August 16 2010

The weight of the suet-cage dangling from the dying branch
May be just enough to drop the precarious maple tree.
The movement of the dandelions scatters the spores to more fields.
The wings of the dragonfly derive their iridescence and vibrancy
Of color from the volatility of the Pleistocene, the infernal climate,
The bacterial vapors of the swamp, and eruptions of seas,
The same eruptions that hurled
Fish to shore to become amphibians,
Amphibians dinosaurs, dinosaurs birds.
The bloom of Queen Anne’s lace folds itself into
Dun-colored broom caterpillars devour to become the black winged
Emperor butterfly, not the monarch or the admiral.
The shadow of the emperor butterfly that shadows
And overlords the world of the ant, laboring
With its fragment of leaf between mandibles
Whose strength when expanded to the scale of one
Entire man could throw a Mosler safe like a shot-put
Or boulder or compact car into a concrete wall,
Break the wall into separate jagged chunks
Bending those corrugated steel rods holding the wall together.

From Broken Prisms (January 30, 2005)

The flavor of the month
comes in concrete chunks and pyrites.
with an aftertaste of bonding adhesive.
The bitterness assures the palate of its strength..
It comes in colors, feldspar, cherry, citronella.
But it’s also brown as rust, the water in a well
whose surface only you can see. Its murkiness
belies medicinal properties. The nausea
is a purgation, even as it shreds your guts
into metal coils a machine ejects
to bind, or blow apart, or to communicate.
Tear stains and fallout filtered through concrete,
years of weather, their turbulence apparent
in tiny steel-backed mirrors embedded in the chunks
of concrete thudding to the floor. A taste
of jet exhaust, slightly bitter albeit bright bouquet,
a white rainstorm in a tunnel, a vortex
of jet exhaust funneled into a plastic wineglass.
Can I dip a cracker into this?
Drink it from a slipper? Water my flowers
until their colors mutate to blood-reds
no Ralph Lauren nor architect has visualized?
The lining of paint can also eat my stomach.
The lining that girds my stomach cannot kill me,
can only make me stronger.
It drips down closet walls, gets into things,
seeps into carpet and drywall sturdy
as the baths of Caracalla, its basilicas
arching over bathers, generals and gigolos
whipping their backs in abandon with poplar switches
as the rain cracks an arch to tell them
nothing is so solid that it cannot bend
or break outright, yet hang together afterward.
Stick your tongue out for the sacrament.
It’s bitter, so mixed up you can’t tell
one source from another, but it’s earth and sky
so surely it should be innocent and common
as trees in the yard with songbirds in them,
snow flecked with bird-lime and nuclear fallout
iron-enriched once-coursing streams overstocked
with fish, the undulations of their fins entrapped
in this concrete roof alleged to be enforced
with tempered steel. You can depend on this
they claim, landlord and roofer extraordinaire.
How many inhabitants in this industrial corridor

owe their heads to him, their lack of hats,
their empty hat-racks, their indifference
toward weather-stations, umbrellas, carports?
Parasols remain in glassed-in exhibition cases.
What clouds? They ask, never having tasted
a roof seeping down closet walls into buckets.
Not inspiration, but perspiration,
a symphony or poem sweated from the pores
until the magnum opus pours from open orifices,
dripping cool impurities in blithe ignorance of the hours,
or cracks the surfaces to which we were accustomed.
We thought we’d lean against the same wall all our lives.
It was an idea they allowed to fall through the cracks,
which are tiny, then wide enough to let the old construction fall,
the safety and solidity it promised, a dwelling
with window that properly opened and closed, a view of heights
to which the dwellers were immune. Now all floats in a vortex,
rubber toys and memoranda, urgent once but ignored mostly,
and how many family effects swirl inside the new holes in the earth:
they open and close, and no one really knows why. So when
the roofer comes to tell you nothing’s solid, perhaps he knows
from whence he comes, from floods alone. Which hole
in the sky will open? Can we forecast our fall?

July-August 08

July 13, 2008

Dome

Isn’t there a conflict between the floor or foundation of a house
and the surface of the earth upon which the house rests?
Doesn’t that surface approach the middle of the floor
since the earth’s surface is circular (discounting irregularities
of topography, such as those of mountains, floodplains, or deserts).
But the dome, made of tiny isosoles triangles, danced upon the earth
it mocked, a little planet skirting the big one, all the while it leaked,
all the while the voices of its inhabitants echoed, beamed back to them
with a clarity that was too truthful to the listener, who would have had
nothing else to listen to except the drip-drop of rain leaking into the
dome because a panel, a thin piece of plastic that could be molded
into any shape in nature, was cracked or leaking. Pray that the frame
of this Mundane Shell doesn’t break as its owner hangs from it
with guy-wires, caulking the leaky triangle with a compound of silicon
or gutta percha, or some such substance, for window frames.

8/3/08

What will the weather do? The rhythms of the seasons. Thunderstorms nocturnal, wind in the trees, deer crossing, crickets singing, birds chirping, flies buzzing, dogs barking, dogs replying to other dogs with more barking, the rare passing of a vehicle, a call and response and counterpoint between the birds, and then between the birds and the crickets or the frogs in the pond, or between the birds and the beeps of the idle fire alarm low on battery power. Seek not to perceive the world through musical terms.

Looking at her, pert and buxom and compact and coy, you could see how he attracted her: he was lanky, naïve, expert in mechanical things. He could fix her car to begin with. So he complemented her—naïve and practical hands-on knowledge of machines suited keenly observant ambition coupled with an appetite from luxury, for cars and houses in vogue.

The density of vegetation in the valley a river makes before it has been dammed—a floor of ferns, a cloud of spores among the vines that crawl the sides of dead trees, seasonal wildflowers on the roadside, grass blades, reeds, cat-tails, hollyhock bushes, the fattened leaves of white oaks and maples pulling the very branches that support them down with their dampness. The park ranger has an easy job—he mows the path to the bird feeder, he feeds the birds.

8/9/08

Age should make a place for youth. I return to trudging through the city of Portland, as apartment complexes are raised along the arterial to the interstate, a maze of concrete thickening with time. I drove to the Oceanside to submerge myself in seawater for a few seconds before I drove back to the mountains. I bought a ticket for Richard Branson’s spacecraft soaring out of the atmosphere into the blackness of space for a few more seconds or enough time to photograph the space before the craft descends. The hell or heaven in a handful of seconds.

Wet and sticky hermaphroditic child, wiping the albumen on his belly to dry in webs. A layer of lithium molecules bonds above the treated surface, protecting the surface from abrasion. I lack depth although I ruminate, and the past for which I cannot exercise retribution angers me. I float or my memory does in slights to which I cannot respond. If anything, I lack enough surface to apprehend the absolute present, or live in the moment, or be the moment. Unexplained shifts in thought become new sentences the connections of which are even less likely to be made the more the future becomes the present. The metaphor of depth or profundity—depth implies scrutiny? Why can’t the shallow scrutinize? Sure they can scrutinize someone other than themselves. Could what we are accustomed to call shallow be a virtue, this word meaning an aptitude to be fruitful and to prosper, not so much admirable self-abnegating behavior void of an effect upon some part of the world? To the shallow the spoils, to the deep nothing or next to nothing, only reputation at best, if others even notice the virtue of the deep, who are too reflective to communicate either virtue or vice, who do not have the horse sense to advertise their virtue when it would benefit them most, who do not, in other words, bring it to the marketplace.

The auspices of the skies
Point to a dry and sunny day.
How could the forecasters
With all their indicators
Be so wrong?
All their instruments
To foretell so faulty?
Faulty all the indicators
Of weather.
They were not the word of God.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was God,
More Greek, more logos.
All began
In some ineffable place
Not with the organs
And fertilizers in the ground
Nor with lightning
And the initial violence that followed
When lightning hit the ground.
Later, the planners said:
What a mistake.

Rash Measures Deemed Necessary

Raze Persepolis.
Burn the libraries.
Trash the museums.
Take no prisoners.
Do it, or else.

Every time I hear
the word culture
I loosen the safety catch
on my Browning--

but sometimes the gun
just -- boom!-- goes off!


De-acquisition the rest,
sell them on Amazon.com.

Search all apartments
for books. But make sure
every school child
has a laptop and Ipod.

Nov. 22 2009

The CIA-Opus Dei-Illuminati consortium
Doggedly preserved their secret weapon, the umbrella man.
On a day such as this on Dealey Plaza, an umbrella an encumbrance,
Unless used expressly to avoid the sun.
Because the sun was out nearly a half century ago.
An umbrella can shade one from the sun that shone upon Dallas
As it does upon White River on this very day.
The illuminati lights the dark, a light within a tomb, sarcophagus.
An umbrella and a sewing machine make music together.
More than a Lincoln Continental, an umbrella,
And yellow rose petals strewn upon the hood of the Lincoln.
An umbrella fails to contribute to the poetic juxtaposition known today as surrealism.
So much depends upon the juxtaposition of the umbrella to the sewing machine,
Whether positioned across the table but below the machine itself,
Passing through the arch made by the sewing machine,
As if it sought to pass through the needle’s eye, but missed.
Or leant to the side of one of the sewing machine’s iron legs.
So much depends upon the dispersal of yellow roses across the red leather seats of the Lincoln,
Upon which waxen rose petals stick to the body of the car by viscous drying blood.
So much depends upon the trolls assigned the job of doctoring evidence for the Illuminati—
Furtive little troll who does not think about what he does,
Little two-foot troll whose amateur verses lampoon the efforts
Of those who seek to disclose the Illuminati-Opus Dei membership.
Little troll who toys with umbrellas and sewing machines,
who knows next to nothing about surrealism or Dealey Plaza.
It is upon you alone, little troll, that I place the onus.

Now (9/26/09)

The Neolithic peoples in Iraq buried their elders in clay jars in separate rooms,
And about the bodies bent in fetal position wrapped reed mattings sealed with bitumen,
but the bones of others were haphazardly piled in other rooms or unmarked jars.
The children buried in jars were given cups of clay for drinking in the afterworld.

In the larger rectangular houses in which rooms of gypsum walls and clay floors
Embraced courtyard or stable, the dead were buried beneath the floors themselves.
Some hamlets threw pottery with geometric decoration; some cultivated emmer wheat
Or gathered wild lentils and stored them; some made sickles and cutting-tools from volcanic glass

Or the obsidian scattered on hillsides. Some butchered gazelles and aurochs, tanning the hides;
Some fashioned rams’ horns or bones into sewing needles or spoons for soups of legume and acorn;
some strapped their flint sickles onto handles that were branches of sumac or oak;
Others wedged arrow-heads onto spears of ash; some stabbed away at the neck arteries

Of plentiful red deer with knives of horn; above their altars hung the skulls of wild oxen
Who’d bellowed at them from an open field before. The eyes of their statues resemble coffee-beans;
And the pornographically grotesque fertility idols, their limbs striped and ornamented,
were amulets that presided over child-bearing or fertility; another hand was always needed

For scything wild grain in the fields or grinding it; for who else would water the asses or feed
the subjugated wild hogs? Near marshes, a hand waved in air a moment might bring down
Game birds that darkened the sky with their clattering wings, thus the squiggling of drakes
Animating the decorations of clay jars the shards of which are tripped upon in this battle-space,

The ostrakons beneath the treads of Abrams tanks. No harps, no tabors or cymbals then,
no libraries to burn, only naked human voices ossified in the open mouth of a diorite statue.
(Black jongleur, court singer, scribe?) Beneath the tells, monumental alabaster jars
Withstood the pressures of the earth and sky. But that was then, and this is now.

11/21/09

About the winter constellations, about the horizon and the hillsides,
About the end of the foliage, then about rivers and the nearby lakes,
And the canoes and the barges and flotation rafts and sailboats,
And waterfall and the mills and about the space between them,
And the main street and the local businesses, about the local eateries
And the hardware and thrift stores, about a row of unkempt Victorian houses
Lining the northern thoroughfare until you approach the left turn
To the garbage dump and the recycling center.
The constellations, above the wisps of clouds, look cold, their light
As cold as the helping hand of the deceased, as the water pouring
Through springs below the earth. As the time that no one has to give to the needy,
As constellations reflected on the surface of some off-season lake,
As the surface of the lake as undisturbed as by a paddle.
The clarity of constellations to the naked eye in the countryside,
The nimbus of the street-lamps that blurs the constellations.
From the hilltop, they shout at you from above, each single star
Of which you must sadly admit you are not adept at identifying.
My blankets have become a sweat lodge in which I wrap myself
Until I begin to sweat profusely through my bedclothes as the sun
Breaks above the White Mountains. Of abstractions
Or of conceits have I little awareness unless they are contiguous
To the concrete and quotidian, such as household chores.
And of rubbing sticks to make fire I am well aware of the associations.