Heal your decrepitude in this whirlpool
Of the Fountain of Youth, in which mendicants drop
After their struggle among the ropes and weights,
An elderly couple, a man with cuprous hair and skin
And his wife, a bombshell once. Whirlpool
At the bottom floor of the fountain of youth
Never cleaned enough but roiling with water
For the old man with few teeth among his children.
Waters that break up the tennis court
Overlooking the Econolodge and the highway
Into loosened green chunks of concrete,
Shredded basketball net and gutter of foam
Above the crumbling footpath.
Swimming’s free of charge, the weight-stacks rust.
Two body-builders man the building.
Weights as fragile as crockery.
A whirlpool in the Fountain of Youth
in which rested an elderly man with few teeth
among his children, the water-jets roiling green currents.
Upstairs the broken machinery among which a man
and his once bombshell wife struggled among weights
as breakable as crockery with seats of foam or sponge.
The waters have broken up the tennis court
overlooking the Econolodge, where you can swim for free.
In the Fountain of Youth a whirlpool promises life
but who’s young enough to gain from it.
At the bottom of the Fountain of Youth
stirs the whirlpool.
Chunks of green concrete with stripes
loosened on the tennis court; the basketball nets shredded,
as if someone had hung from them.
A gutter poured a foam-like liquid on a patch of lawn.
Chunks of weathered wood and shingle lay
beside a crumbling concrete footpath and chain-link fence.
Two body-builders manned the building.
Two elders struggled with the Nautilus, black iron
with chunks of foam ripped from the back rests.
The foam was pink and covered with Naugahyde.
The man, with coppery hair and skin, was for his age youthful;
and at a younger age, she might have been a bombshell.
Few others frequent the broken strength machines,
the frayed cables barely holding the weights in place.
Spots of rust appeared on the weight-stacks.
No one was paying for the upkeep, or so it looked.
Where are the investors who will renovate
this Fountain of Youth, the whirlpool
at the bottom floor in the men’s room,
the shower heads that do not stop?
The whirlpool at the bottom of the world
is water from the white River, the water recalculating
by means of water-jets.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
June 26, 2010
Taxonomy and the evolution of primates teaches the relation of fingers to intelligence, the more articulated the finger the greater the dexterity, until vocables come next. Symbol-making, what distinguishes humans, results from hands, not the tongue. What were the symbols? Cairns, crosses, fertility objects, painted herds of deer or bison, geese effigies above altars. Not the symbol but an image to invoke one creature, the image being the creature until the creature comes of its own accord. For the sake of shorthand, the symbol arrives, maybe the synecdoche.
A French prisoner, his face tattooed, had killed his cell-mate to eat his lung—I can’t recall if he’d consumed both lobes. Maybe one was enough. Was a sexual impulse involved, the desire to consume the beloved, just as a man might bite the shoulder of a woman during the act? On that sunny arid day I’d taken my Claritin D and was as high as a kite. I was jogging slowly besides a drainage ditch choked with wildflowers—buttercups, white-petalled daisies, and purple vetch. As I breathed deeply and looked at the flower-filled ditch and the lowlands around it, so suitable for a vernal pool the size of a large cow-pond, nearly as wide as some playing-field for an aboriginal sport, I thought of the lungs as a sieve pulling in waves of air as the ditch and the nearly level swampland breathes in water, filtering the nutrients from these elements through wild plants or capillaries until the whole field bursts into flower or the running subject rejuvenates, witnessing the actions of weeds comb the rainwater and the runoff untilo the sun comes out and the eyes and pistils of the wildflowers burst into irregular nebulas of color. Ahead was an access road of unusually red soil with the spruce on either side cut down, looking as if an expansion of housing developments into the woods were being planned, descending into the woods in sharper, more rutted steps. I was taken by the odor of sap, but as it became clear that the road would be harder to negotiate, I about-faced. Once in sight the aquatic center resembled a secure block of semi-clear glass or burnished steel, reflecting the sky and its sparse clouds.
Lebanon, an old mill town, quiet in summer evenings, deserted almost, the largest crowds beneath the lights of the ice-cream stand. Otherwise the parking spaces around the darkened commons free, a handful of boys in their early teens in the commons, others either home or by the lakeside with their families; the families have left their roomy white Colonials for the weekend.
………………………….
Those engineers are going to steer the course of the stars someday, re-route the gorges, merge rivers.
And after flooding their ancestors’ hamlets,
Maybe colonize Mars, and drive canals between craters.
How the salesmen with that frosted hair would like a little piece of their magic.
They’ll colonize the castles made among the stars
They control like some stage machinery.
The perpetual shift of stage sets revealing their machinery.
Certainly I won’t have the key to this sideshow
Half-infatuated by Lindsay Lohan in her backless dress
In transit to the courtroom on the MS network dot-com—
Let me read my messages. Rather, I don’t get much mail.
Come to think of it, that dress looks made of mylar foil,
A fabric that can be propelled through pure space
By sunlight alone. Lift it from the figure,
Lift your skirt and fly.
…………………………..
Six pots of nearly withering Romaine lettuce leaves, three other potted plants, two peppers, one tomato, bought at the Price Chopper on sale, about to dessicate on the vine. Two bags of dessicant in the basement, deemed not enough by the housing inspector. A bag of poison boken open, a bucket of antifreeze, a dead mouse. Old clay pots with dried up stems still inside them. Cobwebs on all the beams and joists. Why does this side of the house sink from the other side, as if it wished to fall? Weeds of an especially tenacious dandelion not flowering yet that I most deftly tug from the root ball to remove the plant, a plant thriving in the most granitic of soils, where the dirt drive meets the street among rubble almost too stony to walk upright, better to crawl or coax your car above the first abrupt hump before the splash of tiger-lillies that conceal the incertitude of the storage shed’s foundations.
A French prisoner, his face tattooed, had killed his cell-mate to eat his lung—I can’t recall if he’d consumed both lobes. Maybe one was enough. Was a sexual impulse involved, the desire to consume the beloved, just as a man might bite the shoulder of a woman during the act? On that sunny arid day I’d taken my Claritin D and was as high as a kite. I was jogging slowly besides a drainage ditch choked with wildflowers—buttercups, white-petalled daisies, and purple vetch. As I breathed deeply and looked at the flower-filled ditch and the lowlands around it, so suitable for a vernal pool the size of a large cow-pond, nearly as wide as some playing-field for an aboriginal sport, I thought of the lungs as a sieve pulling in waves of air as the ditch and the nearly level swampland breathes in water, filtering the nutrients from these elements through wild plants or capillaries until the whole field bursts into flower or the running subject rejuvenates, witnessing the actions of weeds comb the rainwater and the runoff untilo the sun comes out and the eyes and pistils of the wildflowers burst into irregular nebulas of color. Ahead was an access road of unusually red soil with the spruce on either side cut down, looking as if an expansion of housing developments into the woods were being planned, descending into the woods in sharper, more rutted steps. I was taken by the odor of sap, but as it became clear that the road would be harder to negotiate, I about-faced. Once in sight the aquatic center resembled a secure block of semi-clear glass or burnished steel, reflecting the sky and its sparse clouds.
Lebanon, an old mill town, quiet in summer evenings, deserted almost, the largest crowds beneath the lights of the ice-cream stand. Otherwise the parking spaces around the darkened commons free, a handful of boys in their early teens in the commons, others either home or by the lakeside with their families; the families have left their roomy white Colonials for the weekend.
………………………….
Those engineers are going to steer the course of the stars someday, re-route the gorges, merge rivers.
And after flooding their ancestors’ hamlets,
Maybe colonize Mars, and drive canals between craters.
How the salesmen with that frosted hair would like a little piece of their magic.
They’ll colonize the castles made among the stars
They control like some stage machinery.
The perpetual shift of stage sets revealing their machinery.
Certainly I won’t have the key to this sideshow
Half-infatuated by Lindsay Lohan in her backless dress
In transit to the courtroom on the MS network dot-com—
Let me read my messages. Rather, I don’t get much mail.
Come to think of it, that dress looks made of mylar foil,
A fabric that can be propelled through pure space
By sunlight alone. Lift it from the figure,
Lift your skirt and fly.
…………………………..
Six pots of nearly withering Romaine lettuce leaves, three other potted plants, two peppers, one tomato, bought at the Price Chopper on sale, about to dessicate on the vine. Two bags of dessicant in the basement, deemed not enough by the housing inspector. A bag of poison boken open, a bucket of antifreeze, a dead mouse. Old clay pots with dried up stems still inside them. Cobwebs on all the beams and joists. Why does this side of the house sink from the other side, as if it wished to fall? Weeds of an especially tenacious dandelion not flowering yet that I most deftly tug from the root ball to remove the plant, a plant thriving in the most granitic of soils, where the dirt drive meets the street among rubble almost too stony to walk upright, better to crawl or coax your car above the first abrupt hump before the splash of tiger-lillies that conceal the incertitude of the storage shed’s foundations.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Oct. 2 2010
Who can stop us from taking an address or two down
Not to use now, but for end times, when the shit explodes?
Nothing can stop us. Write down that address, and wait.
What can it profit a man to let the foe slip from his paws?
Love demands reckoning, at least one good bloody day of it.
And love is not the love of fellow man. Love is the sword
Driving the money-lenders from the temple
Protruding from the mouth like an expired ATM card.
Love is smiting the Amalekites to every man
Cruising this neighborhood in my unsightly Neon
(Not mind you Subaru or Beamer)
My skunk’s nose wedged in every cookie jar.
But I am not the child with his nose pressed
Against the sweet-shop window in the grey of winter.
But I am most certainly the bloom of summer months,
Fleet Mercury and ruddy Mars and Cyclops,
Alfalfa with his sling-shot in his pocket
Stirring up the blue-haired ladies during tea-time,
Ungainly but energetic, stumbling through the yard.
***************************************
The first frost of the season, the temperatures dropping.
What is the spot on this soft liquid crystal screen
That I cannot scrape away with my fingernail?
Out, damned spot, soiling the blue vibrating
From the operating system, always on or asleep.
The Valley News called. The newspapers are hurting.
The editor’s seat is shaky but warm, and the desk-lamps burn
Through the wintry evenings. Only office windows betray
The presence of the city. Come and go the cruise liners,
The volumes of the buildings like orthogonal cubes
Until you think how they stand in night their real state .
Not to use now, but for end times, when the shit explodes?
Nothing can stop us. Write down that address, and wait.
What can it profit a man to let the foe slip from his paws?
Love demands reckoning, at least one good bloody day of it.
And love is not the love of fellow man. Love is the sword
Driving the money-lenders from the temple
Protruding from the mouth like an expired ATM card.
Love is smiting the Amalekites to every man
Cruising this neighborhood in my unsightly Neon
(Not mind you Subaru or Beamer)
My skunk’s nose wedged in every cookie jar.
But I am not the child with his nose pressed
Against the sweet-shop window in the grey of winter.
But I am most certainly the bloom of summer months,
Fleet Mercury and ruddy Mars and Cyclops,
Alfalfa with his sling-shot in his pocket
Stirring up the blue-haired ladies during tea-time,
Ungainly but energetic, stumbling through the yard.
***************************************
The first frost of the season, the temperatures dropping.
What is the spot on this soft liquid crystal screen
That I cannot scrape away with my fingernail?
Out, damned spot, soiling the blue vibrating
From the operating system, always on or asleep.
The Valley News called. The newspapers are hurting.
The editor’s seat is shaky but warm, and the desk-lamps burn
Through the wintry evenings. Only office windows betray
The presence of the city. Come and go the cruise liners,
The volumes of the buildings like orthogonal cubes
Until you think how they stand in night their real state .
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
May 23, 2010 Sunday
A leader who can funnel the indignation of the crowd and give that indignation a single voice, a name, who can claim to take the country back but exactly what is this country for which the leader makes a claim.
A leader who waffles haplessly in the effort to appear judicious and balanced may lose the election but at least is not shown the hangman’s noose.
****************************
These exercises are as dry as dust he admitted in the private notebook he kept for himself and which was at this very date his only outlet for both personal doubt and reflection. He found himself lapidary at times, running on about topics that couldn’t possibly interest others, such as how to capture the lint accumulated in the dryer’s basket, instructions that read as follows: after removing the basket, cover your hand with a woolen sock and run it down the chute to capture as much lint as possible, then from the basket itself, pick a corner of the layer of lint and begin to roll it into a clump that you continue to rub across the screen, picking up more lint because, after all, since like attracts like, likewise lint attracts lint. Not discard the lint ball and throw the sock into the hamper, and hope that lint has not accumulated in the exhaust pipe. And if you can, as the sun lifts the leaves and pulls the masses into the roads and footpaths, drawing them into festivals and dirt track races, his thought took subterranean courses, among the collisions of stone, quartz and shale, his personal theaters were beer-cellars, and when the animals left their burrows to gambol through the forest, he replaced them. His favorite breakfasts had the texture of leaves and stems, for dinner he’d take the legume over the lettuce-leaf, for him the tuber of the carrot o the convolutions of the brassicae over the fruit or flower, like Leopold Bloom, the pork kidney over the flank steak, the tongue but not the pig’s knuckle, the gizzard not the hot wing, and among drugs, the depressant and pain-killer over the stimulant and psychotropic agent; for vacations, spelunking over swimming Caribbean beaches, no matter how many kept women or gorgeous gangster’s molls lay topless on the sand as menus read but not tasted. By dawn he failed to feel the leaden weights of sleep fall upon his eyes, sweating in his cocoon of bedclothes, the brands mixed, Martha Stewart with thrift store chic or go-to-hell practicality. His propensity was for Plutonian depths in which clear and separate entities could not be distinguished, worlds in which flickering shapes penetrated, mingled with others: had he been banished to the sky, he would hope to inhabit a raincloud sailing over the Andes or the least inhabited of the Himalayas, not (please!) over deserts or the thirsty gardens outside Los Angeles. The shovel he drove into the stony soil was nearly shattered, as if the stones had been spontaneously generated by the clay that had once been Adam, meaning from the clay. Against the shade and marble veins quarried only hillsides away shattered the pick of his mattock.
A leader who waffles haplessly in the effort to appear judicious and balanced may lose the election but at least is not shown the hangman’s noose.
****************************
These exercises are as dry as dust he admitted in the private notebook he kept for himself and which was at this very date his only outlet for both personal doubt and reflection. He found himself lapidary at times, running on about topics that couldn’t possibly interest others, such as how to capture the lint accumulated in the dryer’s basket, instructions that read as follows: after removing the basket, cover your hand with a woolen sock and run it down the chute to capture as much lint as possible, then from the basket itself, pick a corner of the layer of lint and begin to roll it into a clump that you continue to rub across the screen, picking up more lint because, after all, since like attracts like, likewise lint attracts lint. Not discard the lint ball and throw the sock into the hamper, and hope that lint has not accumulated in the exhaust pipe. And if you can, as the sun lifts the leaves and pulls the masses into the roads and footpaths, drawing them into festivals and dirt track races, his thought took subterranean courses, among the collisions of stone, quartz and shale, his personal theaters were beer-cellars, and when the animals left their burrows to gambol through the forest, he replaced them. His favorite breakfasts had the texture of leaves and stems, for dinner he’d take the legume over the lettuce-leaf, for him the tuber of the carrot o the convolutions of the brassicae over the fruit or flower, like Leopold Bloom, the pork kidney over the flank steak, the tongue but not the pig’s knuckle, the gizzard not the hot wing, and among drugs, the depressant and pain-killer over the stimulant and psychotropic agent; for vacations, spelunking over swimming Caribbean beaches, no matter how many kept women or gorgeous gangster’s molls lay topless on the sand as menus read but not tasted. By dawn he failed to feel the leaden weights of sleep fall upon his eyes, sweating in his cocoon of bedclothes, the brands mixed, Martha Stewart with thrift store chic or go-to-hell practicality. His propensity was for Plutonian depths in which clear and separate entities could not be distinguished, worlds in which flickering shapes penetrated, mingled with others: had he been banished to the sky, he would hope to inhabit a raincloud sailing over the Andes or the least inhabited of the Himalayas, not (please!) over deserts or the thirsty gardens outside Los Angeles. The shovel he drove into the stony soil was nearly shattered, as if the stones had been spontaneously generated by the clay that had once been Adam, meaning from the clay. Against the shade and marble veins quarried only hillsides away shattered the pick of his mattock.
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