Storm King

The low railing was broken at certain points,
and there were look-outs every mile or so.
You know the place, you may have seen
sports-cars drawing S's along the bends,
from above or below, on television.

A crackle of static: you shut it on and off,
like the images you might use to tell a story
of a friend's death by shit-luck or suicide
only to find them washed out. So you
try again, because on that same road

your father flew daily between two gates
to nothing on either side (dynamited
mountain on one hand, cliff on the other)
and no space in the rocks hooked
in him its vacuous come-hithering index.

In winter time the waters froze and frilled
the mountain with ice like bangs
on a girl's forehead. I might have said
it was beautiful and left you blind
with a dead word, but now you know.

Esthetics 2

Our symbols are invisible, they hiss
& clunk like tympani, like pipes. A flurry of air
taps patterns in the ear, but that's not this.

I meant to say the flutter, the flatus of f's.
But Fuk, without its foreleg, gallops apace
and wears a smile, no longer a blue-black smudge.

Digital

Ambling by the lakeside, my spawn tell me
Pop we're going down to the water, their wives
are tall and supple in unseemly sungear
I vaguely remember made a scandalous ripple.

I can't recall my fifteen between curtains,
my phiz a beaded lemon of joie de vie
in piss-yellow light, nor can I remember when
I crested the hump of middle-age, went white

and ruffled at the collar, can't see the Shabbat
when I palmed the elder off like a set of keys
and made the other one twice as useful until
He too surrendered to his bubbled Heaven.

You can't look anywhere but they push at your eye,
the northern and the southern, stem and stern,
those comely wrenches in the math-gears, bugs
to ones-and-zeroes. I swallow epiphanies

like pills; but this one's ancient: on and off
is all and always was, the yin and yang
of ball and socket. Anything else is chin-music. I walk
with fantails prancing in the pride of my eye.

Esthetics 1

Heaney tosses chew-toys, sinewy quatrains
cubed like dog-food made to look like flesh.
Creeley talks too much. His verses taste like spit.

Middle America

In the country's saddle, lowered by portly rumps
run filthy freckled kids whom Jesus saves
and paper kites come skittering over the roofs
or spell the names of God in the windy trees
In open spaces, frilled by banks of snow
threaded by fences made with loaves of stone
where casement windows shake with flyblown paint
curled sharp and flaked beneath the spider's silk
in the low-slung middle where the sun is cracked
and smeared in dullest orange across far fields
where barns and silos point to someplace else