INSTRUMENTATION IN THE
WHEELHOUSE
An Epic Poem
Michael J. Clark
PROLOGUE
______________________________________________
A FATHER'S TESTAMENT TO
HIS SON UPON HIS DEATHBED
Flowers had made their many runs from the abutments.
All ships had foundered, airless and blue.
Trumpets were banned, not to awaken old clones.
I stood at a point, and conceived many odd fractions.
In the face of the women I saw the falcon, Isis,
Who some say had escaped from the keeper.
I.
There is a great shadow in this land which my ghost must
confront.
Crowds can never understand my conspiracy.
Time has allegiance to my hand and my grotto.
And the legacy that I leave behind, in this Land of Light,
from which I now descend,
This Land of My Fathers, in which Futures
have been stored,
Is a child for every dandelion stem,
A child for every star I've perfected.
A cold wind teaches the lessons of humility.
I am not long on scorn, unless the catcher has his name up.
Cold opinion contains no shame.
And if the child is forced to stand in the rain
Then the monetary Saturday, the moon of June,
Will detain no marauders.
For the father's son will bend his name;
Will twist the proselyte world into a cleave.
How many still walk with me?
How many have fallen,
Since the hound has taken free leave of his master?
He knows the prostitutes' faces by names.
Perhaps he even knows their thighs, and the grace stains
of their honey,
Which was sweeter by far when the rain was not falling.
Each line in the daughter's cheek
Bears inscriptions of broken dreams.
Either to drink or to drink of the fiery penis
she has turned.
The names of each pleasure are not her concern;
Social Morality or Justice are but houses along the road,
Houses which she has passed,
Which only offered protection from age:
A cosmetic alliance with territorial rebuke.
She stopped, and almost knocked--
But a voice told her once that all certainty
was penal logic.
The slave-owner speaks regarding the language of highest good,
As though communal possession and the verb had a common name.
Giving me medicine to save me from error;
Giving religion to save me from faith.
I see. And the man in crocodile gaiters throws a rose
into a bin;
Certainly someone has saved me from pain;
As I hear soft men and hard women speak of nurture;
I hear that women have their pricks up:
The balloon is not safe, if it carries many dreams.
Someone hands Iago the mask of his father.
Hamlet paints his face black, and goes to stand in the woods:
Preparing himself for incendiary folly,
Like a priest laying coins on the eyes of his sister.
War is not a special occasion;
In the common and the daily and the drone there is extinction.
Come all ye faithful, and hear the caterwalk of mice.
The field is green, and has yet to be sown;
The many seas are on the garden;
And the cabbage has sold its hood
to the cleric.
Ahh. Inevitable cynicism, batterramming at the door.
Autumn's precious surrender of stones,
By men in eurythmical gowns
marked for blood;
The killer returns to his home in the village;
The woman now worries that her man might not rise.
Cockofthewaterwalk; countryoftherose;
The woman's skirt is hereby sited
Storing many tales and too much wheat.
Other men in the town seek the excess of her harvest;
When the husband is away, many play, and many barter;
As the ritual of generation degenerates into a cudgel.
Only violence cures the heart
From too much supper on every plate;
If the child is bred to remain always a child
Then Vitality eats the childbread;
And steals away the mother to perform rituals
of obscene angles.
Poor performance begets scenes of nihilation.
Those who seem to know decide
That they would rather die young.
Irons in the fire, poker hot, brand the calves.
"M"-on-"M" gives us "X" inside a pod.
Fire is worshipped when the night has a crystal gale.
Lovers have marched from the Spring into surly Autumn.
Each plots the other's murder; but Mordred stacks the hammers
on wheels.
The Present, with its face-names of Reaganbeginandropovtito,
Of Paullechfidelsandinistacumjumblatt:
What does this matter, when the leaf proclaims its legislation?
There has never been a face, which, in looking back,
Did not discern larger faces.
Children are given the house of their fathers;
I watch as the roof breaks, and someone tumbles beyond the
monument.
The descent is not so hard, not so bleak as you'd believe.
The muscles begin to fade; the Will begins to soften.
Between the Jewish Woman and the Catholic Man:
We possess all the shame and guilt
Of which the world has yet conceived.
Immaculately, in a word.
In swift gyratory circumambulence--
in a phrase.
God bless guilt and shame.
For also you and I have possessed the gift of Gnosis,
Which we tore from the depths of Hell
Where wonderful Lutherans have never been
In straight contemplation of their reich.
Fear drives the kettledrum;
Anxiety drives the whirlwind mode.
Music is prayer built to drive off the Dead,
Built as garb against airy demons
When they come back to attack
The immaculate structure
which cannot be.
Damn the Unbelievers when they tell me I must shrink!
I have armor in my words; and the Dead can only calculate
hysterical virtue in historic pincers.
It takes Water and Earth to create a Human Soul.
If you choose Death over Life, then the Water is withdrawn.
And your continent becomes a desert;
Your seas become archaeologists' new fortunes.
"It is better to kill than to be killed!"
So says the New Christ.
"It is better to weep than to be unloved!
"It is better to live, and drown, than to sell sand
to a coming Titan!"
Monday is a day of play;
Cameras haunt the battleground, conceived by the shock
of Yesterday's purpose.
Jehovah rising from a graven image;
In the dictate of a coming cavern, Moses gave me his mountain
in its September shoes.
Those who inhabit the issue at its crux are those who defend
the women from Creeping Habit.
As over and over the lottery turns.
It is unwise for the Mayor to walk alone at night.
Surely some imagery displays the camp of a coming slaughter;
When missionaries' rags are hurled on bonfires by the children,
All accomplishments are mere chance conjoined with the art of
visual anger.
Holy unrelatedness is but a mask adopted by fakirs and shrews.
The vision is not a circus of leaves, but, verily, a pandemonium
of sorrow.
And of sweet, delicate nocturnal embrace,
From which the screams are not of pain
But from a pleasure received and given by thee.
Death walks in a velvet coat;
If I were to strike him down he would merely laugh.
Yes, he is God's emissary too;
Some say love him, and some say weep.
Some say gold is found in his crew.
Rain fills the streets with soliloquy of type;
If Hamlet had been so bright as tears, so rich as dripping seas
from the sky,
He might have climbed from his solitary pew,
Invoking Shakespeare to shake paddle-words from his brain:
Liberating the son by way of laughter's constraint
Before he struck the blow
By which son and father became one.
An Ark is built for the King and Matrona;
The Temple is sewn by the Word without hands
As a supper with roof that you and I might soon claim it.
These are the last words spoken by the claimant.
An angry black face on the waterway coughs;
Oedipus wrecks the secret chamber of his mother,
Despoiling the ways of his father for a coign.
Fate, you god constabulary, have your crows on the ledge
when the morning breaks my shell!
On someone's wings I surely must flee
To the place where rehearsal of the deed has been directed.
Who is superior to thee and to I?
To perfect one's work, is it not to perfect one's life?
And the women wish only erectperfection could last,
For down that middle stretch of life
Each looks to discover that the men have all gone.
Morose intellectuals plot self-disintegration with glee;
When the bell sounds, in Dawn's new cestus,
The body conceived by Daily Life
Will not find them.
Death is some absolute wall to these weary.
Climb the wall, you fool!
Vico's gnosis: Theology-Aristocracy-Democracy-Chaosidocy.
A river returns: Chaosidocy-Theology.
Climb the dangling braidsheet into heaven;
Regeneration, before the coming in of Trouble.
Condemn yourself to death if you will;
Condemn me to life if, by contrast, you must!
Yet, when the bell is wrung, Ideas give way to the cold steel
of Decision.
Alas, the maid I love exists beyond the wall;
I must go beyond the wall if I would sleep with her again.
Infamous American Pragmatism:
To a world seen as some insurrection
against God.
Do not judge yourself with such virulence, friend,
When your neighbor, in his ideology,
Condemns your name
And would see you dead.
It is but good sense, in our practical tradition.
For no sin is so grave that I cannot forgive it.
And it is easier to forgive desire for Life
Than it is to forgive the lust for self-destruction.
So said Jehovah's First Angel, Michael,
As he built up his armor
By invoking his own name.
II.
A timepiece is constructed, without hands and with no visible
numbers.
It is based on the Lemniscate; yet has Twelve Gods or Armies
which are stationed at numerous points.
Armies One and Seven seem to inhabit the same spot:
At the center of the Eight, where One does rise and Seven
does fall.
At Four you will find Noon;
At Ten will be Midnight.
One and Seven are Six and Six.
Yet the numbers are not seen; even the Eight is not a number.
And Five is a Lion, the King of the World.
And Six a Virgin Moon, in which Ideology of Rite is found.
And the Seven who falls is Man himself,
That Man-Woman-King, who, from King, becomes a Mite.
Mineral atom.
In the Land of Night the woman hardens her stalagmites.
The penis cannot be found, but in her garter,
Inside of which she now conceals some relic of larger fossils.
Bones and dark voices remind her of ages during which
Pleasure's gain, Pleasure's pain,
Came from her own intrepid delivery.
And then the fall is again believed: man and woman again to bed.
And the dreams, by nature, are sweet or either raw.
The Sun would save the North, yet would persecute the South.
The Moon relieves the South from heat:
Yet Winter-of-Night makes the Norseman bleed.
Who then prays for the coming in of Day?
Monday is a day of prayer, a day when players conceive a hymn:
A day when prayers are burrowed and found.
If the Moon protects the Underworld, then who protects the Land
of Exactment?
Sun and Moon seem to be Five and Six;
Their marriage breaks the world into Sevens;
And continents rise as Saviors against grim behaviors.
Who will be the New Christ, who dethrones the teetering old one?
Which will be the New World, when the Old demands its grave?
I see you have come to a new understanding:
It is better to be wise than it is, alone, to have virtue.
It is better to be a man than, all times, to be a saint.
For man is saint, but saint is not man -- is that not
how one re-states it?
A freeze is on the valley floor; fog embarks on its journey of
embrasure.
A spark is extinguished by the trumbelling of clouds;
Wonderful vaginas swallow up men, counting each inch with a series
of wild discoveries.
The Sensualist finds no place to hide;
The woman's broken fruit is a marriage of her labor.
Anger is not the Lover's coat;
When the Religious Vigor comes with knives
He who can't hate might be he who will fall.
And all the sorry agnomens to pride
Seem like spent shell casings in the ditch
before the rain.
Sing your heart's clear burden if you will;
Sing Whitman's glass and Melville's apocalypse.
Sing Brando's disease and sing the melody of Roger Staubach.
A man's land is to be loved;
Hate Injustice, but never hate one's own blood.
For we are all early children laced to a ship which does not move.
The Stage Manager hands us our costumes and customs:
We try to play what we most believe;
And, eventually, even play when we have lost our belief.
For Time gives us spectacles showing Time has inverted pense.
Faith and Knowledge of Facts do not sup, together,
at the Banquet
of Reason,
all times;
Understanding and Fanatic Idealism are like two brothers who each
is half-blind.
A sorry fate; Cappola's grim indictment:
"Drop the bomb on them!"
Nothing says it quite so precisely.
Talleyrand and his bomblets of opinion.
Who now even hears the Capitol bells, and the airy clean dictates
it waters from its garden?
Somnambulistic terriers; the eagle has its claws on.
And, at the stroke of Midnight:
the Eagle, the Lion, the Ox, and the Man.
Elements meet at the "X": Double M:
Crossroads spell Nihilation.
So says the Country Lawyer, Mr. Lincoln,
Before he wanders through the corn.
And what is it we truly fear?
Does Anonymity drive us even harder than Rage?
Does Mortality mean to us a cup without water?
To have the other man stand on our chest,
Demanding that we must accustom ourselves newly.
Yes. To kill is better than to be killed.
The slave is not the element of icons,
Not the paen of endorsement,
When the King builds a sideways castle.
Worship the prerogative of Death,
But never worship his face and his name,
Nor speak some childlike festival of rest.
He who sleeps can't see the burglar
Spoil his wife and lame his children.
The location of my dreams seems a vale below the belt.
The heavy-valed treasure of the valley and the rose.
Civilization has twenty-seven laces on its girdle:
Twenty to hold the goods in place;
Seven to insinuate the number of orifices it honors.
For Pleasure does not exist unless a name be found to call it so.
And, finding a name, it ceases as such:
For a candle is not the word;
And the word, itself, cannot fill an empty chronicle.
The empty chronicle on the lonely hill, and the early bride
must some day take umbrage.
Lesbians carve great phalluses to the name of Woman,
Knowing some will come to supper
If the New Woman acts even better
as a man.
And in the very deep water a gray-colored monster is being hatched.
If the men wanted wives, then why did they not stay,
After the house had been built?
The lure of war is in their blood;
An honorable death is sufficient to drive them.
The specter of death behind the desk;
A desire to punish the monster in the shoe.
He fixes the bayonet, sites through his scope:
Muslims in rags and beards
Drop Twentieth Century prayers into their midst;
Each prayer claims a limb or an organ;
The marine sites in a vague head and squeezes his trigger calmly.
It's as easy to kill as it is to be killed now.
God honors equally the martyr and the soldier.
For, when you place them face to face, you find there is no
contradiction.
Plato and Socrates both were heroes in the war.
The testament brings a scurried applause.
All honorariums for the noon tea and lecture
are distributed by
the man in blue
before he leaves the room.
Ogres begin to surface from the Fire.
Heat is Absolute Hatred when the spotlight swings a turn
on these children.
Traitors live inside this red and ransacked terrain
which wishes only for Death,
for surrender.
Is it God or Devil who lives inside the Fire?
Intellect plots to overthrow souls; it believes that Life must be conquered
by reductionism.
Yet, in this life, I am Michael, Saturn's clone.
I guard the turning spate of days around which marshal
those who hate Man's independence;
And who wish to place a thick blanket of rest,
a quilt of disease,
On my endless production.
It is my brother, the Dark Giant.
He cannot resist Pessimism's lure;
In the thick of Blackness, there is much power,
As Melville did see, as Hawthorne before him.
Yet would you bring a plague into your house,
as Set did to Isis,
To relieve your troubled virtue?
If you would worship but the weak, then weak you too must be,
Or to stand against yourself, without hope of gaining
momentum.
The Fire is filled with tortured romantics;
Set, your typhoons spooned about the globe:
Will you rest when you have my head detached,
tacked upon the farmer's barn
singing the glories of revolt against light?
Horror to the man who kills his own father?
Karamazov created his creed from the grail!
Double Horror, indeed, to the son who won't see me!
I make valleys bloom and deserts bear fruit;
I am Life and Life's Seed;
And he who bleeds me won't recover.
Some say the Fire is Element the First;
and some say the Last.
He who keeps the Fire alive
Surely passes it on to his kinsmen.
Fire is the element which lights up the Night.
It is the star, in its primest color;
Yet, on Earth, this Fire is the Mind of those gone.
And thou shalt not worship the Dead! Abraham says.
For what can the Dead teach the living about Life!
If you would die, alone, then seek out these ghosts!
The tumor upon my right arm's benign;
The doctor burns it down to a stone.
All Herculean pretenders cart corpses of birds to a nearby market.
False hunters have a sterilized grin.
Send to me, please, Israel's Daughter:
Daphna, perhaps, with the flames of her hair,
And the broadness of her torso:
Let me drown in her nuptial rose for a term!
Her water is not water, but the milk of a nursing Matrona
to me;
She keeps this child alive from Fatigue, that bitch
who would sell my heart, again, to Doom.
There is Life beyond the life which exhales;
One thousand stoney seeds scattered by the Lion's brood.
Insist on Death, but don't insist that it is real!
Condemn these thousand years, but don't proclaim I must live
in a copse or a shell!
The corpse has been determined as gone;
But that wall I have climbed guarantees a New Advance.
Daphna feeds this Boy at her breast;
Her milk is for the eyes a cure;
Her skin is for his sorrow an elixir.
Do not desert me, as I rise through the Fire.
Catholic Boy and Jewish Girl;
American Man and Israeli Madonna.
If our love must ever be pure, don't regret that the flesh
of our words mingles wisely.
The child you carry was given by me, in that April of our meeting,
When you asked for one more story to bear.
Boy-Angel mounts upon his cloud to fight the Wind.
He has a secret name, which none can know,
By which he rules the many seas which harbor monsters.
He knows no life but to fight against the leaves;
The Darkness cleans the Earth of her garment,
But leaves the trembling man in a predicament
he can't learn by.
The Headless Man is a Heartless Obsession.
Ahab weaves a cloth in which his journey is foretold:
A tale of a garden his wife once treasured and then lost.
And which am I: believed or beloved?
When I enter the cavern's gasses all the ghosts fly up like crows.
And all the handsome men tell lies, about the meaning of life
and the necessity of speaking of fortunes.
They weep: and hide their tears with gloves which they have stolen.
If you love Failure most, then to Hell you eventually travel.
The Darkness tries to cut the Sun, to castrate his complexion,
to reduce it in to twos.
Very well. When Set comes again, with his knife inside his boot,
Let the family mourn that its Soul has been offered,
Like grapes to the Earth, to the murderous crew.
A woodsman with axe I watch walk the city streets;
He has no mind, but is possessed by Destruction.
The murder he carries in his heart is on his features.
Beauty is ever a victim of Outrage;
Sleep-Carriers are seen advancing on the palace.
Small boys practice masturbation in the hallways,
As a bell tolls five and a woman counts to seven.
And a Pole is seen to melt, and all the water to run to Heaven.
We compete, we tested minds, to find most vivid scenes of
our own destruction;
Schools of Thought spring up in which desolation has logical
construction.
Longing for horror, to escape a leveling boredom.
Yet who will be the King to rule when all the leveling borders
have gone?
Perhaps you have Knowledge of Evil and Good;
If you taste not the fruit from the Life of the Tree,
Then great knowledge might peter to rock by the sea.
Denial of Good three times, before the crow cocks thrice
in the blazing before Dawn.
A man born in Calcutta tells me the city is an evil bin.
And the Language of Dreams seems to cut an awesome swath
Across the desert of the soul, which was, time before, a swamp.
Never or seldom believe in Anti-Matter as opposed to Matter
as a more lasting creation.
The virulent season of Dream's empty body, filled up with force,
spills its treasury from the door.
Each twin born at once; each dying within its reflection.
I see. Troubles for your proverbs ahead.
Maxatron says the fibula rasa has been stolen.
What does it matter, when the document spangles?
The Void is chess, when the Hero prunes his hair and consents
to dress in chains.
No longer Hero: he dreams of his plight,
After he has been destroyed and begin's destruction's aftermath.
Paint it black between the spoons; between the buttons there is an
old man
now pretending.
Guardians of our lives tell us nothing is repaired from turmoil;
Michael and Gabriel spar, but by numbers.
Who wants Power, and who most wants most Rest?
Who desires the circuit's dance enough
To fight and to fall, but, in falling last, to grasp it?
He who controls the gold creates the world,
Creating in his own image the dedication which he would live by.
Working from the mental blueprint
Which the gods have etched
and which he, thereafter, finds.
Yes, Man is a Fallen Angel.
And the First and Second Temples are sacked
Even before they have been built.
The Celestial Temple is builded that the King and Matrona might
cohabit therein.
"I," sayeth the Word, "shall be to her a wall of fire round about;
"And I shall be the glory in her midst!"
Then children are born from her brain and from her mouth,
As she speaks about his glory; and all the townsmen come to gather.
Yes, archaic is the style of this witness who speaks hereby crosswise.
I have come seven millions of light years
From my home to bring you my bondage.
I began my journey when I was quite young,
Like some Apollo fresh from Daphne
Rising boar-like to Time's fresh apex.
I have fallen, since, to old age and trouble;
As I fall toward the fire where peeking men
Clean their teeth and cringe.
Shelley and Keats: would you make of this some romance?
As Rousseau constructs, for teeth-cleaning men,
A box of opinion in which
Beginning's mistaken for End?
Hanseatic Primitive Men, who gorge on the carcass of Ideal Thought:
Stand about your smoking fire to find
The tattoo in numbers you left upon my shoulder.
You are not more evil than I am, friend;
I, too, am Primitive Man --
That man who must fall to put his stamp
on the back of Time.
Jehovah Sabaoth: the Armies of Night.
I am capable of the greatest horror;
I am subject for the greatest necessity for good.
I forgive all things; I forget nothing, but I have no remembrance.
The Past is a forge from which the Future is hammered
in iron.
And in spirit.
Resolutely.
The Word knows all things but speaks only once.
His woman does the speaking and his father fills the surface.
And he stands and does not budge until the Moment comes again
when he must close the open door.
III.
The mask of the Son: is it better fashioned than the mask
of the Father?
The Highest Son leads the prodigals back to home.
He is the swinging gate through which must pass
All the lost and aging angels of rhe rebellion.
Who must seek a new beginning.
Mercury evolves from the shell he wore as Mars.
From Death the Man evolves; into Death again he goes.
Man's the Beginning; he is also the End.
Between the Two Men lie a season of discovery;
And five other Men.
He unearths the compounds silently
Through which the Past composes
Time.
And then the Man devolves into militant.
Adam, at death, is taken to Heaven the Third,
At which station he merely waits
For the New World to him uncover.
And the fall from the nature of god
Comes when a woman makes him weep.
His stomach is a fiery sea,
When the wind blows through the turrets
for a dream.
All is not lost.
Women of great beauty seek many lovers to fill their predicaments;
Lovely predicaments, asking always for more,
Asking always for larger purpose;
But the vat is stirred by dwarves.
Samson pulled the temple down;
He could not believe what his ears had described
In the march of the thirty grim ages
of his chains.
So the men, in the end, pull down cities on their loved ones.
It is an act of religious madness, for the Sun has been concealed
too long.
The Hero shores himself
Of the hair where his Strength has been hid;
Luciferians hold weekly meetings at which the Devil is
proclaimed a Saint.
All invoke the aura of Death, and, thereby, invite Him into their
midst.
And he who calls the name of Death, and offers himself,
shall, eventually, have him.
There are those who strap on shields of words,
To castigate the fumbling dreads.
They ask: who is living and who now a ghost?
The black beauty and the absinthe harlot;
Who hatches these lots in the land beneath smoke?
Noah does give me his name and his task;
There is a power unknown by men of the world
In a land where the covenant between God and Man lies.
I saw Judaism, Christianity and Moroni's Tribe fuse;
In sleep there is a great fashioning of curds;
Angels are not passed beings: light-bearing creatures of old men's
imaginations.
I give you the crucible of Life!
Drink from it: accept not Defeat!
There's no sin in Success which Time won't eventually perfect.
And the Young Man should never wish Age but in Wisdom.
* * *
Who are these children of Moroni, whom the "hidden" call Atlantic?
Atlas, the Giant: a first American Hero.
Mounds of Giants on American plains,
Slain by gloaming Set, who settled in to eat his share.
The brother tribes of Israel
To Israel, across the ocean, did come.
Israeli Woman and American Man:
Married by the Father in heaven who spins
Some imaginary cloth which Primary Fate evolves
as Law.
I build you now a covenant.
Between you and she
This God gives you greatness.
IV.
Life is the Primary Truth;
It is that unknown Maximizer, greater by far than Judgments
on Life.
Judgments carry a hammer of brass, no doubt;
Yet who will pay for dead marines in Beirut, crushed by tons of stone
while in their sleep?
I look at you, Islam: blood is on your bloody crescent.
He who worships Death becomes Death's left hand;
He who kills the Peacemaker soon shall reap a hundred swords.
I have fire in my hands; and only Time implies the message
at which point the fire is loosed.
* * *
Trouble comes always, in a musical sense,
When the piper stops playing,
to reflect upon his notes.
Beauty is ever tragic; the Ugly is also tragic,
But no one minds, for this seems a justice.
Justice seems to lie beneath a century of stone.
Who is so old and so maimed he can resist me?
I delight in beautiful women when the evening has all gone golden.
The Day I work and I shall rest; and together we walk when the
New Day is born.
And I see blue shepherds wandering on a marsh in search of thee;
Holy incorporated madonnas walk a Seventh Day Adventist's range.
Our Hero falls, and meets the sting -- yet which is which
cannot be known.
Brother-of-Peace and Brother-of-War.
One believes in Corporate Evil; the other believes in the Body
Electric.
A calligraphic flaw:
Prometheus with eyes for Epimetheus.
Empedocles has funny handles on his shoes.
The gift of seeing is not a gift but a curse.
And a gift, but not a curse; for the Lion hunts, but is not
a hunter.
And I enter this cavern where cynics are found;
I see many wheats, but none is growing;
I see a captain whose hat is not worn but only shown.
Steeples are ground to the Earth, and then made into buttons.
For everyone knows that the people must come to something.
Miraculous leveling: high to low and low to high.
In that region of the heart, all the elements are in Four Men.
There are murderers in the Earth who think Apollo is the kingdom.
They will rob and kill to have his share;
Set is a lion who behaves like a bear.
I see a puzzle on a table: a man puts a piece in his pocket
and leaves.
All marks of Justice are erased by the pauper.
He who worships poverty puts to death all vegetation.
There will be plenty of time for sleep when I am gone,
he said.
But, not leaving, he only cracks a nut to eat it.
The Era of War is pronounced.
Who shall stand and who shall stall when all the proctors
of violence are grazing?
When the Mind gives the Body a dark Future only,
The Body rebels against the Mind and opts to fight.
The Intellect rebels against the Affluent Way,
which makes its nature so;
Anti-materialists create poverty;
Poverty closes the door on the Liberalist Issue.
And then all the scales are brought to bear
on the dilapidated mentor,
Who speaks in ways and means of diction;
The audience in cords finds his correlation bold.
I see Cain grow jealous that he has not a wife;
Twenty-seven trumpeters lay down their horns and lie,
facing to the East, like ice, on mounds.
The Dark Giant wishes to castrate his Father.
Big-Foot is seen, a great bear, near Grants Pass.
Joshuah and Cush bring back reports from the town.
All of Hell is like a thimble filled with bile.
Cows are seen on the prairie with elk;
A brother of Islam offers reasons for his own virtue.
Someone has forgotten that the falcon has been seen.
The only women on the street are those who
Sell their bread to sailors;
A Beirut woman screams and falls:
Her new American husband is buried under stone.
If my darkness were not abstract, how could I face Yeats' grim
new coming?
Nimrod and Nebo are but miles from my doorstep.
Man is the sacred island who goes on.
And when Death comes near, many Angels become Men,
Choosing hard existence beyond the throne
Rather than critical mass inside a spoon.
The period between the Two Men is what is called a song of rest;
Here Spirits might create what the coming Men destroy.
Lord Michael supports the woman when the beast would consume her
heirline;
He descends upon the Earth and cloaks Millennia in Eternal Diction;
And is seen.
Cap and gown is a new way of standing.
And the Old Thief who haunts the military shack
Pulls knuckles from his pocket and re-aligns the world at large;
The weak are good often but from the power of inertia;
The holy and their madonnas watch the brute encompass the seasons
with a certain glee;
The King of Heaven's shadow is the King of the Earth's oblivion;
Absolute Good demands an absolute companion,
And thereby marries him inside a name.
The Red Woman carries you back into Life;
The Blue Woman's road is to terror and to hidden gems;
The road of flight is blocked by mice.
Who is the Midnight Sun, my friend?
Tell Actaeon which letter of his groin made for truth;
And which of his hounds had the bitter number on his breath
By which the savior was undone and the mooning world marked another
trauma.
The one who fights Death is sometimes called Harsh Opinion;
Death herself is made a ghost, and weds the Wind to bring on Harm.
Sigurd warms beside the Fire which Regin stokes as he bends
Real Perception.
Is he evil who seeks the darlings to fall?
The Force of Darkness climbs the wall and only twin-force can shake
its assumptions.
If you dethrone the Legitimate King, then the world shall break
in throes of grief;
The plant will dry up;
You shall be scorned by your venerated "nature,"
For the laws you dethrone bring Chaosidicy to govern seasons.
All Mondays wear a certain harness and an anger;
Hardness is found in the veins of her predicament.
Coalition is an unknown commodity when isolationists balk at
moderate activity;
Blue Men are determined to be worthless by savage commanders;
Red Armies weight the tin roof of Iran;
As the good are good, so the bad must be bad.
Grenadians embrace the Americans as saviors;
American journalists portray the Americans as hoards.
Self-hate rules the kingdom's multiplicity:
Until the Taskmaster hands the shouting boy his new rule.
I am all things: the Angel of the Face shows the Hostile Soul
the Future;
Least-loved and best-known: he is sent by God to guide God's favorites
through the precipice Night into Canaan.
Best-loved and least-known: he is greeted by the women with a smile
that cures all language.
Invoke his secret name when the Dragon of Spoils comes to caul you;
None shall offer such stiff resolution, such resistance to the Wind,
as he who holds the Covenant's logic.
Australian brother-to-me, offer me your hand!
It is not Europa's girdle I claim--
But, as brothers, we must see that our New World does not turn
ghostly.
Ned Kelly to Jesse James:
The Tropical Clock has but two main hands.
We must watch the Sacred Israel,
For nothing can happen to the Soul but we let it.
All things in God's Heaven are transcribed by the pithed wit;
When the Prophet trades his staff for a sword,
Then the visions all run harsh,
And all he finds are the frightened few.
Religions get updated too;
And if the Sun would marry Virtue on that street where no one walks,
Then on the street where many stand
Armies sharpen knives to fight the Moon.
No one believes what Caledonia knows;
What everyone believes cannot be known but by a few;
And these few are the tortured lords
Who hold great worlds upon their backs,
Like turtles: who live in shells.
They can't let the world collapse, before its time;
And from Chaos they shall raise another world out of the seas.
V.
Blessed are they who give up the body!
This someone told me as he laid a wreath upon his son's grave.
Would you have me be slave and woman to some new Century?
Would you worship the Plague, the requisite of lice,
Which the Horrible Virtues come to cast at each manger,
Convinced that salvation, through God, lies in brine?
We have committed sins in the world -- that much is true.
Youth is, by its own description, folly, afterall.
Adam waits upon the perch, and knows that waiting, itself,
is pain.
Is it the season of the red termites then?
She says: I would rather be a slave to the Russians
than to sit here with Adam Bombs in their silos.
Who is the New Messiah who brings Fire against his foes?
The God, Jehovah, is hard and demanding;
Those who would pin Him to the wheel shall find
The Son is not His nature.
Do not propose to me, while smiling,
A Thousand Years of Tyranny
as Mime,
As though you prescribe some dosage for a flu,
Thinking Hardship is but a calumny too true.
To which sacred island shall the persecuted flee
When the Dictates of Eastern dogmatic maws
Swallow the unlearned and the stalling on the stump,
Stamping on the brow "received", in their corrugated idyll?
Some say: Learn to love Hell! Don't demand you be a Mountain!
The Night is thick when it comes in like this.
Rain streaks the parchment board; and, down in the waves, some new
monster is being fed.
And the Monster says to me: "The Day is finished! I'm coming after
you to kill you!"
But I will not surrender; Moby Dick has his grace.
The coffin of Quequeg, an ark from the deep,
Makes the penman exist
Where local actors are only borrowed;
The writer of the play transforms the Thought into History's Bow;
The walker on the Boulevard of Swann projects the trees and the themes
into a foil.
Tremolos conceived to make the demons fall in line:
Hearts and vines to force the surly shadows to speak their lyrics;
and, so, to bind them.
Valkyrie offers a place to the brave, in that hall of fallen lords
who know that Death is but a shrew.
Past-time and Presence-time: the gods come to lift the frightened men
back into clouds;
It is not enough that you be weak;
Neither is it to be good enough.
Let the sinners also be great at sin:
Mediocrity is Value's chagrin.
The world, at Dawn and Dusk, is reversed;
The caste of Saint and of Soldier is near.
And all attempts at categorization merely strain sand
into the well.
The thin veneer, which we call Magic, is peeled from the brute
by the wire of mental torture;
To win at conflict is his only concern.
To be generous and kind and merciful: it is the way to greatness.
Liberation is the wiser war than that tome called Annihilation,
Which is written by the trumpeters seeking scapegoats for their own loss.
Equality and Freedom be opposite virtues:
Freedom guarantees the opportunity of unequal voice and mode.
And if you'd reduce me to the common element of Need,
I would only once again rebel; for your tight hand squeezes out seeds,
in its constriction,
Which the Mother Curiosity resolutely shades until one grows.
It is the nature of Discovery to proceed in declaration;
One thing's said, and two are done;
Humility waits by the window, and Michael declares he intends
to wed her.
Icarus falls into water; and no one has seen him.
The recollection of his vision brings the paradox of fear:
Fear that it would be; greater fear that it would not be.
He uses the powers of Mesmer to calm him.
He will guide the aching Soul through this region of No Tomorrow;
The Great Fears appear, during Night, as selected rulers.
He will bring Life Eternal to the women who ask for something,
Calming their Collective Terror with the wisdom of numbers and
names.
The Dragon asks him not to care; it speaks Enlightened Rule;
He knows that some things are not spoken.
Ye Nameless, who descend into the water of this world,
can only raise your trembling hand
and place the scales upon the throne.
Remorse is a great weight to bear.
And the seven stars before the throne all bow to greet
the coming in of Day.
I have died so that you need not die.
But the King of Heaven, later, is the King of Clay.
In the 2,000 years it takes the Sun to make His circuit:
He is worst and He is best: High and Low are damnations
from the rear.
And the Fighter has lost his power; he trembles in the rain.
Yet there is no Second Death to claim him:
Her merely draws himself inside himself, and waits for Extremes
to spin off into their stations.
Those who work in this world are not required to work in the next.
Those who create Heaven watch as their brethren rule the Hells.
There is hate and jealousy there: those who wish for Darkness and for
the rule of dying plants.
If you hate Man you hate God also;
Absolute Order has no place above creation;
Totalitarian State is not the heaven which you had imagined;
The Ego, also, is the savior of the world;
Yet, when the time arrives to die, to take your place within the
mass,
Find your way back with a breath
Into the tide where the next fall is certain.
You instruct the Animal against yourself.
The Four Holy Animals are the Elements of Time
When Midnight Sun
is reached.
As Rome was overrun, so the plague came on the seas.
Villagers crouched inside their huts and wondered who'd be the next
to steal.
If you would have no policeman, you would then form your own
protection.
Life is the First Principle;
Life is the Seventh Angel, who is Michael, and
who blows the horn.
Memory is that clinging content of Mind, whereby the Body might
dissolve,
Unless the Memory be rent by Aurora.
And all cats are marked for extinction by the swallow;
Willow trees are bent by thousand-pound men who circulate Goethe;
Women come to me and plead against nuclear carnage.
Some are absolutely broken; others believe that the Intellect still
rules.
Pluto enters Scorpio at 12:48 pm.
And all the Unbelievers tremble; the Believers have made
their gardens from woe,
Having seen the New Becoming from their room inside the well.
Is he evil who is watching as the sickle is prepared?
Russian submarine surfaces along the Carolina coast;
Russian boats have been trapped in the Niflheim Straits.
Is there no force which drives us through
into the Next World?
If you say we must be equal, then equal at whose standards?
Equal as mariotic waves; or as Marx outsaw real Logic,
Seeing Equality through glasses of primrose and haggle?
Must I be Africa? must Africa wear shoes?
I do not know.
The self-conscious Principle should, in the mind alone,
be martyred.
It is no more true than each Hour is truth;
The Son has more distance from his Time than does the Father;
Yet, he is not more true than is the Father.
And each Son becomes the Father in the end.
The martyr must become strong through standing with his own.
And nothing of what I say is Absolute and True;
I am a mouthpiece through which Time expresses itself;
And, likewise, through whom Anti-Time seeks to speak.
The Absolute is not known; we are stationed inside this dome,
Perception,
In which each Degree speaks a voice which fights for volume.
The Absolute is not shown;
When the Doctor puts his leg up, showing friends how the serpent
claws,
All the dedications to sorrow fall
And rust amid tiny spools.
The Emotional murder one another for crusts of Knowledge, and for
that fountain called Community.
When the Fire has lost its power, then the Water comes down in droves.
The Elect are raised into heaven, while the Guardian Angels stand as
buffers upon hell.
Inspire me, God, with your vision of Greatest Beauty!
Dante walked this road I walk;
Small is Beautiful is also an illusion;
Lovers capsize in the ocean where their love was once
a pond;
All boundaries represent the inevitability of inner strife;
The Hater would tear his own house down
Instead of admit that he too can sin.
Blessed is he who does his deeds;
Blessed is he who knows his own loyalties.
The Seen are never to be believed;
The Unseen drive the chariot through Water and out into Air.
Blessed are those who are high in heart, who are powerful
in intention.
Blessed is the power of creation;
Blessed are the Highest Minds in silence.
Blessed is the Woman of God, though many might vilify
the fact that she has come here.
Blessed are the meek; also blessed are they who strive.
Blessed are they who act; blessed also are they who
receive.
The trump card seems to be delivered to the Keeper.
On the day when Pluto enters Scorpio: the giant Goliath
crosses my path.
Desire for Life gives me strength to endure;
His seed shall bruise my heel with his head.
And everywhere those who hate seem now stronger
in blackest virtue.
If no one is taught responsibility for himself,
Then society will break and will the flood waters roll.
Beautiful Shulamit comes walking to me;
She is Israel-in-Exile; and Daphna is Israel-in-Completion.
Shulamit's body smells ripe, and much like love: mercurial;
I wish to enter her garden, upon invitation,
And to try to find the place where she likes to hide her
rose.
Woman's disdain for the Liberal Man
Stems from his subservience to her opinions.
Shulamit speaks of the country of Lesbos.
Feminism is her new garb; Anarchy is her lapel.
The Man-Haters shriek; the shade is never served an audit.
Only the nickelodeon knows that each song does repeat,
Although choruses do know that each phrase has a sidewise sickle.
I am to marry Shulamit: so the Father told me in my dreams.
But our meeting is a battle: I defeat her with my strength.
She has more words and easy concepts to defend, more easy alliances
to the weak;
Yet she cannot rule me; so she fears me, and perhaps loves me.
If she would speak her love, then I would have her;
I am no enlightened man who believes that his wife should be
shared by his neighbors;
I have gone into the next world; I return each night to pick up
souls.
Would you come with me, to walk in my beauty?
I am the Tree of Life:
The One who goes and who comes and who always stays.
I am the bridge over which you must tread to find new safety:
The Bridge of Many Colors, beyond bifrost, with American Stars.
Love me and I will save you;
Hate me and I shall pin you down upon the coals.
The Sword of Metatron never can rust;
The Wheel of Ezekiel winds and never rests.
The Talkers are very nervous and really can't have understanding.
The Night has made them fear:
Their coming doom is on their eyelids.
You must come with me if you would find your way to Canaan.
I am the Seventh Angel, he who blows his trumpet to disconnect
Time.
The Water still is too turbid for me to enter.
The stomach whirls with passionate appeal.
Hell is not undone but by the time it takes to sail to
New Jerusalem.
I love Man, but I punish him when he makes himself weak and begins
speaking of surrender.
When he speaks his praise of Death, then I show him Death's hoary
frame, so to wake him.
Vulcan is nearly completed with the Mind;
Vulcan and Saturn are connected with Jah-Hovah.
I fish for souls which would come into my time
with me.
Vulcan builds a shield; Saturn lets him take it off.
Mercury teaches men the art of seeds and quadrefoil Earth.
The Great Bear and the Pleiades are the union of Day and Night.
Before I turn my eyes back to Heaven I will give to Israel
a home upon the Earth.
The Lord will remember His covenant with thee.
But do not curse me to make me angry with thee.
I am a jealous God; and I tolerate no foreign gods when I return.
I come to you as a warning against that time
When I return to remind you that foreign gods must go.
There is One God, under which all are truly equal;
There are manifested gods, under which we rise and do battle.
Set-Herod makes a plan to strike down the savior
who is promised.
PART ONE.
CHILDHOOD
________________________________________________
First Association
BEGINNINGS ARE REAL THINGS
Beginnings are real things,
Real moments,
Producing rapport.
Rapid associations.
Introduction to the wheel.
With will being more than mere
Stereotypical thought
Strapped on armorally.
It does not take much to trace from one act
A generation of acts,
Each complete and total to itself,
Yet associated, essentially so,
With the genus of acts:
With the First Act as source of Time;
And with the Last Act proceeding that First.
Yet it does take something,
Some vision or some classically gothic blindness,
To draw from the single presage
The epitome of the globe's crusade;
The lifetime of the atom's regal archaism
Etched on stone.
And propelled for ever through Light's
Insularium we call Day.
There is a seed. In this seed is a latent
Phantasmagoria.
Nothing else can be said.
The seed explodes: beginnings are real things.
Beginnings are endings too.
Something ends,
Forged out of willing penmanship.
The seed explodes.
A world explodes,
Grafting itself indelicately
On the round apostrophe of space.
And ready to ride.
The Unborn Child's First Dream
CHRONOLOG OF THE DREAM
I.
The dream comes in the first form
And conforms to the shape
Of the first word uttered.
It is a shape, a mass,
Uniform and unyielding.
It is not a shape; and merely appears to merge
Shadow and alliance, edges with breadths.
It is a dream, a constant, unstrung from one never to the next,
A vast endless sea.
It is Time itself, but reflected in a shadow.
The dreamer being the audience of one,
Who leaves and returns to the cinema he creates.
From the turnstile of moving imagery,
Into the banquet of sound and vacillation.
The dream does not begin and does not end,
But, being the element from which the child, Time,
Is pushed forth, to which the old man, Time-Spent,
Returns, filled with imaginary recompense,
And with the history of creation,
Endures and turns, like a cauldron of rime.
Performing from his elemental ecclesiastes
A new song built out of progressions.
So that the world has new songs when each new Night
Is re-borne.
The dream is not stationary;
It moves by the logic of analogy
Rather than through the fatality of points.
It is stationary in content, in fixed abode,
Yet manifold in management.
II.
The dream begins in a ship upon an ocean.
It is a dream about the last line of thought.
For Noah has children but the children cannot see.
During the twilight preceding the catastrophe of course.
After the sailing and the spearing and the wasting,
Sight comes breaking.
Speed of motion and speed of light
Are twins that must match
Generating parallel glyphs,
Through which Sight (as opposed to looking) --
The Aleph and Beth of thought --
Is made possible --
And, indeed, becomes, itself, the last dream before waking.
III.
The dream comes in and then the nightmare follows.
He who is strong, stronger than Death,
Oppressed by no horror,
No imaginary cataclysm;
Who can live in each season,
Hostile or kind,
Remorseful or proud --
Might raise himself calmly among the living by Day
And ride through the sap-heavy demons by Night.
He might be Lover and Soldier
And Author and Client.
He might be Gentleman first and Officer next.
He might be clean and soiled by turn.
He might be gentle to his children
And merciless to his opponent.
The dream comes in and then the nightmare follows.
Those who deal the hand by which the nightmare is illumined
Wake seven times too slowly to see
How he trumps them with his ace.
And then the dream is forgotten.
And Time creates offspring,
Knowing nothing is so real,
Nothing so voluminous with text,
As love of a woman and a man;
Nothing so immediate
As the bringing down of children
From the sky.
The dream comes in. And the dream never leaves.
A Father's Prediction
THE
MIRACLES WILL BEGIN
The miracles will begin;
His word shall become seen;
And it will make the world impressed.
Miracles: at the drop of the hat.
Never seen before.
The power of sight.
The power to move.
Having come home from the battles
In the zones of celestial combat.
Fighting the dark horde in Israel's name,
The young man in red who battles the wheel.
Unseen by his neighbor, while his combat raged;
His wrestling with Python was silent, capable.
The miracles begin.
They are dropped in a word,
A casual announcement,
A picture of a presage.
The future unfolds only after he has seen it;
He drops words as if they were coals,
To light the sky and warm the hearth.
He begins the world through the miracle of words.
He prolongs the world through his power of naming names;
For names are tendencies of Life to take specific forms.
The world is without end, as he is without guise.
The world is not known.
When the miracles begin, he moves mountains;
And he becomes the wheel itself.
Procreation of the Globe
THE COMET I SEE IS ANYONE'S
The comet I see is anyone's.
Like the agent of mercy himself, the Great One,
Who rides spatial waves of surreal achievement,
August moons,
Containers of the carpenter's blessings,
Tears from the manger,
Relinquishing pains.
The comet I see owns great oceans of ice
And great ambulatory theories.
For its brings water to an arid globe,
An arid sea,
Unfructified,
Unblessed,
Awaiting Life.
It brings the seed-bearing iceharbingered vitality.
Breaking open the eerie darkness,
And giving Time to a satellite of superlatives.
The comet I see is anyone's.
It has as many names as it has shades;
It has protecting armies of ice,
Guarding against invasion at its core.
It is a soldier, an ice-maker.
It is anyone's who can catch it,
Who can touch it,
And not be spoiled.
The comet I see is anyone's.
Yet, like anyone, it is noble in its finest moments;
It is churlish when it needs to be.
For ice is age,
And age has principles of antipathy to cherish.
In Collaboration With the Heavens
ANCESTORS COME
I.
The sense of separation grows.
Depression of the colon.
Colonies of waste.
"Nature" raising her girded bridge,
Her badge as lyric-idea,
Opposing it to "Man".
II.
Refuge from the insidious.
A great land, made of air,
Mostly lost to the Autumn surface.
The Sun particularly scolded.
Ancestors of rage.
Savages being partly tame;
The civilized clan being partly wild.
When the spirit moves them:
Incredible odyssey in the telling:
Argosy of wolves, dressed as men, partly gods.
Rattlesnake veins.
Collaborators with swords.
Symbols carved from the druids:
Discoveries of barbs, discoverers of stars.
Trees made for felinary relationships:
Triangles of perfect honing:
Semicircles made for features.
Then hypnotism of rain.
Chance.
Using wordsongs as elements of power against the Wind.
The doctor of causes.
Holocaust of boxes.
Harmony's snowstorm: a blizzard of rules:
Contagious in perpetuity.
As the Indians dance: Wyoming eagles swoop down,
Drumming atmospheric hymns.
As if the crows were not enough,
So serious in their enormity:
Anonymous preconditions.
Before the first snowflakes fell,
White waterbearers from the heavens:
With their endocrine obituary:
Survival is a constant sail.
With their flintlocks and mounted hawks.
On the trail to capture every ocean,
Like watergazers beyond concrete....
Ancestors come;
No one asks if they have purpose.
The Father Lives in Southern Wyoming
THE
SALVATION OF NOT REMEMBERING --
ODE
TO THE RIVER LETHE
The salvation of not remembering comes
Not from an unweighty ignorance
But from a density of Future,
A solution to the petty requisites of Reflection.
The remunerative processandpreoccupation with
Passed choreography:
The blade that can't cut:
The thought which derigors.
Narcissus drowns in his own water ritual;
For the mirror is tuned to show an age of relative value.
The Memory carves precise shadows on the wall.
Plato shows the wall, casting an image of light
To illumine matters;
Knowing that the Past might give True Certainty
But will never re-create Fortune.
There is no salvation in stolid recapitulation.
There is only the counting of stones.
Among old faces.
In a town along the Platte.
When the Summer has all gone feeble.
And leaves prognosticate bad opinion.
The World of the Father: Unimmaculate Conception
INSTRUMENTATION IN THE WHEELHOUSE
Instrumentation in the wheelhouse:
The grain's seventeen ledgers are filled.
Chains draw calculated images of motion.
Rods of inculcation.
Grease on the borrower's servitude.
The sliding of parts.
The noise of rough salvation.
Where the ink has all begun:
Profitlosscost unstapled in a column of terms.
With blankfaced men pulling urns and sculptured machinery.
Black light and a howling of wanes.
Feasibility of production.
Pumps and slippery sexual anointment.
Workmen's gloves turn to frost:
Back to grease and back to frost.
Morning is becoming.
Rouge on the sooted windowpanes.
Making whiskey for the festival.
Instrumentation in the wheelhouse:
Where father goes to spend his day.
In memories of last night's supper with mom.
Tales of golden flesh.
Untold to the children of dreams,
So snug in their beds beyond their father's satisfaction.
The penalty of too much love;
The rewards of just enough ardor.
Before the bell awakens the sabbathhound.
Sunday is gone.
Monday is surly.
From the bed to the wheelhouse:
Moving several centuries in three block's walk.
Into the redbrick fascination.
Making grain unweave its magic:
Unschooling men of labor from words.
The sound of lost opinion.
Harmony has buckets, strung from the chin.
Silent hellos.
A dayofnoise.
A day of machinery's subtle exility.
Which he believes in.
Giving him unrandom
association.
Making physicians blanch.
Loading rods to wring the drink from the wheat.
Rye operation.
Surgeons of blushing reeds.
Dintoxification.
Waiting for more of Sarah:
Nights made for progress.
Nights made for making.
Sperm in the circular reception.
Soft moans upon the finger.
The battlement of toomanywords has been broken.
Nipple crescendo; cometary eyes.
A caress of each directs the womb.
Seeking New Canaan: moist velvet discovery.
The hips move by dilection.
The mouth of each pore.
The rod of achievement:
Baking in the hermitage.
Superior sarcasm in the brain is gone:
Pleasure mischieves her authoritarial air.
Her anger about issues.
Made luscious by his achievement: filling her brim and beyond.
Her cup built for flowers: bouquets which welt for the service.
Stiff liver and the Night's clear perfection:
Silent roses she can't see, but feels delivered inside her
Situation.
A witness to the progress of...depth penetration.
I am.
All is silent in the wheelhouse.
He will stand tomorrow beside his fire.
He will know his virtue.
It all matters when he hears his wife laugh
And he sees his children.
The Unborn Brother and the Brother Who Is Born
WAITING
WITHIN THE VOID
I.
Waiting within the void:
Two men perform tricks of disappearance and nonpareil.
East and West conform to Day;
North and South perform one Annum.
Annum-a; Annum-us.
Annum-eye; Annum-they.
Michaelangelo narrowed the center, and divided the high and low,
In the name of his basilica.
While Raphael made surgical transactions.
The brush is quieter than the storm: the eye.
Painting in broad strokes.
The Dawn dividing the sky from the crow,
The ceiling from the floor;
And raising the Arc into new production.
Hell on wheels.
Michelangelo defending the circle, narrowing diameters
And broadening the vault, where the Sun goes.
Two men performing tricks.
Two dippers ladel plasma, one above and one below.
The Old World: weary plasma;
Weary transformation from matter into ice.
The strong and the bending.
Michael this and Michael that.
Multiplications on a stone;
The dolman and the act of extension.
Addition being the quality of dimension,
Perspective projection.
Time as two equations;
Subtraction as a negative reflection.
II.
Two men touch inside the Void;
They hand one another the message of direction.
And then there is spring.
Ice is melting.
Each brother takes his legion;
Each is born and proceeds in pairs.
Two brothers are one.
The Mother is Ready: December 1950
THE BULGING CONTINENT
The continent bulges.
It is big with a child, a nation, a furious conception.
The water breaks and rushes over, under, in, as aspiration,
As inculcation, as frenzied maker of waves.
The land moves.
The harpoons of nature's infrequent burial maidens,
Intemperate birth inhabitants,
Strike the flesh of the old mercurial age,
The unopened womb,
The breath-holding unnamed authority,
To free the blood and rage and inculpable child,
Coming forth to bless and to beggar.
The continent bulges.
The continent cringes, cools, hardens, hisses,
Making geysers spire and grottoes form;
Trees walk the land
And find choicest soil
To make their beds in,
Striking aside insouciant ferns.
It is time to begin the big quest.
It is time to announce a beginning.
The Author is Born
I
HAVE BECOME NAKED
I have become naked;
The fortress is abandoned.
Like Noah in his grateful age, beyond the Flood,
And with Stamina's sage:
The shield is given to the son who succeeds;
And wine is given at the end of his rule.
The fortress no longer necessary.
The friction no longer useful.
Noah, on his casket, like Ishmael in his hearse:
Riding from one double-light into the next.
The Clay is said to be alive:
One leg on earth; another buried in the sea.
Almighty Clay, maker of Man in his own image.
Two parts: the perforations of Adam;
The ritual ease of Eve.
Orion and his lengthly horizon:
Miscalculation makes a frieze and a compact.
The historical simplicity of the Day: multi-featured.
The dual practice of slumping Night:
The harbinger of equalitarian density.
The heart is a silver nail, a nail in the heart of Queequeg,
Which Ishmael cleans with harpoons.
Announcing that there is no contradiction
Between rumination and the practice of May.
Coming in like a Lion;
Going out in mandible votives.
Noah's division of labor, into parts:
Northern Mental Freeze;
Equatorial Union of Clays;
Southern Ministerial Surrender.
All sons of naked Noah.
All sons of naked Noah.
The one who sees him naked
is cursed.
In the Image of His Father
REORGANIZING
CHAOS
Reorganizing Chaos.
Bones picked clean for the supper.
Holidays among the clouds;
When the skipper comes home to reassess his performance.
The organ of reproduction.
Notes in the chemical churchyard.
Bells in testicular orison, chanting:
oo-la-la, oo-la-la, obla-de, obla-da;
chickory-on-de-river-side, hickory-on-de-side-o-de-coal.
Bells chanting affiliated remembrance.
Of Rembrandt's dance: autumnal speculation.
Brown soil and amber damnation.
Crowned toil and cucumber nation.
Amid intoxication with rest.
In the reordering of Chaos.
Lent understood.
Spring, and his vernal twin, venal periman.
Exchanging worlds.
Called to the pen.
The penis and the pencil.
The sword and the vendetta.
The pendulum and the pill.
Succoring the ghost of Emit the Red.
Humoring the force of 'Dependence and 'Eresy.
Intended wickedness of radical Menopause.
The scissors of Clio; and the Mirror Heritage of lace.
Leo's bosom friend, gesticulating freely.
To me.
To you.
Two brothers in disgrace,
In grace with the stamp of Dixie.
Frequenter of sobriety.
Temptation to notoreity.
The cabin and the candidate.
Calypso and the Queen.
Asking advice from the clerical persuasion.
Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum,
The old man lived by his thumb.
And living as three, the old man and thee,
Produced four directions;
And, by these, reordered Chaos.
Learning To Walk; With Grandfather's Ghost
SHOCK THE MONKEY, HE SAID
Shock the monkey, he said.
Shock the ape and the heavenly obituary galaxy:
Chimpanzee in the Southern Cross.
The cross of milkwhite lolly lore,
Rib-scratching star,
And the blazing up the tree.
Those who believe African primitive birds
Developed feet to walk on sand
Centuries old and centuries hot,
Burned through to the quick,
Burned in every grasshair and wasted welt
Of water's fine burgundy liver,
Sinking centuries into grim memories,
Not so grim as now,
With starving whiskers of children
Held in arms protruding mothers:
Walking over hot sand with spear and shackle,
Armed to deliver the equalizing straight cockrod
To rummaging Death who ruled old ground with his tusks,
And claws, and hammers of jaws.
Shock the monkey, he said.
Shock the monkey from his trees;
So he will rise out of Cain's country,
Rise above odd persimmon trees,
Cowering no longer,
Not proud, not arrogant,
But living without leaves to hide in,
Living without fear of the apex,
Sand burying buried and burnt.
He said.
He said that rivers were luxuries and stars were our grandfathers.
He said that electrical discharge was the nature of love.
And each child born snatched one light from out of Heaven;
And made the Earth one light richer.
He said.
And I believed him.
The Child Watches the Moon
WANTING
TO SEE THE FIRST LIMITATIONS
I.
Wanting to see the First Limitations,
Those which govern all others,
Which initiate all beliefs
And indoctrinate all salvations:
I am new.
Seeking to find some form of power
Through a test in the mire.
Believing that all true penetrations
Into the vagina of sight require
Blood and an imagery of twisting.
A corkscrew held by masqued Furies.
Some belief in them that Evil is Necessity.
And torturing ourselves with our own form of iniquity:
Fear of our own Emanations.
A link with a savage mensuration.
The menstruation of Tragic Phallacy.
The Moon's last phase in savage sensation:
Ecclesiastical dialogue with Blame.
Carrying the hatchet in her jealous ambiguity.
Her hatred of the static.
Her fear of the fluid.
Proclaiming herself new;
And everyone else a Wasted Chance.
As she cracks the mirror so as not to see it,
Finding in her judgment self-torture
And anger that her independence was not used.
Doublebind of Limit and Freedom:
Each defining the other;
And, likewise, condemning the subtle.
In an ideological abstruseness;
And a belief in the security of knowing.
For she is not comfortable with her own evil,
With her own lack of perfection;
Or with her neighbor's negligible beauty,
Which she tends to exaggerate
By proclaiming its flaws.
II.
Looking for the First Limitations
I find Adam and a family in motion.
Knowledge knows nothing about Life unless it sees.
The definition of Failure is not uncovered
Merely by glancing.
The First Limitation is in knowing;
The second and fatal limitation is bound to pride.
The Youngest Son Begins To Talk
I TALK
I talk.
The camels gather on a stealthy slope.
Time has stopped.
Principles have been rediscovered,
Wearing veils of black
And never showing their face.
The face able to kill in a glance.
Utopian fatality; and the talk of emirs.
I talk against these pigmies of silence.
I am a warrior against continued production of the desert.
Reading rhymes to stop the sea.
Western architect of gold.
In my word is a thought, a thought creating contemplation.
Finding in the rich web beyond idolatry
The vagabond imagery of Tradition.
Breaking twigs of accord the way the wind breaks
Every stillness.
With logical ammunition and grain.
Oil baked from a century of eerie sleep.
Two centuries.
Twin sentries, holy for education:
The seasons of the world.
Gripping at the last candle.
The fuse laid in a wax pandemonium.
Equilibrizing two manners: in Mohammed's honored shoe.
Wholly red and worldly situated.
Black manored and thirsty for just us
In carnation.
Carnality in a crux.
Hanging the J and the C on a cross for their behavior.
Black-faced god curses women and wields an opinion.
Blaming the women for this starion craving.
Historical raving: the crow tries to teach the eagle how to sin.
Holy Madonna, beside the well:
Your skirt has turned golden.
I would teach you about love;
But the Sky cannot teach the Water how to feel.
I would teach you about divinity;
But categories of knowing always bow to the habits
Of incidentality.
Even Wisdom must be transitory.
Wisdom, unbroken, in not Wisdom but merely Fatigue.
And I talk.
The desert blooms in one part,
The place where Ishmael is not allowed.
Lighting candles to the windy God.
When He eats the flame
His precision is revealed.
Before the Fall
SATURDAY IN APRIL
Saturday in April,
Before the Summer becomes hoarse,
Defiant,
Butch-hatted
And broad for action.
Before Time becomes a feast for the pathetic.
Before the hammers of airy eternity
Bristle and crash
The crumbling heart into fours.
It is nice, in this breeze,
In this temporary climate,
Precedent to fury.
A Child's Vision: Southern Wyoming
THE MAN IN THE MOUNTAIN
The man in the mountain does not appear except in Spring.
The years are too long for him to call the clouds at dawn.
The Moon is a serpentine song,
Mostly wind and string and tuba.
And samba.
Lament.
Ingratiating chasms.
Lyrics of local history.
Something to remember him by.
Something to be forgotten, undone, in a universal pedigree.
The man in the mountain is cold, undiscovered, living in clouds
And belts of snowy anger, isolation.
He is not a man of love.
He is not a man of society.
He is a man of danger,
A man of war,
A man of rosaries
And berries and complicated rhythms.
He is alone almost always;
He fights with the bears
And keeps the company of eagles
In the lonely air of his invisible centuries.
He is the brother of the man in the Moon.
He fights with this brother,
For he is mountain, rising above the Earth,
Struggling to rise, above trees and into clouds.
Rising above rivers and shorelines and towns and empty plains.
Rising above deer and azaleas and beautiful women walking
Amid lilac in spring rains down in the city by the bay.
He rises above nights and fog
And furious shouting preachers who immolate evils.
He is not easy to reach, not easy to hear,
Moves not at all but by starts and stops and catastrophes and ash.
He is not accustomed to waiting.
He absolves freely, but approves more the silent air
Than the talking of posers.
They are loud, free with truths,
Incapable of hearing, feeling, prognosticating correctly:
He walks away from them.
Raises himself.
Standing in his heights.
Preparing for battle with some scout,
Some invader,
Who would plunder his private associations.
The Age of Reason
WAITING FOR MAY
The last pivotal rain,
Designed to break up the clay,
To render Ice into savage motion.
It is done.
Pivotal embrasure.
The high into low,
The motionless into articulation.
Word spoken.
Among the cretins.
Among the obligatory fakirs.
In Night's last banquet of flesh.
Before the consecrated mail comes.
In consecrated May.
The Sun's fond enclosure.
Someone has been rejected.
The balance has been lost.
Those who seek only sorrow have lost again their foothold.
Merry May will make you warm;
Marry May will clarify your predicament!
Warming your belly and its preconditions.
Storming the mediocre Clays, the gray and the ochre Days,
Twisting Plain Memory with a screw,
Tainting each harbor with a blue clairvoyance.
Yes, Joseph in his manycolored features stands here.
Piaf with a broom.
The chamber of the Solitary Mood:
The bee's delinquent precision.
Percussion, in the face of his Word.
Utopian precondition: preeminence of Man and Mate.
Transfusion through the loins.
Candid vision through the pendulatory limbs.
Exhaling all manufactured imagery:
The cone and the canceled whale.
Prevailing mental wonder:
Eurogratuity falls on its face;
As local cells reproduce their nature,
And drive dead souls
Through the Gates of Mendacity.
II.
The vehicle has been damaged;
The brother crashed his truck.
Joseph in his rain
Prepares Egypt for a light.
Prepares Israel for a re-born thought.
Yet, no one can penetrate the citadel of May.
No one can render the soil nonproductive,
When the Ice begins as golden
And then becomes a silver veil.
A Dream of the Archangel
I COUNT ON GOD
I count on God because none other is true.
In the wilderness of swords every wife shall turn away,
Every brother shall dream of pleasures,
Every friend shall shake with fear.
In confrontation with the ogre,
Every word shall be undone,
Every fortress shall fall asunder,
Save one.
She scoffed at me, and at my mythology of Michael.
"The killer did not bother me!" she cries.
That is because I am the barrier
Who keeps him from you.
A Destiny Resides in a Name
THE PRINCE IS COVERED BY A CLOUD
Cry if you will
To the blind paragons of noon,
With their hair all willowy white,
And hands of clay
And idle iodine eyes:
The surgery of their prayers is rich;
The renown by which they christen Time,
Renouncing flesh and redounding beyond sensation.
Renaming prophecy the Tears of Elegance.
No tears are cried;
None seen;
None rekindled.
There is no time for begging license.
The women all wish to careen across the screen.
Vaginas are unfilled.
Black men cross the street to stand under streetlights.
A cornucopia of failings.
Fall has scissors made of pearls.
The Dead seem to be awakening, as such:
Still dead, but moving in sideways cues,
Speaking words implanted in their brains
By the crumbling night.
Teaching the idiocy of nonbelief,
The patent perfidy of individual expertise and sanction.
Bells are not to be heard.
An ocean of bells,
Each note an expertise and a sanction.
Bells are to be heard.
An ocean of bells,
Each note a link in a code of evolution.
The prince is covered by a cloud for his protection,
Sounding his note in seven terms
From twelve locations beyond the farm.
A Child's Vision: Imagery of Motion
INTO THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
Into the hippopotamus goes the boy who is felled by fancy.
He is a smart child, given to dreams,
Given to the clay merits of dancing bears
And grandfathers who have no suspenders.
They go up in streams.
The hippopotamus is unseen,
Ever feared by those who know,
Abolished from thought by those who see
His true distinctions,
His non-apparent parameters.
He never gives up those he captures.
He makes them anew,
Transforming them from free children given to walks
And ventures in the breeze
Into mad young men cursing worlds
For never being quite good enough.
They do not understand
When they have lived in the hippopotamus.
They believe that they are graced,
That they see clearly;
They believe that the others are living in cranes.
The Youngest Son Learns About Flight
I AM NOT THE LONE EAGLE
I am not the lone eagle,
The solitary breeder on some limb.
I am not gaunt, and windmade.
My feathers are not actuated by rhyme
Or by Virtue's grim parody.
My beak is not bruised,
From accosting mice who shelter in stovepipes.
I do not dive at game.
I have no alliance with the wisebirds,
The nightcollarer of tiny tales.
Howling in a hooded damasque.
Heartily inventing my seal.
The lone eagle's breeding energy.
Walking in the sound of poetic mail:
Maid's bathing in the Platte make me
Screech my approval.
They are coy smilers,
Loving to be seen in their finest angles.
Bending, showing the lush lengths,
The honied felinaries:
Letting breasts ride the water like floats containing argon.
The nipples are tiny watergliders,
Twisting in the ripple,
Coasting cradled in Neptune's colander.
I am not the lone eagle.
I reach into the sea to pluck a bride
To carry her home.
The water breaks.
She is wiser than I.
She flees into the woods, saying:
"Only the eagle can follow me here,
From his heights and with his beatitude."
"I am the lone eagle, the solitary scaler of the heights."
When the forest opens it limbs,
Making way for a harmony in the vale:
Below shall be my bride--
And I shall capture her without words.
Iconography and Symbol
I
TALK TO THE ALLIGATOR GOD
I.
I talk to the alligator god:
He listens and makes no sound.
I have the judgment of a crow;
I energize totally foreign women,
And foresake those who stand beside me.
I have the harshness of a bear;
I camp in high forests and explain reasons for motion
In terms of the principles of flight.
The alligator god listens;
He makes no response.
I have the patience of a piper;
I scatter entire rituals of careful repose
And slovenly knowing for that masterpiece,
Instant Union.
I carve great paintings in the walls
Of pleistocene caverns:
Turning the anguish of notforgetting
Into the placid penury of remote conciliations:
Making a forest out of twigs,
Making a mountain out of one stone.
The alligator god listens.
He is wise.
He says nothing.
II.
I talk to the alligator god.
I instruct him in the nature of hunting,
In the languid virtue of my mild vocabulary.
He is wise, learning quickly;
He never falters.
I talk to the alligator god.
Is it true that the ceiling of the sky is like a sea?
The Youngest Son and His Grandfather
WONDERER
OF PRIMARY CAPABILITY
I.
Wonderer of primary capability:
Like a child you sit and answer each threat with patience.
Wonderer of primary reasons:
Like a grandfather's friend you counsel all the world with ease.
Wonderworker of primary education:
Like a godfather's fallen innocence, all first existence
Is based on satiety.
II.
I am a walker, in sage.
I see skies but not with fury.
I see heritages of each act,
Each stage,
Each worrisome highlight.
I see ages of merit; ages of calculation.
And each length of disposition,
Each category of virtuous season,
Makes me more a man than god,
Makes me more a god than demon,
Makes me more a demon than lover.
Until the lining is made a coat,
And the coat is made a tent
To be slept in.
III.
Wonderer of primary capability:
I am not old, like you,
When I walk for several leagues,
Seeking life beyond righteous posturing.
I am comfortable only with building:
Each stone I place on each stone I place.
Stone on stone on stone on stone.
A buildingwall.
A buildinghall.
Hat a'cock.
Hands o'muscle.
Shoulders o'brawn.
Mind a mockery.
Standing beside April, in a dream.
Building shoulders of roads and toads out of sandstone;
Building sandcastle bridges of leaves of cottonwoodacres.
Out where the wind howls like dead Indians:
Long dead, neverdead:
Howling to be let in,
For the open space makes them eerie.
Breathless: without caverns.
Building hills out of forecastles.
Building wills out of strongeyes.
Pies out of festering muds.
Childattitude out of clouds a'marching tuneless, skyless.
High and blustering: Indiandrums.
Windwoods: a tune, tuneless, skyless.
A moontune: tuneless, tunneled through vegetation:
A garden made from shale,
Made from the clockhearty hands of the
Wonderer of primary capability.
He is my grandfather: this wonderer.
He works in his garden.
He has lines on his face, deep furrows,
Not from worry: from days in the sun.
Mending fences.
Bending fenceposts.
Arms wracked from work.
Old: too devital to be notwise.
For wisdom is the mind's vengeance on Youth.
Jealous minter.
He who builds without memories,
Having only memories, but denying them.
Taking off his hat--
William Clause, my grandfather,
Boiled beneath heat, drilled by History's drum,
Filled with clairvoyant alcohol of thought:
Loveofloin and loveofdraught.
His wife is a shapeless manager of tables now.
Shapeless to me: fullydrawn.
She is on the other side of the door,
Managing cinnamon rolls and teacake.
In the Summer day beyond the sinews of Will Clause.
His eyes inspecting my expertise in raking leaves.
Autuman is not far off.
He reaches for a smoke.
He would tell me of his youth
But believes blue humor might offend a starliar, like myself.
IV.
Wonderworker of primary education:
I rake the leaves into a hill into a range of hills.
I know nothing about ranges, except what I learn from such creation.
The wind comes along and scatters my mountain.
I look for some response.
You are silent: because you are hungry.
PART TWO.
YOUTH
________________________________________________
Paragon of Motion: Fatality
THERE ARE GODS WHO ARE MEN
There are gods who are men
And there are men who are gods,
But they are not the same thing.
He Meets With a Stranger
THE SEA IS NOT OLD HERE
The sea is not old here, said old man Fury.
The sea is not bought or sold or cold or seriously void here.
The sea is not harsh in its midst
Nor productive of winds
Nor facetious regarding rain.
The sea is not the troublecarrier to the Earth,
Nor the fashioner of grave monsters.
Take my word for it, he said.
Take my word for it.
The sea is great, and giving;
And when it takes your hand,
And leads you away,
It will show you the meaning of disaster.
Yet, without cruelty.
For it is indifferent.
The Logic of Self-Creation
THE EPIC IS KNOWN
The epic is known.
It is know by the active verb,
And becomes the subject of glory.
It is a sentence, surely,
As the previous epoch had its
Lyric of men bound in leaves.
For Destiny has girdles, meshes of thought
In which it ravels its men to courses.
Course indications: words and lines and sentences to be carried,
Like hod beyond the well,
To build the wall which will make some protection.
Building selves out of myths,
Building cells of productive activity.
Not building the perfect world so much as
The perfect being,
The individual god;
Not the society of saints.
Leadership by walking, by talking,
By previous wars which one carries in his torso,
In his tensions, in his precautions.
It is read in his motion:
He carries aeons of conflict, aeons of love;
They see that he excels now;
And this makes them shrink, avoid him, not meet his eye,
Not dare to match him.
The mutilated word has been eaten by the crow,
And disgorged upon the morning;
From the mutilated word comes the text
Which makes the world again
A kingdom.
Walking the High Plateaus of Wyoming
THE HUNTER
Only the hunter survives, in the land of shells.
Only the hunter scales the great stones of Delay,
Climbs the mountain of Waste.
He shall not return,
Shall not bow to Hate or Defeat or Calumny.
The hunter is armed with God,
And with God's first sight.
He is the soul of eternity,
The bounty-hunter,
Who seeks his own courage,
Seeks his own elements,
The many in each element,
Each element in all the numbers,
seeking power and strength and virtuous mentality.
He is strong and knowledgeable,
Especially in the ways of struggle.
He survives, for he has the capacity to love,
While, at the same time, the immensity to fight
The catastrophe of direction.
He is God's vision,
Not the harsh blood vision of Mohammedans;
He is the hearth vision and the Creator's hand.
He does not murder the weak, for Arabian profit.
He is the silencer of bullies,
The conqueror of Death, Despair, Denial of Life;
He is the savager of enemies,
As numerous as ants,
As cynical as Intellect,
As portentious as grim children.
He sends them away, these mites who would connive
To give Decadence a chair at table,
Serving the host up as dinner;
He does not serve them.
He is the hunter.
He is the seeker.
He builds, and, at the same time,
Lives in his building.
His children shall be kings;
But they shall know there is no God before Him;
The King shall never be known,
Except through Wisdom.
Tacit Understandings
THE HAWK COMES IN
The hawk comes in and the day collides.
It is a sterling opinion:
The hawk is great and gray and wears bells and hunts children.
The hawk has eyes of glazed ferocity.
The hawk always talks in a language of signs.
His calls are all songs, laments, hollow chants.
He is cold, bold, starry in aspect.
He is warm, gracious, courageous, and known.
He loves and hates, strikes and smiles;
Offers his hand and opines his poems.
He is a child, a man, a gangster, a father.
He is many things, in thought.
He sees himself as a wind with many feathers.
He can fly where no bird follows,
No man sees,
No minor god lingers.
He is the one in the multitude;
He is serious and laughs, like a child of temptation,
The lover of the temptress.
No one can make him return from his quest.
There is only one way:
Through each predicament,
Up to the crow's nest.
And then beyond.
Faces in the Child's Dream
THE ARCHONS OF HOLYMOUNT
I.
The Archons of Holymount knock on the servant's door.
They have no words, for the servant's door is made of stone.
They knock on the door,
And speak in imagery as crisp as glass.
He does not hear their knock,
But sees their twilit faces in the pane.
The images come down to be encased in words.
They are thoughts: ready-made,
Like maps made for cones:
Four-dimensional travel.
Thoughts to light up the darkest of seasons.
He looks.
When he looks into the Sun he cannot see,
For it is sunrise,
And there is glare which bleaches the sky.
When the Sun is at his back, he can see,
For the trees can be viewed now.
II.
The Archons of Holymount bring trumpets to the clay endeavor.
They are fired for imagination.
They are pressurized by doom.
Holding back the wave, the awful rushing in of Death's emissaries.
The servant behind his door must see
That the words passed down from the Archons
Can save him,
Especially because he is true;
And because the demons crave him.
They must kill him, for he damages their case.
They must kill him, for he is greater than they:
He is both this and what they are.
And they are only that.
They see he has grown.
And that he might destroy them.
Mornings in Ether
NINE O'CLOCK IN THE LAND OF SAFARI
It is nine o'clock in the land of safari.
It is nine o'clock; and the heat is about to rise.
The lions are beginning to smell blood,
And are beginning to suspect some spectacle.
They are wary of men, who stalk the unmerciful beings
Without the respect that should be due them.
They are strong, these men,
With rifles long enough to kill from miles.
The claws are out.
The smell of death is so strong
That the female lions begin to chant and utter threats,
Snapping at the males who seem only concerned with breeding.
Slithering in the captive corners.
Heat rising: producing offspring.
It is nine o'clock.
The brush will begin to sound;
The tents will be abandoned.
There is a long line, a rich history of wounds,
Of deaths in the open dust.
There is no rain here.
The black men carry heavy dreams when they pass and shout.
The black women carry heavy desires, heavy breasts,
And on their backs children.
The tents are brewing; there is coffee in the air,
The smell of bacon.
The rifle is unslung from the shoulder.
It will not be long before the jeeps begin to smoke,
To steal across the plains.
It is 9:10, in the land of safari.
There is nothing to be done, but to sharpen one's claws,
To pray to one's God,
And to begin the hunting of the hunter,
And prepare to die.
For the day is grinning.
Approximation of the Sexes Through Number
THE COCK OF THE WATERWALK
The cock of the waterwalk talks boldly about numbers.
Not abstract membership in the highlanguage of proportion:
Symbolic capabilities in the flesh of a primitive conception.
But the number's absolute existence, prior to created form.
For the cockofthewaterwalk is bold, cold, airy, fairly reasonable.
He sees clouds as numbers without clay:
The heiry pre-city of earth's rectangle composition.
He sees trains as numbers with artifact duration:
As though corrugated steel, much as the precise rose,
Emerged from the plenum of arithmetic intention
Because of ones and production in twos.
Looking for steel in the analytic rib:
Eve anticipating conjunctive geometry,
Conceived by pythagorean accessibility:
The built equation of atom's clan.
Handing vaginal decorum, the leaf, to the wind,
As if in belief that the air counts in tens.
Both hands recording veins: number augury of Eve's condition.
Until her nakedness reveals nothing.
Only relative to the one who views her.
A husband who stands in thorns.
Cockwalking in the horncountry.
A trumpet in calculation: days in the week and weeks in the year.
Pre-existing condition.
Spirit becoming flesh.
Flesh becoming weak.
Weak becoming strong.
Strong becoming tyranny.
Tyranny becoming conspiratorial.
Conspiracy begetting opposed.
Opposition becoming vast.
Numbered by the autocracy.
Against the wishes of God.
Never number thine own.
The number as vaccination in exactness.
Vacillating in some womb: shall I be, shall I not be.
The child of zero.
Born from the wrenching of the circle:
Primitive perfection: geometrical philo-onomy.
Curtained from clairvoyancy: like Oedipus at his wheel.
Adam at his grate.
Carving Michael Angelo into his apple.
Knowing some precise architecture, the first rose, from the core appeared
And proclaimed musical proportion.
Cockbantering and cockconcussion.
Cockwalking and cockfixation.
Womanbannering and wombmenstruation.
Mensuration in twenty eight days.
And nights.
Periods of overuse.
Periods of ace and the loverace.
Numbers for the guardian thighs.
Explosions of pearls.
White statement with children's names inside.
Purloined from the loinal web.
Given to Eve in nonnumerical associations.
Waterwalking: the son of tissues.
Issues preconceiving: the feeling of sorting the town into fours.
Catterwatering.
Walling zones of auricular extension.
Wading for the barber aryans.
Bobber airy ants.
Hun effective in the bush:
Where the water is made for wells;
Where the number can kill cold stones,
And make the city of halls but a turret for hiding rats.
Clinical perversity.
Shaggy muscles and twin hemophiliacs.
Hemoglobins of discourse.
Bleeding from the mouth and from the ear:
Two lovers in amiable contact.
Bleeding from hand and bleeding from thigh.
Adam reading from barbarian brides.
Cockwatering and thin transportation.
Organ asthmatic situations in goths.
Roman rib and Roman bib.
Roman whip and Roman wish.
All punctured by the rune of Obsequy.
Precondition of numbered waterworks.
Copernican canceratomy: candidates ask for fees.
Unsuited for prosepoems.
And the like.
Where words become points of color:
Leaping between numerical legends,
Wherein actual composition must trace the land
Between each leap (as an acre).
An archer of memory.
And archer of enmity.
Land between each shore.
Waterwalker between each Time: seven continents' shoes.
Walking in cockwater near Adam's bottlemodeler:
The sound between each sound gives body to each form of waiting.
Insisting on the pause.
Insisting on reconstitution of harmony's relation.
One walking beyond each zero.
One standing and demanding ones.
Other ones.
Taking responsibility for the fury,
For the early enticement to life which corrects one.
Yes.
Names pass but numbers continue.
The structure of anythought.
Depth perception as number clarity:
the depth of the inside of One stretches form.
Eleven.
The marriage of Old and New.
The producer of earth makes all silence seem unwanted.
He builds from cockwalking to cockbuilding to cockproduction.
The morning arrives and the cock crows and struts.
The hen makes the meal; but the rooster provides statistics.
The Powers of Thirteen
DOWN IN THE VALLEY OF LUST
I am down in the valley of lust; and the crow cries.
The morning comes up in light electric mist.
It is a day given over to tears perhaps.
A day given over to manipulation of extremes.
The fists become hard, preparatory to fighting.
The calories expand.
The heat begins in earnest.
There are fields of warfare growing on each street.
Men who meet exchange glances of toughest mentor, toughest god.
Each has his own guardian;
Yet he with the strongest is he who is great,
Totality's own Behemoth:
Great and small,
Hard and cold,
Black and white,
Wild and tame.
He is all things, this foresaker of dreams,
This maker of dreams.
This remaker of Love, and cantankerous lover.
He walks on white sidewalls, walks on the clay,
The air, the sea, the widow's blanket,
When he finishes with her pleasures.
He is down in the valley of lust; and the cow moves.
He is I, and not I.
He is big with muscles and large with instinct,
Motivated by God, and saved by mental clarity.
Body and heart and soul and desire:
Spiritual enormity, unblessed by the dirty,
Unseen by the clean,
Undeserved by the meek,
Unreserved among the proud.
Unseen; unburdened.
It is a war to move, in the calumny of pretense.
He is surrounded by flat talking.
He sighs, nearly squirms.
And goes down into the valley of lust.
He would rather walk with virgins, or, even whores,
Than talk with self-flatterers.
And so he walks on.
Youth is Raw: Hunting Memory and Time
SOUNDING THE LAST FIRE'S FREQUENCY
Sounding the last Fire's frequency.
A bundle of wheels and the predicament of slaves.
All processed for eternal clarity in the language of promiscuity.
Feasible nonentity.
Calculating fires in a forest of wages.
Weeping frequently for immortal speculation.
Demon time.
Demon obligation, in the whispering dimensions of honor.
No honor.
No actual empirical understanding, before the new mirror is conceived
And gives to each a glimpse of dichotomy.
In the pine forest where bears inhabit shadows and strange nooks.
Hunted by Faulkner's eternal hunter:
Wash and his dialectic.
The killer in Lawrence's flesh, and the super-rogative,
The impediment to actual touching.
For the imagers are blind;
The conjunctives are orgiastic, elastic, elegiastic.
And when the flesh grinds against expected portals,
Someone comes and asks for donations.
And the hunting party says nothing.
Alone with bush and burden blood;
Alone with silent expectations;
And the lyric of a walk into a territory's implication.
Land.
Frozen bearsteps.
Hounds on the loose.
Sounding the last Fire's frequency.
Last hunt before the sound comes.
Last hunt before the forest quakes,
Spouting smoke into oblivion.
A harbinger of thick women in Sunday gaiters and rural obfuscation;
Men with motionless features.
Where the daughters and darlings of kings lay their slips down.
Beds for the pine forest kneaders.
The landscape proprietors:
Mass with the broken kneelers before poems.
With rifles in their abode.
With glass to light the fire by.
Making the darkness into Indian tombs.
The circulation of Night--darkness breaks and swallows
And disturbs those who sleep.
Trying to impress the untried Fires
With stories of horrible consequence.
But it is too late; too much is known.
The dead are undressed.
Logic is a loose cape.
Leer no longer wanders.
His children take him home.
He wonders where his wife is.
An American shore.
A lake by the harem Chicago.
Where the Cubs rule a new world,
And where the Fires are speaking dollars.
New ruse.
New rushing categories.
Where the pines once demanded wages,
now the mountains ache like shells.
And the walls are eternal trees,
The stone scrapers are prayers unto God.
All is complete.
All is sequence and understanding.
Those who fight Time build anti-castles for their own destruction,
Pushing blueprints of anti-production
Through the sand into Chinese faces.
Until they awaken;
And see Life is a gift.
Talking
to the Alligator God:
The Creation of Names
WALKING IN THE EVERGLADES
I am walking in the everglades.
It is nearly spring.
The day is cool; and the trees stretch and moan.
It is cold eternity, this walk.
For there is something too real, too insidious, in the brush.
Something beyond understanding.
It is as if I am being taught by some invisible association,
Which shadows my walk from a safe distance,
Governed by precondition.
The principle of balance.
The principle of attraction.
Ever angular and ever real.
Ever rich and ever immediate.
Walking in the everglades.
With trees and with trees' shade.
With gators and with fish in the mouths of these machines.
Machinery from an age of scales
And mud and Ilus and teeth.
An age much before chivalry.
An age preconditioned by discovery.
Beyond eggs and before moons.
Beyond moons and before cranes.
Beyond cranes and before dunes.
Beyond dunes, before the creation of names.
Too soon to be known:
This shadow whose step I hear utter caution
As I step on the slope.
Fish are being eaten by monsters.
Ghosts of the primitive times
Make air from a colony of skins.
Breathing skins of old creation.
Hanging on trees like invisible moss:
These voices and shouts of harmony and rye,
These shouts and cries of pain and blight,,
And shirts of woe and flights from the beast:
Hanging in a tactile pall.
The shadower walking always in the vale
Like some stone-gathering weaver.
Weaver of premonition.
Weaver of hard story, cold worry, black history.
Weaver of antipathy to me,
Of water to rock,
Of Urim to Thummim.
Telling tales to the cloistered Reason.
What has led me to these everglades now?
I sit by the side of this swamp and merely wait.
Silently.
A Youth Among Youths
OCTAGON KNOWS
Octagon knows the surly temper of the passing edit.
An age produced for the unproductive.
An atomsphere of guilt, of ecological extradition.
Anger in the faces of elves.
In the rich tradition of spoiled sons who wish to fragment
Previous cultivation.
Anger of the sunspoilt ideal.
Fruit rotting on the vine.
And Octagon knows this.
Octagon sits in trees and enjoys the heat.
It makes his muscles hard, his desire robust.
He sees in skirted women
A precise treasure for his easter experience.
It is not the feast he shirks.
But he sees faces of blond men fit for famine.
A ritual of combat.
Like virtue in the grapes: swollen for sound,
Swollen for sweet munition -- swinging, unseeing,
Beneath Octagon, in his tree of wind.
He evinces no emotion.
He is not hard, but he shows no comprehension.
In the atmosphere of gilt, the ecological serenity of brains
Dissolves.
Summer.
Unseen.
Unknown.
With the eight sides bound for glory:
Each season chimes a hemisphere.
Without distinction of curried meaning.
Watching the unselfconscious breathe.
The unselfsatisfied.
Producing spokes from wheels,
Wheels from festooning machinery.
Breaking everything but the glass.
The ruby glass.
Which they cannot find.
Octoroons built for vapors.
Gas-manufacturing and the precise bitch heritage
Of the dilettante who cannot build.
Knowing only the sunless occupations.
Called by some reflection's proximity.
In the shade of Octagon's grail.
In the grade of Octagon's vision.
Beneath the tree with the fruit of Grace.
Condemned by the root-dwelling cranes.
Octagon produces children from the lyric of phallus and concord.
He re-establishes myriadhouses
By making the Sun
The fertility of transit.
6-12-85
Brothers
About the Town:
Preconditioning Virtue
ANOTHER FOLLY UNDONE
The vulture is coming near.
Poor Prometheus: giantframe and goldenrailed.
Words of foresight: aviary indictment.
Consternation: built for twos.
Epimetheus, on a coign.
The words of prosperous wagings.
Made eligible by the dream;
The world passed from hand to hand, mouthtomouth:
Like vows, but in arcane modes.
The trumpet, hammered into brass;
The lyre reshapen into basswood;
The orchestra made a Northwind;
The conductor, composed of shells.
Prometheus meeting Atlas.
Atlas handing the Sun to Poseidon.
Pluto's rocks beneath the waves.
Totaleclipseofthesum: a banquet for the Minotaur.
Mirror sandwich; a salad of permanent values.
Wine for the testicular orison.
Desert made of caves;
Flowers from the castle.
Heaped on words of fathermapple.
Prometheus gives up his burden.
Sweatinglikeapig.
As the destroyersofTime, like vultures,
Sharpen eternalspears and grisly scenarios.
Foresaking the wisdom of Life: preoccupation with equalatinuse.
Dilettantesoup; Marxistcalendar.
Solzhenitsyn's icy steppes:
There are millions of bones for each virtue.
Statevirtue: the candle carvedbymetropolitans.
Hatevirtue: the trumping up of a goatwithwings.
Pursuing the unpursuable.
TheghostofPlato and theghostofKlee.
TheghostofAbsolutes and theghostofFreedom.
Fear of nonproduction.
Fear of nonrecognition:
The mantle in the house being the rule
Of the limits of display.
Clayvirtue and play to venery:
Tops see turverys.
Turveys speak daily of change.
Speak of chains beyond the wailing wall;
And Prometheus swerves, without glories.
Who brings Fire and who brings Grace?
Prometheus collects stories;
Epimetheus pretends he is martial.
Sundoctrination.
Bless luxury in the soil:
For it is God's recreation.
And makes each Life, ultimately,
Stronger than doom.
He said.
7-19-85
Meeting With Fatality
RE-ESTABLISHING
THE CURE
Re-establishing the cure:
The Mentor in his veil and harbinger wreath.
Talking no friendly memories.
Hoping river is not so sure, no real manager of Fate.
Walking beside troubadours.
Song has no sound when sung by the meager fatalists
Who clamor soundlessly:
Turrets of opinion;
Hornets of accentuation:
Their stingers in their mendacity.
Singing traditional runes.
Southern docu-numeration.
Unheard for the moment.
In their ritual of moral nascence.
Built for the establishment of tales.
* * * *
Thomas Sutpen has a wife.
She is the daughter of a goodman.
He builds a plantation out of swamp.
Castles credited with labor.
Black pounders of boardplankandnail.
Trumpeted for disaster.
Nothing to swerve him from his appointed self-destruction.
Degeneration of the cure.
Emotionless in his fatality.
Hard-faced.
Without words.
A solitary roan from the solitary fire.
A furnace of exactment.
Smoke from Saint Martinique.
Rising through the shalealley of mudweary Mississippi.
Carrying the frail giant with eyes unwavering
And personal history snapped at the Present.
Standing, his back to the mirror.
No past to give him credence.
No story to give him familiar scale or calorie.
Ghosts only have no traced lineage.
Astride the wracked roan, circling fatality,
Descending with implacable monomaniacal energy:
Determination for the cure.
Sweeping women into his wake.
Without sight for commonplace destiny.
Surrounded by the savage destiny of Necessity.
Riding through hollow worlds into one cure
And out through another.
Untouched by commonality,
Like some demon from an emergency fortnight.
Calculating no prognostication,
No cervical dream,
But an intense dread of failing.
6-4-85
The Powers of Imagination
THE CAPTAIN IN THE FIELD
The Captain in the field does not tolerate the breeze.
He sends pincers against trees,
Turns the flank of each gray umbrage.
He strikes at the heart of enemy resistance,
Dispersing the leaves and sending riverdivisions in flight.
The Captain in the field does not tolerate the breeze.
And when he awakens from his dream,
This boy who admires the sky:
He rises, in surprise, to find
An alliance of meadow and mist.
He knows that he has gained his triumph.
11-22-85
History Versus Myth
THE
HARD ROAD OF APPOMATOX
I.
There is the hard road of Appomatox.
There is a hard season, a hard brain,
An heavy apprenticeship.
It is the craft of combat, the caftan of doom.
It is worn by twin brothers, North and South.
One dreams; one perfects, develops, creates Individual Will.
One burns in the Sun's righteous virtue;
One quakes in Summer's primordial absence,
For Ice makes each virtue more profound and more rigid.
The slave to action; the action of slaves.
The Law and the Code of Law.
Prepared for battle over the blackskin contest
Of History versus Myth.
One with direction, progression;
The other with a motionless perfection,
Making Time but a mimicry of a more real
Stationary Truth.
And Sumter begins to burn.
It is for ideas, in one sense;
God rules each quadrant,
But a god with different faces and perplexities,
A god with different angelic extensions.
It is a war for perfections, a war for future idylls.
Vicksburg breeds lice;
And cows slaughtered no longer for sport or pleasure
Or bread-comfort
But for life.
Hunger.
Acres and fields of dead boys,
And riding generals,
Some built for conquest,
Many made for headlines alone.
Granted it is lonely in the lone tent of decision.
McClellan cannot be forgiven,
An historian dressed in blue,
Motionless,
Like the South,
Transfixed by form and by the precision of marching.
Combat far from his perplexities,
Yet very near his love of learning.
He is gone.
Many are gone.
Hooker is undone, snookered by his own arrogant
Predisposition to Fame.
Fame looks for the one who seeks her;
But she does not disrobe for the vain or profane,
Instead, saving herself, by natural law,
For the one who loves most
The soliloquy
And Satan's sacred sister.
II.
Appomatox has great trees beside its hard road of iron.
Leading to the twins programmatic re-appearance.
The scavenger, the Yankee, the Western brother surnamed Ulysses;
The honorable gentleman, more Eastern than Northern, more Southern that Western,
Mr. Robert E. Lee,
Most admired man on the scale of retribution,
For he appeared out of some book,
Some history on nobility.
Grant is dissheveled, for he is Western,
Where the Sun sets,
Where the Day ends,
Practically,
With real fervor,
And less style,
Less shine than where it began.
Lee is less practical;
For the Dawn is made from dreams,
From fresh rising from toiled bedclothes
Where dreams have been recently discarded,
Making Life somehow antecedent to manic belief.
Lee and Grant.
With Lincoln, the God-Man behind;
For the curtain is pulled and opened at once,
Closed and drawn.
Lincoln watches all, like the Time-Maker himself,
The Time-Perfector,
The watcher who accords and records and perfects
And leaves the stage always
Before the song is completed.
3 April 1986
The
Imagery of Nature:
First Love Rejected
CAUGHT IN THE ADVANCING PLEASANTRIES
I am caught in the advancing pleasantries.
It is shale, carbon, millerred advancing goodness
And cloth symmetry on white bones:
Smiles are not without transitions.
Pantheism is a regal imitation.
Whores of culture: resurrecting images,
Real banquets of the passive style.
Crossclassical spores.
Advancing in pleasantries;
And, if not always pleasantries, then in the hardest of convictions.
Making popular conceptions fall.
Trading Life for a catalog of EnormousEternity.
The civilized demand, not for quality so much as for RationalUnion.
Hearing the cleavage of chaoticritual not far gone:
Down by the river, on a set of hounds.
Approaching.
Crossclassical.
Hating the rock: the image of the patient paradox:
I shall not move until the Wind wears my edge.
Bearing horrible sacred markings on my wings:
Shaleheavy and begging memory.
Horrible geometry: significance of shallow earnings.
As the moonheavy gorgingcalendar tortures Paradox
And calls for the uniform.
Exchanging pleasantries and codes of propriety.
* * * *
The river runs.
And runs.
And shall not stop.
13 November 1985
The Youth Thinking as a Soldier
THE WAR FOR PARADISE
I.
It is a war for paradise.
All the rest is dedication to cause, to grandiose effect.
Biceps and the stirrup of ascension; rising to the clap of Cains.
Effective maneuvering.
Totality's brain.
All else is dedication to bones, girdles on hips, paint on cheeks;
Maneuvering on callous foretips and cancandancing calves,
Pirouettes on delicate endeavors built by geometry.
The audience applauds.
It is serious fun. I like it.
The women in their ripest fashions,
Their proud betempest tempitudes.
I bring them watches, rings, flowers, candies.
They give me affection, when so inclined.
In the war for paradise.
Two menspenders courting the moonforthemisbegotten.
Calculating terms of satiety versus urns of protoanxiety:
Wrestling for that historical monument:
The Mountain of Stars:
Olympian peakparadise.
All else is calls for judicial reserve: zodiacal pendulation.
Halls of menly diplomatic menageries:
Zoos for the product of talk.
Laws.
Laurels.
Slips dipped, dropping into curtsies.
Into the war for paradise.
Two cures: two men on a plank.
Two men boldly productive: anxious for the craving.
Behaving like two cultivated cranes;
Two savage associates, noble and ignoble,
Turning plowshares into fireflares,
Turning swords on cobbled hordes;
And turning armies of mites into a contrite oblivion.
The dance of balance: toespin; and the thick muscle of dominance.
The clock accompanies the legitimate cadaver:
Walking on watercontadores.
Up in the highground of frost and snows.
Mount of Olives plus the Mountain of Staves.
The turbulence of Elk Mountain: a blizzard of wolves.
Elk coming down toward valleys.
The kings of the woods.
Moose on hairpin plains, turning toward Bear Creek,
Where the cow has planted moisture.
The spear.
The owl's first forgery:
Night's emblazoned blanket.
Man nearby, whittling his icon.
With the berries of the forest canyon, in a bowl, beside his knee.
II.
It is a war for paradise.
All else is the lyric of dreamers,
Mimicking penmen,
Prosepoem tormentors.
And it is not without grand eloquence.
Writers conspire their own roles,
And then induce them:
Historical machinery is but a braingrown drama,
Written and acted and mourned by the same.
1 November 1985
High Plateaus: Contact With Ghosts
WALKING IN THE RAIN
Walking in the rain.
Taboos, in mental stricture.
Who will weld the Wind to wain?
Arch-diocese?
Indian feathers in the rain.
Bones of ancient history.
Wyoming calendar: not far from my home.
The wildest tribes of the plains: Crowshoshonisiouxcheyennesabsarokaunkpapa. Murderers on the perimeter: red against red.
Scalps upon the forelock.
Children's skulls torn open with hatchets.
Bloody dresses in the lodge.
Wardancing.
Ghosts:
Wyoming Winters.
The ghosts are thick with snow;
They blend with wind.
I watch for some clear significance.
I listen for drums, watch horizons for horses:
Walking in the rain,
Before the snows of October.
21 October 1985
Ancestors of Woe
THE
SENTENCE OF PRIVATE LEWIS
The sentence of Private Lewis comes and goes
And is easily forgotten.
The sentence of exile.
A bleak foreground; an ancient battlemonument.
Cleaning his rifle near Jack Creek.
Crow featherwearers in the dust and bush.
Far from the frost of Boston,
The weatherfrills of Baltimore.
Riding highhorse crests in the Wyoming barrierlands.
In 1869.
Where the snow makes bones of highcarriers.
Horses into cadavers.
Wagontrains into wood for the fire.
In the highcalorie country of Crow and Shoshoni.
Waiting in the sagebrush;
waiting for the sound,
The whistling of the wedges of Death.
The paganheralds not far off,
Crouching,
Laughing:
Like wind themselves in their pale and panting stereotimes.
Killing and being killed.
Carrying disease and a legacy of waiting.
Buffalo robes telling stories like palms.
Scalps around the beltline.
Blood on the fist and arm.
Ponies scalded by gunfire.
Private Lewis waiting for muscle, waiting for thin Annihilation,
Who accompanies thickstone Passion For Life.
Raising his Springfield.
If he shoots he will be shot.
Dawn coming on.
Frost everywhere.
The laughter of the gaunt.
His skull like an egg with hairs:
The prize of laughter and struggling for fortune.
Leslie Rhodes back in crinoline.
In the civilized pantheon: frontiers of backyards and pianos of Mozart.
The clean quick line: conversations over meat and pie.
Walks near the grove with Messers Smith, Polson and Rinaldi.
Talking about the strength of the daylight.
A crush on her bloom.
As her man crouches in the weeds,
The home of rattlesnakes and cottontails.
He levels his rifle at the face of First Nemesis.
He nudges the trigger, and begins his flight into stars.
16 October 1985
The Death of Custer
CATASTROPHE
IN THE FIELD
Catastrophe in the field.
Approaching the village of redmen on the banks of Little Bighorn.
Harvest in the air.
Snow redeeming cold membranes.
Animal husks in the dustandsod.
Antlers in Montana brush.
A travesty on the plains.
Coated in bright yellow scarves.
Red and white opinions.
Smoke, and the craven fields.
Catastrophe.
Waiting to happen.
Custer and the memory of Ben Clark.
Where is he now?
Stranded in some remembrance.
A scout of scouts.
Animal train and men by the hundreds.
Stranded in the seadesert's loins.
Lion of air and mischief.
Crazy Horse and his minotaurhorsemen.
The redminion and abstract Doom.
Circling the buzzards: the falcon hunts the falconer with silence.
Yellowhaired searching on the highhorseplains with noise.
The scouts bringing back options.
Where has Isaiah taken the horses?
Something in the air.
Reaching for your rifle.
Something left unspoken.
His wife has not been reached.
He sees her hair, smells her clean virtue,
Her skirts, her laughter,
Coming through the cottonwoods.
Wind.
The smell of blood.
Savages in the brush: sage and colored white.
He does not know.
Where is Reno?
Something does not add here.
If he strikes, he will be struck.
The Crows move about in fear,
Knowing gods strike swiftly when angels have spoken in rhymes.
Moving with their long hair and fair skin.
Waiting for blades.
A bullet in the brain.
Remembering the Platte,
Its wide thick springmudbottom,
Washing corpses of buffalo and cattle on to rockbeds.
The water of synapse: a structure of pleas.
Memories on hand.
Indians to kill: ole Heritage has its stakes up.
Feeling knives in the feet, in the ribs;
Hearing sounds of guns and shaking braves:
They are not far off.
We have gone out too far.
We are weary: elongated mass.
Prayers are stretched into Infinity's mass.
There is no food.
Only thoughts, to accompany ravenous fears.
Until the sound comes.
The eagle curls.
The talons are empty quivers.
The sun is hottest when it rises.
Autumn bruises every dream.
Autumn saves the dreaming with ciphers.
22 October 1985
Revenge: Daydreams of a Young Man
RAMPAGING ON THE CRUEL LAND
Rampaging on the cruel land:
The horse's hooves plant eights in the dust.
Two eights, times a mile: two miles.
The race of the scepter: blackanimal in flight.
Dustraising.
Sounds from behind, in that sinister void
Removing sound from the fore.
Riding.
Rampaging, like a beast on wine.
I am Time's mechanic.
I sit upon Brute Force, with his blacksilk muscles
And his blackmannered mane:
Slamming eightstimestwos into Wyoming fleshandbone.
A pursuit is on.
I ride Brute Force, an animal of gods.
He keeps me from cruel fate,
On this cruel badland,
Back when Time was still a boy.
Before the ironanimal of ore.
Before steam.
Before man's rude magic raised voices in the wires.
The long rifle covers ground:
A spear shrunk down into quarters.
Indian paintbrush.
The hills recede and die: arise and flattened and die.
Flatland.
Everflat; everrising.
And the wagon burns.
I rode upon fleet Black Force, brute in haunch and neck.
He carried me past Laramie's protective walls.
I was alone.
Custer had no message for me.
I walked, down shalehillside into dry creekbed.
Where the Indians kill messengers,
For the sake of the desert's consumption.
I was not seen, for I am silent when riding Brute Force.
Invisible pair.
Melding into air: me and my messiah.
Until shots in the east came: claps and popping sounds;
And the eager ears of the horse stood up.
I rode toward majestic Death,
Knowing only the greedy see Despair,
And only the desperate care to touch his cold shawl.
I am each, greedy, and equally needy.
I ride, the storm of sound like a vacuum of attraction.
A wagon burned.
Indians paraded, danced, swam, sang brutal odes to vengeance;
A woman had been stripped, her hair in threads:
Scalp carried by Eagle Walker, the son of Heated Morning.
I lifted Black Force, my horse, up the hill.
Approaching to a highmark.
I raised my rifle to a quiet arm.
Brute Force was quiet, like a pond.
The rifle was his extension.
When it rose, he held his breath, did not move.
Together, we killed our rivals,
Who would strike with knives, lances, longrange
Avalanches of horror.
He protected me.
I was his son.
He held his breath.
I sighted Eagle Walker, so proud a brave, dancing wildly, ecstatic,
Raising the blondehead to his god.
He did not feel me:
I was longrange destruction.
I edged on the lever; the trigger did a squeeze.
A sound; recoil; a fallen honorguard.
The blonde scalp hit the dust.
Eagle Walker bounced, twisting into nothing.
His soldiers stopped their dance,
Amazed at the crush of swift Death.
I raised my extension.
Cold Head In Water watched me, standing near the wheel.
He could not move.
He felt I did not see him.
I drove a nail into his skull.
His body split in parts and shattered on the axel.
The crows scattered after bread.
I targeted Long Ear's horse, Prince Havoc;
And I dropped him.
He cursed me; fired his rifle.
The shot fell wildly, a stone that he had thrown.
They could not touch me; they barely could see me.
Antelope's Head rode first toward the hill.
They should have fled, but Honor drove them forward.
Many followed Honor, the pintohorse on which he rode,
This Antelope Head, son of Blue Eyes On Wind.
I hit him in the throat.
His head flew back; he tumbled into sagebrush.
I slipped the rifle into its sheath.
Brute Force was now my god,
My connection with the wind.
Fifteen Cheyenne hunters rode behind me, borne for Hate.
I smelled their blood, their antelope hides,
Their blackrituals and dances.
Their women smelled seductive,
Smells they carried on their hairs,
Their necks, the flesh of dusk and breeding.
They chased me, as hares chase a hawk.
I rode Blackbruteforce.
He was good.
He was essential, a king in the duststorm,
A trump of creation.
Making eights in the land of horns: savage retribution.
A wagon burning.
A sky emblazoned.
A score of Indians in pursuit.
Brute Force never touched.
We rode faster than boltlightning:
A god and his September son.
No separation in speed.
No separation in arms.
Faster.
Faster.
The sounds receded; the void shrank to spools.
Near the aspen grove, beneath Elk Mountain,
Brute Force and I vanished;
Deeds were done and Time was full.
4 October 1985
Revenge
Continues:
Visions of a Town, Sinclair
RIDING VIRTUE IN THE BADLANDS
Wind rides Virtue, the bay, and counts the trees.
There are so few here.
The dust swells: groundblowing;
No coagulants to keep it safe, near the surface.
Wind rides the man, pulls the man, dictates his mind.
As he rides his bay, Virtue, south of the ridge.
Shark's Tooth Ridge:
Even the names have a menace, a dry parchment, huddled sound.
And shape.
In this land where coyotes rule, where hawks are proud.
I cast grim glances down the flats: there is fear here.
No man should wander in borderlands betwixt Crow and Shoshone.
Scalps have no value here.
A spear, a stone, a snake: cromagnon impediments.
Yet I ride, alone: for Virtue takes me out,
Along the Ridge, in open sacristy.
I do not smoke or drink or believe in aboriginal honor.
His knife is not clean.
His humor is always forked.
His hair is a document of lives,
Like rings in a tree,
From which lives his shield is carved and doubly perfected.
He comes in pairs.
He comes like insidious dust,
Blown by the quaint Hades,
Circling hawks and shattering air.
And so I ride.
I know that the Platte rises heavenward, six miles northward.
I sleep in caves, windformed cervices;
I load my rifle and trust my colt.
I dream of a world beyond this crescentmanacled badland.
I dream of love and children and trade and schools.
It is somewhere beyond the hill,
Beyond Elk Mountain,
In a western heart.
Arapaho are beyond the shorthills.
Murderous whites for gold are deadly:
Pike's Peak bears a whalefull of potherds.
There will be a town here someday, below me, in the plains.
A refinery shall pour smoke; prosperity shall proclaim itself.
The clear moon shall give a name.
A park, overrun by mites.
Women in skirts, full blown,
Fresh in the cheek,
Sometimes virtuous in the claythings:
Knowing about fruition and the act of calmtradition.
Taking me in her arms--the one of choice--
And positioning me in her dream.
The wet acres of her ascendancy;
The serious stewardage of her breasts, lips, hair,
Sensation.
She is not far away.
She approaches.
And, when she does, I become alert.
For I know that when she comes, in a dream,
then Death is nearby.
Then Virtue, alone, leads me down,
Beyond certain torture.
For Virtue is godlike.
Through him I ride, like the Wind,
and scout grim memories.
30 October 1985
The North Platte River
I HAVE NO STATIONARY BELIEFS
I have no stationary beliefs.
The rain is not stationary;
The love of young beauties comes and explores;
Wind passes away in scores;
Antelope herds vibrate the sky;
Empires dissolve;
Love rides a trolley;
Warriors become fat;
Breasts sag and have no milk;
Communists own ideas and, so, succeed;
Paint peels;
Harmony fractures;
Music bleeds, chords into notes;
Blonde women purchase dyes;
Coal is sold, but brings no price;
Towns move;
Leaves reproduce;
Clouds form;
Gold is stolen;
Children become ill;
Statistics form trends;
Birthdays grow;
Calendars describe change;
Rivers never sleep.
When I believe I finally see, I am moving.
I have no stationary beliefs.
Life is always a dress being sewn;
And I learn, or so I think, always riding on a train.
25 October 1985
Driving
At Night On the Interstate,
Listening to Springsteen
THE RITUAL OF RHYME
Who shall be the boss?
Camel-driven manager of mangeremptied pharasizacle hue?
Not I, said he.
Not I, to they.
Cars are run down hills and fall into seas.
Gasoline buys riches;
But the rhymes of our seasons bespeak no alliance
With the bleak.
Under grass and under dale.
Under hatstanding madhattering tiptop manageries:
Speak no aramaic spoons of wisdom to the cow and to the queen.
The carsinger has no armor, other than truth and an innocent torch.
And he crosswalks the nightstreets without fear of vagrant knifewinders.
For fear cannot be known, but through Chance.
But through vengeance.
Death is not light;
Cameras capture essence once;
But the steely shadow which moves across the seagrass,
Down boardwalks in surly night,
Carving moving pinions of scenarios from the concrete and the blaze --
Nightmovies in teenage headlights--
Cannot touch the maker of phrase and belief.
For an island is thee, unto thee, unto I.
A wall surrounded by the vision of enchantment:
Love in thy veins, love in a nourishing candle,
Marriage and children of thighs and heart,
Ghosts undone by the banquet of the saved.
Saved from the harmony of hatred,
The inexcusable rage of the poor inventor:
Saved from the short circle,
Closing like rats on barks of bread,
Amidst a city with its shades pulled.
I hear words on your arrows;
Clay cities built out of carbonated psalms.
Dirges and ballads of life as a childman:
Growing ages into adultincarnation.
Manbecoming.
Kissing the father's bruised memory,
In a cradled mint of Nebraska wheat,
Louisiana cotton,
Seattle's Roman sevenhills minus one;
Asphalt wheatfarrows in northeastern masterghettos.
Neighborhoods of cronefairy killers; Jewelssportsfansmenofhonorwomenofshamebreadbakerstrucksteeringmenofportlyprideand
hardworkingmantlesofbelief.
Wyoming dusty Indianstrewn plains.
An age from New Jersey.
But in the mouth is still that dust,
Carbondaled beside the Platte.
The River.
Pointblank, against a cavern of teenage frenzysome pain.
The pain is there.
The dreams.
The car filled with savage men made clear,
Wishing for the woman of choice associations,
The queen of houseandhome,
Of which all mythology is filled to a tea.
And the tears are made frequently.
The despair,
Against which major battles become the meat of the living.
Striking against phallacies with acuitous reason;
Loving myth and loving illusion,
For it is better to have illusion and pain,
To have a dream and a fall,
To have a road out of each station of the cross,
Than it is to believe that
Each human aspiration is doomed
To disease.
And that there is nothing more.
5 October 1985
The Son Is Taught To Wait
THE
TRADITIONAL BOW
I.
The traditional bow makes the manchild whet and wait.
Tuberculor endocrinology.
In the cave of too much yearning.
Too much solitary waiting for shows from the clouds
And the damned.
Solitary sating: inching closer to September wine,
When the clouds fall and take shape
As eerie menframes to stand between Sun and Earth,
Like eternal giants,
Though their substance is wary.
As the celulose wind doctors mud into mudambition.
The dominance of the walk.
The cantankerous beastbreaking maneuvers
Of the god on fourwheels and whetapparel:
Taming the umpteen keepers of oldtime rage
With heir solitude.
No one is untouched.
The traditional bow is handed to the son.
Traditional: handed down from clouds to the one who waits,
Who waits to be saved from too much eternalwaiting.
II.
It is not the hunt which he fears; it is the feast.
For he is young; and only his father provided feet
In which he might walk and find shoes.
Only the father lets him know that to eat a feast
Is not a sin;
That to love a woman as a wife
Is not the end
But a differing proximity.
10 June 1985
Growing Weary of the Hunt
WANDERING INTO THE CANYON
Wandering into the canyon: stiff beings and so much fruit,
So much puff of life, being carved into stone.
The rocks drink the sky and form small eyelets of space.
Drinking in universal miles between edges,
Great chasms of empty stratispheres.
Rocks and grim dust.
Dirt scattering at the sound of shoes:
Like ants performing in an attitude of flight.
Dirt like ants.
Descending: each step is like a performance of caution.
Phantoms coil: a sagebrush snowshade.
It is too late for snakes.
But fear is here, lives here,
Is less comfortable in the towns,
Beside hospitals and animated grates,
Beside A and W's and popcycle grinning.
Fear evades hopeful situations.
It lives in crevaces, dusthavens, holes beyond craterknowing:
Expanses of space, all relative,
With a density of spoons and pipes.
Descending.
My relatives walked this improper walk,
Hunting deer along the Platte,
Beyond the reach of the Cheyenne men.
The brush provided cover against what?
The arrows pierce the sage;
Warclubs bruise the burnished head,
Hiding, creeping, beneath the sage.
I wander in the canyon.
Memories are high:
Ghosts with no language;
They linger at the mouths of rivers and brookwrite.
Clouds.
The harbinger of ecclesia.
The book on his belt.
The Preacher attends the bleachmaking periphery.
All in a dream: in my mind.
Wondering if women I have known,
As I walk this endless path,
Descending further into the canyon,
When they lie in bed at night,
Will remember the prosaic words I have strung,
Like beads upon a string,
Giving vent to my airy metaphors,
In fear of having them turn into stones.
Or: The walker with rocksinhispocket descends further
And never returns to the office.
Or: How can the decent boy, in his decent descent,
Carry the weights of the world,
And still proclaim a rising Taurus?
As I descend: knowing living things have frozen a fortnight.
Knowing: there is nothing to fear. But fear is deft.
One footed; one shoed.
His middle name is made a secret by contrition.
He looks in the icebound wages: a man's life in full portrature.
Who moves?
Sodom's sandalphonia;
Gomorrah is not a social disease.
Unless the minister has his shoes on.
In which case: it is a social foe paw.
For humor saves one, in the descent into the canyon.
White Rock.
Armed for sport, courting primate instinct.
Looking for bucklife, primed, ambulating,
Covering ground with a scratch of his horns.
Deerlife.
On this trail of unlucky means.
Having tension etched in its rockface:
Like Michaelangelo's carvings to flesh.
Hidden in stone.
Screams.
Ghosts.
Painting me pictures: terrible distinctions.
Foreground and background: the ancient art of sight.
As I hunt and hunt my brains.
Hunted by the pack of poachers: they desecrate the meal.
And the fear of crunching ice.
Being alone, in this wilderness.
To the north side of the Platte, lying low, moving in red.
Orange.
Having heard no sound, no blast to send me heavenward.
Only crunches.
In this summer refuge of rattlesnake talkers,
Coilers armed for vendettas.
They are not here.
I descend, approaching the stream.
Brushlined and dawnhardened.
It is beautiful, but for adrenalin.
Making the eyes wide with urgent compulsion:
Concentrated fast and imagemaking hones one.
Under the sun, in the grey day,
Drinking forms of ghosts from the mulberry stream:
The prey.
The ancient god of wings has dropped
His barbs upon the earth --
Stinging praise--
And twisted his feathers into antlers of chrome:
The deer of the day is poised,
Hardly seeing,
Prepared for grace.
He offers himself to the bountytaker staggerer.
Talkers abound in safety.
In this land of blood and sand and cadaver:
I raise my rifle
And remember generosity.
1 November 1985
He Watches the Sky
THE SAD CREATION
It is the sad creation which makes me bleed.
The sad folio of pretending virtues.
The craning head and the captivated smile.
Unprecise, pretending virtues.
The drooping chronicle deceiving sad creation.
Sad mentation; sad compilation.
As the bleek winter horrorgoblin
Strikes the living Sun with threats.
Binding Life to a cloud,
Like stoic Hermes to a shield.
Before the hurricane relieves him,
Scattering limbs and cloudoracles beyond each century.
And beyond the covenant.
While the stars uncover their pretensions,
And bask for a moment in solitude.
24 January 1986
Everyman's Odyssey
THE
CROWNING THORN
The crowning thorn.
The wit of anger.
As Penelope cleans her broom.
In the halls of certain danger.
Clams looking for a well.
Hell's dreary gates, projecting dams at the mouth of the Lethe.
Running off into the Platte: river of no dreams,
No certainties of historicity.
Pike savage against the whites.
Beneath the muddy waves where circulation bleeds.
Irrespective of color;
Irrespective of arty affiliation.
Riding on the crest of Turmoil.
Raising the head of the sturgeon.
Within the glimmerings of dusk.
The mates of calories: you need her and she needs you.
A song played by the servile.
You need her and she needs you.
It is true.
A song played by eternal verity.
Calypso harkening to thee:
Eternal harkenings to the womb.
Circe in her garter;
Her lackeys scoure the Platte,
Along the banks,
To find the flounder.
No luck for this Sirius missionary, Circe
Sironical momentum: rounding the Cape of Good Intention.
Without hope but with a broad sense of participation.
As Penelope unweaves her daycloth:
Hardened members waiting at her bed.
A crowning thorn.
Worn by each in turn, the missing husband and his wife.
Worn for centuries at a time:
First the one; and then his mate.
Some believe he will return,
For the dog's tail is wagging;
And the San Francisco Giants are printing
Tickets for the fall,
Proving something essential has occurred.
28 May 1985
He Belongs To His Town
IN
SUMMER'S FIRST NATION
I.
In Summer's first nation I walk and find a Heaven.
It is not the heaven of reflection;
It is not the heaven of flesh and consternation;
It is not the heavenrid thought,
Nor of superior amelioration of logic.
It is a heaven without words, without thoughts,
With no pretentions to understanding.
It is a heaven of the warm evening,
The scented breeze,
The friendly attractive woman
Who passes with her dog.
It is the heaven free of Goethe and Mohammed;
And with neither Luther nor our friend Mozart.
I meet not Da Vinci or Lao-Tse or radical feminist
Or black mercenary.
It is a heaven of trees, new-born;
And of women fresh for ardor.
There is no strained cosmology of the procreator Bach;
But Bach's childe is there, on his cycle:
He looks both ways before crossing the street.
II.
In Summer's first station every soul is dressed in Glory.
All faces are honed from Beauty.
And, for a moment, there is a quiet perfection.
22 May 1985
Celebrating the Town of Sinclair, Wyoming
THE FESTIVAL OF LEARNING
It is a festival of learning.
The river comes in, welcoming the crowd.
The sky peels back a skin of laughter, a python of clouds,
scattering Rain from its harbor north of Lore.
The Sun shouts orders to the Wind,
Which pursues the clouds to the South.
It is a spring day.
The colors come out on girls and young women.
The men shave and wear Sunday coats
And ties and shave lotion.
There is food, in the pit, on the tables near the merry-go-round.
Horshoe pitching is beyond the swings,
With men drinking beer and cursing playfully.
The children watch from a distance, those not climbing on the slides.
Someone sings, and the fiddle is played.
Some dance.
The baked beans are memorable; potato salad, steaks on the open grill.
Coors beer in aluminum tubs in cans
With big cubes of ice, with holes in the center.
Dust kicked.
Talk of older boys along the Platte with a dead snake on a stick.
Golfers walking up the road.
The older girls talking about matters meant for whispering
And scared looks, and then laughter.
Filling out their shirts.
The older men laughing, pinching the women on the ass.
Feigned outrage.
Laughter.
A road through the trees raising dust and out of sight.
The Sinclair Golf Course, in the picnic grounds,
Not far from the clubhouse and the first tee
Where the fourth of July fireworks explode.
The Halpiau girls, with Barbara in her first brasierre.
Dody Frasier: early lover of contact.
The Musgraves: Shelly with the marvelous developments;
Lindy with her eye on the author.
Eddie Spicer with his tricks.
Randal Haas, with his twelve-month tan.
Ralph Vasey.
Bill Clark.
Jack Argyle.
Mike Grubb.
Gary Eaton.
Lee Norris.
In a festival of learning.
Food and family and community and fun:
In a day not yet old and not tortured by tortured
Demands.
The world moving according to names,
According to face-names and place-names
And legends and moving feet.
For I am young and afraid to grow.
When Lindy approaches and asks me to chase her
I feel a fear, first, and then serious desperation.
It is a festival of learning.
It is first employment, first encounter,
First festivity I remember.
I am young and fear each change.
But in each change,
Each new face,
There lies a form of renewal.
23 March 1986
High School Romance
THE ATTACK OF THE FERTILE MAIDS
The fertile maids attack.
They are proportional in space,
Propositional in nature,
Proponents of incisions and incursions among the bees.
The drifting soliloquy harbors resentments
But attracts budding beauties.
For they are prone to love the one who is solvent,
And the one who consumes them.
It is not their poison which one must love;
It is not their beauty which one must baffle;
It is not their addictions which one must face, and reshape;
It is their ardor, their passionate attention,
Which one must absorb
And, ultimately, re-educate.
There are 1000 fertile maids.
There are 100,000,000 fertile thoughts.
There are calendars of amassed opinions,
And proper understandings, so large as to be redeemed,
So lovely as to be rescheduled.
I find one woman who is ready to absorb me.
She dedicates her thoughts,
And makes myself become her object of notoreity.
13 June 1986
Life Inside the House
THE
EDUCATION OF MY SISTER
The education of my sister involves the coming to terms
With flesh.
Power influenza; and the religious hedgemony of lust.
My sister's growing into breasts,
Into thighs and the honey of fancy.
Lonely, for the world to watch.
Private.
Absolutely public: knowledge.
Pregnant with relished light.
Sweetandsour meaning: the meal of too much in want and in asking.
Boys fresh for contact.
Handsome men wet with remembrance:
The first look, touch, wet delight:
And the continuing implication.
Eyeing my sister with conquistadorial tendencies.
Choosing her legs to make their dreams;
Her eyes to make their ballads;
Her hands to inspire their epics;
Her thighs to manufacture children.
Heavy-handed circumspection.
Love as an armored law:
Nature has pricks and proprieties and awl.
She weeps.
She forgets.
She is used, uses, confuses muchandmany,
Especially manmachinery.
In the end she chooses Life,
Even with its sorrows,
Its betrayals,
Its public confessions,
Its burdens of wombbearing trials,
Children for the pit,
In the Summer of extra deliveries,
Where private accusations become public as vows,
In that veiled territory beyond abstraction.
She wants.
She demands.
It is not clear, this education of teacher and pupil.
Which is which.
The man with broken desire.
The woman with vaunted treasuries and debts.
Trying to build the eternal sacristy.
Lessons are given to masters (so trivial in the aura of their authority).
Lessons given by legs, by high rump appeal;
The haircovered sacred studio,
Where erectlegation is simpered and fed.
Sinking into Leviathan.
Sinking into wind, velvet sea, astonished mythology,
The clouds of Perplexia.
Sinking into Sin's garden.
Musical and hot.
Wet with humid lingering: the lineage of care.
A touch born of touch, born of labor and lank craving
And the documentation of reaching for more.
She leaps, is free, is bright.
She makes him free, loving him, beyond what is casual.
She will disappoint him;
She will accuse him and try to kill him.
She will raise him from dust;
And then saboutage his flight.
It is her way,
Theway of softfleshcenteredmentalestrangedstationarymotionnomotioncommodeinharmoniousandcapableofdeepfeelingdevoutpresencebeyondknifeweildingjealouspursuitofequalityandmatedestructionbeforeawakeningtotherealnatureofloveagainandrecreating.
No.
She knows, and does not know.
She is oppressed, and untouched.
She is bone, and soft, and hardmarrow, and can save.
And she learns.
She appeals to goodness;
Cures, merely through her voice.
She is harmed, abused, hated, all through Love.
But she craves what she must have;
Learns always what is true;
Scales each despair with fervid quest for understanding;
Accomplishes much in the vacinity of grace;
Rekindles the penisfatigued and gives out muscles to
Make a world again.
My sister knows the Fates;
Through them she becomes bold
And even godlike until she remembers
And becomes small again.
As it is written.
26 June 1985
Social
Ascendency: Love of the Unattainable
COUNSELLING
THE QUEEN
I counsel the queen.
She is a beauty, with a rose complexion,
A creamy embellishment of each deed I perform for her.
She is queen, but does not know it yet.
She is an abstract queen; my deeds are abstract.
Alas: too much beauty and too much abstraction.
She is a queen, indeed;
She should know it, too,
To be certain that it's true.
She asks quiet questions.
Her realm does not even know her yet.
Her realm would love to see her ride
On the black horse, next to me,
When I become king;
When the abstract love and abstract counsel to flesh
And real deed and endeavor it becomes,
Flowering in some unsubtle crowning,
Proves her worth;
And the worth of her lordship, myself.
t is not the kingdom I want, it is the queen.
It is not power I want, it is love.
t is not wisdom, primarily, I desire,
Although I am no where without it.
It is this woman, on her black horse,
Who rides beside me on my white horse:
A love, a heart, a counselling cleaving:
Two souls parading as one,
Two hearts fused by a great God's plan.
I counsel the queen:
And, some day, I will see her,
I will touch her,
I will walk with her,
I will ask her questions,
And tell her of her marriage to come.
I am lonely, in this wood of wisdom,
In this sea of waiting.
I look on each horizon to find
The partner of my design
Who can love my Wyoming sadness.
And find me true.
31 May 1986
The Queen's Husband
THE KING'S CONTINUUM
I play the King's continuum.
It is made of brass and substitutes angry perjuries for tones.
Bubbles of sound.
Floating imagery over lands of poor and bleak and laughing craving.
Amid rumors of war and war's unclean heroisms.
Plain lengths of cadavers in marches made for ultimatums.
Like a middle-aged play.
Like an escape toward a Shakespearean tragedy.
Untold and ever untried.
Untrialled and made for the ode.
As if the King's continuum could solve every fever,
Could serve every queenhood,
From Cain's perjury to Anne's seductions.
In musical oblivion: chords to hang oneself by.
The continuum as real, as predatory, as a diamond to wear.
The continuum too true.
I am lucky that the King is only stationary,
And wears no clothes
When he hears my song.
Or he might flee.
Leaving me without a continuum,
As it were.
25 April 1986
The Son Learns to Laugh
THE
COMING OF COMEDY
The coming of Comedy breeds many frivolous currents:
Preoccupation with virtue and with the handdanceclapping
Of muppets.
The current of berries; and the white dress of May.
Spring in folds of frenchmerits: abruptly.
Seeking the vegetation of impregnancy.
Seeking it all: th elyric over the liar.
The ciryl over the rail.
Circles for all recovery.
Hercules' brains: twelve mainframes as Time Elements.
Time circling each brain like the Sun eagling Earth,
Illuminating islands of brainformatting peculiarities.
Noons create formaldehyde; Nuns obviate Excaliber;
Four o'clock shadow; and the majestry of Olympus.
The godgiant in a tunic.
The King of Comedy in a brace.
Laughing to beat the band.
As clambuoyant as Jerry Lewis.
As infrequent as a field of danger.
As elementary as the green fishmistress.
Cloying the carping dragons (dragoons from the Eastern
Accompaniment):
Cloying these to mitigate against sobriety.
The slender areminarm procurials.
Love from the back parlor.
Love not under the elms.
Huge leaning keel: under the arms of a dove.
Snow white dove: he brings his pure sweet love,
From acres above;
The postmistress wears gloves.
To keep the letters clean.
To guard against unsightly bloodcovering
Papercutting blueburdens.
Where none see.
And where none are seen.
Where none see: is where secrets dwell.
In the celerity of celebration:
Making the boy remember his grace,
Before the cow is served as a noonmeal,
For the whitegarmenteers.
For I was one once, notsolongago:
In a flowing white gown,
From which the Red Sea was sewn.
Unshoren: made abrupt.
Samson in a wane.
Longbefore I livedandsought:
In his elemental lore,
This time of Comedy,
Where laughter costs.
The King of Comedy gives me a raise.
If I lose my voice,
Then poor Vera might lose a mate.
She might wander vagabond hills in rags,
Wondering why the soul of man spells and suers;
And, when fortunate, re-creates.
8 July 1985.
The Son Accedes to Life
I AM NOT FINISHED
I am not finished, the carpenter called.
And the house was undone.
The carpenter was gone.
I am not finished, the painter declared.
He was not certain.
He brushed up certain shadows.
Walked to the window: jumped.
He was gone.
I am not finished.
The captain is a clerical man.
He manipulates broad centuries,
Locating distinct and detailed allergies
Among men dead for generations.
His mind knows the locution of bees.
He strides among festooned planks,
Ungalleonable builders.
His mind locates treasuries in a wave:
The mint smell of fish, sturgeon, tuna;
Sacred bread.
He is mad with fishtales,
Mad with the vengeance of water.
He locates Shakespeare in the hold,
Nailing the bard's silent inquiries
To Sunday masts
And to slippers he never wears.
Each sleepwalking man to whom he nods
Knows he sees all.
He is a clerical man.
He is worthy of madsight; madintentions; madlegacy.
I am not finished, he says.
When the waves come up to encircle his endeavor,
Before he reaches the gold islands,
Where fish are found up to the arm:
He cries that he is not finished.
He has not reached the dryland.
He makes no bones of it;
But, still, he is gone.
I am not finished.
I watch and glean and calculate, but mostly live.
I find that the flesh beneath a woman's sweater
Surely pleases the imagination
As much as calculations of free will.
I find that touchgoddess named Intimacy,
Queen of Immediacy,
Has a key which unlocks splendid gardens
In silver lamaseries.
I am not unworthy of outerinnerdimensions,
Keyed to selfsecession.
I have attended my demise,
My waterdisease,
At least fourfold,
Beyond my need.
The seasons build a miter showcase through excess.
Life proclaims logic.
Logic declares that pleasure is not a secondary nature.
And I am not finished.
Said Jesus.
To the nun.
I am not finished.
When the Catholic mass demanded its supper.
28 January 1986
PART THREE.
FORMAL EDUCATION
________________________________________________
Transition
Into the World
IN THE DOCUMENTARY ERA
In the documentary era--that is to say,
The era of analysis of the social dichotomy,
Evil being a paramount process,
For the analysts are largely obituary --
Illness manifests itself as virtue;
And health is proclaimed to be victorious.
Down where the viruses are made of words:
And proclaimed to be victims of the healthy bloodcells.
The doctors, in this era, applaud the killing cycles,
The empty entities, festering plenty, eating militants,
Applauding empty reason,
Filling the moon with a trajectory of force.
It is true that the documentors admire suicide.
Tormented by abstract guilt.
Centuries of amassed presentiments to virtue:
Saints deride the unsaintly halves,
Thereby nourishing their morbid desires
To attain self-destruction.
In the documentary era, the crows are proclaimed to be great archons.
The vulture is praised.
The black panther is termed gregarious.
As if to vitalize the grace.
And mask the human endeavor
With defeat and decay.
Alone.
13 March 1986
An
Understanding of Children:
The
Point and the Wave (as a Line)
THE HEREDITARY MEANS
The hereditary means by which Liberation's Doll
Is eventually qualified.
The body and its purpose:
Genetic rediscovery makes Free Will
But a paradox.
At best.
A paradox at best.
Making the straight line but a family of points,
Each mobile,
Each free to move in immense arcs,
Yet none so free as to break the definition
Of the straight line.
Points moving at high speed,
Congregating in a seemingly absolute condition.
With each point acting to balance another,
Making the rule of the Line an unbroken existence.
So it is.
A paradox at best.
The straight line is a straight line;
And, at the same time, an association
Of unstraight lines,
Arcing points,
Blurred into concretion.
10 March 1986
The
Catholic Boy Attends the University
AMONG THE CALENDAR HOURS
I.
Among the Calendar Hours the man walks and conspires.
For the day has become cool, even as Spring comes on,
Making the day more bright, less concerted.
It is the not the day which becomes cold;
It is the air, the face-inversions of walkers
On clay-diamonds and beneath tree figurines:
Filled with the imagery of paradox.
White stimulation on a black angry background.
Urim and Thummim present two stones.
For it is the face of God's Calendar which is seen in the mirror.
I see it, halved by certainty,
Unhalved by Destiny's egg
Broken in fours.
It is true.
I have known it for unspecified eras, unspecified quaternary absolutions.
Absolved of care; yet not uncaring.
Absolved of worry; yet worried for thee,
The unknowing gamer,
Who mimics freedom of thought,
Easy profundity in the mirror,
As though Life were a mere dance
Through a brickabrack concerto,
With you in the lead-role, of course,
A veritable archangel of self-love,
Moving worlds by your wit,
Oppressed by significant virtues but
Always believing yourself original.
II.
Among the Calendar Hours there is no significance.
Time moves inside a shoe.
Worlds move inside a boat.
Your stuttering and damsel-moving dramatics
Amuse no one but those very near.
The lords of Time's acreage
Do not see your acrobatics,
Do not anticipate your demise.
With UnTime's Black armor getting rustic
But nearing use.
And you heavy with depletion,
Becoming armored by each virtuous thought,
Growing unsteady with victory,
And with the victory of "the people's" ascendancy:
Justification for your sinking.
Each justifying his own progressions,
With Ideas (the true Angels)
Which lead us through our stations:
The cross getting heavy;
Veronica beside the path,
Armed only with a smile.
III.
Among the Calendar Hours there is only one laugh.
It comes from me, as I watch myself speculate.
It is not a laugh of emotion,
Not an outburst of joy certainly.
It is not sorrow either;
For Sorrow is the regent of Autumn,
Not the Calendar-Honored Horus,
Rocking on his boat,
Putting on his shoe.
There is a hell made for the virtuous,
As there is a heaven even for the mean.
There is a hell made for the proud,
Even as there is a heaven preserved
For the strugglers.
There is a hell made for the remote,
Even as there is a heaven concealed only for embracers.
I carry keys inside my coat,
A treasure of memories,
Bloodied but unbent,
Which unlock the Calendar's sources.
27 February 1986
Numbers
of the Student
THE FREQUENCY OF LIMITS
I.
There is a frequency within limits.
A frequency, in terms of quantities.
Also a frequency in terms of tones.
The practical guardians pass into oblivion,
Like fathers who leave the world to their sons:
Incapable hands, touting ritual, provoking wars.
II.
There is a frequency within limits,
The main frequency being the necessary creation
Of harmonics to transcend alms.
The poorh