7/20/08

The descent of rain into flower gardens and bushes
The turning of the overhead fan, audible from the friction
between the ball-bearings and the wheel upon which the fan turns
pushing colder air down until the living room is as cold as a tomb

I brushed the incipient mildew from several books that were in storage

A pamphlet for an experimental prototype of a helicopter or airship
whose wings are modeled on the dragonfly skirting the surface of a pond

A broadside declaring the imminent arrival of doomsday or the crisis
in capitalism, impending, according to the sundry voices

The tapering off of rain in early afternoon attended by the
weighting of the maple-leaves and the sodden branches
Would you putter around the garage if you had your own garage?

The drenching rains that visit us from the Canadian north

You must explain to the salt of the earth the ways of God to man
Another very green and wet Sunday afternoon as traceable as
the passage of youth into age or into ages of work into retirement
or the reification of one entire life into a plexiglass cube for family photos
and a selective eulogy--the rain thickens as the sky darken.

Mother told me there'd be days like this, the thickening of rain
among the branches results in moods of relaxation and abandonment
as if the toy ship were tossed among storms: toy boat, toy story.
Toy poem in which each word defers to a common and
ceremonial practice such as the phrase a month of Sundays
of rain and red slugs and the washing out of man-made roads
and trenching of new water--paths and furrows down watery banks
and flowery waters and watery flowers that could be called
a realignment of forces such as when finance dislocates careers
thought certain as the ground beneath one's feet and the
rock-bed beneath the ground. The flood plains by the riverbed
are a pre-Cambrian field of fern and dragonfly,
trees refuse to root in the sediment beneath. The potting soil
abandoned in a bag appeared black, bacterial and fecal
as it poured upon the freshly tilled soil, beneath which lies
fragments of a slate bed. From a shelf of slate rest garter snakes
when the sun is out, fattened from licking silverfish and spiders
from holes in the slate. The skunk's tail flung in the air,
each white fur strand a warning-barb, behind the uncut grass
rimming a ditch. In Sweden, a hill cannot be blasted for a new road
because residents have protested that it houses gnomes.
Elves however are forest-dwellers, gnomes are subterrranean,
living in kingdoms beneath the mountain. When black tar turns silver
and the air you breathe is saturated with water-droplets,
and rain drips from the roof and the porosity of tar-paper
holds the rain. Rims of wineglasses emitting a tone peculiar to it.
The reduction of life into granitic material, into coal from tar,
the apparition of silver when the tar is wet from light,
of surfaces on the paved road, the burden of leaves on the tree,
of fruit about to drop from branches. The absorbant surface of
thos Darth Vader fighter-bombers dropping their payloads upon
parched villages with mud huts and underground cells sniffed out
by satellites. Ignorance is bliss at such an altitude.

But the redneck said the will to win was sapped. Were he young
he'd spy on the back-stabbers. The voices of elites declared
him simple. That criticism was an inner voice that rankled
his insides.

The yellow warbler darted into a hedge along the road
of the industrial park.
The porta-potties on the cul-de-sac worked fitfully.
A gas main protruded from the ground.
Compactors had flattened the patio.

5/5/09

After his manly sonorous outburst, he abandoned verse
and resorted to journals, but having mastered the form,
realized they could only be completed when he passed away--
nothing of their occasional flashes of beauty
could be extracted and reshaped into another form.

Many would not relish his remarks about restaurants or movies,
nor lend a reading eye to his tireless minutiae.
Here was truth with all its warts, no lacquer nor varnish.
Inspiration had flickered then died among their pages.
Then a pertinacious realism was born, a living testament
to how people are shaped by the ride of their underwear,
the fit of their shoes, how drink or food poisoning shaped them.
He'd held the lyrical mode in suspicion and grown fonder of satire,
and though he didn't revile past influences, grew suspicious,
settling for photographically accurate laundry lists.
Who'd know how far he's walked from his career and old beliefs,
not so much to be in a monastery as in the Idaho woods
among trailers on dirt plots -- or did his scathing rejectionist
contrarian cant reverberate from the pages of the Financial Times
or some other august organ of the finance-military-industrial complex,
or did he merely sulk at home and snort cocaine from a silver-mirrored
Army knife -- or was it a Bowie he'd been given by a Special Forces sargent
who was in league with his beliefs about the pernicious influence
of the Counter-Reformation on daytime children's TV shows.
Late environmentalist visionary who'd advocated the cultivation
of flesh jello in vats and the systematic bombing of overpopulated
equatorial countries, along with an abandonment of green technoligies
for a retrenchment into sub-Arctic latitudes abandoned by harpoon-wielding
impossibly tall and proto-aboriginal Red-Paint people?

4/4/09

Vernal pools

Slushy, muddy, watery, not flowery waters nor watery slush yet.

Resident seeker, desert sunset

The sunset, in his desert fastness, is the red
of the foundry, molten iron poured from the crucible
into the casting. The face that looks at the sunset
is a burnished obsidian mask drenched by fire.
Who knows what this lifelong seeker thinks
outside his desert home, before the spectacle
he shares with no one -- what he'd wanted all along.
Ruddy invulnerable mask of a man of iron.
Roll from his pen those iron sonorities, blunter.

5/10/09

Everything you touch or taste or listen to or see,
according to this blowhard, has been compromised.

Tell me about the last freshly-slaughtered game you caught and tasted
before the hearth-fire spoiled the taste,
of acorns before you had to roast them.

Talk about the fruit from the trees that dropped in your mouth

about the fish roe and the seeds

about the whitest apple-flesh and the fish in the stream.
How about the place from which you were estranged
about the roadhouses and the charismatic churches
and the commune in which you rolled about among others
the opening seconds of Beatlemania and the years
before the great war when your mother's arm
only got stronger from tugging the milk cow
across the dirt road where the brick library
or wax museum was
the statuettes so real in facial tones you thought the figures
moved, such are the lost arts and the carved
Hummel figurines of the local Gepetto
about grander thoroughfares and greater aspirations

3/22/09

How many dead things and barely opening buds and stiffened forked branches
And rusted beer-cans can one account for, how many more engine-blocks
And harvesters sunk among the weeds? How many weeds and cat-tails
Sprung from marshy landscape, runoff winding in rivulets and courses
The naked eye cannot trace, as it can trace how the crow leapfrogs
Toward another spot of carrion after the cars pass? How many
Stiff, forked, twiggy, branched, and budding things
And how many cold winds crossing unlovely flats before
The hospital dump? How many more biohazard vials unsealed,
How many Coke bottles by the river bed beside the tampon strings?
What crawls from culverts other than the rainbow of an oil-slick?
Where lies the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? How much longer
Can one write about the brush of clouds above the orange landscape
And desert sunset juxtaposed beside the rusty Roto-rooter
And sundry collapsed machinery, about old beercans,
Or forked and spiny desert flora. A snow flurry during early spring
Is winter’s stiff answer to the coming thaw, as if to reiterate
I’m still around. How many spare tires, rusty axles? That’s the kicker.
Chew more than you bite off. Time to stop. The snow flurry,
No more than half an hour, thickened air before it went away.

August 30 2009 Sunday

Today doesn’t feel like Sunday—the stores were open wherever I went, the sky bright, and I bought a pair of shade and a steel rake for a pittance (because plastic tynes do not perform as well on unmowed lawns, which demand teeth, steel teeth, to pull up the hay). I lose my shades routinely. I can’t keep a single pair for more than six months at a time. Then they’re lost or broken or misplaced, or the lenses pop out until I find a half dozen lenses in the wells of the car door, all dusty and cracked, the scalloped layers of shellfish still sharp. They go like windshield wipers or vacuum cleaner bag. But I can’t go without sunglasses for very long. Some aging starlets conserve their remaining beauty by avoiding the sun entirely, as if they must travel incognito among the populace for impossibly attenuated periods of time under canopies of banana leaves, umbrellas, or straw sun-hats, sans floral or fruit decorations balanced upon cones of filigreed wire, but some of us, mostly hoi-polloi, mind you not hoity-toity, must wander through life with our heads exposed to those vissisitudes of weather that would drive the most patient hermit-monastic to extremes of behavior unheard of among the lordliest surviving ecclesiastical orders in the western world. Land-O-Goshen: the sun peeps from its hideout of parted clouds. Of the news you might say there is so little you couldn’t place it in a thimble-sized container for news, which is a manner of dismissing metaphor albeit in a rather hectored willful style as if our author wished to actually prove not merely competence but virtuosity as well among these vocatives, exclamations, embellishments, and diminuendos, as if her were desperate to secure an audience, having lost rapport with them once, determined to clutch them fast to his heart once again, an uncertain occasion for which the clouds appear to break before the sun hides behind their flotillas once again. The news was neither bleak nor did it promise. The news was incomplete—only a slice of it appeared at the collectively designated time, too much to ignore, too little not to say with Chou En-lai far too soon to tell.

*************************************************************

The mistake was to wake far too late to use the morn to advantage,
but the dew is dried from the grass enough to mow. Mow, sleepyhead!
Otherwise be grass. The grass will engulf you in silky strands.
Are they not pleasant to the touch of bare feet? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,
what golden nugget can you extract today from the dross
of the common tongue? All demands to be written, not read.

*****************************************************************

The passing of interstate traffic, the buzz of cicadas
In the dead branches, the shadow the weathered fence makes,
The birdhouses nailed on the fence without birdfeed, tendrils
Of wild grapes climbing among sugar maple saplings as they graze
The corrugated roof in the shed’s rear, a recollection
Of town lights extinguished by midnight, the winding
Of Wells River among wetlands abutting the public golf course,
Spiderwebs bearding the wild grapes bunched on tendrils
That twine among finger-wide branches of maple saplings,
A broken pallet, one waterlogged and lichened, leans against the rear
Of the shed beneath the shade the saplings and the grape vines make
Even in the middle of summer at the peak of day, with the sun
In the meridian, all pistons running on the interstate,
You might intuit all travelers make the destinations they intended.
Some straggling perennials, some garish flowers wilted to their stems,
Spiky weeds that break loose concrete, grass-blades among
Marble chips in the drainage, thankfully the motion lights
Remain off with the arrival of dusk—only domestic cats
Criss-cross the backyard searching for cardinals
Or song-birds perched above in the branches of a dead willow.
The rusty corrugated shed roof on which they land.
The peak heat of the day in which the fruit would ripen,
The blush upon yellow deer-apples shot with worm-holes and a brown blight,
The brambles shorn of their blackberries bow on the edge
Of landscape, the whole town terraced and built on tiers—
Who will dive from the steel bridge near the furniture mill.

***********************************************************

A Fort (Aug 25)

Families wind around pay-to-view telescopes.
Bunkers with light fixtures stripped from ceilings,
the sockets hanging. Warped cast-iron doors,
iron bars bent in windows, the frames removed.
A tour bus circles the cul-de-sac before the lighthouse.
And the smell of lighter fluid fills the trees.
At land’s-end, a footpath wanders through poison ivy
yielding to a lookout or a gun brace, but the area’s pacified,
its weakness transformed to pacific strength,
the gutted interior cleaned of debris, except bricks
dropping from walls with tiny ceiling tiles. Grass snakes
wind around the weeds among foundation cracks.
Temples with recombinant winged hermetic dragons,
bearded men with wings and claws or serpent’s tails.
Here, the deity doesn’t have a graven image other than
the drop of masonry, the iron bars that made
a holding-pen for the unruliest of soldier-sailors.
You’d almost think they did the damage,
impossible children, or whirlwinds.
How quickly ruins become shrines, the bolts bent.
And what was costly to demolish slowly sunk.
Local deities expose the weakness of their self-image,
layered and mortared and always cracking,
but the people wind around the erosion and picnic
and the lighter fluid floats.
With the old names fallen away, they’ll find new ones in the grass.