Dec 5, 2007

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.

Dec 3, 2007

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

Nov 19, 2007

Compost: Smart Ass

I will consider now the ass of a woman, for it hath length and breadth and width.
For it is sturdy & well-made, that though it shaketh it crumbleth not;
For it is like a fortress standing tall & bold among the pygmy fortresses,
For it putteth its tongue between its lips and bloweth out raspberries & saith
Look upon me, ye mighty, and despair, for I am like a Pyramid in the desert,
Gravid & swollen w/ pride for being the joy that I am, a thing of beauty that is forever.
And though the seasons come & fade before me, lo I am constant & never fadeth,
For I am like unto a red red rose set bold against the small & timid roses.
For the ass of a woman doth not admit impediments, which is of a marriage of two demi-asses,
For the ass of a woman crusheth the straight back of the simple donkey,
For the ass of a woman riseth and the anus also riseth,
For ask ye not for whom the ass riseth, nor what becometh of the ass defer'd,
Nor wherefore it grieveth for the ass of a woman grieveth not.
For I will consider my cat Ofelia, my soft pussy, for she is sleek and mewleth
like unto harps & viols & fecund bassoons of umber timbre,
For who shall say that when she walketh naked she is not the genius of her own household?
And what though she kneeleth & showeth her cloven haunches wide asunder?
For I will consider my soft pussy tho' all the seas gang dry,
For from her behind the sun shineth and straight to my heart she slayeth me,
For if the red slayer thinketh he slayeth he slayeth not nor can he crack a nut.

Schutz

"Is it not risible," said Chesterton, closing the gilt volume with a harrumph, "that we put so much time and energy into the production of these cumbersome and manifestly impractical boxes of vellum? Is it not risible? Is it not?" Holden Quartermain of Catbox-on-Hatbox thumbed the ornate lid of his snuffbox, and called for Schutz. Schutz appeared, like a camel fitted with saddle and canteen, a pair of white gloves in mid-air making the sign for applause, because Schutz was invisible. Chesterton had a large red face. He refused to look at Schutz, for he was terribly envious of that gentleman's gentleman. Schutz agreed that it was indeed risible. White fingers gesticulated, articulated his four-fifths of the conversation. Donita Maria Graciela Sofia Perez de Quartermain was bathing. She dreamed of the long white fingers of Schutz. She dreamed of an olive grove and apricot brandy, streaks of moonlight on her snifter, her Winchester cigarillo kissed with saffron lipstick. Quartermain put up his hand, for he was in no mood to talk of books. "Did you know that Schutz, our good man here, has swum the British Channel on all seven continents? That he has made love to dozens of the world's most beautiful women? That he speaks fourteen languages, including semaphore? That he is a paramedic, a paralegal, and a Notary Public? That he has won cash prizes for his underwater subaquatic photography? That he has taught History and Medieval Cartography at Cambridge? That he has six certified toes on his left foot and is a qualified dental assistant as well as a licensed Speech Pathologist?" "You don't say?" said Chesterton with a cheeky scowl, spilling vinegar crisps all over his necktie. Isabella helped her lady into a turquoise pongee bathrobe, tied the delicate sash around the protuberant midden, poked her index at the distended navel. "Only a few more weeks!" she said giddily. "Oh that Schutz! What a rakish rapscallion he is! No?" "Oh yes," Donita agreed emphatically, "He is nothing but a scoundrel! A blackamoor, a cunting devil of a drake!" The women began to salivate with excitement. In only a few moments the two women were jumping up and down on Donita Quartermain's four-poster bed. Schutz was a braggart. He had the fastest hands in Seville, he boasted. He was the best swordsman in Heidelberg, claimed that swaggering cock-a-hoop. Down under he was a legendary breaker of horses. In Canada he had bagged moose, caribou, elk. He had caught salmon with his bare gloves in the north of England. "His yard is the length of two spools of yarn," Donita explained, "It spends itself like a bottle of shaken French wine. Dollops of his raffish passion fly every which way, like transparent tapioca pudding!" "Oh it must be something!" spurted Isabella. She imagined paper dragons in a Chinese parade, except instead of paper they were made of tapioca pudding. She thought of chilled platters and sea-foam salads, white curds immersed in crystalline citrus-green, and the little curds had cocksure faces with winking eyes. Donita went on, "Inside you feel thunderstruck, and a thousand golden gongs clang as if clacked with titanium clappers, and every nerve sings Mahlerian, undulates with sinister vibrato, and roses burgeon, unblossom in each tintinnabulating bone, burst like backward sunsets, like soft abrupt explosions. O Isabella, Chesterton is right! How tedious, how futile these blustery chains of words! Schutz is silent and unseen." "That varlet! That scalawag!" cried Isabella, unable to mask the meaty noumenon that was her jealousy. It grew out of her shoulder-blades, split and deltaed like antlers. She opened a second bottle of Wild Turkey, changed her ropa interior. She was a virgin, she confessed at last, and Donita's mouth was a capital U with polished white choppers set uniformly, like fluorescent lights, across the top. A fortnight later, young master Quartermain made his earthly debut. The physician on hand was forced to open up the beautiful young mother, wrench the early-bird from its sticky, tentacled cage. Poor Holden Quartermain fell into a faint. The nurses tittered behind their gloves. Chesterton was called in immediately. Looking straight through that writhing miscreant who had become so suddenly a persona non grata, the intelligent man turned and shouted with all his breath, "Schutz! You rogue, you blackguard!" But Schutz was nowhere to be seen. x

Nov 1, 2007

A Pact

This is our house
and in it we do as we please

I choose sea-scapes
wet scenes along the walls

You can do as you like
where ever you reach
you will find a door

you like hills
you can have hills

I prefer sea-scapes

Oct 12, 2007

Veils

When by the Night in blighted Parks
Our Pride is measured one and all
We shall be ripened for the Fall
And dinghies altered into Arks
When Woods are rife with Seamen's bones
That hang upon the boughs like Nails
There will be Nothing that avails
To wash the Salt from sodden Stones
And ever more like Tree and Leaf
Time tumbles downward like a knell
And summons every broken Belle
To cry her Coronach of Grief
That sings of Blood upon the rocks
And lets the ding of Death be tolled
Though every Lass may be consoled
And courted at the Equinox


Beyond the Pale and further out
Where Kingdoms come and Gadflies go
There lives the everlasting No
That floods the rills with noisome Trout
Though yet some pray Minerva save
A plenitude of Golden Grain
For Silver Veil and glimmering Train
Brush Pillar now and Architrave
Forever though the Stars grow dim
And all the Seas become the Dust
Forever shining in the rust
The Madmen and the Teraphim


We count our Coins by lanternslides
And tote our Pauper's purse along
A slender breath of Evensong
From lips that never leaned to Brides
We rue the never faring Seeds
The Trillions the Apostles saved
The Husbandry of the Depraved
Who fill the furrows up with Weeds
Who scatter idly in the Earth
And shiver in the throes of Brutes
Who curse and beat their tender Shoots
And bring a Slouching Beast to birth


I saw him in a Public House
Appeasing an undying itch
He often scratched and struck it rich
Between his fingertips a Louse
I saw him underneath a Sign
His cap pulled down to cloak his eyes
In sleeping he was almost wise
His hunger very near Divine
For he was lean and stubble-chinned
Of Worldly Things so Dispossessed
We almost thought of him as Blest
A puff-ball in a Holy Wind
Blown here and there without a Thought
Nor by his Conscience nor his Will
Yet we may spare some Pity still
Though it will surely come to Nought


The Dragon crouched and set aflame
A Village and the Woods about
And even put the Priests to rout
Who cried and called a Sacred Name
And clutched in whited hands a Charm
With that thin Hanging Man embossed
Whose Stars were evidently Crossed
Who could not save himself from harm
And some could only watch in Awe
The houses with their roofs ablaze
And could not turn away their gaze
Because the gorgeous Bird they saw
Go rising on a Stair of Gold
Was greater than the Beast whose breath
Could only bring Despair and Death
And far away the Thunder rolled


It was some poet put me here,
Some prattling fool whose gift for Words
Scattered my idle thoughts like Birds
Without a Road or rooftop near
In land as long and flat as Death
I wander in the knee high grass
Accoutred with a Looking Glass
And with a hitch in every Breath
I sweep the far Horizon's line
And hum to keep me Company
Though not a thing will comfort me
Until the Night begins to shine
And overhead Orion aims
His cold Eternal Arrow by
The barren place I fix my Eye
To look for stars that have no names.

Oct 11, 2007

Book Covers

I am certain I led you
down this aisle before,
marked those deltas of blue veins,
that gold band there,

those ruffled wrists;
desired to roll you in some antic hay,
dotty with carousels
and black umbrellas.

The boys were trigger-happy, streets
hazy with cannon fire.
Most still have jackets,
drained of color, but intact.

They go for pennies
in a market rife with junk. Eliot's roses
are on that one, in front of the flaked Eros,
between the pedestals.

Some stone painted white
or white stone. The flowers? I wish I knew.
My father let weeds grow,
mowed wide lanes between them,

here and there a clump of stalks gone haywire,
higher than our heads.
Under my window
oceans of etcetera waved in spring.

Roses, tulips, that's about all I know;
but we were saying
something about Monet, or was it Renoir?
The wet umbrellas and the pretty girl?

Yes, we forget; your hand is wet and cool.
Blue and white and gold
make you a thing
to be marveled at,

like the sky or a sea-
scape, like one of those tilted
cherubs in the garden
that piss forever.

An Odd Number: Hemmies

It's all in your head son, the bowling green,
he said, son, the plague, the emerods,
at various points along the perimeter:
ducks, and moonlight fiery in the pines,
across the street, see steam behind the horses,
see wet top-hats, see red, see barber shops,
see candy-canes. Spell theater theatre,
adjust your codpiece. Run your hand along
the rusty chain and see the shadowy fish,
see girls with cropt hair on the benches. Green
is the color of go, of gallop and gallumph.
It turns your emerod to emerald.

Sep 8, 2007

What if?

What if I opened my mouth
and spilled some shapeless rigmarole
like tongues, but suddenly it changed to Mandarin
and woke up dogs that slept by monoliths
inside their perfect circles?

Grapes would drop like punch marks into clover,
write manifestos with their stems
and burn the vines, exalt the trees, posit flames
that cannot soften Billy's ice-cream
tipping its sugar cone, his hair

tousled by flatbeds on a rural highway. Houses put on
their gaudy plumage: gray stoles, orange feathers.
Flat tones stink, ash bleats its siren.
Abstracted to a giant room
the monkeys hammer into oblivion.

The mad king makes his quietus, words wrested
from his throat, betrayed at last by you
that suppose a world without objects,
relations without boundaries. The bishop's
lips curl, the smug dimple

a few mere inches below the eye winking
its satisfaction. A suicide slouches
close to white cliffs, a demon fudges
with a handkerchief. He will say nothing
in the end and in the end he says nothing.

Nonetheless tall camels
sidle through the eyes of needles
at every imaginary prick
brandished as a bodkin.
Pigs circle or form a wedge,

platonists lick their pencils. Clock-hands
spin berserk, dogs revolve,
sink to the shoulders in tenuous loam.
The towers melt
but Billy lives.

x

Art Schmart

The snow-capped mountains make me lean sedately,
and in those silver nets the scalloped fish
make spineless u's, their O-gapes yawning brightly.
The lights splayed on that wedge of water flash
in all directions, and the boats are laded.
Past banquets or at cornucopias
I get no appetite; by many-shaded
apples and pears I only hear the buzz

of flies; at Titian's nudes I'm merely wanton.
I read the sacred names, but just get hotter;
I need the sheen of sweat, that primal odor.
A sonsy woman at the water fountain
leans down to sip, causing a sudden gush
of adulation, and a secret blush.

x

Faking it

The fudging happens right under your thumbs,
precisely when you start listening. Can
you hear the clarinets, the brown bassoons,
the grainy umber of flutes?
Such sylvan tones denote
particular images: at sleepy pools birds
flutter and drink. The trees themselves, of course,
are essential, but even more so the odd modernist
enjambment. The forest,
the pastoral instruments, vanish.
The birds are pretty props, the pools
merely contextual, and presto,
the tink of hammers rests
and a shanty
looms like a stadion.

But you are paying attention
and your determination
should pay, though it won't. The sun impales itself
on a weathercock or crucifix, night settles
over a church or silo. So what?
Somebody's blonde
opens a basket under willows. The lake is orange
and surprises, like fire. The swans swan
in lazy flotillas. You want a waltz, that's
up to you. I'm sure you'll make the obvious choice
and I thrive on such distractions,
nudge you through a different doorway,
famish you with pears
that dangle inches from your mouth
which really should protest.

Since you insist on playing the soft touch
I will admit something: Beyond the hills
where pines bristle, in a mauve
oblivion occasionally relieved
by the spit of contrails (fake clouds
ejaculated backwards) which might spell
some sweetheart's birthday
or an adman's hook, in that nearly twilit
pinkish space, lies no answer.
May you ponder
tarot cards and tea-leaves, may your pulse
find calm in omens, your lips
make ovals of aums, may revelation come.
In green pavilions Tudor horsemen
kiss thin horns
and splendidly expire.

x

Aug 27, 2007

Americana

Miles and miles of forgotten junk:
rusted iron, old paint past luster,
chickenwire put out to pasture,
farm machinery long defunct.

Sunset slides down bellied walls
of moribund equipment sheds
and in a melange of withered reds
the night falls.

Aug 8, 2007

Telefono Phonics

Your ear's infected, meinen lieben shatz.
The tiny lieder tickle through the holes,
the curly saxophones of speech. What news?
I run my index round the open conch,
dab at its baubles, tap the sexy jawbone,
watch the tongue flick out its sounds. My German
founders on the air, too flat, too false,
it stinks, like sheiza. You're not even German.

Your ankles cross beneath the table, pebbles
swept from some little stream in Nayarit,
your nails not gussied by some whorish reds,
nor flaked azuls. I listen like a chimp
and breathe the dust, filthy and ignorant,
mutter que linda ach du Lieber. Nada.

x

Query

John I said how do we
get this over on them?
They will become wise,
their eyes will blaze
and there will be precious little
we can say in our defense.

You might say it's the slant
of light from the point
where three corners of a room
meet, or the slight
rustle of a curtain with the shoes
showing underneath,

but that won't satisfy
the least of them, who prattle
on about what matters, who
gainsay our frivolous hi-jinks
and vaunt thair square chins
like a bunch of Ivanhoes.

I felt as if the water under
the boat had breathed
like a fantastic lung,
so I hunkered down
and shivered like some Judas
under the stars' fingers.

x

Jul 27, 2007

Moodna Viaduct

It's your unbowed and accurate line I love,
a thing that rarely ever occurs in nature,
the protest of your thrust, your gallant push
across the sky between the passive hills;
the ballsy umph that drops a laughing no
down to the green come-hither of the fields,
as over birds in high defiant black
your hubris stretches and will never break

until the town past the next station stop
has eased its last ghost out, until all towns
that quietly doze around the last wide arc
darken and sleep. Until then, span the world,
despite the earth's pull and the push of storms,
an iron stride across the common ground.

x

Shanty (An Ornament)

Over the 'wine-
dark' sea salt-whelmed
we rode; in white
foam steeped we slept.

Silver the sleek-
backed dolphins leapt
& dipped when loured
the sky's egg, dawn-

cracked. Wind-whipped froth
spat cold, splattered
bulwark & beam-
end, brimmed scuppers.

Adroit all hands
abaft, astern.

Trim-sailed we sought
palm-piked islands
& round-lobed brown
loves: horn-bosomed,
eyes obsidian.

x

Jul 25, 2007

The Show that Never Ends

All night he worked. He tapped at blurred edges
carefully until the edges were lines
of perfect circles spinning on their sides.
Weary of balance, and still more tired of feeling
the constant tug from the floor, he would have rested,
but the crowd was hungry and he fed them. Girls
swept up the plates that fell and easily cracked,
unbelievers that, prone to the earth's pull,
wobbled and gave in to the facts of physics.

The big cats leaped about him, through the hoop
he held out, ribboned with a wreath of flame
that started from a spark at his wrist. His head
lay like an infant's in the lion's mouth.
And when he conjured with a thriftshop tophat
he was playing God: he sowed thin air
inside the hat with witching seeds that turned
to silk scarves, bouquets, impossible mouths
that drank up water by the glassful.

The man was something with a deck of cards:
He dealt, flipped cards with cards, shuffled
in ways that shocked and stupefied the eyes
like waterfalls, chain lightning, lunar eclipses.
He didn't need the sudden ace of spades,
the queen of hearts tucked in the sucker's pocket:
His every move was a trick, and when he spoke
he buffed each word soft like a hypnotist
so that they never heard the pulse in his breath,
the bangtail gallop thumping in his ribcage.
Even the sweat on his forehead turned to diamonds,
and garnets dribbled from his palms, click, clack.

x

Jul 17, 2007

Lethal Injection

One pinch, and winter drifts toward your heart.
Your eyes are dazzled by the thought and keep
a point transfixed in space - cold and apart,
two fathers watch them shudder into sleep.
Now I will speak, though I cannot forgive:
lifting the iron from my tongue I swear
three syllables that are too vain to live,
that fall out stillborn, withered in mid-air.

You cannot hear me now. You lie so still
my voice returns to me, its breath turned sour.
They lift the sheet and hide your face from view.
Most will forget your name. Two never will,
who'll waken nightly in this terrible hour
joined in the ritual of remembering you.

x

Jul 14, 2007

For a Fearful Flyer

A book at the knees is unread.
Carry-ons guarded between the ankles
are minor possessions you are loath
to part with, things that are the dislocated
you which should never soar, never
wantonly slice through so many climates
in such purer air. The book's tattoo
of thumbprints at the author's preface
will go unnoticed by the janitors,
the flight attendants, and the dapper captains
who saunter by like royalty. Walls of glass
contain what is, ostensibly, the genuine
Middle of Nowhere. Jetways offer the only
practical escape, cold connectors of Here
and There. Now from those channels
the newly arrived stream and smile,
pouring landward, religiously grateful.
You envy their relieved aplomb, the dry hands,
the giddy chatter of wet mouths; but soon
this you, this faceless, purgatoried you,
will also grin and mill among the living.

X

Jul 13, 2007

Light

The crow's caw yields at last to cock's crow
whose bluster at the wakening of the world
blots out the black bird and its banshee squall.
The dawn's red army on the hills scatters
and crawls; he breaks his baby film on peaks,
his yokeblood trickles down the stony slopes.

But night will never loosen its grip: it holds
the fire-god in contempt, that fat-cheeked idol,
that ruddy Buddha-bellied sky-king rising
to put his sopped thumb under the witch-kettle,
spill entrails and deride the shepherd's book,
forgo the butchered ox, invent the clock.

He has his gold throne on the sky's ceiling,
slays mythic horses in their circuit, throttles
the mad bolt-thrower and the four-faced blowhard.
All mornings mark the death of alchemy,
of trick and ritual; out of star-pricked gloom
they blaze up, killing shades in sudden fire.

m

Arcadia Revisited

Although you're older and a touch myopic,
on coming here you thought to find a clutch
of naiads in a brook with beaded spines
stretched at a sun in slow-fall, rumps pushed up
like Valentine hearts, pulled under foam fringes;
or Silenus, woozy in his canted world, spilling
his tankard, hedged by melon-faced tipplers
whose jaws hang slack in permanent guffaw:
bacchants, bare-assed voluptuaries, cupids,
attending his collapse, air thrumming with a tense
blush of birdsong: the port-red flutter of flutes,
the shrill, cinnamon-sharp chirrups of piccolos.

And then the blare of a horn: a shepherd's flock
galumphing up some sunblazed slope, leaving
a green valley echoing. But the day winds out,
dusk settles in cool silvers. The furtive sun,
once salient as a crown, glints like a drowner's hand
between armadas of cloud that drape the hilltops.
Crocus blooms bow down; in a wizened ilex
one pipit cries. You imagine this world is spent:
waters soiled with the deepening silt of age,
windfall foaming, cracked like a crone's skin.

You kneel at a spring and spot beneath the surface
a face you've seen before, drawn and fish-eyed
from mooning into a well of enchantments too bright,
too cloyed with opulent greens and golds to mean
as much to the father as to the dreaming fry
in his fiery dawn. You see in that searching gaze
the reason for your visit. You thought you came
to sing the brown pools back to clarity,
to make the olives thicken with oil, to hear

the splash of galleons in the salt-laced air
arriving somewhere in the middle distance:
a coast obscured by coppice or chaparral,
just over the bluff. But now you see you came
to greet the eyes that quiver and requite
the soft, dumb love that furrows your brow,
the peace that likes things quiet and hears no feet
in the grass. You lean and taste your life.
Your tongue is steeped in ordinary water.