Spirit

This is the guy I was telling you about.
So I stepped through the door, a little
carnation in my lapel, a dapper Dan
shaking my chain. She liked my chin,
my charnel savvy. I left the room and returned
later in the afternoon.

There are other kinds of being I mentioned
down at the service station. Yassir Nawssir.
Top your fluids too, twunnynineniyniefie.
Tarmac glistened, rills crawled over the road.
Birds turned lazy circles: naahtsokay.
Gehenna's angels.

Wiped a clear wedge in the windshield
and noted all emergency phones.
Radials no good, car too long
in dry dock; a/c kaput, and heading
south: Yuma, then Abaddon.
Tapped harvest.

Hanging Around with Pat

It didn't matter if we were having dinner,
watching a film,
or just strolling along, Pat was a winner. Swans
have this aplomb too, and most morticians. We poured
spackle on his shoes, gave him purple
hermans through his blazer,
he just smiled and nodded, smooth as a balloon.
You didn't see his hands much, they were
usually in his pockets, fumbling with silver dollars.
He was taller than you might think.
I saw him duck
as we tooled under an overpass,
lips sealed like a stranger aiming a rifle. He never
told us where he lived, if he had a wife,
a girl or what. Of course
we never asked him.

He looked stony under palms, but it suited him.
You only saw his hands
when they were in the open,
or his face,
that smirk in half-bloom, and the eyes
that blinked two, maybe three times in a day.
I paused before I stepped on the pedal,
looked furtively in my rear-view.
He rocked on his heels, hands in pockets,
immaculate tie, suit still pressed.
He waved at people who passed along the freeway,
and even the dogs seemed to know him.
I hated to leave him on the side of the road,
his pantlegs ruffling in the wind.
We drove by [later that same evening]
but he was gone.

He always looks unreal on television,
like uncooked oatmeal; and his shifty eyes
avoid the camera, the constant blonde
who stares him down. Of course he's in love
with her. You can tell by his hands.

We started to doubt if it was Pat we courted
that night, bought supper for,
took to a film he strongly disliked.
He never actually said his name was Pat,
we just assumed.
I recalled next morning
the blush of a shadow on his cheek
and he never instinctively shooshed a clamor
of conversation.
She undid the top button of her blouse
but he never peeked, though
you could see the tension in his hands,
like stopping the spin of a fourteen pound ball
fresh out of the return.


We never watch the show now, having seen
the back of his head for more than thirty seconds,
having seen him sit down,
put his hand to his mouth,
politely clear his throat.

Falling in Love

No one did figure eights. When the pond froze
we walked under the trees around its edge
and looked for cracks, wondered if the ice
was solid, how thick, who would venture first.
No one we knew ever fell in through the ice,
but we'd heard stories we didn't need to hear
because in New York winter the cold
was cold enough. We took off our boots

and made too much of it, undid the laces
(that were so quickly knotted under roofs
burdened with new snow) with nimble
fingers limbered by central heating.
Someone always went first. Soon, the rub
of blades across the ice, the rub that made
a sound I can't compare another sound to,
signaled winter like a fanfare. So began

the criss-cross of lines, the powder gouged
by blades that sat the rest of the year out,
the meaty thud of elbows finding ice
less friendly than a road. With my hands
behind my back, each year before long
I got the manner of gliding back again
and swanned across the unruffled pond
that kept its dangers hidden under glass.

Where Shadows Crossed

where shadows crossed, where such tall houses leaned
like drunks, whose doors spilled tea-steam into dung
where horses clomped and paused, their bells at peace
that brought on silence like a Christmas scene

through windows wreathed with spurious drifts of snow
through curtains fringed with an electric light
of Yules that blazed eternal on black tape
wound back to spools like thread that brings to mind

the knitting needles and the crochet hooks
that crossed and crossed until the slow-made shapes
were born, each an epiphany, and yet

those scarves would never drape a grandchild's neck
though everyone pretended and were glad
to be so blest there, where the shadows crossed

Harsh Job Yen (J. Ashbery): Exercise

This sitting and typing, I'm done with it.
Dry brows in artificial light, the click
of calloused pads in shuttered rooms.
Shy monks stroll the boulevards, scribblers yawn
among pidgeons. There's no hunger without shape,
no ennui stranded in its vacuum.
I watched two men hauling garbage
behind the diner, mouths
pursed around their simple vowels. Qwerty
is enigma.

The higher primates will happen upon Lear
soon enough. I've had it.
I want inspector's gloves, safe temperatures,
bleach, fifty parts per million.
Quiddity waits in the third sink
in quaternary solution.
You kill mice.

The Shadow Men

Several men filed into a clearing
and some sat down to rest
on a hollow log covered
with green moss that most
would venture to say was green

and some saw men who levitated
seated on nothing but air
and quietly they were astonished
It did make a sound No it
did not it did did not

when out of the end of the hollow
log a mouse came
and some of the seven or nine men
saw the mouse and said
look it's a moose

You mean mouse
No I mean moose You're crazy
Look at the antlers
Some of the men saw nothing
and were deeply concerned

The fourteen suns arched slowly
the twelve suns ran quickly
the eight suns were still
The shadow men bickered and babbled
and some filed out of the clearing

Dream Fodder

Divide the flesh, pry skin
from linen wrested from its tuck,
roll back in the swim of sleep.

Unmind the knot between
the shoulders, niggling fist
that kneads the knuckled spine,

wink out the light that slants
through skewed blinds, a door's
click, the hiss of her water.

And down the road some dog's
nagging alarum filtered
through seven or nine houses

becomes a caw. Her knee's return
tilts a sea, the clock's tick
an even keel in cold salt.

A Warm Day in Winter

i get older, older than this mock summer who's young
always, ever the lamb that gambols, galumphs, white
and new & shining, for which is everlasting.
my bones are cold at dawn and crack like a ship

in a squall through chilling salt, though i am younger
than my father, whose hands are stronger. light,
like blood from a lemon, threads my eyes in oversleep
that greet the sun through injured gaps. light, my enemy.

o make me new, false summer, spurious spring,
but spare me flowers and the fawning of poets; bring
no birds with their calliopes of clamor, no doves,
no sparrows, no swallows; bring no bloodrush, no heart's

triphammering, no love's crush; only the reminder
of peace engendered by your generous fire that made
past mays more kind, when love brought belly-flutters
& handsweat, not this callous and creeping killing.

Circles: an Experiment

Brad tugged a cigarette from the box,
rolled it back up his short sleeve, flicked
a lighter open and birthed a cherry. He flexed
his tat for Audrey, whose backside tensed
in her pleated skirt.

Something in the efficient grumble of V-eights,
of a moon slipping down the arch of night,
pink so striking it cannot belong,
gum, lipgloss: signs and portents;
something in the meaty
compost of bodies, the music, the brawn of engines.

Audrey felt the chugging pistons knock,
the oily crowbar at the knees,
the stink of metal and heat. She kept her lips closed,
flipped her gum like a pancake, her tongue
flattened, pushed, until it hurt.

The bleechers shook, the young mothers
cupped their babies round the ears. Kerchiefs,
white tiaras, and the infinite blessing
of breathable cotton
walked in a pungent sheen
under the lights or did the seats a kindness
with a more mundane kind of shifting.

"So, they squeal around the track
like crazy planets, growl and bear their teeth,
push and bump and bang like toddlers
over a stuffed frog?"
"Stop being such a pain in the ass."

Epithalamium

At Matins,
pause. Doves
in covens congregate, and swans
complain.

Virgins in black
beckon with palaver,
murmur, simmer
in weather's swelter.

Cracked mirrors, lost connections,
clamour in pieces,
Pride undo, that vain adorning,
unmask the treble Graces.

Goose and gander, in planes
opposing, crush
the tenuous membrane,
concoct delerium,

dismantle the matrix.
Bell's cacophonous
pulse intones
Excaliburs, stilettos,

baubles and obols.
O brazen Philomel
perched in a pristine ilex,
preen and genuflect,

perfect the conflagration
of Aurora,
Beltane's fabulous
conjunction of azures.

Roads 1

roads:
to come through to
arrive to be at a place
here & now in the north
there the arrow points   >
upwards always further; though
a thread opens down &  outward
the same way: words gathering green
copied connected across down & outward
so to go up we dig down, remember and take w/
us all the things we have shined and tucked away to
remind and to keep us together bound in memories up




Nov 25 2010