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.