface that attracts.
I am still in my center, red star on a public map.
Another line can trace a point of departure,
a destination there. But hardly anyone is here
to appreciate from whence we came or went.
Half the time the restrooms here are closed.
And there’s never an attendant to be seen
although his radio blares--a very tiny radio
with a very very big speaker. The air-vents
in the rest-room broadcast music to the stalls.
And also there’s graffiti in the toilet stalls.
Did someone make the telephone numbers up?
Are the exchange codes faked, or authentic?
What is at the other end of this number?
The rest-stop’s in the middle of the state,
but there are no easy answers on the map
or on the panels of the stalls--lesson being
don’t read in maps what you can’t get from them
or never find a meaning that cannot be there
or do not read into these layers of topography
defaced with loops gouged in Plexiglas with keys
as if their maker could include the state with them
or in the stall, the message: for good times, call:
what friends of friends know friends who call this way?
How small the line between me and my object.
I am always in the center of the state, my center.
Were I nowhere, I would be a cloudy substance
without a center, without a fixture in space.
The map will be lit every night, a wad of gum
stuck to its buffed-up front of Plexiglas.
Anyone could be beneath the wad of gum --
an addressee for a number in the stalls
or friends of friends, real breathing acquaintances.
The fountain anyway is frozen overflow
like the first volcano, first geyser on tundra
or on empty steppe, first thing on flat earth
declaring corners, here or there, direction.
Canal, Park Slope (Jan. 03?)
The canal has been filled, above it rise the dead
with needles stuck in arms or wielding pick-axes.
The markets sell desiccated fruits and flowers.
Public transport moves almost to a standstill.
Across the river, how littered the fairground is.
An imitation of a very famous person sings
cover tunes to a crowd, all friends of friends.
Above the canal, junkies unwind Ace bandages
and dangle them from the branches of trees
like pennants hastily fashioned from toilet paper,
and in the lofts, one prestigious avenue across,
artists no one will ever hear about again
paint willy-nilly green bucolic slashes
they first became enamored with on billboards.
The subways move like cattle-cars stranded
in stranger countryside, and the commuter
who dares to pick his nose will elbow the belly
of some pregnant woman or wobbly octogenarian
who wishes already he could straggle the desert,
some scirocco arresting his slo-mo progress.
But since hell is other people, he doesn’t mind
the time it takes to be summoned to the present
as the E-train halting, shudders, no express possible.
with needles stuck in arms or wielding pick-axes.
The markets sell desiccated fruits and flowers.
Public transport moves almost to a standstill.
Across the river, how littered the fairground is.
An imitation of a very famous person sings
cover tunes to a crowd, all friends of friends.
Above the canal, junkies unwind Ace bandages
and dangle them from the branches of trees
like pennants hastily fashioned from toilet paper,
and in the lofts, one prestigious avenue across,
artists no one will ever hear about again
paint willy-nilly green bucolic slashes
they first became enamored with on billboards.
The subways move like cattle-cars stranded
in stranger countryside, and the commuter
who dares to pick his nose will elbow the belly
of some pregnant woman or wobbly octogenarian
who wishes already he could straggle the desert,
some scirocco arresting his slo-mo progress.
But since hell is other people, he doesn’t mind
the time it takes to be summoned to the present
as the E-train halting, shudders, no express possible.
I pulled a circle apart (2003, never finished, never cut)
I pulled apart a circle until it was a drum
and tapered cones more so they fit the payload
but pierce the cloud-banks and the bunker’ s hardened armor
or the helicopter cabs in which the shadow government
would flee. The fins were pure V-2, the engine pending.
I fused the separate parts, silvered the whole thing over.
Chaos, Inc. would be the NGO to sponsor the take-off.
To where would chaos fly? I would have to draw
multiple environments, steal objects from the neighborhood,
plot them in 3-D cubes. Tempting you to shoot a chicken
scurried through cobbled hamlets reminiscent of Mexico,
except their lack of Aztec ornament. And you had to choose
the virtual chicken’s feathers. Would they be tawny or calico,
the latter subspecies unknown? Once chosen,
you could blow the chicken to bits. How well the designers
had mastered chicken anatomy! The internal and dark
externalized, like shriveled gloves drying on a radiator!
yet their surfaces connected, like those in Mobius strips,
geometry’s Siamese twins, faces apart, vertebrae joined.
Who were the software designers, butchers or magicians?
Then popped out a palette window to navigate universes,
albeit determined as roads sharply forking at intersections.
You couldn’t choose the tynes on the forks you ate with–
The choices were infinite, from Doric scrolls, to the severity
of the Israelites, to inappropriate fleur-de-lys wallpaper
or dumb concrete pressed with the grain of two-by-fours
that your single, hand-held, semi-automatic pistol
obliterated to meal, make chunks of concrete fly
or atomize to tinier particles too small for pixels to capture.
And when Barbara, my first crush, would mildly praise
my watercolor sketches with all their stilted proportions--
anything around her house was game for my loaded brush
(nuts and bananas in a bowl, cars in the driveway,
always dependable trees (sketched easily from the mind)) --
I would cry my way home, thinking she didn’t mean a word,
then console myself: she must be jealous of my talent!
Here, however, talent didn’t matter, choices did.
No one was, as they said, talented anymore. There were
only preferences, that built up, to constitute a world.
Every one had a world, but first you had to select it
from the palette. But with no virtual girl to be won
with a double-click I fired my weapon to the sky
and the blue neither cracked, nor rippled with heat-waves.
I swivelled to a bunker propped on a calm sea
but without connections, my bullets met nothing but walls,
as if I had declaimed this poem to water or written
to Barbara, crumpling the completed letter in my hand.
and tapered cones more so they fit the payload
but pierce the cloud-banks and the bunker’ s hardened armor
or the helicopter cabs in which the shadow government
would flee. The fins were pure V-2, the engine pending.
I fused the separate parts, silvered the whole thing over.
Chaos, Inc. would be the NGO to sponsor the take-off.
To where would chaos fly? I would have to draw
multiple environments, steal objects from the neighborhood,
plot them in 3-D cubes. Tempting you to shoot a chicken
scurried through cobbled hamlets reminiscent of Mexico,
except their lack of Aztec ornament. And you had to choose
the virtual chicken’s feathers. Would they be tawny or calico,
the latter subspecies unknown? Once chosen,
you could blow the chicken to bits. How well the designers
had mastered chicken anatomy! The internal and dark
externalized, like shriveled gloves drying on a radiator!
yet their surfaces connected, like those in Mobius strips,
geometry’s Siamese twins, faces apart, vertebrae joined.
Who were the software designers, butchers or magicians?
Then popped out a palette window to navigate universes,
albeit determined as roads sharply forking at intersections.
You couldn’t choose the tynes on the forks you ate with–
The choices were infinite, from Doric scrolls, to the severity
of the Israelites, to inappropriate fleur-de-lys wallpaper
or dumb concrete pressed with the grain of two-by-fours
that your single, hand-held, semi-automatic pistol
obliterated to meal, make chunks of concrete fly
or atomize to tinier particles too small for pixels to capture.
And when Barbara, my first crush, would mildly praise
my watercolor sketches with all their stilted proportions--
anything around her house was game for my loaded brush
(nuts and bananas in a bowl, cars in the driveway,
always dependable trees (sketched easily from the mind)) --
I would cry my way home, thinking she didn’t mean a word,
then console myself: she must be jealous of my talent!
Here, however, talent didn’t matter, choices did.
No one was, as they said, talented anymore. There were
only preferences, that built up, to constitute a world.
Every one had a world, but first you had to select it
from the palette. But with no virtual girl to be won
with a double-click I fired my weapon to the sky
and the blue neither cracked, nor rippled with heat-waves.
I swivelled to a bunker propped on a calm sea
but without connections, my bullets met nothing but walls,
as if I had declaimed this poem to water or written
to Barbara, crumpling the completed letter in my hand.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
untitled circa summer '04
A silver compact vehicle crushed nearly flat where its engine should have been,
reduced to half its original length,
collapsed like some concertina, hand accordion, or other corrugated thing,
painted dull silver and crushed into asymmetrical lopsided folds—
as if spiders under the influence of LSD grew hands and made origami projects
in art class with the other children instead of uneven spiderwebs.
What would teacher say to the spider become a little girl,
who spoke the silently rendered language of the arachnidae better than standard English,
who alarmed other kids with his-her propensity to catch houseflies with his-her hands, pulling the wings off the fly on the desk.
The child who brooded in the corner and who didn’t answer questions,
whose most natural thoughts turned retrospectively to the egg it shared with the other little ones,
and who thinks tribe when others think eggs, who fears chickens and robins,
can’t comprehend the size of dogs and horses, and enjoys being zapped by electrical appliances in the dark.
Who cannot comprehend the surface of his-her own skin or why there aren’t more tentacles or fingers jutting forth.
Who intuitively understands construction sites and instruments scooping the earth,
who envies the pneumatic appendages of the earth-movers or any appendage
from which extends smaller, more precise ones,
like Swiss knives unfolding into awls and corkscrews,
or finer ciliations meant to filter impurities from sluggish water or sting predator or prey.
The logic of the spider moves down a hierarchy of appendages,
arms or legs or shafts or pincers, bear-claws, nails or other cutaneous extensions
or exoskeletons, all moving from the blunt to the specified.
The spider is in natural sympathy with automobile engines, with engine-blocks halved or jogged apart.
reduced to half its original length,
collapsed like some concertina, hand accordion, or other corrugated thing,
painted dull silver and crushed into asymmetrical lopsided folds—
as if spiders under the influence of LSD grew hands and made origami projects
in art class with the other children instead of uneven spiderwebs.
What would teacher say to the spider become a little girl,
who spoke the silently rendered language of the arachnidae better than standard English,
who alarmed other kids with his-her propensity to catch houseflies with his-her hands, pulling the wings off the fly on the desk.
The child who brooded in the corner and who didn’t answer questions,
whose most natural thoughts turned retrospectively to the egg it shared with the other little ones,
and who thinks tribe when others think eggs, who fears chickens and robins,
can’t comprehend the size of dogs and horses, and enjoys being zapped by electrical appliances in the dark.
Who cannot comprehend the surface of his-her own skin or why there aren’t more tentacles or fingers jutting forth.
Who intuitively understands construction sites and instruments scooping the earth,
who envies the pneumatic appendages of the earth-movers or any appendage
from which extends smaller, more precise ones,
like Swiss knives unfolding into awls and corkscrews,
or finer ciliations meant to filter impurities from sluggish water or sting predator or prey.
The logic of the spider moves down a hierarchy of appendages,
arms or legs or shafts or pincers, bear-claws, nails or other cutaneous extensions
or exoskeletons, all moving from the blunt to the specified.
The spider is in natural sympathy with automobile engines, with engine-blocks halved or jogged apart.
untitled
After he lost his teeth he began to pray,
And when his children went to college went to church.
and then played songs that used the same shuffle,
wrote more songs that sounded the same as the first
but played them to children, who could hear them.
His songs slowed down because his heartbeat had.
He was content to play the hits with friends in ski resorts.
He found it hard to sing the words of others without teeth
But charmed at once the eternally young and sick at heart.
A hole was in his life that he could barely touch.
He couldn’t recall what was inside except good times.
The songs he sings recall some dusty Southern town
He’d never been to. He invokes their sleepy traits
Never seen first hand, years outside the power grid,
when lights swung for the brakeman to move the train,
departing another sleepy town another porter, blackfaced,
introduced with a flourish of hands upon guitar strings
lulling the patrons in their cups another long weekend.
And when his children went to college went to church.
and then played songs that used the same shuffle,
wrote more songs that sounded the same as the first
but played them to children, who could hear them.
His songs slowed down because his heartbeat had.
He was content to play the hits with friends in ski resorts.
He found it hard to sing the words of others without teeth
But charmed at once the eternally young and sick at heart.
A hole was in his life that he could barely touch.
He couldn’t recall what was inside except good times.
The songs he sings recall some dusty Southern town
He’d never been to. He invokes their sleepy traits
Never seen first hand, years outside the power grid,
when lights swung for the brakeman to move the train,
departing another sleepy town another porter, blackfaced,
introduced with a flourish of hands upon guitar strings
lulling the patrons in their cups another long weekend.
9/11/05
The postman who said he wanted to get rid of some tonnage applied the stripes of nail polish in uneven patterns. Post-mortem, the cutaneous material continues to grow once life and breath has left the body, once the functions of the brain have left with the pulse. When the pulse no longer flutters however it’s over. The use of drugs accelerates this process, the organs damaged: the impurities no longer passed into the streams of sewerage that could be used for farming the crops that flower or leaf greenly, but not for tubers, since full disclosure requires the consumer be informed where the crops have been: on what have these parsnips fattened, whose blood oozed into the muck? What tumors were lanced before the turnip could prevail? Better if the crop rise into the air, untainted above the girdle, the slush of human fertilizer. Blood fattens the soil, a sensible and green alternative to its indiscriminate spilling in fields and valleys. Let the standard planted on high ground be an ear of corn or a beanstalk, better yet, let a sunflower sprout from shit and twist its face to its maker.
Drowning I
From my last address, the dogwoods: how they hung
from April branches! Henry Adams, on that weather:
passionate depravity of the South. What can I say:
it assaulted me, in floating dust bouquets,
or vortices from air-ducts never cleaned,
or broken webs of foam torn from the air conditioner,
their pollen specks and spores loose with fragrance
from petals decomposed and pestled into air-vents
and convolutions of tubing packed in the compressor,
milled to particles that, as they dance, nearly kill me
landing on my bronchioles: fatal inspiration --
mold spores, stiff flowers twisted from broom closets,
green cuttings from hedges, weeds golden in their prime
or dander or the same old same old, in nests the hornets
weave from Sunday funnies or corsages. How many hundreds
of sentences wrapped about that pliant Saturnine ball
workers glue to eaves to prove again that form is content.
Between dust and dust lies whatever happens.
So as I rent these two bellows for lungs,
and air, their lonely explanation, I cannot own myself
anymore than crews who sailed on caravels to pass
through these branches after their jefe Columbus--
who I thought I’d expelled with a feather-duster once
or drowned with Endust, an ooze of lemon oil
dried about the corners of the coffee-table--wood
for wasps to build their gray abysses. No matter
how you re-arrange it, what’s new beneath the sun?
Answer: none of the above. The secret’s
in packaging. Rest assured I’m not the only one
who’s breathed the dust of tyrants along with their underlings.
from April branches! Henry Adams, on that weather:
passionate depravity of the South. What can I say:
it assaulted me, in floating dust bouquets,
or vortices from air-ducts never cleaned,
or broken webs of foam torn from the air conditioner,
their pollen specks and spores loose with fragrance
from petals decomposed and pestled into air-vents
and convolutions of tubing packed in the compressor,
milled to particles that, as they dance, nearly kill me
landing on my bronchioles: fatal inspiration --
mold spores, stiff flowers twisted from broom closets,
green cuttings from hedges, weeds golden in their prime
or dander or the same old same old, in nests the hornets
weave from Sunday funnies or corsages. How many hundreds
of sentences wrapped about that pliant Saturnine ball
workers glue to eaves to prove again that form is content.
Between dust and dust lies whatever happens.
So as I rent these two bellows for lungs,
and air, their lonely explanation, I cannot own myself
anymore than crews who sailed on caravels to pass
through these branches after their jefe Columbus--
who I thought I’d expelled with a feather-duster once
or drowned with Endust, an ooze of lemon oil
dried about the corners of the coffee-table--wood
for wasps to build their gray abysses. No matter
how you re-arrange it, what’s new beneath the sun?
Answer: none of the above. The secret’s
in packaging. Rest assured I’m not the only one
who’s breathed the dust of tyrants along with their underlings.
Monday, June 23, 2008
They Are The Intermission (03)
Though nation-states may fracture, the world split between Guelphs and Ghibellines,
how the Shakey’s banjo-man displayed mastery over his instrument
carved from a calabash into one worthy of the ritziest of concert halls
or some Houston opera house, its gauzy glitter of sequins and chandeliers.
Sweating under the foam boater the franchise makes him wear, what ancient,
vatic feeling he could insert in Holiday on Strings or some other old-timey favorite!
Whether accustomed to 12-bar blues or bars or concert halls, local musicians
formed a ring of reverence around his shiny, tapping shoe. While Junior struggled
to follow those shimmering arpeggios and chord-clusters piercing the beer-mist!
But some complained they could not see the Looney Tunes, between which
the duo were meant as intermission. And thus the festive air was lost, the thread
To pubescence, and so slender at that! May the sprocket-holes to film shorts
never break! Outside the door, nations re-assert themselves, signs scrawled
with best-loved imprecations, Amharic, Cyrillic or Kanji, or red-lettered English.
While Mr. Banjoman, barely aware of such historical contingencies or brouhaha,
introduced a weltanschauung of discord, fragmentation, population shift
and creak of continental crust ins his musical sphere when his plectrum struck the steel strings,
while the audience hollered: four Sicilians, three Rolling Rocks, three loaded,
more Looney Tunes, please! As frosted beer-steins clink, hear strings
upon the banjo pluck: kerpluck, kerplunk, kaplunk! How rapt the banjoman!
While Junior followed those shimmering arpeggios piercing the beer-mist!
how the Shakey’s banjo-man displayed mastery over his instrument
carved from a calabash into one worthy of the ritziest of concert halls
or some Houston opera house, its gauzy glitter of sequins and chandeliers.
Sweating under the foam boater the franchise makes him wear, what ancient,
vatic feeling he could insert in Holiday on Strings or some other old-timey favorite!
Whether accustomed to 12-bar blues or bars or concert halls, local musicians
formed a ring of reverence around his shiny, tapping shoe. While Junior struggled
to follow those shimmering arpeggios and chord-clusters piercing the beer-mist!
But some complained they could not see the Looney Tunes, between which
the duo were meant as intermission. And thus the festive air was lost, the thread
To pubescence, and so slender at that! May the sprocket-holes to film shorts
never break! Outside the door, nations re-assert themselves, signs scrawled
with best-loved imprecations, Amharic, Cyrillic or Kanji, or red-lettered English.
While Mr. Banjoman, barely aware of such historical contingencies or brouhaha,
introduced a weltanschauung of discord, fragmentation, population shift
and creak of continental crust ins his musical sphere when his plectrum struck the steel strings,
while the audience hollered: four Sicilians, three Rolling Rocks, three loaded,
more Looney Tunes, please! As frosted beer-steins clink, hear strings
upon the banjo pluck: kerpluck, kerplunk, kaplunk! How rapt the banjoman!
While Junior followed those shimmering arpeggios piercing the beer-mist!
At Whit’s End (Aurum Potabile)
Dedicated to Whit’s End, Portland, ME , 1993-2002
The National Bank is a bar now,
All the free pizza a token gesture.
There is never any on the plate.
The pizza oven, once a Mosler safe,
Is safely broken. The pizza cook
Absconded with the spatula
And, odds are, a bottle as well.
Only the facets of a shot-glass
Refract wealth’s amber glow.
Where there were glass holes
The size of windows in divers’ suits
Where there were slots of glass
For the moneychangers’ hands,
Where there were vents for voices,
Under the bar-top's laminate
Are scenes of some abysmal
Florida beach, an umbrella
With digits scrawled on the topside
A golf course magic-markered up
Or maritime scenes to sink to
Or escape from, borders of hawser-line
Lassoing sand dollars, phosphorescent octopi--
How gorgeous the labels for the spirits,
Their juniper sprigs, their long peppers
Plucked from the sun-belt of the Caucasus,
Slick as brand new toys or stamp-books
Of songbirds, state flora, benign bugs.
Who cares about the windy columns of spread sheets,
[Who cares about spread-sheets, their windy columns,]
When the body is a crutch to refuse?
We get what we deserve: now watch us
Toss our skin away, another body bag,
Rinsings evaporated from a glass,
Five or six or seven facets
Twirled in the hand of a stranger.
The National Bank is a bar now,
All the free pizza a token gesture.
There is never any on the plate.
The pizza oven, once a Mosler safe,
Is safely broken. The pizza cook
Absconded with the spatula
And, odds are, a bottle as well.
Only the facets of a shot-glass
Refract wealth’s amber glow.
Where there were glass holes
The size of windows in divers’ suits
Where there were slots of glass
For the moneychangers’ hands,
Where there were vents for voices,
Under the bar-top's laminate
Are scenes of some abysmal
Florida beach, an umbrella
With digits scrawled on the topside
A golf course magic-markered up
Or maritime scenes to sink to
Or escape from, borders of hawser-line
Lassoing sand dollars, phosphorescent octopi--
How gorgeous the labels for the spirits,
Their juniper sprigs, their long peppers
Plucked from the sun-belt of the Caucasus,
Slick as brand new toys or stamp-books
Of songbirds, state flora, benign bugs.
Who cares about the windy columns of spread sheets,
[Who cares about spread-sheets, their windy columns,]
When the body is a crutch to refuse?
We get what we deserve: now watch us
Toss our skin away, another body bag,
Rinsings evaporated from a glass,
Five or six or seven facets
Twirled in the hand of a stranger.
The Ferry October 17 04 [inconclusive, 1/2 baked]
Boy did you ever missed the boat. An islander
Who’d rather you not know the real time
Displays his time-piece. A venerable watch,
reliable silver, but leather band ratty. How
shabby-gentile this time-piece! The watch
that says you’ve missed the boat, so better run.
So you run, but there’s no boat on the dock.
So you’ve missed it. But in the restaurant
The clock with the Coca-Cola sign says no,
You still have too much time. He was wrong,
wrong, this resident of the isle of the blessed.
Count on his never winding watches. He’s better
At winding his watch where he’s from, away.
At his home, away from here, he may wind it
very punctually. But here, how lazy he can be.
Him with his rickety bike with its broken bell,
His false chronometer that couldn’t time a flea.
Now how will you kill your time? How long
can you sit in the restaurant, how many drinks,
all the time you thought you had collapsed?
What was the man who didn’t wind his watch
Thinking on that shabby genteel child’s bike?
Unwound, uncoiled, his hands and dials never fail.
A few weeks riding his rickety bike to the beach.
Such watches should be unwound in some enclave.
But what about you? Why should you be late for him?
You’ve missed it already, he gestures said,
Silently he was disinviting you to stay.
Who’d rather you not know the real time
Displays his time-piece. A venerable watch,
reliable silver, but leather band ratty. How
shabby-gentile this time-piece! The watch
that says you’ve missed the boat, so better run.
So you run, but there’s no boat on the dock.
So you’ve missed it. But in the restaurant
The clock with the Coca-Cola sign says no,
You still have too much time. He was wrong,
wrong, this resident of the isle of the blessed.
Count on his never winding watches. He’s better
At winding his watch where he’s from, away.
At his home, away from here, he may wind it
very punctually. But here, how lazy he can be.
Him with his rickety bike with its broken bell,
His false chronometer that couldn’t time a flea.
Now how will you kill your time? How long
can you sit in the restaurant, how many drinks,
all the time you thought you had collapsed?
What was the man who didn’t wind his watch
Thinking on that shabby genteel child’s bike?
Unwound, uncoiled, his hands and dials never fail.
A few weeks riding his rickety bike to the beach.
Such watches should be unwound in some enclave.
But what about you? Why should you be late for him?
You’ve missed it already, he gestures said,
Silently he was disinviting you to stay.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Rites of Priapus (winter 06)
Dramatis personae:
Priapus
Plaintiff
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
Ira “Unicorn Killer” Einhorn
Priapus:
Prickly tickly wee wee
The little piggie went.
Tingly purple tip,
shaft pink adrip.
Come to papa: dock.
Flag awaft, pole engorged.
Shaft wows you!
Crinkly shar-pei slips
on tongue, says wow!
Bow! Swallow me!
Also sprach cock-robin.
Plaintiff:
No more! Negative! Gag me!
Priapus:
Then let me hip you
to man’s whole history
(my version abridged).
Once he was golden
but as with solo cells
one wished for two.
Once that was through
so appeared woman.
And if she was weak,
think of her offspring.
Please hear me through.
The weak were slaves
yet were fruitful.
From ressentiment alone
they multiplied.
Their separate ailments
metastatized.
Thus diversity seminars
and civil action suits
--as if life were fair.
Paramour, shall I explain
what my imprimatur
can implant upon
your materia prima?
Or shall I get knee-pads?
Or do you need light surgery?
Plaintiff:
See you around.
Priapus:
Wait. Take a tip, tingle it.
Time to switch modes?
MODE A:
Be the girl in my harem
who really pleases the boss,
no Andrea Dworkin drone!
If you’re a spiral stair-step,
don’t be the pink conch,
or serpent's hiss inside the shell,
wind recurving circly space,
some lavender lip-gloss
concealing in your murk dentata--.
be where I am. Drop down
Plaintiff:
--to be your “mournful last resort”?
You bluff!
Priapus:
Let’s change this pitch to hard-sell.
MODE B (HARD SELL):
(Sweat poured down his brow,
whose furrows were valleys
through which streams wound,
semen streams smiled Priapus
to suck as does the bee.)
No old man melts in your mouth
reeking of oysters and urinals.
Darling, unicorns are real.
Regard his horn above!
IRA “UNICORN KILLER” EINHORN:
hanging out, nearly approved,
but from sky declaimed,
among bare pipes that dripped
the silvery braids of dew
on poems to the mirror or the sky:
Watch out bro!
don’t hide a woman’s body
in a footlocker stuffed with today’s papers
because she won’t do you!
To be as me, do not be me.
Bludgeon fast, or stonewall.
Fly far, and molt your nom de plume!
then ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE
popped in:
Stressed, dude?
Don’t use prosthetics,
or take what is handy,
and ad hoc, ram her,
as Unicorn would.
EINHORN:
(glowering):
Fatty, schlemiel
-junkie, shut up.
CHORUS:
Where was the paperweight with snow-drift
curled around the red barn and the country road,
where the crystal ball, the lead-bottomed
eight-point-antlered coat-and-hat-rack,
blunter letter-opener, ballpeen-hammered pewter,
O where that heavy object
to make this boo-boo better?
Where the brass trophy,
weighty even with a hollow core,
bronze lion’s foot, cut-glass decanter,
micro-brew beer bottle bludgeon–
ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE:
No no no nuh no, stuttered Fatty,
panicky, not that one!
CHORUS:
But if sharp blows cannot cauterize
can one rip some cinderblock
in chunks from office walls
of this land-grant campus
fashioning a portal
to alternative worlds,
to shut the speaking subject up?
Through what wormhole can Priapus crawl?
See how low our hero’s head has bowed.
**********************
Wait, said Unicorn.
Don’t leave witnesses.
Clean up in the washroom
without the custodian about,
sniff arm-pits, douche if you must
before returning to wifey.
And what the heck, let the girl go.
[Plaintiff leaves, grabbing keys.]
Will she sue?
whispered Priapus.
Suits me, said Fatty.
Loose lips, replied Unicorn,
sink ships, sink flesh torpedos too.
Just don’t take the rap.
It’s no biggie
to rub the stains deep
in fabric so you don’t appear.
So pack those pheromones
back in your Fruit of the Looms.
Use some alcohol handiwipes
they stock in the bus loos.
Priapus:
Guys, thanks a bunch, Priapus replied,
his shirt-tails dunked in the washroom sink.
And after wiping his Byronic brow
he checked for protein spots
luminiscent as those the president
dropped on Monica’s blue tulle
--visible sign of his puissance--
or stains on the Turin shroud
or shine of OJ’s Bruno Maglis
immaculate in that photomontage
CIA goons assembled
who stifled Unicorn’s discoveries
on paranormal mind-meld.
Unicorn’s Digression:
(But the wire-tappers
being Keystone Kops,
cut their own cords,
and with J. Edgar Hoover
obsessed with lipstick
and mincing in silk slips
before cracked mirrors
while Walter Winchell greased up
in their hotel-motel
one star above a flophouse,
the appropriate ears
failed to home into the paranormals
who like Sanhedrin huddled
as they communicated
from steppes and silver seas
more covert histories than radar
or inaudible frequencies
pricking the ears of canids
or loosening the petals
of the plainest daisy
or ugliest junkyard sunflower.
Why do baseball scores
coincide with the latitudes
Seventh Fleet destroyers sail?
Why do batting averages
correspond to my IQ?
What gives me headaches
other than Tibetan monks
on Himalayan mountaintops
as they masturbate?
My psychic antennae
locked into these deep truths:
how flat the earth was,
how tight the queen’s
grip on the heroin trade,
how methamphetamine
addled Jack’s sore brain
amid the missile crisis,
how shots of cortisone
made him a bull amuck
the White House maze,
even how Willie the Shake
made Bacon write those plays.
Enough, said the CIA.
Noble lies must oil the gears.
Their page from Socrates taken,
they paid the handyman
ten bucks just to stay mum,
dropped my Holly Maddux,
Bryn Mawr/Texas belle cheer-
leader-cum-seeker cum soul-mate
gingerly into my linen closet
to ooze on my neighbors
a fluid brown as chaw-juice
or mounds of cockroach liquified
in Stolichnaya or acidic spit,
shrinking her to 37 pounds
of atrophied flesh and bone
to incriminate yours truly,
Philly’s avatar, man-god
in communion with god.)
Priapus:
How rare and strange
that we, so soon, co-recognize!
How close we are, lion-brothers
[surmounted] by hyenas ganging,
our boldest transgressions checked
by batteries of PC lawyers,
Lilliputian Gloria Allred wannabes.
Chorus:
But stains can still drop
on that corduroy blazer
or tight moleskin trousers
as blemishes on the fly,
a little spot, but luminiscent
such a telling little spot.
That sink-water cloudy
with wriggling life,
Priapus recalls Bloom
spent from Gerty’s scissor-kicks,
his dress shirt-tails wet too.
(Precedent, help him through.)
Conscientious as some boychik
at confirmation or mitzvah,
he spit-licks thinner locks,
his collar wet, unfitting
as the clog-free drain sucks
his progeny into the sewer,
mini-Einsteins, concert pianists
roaming the rusty culverts,
no egg to nestle them,
no mama to nurture
their lightning-rapid minds
or spindly appendages:
adieu, adieu, adieu!
************************
Latch on, urged Fatty
to novice Unicorn,
his stairway to heaven:
look, Fred, a stair!
But as they charge
the firmanent, walls
of dislocated water slap them
and again they fall.
Priapus
Plaintiff
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
Ira “Unicorn Killer” Einhorn
Priapus:
Prickly tickly wee wee
The little piggie went.
Tingly purple tip,
shaft pink adrip.
Come to papa: dock.
Flag awaft, pole engorged.
Shaft wows you!
Crinkly shar-pei slips
on tongue, says wow!
Bow! Swallow me!
Also sprach cock-robin.
Plaintiff:
No more! Negative! Gag me!
Priapus:
Then let me hip you
to man’s whole history
(my version abridged).
Once he was golden
but as with solo cells
one wished for two.
Once that was through
so appeared woman.
And if she was weak,
think of her offspring.
Please hear me through.
The weak were slaves
yet were fruitful.
From ressentiment alone
they multiplied.
Their separate ailments
metastatized.
Thus diversity seminars
and civil action suits
--as if life were fair.
Paramour, shall I explain
what my imprimatur
can implant upon
your materia prima?
Or shall I get knee-pads?
Or do you need light surgery?
Plaintiff:
See you around.
Priapus:
Wait. Take a tip, tingle it.
Time to switch modes?
MODE A:
Be the girl in my harem
who really pleases the boss,
no Andrea Dworkin drone!
If you’re a spiral stair-step,
don’t be the pink conch,
or serpent's hiss inside the shell,
wind recurving circly space,
some lavender lip-gloss
concealing in your murk dentata--.
be where I am. Drop down
Plaintiff:
--to be your “mournful last resort”?
You bluff!
Priapus:
Let’s change this pitch to hard-sell.
MODE B (HARD SELL):
(Sweat poured down his brow,
whose furrows were valleys
through which streams wound,
semen streams smiled Priapus
to suck as does the bee.)
No old man melts in your mouth
reeking of oysters and urinals.
Darling, unicorns are real.
Regard his horn above!
IRA “UNICORN KILLER” EINHORN:
hanging out, nearly approved,
but from sky declaimed,
among bare pipes that dripped
the silvery braids of dew
on poems to the mirror or the sky:
Watch out bro!
don’t hide a woman’s body
in a footlocker stuffed with today’s papers
because she won’t do you!
To be as me, do not be me.
Bludgeon fast, or stonewall.
Fly far, and molt your nom de plume!
then ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE
popped in:
Stressed, dude?
Don’t use prosthetics,
or take what is handy,
and ad hoc, ram her,
as Unicorn would.
EINHORN:
(glowering):
Fatty, schlemiel
-junkie, shut up.
CHORUS:
Where was the paperweight with snow-drift
curled around the red barn and the country road,
where the crystal ball, the lead-bottomed
eight-point-antlered coat-and-hat-rack,
blunter letter-opener, ballpeen-hammered pewter,
O where that heavy object
to make this boo-boo better?
Where the brass trophy,
weighty even with a hollow core,
bronze lion’s foot, cut-glass decanter,
micro-brew beer bottle bludgeon–
ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE:
No no no nuh no, stuttered Fatty,
panicky, not that one!
CHORUS:
But if sharp blows cannot cauterize
can one rip some cinderblock
in chunks from office walls
of this land-grant campus
fashioning a portal
to alternative worlds,
to shut the speaking subject up?
Through what wormhole can Priapus crawl?
See how low our hero’s head has bowed.
**********************
Wait, said Unicorn.
Don’t leave witnesses.
Clean up in the washroom
without the custodian about,
sniff arm-pits, douche if you must
before returning to wifey.
And what the heck, let the girl go.
[Plaintiff leaves, grabbing keys.]
Will she sue?
whispered Priapus.
Suits me, said Fatty.
Loose lips, replied Unicorn,
sink ships, sink flesh torpedos too.
Just don’t take the rap.
It’s no biggie
to rub the stains deep
in fabric so you don’t appear.
So pack those pheromones
back in your Fruit of the Looms.
Use some alcohol handiwipes
they stock in the bus loos.
Priapus:
Guys, thanks a bunch, Priapus replied,
his shirt-tails dunked in the washroom sink.
And after wiping his Byronic brow
he checked for protein spots
luminiscent as those the president
dropped on Monica’s blue tulle
--visible sign of his puissance--
or stains on the Turin shroud
or shine of OJ’s Bruno Maglis
immaculate in that photomontage
CIA goons assembled
who stifled Unicorn’s discoveries
on paranormal mind-meld.
Unicorn’s Digression:
(But the wire-tappers
being Keystone Kops,
cut their own cords,
and with J. Edgar Hoover
obsessed with lipstick
and mincing in silk slips
before cracked mirrors
while Walter Winchell greased up
in their hotel-motel
one star above a flophouse,
the appropriate ears
failed to home into the paranormals
who like Sanhedrin huddled
as they communicated
from steppes and silver seas
more covert histories than radar
or inaudible frequencies
pricking the ears of canids
or loosening the petals
of the plainest daisy
or ugliest junkyard sunflower.
Why do baseball scores
coincide with the latitudes
Seventh Fleet destroyers sail?
Why do batting averages
correspond to my IQ?
What gives me headaches
other than Tibetan monks
on Himalayan mountaintops
as they masturbate?
My psychic antennae
locked into these deep truths:
how flat the earth was,
how tight the queen’s
grip on the heroin trade,
how methamphetamine
addled Jack’s sore brain
amid the missile crisis,
how shots of cortisone
made him a bull amuck
the White House maze,
even how Willie the Shake
made Bacon write those plays.
Enough, said the CIA.
Noble lies must oil the gears.
Their page from Socrates taken,
they paid the handyman
ten bucks just to stay mum,
dropped my Holly Maddux,
Bryn Mawr/Texas belle cheer-
leader-cum-seeker cum soul-mate
gingerly into my linen closet
to ooze on my neighbors
a fluid brown as chaw-juice
or mounds of cockroach liquified
in Stolichnaya or acidic spit,
shrinking her to 37 pounds
of atrophied flesh and bone
to incriminate yours truly,
Philly’s avatar, man-god
in communion with god.)
Priapus:
How rare and strange
that we, so soon, co-recognize!
How close we are, lion-brothers
[surmounted] by hyenas ganging,
our boldest transgressions checked
by batteries of PC lawyers,
Lilliputian Gloria Allred wannabes.
Chorus:
But stains can still drop
on that corduroy blazer
or tight moleskin trousers
as blemishes on the fly,
a little spot, but luminiscent
such a telling little spot.
That sink-water cloudy
with wriggling life,
Priapus recalls Bloom
spent from Gerty’s scissor-kicks,
his dress shirt-tails wet too.
(Precedent, help him through.)
Conscientious as some boychik
at confirmation or mitzvah,
he spit-licks thinner locks,
his collar wet, unfitting
as the clog-free drain sucks
his progeny into the sewer,
mini-Einsteins, concert pianists
roaming the rusty culverts,
no egg to nestle them,
no mama to nurture
their lightning-rapid minds
or spindly appendages:
adieu, adieu, adieu!
************************
Latch on, urged Fatty
to novice Unicorn,
his stairway to heaven:
look, Fred, a stair!
But as they charge
the firmanent, walls
of dislocated water slap them
and again they fall.
Blank Verse (from '99)
At the time it was painful reading the note
you’d left with the librarian to hand me,
a piece of filler paper creased four times,
or so I’d thought, to enhance the mystery
as a necessary prelude to the message:
don’t you want to dance and sing it said
Thirty years between the sending
and reception have erased the rest,
the exact but flowery language of a crush.
In a new town, I resort to playing records
in the library, a tiny brick structure
the size of provincial train depot
contending with rows of palatial houses
white and hooped by wrought-iron, a street
that in winter bad children avoided
pelting each other with snowballs,
liquor on their breath, too young to drive,
to get into more trouble with the law.
Now I think the librarian was prescient:
not spending hours thumbing Lifes and Times
improved me. Usually I complete the book
even if I can’t recall the opening chapters
or the expectations I had for them. Content,
however, cannot lie flat on a photograph.
In our memories the stills of students
heckling cops or forcing flowers down
the barrels of their carbines cannot leap
from their frames. Alas we’ve dawdled
the rest of the century away-- like the moment
after sneezing when you can’t recall
the train of thought, or the warped record
liberated from the jacket age inhibits me
from touching or playing. I have outgrown
my taste with my regret: it’s a parka
hung on pegs in school or trampled on too much,
too torn to be a garment: please take it.
I will not wait for a parent to pick me up.
you’d left with the librarian to hand me,
a piece of filler paper creased four times,
or so I’d thought, to enhance the mystery
as a necessary prelude to the message:
don’t you want to dance and sing it said
Thirty years between the sending
and reception have erased the rest,
the exact but flowery language of a crush.
In a new town, I resort to playing records
in the library, a tiny brick structure
the size of provincial train depot
contending with rows of palatial houses
white and hooped by wrought-iron, a street
that in winter bad children avoided
pelting each other with snowballs,
liquor on their breath, too young to drive,
to get into more trouble with the law.
Now I think the librarian was prescient:
not spending hours thumbing Lifes and Times
improved me. Usually I complete the book
even if I can’t recall the opening chapters
or the expectations I had for them. Content,
however, cannot lie flat on a photograph.
In our memories the stills of students
heckling cops or forcing flowers down
the barrels of their carbines cannot leap
from their frames. Alas we’ve dawdled
the rest of the century away-- like the moment
after sneezing when you can’t recall
the train of thought, or the warped record
liberated from the jacket age inhibits me
from touching or playing. I have outgrown
my taste with my regret: it’s a parka
hung on pegs in school or trampled on too much,
too torn to be a garment: please take it.
I will not wait for a parent to pick me up.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Abu Gharaib: A Masque ('04)
Setting: B.F. Skinner box, infernal as bitumen
Or black fields of basalt camels cannot crawl
between Amman and Baghdad, some taxi route.
Civilian ideologues profess, now practice:
Bovver brown scum. Push button, jar-head!
*******
Officer: Any coin-op hard-core porn, big dude?
Pfc Graner: Real-time video action reels
of human bondage: for sequel, please squeal.
Organ donors squashed to shapes primary.
Triangles? Sex-pyramids? Deal done.
Officer: Meat market under green line kosher?
Pfc Graner: Butcher slab scrub-down, tiny miniskirt.
Runway lingerie show at eighteen-hundred,
more inmates with frilly women’s panties
free of stains--otherwise, hell paid for.
Officer: Any contractor sex sport, online fantasy chat?
Pfc Graner: Albeit the phone line jammed or cut.
Officer: Any shit-kicker cowboy sex-track, trooper?
Pfc: To be.
Officer: Some golden shower, potty joke enactment?
Pfc Graner: Plenty. Ramp the speed and tag along.
Officer: Aerobics high-impact slaparound?
Any totalitarian slapstick routine?
Pfc Graner : More than that, even better than.
Officer: Any full penetration, whole 90 yards?
Pfc Graner : Underground they get goosebumps.
Live video-cam, sex-action capture.
Free-style, purgatorial yogic contortion.
Both: square-jawed soldiery sodomites
or fisters, certainly no! That would be wrong
(straight faces maintained).
Officer: Discipline regimen, pigskin in black?
Pfc Graner: Big boots on collar-bones and body-bags
for big boobs and penile extension bench-press.
Both: Tres vulgar perhaps. But of Saddam?
His Hefnerite grottos, tacky art stash,
castle-cabinets of Johnny Walker Black,
and golden toilets–Christ Jesus,
even Liberace’d blush!
*********
Lyndie: came me to get some.
Pfc Graner: me too!
Lyndie: Yummy copulation concrete tower,
Colder concrete floor on which to mate, torment.
PFC Graner: trailer park tomboy, you'll do.
Both: Imperative: to liberate, from norms and despots.
No Marquis DeSade nor Hammurabi had it better.
Lyndie: fucky, fuck?
Pfc. Graner: Please do.
Articulate your petite limbs around my bone.
Both: Artistic influence? Internet cumshot.
Video arcade game: blast 'em, despot!
All: Cluster-fuck ‘em. We’re a team!
Who said not? What care we? Not we care!
Tribal prerogative uniform. Cut loose! Copulate
before jailed. For jailers, jack.
Pfc. Graner: Not pretty, you'll do.
Lyndie: Squeeze 'em! Ride 'em, big boy, into dawn.
Sense of shame? For the camera, grunt, you grunt.
(Limbs in puzzle-pyramid linked like plumbing
spawned on some Windows XP screen-saver.)
All: Bone 'em, po'boy! Sex sandwich al a halal.
Matamoros, O alaque! Who's king? Ham you, rabbi!
Pumped-up village pineapple people-pyramid: go man, go.
If you look enough, a body spells the alphabet.
O the eye, em the nose-bridge, with the brows,
and the eye-O. By stimuli steer the body, steer the man,
until... petered out, descending figure?
Pfc.: will you?
Lyndie: do I. (Deep sigh!)
To jailed: contorted positions no option.
Doggy: Spring to attention guy!
Calib am I, so close to caliphate
or to Marvin Kalb, who’s pal
to Henry K., that it’s not funny.
My name’s a taunt to Islamic man.
After interludes of herding
for the Franks and being bred
to lie upon the laps of regencies
the bitch is back, no scavenger
to lick a dead Sassanid’s cheek.
No matter how tough you are,
the nape of homo erectus is tender.
Now that jugular will I go for.
Fraidy cat? Bow. Do not move.
Leniency? Conjugal visits? Dream on!
Potable water, bandaids? Wow, better, Jack!
Protect your manhood? Try me, meanie!
The bone I'll unbury's your thigh.
Prisoners, atremble: Nota bene
We didn't audition the normal way,
Our casting couch concrete.
Doggy: Woof! My licks, that look
so loving, while I clean indifferently carrion
from rifle barrel or bone. Heed how fast
All: the last can switch places with the first:
new contexts convert the slave to taskmaster,
morphing the modest-meaned lunch lady
into the cold-cutted brute of the land-grant campus.
Pfc. Graner: (One sound, a single eel fingerling
slipping in the latex pinkie of a hospital glove.)
Lyndie: O make/unmake me. Bone me, man.
Bore me. Use your man-handle, plough
rocky soil. Bone through me, bore me. Man!
(Soon an adults-only sex action video feature.)
To jailed:
Moan no more: your maker you'll meet.
All together: Anyone below eighteen
unaccompanied by parent or guardian
forbidden from entering the theater.
Harvard-bankrolled hack, official historian,
and radio heckler: "little difference here between
[for your eyes only] and daily fraternity haze."
Neocon: so imam, of umma dream, and yo mama.
Passports of pleasure, a few pennies a day.
A special club, accessed through our portal.
Read the affidavit, then click and enter
Lyndie: (blows, post coitus, smoke rings.)
You’re a pfc specialist, and I an associate.
Pfc: and discharged, you’re a sales specialist.
and I an associate trainee. We won't make
the appliances we sell. But you won't be
a cashier or a snitch, now will you?
You'll be a sales specialist, and I your king.
Lyndie: And I your queen.
You'll move the units
From the in-door to the out
and never never snitch
And you'll promise. So promise.
Pfc Graner: We'll be what we can be.
Lyndie: a meterologist to read the oracles
Of weather right, the entrails of the sky
Among several sets of burning candles.
Prisoners: but we never "auditioned."
Doggies: Keep your distance, hoi polloi! Woof, woof!
Or black fields of basalt camels cannot crawl
between Amman and Baghdad, some taxi route.
Civilian ideologues profess, now practice:
Bovver brown scum. Push button, jar-head!
*******
Officer: Any coin-op hard-core porn, big dude?
Pfc Graner: Real-time video action reels
of human bondage: for sequel, please squeal.
Organ donors squashed to shapes primary.
Triangles? Sex-pyramids? Deal done.
Officer: Meat market under green line kosher?
Pfc Graner: Butcher slab scrub-down, tiny miniskirt.
Runway lingerie show at eighteen-hundred,
more inmates with frilly women’s panties
free of stains--otherwise, hell paid for.
Officer: Any contractor sex sport, online fantasy chat?
Pfc Graner: Albeit the phone line jammed or cut.
Officer: Any shit-kicker cowboy sex-track, trooper?
Pfc: To be.
Officer: Some golden shower, potty joke enactment?
Pfc Graner: Plenty. Ramp the speed and tag along.
Officer: Aerobics high-impact slaparound?
Any totalitarian slapstick routine?
Pfc Graner : More than that, even better than.
Officer: Any full penetration, whole 90 yards?
Pfc Graner : Underground they get goosebumps.
Live video-cam, sex-action capture.
Free-style, purgatorial yogic contortion.
Both: square-jawed soldiery sodomites
or fisters, certainly no! That would be wrong
(straight faces maintained).
Officer: Discipline regimen, pigskin in black?
Pfc Graner: Big boots on collar-bones and body-bags
for big boobs and penile extension bench-press.
Both: Tres vulgar perhaps. But of Saddam?
His Hefnerite grottos, tacky art stash,
castle-cabinets of Johnny Walker Black,
and golden toilets–Christ Jesus,
even Liberace’d blush!
*********
Lyndie: came me to get some.
Pfc Graner: me too!
Lyndie: Yummy copulation concrete tower,
Colder concrete floor on which to mate, torment.
PFC Graner: trailer park tomboy, you'll do.
Both: Imperative: to liberate, from norms and despots.
No Marquis DeSade nor Hammurabi had it better.
Lyndie: fucky, fuck?
Pfc. Graner: Please do.
Articulate your petite limbs around my bone.
Both: Artistic influence? Internet cumshot.
Video arcade game: blast 'em, despot!
All: Cluster-fuck ‘em. We’re a team!
Who said not? What care we? Not we care!
Tribal prerogative uniform. Cut loose! Copulate
before jailed. For jailers, jack.
Pfc. Graner: Not pretty, you'll do.
Lyndie: Squeeze 'em! Ride 'em, big boy, into dawn.
Sense of shame? For the camera, grunt, you grunt.
(Limbs in puzzle-pyramid linked like plumbing
spawned on some Windows XP screen-saver.)
All: Bone 'em, po'boy! Sex sandwich al a halal.
Matamoros, O alaque! Who's king? Ham you, rabbi!
Pumped-up village pineapple people-pyramid: go man, go.
If you look enough, a body spells the alphabet.
O the eye, em the nose-bridge, with the brows,
and the eye-O. By stimuli steer the body, steer the man,
until... petered out, descending figure?
Pfc.: will you?
Lyndie: do I. (Deep sigh!)
To jailed: contorted positions no option.
Doggy: Spring to attention guy!
Calib am I, so close to caliphate
or to Marvin Kalb, who’s pal
to Henry K., that it’s not funny.
My name’s a taunt to Islamic man.
After interludes of herding
for the Franks and being bred
to lie upon the laps of regencies
the bitch is back, no scavenger
to lick a dead Sassanid’s cheek.
No matter how tough you are,
the nape of homo erectus is tender.
Now that jugular will I go for.
Fraidy cat? Bow. Do not move.
Leniency? Conjugal visits? Dream on!
Potable water, bandaids? Wow, better, Jack!
Protect your manhood? Try me, meanie!
The bone I'll unbury's your thigh.
Prisoners, atremble: Nota bene
We didn't audition the normal way,
Our casting couch concrete.
Doggy: Woof! My licks, that look
so loving, while I clean indifferently carrion
from rifle barrel or bone. Heed how fast
All: the last can switch places with the first:
new contexts convert the slave to taskmaster,
morphing the modest-meaned lunch lady
into the cold-cutted brute of the land-grant campus.
Pfc. Graner: (One sound, a single eel fingerling
slipping in the latex pinkie of a hospital glove.)
Lyndie: O make/unmake me. Bone me, man.
Bore me. Use your man-handle, plough
rocky soil. Bone through me, bore me. Man!
(Soon an adults-only sex action video feature.)
To jailed:
Moan no more: your maker you'll meet.
All together: Anyone below eighteen
unaccompanied by parent or guardian
forbidden from entering the theater.
Harvard-bankrolled hack, official historian,
and radio heckler: "little difference here between
[for your eyes only] and daily fraternity haze."
Neocon: so imam, of umma dream, and yo mama.
Passports of pleasure, a few pennies a day.
A special club, accessed through our portal.
Read the affidavit, then click and enter
Lyndie: (blows, post coitus, smoke rings.)
You’re a pfc specialist, and I an associate.
Pfc: and discharged, you’re a sales specialist.
and I an associate trainee. We won't make
the appliances we sell. But you won't be
a cashier or a snitch, now will you?
You'll be a sales specialist, and I your king.
Lyndie: And I your queen.
You'll move the units
From the in-door to the out
and never never snitch
And you'll promise. So promise.
Pfc Graner: We'll be what we can be.
Lyndie: a meterologist to read the oracles
Of weather right, the entrails of the sky
Among several sets of burning candles.
Prisoners: but we never "auditioned."
Doggies: Keep your distance, hoi polloi! Woof, woof!
Locomotion (Improvisation)(02)
Did the song propose a dance,
was it a program for abandon
or for movement--against sobriety,
of a personal or political nature?
Was the song pure self-advertisement
so to do the locomotion you had to buy it,
after which the record taught you the dance,
an invitation to the dance that required
you listen to each verse, one by one,
and in that order. Otherwise you wouldn’t
learn the dance in sync with your peers,
the happy initiates your friends who danced
as they conceived of chambers, pistons, camshafts.
Some in shop had even seen whole engines
halved like wombs, understood vertical strokes
turned weighted wheels, like those on Singers
through which you tugged a needle. Either you
watched your mother do this, or your sister
learned in Home Ec class: the locomotion.
But when you dance with what appendage
do you ape the chuff of the diesel
that pulls or pushes cars across a country
to one tune? Is the magic in the arms
of the steam trains, in oiled arms that turn
the crankshaft, alternate strokes translated
into revolutions? On the plain the lights dim,
the countryside surrenders to a rhythm.
Aren’t the mind’s appendages real as bone,
sprawled across an overlay's transparent sheets
that fly from homo erectus, simply machine parts
homo sapiens superimposed on the skeleton
in these perforated lines, as if to say these
are dreams become facts? The song
intrudes into my living room from the street.
And how embalmed the oldies have become,
unfanged and helpless and common
as one more dream of flight, though babies still
mimic engines with their mouths, and growing,
attach to crates scrap wooden wings
that they will stand or fall before.
was it a program for abandon
or for movement--against sobriety,
of a personal or political nature?
Was the song pure self-advertisement
so to do the locomotion you had to buy it,
after which the record taught you the dance,
an invitation to the dance that required
you listen to each verse, one by one,
and in that order. Otherwise you wouldn’t
learn the dance in sync with your peers,
the happy initiates your friends who danced
as they conceived of chambers, pistons, camshafts.
Some in shop had even seen whole engines
halved like wombs, understood vertical strokes
turned weighted wheels, like those on Singers
through which you tugged a needle. Either you
watched your mother do this, or your sister
learned in Home Ec class: the locomotion.
But when you dance with what appendage
do you ape the chuff of the diesel
that pulls or pushes cars across a country
to one tune? Is the magic in the arms
of the steam trains, in oiled arms that turn
the crankshaft, alternate strokes translated
into revolutions? On the plain the lights dim,
the countryside surrenders to a rhythm.
Aren’t the mind’s appendages real as bone,
sprawled across an overlay's transparent sheets
that fly from homo erectus, simply machine parts
homo sapiens superimposed on the skeleton
in these perforated lines, as if to say these
are dreams become facts? The song
intrudes into my living room from the street.
And how embalmed the oldies have become,
unfanged and helpless and common
as one more dream of flight, though babies still
mimic engines with their mouths, and growing,
attach to crates scrap wooden wings
that they will stand or fall before.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
May 19, 2007
Among the aisles for biscotti, darts before me
one Darien Aryan: nose aquiline, hair blonde,
complexion ruddy from repetitive ski-sunburns,
(perhaps sailing) a hint of blossoms from gin-drops.
Next aisle, take the working poor: unisex nose and ear piercings,
sweatshirts for Orange County Choppers, obesity, bad food.
For men, hair close-cropped; for women, whatever men wear,
baggy denims, deep pockets, perhaps Insane Clown Posse tees.
Early 20s, with children. Man’s job? Warehouse maybe.
Class resentment, to granolas addressed, personified by girl
with tie-dyes and dread-locks, festival trustafarians.
Subaru Outback-driving, summer campers, prep-school habitues,
grown to slummers, guitar-slingers. Or Bard artistes, with hauteur or auras.
Like heros Slipknot, I decapitate between the vertebrae and skull.
And when I’m through, they’ll need to wear a crown of spikes
to keep from bumping into fatal walls or door-jambs.
The ruling class: [unreadable the disc].
But for granola: Nepal’s the place.
For our nose-pierced friend, fingering corn-dogs
in the freezer aisle, only home can be imagined.
Could fame bite, as it does rappers and playmates
viewed in passing while surfing channels: OC or Florida.
Wherever I can wear my gear beneath the palms.
What’s the airfare to this virtual battle-space
Where artistes and granolas are punched with impunity?
Anything with beaucoup fast-food, crows,
thistles, pit bulls and septic system’s cool.
College girl granolas go to Nepal after Bard,
goodie-two-shoes help cripples cross the street for resumes.
one Darien Aryan: nose aquiline, hair blonde,
complexion ruddy from repetitive ski-sunburns,
(perhaps sailing) a hint of blossoms from gin-drops.
Next aisle, take the working poor: unisex nose and ear piercings,
sweatshirts for Orange County Choppers, obesity, bad food.
For men, hair close-cropped; for women, whatever men wear,
baggy denims, deep pockets, perhaps Insane Clown Posse tees.
Early 20s, with children. Man’s job? Warehouse maybe.
Class resentment, to granolas addressed, personified by girl
with tie-dyes and dread-locks, festival trustafarians.
Subaru Outback-driving, summer campers, prep-school habitues,
grown to slummers, guitar-slingers. Or Bard artistes, with hauteur or auras.
Like heros Slipknot, I decapitate between the vertebrae and skull.
And when I’m through, they’ll need to wear a crown of spikes
to keep from bumping into fatal walls or door-jambs.
The ruling class: [unreadable the disc].
But for granola: Nepal’s the place.
For our nose-pierced friend, fingering corn-dogs
in the freezer aisle, only home can be imagined.
Could fame bite, as it does rappers and playmates
viewed in passing while surfing channels: OC or Florida.
Wherever I can wear my gear beneath the palms.
What’s the airfare to this virtual battle-space
Where artistes and granolas are punched with impunity?
Anything with beaucoup fast-food, crows,
thistles, pit bulls and septic system’s cool.
College girl granolas go to Nepal after Bard,
goodie-two-shoes help cripples cross the street for resumes.
untitled, uncertain date
B.
Looking at an atlas of a state the pages of which
are broken into alphanumerically ordered squares,
I cannot find my way among them, or get outside
the one with my address on it. Discolored carpet
with billowy edges of brown suggest formations
Of lava or fjords rimmed in by high mountains,
steep slopes that would erode to water did the moss
and boulders not hold the soil back, and behind them,
tundra with the sparsest vegetation on earth, and deer
with huge antlers padded with regal velvet,
And after them, nothing for an incalculable distance
except gray carpet, which since the landlord
is going to rip it out of the hallways, proves
there are limits to this landscape,
And that my powers of invention or merely dictation
can easily flag, leaving yours truly empty-handed:
the wealth that in my dreams I had acquired
Is not in my waking life. I enrich myself
in dreams and wake to find that in the transference
I have lost my shirt along with the power
to fly in a kind of buoyant liquified maternum humanum
by which I can sustain myself above the ground
for whatever length of time the dream takes place,
Whether in the blink of an eye or in an hour
or in these sporadic periods between sleep and wakefulness.
Gears from tanker trucks grind, full of milk,
which more than a few pampered empresses
have bathed in to emerge in blood-red ballroom gowns
and a tiara, the emperor dressed in the epaulets
and shoulder-braids of a Bonaparte:
milk is a kind of element through which the exalted and elect
enter and emerge—in this way it’s the body politic,
the dugs of state, the king nurtured to keep his state in order.
A.
There is no website for the event that I am attending,
There are no maps. There is a map to North Station
Or North Causeway Street—that much I know.
There are as many maps for the south as for the north,
And some are color-coded, as if for different systems
Of fluid under the coarser, built-up, outer layer of tissue
of lymph, blood, mucus. There are no maps for water-mains
With crosses for valves and locks. It should be possible
To walk into the ground blind and dumb and arrive
At the other end of sunlight, which dries and simplifies
All kinks, as an iron or the sweep of a hand across landscape.
Abstractions melt before the eye like spiderwebs,
Or dry against the safety glass. The maker’s initials
Are white frost, an acronym that can’t be spelled
Because the companies have split into subsidiaries.
Their legal disputes will carry through the afternoon.
But the glass won’t necessarily break. Being safety glass,
It breaks into impermeable pebbles of equal weight,
Each segment discretely weighed and measured beforehand.
Looking at an atlas of a state the pages of which
are broken into alphanumerically ordered squares,
I cannot find my way among them, or get outside
the one with my address on it. Discolored carpet
with billowy edges of brown suggest formations
Of lava or fjords rimmed in by high mountains,
steep slopes that would erode to water did the moss
and boulders not hold the soil back, and behind them,
tundra with the sparsest vegetation on earth, and deer
with huge antlers padded with regal velvet,
And after them, nothing for an incalculable distance
except gray carpet, which since the landlord
is going to rip it out of the hallways, proves
there are limits to this landscape,
And that my powers of invention or merely dictation
can easily flag, leaving yours truly empty-handed:
the wealth that in my dreams I had acquired
Is not in my waking life. I enrich myself
in dreams and wake to find that in the transference
I have lost my shirt along with the power
to fly in a kind of buoyant liquified maternum humanum
by which I can sustain myself above the ground
for whatever length of time the dream takes place,
Whether in the blink of an eye or in an hour
or in these sporadic periods between sleep and wakefulness.
Gears from tanker trucks grind, full of milk,
which more than a few pampered empresses
have bathed in to emerge in blood-red ballroom gowns
and a tiara, the emperor dressed in the epaulets
and shoulder-braids of a Bonaparte:
milk is a kind of element through which the exalted and elect
enter and emerge—in this way it’s the body politic,
the dugs of state, the king nurtured to keep his state in order.
A.
There is no website for the event that I am attending,
There are no maps. There is a map to North Station
Or North Causeway Street—that much I know.
There are as many maps for the south as for the north,
And some are color-coded, as if for different systems
Of fluid under the coarser, built-up, outer layer of tissue
of lymph, blood, mucus. There are no maps for water-mains
With crosses for valves and locks. It should be possible
To walk into the ground blind and dumb and arrive
At the other end of sunlight, which dries and simplifies
All kinks, as an iron or the sweep of a hand across landscape.
Abstractions melt before the eye like spiderwebs,
Or dry against the safety glass. The maker’s initials
Are white frost, an acronym that can’t be spelled
Because the companies have split into subsidiaries.
Their legal disputes will carry through the afternoon.
But the glass won’t necessarily break. Being safety glass,
It breaks into impermeable pebbles of equal weight,
Each segment discretely weighed and measured beforehand.
never titled (2005)
Soon I’m going to leave this place
but where will I go, to an aunt
whose preconception of discipline
is to be pre-emptive, and all at once?
Or to the coast, where beaches are cold,
and the locals hunt you with shotguns
until you hide among the gorse, where
you may expire? Or the hills,
where dwellers suspect outsiders
as the man himself, Pius the XIIth,
out for a stroll with his retriever and cane,
and if you see him doodling, stop him
before he captures the virtues of the locale
on pretty paper he will bind in a portfolio
of animal skin -- species unspecified--
embossed with his acronym and sundry titles
for territories extending into the veldt
or gingerly traversed by marsh birds
or by striped panthers pounced upon
(a looking-glass at the bottom of the lake
saw this, but I used my naked eye).
I myself have been prone to fold
this book of errors with its sanguinary waxen seal.
The titles show I can foreclose upon myself
so rangers encircle my Cherokee Chief
at six in the morning to the tune of chickadees.
The marathon would be quick and easy
all the runners agreed, the gun went off.
They crossed the limit, a band of tape
was all between us in a parched field.
A device driver broken on the machine,
we resorted to manual measures on the farmyard.
A day in which there is nothing to be said
or arranged, a laundry day, for what you will
–they promote the arts by starving them,
by allowing more soft-core on the internet
to distract the target demographic, army of one
–what is it like, broken up on a beach.
How much would I like to walk my terrier
on the beach, if only I had one,
but neither do I have a beach as I think of it,
nor the scalpel by which to sketch it
on a fragment of sand, the shattered besieged silicon
in all of us, imprinted like Ash Wednesday
–my forehead is an envelope upon which
a seal has been placed. What did they burn
to insure its adhesive qualities on skin?
It isn’t sallow, like a long-term care patient
whom no one visits but reporters,
or a fly tossed from the landing by a fisherman on a lake. The borders,
after all, are known, like the lines
in palms, like how children get paintings
adults don’t, because adults are dumb,
their heads are crammed with facts whereas
children possess that beautiful naivete
glimpsed in early quattrocento frescos
where the earthen qualities in the pigment
are truly drawn from earth, and a vineyard
happens to be in a region we should visit
on the fly, our vented Alfa Romeo a bullet
that would speed to the center of the earth
but amid the glowing magma of the core
you had best keep the top of the vehicle up
and no photographs either, since the brilliance
reflects back to become the viewer’s blindness.
We must devise a means to rise to the surface
without remaining superficial. We want to be children
and understand things adults can’t
since they’ve cluttered their minds up
with useless factsand we’d dance among the daffodils, and accustom
ourselves to lapses in invention that I am
encountering in the present, a stain
on my cheap, military olive, go-to-hell t-shirt,
which I remove with my index fingernail.
The nail’s uneven and must be cut a little more
as I wait for the muses or gods to breathe
upon my, preferably not within me, they
should display the lighter touch, not that one
turned up to ten, or wired for sound:
of which there is enough already. Make haste
speaks the organ, schneller. I hardly know
another mother tongue. And the ones I do
are well parroted. The slightly supercilious
demeanor of the poet-teacher of a small college
with two dubious chapbooks to his credit,
and a regular gig writing reviews for a tony periodical,
although somewhat dated, its editors chasing
Stalin’s ghosts around the office with flyswatters
with which they once expelled Henry Wallace’s minions,
these lines of non sequiturs are failing me
at this very moment. To get to a position
of advancement by means of many ladders
arranged without the encumbrances of prepositions
directing the reader to that special place
the author wishes him to be, the pronoun has some
problems, the one of gender the most troubling.
She clenched her teeth, repeating keep it brief.
You mutter to yourself behind an ivy-covered wall.
The tourists are straining to get a view
you repeat your name to steady yourself.
You drool from your meerschaum pipe.
Your song, as you lean toward the sun,
is not pretty, your chatter unmelodious,
you who are not so much rude as disrespectful.
but where will I go, to an aunt
whose preconception of discipline
is to be pre-emptive, and all at once?
Or to the coast, where beaches are cold,
and the locals hunt you with shotguns
until you hide among the gorse, where
you may expire? Or the hills,
where dwellers suspect outsiders
as the man himself, Pius the XIIth,
out for a stroll with his retriever and cane,
and if you see him doodling, stop him
before he captures the virtues of the locale
on pretty paper he will bind in a portfolio
of animal skin -- species unspecified--
embossed with his acronym and sundry titles
for territories extending into the veldt
or gingerly traversed by marsh birds
or by striped panthers pounced upon
(a looking-glass at the bottom of the lake
saw this, but I used my naked eye).
I myself have been prone to fold
this book of errors with its sanguinary waxen seal.
The titles show I can foreclose upon myself
so rangers encircle my Cherokee Chief
at six in the morning to the tune of chickadees.
The marathon would be quick and easy
all the runners agreed, the gun went off.
They crossed the limit, a band of tape
was all between us in a parched field.
A device driver broken on the machine,
we resorted to manual measures on the farmyard.
A day in which there is nothing to be said
or arranged, a laundry day, for what you will
–they promote the arts by starving them,
by allowing more soft-core on the internet
to distract the target demographic, army of one
–what is it like, broken up on a beach.
How much would I like to walk my terrier
on the beach, if only I had one,
but neither do I have a beach as I think of it,
nor the scalpel by which to sketch it
on a fragment of sand, the shattered besieged silicon
in all of us, imprinted like Ash Wednesday
–my forehead is an envelope upon which
a seal has been placed. What did they burn
to insure its adhesive qualities on skin?
It isn’t sallow, like a long-term care patient
whom no one visits but reporters,
or a fly tossed from the landing by a fisherman on a lake. The borders,
after all, are known, like the lines
in palms, like how children get paintings
adults don’t, because adults are dumb,
their heads are crammed with facts whereas
children possess that beautiful naivete
glimpsed in early quattrocento frescos
where the earthen qualities in the pigment
are truly drawn from earth, and a vineyard
happens to be in a region we should visit
on the fly, our vented Alfa Romeo a bullet
that would speed to the center of the earth
but amid the glowing magma of the core
you had best keep the top of the vehicle up
and no photographs either, since the brilliance
reflects back to become the viewer’s blindness.
We must devise a means to rise to the surface
without remaining superficial. We want to be children
and understand things adults can’t
since they’ve cluttered their minds up
with useless factsand we’d dance among the daffodils, and accustom
ourselves to lapses in invention that I am
encountering in the present, a stain
on my cheap, military olive, go-to-hell t-shirt,
which I remove with my index fingernail.
The nail’s uneven and must be cut a little more
as I wait for the muses or gods to breathe
upon my, preferably not within me, they
should display the lighter touch, not that one
turned up to ten, or wired for sound:
of which there is enough already. Make haste
speaks the organ, schneller. I hardly know
another mother tongue. And the ones I do
are well parroted. The slightly supercilious
demeanor of the poet-teacher of a small college
with two dubious chapbooks to his credit,
and a regular gig writing reviews for a tony periodical,
although somewhat dated, its editors chasing
Stalin’s ghosts around the office with flyswatters
with which they once expelled Henry Wallace’s minions,
these lines of non sequiturs are failing me
at this very moment. To get to a position
of advancement by means of many ladders
arranged without the encumbrances of prepositions
directing the reader to that special place
the author wishes him to be, the pronoun has some
problems, the one of gender the most troubling.
She clenched her teeth, repeating keep it brief.
You mutter to yourself behind an ivy-covered wall.
The tourists are straining to get a view
you repeat your name to steady yourself.
You drool from your meerschaum pipe.
Your song, as you lean toward the sun,
is not pretty, your chatter unmelodious,
you who are not so much rude as disrespectful.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Snowmen (03?)
At the half-time show couples stomp their cleated cowboy boots on an improvised dance-floor – line-dancing cowboys, authentic Indians, and Aleuts flown in with snowmen from Mars, the last of who impress the fans and journalists as overly grave albeit dignified, but surprisingly disinclined to pronouncements about the state of civilization, whether in the form of cable TV, loud music, video parlors, or porn. They glimpse civilization from iceboxes with little windows no larger than slots in camera oscuras since snowmen require constant air pressurization to keep their bodies and their noses and coal eyes intact. Being close to diamonds, coal is a surprisingly good medium by which to see through reflection, despite its skewered facets, creating a ricochet effect in which what enters does not leave the same way. Nor is their vision as geometrically repetitive as that of the fly. Snowmen take things in at odd, unpredictable angles.
There was some initial concern about the effect of pollution but this was solved by sprays of dry ice supplied by maiden attendants in bustiers too risque and revealing for the cheerleaders who leap in the field. But snowmen are men, and men will be men. Their pleasure appeared in a melting no dry ice jet could counteract. Sometimes however the cowboys appeared to take flying punches at the snowmen, immobile themselves except for their coal eyes, frightened and wide as eyes of dogs when they sense their masters’ violent tendencies. But snowmen don’t have the brains of dogs. They can calculate complicated algorithms the concepts of which are yet untranslatable into contemporary physics. On the other hand, dogs calculate algorithms of a similar complexity, such as: how soon will master retrieve that bone meal biscuit from the cupboard? Were this energy to be harnessed to human use, it would build a bridge span to space with material more fragile than cotton fiber or egg-casing.
Some promoter had the novel but stupid idea of giving the snowmen beards of ice to achieve Homeric dignity, but during the half-time show, the beards threatened to suffocate them. The band’s amplifiers vibrated so loudly their icicle fingers were shattered, depriving them of the sensations crucial to their well-being. Only two survived to be shipped to a Greenland convalescence, another adopted by a boy in Minnesota who witnessed its melting demise during a prematurely warm winter, but if it’s any consolation, after the snowman had melted into two coarse crystalline lumps the texture of sno-cones, the boy brought a lump of coal before his eyes and saw domestic objects dance in the black aperture, cars parked on the street, budding trees, and picket fences. No half-time line-dancing cowboy kicked in his direction a veiled threat.
There was some initial concern about the effect of pollution but this was solved by sprays of dry ice supplied by maiden attendants in bustiers too risque and revealing for the cheerleaders who leap in the field. But snowmen are men, and men will be men. Their pleasure appeared in a melting no dry ice jet could counteract. Sometimes however the cowboys appeared to take flying punches at the snowmen, immobile themselves except for their coal eyes, frightened and wide as eyes of dogs when they sense their masters’ violent tendencies. But snowmen don’t have the brains of dogs. They can calculate complicated algorithms the concepts of which are yet untranslatable into contemporary physics. On the other hand, dogs calculate algorithms of a similar complexity, such as: how soon will master retrieve that bone meal biscuit from the cupboard? Were this energy to be harnessed to human use, it would build a bridge span to space with material more fragile than cotton fiber or egg-casing.
Some promoter had the novel but stupid idea of giving the snowmen beards of ice to achieve Homeric dignity, but during the half-time show, the beards threatened to suffocate them. The band’s amplifiers vibrated so loudly their icicle fingers were shattered, depriving them of the sensations crucial to their well-being. Only two survived to be shipped to a Greenland convalescence, another adopted by a boy in Minnesota who witnessed its melting demise during a prematurely warm winter, but if it’s any consolation, after the snowman had melted into two coarse crystalline lumps the texture of sno-cones, the boy brought a lump of coal before his eyes and saw domestic objects dance in the black aperture, cars parked on the street, budding trees, and picket fences. No half-time line-dancing cowboy kicked in his direction a veiled threat.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Program Music
Outside the coffee-shop, the boxer with shaved head
admits liking Mahler. His windbreaker proclaims
a training camp in Lowell. One of the black-shirted staff
stops her sweeping to talk. Acne on her cheeks
scars features otherwise delicate. Pedestrians wrap coats
around them, ever more tightly -- if they have them.
Perfect weather for wind-breakers, nothing so cumbrous
as goose-down. The boxer admires music
without lyrics. Program music, I want to add, watching
ochre stones that arc above the picture windows
of the art school alternate with tan ones. Style: Eclectic,
Moorish, Romanesque? What do those gray thinkers
think on the frieze of granite over the view, beginning
with Socrates, leaping to Spinoza, onto Jefferson?
Color, however, is missing. There is no lack of music.
But the tribe for which it’s being sung cannot be
so easily identified. Who bothers listening to lyrics?
The music muddles what the boxer has already said
until I cannot trace the course of his argument
through the air. Maybe I can overhear him
when I leave the coffee-shop, its central location
so convenient -- from my door a hop, a skip, a jump.
The alternative weekly (name to go unmentioned)
featured black-face masks like those of minstrels
for turn-of-the-century handbills, but repeated
like overcrowded wallpaper patterns – ho hum,
fleur-de-lys and trellis, ribbons, globes, and masks.
Nothing in the listings. Enters in a summer dress a girl
who confesses she hasn’t been in town all winter
and has never, this entire time, seen the snow melt:
shame. Dumped in lots. No problem. To communicate
emotion, such as Mahler’s, words are unrequired,
program music being how things sound: valkyries
who drop from storm-clouds in a cascade of notes
and make figures that fall. He won the fight, and not
by decision either: his opponent fell. Missing a season
is not like missing a note or a box-office feature,
which can be acquired in a video store months after
the gala premiere. So the summer blockbusters
can be in your hands by spring. Even on windy days
you never need to miss an episode. Even snow
can be communicated: place your hand in a freezer
before defrost: imagine cities inside. Their inhabitants
wrap their blazers around themselves more tightly
as if to live were to be tossed capriciously, not fallen
as opponent or victim – nothing so serious as all that –
and lacking certain listings for films, you must call
the theater or stop living vicariously through shop-fronts
and these alternative weeklies: what’s the non-alternative
version anyway? Tell me. I want to know. Communicate
without ornament, without a tongue – if you can. I lack
the term for that kind of masonry. But it surprised me,
although I must have passed it by a thousand times.
admits liking Mahler. His windbreaker proclaims
a training camp in Lowell. One of the black-shirted staff
stops her sweeping to talk. Acne on her cheeks
scars features otherwise delicate. Pedestrians wrap coats
around them, ever more tightly -- if they have them.
Perfect weather for wind-breakers, nothing so cumbrous
as goose-down. The boxer admires music
without lyrics. Program music, I want to add, watching
ochre stones that arc above the picture windows
of the art school alternate with tan ones. Style: Eclectic,
Moorish, Romanesque? What do those gray thinkers
think on the frieze of granite over the view, beginning
with Socrates, leaping to Spinoza, onto Jefferson?
Color, however, is missing. There is no lack of music.
But the tribe for which it’s being sung cannot be
so easily identified. Who bothers listening to lyrics?
The music muddles what the boxer has already said
until I cannot trace the course of his argument
through the air. Maybe I can overhear him
when I leave the coffee-shop, its central location
so convenient -- from my door a hop, a skip, a jump.
The alternative weekly (name to go unmentioned)
featured black-face masks like those of minstrels
for turn-of-the-century handbills, but repeated
like overcrowded wallpaper patterns – ho hum,
fleur-de-lys and trellis, ribbons, globes, and masks.
Nothing in the listings. Enters in a summer dress a girl
who confesses she hasn’t been in town all winter
and has never, this entire time, seen the snow melt:
shame. Dumped in lots. No problem. To communicate
emotion, such as Mahler’s, words are unrequired,
program music being how things sound: valkyries
who drop from storm-clouds in a cascade of notes
and make figures that fall. He won the fight, and not
by decision either: his opponent fell. Missing a season
is not like missing a note or a box-office feature,
which can be acquired in a video store months after
the gala premiere. So the summer blockbusters
can be in your hands by spring. Even on windy days
you never need to miss an episode. Even snow
can be communicated: place your hand in a freezer
before defrost: imagine cities inside. Their inhabitants
wrap their blazers around themselves more tightly
as if to live were to be tossed capriciously, not fallen
as opponent or victim – nothing so serious as all that –
and lacking certain listings for films, you must call
the theater or stop living vicariously through shop-fronts
and these alternative weeklies: what’s the non-alternative
version anyway? Tell me. I want to know. Communicate
without ornament, without a tongue – if you can. I lack
the term for that kind of masonry. But it surprised me,
although I must have passed it by a thousand times.
2/25/05
Do you teach, paint, weave, travel, or preach?
Or teach privately, or weave stories while you paint,
Or do you travel, weaving yarns based on your itineraries,
Which weaves up the coastline to Peru and Australia.
You vagabondage teaches you about the customs
Of tribespeople unexposed to hair-dryers and cotter-pins.
Your wandering weaves an irregular path about the globe.
Sometimes it is a drunken man’s saunter, a ballerina’s twirl.
You teach privately the methods of releasing chakra-energy
These tribespeople taught you in their palm-leaf shelters
But you collected all their orgone energy on the sly,
And packed it in a little book no thicker than a ring finger.
To the converted alone do you preach these doctrines
Of energy release and of living. With the paint-brush
You weave another itinerary, among the jack-fruit thorns
And the Venus fly-traps. Your own backyard
Is wherever you happen to be standing, a point
On the itinerary, but hardly the end.
Or teach privately, or weave stories while you paint,
Or do you travel, weaving yarns based on your itineraries,
Which weaves up the coastline to Peru and Australia.
You vagabondage teaches you about the customs
Of tribespeople unexposed to hair-dryers and cotter-pins.
Your wandering weaves an irregular path about the globe.
Sometimes it is a drunken man’s saunter, a ballerina’s twirl.
You teach privately the methods of releasing chakra-energy
These tribespeople taught you in their palm-leaf shelters
But you collected all their orgone energy on the sly,
And packed it in a little book no thicker than a ring finger.
To the converted alone do you preach these doctrines
Of energy release and of living. With the paint-brush
You weave another itinerary, among the jack-fruit thorns
And the Venus fly-traps. Your own backyard
Is wherever you happen to be standing, a point
On the itinerary, but hardly the end.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
I am blue (02)
Wordy accuse the commonest songbird
you who adorned your filler notebooks
with weaponry scattering the figures
of the Wehrmacht or the pithier Cong.
And blots were a failure in transmission
soaked in multiple sheets of filler paper,
either bombs or targets, beneath them
words cancelled. When they didn’t come
there was tic-tac-toe, no square left empty
in which two nothings, exes or zeros, recurred,
two options to nothing, one to which a number
could be added, one to which it couldn’t be.
Time permitting, you blotted grids out
and there you go again, staining paper
with multiple choices, your fingers
pressed down so hard as your attention
to what was sketched or spoken lapsed
the paper broke, or bruises of ink
passed their imprint to the paper
as a father passes misery to his child.
So to a lack of figuration you were driven,
the dream of the true abstractionists
who permitted in their manifestos
total immersions of baritone blue
until airplanes vanished with rocketry
and tic-tac-toe with rote vocabulary
and boxes rounded into azure ovals,
perfect holes that didn’t represent.
you who adorned your filler notebooks
with weaponry scattering the figures
of the Wehrmacht or the pithier Cong.
And blots were a failure in transmission
soaked in multiple sheets of filler paper,
either bombs or targets, beneath them
words cancelled. When they didn’t come
there was tic-tac-toe, no square left empty
in which two nothings, exes or zeros, recurred,
two options to nothing, one to which a number
could be added, one to which it couldn’t be.
Time permitting, you blotted grids out
and there you go again, staining paper
with multiple choices, your fingers
pressed down so hard as your attention
to what was sketched or spoken lapsed
the paper broke, or bruises of ink
passed their imprint to the paper
as a father passes misery to his child.
So to a lack of figuration you were driven,
the dream of the true abstractionists
who permitted in their manifestos
total immersions of baritone blue
until airplanes vanished with rocketry
and tic-tac-toe with rote vocabulary
and boxes rounded into azure ovals,
perfect holes that didn’t represent.
Old School (04?)
1.
Purple worms for fishermen, crawling,
exposed, negotiate roads or wrap around rocks,
while in humid unfamiliar landscape bombers rise
beyond your line of sight. You hear broadcasts
about Laotian guerrillas romping in jungle-brush–
why can’t they calm those apes down anyway?
Give them bananas or tranquilizers? If guerillas
could only go back to their cages or the jungle,
not pester innocents who’ve come to see them,
and if visitors could only be kinder to guerrillas,
not haze them like King Kong in his cage!
2.
Laos is how people terrace hills for crops,
or another catalogue of precious minerals
you’re too afraid to touch. Or in geometry,
Laos is a pie bisected. Or in current events
it spells trouble. You learn each country
has chemicals beneath them when you learn
about resources: bananas, copper, or worms
blush in the earth with the ruddiness of iron.
All the world is blut und eisen, said Bismarck,
a cookie with custard within who tried to talk.
3.
Resources from thimble-sized vials
foam on the chemistry set, stain the drop-cloth
of your makeshift crawlspace laboratory.
A label is as much a law as mattress tags.
So if you tear the tag, soon you’ll go to jail.
The warning labels told you not to mix them,
and the tag tells you not to pull itself away
from resting places for heads of the weary-- the labels
on the fruit lack addresses, orange hides kissed
by sun, bananas hacked, hauled by muleback....
the fruits of earth drop in a stony silence.
4.
Laos, Peru, and the resources beneath them...
swirl in the toilet bowl down which you flush them
to illumine nightcrawlers--they grope their way
above the planet in the spring, the playground
become a flood, another water-body to recite
or fish with string and worms impaled on hooks.
Within this migratory sea Laos could be sunk
aswim with butts and landfill. Or like Peru
it’s terraced, or maybe they join in the runoff
to the standing water of the playground.
All terraced places are sisters, all gloves
discarded in life become at some point hands that join.
5.
And the trails overhead that fade when you stare
them down during recess mirror the ski-tracks
furrowing to valleys that stretch to Laos or Peru.
Can guerillas crawl above the globe like worms,
drowned and crimson in the playground pools
when the run-off can do nothing else but rise?
Although your teacher answers your quizzes,
spelling the required words in festive circles of chalk,
still you feel smart: you can demarcate the world
your toes can touch from what they can’t.
Purple worms for fishermen, crawling,
exposed, negotiate roads or wrap around rocks,
while in humid unfamiliar landscape bombers rise
beyond your line of sight. You hear broadcasts
about Laotian guerrillas romping in jungle-brush–
why can’t they calm those apes down anyway?
Give them bananas or tranquilizers? If guerillas
could only go back to their cages or the jungle,
not pester innocents who’ve come to see them,
and if visitors could only be kinder to guerrillas,
not haze them like King Kong in his cage!
2.
Laos is how people terrace hills for crops,
or another catalogue of precious minerals
you’re too afraid to touch. Or in geometry,
Laos is a pie bisected. Or in current events
it spells trouble. You learn each country
has chemicals beneath them when you learn
about resources: bananas, copper, or worms
blush in the earth with the ruddiness of iron.
All the world is blut und eisen, said Bismarck,
a cookie with custard within who tried to talk.
3.
Resources from thimble-sized vials
foam on the chemistry set, stain the drop-cloth
of your makeshift crawlspace laboratory.
A label is as much a law as mattress tags.
So if you tear the tag, soon you’ll go to jail.
The warning labels told you not to mix them,
and the tag tells you not to pull itself away
from resting places for heads of the weary-- the labels
on the fruit lack addresses, orange hides kissed
by sun, bananas hacked, hauled by muleback....
the fruits of earth drop in a stony silence.
4.
Laos, Peru, and the resources beneath them...
swirl in the toilet bowl down which you flush them
to illumine nightcrawlers--they grope their way
above the planet in the spring, the playground
become a flood, another water-body to recite
or fish with string and worms impaled on hooks.
Within this migratory sea Laos could be sunk
aswim with butts and landfill. Or like Peru
it’s terraced, or maybe they join in the runoff
to the standing water of the playground.
All terraced places are sisters, all gloves
discarded in life become at some point hands that join.
5.
And the trails overhead that fade when you stare
them down during recess mirror the ski-tracks
furrowing to valleys that stretch to Laos or Peru.
Can guerillas crawl above the globe like worms,
drowned and crimson in the playground pools
when the run-off can do nothing else but rise?
Although your teacher answers your quizzes,
spelling the required words in festive circles of chalk,
still you feel smart: you can demarcate the world
your toes can touch from what they can’t.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Crossing (05)
The parking lot across the street is very empty
because the import store is very closed.
Nor does the dairy fleet run to the cooling bin.
And the smokestack by the cooling bin is smokeless.
The day is cloudy, crows cross the cloud-banks,
caw and land among the trees, while the traffic crossing
is noiseless, and the cars don’t cross the footpaths,
and the paths the cars don’t cross are very empty.
Few caws, few cars, fewer people, fewer paths to cross.
The empty buses run, but the parking lot is empty
because the import store is closed Columbus Day.
Not that the rubber workers drop their machetes
or rubber-trees they cut won’t grow again, or land
reserved for rubber trees in semi-tropics not be razed,
or machetes be stilled in the middle of a field
or the basket-weavers cease their tying.
The import store won’t stop expanding with more baskets
or more spaces. The growers will need more land
for more semi-tropic rubber-trees, not that their leaves
are thick as cactus: a rubber plant, not rubber tree,
wilts on the casement. Wind can blow through both.
But wicker baskets can’t float, nor can rubber when raw.
Not that reeds won’t be weaved into baskets for the store,
nor paths not cross, life not continue, crows caw.
The inhabitants drifted, unaware of where they’d land.
They hadn’t crossed another shipping lane those days
when sailors defined the lanes they sailed by crossing them.
The traffic island deserted, no classes will be held in the future;
nor will there be classes today-- few crossings, fewer people,
fewer crows to caw. On the traffic island is a sign.
Who could know the island natives wrote them,
or could master the crossing-sign language,
not only stop or go -- red to cease, green go --
but caution, pedestrians too, more places to cross.
This is not the place to cross though,
not that it’s any trouble with fewer pedestrians,
less traffic, so many mute crossing streets,
so few imports or crossings or classes,
even fewer baskets, baby bassinets or hampers,
no wicker warp nor woof, no rubber-trees
cut into bar-stools, not wobbly as rubber
no lack of space or niches to place things,
small vessels to be fit primly into larger ones,
which in theory can continue ad infinitum,
as with kachina dolls or concentric compartments,
spheres that fit around a core too hot to touch or hold.
If the paths don’t cross, neither can the space
between the rubber of the tropics or the wicker
for which importing and paths are required.
Strange woods, rubber trees, no crows in them.
Empty traffic islands, universal sign-language.
Natives knew what red and yellow meant.
When a pedestrian stands there, natives hide,
letting signs they made from scrap-heaps speak for them,
the coast on which they landed surely not what they had had in mind,
green and given, unlike this traffic island. The import store
does not import their wicker-work or rubber-wood from them.
And the only tree on the traffic island is a sign.
Who has heard them speak the language of signs,
their perpetual stepping-stone to more places
where are grown the reeds of wicker or the rubber trees.
How time flies too, when adrift on rubber barques,
among bath toys, baby bassinets or wicker baskets,
an island in sight, a sign on the island
proclaiming: world over, crossing, diverge.
because the import store is very closed.
Nor does the dairy fleet run to the cooling bin.
And the smokestack by the cooling bin is smokeless.
The day is cloudy, crows cross the cloud-banks,
caw and land among the trees, while the traffic crossing
is noiseless, and the cars don’t cross the footpaths,
and the paths the cars don’t cross are very empty.
Few caws, few cars, fewer people, fewer paths to cross.
The empty buses run, but the parking lot is empty
because the import store is closed Columbus Day.
Not that the rubber workers drop their machetes
or rubber-trees they cut won’t grow again, or land
reserved for rubber trees in semi-tropics not be razed,
or machetes be stilled in the middle of a field
or the basket-weavers cease their tying.
The import store won’t stop expanding with more baskets
or more spaces. The growers will need more land
for more semi-tropic rubber-trees, not that their leaves
are thick as cactus: a rubber plant, not rubber tree,
wilts on the casement. Wind can blow through both.
But wicker baskets can’t float, nor can rubber when raw.
Not that reeds won’t be weaved into baskets for the store,
nor paths not cross, life not continue, crows caw.
The inhabitants drifted, unaware of where they’d land.
They hadn’t crossed another shipping lane those days
when sailors defined the lanes they sailed by crossing them.
The traffic island deserted, no classes will be held in the future;
nor will there be classes today-- few crossings, fewer people,
fewer crows to caw. On the traffic island is a sign.
Who could know the island natives wrote them,
or could master the crossing-sign language,
not only stop or go -- red to cease, green go --
but caution, pedestrians too, more places to cross.
This is not the place to cross though,
not that it’s any trouble with fewer pedestrians,
less traffic, so many mute crossing streets,
so few imports or crossings or classes,
even fewer baskets, baby bassinets or hampers,
no wicker warp nor woof, no rubber-trees
cut into bar-stools, not wobbly as rubber
no lack of space or niches to place things,
small vessels to be fit primly into larger ones,
which in theory can continue ad infinitum,
as with kachina dolls or concentric compartments,
spheres that fit around a core too hot to touch or hold.
If the paths don’t cross, neither can the space
between the rubber of the tropics or the wicker
for which importing and paths are required.
Strange woods, rubber trees, no crows in them.
Empty traffic islands, universal sign-language.
Natives knew what red and yellow meant.
When a pedestrian stands there, natives hide,
letting signs they made from scrap-heaps speak for them,
the coast on which they landed surely not what they had had in mind,
green and given, unlike this traffic island. The import store
does not import their wicker-work or rubber-wood from them.
And the only tree on the traffic island is a sign.
Who has heard them speak the language of signs,
their perpetual stepping-stone to more places
where are grown the reeds of wicker or the rubber trees.
How time flies too, when adrift on rubber barques,
among bath toys, baby bassinets or wicker baskets,
an island in sight, a sign on the island
proclaiming: world over, crossing, diverge.
Theories of the Leisure Class
1.
He was the product of the cushiest schools, a software engineer who could have been a poet. She was a visual artist who could have been an attorney for a law firm specializing in international corporate litigation, but who spent half her life at artists’ residencies and the other half on earnings from Paris and New York galleries. In winter, they nested in their refurbished lower Manhattan loft; in summer, at a seaside cottage once owned by a dotty magnesium extraction heiress. So what were they doing in handcuffs, their Range Rover impounded, the cops reading them their Miranda rights? You have one call.
2.
He strode among his pastures with Nordic equanimity; she sprawled upon the velour divan munching seedless grapes, devouring with shaded eyes her well-thumbed copy of The Hours. He’d been a shipping magnate; she’d been his trophy. Once they’d traveled to the Preakness, after the Nile tour and the Bay of Naples houseboat. So what were they doing at the bottom of a ravine, blankly looking up?
3.
He’d overturned Triumphs among the steep leafiness of the Berkshires; she’d been his debutante for whom he’d cleaned up his act. Now he was a town pillar, a wild young man descended into respectability, and she his willing buttress. Their marriage made the society pages. So what were they doing at a Motel 6 on the outskirts of town, his body filling the chalk-lines of a corpulent, bloated 60 year old, her face red and streaked with unwilling tears before Dame Scandal’s flash bulbs?
4.
They were the dream couple, the objects of envy of all. He’d skipped grades and captained the football team; she’d become a psychiatrist and author. Their homes and gardens were in Better Homes and Gardens. He’d shepherded failing companies to new thresholds; she’d cured the impotent and agoraphobic with methods that were the envy of the psychiatric community. So what were they doing, one apprehended at the airport outward-bound, the other at the Mexican border? What were those offshore accounts doing with their names tattooed on them?
He was the product of the cushiest schools, a software engineer who could have been a poet. She was a visual artist who could have been an attorney for a law firm specializing in international corporate litigation, but who spent half her life at artists’ residencies and the other half on earnings from Paris and New York galleries. In winter, they nested in their refurbished lower Manhattan loft; in summer, at a seaside cottage once owned by a dotty magnesium extraction heiress. So what were they doing in handcuffs, their Range Rover impounded, the cops reading them their Miranda rights? You have one call.
2.
He strode among his pastures with Nordic equanimity; she sprawled upon the velour divan munching seedless grapes, devouring with shaded eyes her well-thumbed copy of The Hours. He’d been a shipping magnate; she’d been his trophy. Once they’d traveled to the Preakness, after the Nile tour and the Bay of Naples houseboat. So what were they doing at the bottom of a ravine, blankly looking up?
3.
He’d overturned Triumphs among the steep leafiness of the Berkshires; she’d been his debutante for whom he’d cleaned up his act. Now he was a town pillar, a wild young man descended into respectability, and she his willing buttress. Their marriage made the society pages. So what were they doing at a Motel 6 on the outskirts of town, his body filling the chalk-lines of a corpulent, bloated 60 year old, her face red and streaked with unwilling tears before Dame Scandal’s flash bulbs?
4.
They were the dream couple, the objects of envy of all. He’d skipped grades and captained the football team; she’d become a psychiatrist and author. Their homes and gardens were in Better Homes and Gardens. He’d shepherded failing companies to new thresholds; she’d cured the impotent and agoraphobic with methods that were the envy of the psychiatric community. So what were they doing, one apprehended at the airport outward-bound, the other at the Mexican border? What were those offshore accounts doing with their names tattooed on them?
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Music’s Empire (1997?)
On a hazy summer day
musak shook walls. When he paced,
sound allowed him not to think, or relaxed him,
engulfing embryonic thoughts
about foundations: water seeped through walls
and cracked them, pooled on concrete,
levitated carpet, dropped it in a mildew bed.
The cesspool, its rim edged by the emerald
of tender grass, had clogged, the guest-room
cum tool-shed rustled with swallows -- just as pigeons
inhabit rotundas of dying gods. Fisher-cats
vampirized the fowl. Music drowned
the attenuated crack of the house, the sound
of stars collapsing, ruptures in the sun’s corona
for which humans haven’t ears.
A hairline fracture
down the living-room wall betrayed it–
foreclosure that spackle, tape or paint
could not dam up, reverse.
But how the bees orbited the goldenrod that summer,
how meadows buzzed, the sacs of milkweed ruptured.
musak shook walls. When he paced,
sound allowed him not to think, or relaxed him,
engulfing embryonic thoughts
about foundations: water seeped through walls
and cracked them, pooled on concrete,
levitated carpet, dropped it in a mildew bed.
The cesspool, its rim edged by the emerald
of tender grass, had clogged, the guest-room
cum tool-shed rustled with swallows -- just as pigeons
inhabit rotundas of dying gods. Fisher-cats
vampirized the fowl. Music drowned
the attenuated crack of the house, the sound
of stars collapsing, ruptures in the sun’s corona
for which humans haven’t ears.
A hairline fracture
down the living-room wall betrayed it–
foreclosure that spackle, tape or paint
could not dam up, reverse.
But how the bees orbited the goldenrod that summer,
how meadows buzzed, the sacs of milkweed ruptured.
The Anxiety of Influence (9/02)
Is there not time enough
more than enough time
to press a delete key
to cross a line out
or stet first thoughts
or attend some convention
where you get a prize
just like you do
at a sidewalk art show
among the seascapes
and the still-lives?
And there’s your still-life.
And isn’t it beautiful too,
a bowl of fruit, a teddy,
incongruous, but striking.
I was hit between the eyes
among the grandmothers
and ministers with hobbies –
and how they’re still at it,
daubing print dresses
and empty surfaces! And oops!
they’ve mastered boats
and buoys and weathered shacks
with icicles and trees
that cannot be identified
in all nature’s unbound book.
more than enough time
to press a delete key
to cross a line out
or stet first thoughts
or attend some convention
where you get a prize
just like you do
at a sidewalk art show
among the seascapes
and the still-lives?
And there’s your still-life.
And isn’t it beautiful too,
a bowl of fruit, a teddy,
incongruous, but striking.
I was hit between the eyes
among the grandmothers
and ministers with hobbies –
and how they’re still at it,
daubing print dresses
and empty surfaces! And oops!
they’ve mastered boats
and buoys and weathered shacks
with icicles and trees
that cannot be identified
in all nature’s unbound book.
Malice of Bells (old, really old, 20 years old)
There go the bells again, the ice cream truck
braking in the cul-de-sac. A tune repeats
through the gunmetal horn, the timbre papery, crackling,
the oldest sound in the world. You'd think the peal
would end, until it wedges in the neighborhood,
floats through corridors from which plaster falls,
eavesdrops on uneasy conversations. Then bell-notes
lose themselves through sprays of goldenrod
in the city graveyard behind this hill of apartments.
Slanting from erosion, headstones lose their names
in slate that flakes to weeds. The dead
shake from the tremors of the subway. No one hears
the keeper rattling his shackled gates wrapped in chain.
A filthy wind insures the plainest flowers spread.
No one notices a single visitor with a wreath.
Our future a hillside eroding into the graveyard,
the rise of rents or masonry to retain the soil
cannot keep us from the equilibrium land desires.
Good Humor's clarion roams through this periphery
of buildings that will drop in fields of weeds
and break apart from layers of weight
while faceless headstones nod to the soil's whim.
The vendor hands a line of fatigued boys oases
that melt upon each tongue, a small mirage.
When mothers bear their youngest to the line
they are really leading them from infancy
into the cash nexus, the wet kiss
of a vanilla cone, the shucked paper shells
stuck to curbstone like the fronds of sea-plants.
Reflections of warped noise
trail the vendor as he trawls another gullible street.
Since the sound is less than what it was, it spells
remorse. (Even I've been moved to ask myself
if I missed a true sound in the speaker's battered throat.)
braking in the cul-de-sac. A tune repeats
through the gunmetal horn, the timbre papery, crackling,
the oldest sound in the world. You'd think the peal
would end, until it wedges in the neighborhood,
floats through corridors from which plaster falls,
eavesdrops on uneasy conversations. Then bell-notes
lose themselves through sprays of goldenrod
in the city graveyard behind this hill of apartments.
Slanting from erosion, headstones lose their names
in slate that flakes to weeds. The dead
shake from the tremors of the subway. No one hears
the keeper rattling his shackled gates wrapped in chain.
A filthy wind insures the plainest flowers spread.
No one notices a single visitor with a wreath.
Our future a hillside eroding into the graveyard,
the rise of rents or masonry to retain the soil
cannot keep us from the equilibrium land desires.
Good Humor's clarion roams through this periphery
of buildings that will drop in fields of weeds
and break apart from layers of weight
while faceless headstones nod to the soil's whim.
The vendor hands a line of fatigued boys oases
that melt upon each tongue, a small mirage.
When mothers bear their youngest to the line
they are really leading them from infancy
into the cash nexus, the wet kiss
of a vanilla cone, the shucked paper shells
stuck to curbstone like the fronds of sea-plants.
Reflections of warped noise
trail the vendor as he trawls another gullible street.
Since the sound is less than what it was, it spells
remorse. (Even I've been moved to ask myself
if I missed a true sound in the speaker's battered throat.)
Tulip Heaven
The old man next door had perished from sepsis of the bowels
but his wife, unmoved by loss, still brought the groceries home,
replaced the motion lights on the garage, and mowed instead,
and around their house replaced the flowers with plastic ones:
and who would recognize them as plastic from this pretty distance?
And who would know that when the water from the gutters pooled
into their cups, the waters of the world could neither quicken
nor bend them: though immortality, naturally, came with a price.
So the Indus, the Danube, and the Androscoggin all schemed
and none of them, none ever washed them away, the cups intact,
while the mulch, pungent as Buffalo chips, washed into gutters
with rivers of the world atomized into a single cumulo-nimbus cloud
that, spirited from Canada to Westbrook, expired in a silver shower.
On the stump of their final tree glittered a handful of party favors
their grandchildren had planted in the split alongside loose ribbons.
Their pinwheels twirled as frantically as weathervanes in wheat.
Twirl on, to compensate your tree that will never grow again.
And sometimes, when the wind whips up, and they twirl that way,
a loose beagle, distempered and skittish, will roam the yards,
barking at the neighbors, especially with the coming of a storm.
And when that happens the whole world seems to be a carnival.
that at will produces Dorothy from Kansas and Toto in a shack.
The motion lights turn on as wind whips the maples to a frenzy.
But there would always be tulips in the yard. Though faded,
call them classics if you will, as from enough distance for awe,
you couldn’t see that the siding was vinyl. That was his idea,
although he is a box of ashes. And to no one’s knowledge,
they have not been misplaced. They are not on the mantle though–
there are no fireplaces. I should know, they’re my neighbors.
And they can’t be in the garage: that would be sacrilege.
Ditto the basement: too much water condensation. But where?
Where is the jar for our veteran, this forty-year-long handler
of your letters? At his branch they have never replaced him.
The swivel-seat that wobbled with his living weight is cold.
*******************************************************
In the news the other day a lake in Bolivia completely dried,
and the peasants skinned the alligators for their hides,
leaving flayed carcasses to roll in mud that baked them
in concentered rings. Then a spider-web of cracks
appeared, no center evident among cells or dry hexagons
the lake was now. Surely the peasants could have used tulips
for ground zero among the bones, a banquet for the condors.
When the eyes of the peasants drop, taking in memento mori
where water was, in whatever mother tongue they breathe
they will need to whisper valley, no choice but valley.
And if there isn’t a word left, they will need to make one.
Life must be drained from things before we find them--
o felix culpa, you hang on plaster walls.
Nothing to do but pull the stamens back with our thumbs,
roll back the primitive, thick petals like the ears of creatures
we can reconstruct from sand, settle for the form
of the tulip, bred in bogs and polders, those marshy bridges
among low countries, but everywhere,
everywhere the form of the tulip.
but his wife, unmoved by loss, still brought the groceries home,
replaced the motion lights on the garage, and mowed instead,
and around their house replaced the flowers with plastic ones:
and who would recognize them as plastic from this pretty distance?
And who would know that when the water from the gutters pooled
into their cups, the waters of the world could neither quicken
nor bend them: though immortality, naturally, came with a price.
So the Indus, the Danube, and the Androscoggin all schemed
and none of them, none ever washed them away, the cups intact,
while the mulch, pungent as Buffalo chips, washed into gutters
with rivers of the world atomized into a single cumulo-nimbus cloud
that, spirited from Canada to Westbrook, expired in a silver shower.
On the stump of their final tree glittered a handful of party favors
their grandchildren had planted in the split alongside loose ribbons.
Their pinwheels twirled as frantically as weathervanes in wheat.
Twirl on, to compensate your tree that will never grow again.
And sometimes, when the wind whips up, and they twirl that way,
a loose beagle, distempered and skittish, will roam the yards,
barking at the neighbors, especially with the coming of a storm.
And when that happens the whole world seems to be a carnival.
that at will produces Dorothy from Kansas and Toto in a shack.
The motion lights turn on as wind whips the maples to a frenzy.
But there would always be tulips in the yard. Though faded,
call them classics if you will, as from enough distance for awe,
you couldn’t see that the siding was vinyl. That was his idea,
although he is a box of ashes. And to no one’s knowledge,
they have not been misplaced. They are not on the mantle though–
there are no fireplaces. I should know, they’re my neighbors.
And they can’t be in the garage: that would be sacrilege.
Ditto the basement: too much water condensation. But where?
Where is the jar for our veteran, this forty-year-long handler
of your letters? At his branch they have never replaced him.
The swivel-seat that wobbled with his living weight is cold.
*******************************************************
In the news the other day a lake in Bolivia completely dried,
and the peasants skinned the alligators for their hides,
leaving flayed carcasses to roll in mud that baked them
in concentered rings. Then a spider-web of cracks
appeared, no center evident among cells or dry hexagons
the lake was now. Surely the peasants could have used tulips
for ground zero among the bones, a banquet for the condors.
When the eyes of the peasants drop, taking in memento mori
where water was, in whatever mother tongue they breathe
they will need to whisper valley, no choice but valley.
And if there isn’t a word left, they will need to make one.
Life must be drained from things before we find them--
o felix culpa, you hang on plaster walls.
Nothing to do but pull the stamens back with our thumbs,
roll back the primitive, thick petals like the ears of creatures
we can reconstruct from sand, settle for the form
of the tulip, bred in bogs and polders, those marshy bridges
among low countries, but everywhere,
everywhere the form of the tulip.
Monday, June 9, 2008
UNIVERSAL MART (JERSEY CITY) (1988)
I.
Loew's copper marquee, its tracery of bulbs smashed,
frames empty letter guides, except one panel, announcing
No features. Closed for renovation. Open soon.
The owner bought Loew's for a song, and has sectioned
its shadows into office space for the future--
already legs of typists hang from swivel chairs
and their desks are overcrowded with bouquets
or fruitbaskets, or babies in bonnets, or dead dogs
they loved once, or husbands smiling from casinos.
In the developer's mind glows an ocean-blue of monitors,
technicality: the city insists Loew's be a theater,
that it stay a theater--so the city battles the owner,
the plywood face of the theater concealing seat-rows
upturned like false teeth, among toppled Ionic pillars.
Has the curtain been gathered, was its scarlet heap
discarded in laundry-chutes as jackhammers shattered
the spectacle it veiled? The wrecking crew has asked aloud
what those who paid for them will bring to desolation.
II.
But across Loew's, the manager of Universal Mart
considers how value dances over the visible face
of Journal Square, all wrecked facades and billboards,
canvas sheets and scaffolds obstructing the sidewalk
that leads to the bargain store, where citizens
buy things woven from the recycled plastic of milk-jugs--
and plaster-smeared heaps gathered in backlot dumpsters
where crews discard the scalloped detritus of art-deco,
a caryatid backed by shell, a mealy fat acanthus spear.
He cannot ban the moisture blackening his onions
or the sponginess of Idahos. Ziggurats of mangoes and romes
shrink while mounds of change palmed of brilliance swell.
Nor can he stiffen wilted lettuce-leaves, nor
exorcize the mold from whole-wheat bread, nor keep
the leeks from drooping, unsour milk, retard the spoilage.
After closing, he rebuilds the pyramids of fruit
into diminished versions of themselves, and thinks
how much the key to wealth is scarcity, how one should never
offer what was yours for free. Usually he thinks such things
while turning out lights that illuminate aisles
of dated wares, overpriced or padded, he knows the old must buy,
or wiping business, simply business, from battered weighscales.
Loew's copper marquee, its tracery of bulbs smashed,
frames empty letter guides, except one panel, announcing
No features. Closed for renovation. Open soon.
The owner bought Loew's for a song, and has sectioned
its shadows into office space for the future--
already legs of typists hang from swivel chairs
and their desks are overcrowded with bouquets
or fruitbaskets, or babies in bonnets, or dead dogs
they loved once, or husbands smiling from casinos.
In the developer's mind glows an ocean-blue of monitors,
technicality: the city insists Loew's be a theater,
that it stay a theater--so the city battles the owner,
the plywood face of the theater concealing seat-rows
upturned like false teeth, among toppled Ionic pillars.
Has the curtain been gathered, was its scarlet heap
discarded in laundry-chutes as jackhammers shattered
the spectacle it veiled? The wrecking crew has asked aloud
what those who paid for them will bring to desolation.
II.
But across Loew's, the manager of Universal Mart
considers how value dances over the visible face
of Journal Square, all wrecked facades and billboards,
canvas sheets and scaffolds obstructing the sidewalk
that leads to the bargain store, where citizens
buy things woven from the recycled plastic of milk-jugs--
and plaster-smeared heaps gathered in backlot dumpsters
where crews discard the scalloped detritus of art-deco,
a caryatid backed by shell, a mealy fat acanthus spear.
He cannot ban the moisture blackening his onions
or the sponginess of Idahos. Ziggurats of mangoes and romes
shrink while mounds of change palmed of brilliance swell.
Nor can he stiffen wilted lettuce-leaves, nor
exorcize the mold from whole-wheat bread, nor keep
the leeks from drooping, unsour milk, retard the spoilage.
After closing, he rebuilds the pyramids of fruit
into diminished versions of themselves, and thinks
how much the key to wealth is scarcity, how one should never
offer what was yours for free. Usually he thinks such things
while turning out lights that illuminate aisles
of dated wares, overpriced or padded, he knows the old must buy,
or wiping business, simply business, from battered weighscales.
End of the Line (05)
At the end of the tunnel in the light
a ball of fur will sit and please itself,
no eyes, no olfactories, or nerve-ends
for stimulus, no more limbs to move
to the end of history, the big merge
after chimeras recombined with men
who grafted prosthetics on themselves,
shape-shifting in wombs like sea-creatures,
like fish with feet or horns or occipital tails
or more extremities than they could use
to reproduce, defend, or hunt down prey.
And so the manipuss becomes a platyman
and lays his eggs upon a coastal plain,
his ancestors having grafted surplus parts on,
spare horns, shed with prehensile tails of Pan.
Dr. Moreau would blush at the horned goths
with puzzle-pieces carved in every inch of skin,
at the tumescence of the dwarfs who couple
with phone-sex housewives, at horned men,
half-toads with flickering tails and multi-tongues.
The pensive chimpanzee who pushes a broom
above the cold stone steps of the college
had melancholy injected in his mother’s embryo.
a ball of fur will sit and please itself,
no eyes, no olfactories, or nerve-ends
for stimulus, no more limbs to move
to the end of history, the big merge
after chimeras recombined with men
who grafted prosthetics on themselves,
shape-shifting in wombs like sea-creatures,
like fish with feet or horns or occipital tails
or more extremities than they could use
to reproduce, defend, or hunt down prey.
And so the manipuss becomes a platyman
and lays his eggs upon a coastal plain,
his ancestors having grafted surplus parts on,
spare horns, shed with prehensile tails of Pan.
Dr. Moreau would blush at the horned goths
with puzzle-pieces carved in every inch of skin,
at the tumescence of the dwarfs who couple
with phone-sex housewives, at horned men,
half-toads with flickering tails and multi-tongues.
The pensive chimpanzee who pushes a broom
above the cold stone steps of the college
had melancholy injected in his mother’s embryo.
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