12/12/09, 12/20/09

Flip through Death in Venice:
note the old pansy in hipster's attire
with hair dyed and lips rouged
foreshadowing/mirroring/foreshadowing
protagonist Von Aschenbach in his demise,
tansy in his buttonhole, youth restored
by the glib barber, wandering in mazes,
feverish, lost at career's finale.

But this pansy treats you to a frown
no matter what you tip him.
You thought your visits would be kind,
knowing that his partner was sick.
Who is he to seek your straight charity?

So for hair you go to girls instead,
a half-dozen housewives out of town,
their spouses cops or firemen.
One of them doesn't mind pressing her hips
against your knuckles as they grip the leather armrests--
hers are curved as in Rubens or as Charytyn
among her circle of Afro-Caribbean dancers,
animated Venus of Willendorf.
You wonder what her love life's like.

Is the husband, so small in the photograph
taped to her mirror, touching her?
Does she take more interest in male customers
than in children whose hair she cuts
customarily before the baseball season?
She's talks about her old bedroom.
I don't get what neighborhood it's in.
Who does she bring there, her parents gone?
How old is her offspring,
also in the snapshot on the mirror
another stylist will take over
when she leaves, starting her own business?
My knuckles memorize the her jeans

as taut as skin around her hips,
although she'll go to seed, not eating right.
As if I were swayed by rhythm and undulation,
waves within the tides all lunar push and pull.
Nor should she bare her midriff now.
Still I'd enter Shannon without effort,
bathe with her, let friction build.
But inside, I'd make a remark
so ridiculuous or laughable,
the act would become(see Marcus Aurelius),
rubbing of innards and spastic extrusion of slime.

The aftermath feels like a meth crash,
this coming to one's senses. Among bedsheets,
the sated body feels indented as fieldstones or concrete.
O Hold it: she's a barber with a son,
her husband's municipal, her extended family
large as some Irish-Yankee mukhabarat.

Venus' gravity can grind stone
into plate-shaped fragments.
What is the likelihood of bumping
into another woman built like her,
the curves just tracks or trajectories
on which bodies and elements hurl?
Like a rolling stone, begin with the drum-beat, don't end with one.

12/20/09--6/7/10
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Last night's blizzard missed Vermont entirely,
but it snowed in Boston and most of the eastern industrial belt,
until there were flight delays clear to Chicago and down to DC.

I've never eaten a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen.
According to the Larouchies, the Queen of England runs
the heroin trade and is the force that drives the Kyoto protocols.

Said Jerry Garcia once, heroin is a great drug for old people.
And old people such as myself, without children to support them,
and with a hard time finding shelter. Heroin will be a great temptation.

Once at an airport such as Idewilde or Logan, I search
for a bus shelter as soon as I am outside the flight gates.
Someone stole the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from the gates

to Auschwitz, or was it to Bergen-Belsen, or was it both?
When the sign says STOP my instinct says do the opposite and GO.
However if my instinct entertains murder, I do not follow the lead.

When again I fish on Lake Morey, I will use lead weights
to hold the bait down below the waterline.
Were people to disappear, fish would overcrowd the sea.
When people overcrowd the planet, the fish will flounder, prices rise.

Surely all airports and stations will be overcrowded during this season.
And a sigh of relief will escape once the season ends.
But from the imprisonment of family, there is neither escape nor relief.

Could you row into the middle of the lake, without friends or family,
would that bring a quiet although lonely respite, satisfactory
to those who are used to being alone, although one hankers for a dog
as a companion, who looks up to you, depending upon you for sustenance,
for food and for shelter, wagging its tail, hanging its tongue out.

Only the weekends, unextended with vacation or personal days,
bring you respite now, your furloughs and holidays spent.
For my furlough week this year, I chose the week before Labor Day,
while the sun still warmed the lawns and gardens,
spending no small amount of time trimming my lawn and weeding my garden,

some weeds with milky pods or stems, some with thorns
or velvet-textured pulpy leaves and impossibly tenacious roots,
ensuring the plant's recurrence next season, suggesting
those eastern resurrection gods who submerge in winter but
in summer ascend before Phoebus--who knows what
poisons or medicinal properties they offer, conceal?

Among the gates of airports in post-industrial cities
and between the broken tarmac and the faded traffic stripes,
rise weeds to a nearly human height, scattering their spores
to the winds that are borne from the Arctic.

Terrorists don't need to hold such airports under siege,
all they need to do is tie up outbound traffic.
Counter-terrorists besiege the post-industrial airports.
It's ideas that are the poisonous weeds rooted in the minds
of both, scattered among the winds like so many spores

that refuse to acknowledge borders or the gates of airports,
the weeds are bringing the wild back to entwine among the ingenious
structures, a field already reforested, repopulated with vines
entwined among the video terminals and concession stands

where Milk-Duds rot among and feed the milkweed
bursting through the summer with the frequency of incendiary devices
released from the hand of the fighter egged on by imam or Bakuninist,

although there remains nothing to conquer but unregistered space
of weeds among perennials I cannot claw from soil, once on my knees, enough.