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 poorhouse quaternary.
The pauper's obloquy: isolate soliloquy of main.
Hands for purpose.
Hands for purport.
Condescending the cane.
To raise it on the heavens.
The habitual nonsequitur:
Arbiter has free basis for assault.
For the frequency within limits has still a sound
Beyond even limits.
The clay distinction of dregs and folly
And the lovely canon of sex,
The lovely sea of possession,
Sea anemones to be eaten,
And surgically unflowered,
Opening up like caverns.
If the hand is soft and gentle and surrounds them,
These treasures
Blanche and draw their petals up
Into a clam.
Looking for the pearl: within limits.
The shell is not so sturdy as it seems,
Opening up on Time.
In time for avoiding perjury.
The sun emboldens them,
These lips which speak no word,
But still dutifully impress
The floundering waterwalkers' expression;
And rule the world in silence,
Or, if not not in silence,
Rule the world through
Soft cushionry.
Within limits, of course.
For frequency is an issue.
He without water is thirsty
And adores wells.
Afterall.
III.
In capable hands beyond the borders:
The watchers wear their clothes clean,
Waiting for the harmony of knaves to excel them.
Waiting for the scholarly wave to unsoil them.
The harmony of caves,
Not the pleasant caves once anemones in soft rocks,
But the caves of bats and the caves of bad dreams.
Far from the aromatic scents of the clam,
So ritually represented as the monument of scales:
A hand in the shell is worth a bush in exultia.
For the time being.
That is.
IV.
Frequency beyond the bush,
Beyond the squeezing of the seed.
Dry.
The borders are known.
The unimaginable sounds of noise beyond the pale.
Beyond the pall well-known doctrines
Of unmoving encyclopedias:
The time comes to rise
And enter the priestly beatitudes of thighs
And then to be smiling.
V.
The music which comes from the frequency of limits,
The frequency of repetition,
Is like the frequency developed
From analysis of Pluto's brigand.
And from the quest of the unknown man, for election.
20 June 1986
The
Son Discovers a Profession:
And
Some Kind of Commandments
THE DESIRE TO WRITE
I.
The desire to write.
The need to be productive.
As the element, Intellection, begins by torturing the soul;
The Individual, with a crown of thorns.
A belly full of wire:
Hot iron, hot and bold.
The catchphrase: "Social Responsibility."
Black-faced, white-featured: hating themselves.
The Night has many segments to hide in.
Many slaveries to prepare for,
Beyond Egypt's Queen Delta,
Where the dromedary starts bespeak airy introduction.
In tot in absentia.
In doctro in natione.
Each looking for one to blame.
Some servant to private woe.
As the inferior brothers, the dilettantes,
Grow fearful, anxious;
The Earth does approach, also anxious,
For Its dream is done.
And Its waking has become crucial.
II.
Bulls gather on the marshbank;
Female bulls, fighting to possess the dungheap.
Doctored by their furious Eden.
Stimulating the furious Eve.
The unfilled womb makes the moon
Untender.
The cows gather to choose a mate.
The light, when covered with water, is bronze.
All the men who fish for mermaids,
Beyond Clovis's Gate,
Find only barbery.
And the sow.
III.
Do not eat when the tide is bronze.
Do not ask questions of mice
Merely because these mice
Are furious in the field.
Do not resolve to act accordingly
Simply according to some legendary
Rehearsal of deeds.
Do not inflict pain on thy brethren;
Do not intervene where there is no profit;
Do not inculcate the rain with wind;
Do not ameliorate thine enemies with fear;
Do not pronounce the secret name;
Do not circumvent the authority of seasons and men;
Do not reproduce the darkness;
Do not avenge those guilty of no crime;
Do not persecute the wise;
Do not ask the blackness for a treasury;
Do not kill when there is peace;
Do not enjoy any act of violence;
Do not allow thy wife to be damaged;
Do not listen to those who are dead;
Do not respect those who seek a scapegoat;
Do not sit with those who won't work;
Do not tolerate the criminal;
Do not romanticize sterility;
Do not promulgate sophisticated phallacies;
Do not circulate rumors or treasons;
Do not make excuses for thine own failings;
Do not enter the Night with no shield;
Do not harbor the foreigner's opinions;
Do not ridicule the making of children,
In thought or in deed;
Do not suffer thy woman to rule thee,
Although understand the equality of the sexes,
And make this thy practice.
Seek a balance between extremities.
Be willing to fight for thine independence.
Love God first and thy wife second.
Do not curse paradise or fertility or virtue.
Choose life over death.
Choose success over failure.
Choose the family of families.
Choose seeing and wisdom
Over style and conventional vision.
26 April 1999
How
He Died From Thirst and Waves
TELL
ME ABOUT THE CANVAS
I.
Tell me about the canvas.
Stretch tightly the twin rifts to expose vales of contour.
Whole cities of explanation
Veiled by Milliscenters of mesh.
Paintpots of Egypt.
Mercurial bloom and the brush of several masters.
Ices turned to osiers.
Back to ices and then to oar us.
Taking turns to row us:
The painter and the parrot.
One speaking firstly,
The other then in labor;
The painting then mocking
The talking bird
Word-for-word.
As the parrot awaits some wind
Which will carry him back to port.
II.
Tell me about the canvas,
On which you sketch your history's fashion.
Tell me about blue pain, and Love's grays,
The mountains of Odette,
The calumny of shades.
Render severed ears, if you will;
Dollied clocks;
Rembrandt's autumnal surgeries.
Show me Homer's nature;
Eakins' operation;
O'Keefe's unrandom vulvae;
Lucero's Mexican conceit.
All images fit here, one upon the next:
Endless Dimension in serial skins;
Yes, the epidermis, which is your canvas.
The painter tells the story of how he died from thirst and waves.
The parrot commands the bark to move.
From the shore two women watch;
And proclaim the lyricism of art.
20 June 1986
The
Red and the Black
PROXIMITY TO THE CRIME
I.
Proximity to the crime.
Give him rope and he will hang thee.
Temptation of the straw.
Burgoyne and the meted vendetta.
As, for instance, Leopold and Loeb.
Give him ears and he will harangue thee.
Mediator between flaws.
Black Hawk's foreign blankets.
Red pepper and redder education.
Stalin's predatory greatness.
Steady as a crow.
As imaginative as silt.
With guilt unknown
Far beyond good and steeples.
Peopleobfuscation.
Bedraggled by the brain:
Implicating predominance of a broader Intellection
(While lacking a better concept).
In starry condensation.
The murderer's lament.
Far beyond God and Evil.
The straw always snaps the bicameral back.
II.
Those not working plan improvements.
Laissez-faire, except in ideals,
By which guns are composed
And bullets predisposed.
Making the innocuous fill with rage:
The clandestine fall, with the slovenly impetus.
Uncovering particulars:
From the savagery of femaleabsoluteisms.
Inoculated by germ men.
Ideas in their quads; supper in its reef.
Each perception an article of quotientism.
In which Lenin makes his bed:
Having been poisoned by clarity,
And surrounded by newslaves.
A tuppence forereaction.
He is murdered by his followers,
Lest he slacken in his paradisemanagement;
To be forgiven in his dotage.
III.
All the women come to weep
When the murdered they have dressed
Cannot answer.
Except by threats.
30 May 1985
The
Powers of Analysis
ANALYZING THE CAPACITY OF SNOWS
They analyze snows: the capacity of white.
The capacity of the whiteless whites
And the depth of drifts so real
As to reach above waists
And to freeze insolvency.
They analyze stones: white stones,
Capable of being cast for centuries,
Great incentives to virtue,
To David's clean associations.
Stones beneath snows,
On the Winter haven of Wyoming obituary
Windeaten plateaus.
They analyze symptoms:
The desire to fight;
The fear of victory;
The longing for disruption;
The obliteration of fear.
All symptoms relating to Winter.
And to snows.
And to stones gathering moss.
And to moss gathering momentum.
Stones beneath snows with symptoms buried in shadows,
Under the tiers of the harshest rocks.
They analyze serpents: the category of shades.
The serpent lives beneath syndrome and stone,
In the shadows beneath snows
And beneath rock and beneath symptoms.
The cause is a thought: categorical imperative.
They analyze snows.
Down in the deep
An eerie entity plots mastication.
And emboldens Winter with his glass,
And through his winery of judgments.
23 June 1986
The
Son Discovers a Form of Salvation
LETTING OFF STEAM
I let off steam.
It comes through words, crazy transpositions of sounds.
Meaning exists in the sounds.
For music (soundpotentials) is rife with structure.
And structure is meaning.
So it is.
I let off steam.
Words.
Soundcanons: olive cadenzas.
Winter is deep here;
December has no girdle
And the crepe paper moon sends
Dualistic mechanisms into bowers.
And I write.
Like a child, transfixed with release.
Writing.
Tiptop.
Tiptoptabletop.
Writing.
For the majesty of unburdening of weights.
Hoping meaning is not antecedent to uttering;
Hoping meaning is antecedent, conjoint, with hurried talk:
Sound: syllabic sense.
I let off steam.
The whistle is in the dream.
Tea is in the teatime tenor.
Letting off steam: before Christmas Day.
It is my birthday.
Letting off steam.
Waiting for some accompanying song.
It is not here;
The women have passed into angry abodes
Of harboring dissonants.
Cat as trophic felinary abuse:
Moon-heavy,
With too much
Self-component
Minipotencies.
I let off steam.
I feel it in my brain, my chest, my belly, boy.
It is the letting off of steam.
It is good inandofitself.
I let off steam.
I have a birthday dinner, fried chicken,
Which I must catch soon.
It is a birthday giving me weight to bear.
I wonder if I might be on a cross,
For I can't move.
And I'm beginning to smell blood.
17 December 1985
Writing
the First Story
FATIGUE MAKES THE EYES WORK
Fatigue makes the eyes work.
Fatigue makes the desires slow to the crippled status
Of a man without legs,
Telling tales about his windsprints
Performed down some backwater
Wheel of Time.
21 June 1986
Analogy
in the Absence of Cause
THE MOSS AND THE CLOSET
I.
The moss and the closet:
Winter's cleaving heritage
And the passing of new investments.
The droll way, weary weavery,
Huge in commitment, tiny in stature.
It is true.
It is done.
The moss and the closet: one clothes and one holds.
One stores in darkness, in the hidden treasury of support;
The other proclaims that it has life
Only in the season of Unlife.
There really is no need to call your attention,
By the process of association,
To the natures of moss and closets;
It is merely sound orientation
Which brought together these two notes
And noteformations in my own mind.
However, if there is inherent meaning in sound,
If each sound orientation comes prior to
Or concurrent with meaning,
Then there is something necessary here,
In terms of meaning,
Rather than mere accident,
Mere gratuity or disease.
You decide: is it only a note relation here,
A sound correspondence,
Which hearkens the protrusion of two images
From the mass of incognized mantras;
Or is it meaning which demanded sound
To unveil itself through this medium of chords;
Or, more than that: does the music of words
Rule the logic of thought,
Ruling the vaster nomen and noumenon
Through the majesty of unknowing relation?
II.
The moss and the closet.
You probably didn't know that
These two children could evoke
Such an impasse.
Yet, is it not so?
10 June 1986
Expanding
Into Significance
I AM NOT LOST ON WORDS
I am not lost on words.
Although the surviving impressarios,
The poets of early conception,
After the flood has come and claimed
Early purgatorial benefits,
Immaculate, after a fashion,
Believe that words are lost on me,
And art is artifice and merely randomality.
Making big something valuable.
As though a block of wood were art,
And not the shaving of the block into some fashion,
Some useful, beautiful form.
They think.
But it is not the woodblock which works,
As the metaphor of quest.
It is not something inanimate,
Which must be whittled away,
As though the essence were hidden inside,
Beyond shavings,
Beyond strokes of antic sculpture.
It is Life which becomes Art's best metaphor,
For the Art of which I speak
Is no block to be shaved down to essence,
But Life itself which expands into essence.
As a flower begins in essential nature (its seed),
Expands into essence, into Life,
Which is beyond seed-thought,
And greater than seed-thought,
For it is not the seed-thought which is the work of Art,
Although it is the origin, the prelude if you will.
It is the development of the origin,
The petals,
The scent,
The form,
The interplay of air and fire and bees and honey-appetite,
And rain and cats' paws,
Life itself,
Which is the Art,
The rendering of potential essence
Into actual essence.
And so to those who would say that my Art
Is like a block of wood, uncut, unshaped,
I would say that it is, rather,
The sculpture which adds elements
Rather than reduces them,
Which adds rock shape and rock significance,
Beginning with little and building out of a single name
An act which signifies only direction,
And clearly needs limbs to become, ultimately, a tree.
14 April 1986
Learning
To Listen To Craving Genius
MISCHANCE GUIDES FOOLS AS WELL AS LITERARY BRIDES
I.
Mischance guides fools as well as literary brides.
As well as doctors to the well.
Appealing to all, in a forest of garbs.
His Horus of barbs a detective of crimes uninvented.
Driving all to some misgiving.
Misinquisition and missive masterpiece.
Mater Dolorosa.
Sad, forgiving bride.
Lovely by noon and tragic in June.
Guided by Mischance into advanced age:
Life formed by steps mis-taken --
Although the stepping and the taking is itself
A form of
Progressive missed direction.
Mischance guides tools of dark endeavor too.
Also, he drives creation.
Misharmony of tempos: rings of Saturnnailian abutments.
Concentric and colliding.
Mischance and also Miss Karma Knee.
Miss carmoney barmoney is a play on words.
Shapely plays on worlds.
In her blonde hair (streaming in Sun),
Her well developed breasts,
Her music and airy convertible.
A shapely knee on which his hand lights.
Carmany Two: Indian vendettagod:
Spanish vendettavamp;
Aryan missed paling:
A description of wealth.
Racy man.
Ram cany man.
Cam Ranh Bay man.
Yank marred many man.
Many car man.
Rainy morman.
Craning more man calling.
In the guise of Mischange: guide and guardian misleader.
Spellbinding with a smile: deadhearingmiraculousman.
Following the grist to the mill.
Where Tragedy makes shoes.
In the factory with gases.
Tory calf in the land of sages.
Transposition of Trans-Sylvanian thoughtmode.
In a hierarchy of values: pyramidal tempera.
And a temperament of wolves.
Penderetski as a background moon.
Wolf conducting: leading the dogs into madness.
Two turns around the gazebo, by the hollow.
Two turns and tortured earnings.
Transitions to each new thought.
Being bound to creators of invisible architopia:
Standing in the vegetable zone.
Which is the transit between deadmen and the living.
Where few are allowed: without notes from their granddads.
For the legend is in dreams;
The scale is notoriety;
The map is, itself, a map.
And the envelope is free from sound;
It cannot be solved by that demon,
Heiry Mischance,
Who is called in this land
The only true King of Barter.
The only regal Knower of Portions.
II.
Massive mister peace comes round,
Built for dreams and ritual metaphor.
Mischance cannot compete with this Chance,
This manhero made of ironregattasteelbeautydisciplinejusticeunderstandingcompassionsexualprocreationpowerskillsatbuildingchildrenasfineplantsofhisownnonsurreptitiouspresenceunsermoniousreligionandwifewithloveofproductioninabodywhichscattersthedemonsofcomplaintsclaimtoperfectionisrejectionofdetailedwork.
Massive mister peace comes round.
Missive masterpiece beside him.
Together creating the heaven of familial balance.
Flesh and bone and blood and tearrendering.
Shoutandcryandaccuseandforgive.
Soilandsodandskyandtree.
Houseandcarandfactoryandfutilelonging.
Nature.
Epi-nature.
Life:
Handinhand
Through each zone of daynight.
III.
Mischance is gone.
His black masterbase and his masks have been rent.
He has fled to somberer terrain,
With his lexicon and airfilled talon.
His map beyond soils,
Beyond filigree as prime material.
He is not remembered well;
He was barely known when here.
Angelic temperament (the Sun)
Made him blanche.
In archisectual misgivings:
One flees and the other has twins.
IV.
Mischance guides fools;
But the literary bride begins to see
When she is kissed.
It is the fond kiss,
The warm hand,
The breath on her neck:
These make her remember
That to build is also the lyric,
And has its home
Very close to eternity.
21 June 1985
Dining
With the Worldly
THE MERCHANT OF LOVE
The merchant of love comes regularly to dine.
I know him well.
He tells me stories about the stars.
He is wise, beyond knowing;
He is rich, for he can see.
The merchant of love tells me where to go
To find companionship.
He carries shells in his pocket.
He has maps inside his shoes.
He has a lastname composed of twentyseven syllables;
He is assumed to be Lithuanian;
Yet it is an assumed name.
His name is really Smith.
His father sells Fords in Akron, Ohio.
9 December 1985
Awakening
to Flesh
THE FRESH STRUT OF FEMALE BEAUTY
It is through the fresh strut of the female beauty
That I begin to remember
The joy of being alive.
It is the long limbs, the trembling hair,
The proud powers of her grave attraction
That make me rise each morning
And thank God that I am alive.
22 May 1985.
The
Virtues of the Coed
A MORNING WITH A VAMP
A morning with a vamp.
Tousled brunette: bed-weary:
The penis heir.
Italian in her nose and ass:
Brassy sister of the perilous glance.
Her eye is on me.
She passes closer to my hellos.
Her hunger pleads some savage REM.
Her black pants anoint some sacred dimension.
She is the girl of the moment;
The girl of a whim,
In blue mercurial fashion.
As quick as she has come she leaves.
As soon as she is hot she's cold.
As fast as she can make believe
So quickly too can she be devoured.
21 May 1985
Is
This Love?
THE EXPRESSIVE ITALIAN GIRL
I.
The expressive Italian Girl is a woman with curls and fidelities.
Her name is not latin.
Her eyes are nearly green.
Her figure a prettygirl's formula in bronze.
She has legs which start opinions.
Her buttocks inspire the mensingers.
Her breasts are manufactured for kissing.
She is nice, pretty, delicious, capable of pleasure.
I like her.
She can laugh.
She knows when to be delinquent.
She knows when to show her stocking.
She uncomplicates human emotion.
She has largesse in her arms,
Like a woman who understands fleshengagements
Can build a fire.
The Mediterranean whim.
The high heel tart.
Tight, in a dress.
Her hair kinked.
Born in Pennsylvania.
Reared in New Jersey.
Mediterranea in her bosom, her laugh,
Her expressive exponentia.
She is Marie, true to her name.
She is handtalking, angry, accusatory.
She can be cruel; she can be vengeful.
Like a child she is rough.
Like a martyr she is willful.
Like a spark she is expressive.
Her body is full of juice and fruit.
Berries.
Strawberry delight.
Her hair is coconut and chocolate.
Her ears give off scents of licorice.
Her breasts respond to kissing.
Her thighs seem like bananas and cream.
There is gold inside her shoe.
She curses and cures and delights and seeks delight.
Her hidden hair is a garden of pearls,
In which unsubtle sensations abide.
II.
I like her.
She is light, given to laughter,
Given to easy conversation.
Her eyes match her clothes,
Take on hues to catch her gown.
She is plump: a grape everlasting.
There is no sense to waste it,
This wonderful harvest of laughter
And of Catholic indiscretion.
For she is bold when she must be.
And then she calls you on the phone;
And asks you to visit her and have supper.
6 January 1986
A
Garden of Beauty
THE MILLINER'S DAUGHTER
I.
The milliner's daughter sits and studies her French.
Her hair is short, brown, perfumed;
Her eyes are the color of a gentle beer,
Not quite golden: much softer than amber.
Her shirt descends against her breasts;
Her neck is tanned.
She wears a gold necklace and delicate pearl earrings.
From one angle she is brutal and manly;
From another she is plain;
From another she is proud and wealthy;
From yet another she seems permanently lovely.
II.
She likes it when I stare at her;
Our eyes meet for several seconds.
She cannot study French today;
She has no concentration.
She runs her hands between her legs,
To warm her hands.
It is Spring, afterall.
The men who surround her
Cannot see that she is lonely.
4 May 1985
The
Writer and the Writer's Critic
THE SOFT SEASON OF BELIEF
I.
The soft season of belief.
A degree of continental behavior.
A sun belly up on a reef.
In the bikini season.
An erstwhile female friend
Makes the pejorative comment that
I am in my "minor" stage.
She would rather I were writing
In some hypnotic stupor
A great tragedy in vicious isolation.
Because I love the bikini season,
She turns up her nose;
As if Life were secondary to Art.
I believe too much now in the soft season.
The hard season is in soft imagery now.
The hard sensation in the soft root of comfort,
Of female incandescence.
Too much for her, so pure in essence,
So whorish in dress.
All a ruse.
She comes in glitter; and a black dress
At her high thigh.
Believing herself modern.
Modern imagery being easy.
Yet she is no modern prophetess.
She shows herself and runs,
Making like Diana with a cleavage,
Presenting any Actaeon who might look
With more fangs and claws
Than honeyed moons.
To be sure.
Sure that her moral height is a sign of more
Than timidity.
She speaks too loudly by her attire.
She speaks too purely abstractly
Through her insouciant untouchedness.
II.
In the soft season of belief.
Continental adjacency.
She speaks highly of self-discipline,
Of fleshless undertones,
Of emotional loyalty to some imaginary boy-friend.
But it is sympathetic skill.
She believes her own map
More than in excavating
Grass and sod and gold and mild impression.
She is linked to European hypo-negation:
Formation of history from old buildings.
She apologizes to her betters for lacking
Sensitive ecstacies.
For her parents and their parents are only Americans,
Who have no culture,
No understanding of the delicate,
The artistic soul,
The sublime.
And so she sleeps without me.
She nods without me.
She talks without me.
For I am like her parents:
With no culture,
No understanding
Of the true.
III.
It is the soft season of beauty, of flesh,
Of walks on a river bike-path.
She is not there.
I wonder if the time will come
When she will find the parameters
Which transcend thought.
When she will be herself,
Without apologies
To Old World ghosts
For being who she truly is.
Herself.
Will she understand that is enough?
14 May 1986
The
Son and the Older Woman
A GREAT SERVICE HAS BEEN RECORDED
I.
A great service has been recorded.
A fiery festival to the queen,
Who, by free association, chooses boys
Who would make her believe
In the logic of too much whim.
And appeal.
Her bare arms like twin breezes,
Her winter atmosphere broken by love.
She is fine, regal, abetted by Chance.
The man who earns her profits with the Fatalities.
And teaches her in segments
All the decorum of living in dreams.
Heartily appropriate: to her station.
She teaches me methods of repose,
Means to the matrimonial ends.
Priceless is her humor;
And, when she resists the knowledge of ants,
And taps instead the anima of stars,
It is to me that she gestures;
And through me only can she surface.
II.
The waterclock tells stories of indiscretion and open doors.
Rooms meant for hiding.
The open window; the secret word, passed between mouths.
The madelaine with the soft tea-edge: exchanged between lovers.
Memories being formed.
The serious respect for flesh intermingled.
It is not a dance,
Not some annual introspection
Performed by linguists divining origins.
Organic preparations: follyfury and the bells of Rhymny.
And the moment of sex.
The entry and the ecstatic.
The sound of two impressions.
Implosions and extrasensories.
Swallowed up to the hips.
The caressing funneled horn.
Cornucopia's abode.
In the season beyond ecclesia.
Seaclesiastical domain.
Beyond fleshless contraception:
Passing through the hellzone into Time.
Into the arms of the female companion:
She who grips me hot and luscious:
Indescribable in her roundness.
It is her world, this hot night between sheets,
Wherein conspiracy for knowledge of satiety takes place.
Nipple abode: swollen with temporary accusation.
Pleasant accusatory ripe protestation.
Rubbing root into the sea.
Harried mother of monumentia.
Rotating the globe.
Ruminating thrusting conversation.
Fit for kings and the daughters of kings;
Fit for princes and queens and the daughters of kings.
Ritualistically.
Surgeons and cleaners and farmers and vamps.
Fit for smiling petite incendiary tarts,
And righteous madams,
And humorous neighbors.
Fit for ministers and poets and salesmen of cars;
Rock musicians and foot doctors.
Speakers on sincarnation, syntax, synergy, synophobia.
For mothers with seven children
And even the teenage girl in her cherryabode:
Smiling at her lucky beau.
Fit for extravagant opportunists and meek chessmaster enthusiasts.
Fit for bedridden philanthropists and even Catholic girls with acne.
All an act without omission.
A commission of pleasant feeling: just between friends.
Pants without authority.
Skirts without trestles.
Wet nature, wholly innocent, wholly rude.
Real and starily vast.
Huge and rodramming metaphor.
Pain and pleasure as mingler.
Me and the queen.
The queen and the newly-made king.
The prince.
The stranger.
In a bed made of feeling.
Sons in the fertile ground.
Sinking deeper into true nature.
Oblivion.
Beyond the celibate race.
Beyond the harmony of pure analysis.
The flesh of reeds and windtunnels.
The early bird catching her worm:
Turning him on end; and making him smile.
In the queen's own way.
Fit for songs in immortal co-creation:
Admiration for her skills;
Admiration that winter eddies.
And the cold bitch tendency with it;
The crusade against life passes on.
Transformed to worshipping the fertile God,
The God of generator nature,
Of Spring and Summer
And mountain and lake.
III.
The God of monument and ecstatic origin.
Beyond origin.
The God who gives his children elemental Love.
Physical and deep.
Emotional and hard.
Mental; and oceans of motion.
Spiritual love: prognosis to childhood.
Inside the feathery night there is thrashing.
In the simplicated thrashing
There is some quest for a taste inconspicuous
But knowing.
17 June 1985
Life
At the University
SURREPTITIOUS BARGAINING
Surreptitious bargaining;
Complete with foolish mutterings
To girls ready for flattery.
They are pretty, these wenches.
Spring is approaching.
There are things to be done here.
They smile; but some are angry inside.
They are angry because you value their hidden gems,
The broad variables inside their skirts and shirts.
They wish you loved their inventiveness.
They wish you understood their grace,
Their culture, their capacity for creation.
You look at them with heat,
For they are the image of Love to you,
The focal point of God's green arrow,
The Sun's primordial accentuater.
They dress for you: because they both regret and desire
The Archer which God has made you,
The holder of the bow,
The launcher of animal trajectories.
They are made to hold you,
To cushion your discretions.
They hate you, for you are rich;
They love you, for you are bold.
They harbor you against thick deaths,
For the atmosphere is crowded with evils.
They cast you out, when you anger their virtues,
When you annihilate their lusts.
They cannot live without you;
For, even in the arms of another girl,
Be they so skewered,
They are not full.
And so they long.
3 February 1986
Learning
To Paint With Thought
I
AM COMING CLOSE AGAIN
I.
It is Summer's ministerial option:
Mountain and topseaturvy theatrical puff of creation.
Sun holding vats of canvas in its mouth, like a bone.
Flagellation.
Flagellating the canvas.
Like Pollack with his mental broom.
Painting no gay day of hollow incentive
But a brusque afternoon, surly, golden, rodangry.
Muscular: breviary shape.
Hardened to a curve.
The curve being the hardest visible particle of an orb.
Orbangular: crevice unhidden.
Sun hardy and pounding the roof with neutrinos
And poetic Corbusiers.
Concrete sun.
Concrete bleached ammunition of sun.
Far from women in their Spring annunciation.
Turning in the wireeye of the cat named Sanguena.
Bloodheavy.
Broadleavened.
Cockwandering.
In the town with girls once gleeful, once peefull and brave.
Now cocksauntering.
Cockvomiting.
Cockedeye and sapttempered glaze:
Eyes like pervious crustaceans.
Skirts showing only jarred flesh.
Not Spring's becoming wind:
Transfixion among the dawns.
Sun painting a totoabstractia:
Entering the mindscavern with a torch to light the cavestones.
Notseeing pretty girls of May:
Whitedresses along a beach, in a therapeutic impressionism.
The picture blurring because the seer moved.
The picture always approximation because the Sun moves
And paints in hot pejoratives.
II.
I saw the calendar leap and fall.
The woman I love
Titillates me with harlequinity;
I touch her in the sacristy.
She has moved;
And she closes the drapes --
Yet I am near.
2 July 1985
Why
I Write
WRITING TO ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING
I write to accomplish something.
It is not dramatic art, high principle, low dictation.
I write to balance the world:
For in my sanctity and understanding --
The precise image of self-consciousness --
I appreciate the fact that nothing can derail
The self-created existence
Which harmonizes all factors
Into a rudimentary totality.
There are problems in this.
For by accepting all things
All beings become present.
They merely become incapable of persiflage,
Incapable of aggression.
They are weaved into a fabric which is controlled by
Harnessed imagination.
They cannot move without reaction.
They cannot strike -- I speak of inherent lawlessness --
Without unsubtle retaliation.
Capable of riposte.
That is it.
As rich and as real as the images of poets,
Yet concrete,
As true as the prime nature of physics.
Power in wielding a word --
The word being the reflection,
The skin if you will
Of the power itself:
The seed husk to the seed.
The unspoken word being the power still leashed,
Yet with emphatic tactile presence.
The word: being the mover of all metallic structures,
All ingrained fleshcorresponding musculature,
Termed real, but phenomenally moved.
I see.
Looking for words to make my sight clear.
Looking for the musculature of vision:
Keeping us safe from the grief of reflection:
Ad infinitum.
I write to instruct myself,
Not to please the stage-manager chiefly,
Or to flatter the pennyoperapublic,
Or the selfinfatuated talkingcrowdofEuropeantastes.
I write to grasp myself;
And, in grasping myself,
To gain power over
Black chaos.
2 August 1985
Increasing
Isolation
THERE IS NO ONE HERE TO TALK TO
I.
There is no one here to talk to.
I walk on three tiers
And ask the hens to make a call.
I ask the pigeons to weave a sky.
I ask the dromedaries to bake a tale.
There is no one here to talk to.
And so it is.
I repeat my wanderings among sheiks
And out of stolidities.
I am alone.
The Summer days of earrings on ears
And nights in shiny cafes,
Eating exotic pates and talking with sweet women,
Apparently have ended.
I see only icy ways, icy calendars approaching.
I see women who have no capacity to love.
I see only fatherhating episodes;
And mothers weaving in drunken fits.
I see too much.
I see sorrow.
I see calculated self-destructions.
I see gambits for power:
Man against woman against man against man.
I see the Light Man and the Dark Light Man
Fuse to create the Dark Man of Power,
Who challenges the Reigning Hero
With dread.
Emancipation.
I see rock against rock
Create an ocean
Called Othello;
I see Othello plot with Isis
To depose the talking god.
II.
It does not matter.
There is no one here to talk to.
All the thoughts of love,
Or erotic embrasures,
And the lyric of joyceful living:
These all pass into the abyss
Wherein Chaos fashions her vengeance.
14 February 1986
Alienation:
Drug of Infertility
THE WRITE WHO HAS NOTHING TO SAY
I.
The writer who has nothing to say
Is a sad thing indeed.
He is an ocean without a sea,
A wife without a mate,
A house without a roof or a dweller.
He is alone, built for sorrow,
Built for unwed sounds of words
Seeking some stable understanding.
He is without a story, without a rhyme:
He wanders down the street,
Recalling days gone by
When he understood his direction.
II.
The writer who cannot speak eats food
And ideas and sequesters his dreams.
He is sad, lonely, cold, pretending wisdom perhaps,
But equally distrusting her.
He enjoys his silence,
Feeling in it some female precision.
Yet he can fight, fume, kill, with a word,
Without a word, with a quick glance;
For he is lame, and, being lame,
He is prepared for reaction.
* * * * *
An absence of associations makes the face grow lean and long.
As though predicting drought in the cheekbone;
Spatial vacuity: the absence of love in the eye.
Self-hate being a corollary abolition.
Preparing to strike the world with rage.
Like a rat without a leash,
A dog from hell's periodical occasion,
Circling, threatening, daring himself to cry.
If he only had a word by which to state
His sense of dread,
Then he might raise his silent conflict
Into the realm of art and redeem it.
2 January 1986
The
Liquid Nature of Thought
PROSE IS FROZEN SOUNDS
Prose is frozen sounds;
And is a great fall from the regions of poetic sight.
Prose is thick with legality,
With linear dimensions.
Poetry is God's language;
Sight in applied round relations.
Of sound.
Like music it is savage, chorally immediate;
Rich with speculations hinted at but not outspelled.
Poetry paints.
Prose draws straight lines and sharp distinctions
With a ruler.
Poetry leaps over deserts in two steps;
Prose walks over sand;
And two days later reaches water:
Its descriptions freeze.
10 February 1986
The
Son Watches the World
THE MARRIAGE OF THE LANDLORD
The marriage of the landlord
Prevents the tenants from taking umbrage.
He is fat and churlishly ugly.
He is patient with none and appreciates only immodesty.
These are all stereotypical images.
Instead, he is thin;
And he reads fluently all types of precise and rhythmic prose.
He writes in his shaded garden;
He calculates numbers as the archon of dietetic proportion.
He resembles architecture in his lofty self conception.
This is how his bride sees him.
Her eyes are blanked with passion
(The precision of lust and touchconsequence).
These are her illusions of the man she has known.
Yet it is not him.
He is neither fat nor thin;
He is muscular,
With a history of successful battle against those
Who benefit from weakness.
He loves knowledge,
But is churlish in his intolerance of irresponsibility.
The tenants fear him but respect him.
He loves to read in his garden,
When the day becomes low,
And the heat begins to ebb
In that fine period of evening
When fruit tends to become bold,
Hanging from enervated limbs.
He loves also sport;
The blast of crowds in violent inner upheaval.
His bride is ripe like dusk.
Her hair is almost golden.
Lucky that his tenants cannot know him
The way that she does.
12 June 1985
The
Twelve Times of Knowing
THE ARTICULATE ANIMOSITIES
I.
The articulate animosities by which
One side brands the other
And in which that side lives
Like a beast of prey,
For ever proud of such unsettling nomination....
These are the code-words of violent embassy,
Rigid in description,
Which make the world abide
In a curtain of threats.
The world rolls.
Men trade right cloaks,
Hoping one fits when the other is lost.
Outgrowing ideas as we outgrow our clothes.
Some wear out.
Others become too small.
Some fall out of style.
Some, perhaps, are too large.
Maybe we shrink too.
Maybe our ideas don't change at all,
But we shrink and expand,
Constrict and superstrict,
A serpent in his eggs,
In the breadth of several decades,
Several limbs,
Several febrile liberations,
Making the clothes seem as changelings;
Yet it is light which draws out colors from fabric.
Our ideas, the One Idea, do not change;
The One Idea merely has, within it,
Twelve Ideas,
Twelve Months,
Twelve Tones or Degrees of Light:
One has his glory (One Entity-as-Idea),
And then turns his edge, and becomes manifold,
And seems to change.
II.
Like light repels like color, making it appear.
Like Idea repels like Idea, too making it appear.
Every mouth has every month has every story has every stage,
For a moment, a decade, a lion-age,
But saves itself,
When captured by staid concretion,
Reforming itself
From the surface it leaves behind:
And, so, by means of this,
The world saves itself,
Not through static ideology,
But through change,
Through process,
Through manifold eternity,
Breathing,
Expanding,
True coloration,
And the age of plants.
In the light manufactory,
A dodecahedron,
Turning on a string.
26 March 1986
The
Son Becomes Alienated From Despair
WHY
DO THEY SMILE SO CRUELLY ALONE
Why do they smile so cruelly alone?
Why do they sign, laugh, without contentment,
Believing always in the tragic endeavor,
In and through which their love of death
Can be believed?
I watch them.
And sometimes travel in their thin sphere,
Their abrogated paralysis,
Listening to their perjury of Hope,
The innocuous bellicose palaver of failure.
And they wax, knowing that all dreams
Are brutal lies;
And only brutal nonconviction and despair
Are closest to true understanding,
Killing themselves with this truth.
It is such a lonely way to starve.
11 August 1986
Alone
Among the Reasonable
THE COUNSELORS
I.
There are counselors in the streets, in the marketplace, on the millrace.
There are counselors in the towns, in the factories, on the farms.
Counselors who would share each indiscretionary projection
Of opinion with an errant object.
Counselors who slice air, measure its heritage, its degrees and the lengths
Which separate it from a solid.
Counselors who prophecy increase;
Counselors who prognosticate doom.
Their words are never without tense, tendency or proportion.
One word to another; one friend to the last.
II.
The counselors are ever interested in the common good.
And each arrives at his goal by a singular path
Which is called Individual Style.
And I am here, without words,
Standing near these ecclesiastical titans:
The very hive of sparkling incentives
And propositions for a better environment.
Everyone willing to save his brother,
With a word, a clause, a sentence.
The sentence being the finest potion,
The least inglorious of all possible dilemmas.
Speaking always, among friends,
From the perspective of bleak security;
Always eyeing some remuneration
Which might render their anonymity
Unritualized.
III.
The counselors have understood for years
That all Hope is a dreary illusion.
They have known for several decades
That all striving is a striving for bones.
They are educated;
The intellect prospers, if at all,
From an absence of belief.
I am not as wise as they;
I believe that essential logic demands
A correlation of knowing and better powers
Of re-creation.
I am oldfashioned.
That is why I am usually silent.
I tend to understand
That we are eaten by jealousy or boredom or wisdom,
That greater eater of corpulent frames.
The counselors have unique categories,
Fantastic frameworks they keep
As collections.
When I walk in the street, long past dusk,
I tend to understand that each vision is costly.
18 November 1986
Imitations
of Flight
THE PRODUCERS OF WRY OPINION WALK
The producers of wry opinion walk the causeway
To find a server.
One ear out for the stupefactory sequence.
A witness to the scurrilous word.
Sharing the clear sensation of speculative noise:
I believe, I think; I assume, I intend.
As the rain falls.
Stupefactory rain.
As the wind distorts each branch.
The harlotary history of branches:
Rumpled in the sun:
Stump and bark and leaf and sod.
Beneath which men talk.
Political salvation.
Analytical preoccupation.
Pessimystical doctrination:
The imagery of the twenty-eight moons.
A harvest of every Noon.
White-faced features of despair:
Listening to the clock.
The irreparable order.
The philistines carve the chopping block and shout:
"I shall do it without a thought!
"I shall do it without a shot!"
Walking in a trance beyond opinion,
The opinion of the mice,
Who proclaim their love of cheese.
Believing they choose even the element of their hunger.
In their elementary blindfolds: fig leaves across the portal.
The sound of the bark of dogs in the woods:
Hades' legation, set free by a vacant word.
Wind twisting the elementary cord:
The branches of human tissue and limbs.
As producers of wry opinion search the causeway
To find some listener
Who might believe them.
24 April 1985
The
Mornings Have Become Cold
THE ARGUMENT OF THIEVES
I.
The argument of thieves begins
And leaves the seasonal motifs behind,
In the drawer.
These don't matter, when the thieves begin to impress themselves,
And convince themselves of inherent value in theft.
They are driven by lust, justified by political investment.
All the knowing people agree that the poor and criminal
Are victims of the system.
The rigid defend the system's fragile enormity.
The shadows find the void in the heavens
And find no sentry at the gate,
With words of the author's city.
The river overruns its bank.
The flood is a capacity for venom to reproduce.
And the scholarly obligation to feel guilt
For the genius of commerce.
The genus of mechanical cleft management
Leaves tears ever in the eyes of the daughters of men,
In the fists of rage of their sons,
Who use oblique measures to undermine
The stallion's exhibition in grace,
Undermining themselves
And undertowing their bow-tying children,
For a fathom.
It is so.
The raucous Summers of wealth in the country are gone,
Given up for the blank-slate conscience
Which is purchased
Through self-exacerbation.
II.
The pool never freezes.
The pool produces a thin skin of ice,
While the life-hungry formats
And the depth-hunting unmartyred penchants
Drive the water deeper into the clay,
Making room for the burying of gold and philosophical hay
(The treasury of the philosophical horse,
Less Trojan than Arabic perhaps,
More shetland islander even
Until the production of their rise).
I watch and find I want some assurances.
The buckles are broken.
The swords won't work; the belts hold only slanting air.
This is no gentleman's sport no gentleman's season.
The gloamers are built with anger
And built by the cunning production of corpses
From fruits, fallen roughly,
Out of palm-reach.
Yet, do not fear; do not lose hope.
Someone is near to my heart.
Someone is near my soul.
Someone is near to my heart.
Someone will catch my soul.
Shortly.
Before it falls.
3 July 1986
The
Son Rebels Against Rationalism
ON BEING RIGHT
The world is full of those who are right.
Especially here, in this land of beatific logic.
The rational know each move, each element of progress.
It is true:
Irrationality is no goal, no maneuver of accomplishment.
Yet, the regal talkers who oppose Love and approve only power,
Rational right, empirical chronological order,
Do not understand the living.
Some live and some proclaim.
Some live and some condemn.
Some live and some adore,
Abhorring life while adoring clean concept,
Frozen existence.
Ideological stew.
They who know what is right lick their lips and demand
Their turn upon the stage,
Their hand upon the wheel.
Let them live their emancipation.
Let them promulgate disease.
Let them circulate darkness,
Clandestine delights,
For suicide is a romantic pleasure
For those addicted to image-building,
Addicted to sleep orientation.
They are free, to be bruised by a backfiring notion.
For all of life is not accusation and generalized knowing.
Life is precise and imagistic at once.
Life is a fluid confluence of individual beings,
Much larger than generalized Truth,
For they are beyond, above, and uncontained by that Truth.
And, at once, ever governed by it.
4 April 1986
Ennui
and Reflection
A BOAT NEAR MY WINDOW
Talking to the wallhangings.
The hanging garden of abalone.
Fish for every pestle.
A flower for every grid.
As the rumble of thunder is measured by boatmen:
Thunder as metaphor; sea as its aspect.
Boatmen as symbolic impressions: a painting frozen in colonies.
Colors as villages of tints, landscapes of memento light.
Memories as fragment of shades,
Making color the sum of the light left exposed.
Clothes hanging on naked form:
The lightbeing and garments the shadows compose.
As wallhangings on the world.
As a necklace of bodies proposed to by suns.
All apparent in my room, as I study a painting
Of a boat near my window.
2 October 1985
A
Literature Class With Mrs. Mathewson
DANCING WITH MAGPIES
I.
Dancing with magpies in a February rain:
The mentality of cusp tutorials
And the crisp calculation of Oliver and the brain.
The stumped orphan and the organ-mender playing
"All Too Lightly Treads the Bone Among the Hungers."
Foodstuff served by Winter mentors out for sleep:
With the "Redistribution of Wealth" being
A primary topic of consideration.
While the children sell buttons,
And predict the statistical expectation
Of a desire to close the coat.
Hope springing eternal,
Among the urchins who count production.
On short fingers and with Belief's golden chain.
Dancing with pygmies while the instructor counts Joyce:
Joyce amid Joyce:
The circulantine imagery and the prospectus of doubling
Mumpers.
How many times does he appear in his peers?
Harf, harf!
Humor dog living in the heart of the heart of the country.
Caroler asking for Carol
Who might show the choir their glee.
In vocal range and in the beast of flesh:
Her collar is loose;
This unloosens the cords of the boys bound for octaves.
Irishwheat in the production of erectionary notes.
Amid American Heritage and Henry Miller rumors.
Gauche vendetta, and revolutionary blood.
Pricked by the needle of History,
Who despises, as such, the gale.
Who always dances with magpies.
In a February rain.
Saying, the gale, that is,
In the words of the wind:
"Come stand by my sheet
And from thee I might prosper."
II.
Dancing with the crow is not possible any longer.
The crow has sold her claws,
Thinking a beak is better to stand on.
She has no song, for her beak clings to twigs.
She watches young boys, out for profit;
And she speaks of illusion.
And who should know better than this shrew
Who hawks confusion?
21 March 1985
He
Wins a Poetry Prize;
He
Attends an Official Function with the Department Head and His Family
ANNOUNCING MISTER RANDALL
Announcing Mister Randall to the sea gathering:
It is rather like propositioning the sentry.
Utopian election.
Banquet funded by morosity.
Cells ticking of the clock
Minutiae.
Minutiae.
Cat's foundry: midnight oil.
Owls bartering mysterious pharoaseeology:
Learning from the delicate way of Miss Randall,
Daughter of the aforesaid.
She shows her thighs to no one.
She dresses with miraculous precision,
Leaving her jewels beside the bed
As she views, askance, her plums.
A harpy foretells that rich jewels fall.
Ministry of preoccupation: round about the tarp they roll.
The children of folly: not caring about precision.
Not caring about waste.
Not caring about devaluation.
While their fathers bleed in their bowels with worry.
The crab-apple supper: Midsummer Night's raid.
Apoplexy, for tuber's sake.
Cocksale in the morning: the finest voice has been found by the hen.
hearing about the military pride.
Too loo, too loo, too looreaugh!
Lay!
Henhearing and ovalevolution.
Stealing yeast from the baker's wench.
Horns produced by wending of ways.
All bells for St. Vincent.
Vincent and Vicentia: twice to be and be undone.
Twinacre of sentiment.
Twintoes produced by brine: baths twice weekly.
Let the children watch her lather;
Young boys with fists of iron,
Pounding Herculean meals of armor from their loins.
Indiscretion in rate.
The two eggs in the nest of news: if their sister doesn't tell.
About the pounding.
And the strange imprecision of moantempesttonia.
His family sits behind him,
While Mister Randall speaks about the Library Fund
Along the seawall.
21 March 1985
Attending
A Lecture On Architecture
TALKING
OF CORBU
I.
Talking of Corbu, the audience is golden.
All mirrors have been painted a shocking purple
And reflect only steeples.
The audience has bleu hands;
The clapping audia is thoroughly cold.
Stiff.
Corbu's alleyways.
Leaning metaphors in a lockaway.
Hocking pragmatic tension for pregenetic ruse.
From runes and starry principles.
In the language of mid-French preoccupating with angles.
Amid Angleterre.
Channels of turrets and charming elementia.
Harnessing the waves and furnishing the clay.
Fire-bred solid Earth.
the structure of a mechanized tune.
Harmony golden and blue; purple abrogation:
The words are built like towns,
Like winding characters through Rome's
Serpentine predicament.
II.
The speaker clarifies Corbu's indoctrination with formation.
Each angle is a clairvoyant pincer. Harking to a coming mood.
Sold to American prejudice toward thee:
Continental horror, in a gown producing
Cultural norms.
Bauhaus dowhouse.
Beauxarts crowshearts.
Shearing beauty from the queen.
Productive of higher tariffs
And crowning Utopia with thorns.
Like so many monuments for effective Monumentmania.
Lopping off the gleam.
With Marxian precision; and, as such,
Without notice of Life.
Walking of twos and then threes and then fours.
The building of serials.
Numbers being names.
Applause.
the ark harp plays silently,
A node of clarical sound imperative.
Harping.
Harping.
Shoes being looked at.
Crews waiting for recovery
Of programs and discarded ideas.
And looked at.
Crews with eyes of arch and axis.
And the broom.
Locking doors with their eyes.
Wives waiting at home,
Waiting in negligees for their boarders.
III.
Much circulation.
It is done.
The students walk in fives and speak of
Turning to the board.
Faculty make statements in the lobby
About understanding and the lack of direction.
The audience looks inside the reddened mirrors
To find their appearance.
Steeples are in the doors.
No one leaves for fear of some worship.
13 April 1985
Walking
With a Lecturer on Architecture
A SEPARATION OF WORLDS
The visit of a European voice.
The lecture of Mr. Kroll, Belgian Builder of Worlds:
Walking beside me,
Speaking of European modes,
Political docu-dormitants,
American apperception of privacy.
He was droll, confused.
Confused and droll, Herr Kroll,
Trying to speak to American ears
The desperate calling of European
Social insectaryanism.
Clear to the ear and fabled to approximations.
He looked for the social dimensions of architecture.
There were none.
Private buildings became private spaces.
Private men beside private women:
Walking in the sun, carrying a coat.
He could not comprehend it: this space,
This lack of desperation
(that entity which manufactures political will).
European mode of thought.
It was not here.
Europe was trying to lead.
America was leading; Europe could not find her.
Wishing political rigor made each object.
The structure of classaction architecture.
"Do you think the abundance of space in America,
The sense of fewer limitations, based on space,
On the youth of the nation,
On various histories of continents,
On a vision of limitless resources:
Do you think that these immediacies
Make our architecture quite foreign to
European expectations?"
He took pictures of a May Day rally
Against American investment in South Africa.
He did not know what to make of this land:
Either so far ahead or so far behind.
He did not understand American independence,
American individualism.
He scratched his head.
He could not comprehend it;
Still, he found this world somehow refreshing.
And, of course, this discovery ultimately troubled him.
Because it went against his training.
1 May 1985
Awakening
THE FOREIGN WOMAN'S EYES
I.
I saw it in the foreign woman's eyes.
It was something strange,
Something akin to love,
An intensity borne of an earlier love,
An earlier meeting.
She climbed the stairs in the outdoor cafe,
To eat in the Sun:
Her husband and son were climbing with her.
I met her eyes.
I had been surrounded all morning
By fleshy women in bronzed skin,
Showing off breasts and legs in shorts for suntans.
They were only so much scenery.
But she came, lovely, contained,
With black hair to her back,
Strange Greek eyes,
A white blouse,
A long red skirt.
She saw me,
Turned, told her husband they were not to sit here.
He wished to.
She insisted.
They descended.
They ate below,
On the lower deck.
She sat in such a place as to turn and look upward.
I watched her closely, with Love's fixed gaze.
Then, in time, she was gone.
Later in the day, as I rode a bicycle along the river:
They were walking in the park.
I passed, and felt her beauty,
Which was paradigmatic.
Her eyes were full of torment, and softness,
And capacity for gentle acquisition.
I lingered on her shoulder as I passed her,
Touching her cheek with my gaze.
I had known her before.
She was not new to me.
We had met.
We had loved perhaps,
In some season prior to memory's clarity.
I brushed her body with my thoughts
As I sped on down the path.
I returned.
She was helping her son on the teeter-totter.
Her husband rode one end;
The son the other, with mother ready to catch him,
Should he fall from his great height.
I watched her.
She knew I was there.
I strained to enter her.
To make her fell me on the inside.
And she did feel me.
My gaze was hard and isolate.
I rode by her.
The wind blew her skirt.
Her hair flew back.
She caught my eye.
I rode by, and stopped at the bottom of the hill,
Near a water fountain.
I turned in my bike.
They were coming down.
She led them, her step quick.
A child standing beside me was giving away kittens.
When her husband saw the kittens,
He hurried with his son, leading him to the cats.
She lingered, came close.
She was pleased that her husband loved his son so.
She stood near me.
My eyes pressed into her face, trying to catch her eye.
I did not dislike her husband.
He seemed dedicated to his family.
Yet, she was ripe for me, passionate, hungry.
I looked into her, made a link between us,
A magnetic field.
She felt it, looked up, around, catching my eye,
Glancing away, trying not to stare,
And be caught by my looking.
They walked away, to sit in the grass.
She was very beautiful.
All the other women I had seen that day,
The girls around me,
Were like insignificant children
Compared to this beauty.
Dark inside, like red wine,
With dark eyes.
Each side of her face, alone,
Seemed somehow tragic,
Somehow not complete,
Too much eye.
But, face to face,
Eye to eye,
She was the most beautiful woman
I had seen.
Stunningly lovely.
Soft, speaking Greek, or some other foreign tongue.
She was young.
She appreciated my capacity for heat.
II.
I rode away from them,
Several miles,
Looped around the river,
Over a bridge,
Then came back.
I stopped on a path across the river from them,
Hundreds of yards away.
I could see her red skirt.
I watched her, barely seeing her,
Waiting for her to move.
Eventually she did,
Rising from the grass,
To return from where she'd come.
There was a fishing boat below me.
And a kayak in the current.
Her husband walked behind her,
Holding his son's hand.
He looked down at the river,
At the kayak plunging through the rapids.
"Look!" he cried, pointing to the river.
His wife turned back, looked to the river,
And saw me watching her.
30 June 1986
The
Son Considers Exile
THE
ESCAPING OF THE HEAD
The head escapes.
It is hot; and the air becomes a Spring feast.
The vendettas (small creatures with hot irons)
Begin to pierce the skin with their demands for attention.
The invasion has begun.
The circle of distance in which the head has lived,
Has produced great miracles,
Is broken and becomes void,
Even attractive, accentuating forecasts.
The spears are carried in tongues made for
Obliteration.
The head is under siege.
The head breathes, longs for rhythms,
Longs for extended periods of isolation,
In which event he might re-create some mythology.
The angry perturbations (unfilled cramps)
Hurl bombs of emanations and constrictions
At his name,
Making him feel blame
And, although not shame,
Certainly unease.
For the air is free; it is a feast.
If he could only find it.
There is an open door.
He shall abdicate his kingdom.
He shall walk away from his throne,
Through the open door,
Into a land more poem than actualization,
More music than category of form;
He is led to a land where each movement is by sound.
He creates, from his own brain, his exception,
Which gives him back his life again.
12 June 1986
The
Son Opposes Plato and Marx
POLITICAL METAPHOR
It is a political metaphor,
That which pits bull terrier against german shepherd,
Which pits empiricism against dedicated rite.
A metaphor alone,
Neither as rich nor as noble as the act of brutal alignment,
The Packers against the Bears,
The Celtics against the Lakers.
There is nothing regal about the European forensics
Of East and West
And Intellectual system against Individual fatality.
There is something for everyone.
Individual fatality rules always as best metaphor of utopia.
For God helps those who help themselves.
No forced system of thought-action
Shall convince the men of Earth
That what is best for them is really ideology.
The man knows best that God moves and the man moves with Him.
The man knows best that responsibility for oneself makes
Giants out of children,
Out of boys too large for the breasts of their moms.
It is a political metaphor.
Ireland is a sow which eats its own piglets.
Russia is a beast which feeds its cow to the Great Machine.
Iran is a palette on which no color is laid;
Is an old woman who carries her coffin to the front
And pursues Death, believing Life is unattainable.
Each utopia builds graves.
Each utopia feeds furnaces.
Life exists beyond correct political metaphor.
Life is a tree which is never bruised,
Never burned, never cold, never neglected.
Life is a treasury, buried and unburied,
Which only the living can see,
And which the Caspian's desire to hate,
Believing the blackness superior to the laughter,
Believing neglect and ascetic indifference
The least remote grasp of heaven.
But they are wrong.
14 April 1986
A
Sense of What Is To Come
THE HORRIBLE DREAMS OF A MEDIOCRE EXISTENCE
I.
The horrible dreams of a mediocre existence
Come again and surround me like a club filled with jazz fans.
They are so superficial, these horrible dreams,
That I can scoop them out of their starry element
With a cup and scrape the bottom.
The dreams have no pain, no unease, no discernment:
Everything for effect.
I despise them, these horrible dreams,
For not having the capacity for imagination.
These horrible dreams are peopled with the fine people,
Jazz lovers, dancing women (improvisational, of course).
They have no children, or one child
By a man who is a genius
But who lives a thousand miles distant,
And does not know he is the father.
They have no bras, are free with their sexuality,
Especially with relation to young men,
Almost boys, whom they treat as a mother might her sons,
Who do not challenge the rule, the mendacity,
The cup half-filled with impervious dreams
Barely real enough (as dreams)
To be called anything but
Tiny voyages.
They come with the sun to surround the damaged birds.
Everything callow; every profundity made shallow,
As though easy discovery were, itself, the end.
Everything for effect.
Keeping score on who is hip.
Yes.
Hips built, not for love, not for love's encore,
But for advertising.
Mediocre at sex also,
Discussing it, as if it were a movie,
Something from which they are so detached
As to critique it, to give it a number.
There is something wrong in this.
They are not attached to Life,
And, so, they are dead to all feelings.
They are suspended from a branch,
By a rope around their waists,
Walking but never moving
And believing that they have seen each landscape.
As the ropes twist, they revolve;
Never moving really; scale never turned, twisted, expanded.
Victims of books they have read.
Victims of inability to be victims.
Surrounding me.
And showering on me their virtuosity.
God, have pity!
11 January 1986
The
Mind and the Body
IDEAS
FILL THE GRAVES
I.
Ideas fill the graves left by Mexicans who shoulder spades.
The dusk has gathered:
The cemetery is bold, blessed by the folding of the sky.
Night paints skeletal trees on gray backgrounds.
A dog barks.
The dust settles back in patterns on the ground:
Snowflake images, webbing membranes, airily sunused:
Now lying on monuments, scattered on grasses.
Amid ideas.
And the broken fork of afternoon.
A ruin, made of glass.
Like a simple sun, shattered by an omen:
Smashing on an earth when simple ideas evoked a form.
First form: enduring each manufactured romanceofstone:
Ideas being the shape of early touching,
Early misgiving, early fire.
Shaping living flesh.
Shaping History with a ladle,
History with a lathe.
Shaping: always shaping.
The Unshaped claymaker:
Making the shaper contact foil, and frost.
And ideas tend to fall when they meet unclear distinction.
Dusk is hollow, and experiences no love of pride.
Making Life superior to Thought,
Making harmony no ulterior judgment,
Making judgment no clear indictment.
II.
Ideas fill the graves; intellection takes on sound.
Poets lead; and then succeed Historians.
Prosaic menus carve new lengths,
New mandated legions of proud momentum.
Covering the lost expanding network of thoughts
And skillsensations with the fossilizing eve.
The men who dig the graves are gone.
The night is schooled to welcome wordformation.
In the tomb's clinical insight grows the next portentious era.
13 November 1985
Preparing
To Travel
THE UNNECESSARY LOGIC OF METEMPSYCHOSIS
I.
The unnecessary logic of metempsychosis
Becomes clearer each day;
The logic is unnecessary;
The philosophy, itself, is necessary to the regions of repose.
For the East is not hinged on logic,
Is not gate-hungry for systems of realism,
For catastrophes of sequence.
Yet the dream, the regions themselves,
Wherein transmission between forms
And transitions between lives,
When a man is inspired by the unlogic of proportions,
The animal entity of Eternity,
Which has a void for its companion:
This explanation of Jacob's Ladder,
Walking rungs, and ringing progressions,
Leaping imagery built by thought and eerie dream
Into understand,
Is the very basis by which the boat of Hope
Rides out each contagion.
II.
The logic is not necessary;
Yet the plaint is real and hard and not imaginary,
Although the imagination alone
Builds the boat which Noah called Home.
28 February 1986
The
Lost Years
UNTITLED
[In each life there are lost years,
Years which vanish,
Years which are not documented,
Years spent in obscurity,
In mystery,
In a kind of translucent movement between life and death,
Closer to death than to life,
Closer to ghosts and thoughts of extinction.
For our hero, too, there are lost years.
Some fragments are known:
He loved.
She was wed to another for two weeks
When they met.
They loved for many months, intensely;
Insanity ensued; a form of insanity.
Passion being mostly flame
And courtship of self-censure.
The courtesan of annihilation.
She was small, petite, beautiful.
She had long brown hair, a trim waist.
Her name was Leslie.
They were friends, lovers.
They were made for one another
Then it ended.
Our hero fled from southern Wyoming.
He traveled to the Pacific Northwest.
Soon thereafter his father died.
He returned home for the funeral.
Time vanished.
He again fled.
He courted, now, lost time, lost identity,
Lost satisfactions.
Love had been lost.
God had been lost.
Life did not dream now.
He descended, in doubt,
Descended to amorphous consequence,
Writing,
Losing seven years,
As if living in a cave.
Before waking again.]
PART FOUR.
DESPAIR (LOST LOVE)
________________________________________________
The
Walking Continues
THE GRANDEST NATURE
I search the grandest nature.
I search whole trees, whole eddies, vast plains and eerie canyons.
I walk in streets of clay, asphalt aviaries, salted mansions.
I walk for ever, looking for the sweet danger of Love's triangle passions.
It is a buoy of the heart, myself;
I seek to rise in the quest for longing.
Boy-man; man-boy.
Looking for his sweet match in a woman so fine,
So well-featured, intelligent but kind,
Capable of love and discretion both,
Capable of acceptance and self-acceptance,
Passion and unpretentious self-uncovering.
I see her now and then.
I meet her occasionally.
She means much to me.
For I am rich with women who feel superior to Suns
(In the water, the female fish are bigger than the males:
There is a lesson in this).
Yet I search for the one who does not think this,
Who is merely alive, as an individual being,
Unstructured by class and associations of class,
Uncategorical in life apostleship,
For she is blessed by being for ever-curious,
Having no pretensions of knowing the scheme,
Through which she might be larger than the drama.
It is she: I search for her.
18 July 1986
Older,
The Hero Continues to Look for Love;
He
meets Sari-Beth
WHAT
IS YOUR NAME?
I.
What is your name?
I have seen you in the remote ages,
Down along the avenue,
Where the carrion come down in cars bought at Jake's Service
For a tenth of their real value.
I have seen you in the straits,
In long evenings,
Unseen by the romeos in shortsleeves and productive tattoos
Who gather at opendoors to make words at passing Italian girls.
They do not see you because you are not Italian.
But I see you.
I saw you at the Salmon Garden, smelling flowers for a fee;
And asking the locators to find you a heaven before seven eleven.
I saw you listening to Springsteen, one April afternoon;
And casting julietic eyes at my grim memories of Sinclair Oil.
Straight out of sorry New Jersey ballads,
This noromeo from a desert of vows.
You saw me; you touched me with your query:
Long eyes, long enough to touch me;
Long enough to circle to globe;
And then be bored with such easy discovery.
What is your name?
Why do they call you Sari,
Those broken Italians with the long classifications
And verbal roots?
Is Sari your name?
Is it good, in the ghastly heritage of robes,
To cross with a girl who drives a Volvo
Highly wildly?
You tell me.
For you are good with words,
Good with dry concepts;
You look saucy in your summer dress.
If you are angry that I dwell upon your body,
I am human, when not unmoved;
I am curious to find a real nature,
Beyond primary manners.
II.
What is your real name,
You with legs perfectly naked,
And with your historical triangle
That you hide but fully accentuate?
A mid-summer night;
A car with drinking teens set for surfeit.
I walk along the avenue, cursing the rain,
And wonder where you might be.
1 June 1985
Part
Raven, Part Ecclesiastes
THE CALENDAR OF EVENTS
I.
The calendar of events: a walk with a blackhaired girl in the snows.
It is real, this embellished progress.
She laughs.
You hold hands and talk about sculpture;
And there is love in your propinquity.
Clayintensity.
Looking into a stranger's eyes.
She tells you about birds, in her movements.
She knows that she will soon fly; blushing:
Her Opera coat telling more than her predicament.
You talk of movies, art, philo-history.
She is smart, quick, can make you laugh.
The calendar of events.
She takes you home.
She is nervous.
You are dull, silent, deep in disbelief.
She wants you to leave, for you make her feel fear.
It is done: passing away into thoughtlessness.
She takes you home, plays Chopin on the musicbox:
Deep in her world, a world of dark sounds and occasional tenors.
She takes off her clothes.
She strips you naked, in her frenzy for discovery.
She is far away, more with Chopin
Than with the man she's disrobed.
You fall in her arms, more dream than flesh,
More misconception than actual ritual, a
Actual bonehardening man.
Centuries of failure are rolled in a night.
Her nakedness transforms the world.
The night is made for touching her skins.
Night passes.
Failure becomes rich, proud, satisfying achievement.
Yes. To life.
The calendar of events.
She angers easily, beyond the bedgrave.
Bliss without words: anxiety in contact.
The waking hours are strewn with soliloquies:
Disastrous unions: disappointments.
She sees you as others might see you.
Your imperfections more real than your virtues,
Those inescapable invisible burdenvirtues,
So important but so littlevalued.
II.
She grows weary of your stoic grace.
Excitement.
Craving a world of delight.
Recognitions of another sort.
Another man: the calendar of events.
The man of the alter-eccentricity:
If you and he were fused
She might find you.
He is lacking emotion, body, generous tactile capacity.
You are lacking worldly movement,
A master intellect's understanding;
Social consciousness makes for his virtue.
She rolls between understandings:
An electron in search of a proton.
A calendar of events.
You ask her to marry you, to live with you.
She chooses the other, that man with common affection,
Quiet grace, who does not make her mad.
Her desires are left in trance.
Her flesh is not redone, not savaged, which she must have --
But does not have.
Making madness a life and a death in consorting.
As depression reminds her of former calls.
The walls close in.
Winter decapitates.
You are somewhere.
She telephones you.
She tells you you are someone, actually.
She wants to sleep with you,
But for her loyalty to the man who keeps her.
She weeps in your arms,
Wanting only satisfaction,
Wanting only understanding.
III.
The calendar of events.
It is winter again.
You walk the streets alone at night.
It is good to be alone again.
There is wonderful capacity in the stillness.
The calendar of events.
Nothing changes perhaps:
But the calendar of events keeps certain ills
From becoming chronic.
And catastrophe is soon forgotten.
Every day misbecomes
And creates continued blessings.
12 November 1985
The
Boat of Storm is Prepared
HARMONY
AMID THE RUSE
Harmony amid the ruse resembles a candle amid the clouds.
The dark harness of each storm makes the taper loud
Only when the listener stares.
My love walks without shadows
And proclaims a real devotion.
I see that her words are true,
If without lyrical impress.
I understand that her tempest heart,
Though always proud,
Carries proof that she can care.
And, in this, there is all knowledge.
The pleasure of each caress teaches harmony endures.
In the storms and the ruse of automatic cures,
Love alone produces all;
And manufactures each new age.
11 March 1985
A
Memory: The Fountain of Bearcats
THE EMANCIPATION OF SORROW
The emancipation of Sorrow comes when the wound is made a sea.
Washing white linen in a fountain of blood.
Blood union, tearfully made:
My walking wife makes a crosswise road,
And in the wake is a sterling reef she has gathered.
Horticultural suspension.
The hand in the clay renders the principle unknown:
In the grave of a solitary virtue.
Separation.
Working.
Seeking.
Wounded walking Lover seeks a wife in this town of leaves.
Spring or Autumn?
Sing or Spot Him?
Binocular precision.
The grace of not knowing.
The pace of Belief.
A tortoise on a shell shore.
The man she most believes is hers.
The man she must conceive as Love.
What else is there to touch?
What other is there to grasp, to feel solidly and to be pained by?
Pain always.
Pain before understanding.
Pain beyond jargonistic intellection.
The penis and the womb.
The mouth finding flesh expression.
A soul torn.
A memory pulled, wrenched: familial mayorality.
Morality's experienced bower.
Morality's essential shower.
Where is he?
Where is this man
Who knows Silence even better than he knows
Yourself?
Walking.
Talking.
Separated by the town tower:
Leaves wearing emoluments:
Precise temporal dictation.
Tempest tower and the solitary sentry:
Glowering on unmoved Space
And always gathering the world with vision.
Yet, he returns.
He returns from his fountain of Sorrow.
He returns from his wound and soiled linen.
The dream is made from the marrow of his expression.
The extension of his walking doctrines:
The lands that he has moved simply by walking.
And by being who he is.
Unsullied hypocrisy.
11 April 1985
Nights
With the Student of Psychology
AND
HOW I LOVE TO SLEEP WITH HER
I.
A floral arrangement for the woman.
A child of New York.
A mind of acquisition.
A heart somehow not florid yet.
Jewishmatron in her blood.
The arthritis of psychoabstraction.
Clinical measurement: sane, not-sane; sane, not-sane.
Fighting to keep the light lit.
The impractical armageddon against feelings.
Slowly swallowing her new limbs.
Flesh against flesh.
Harmony against Imagined Callings.
And how I love to sleep with her!
How I love to touch her precision!
The imagery of Tyrant Psychology:
Boxes for every new thought to be placed in.
Giving way to the urgency of touch.
To the no-longer-anonymous thought
Of the man who wishes to keep her.
He loves her with both fist and air,
Both fury and despair--
Unless she kills him with her shell,
And rolls him over with her "analytical technicalities."
Losing while she wins; gaining, only in abstraction.
Her breasts illumine the atmosphere.
The clean strings of her vagina play a song so clear
That he who plucks is made a trancer.
Dancing for the virtue of dance.
Answering her frustration with silent
Patience and allegiance.
The center of the wheel.
"Impenetrable!" she cries.
Yet, she has found him: inexplicable union.
Opposites attract, and, in attracting, re-create.
II.
A floral arrangement for the woman.
In the time it takes to build a world,
The union of Tempest and Solid Oak exclaim a word:
And are thereby solved.
23
March 1985
Ode
to the Goddess Eros
THE
IMMOBILITY OF LOVE
I.
Love cannot move.
Love moves the world, but Love cannot move.
Love sets in motion each element of Time,
Each particle of mail;
Love carries sea to shore,
And burns each field with elemental war.
Love transforms the hips of the maid,
Sets them to twitch beneath the hurried ardor of her man.
Love creates mountains and designs city stones;
Love imperils delicate showmen who think that
She might be caught;
Love makes poets fools, and wisemen surly;
She makes conquerors feeble, and old women weep.
Yet, Love does not move.
It is the world which moves, set in motion by Love's heat.
The world circles on, and, in time, returns to Love;
Yet, Love never leaves;
She always waits and, in waiting, triumphs.
II.
I have come back to you.
It is the soul of you I love,
That massive potential in your bones,
That legendary city in your brain.
I stroke your private corridor of flesh:
It makes my brain produce children.
I kiss your breasts, and the flowers of your breasts.
It is the soul of you I love,
That missive world which you have wrought
From the perils and daisies of your serial completions.
It is the totality of you I love;
There is no able segmentation to perform.
When I love your body I love your heart.
When I touch your mind I find your soul.
Love cannot move.
The canon of our motion tells the story of flesh and salvation.
When I walk in the new canvas of Spring's true clothes and hopes,
I shall look to see your shape and to find clairvoyant emotion.
29 March 1985
A
Trumpet Handed to the Driver
WALKING
HOME FROM THE BANK
A silvery thread of life:
Elfleaf and a moving brain:
The small wonder of Natura's thought invective.
Trumpeting dis-grace: the unmoved tupperware encyclopedia of understanding.
Like monuments to the showing slip.
The child groin and the slipper of upper lips:
Stiff like a coiled endeavor.
Cold like a Herculean lien: the bank taking its effort to task.
Taking its leopardskin titanic lore to mask
Unclean endeavor to pandemonium.
The innocuous leverage of the banknote.
Passed from the pocket to the mainbrain:
In terms of numbers which build a world.
Not knowing that the world is fat, flat-featured, and with pockets of billiardlives.
Milliardlives.
Humble and nothumble.
Thimbled in a cleavedweaved tarantella.
Guaranteed to bring rain;
Guaranteed to furnish the wind with elementia.
Tokens here and tokens there.
Throwing in the kitchen zinc:
Untutored prosepoem written by the wheel of delinquent rhyme:
My Call Jaune Cleric.
Overandoveragaingst.
Two slippers and four feet.
Natura's invective of notenoughforthee.
Notenoughtfortheo.
Like moonuments to a slowing crypt.
Darkness built for speed: on a bicyclebuiltfortwofortu.
Adding meaning without adding sense.
Nondirected lux.
Lit terrain and the one who plucks it:
The lighter of the gasnightlight.
As I walk from the bank toward home amid my images.
A ladder in my brain.
Stars leaping by a grainysidewalk.
A trumpet handed to the diver.
In his eye is a declaration.
He can't see me, as I think about loving Sari.
Greedy pleasure makes my knees knock.
23 May 1985
The
Oregon Coastline
THE
ROCK IS NOT BELIEVED
The rock is not believed.
The sandpiper hurls tiny threats at the sea.
Water laughs at such insistent abandonment.
Hurls its massive force against the wall of stone,
At the tiny laughing piper who dances mildly out of reach.
The stone bellows cold invective at the sea.
They live in grim accord, the Immobile and the ever Fluid.
The ocean has great appeal in her rhythm;
Her hungry destruction,
The imageless depth within her wheels.
This is rarely believed, until experienced as a rage;
The stone is considered almost savage,
Wildly primitive in its solidity.
He is not moved;
His stoic grace is considered rude;
His analytic pride makes particle sand try to drown him.
And, so, the rock is not believed.
The Moon descends to charm the sea.
She evades the guardian stone by casting moods on the air
Made of fog which can blind him.
The morning is serious in impressions of deception.
When the Moon is gone and the Sun is king,
The stone is made clean and begins jousting with his lover.
12 April 1985
The
Jewish Woman and the Catholic Man
STANDING
IN THE GODFATHER'S HOME
Standing in the Godfather's home.
A ritual of catholic imperative.
Prognostication of preparations.
Looking for the wife who has new shoes,
New laces and stately Latin vision.
Unknowing, beyond the catacombs.
As I wander in their shadows,
A small misery in a larger canon.
Taking whips from the shale of metaphor.
Whips and widening categories:
Mass equals the speed of light times twice the extent of genesis.
Energenesis.
Equals mass times the principle of light, in a square.
Body imagery being the condensation of potential energy.
Light qualified into exegesis.
Inneremphasis:
Nothing changes one's lifestyle faster than Necessity.
Says the nun, none too cheerfully.
Visiting the Godfather for some wheat.
Donated to the house of clergy.
Baked in the imagery of heat.
Blackwidow without a husbandman.
Under the sun of a middday service, in the wind.
No wife for me here, in the imagery of moons.
The sweet Jewish princess named Sari
Makes me forget about the daughter of the king
Of the land of sand.
When she repudiates me for my mythology.
And cures me with a breath of experience.
13 June 1985
First
Separation:
The
Other Man Escorts Sari to the Airport
THE
WOMAN ABOUT TO TRAVEL
I.
The woman about to travel calls and no one takes her home.
Vulnerable to age.
Venerable with beauty.
Her flesh and wish beyond recall.
The call, however, is not returned.
A plane is in the fields and rain.
A thought.
A second thought.
Wondering where the lion went.
The hot pudding of thought.
The hot tonic of love: waiting on the bridge.
Waiting for the recircled heir.
A bald man as the cumulative host.
Not walking too close.
Unburning of momentum.
A walk.
A second walk.
Dinner among the Chinese.
Rain torturing each glass.
Troubadours unremembered, like frozen aspects on a sash.
Leaning.
Pizzaleaning.
Teetering.
Aspenwithering in a thought.
Why did he not call her?
The plane begins to turn.
She will be leaving soon.
He wished a night with her,
A frantic mouth, her hands against his thigh.
The bald man is good to her.
But the calendar is rheumatic;
Bombastic is the tick, the icy virtue, of the clock.
And punishment seems so grand, for a crime that none can know.
Walking.
A second walk.
Flowers in a vase he sent to her.
Word of love: "I love you, Sari."
She doubts, and fears her doubts.
He wishes to smell her naked body once again:
The furious pleasure in his mouth.
The rioting trance inside his brain.
Speaking fury and love and richness and sorrow.
With a kiss.
A touch.
She feels him naked against her,
Holding her,
Holding for ever.
II.
A phone rings.
She is not near to forgive him,
To forgive him a glance,
A word not delivered.
She regrets her travels.
His body is a fire.
In his arms she is golden.
The bald man tells her a bad story
About indiscretion.
He buys her tonight's dinner;
She listens for the phone, and hears, instead,
An engine's jets.
29 April 1985
He
Begins to Swim
WAITING FOR HER WORD
I.
Waiting for her word to clarify my purpose.
Waiting for incipient laws of logic
In the pattern of emotional brewerage to come.
Winemaking.
The wine of blood.
The water of sorrow.
Married to the whim.
The whim of kiss and tell tales;
Hiss and sell nails.
All according to myth.
Eros's knee.
Stroked by gorgeous Europa.
Blonde questsectarian with thighs made of cheese.
Free tastes and euroecclesia.
For the prophet smokes a pipe here:
In the realm of logical love.
In the realm of undisturbed cause for concern.
Not here, however;
Not in the grim apron of Sarah and Michael's verbal duet.
Not in the rich imagery of Saturday conquest:
Walking on the Moon with her, t
This child of wealth and rags
Who asks for hearts
But loves the cold: clear abstraction.
Love.
The pain of the root issue.
Power against grace.
Power against suggestion.
Power and notpower.
Power and life.
Power and discharge.
Power and lust.
Power and softness, touching in an evening.
Power and chaosforce: length of notknowing.
Power and taste: the highest standard.
Power and flowers near the window.
Sent from her lover, Michael,
Who makes her suspire.
Power and license.
Power and guilt.
Power and parental ghostmechanism,
Watching and jabbing,
Not letting go.
Power of the womb.
Powerofprayer and the cockmocker.
Cockoldlover and discoverer.
Lastlover of silver.
Lover of goldmiracles.
Solid lyrical impressarios:
Memories of a past achievement.
She who loves wages: wages of sin and ages of virtue.
A cat and a crooner;
Solitary learner with her black hair
Of appointment.
Not as black as his, as mine:
Shadowbanker, who mines her treasury.
She is wisest when she learns best;
She is smartest when she loves me most;
She is prettiest when naked; loveliest in surrender.
Beneath the moving finger
Designed for pleasure.
To make the world right.
In the breeze which moans for she:
Lyric and tragic:
Happy in consternation:
She of a thousand descriptions.
Made happy by the wind.
Made heartless by the whim.
Discretionary torture.
The feeling as a crux:
Carried by mental secrets as verbs.
Activity toward satisfaction.
Waiting for the warm bed and the warm breeze:
A word of knowing:
A word from the boss,
Who makes worlds through clear understanding.
II.
In the town without pity;
A hot tin roof hat;
Mischance and violent earrings.
The taker has his head up.
His eyes are on the vamp,
The harlot,
The queen,
Equally saint.
Beauty and horror,
Lover and mate,
Tormentor and mentor,
Lustmachine and bird:
All in a corporal format,
Giving words of the wise
To the waiters for certain purpose.
And I love her.
Why is it so?
Why does the water rise?
Why does the godheaven transpire rain
In September?
Why is her face revoking;
Why do her thighs give dreams,
Great stupors which mimic trance?
I love her for her words, her hatreds, her menstrual race;
For her country kenship,
Her luscious Ientcentive,
Her ritual words,
Her grace in a tight dress.
I love her for flesh and blood and religious creation;
I love her for each face she creates
And wears according to the wind.
And to the wheel of Time's forging heavenclock.
Arms which unlock life.
Legs which unburden penalterrorforce.
I love her, for she is mine.
She was sent through centuries' blockades,
Millennial crusades:
Through each plague and war
And hysterical distention,
Through persecution and risk on the sea:
She was sent to me, by the gods of planandpurpose.
She was sent as my great gain,
My charm against elemental distortion.
I love her for she is herself:
She stands; and I stand beside her.
19 June 1985
Waiting
For Her Word
THE SALVATION OF MAIL
The salvation of mail brings Sure Understanding a placid delivery.
Association with rites.
Unconscious unbecoming.
Waiting for usual associations.
Unusual paraccompaniments.
Waiting for word from thee,
Minister of ills, minister of pain.
Womanofbreasts and thighs with memories of hot ointment:
A letter is not so much.
The memory fired with rich fingerpainted types:
The womanofbones and unbleached fury,
Who clasps me between legs of unmeager clay:
To tear out my sorrow and make frenzied motion
A sacrament alone,
To itself like a firstdiscovery.
Undiscovered in the mail.
The word: in the bellished hay.
Unfull, beside the flesh.
The naked torso of the breathing beauty.
Inspiring my magnet with abrogation.
Making the wheel seem small.
Making Luck almost gone.
But for the brash happening of mercurial love:
A tempest in the veins.
Making it rich.
Making it a word of love,
A word of hate,
A word of abandonment.
Nothing is frightening;
Nothing really is so hard.
Inside the envelope of love: anything goes.
Any cruel paradise will seem real here.
Any kind hell or crumpled rose;
Any real marriage of torture and rain.
It is bold, uncurled, a lip, a kiss, a winding stair.
Leading to mail.
Leading to a word.
Leading to unstopping parrotage.
For parentage is too bold,
Too sincere to be dismissed so surely.
Parentage is too real.
And too blessed
Not to be fought by thee,
Sweet child of Youth
And demander of ungray ferals.
But the letter is not here; it does not come.
No word from this Jewish American Princess.
No word from my wife who comes to me only on offdays:
Everyotheryear:
Bringing salvation in a legal prose.
Watching the world change from her vantage of safety:
Intellectual Paraecclesiastes.
Without words to give to the boyman,
Who waits in the porridge of Summer,
Waiting for a word,
For a description of the fortitude of Love.
But nothing comes.
And he becomes tired.
29 July 1985
Some
Romance Is Lost
WHERE HAS LOVE GONE?
I.
Where has love gone?
Where is the bright face, the brown eyes,
The Opera brand jacket that you wore when I first saw you?
Where is your love of banter,
Your love of newness,
Your fear lest I have you,
Or, perhaps, have you not?
Where is your mind, so hinged for analysis?
Which defeats you, more often than not.
Which depicts you with reflexion,
For the power of your memory is often greater in detail
Than was your life in extenuation.
Is it Love, who creates madness?
The madness in which you convince yourself
That to love me is to perish.
There can only be one genius,
One temper of lyrical greatness.
And it would be you;
You will not play the secondary role to me,
Or to another.
You will find the humorless man,
The stiff undimensional man,
And you will be his genius,
Be his brain, his artist, his extravagance:
Until he again bores you,
And you wish again for the dark-hearted romance
Of creation.
And then you will look for me,
Or for one like me,
One who writes poetry to you,
Which you must dismiss,
For to recognize greatness in this world
Would be to give away power
In the form of praise.
And this implies a shrinking of yourself,
In relation to your mate;
And so you prefer your own image, to his image.
Your own creation, to the one of myself,
And those like me,
Whom you find to be mad with desire
And rage and dreams and magma.
II.
Where is your love now?
Where are your dreams?
I know you have comfort now,
You have superior position.
But where is the passion, the flesh, the danger, the dark love,
Making your womb ache and stretch and explode;
Making your heart heave, your breasts swell, your skin extend,
Opening you up to sorrows?
Time has gone.
Time has built walls out of experience
Around castles which become ourselves,
And leave us together, but hidden,
Unable to see, not only ourselves, but also one another.
It is sad.
I would like to see you;
But you are in some other land now.
I cannot reach you.
You are dreaming perhaps;
But the clock is wearing motors.
And all my needs are becoming hard and unnoticed again.
6 June 1986
The Earlier Condition
WHERE HAS LOVE GONE?
Where has Love gone?
Where has the cavernous ample clarity I knew,
When I was young, enervated, rich in salt,
Sultry with lust for human nymph parity,
When I was young and lusty and regal with looking:
Where has it gone?
I am the servant of two minds.
I am the servant of dual amplitudes.
I am the master of several zones: combat and commendment.
Beyond Love.
For Love has no master,
No name to be known by
For men who garland honors.
Talking sideways, through a fertile girl.
Her legs bowed.
Her thighs deep with desire.
Her face the same as the moon.
Offering inverted pyramids for glory.
The meat of surgical precision.
With a smile, a word of goodness.
And soft embrace:
The night is meant for the simple caress.
Has it gone?
For good?
As I walk alone, looking for such glories.
Of night.
Of the simple caress.
Has she gone for good?
If I call out her name, and no one answers,
Must I freeze?
6 December 1985
Why
Am I Here?
I
HAVE COME HERE TO DISCOVER SOMETHING TRUE
I have come here to discover something true.
I have come here amid stone and sea and virtue's weavings;
Among talks, with broad knocking tales of brave sons of cavemen;
Amid horned trees and vapid mornings made by long nights
And fighting cloud-demons;
Among horses made for iconography;
Eagles made for warfare;
Fair women made for pious foreplay;
Bears made for mountainous flight;
Men made for unserious post-operative symptomatic dichotomy.
All these things, these beings and motionless symbols
Seem as empty to me as does the sky,
Though it is full.
Full with the thick vapor of space itself,
Not empty surely, but full, dense with blood-light,
The plasma by which each early circle
Can touch each late one.
Each end of the world passes through its seeming adjutant.
That is true.
That is something true: amid this rumination,
Amid twisted imagery.
It is true that space is full and that time is the form of space
(Although the Germans argue this).
It is true that feasibility is the wrong term to use
When discussing the motion of planets and gods;
Even more is the term probability.
For nothing moves unless moved.
Nothing undoes except the thing, alone, which can do.
And so I sleep now.
Understand that Truth is near.
And that tomorrow shall bring sun and lightly-clothed young women.
That is a truth also.
Their bodies in the thin spring colors make me smile.
Even more than does the truth that Space is filled by paroxysms.
6 March 1986
The
Conquest of Homes
WHAT IS HER MEANING?
What is her meaning?
She speaks in ambitions of hostility.
She speaks about issues as though they were meant to armor
Left against right,
Black against white,
Women against men.
What is her cause, so noble as to be true,
So requited as to be feasible?
She is capable of great hate,
Believing the world to be conformable to her ideas;
She does not understand that the world conforms
To God alone,
And to God's ideas.
And so she raves.
27 may 1986
She
Returns
A
MORNING WITH THE SHREW
I.
A morning with the shrew.
Unreal expectation.
The bogus of Love and the Lyrical.
Her appeal a quaint invective.
Harmony undone, as such.
Making penal authority blanche.
The trumpet given to serfs.
The strumpet given her worth.
Unmaking of the queen, as she harps like a lurid jay.
Accusing me of toxic pride.
"Your foundation is too rigid: a crack: your world is done!"
Yet my world is eternity.
So the proctor says.
The Mind is period and gun.
Transmutations of the shoe.
The woman who looks for "problems,"
Who thrives on the nature of crisis.
"Life is not a problem to be solved!"
This response undoes nothing.
"I do not look for problems!"
A man-mirror, walking down a man-road.
Flaubert's flouting grammeria.
Art carnie.
A tea venal carnival of woe.
As some still spurn historicity.
Choosing European mood and rejecting pro creation.
For Death is light, it seems, when it wears Parisian gowns.
And she harps against my relics, my two memories:
Time and Assumption.
In an Eastered bloodied heart: one does rise and one does fall.
In the circularity of too much meat,
Too much surface and one-too-many mentors.
Her mind condemns her soul;
And makes of me that mirror she abhors.
II.
I would marry this acid beatitude,
Who, in my destruction,
Would find herself free?
Who might make herself weep,
For sorrow is freedom's carriage?
I feel the whip of Time.
Salvation on the roan.
A team of circling stories.
A shrew for the blessing of words.
A shrew who could show me a rainbow.
Her skirts are black and sometimes cold.
If I love this woman it is because I require it.
If I would walk away, she would sing some dirge.
She would lament my demise.
And then the world would become lost.
There was a young woman who lived in a shoe.
A shrew she was truly.
When she was not the element of Beauty.
2 April 1985
She
Has Chosen the Other
HIDING
IN THE MOON
Hiding in the moon.
Servitude amid parts.
While the men who wish mostly to fail
Circle about their prey:
The women begin to wonder
Who really will be the game?
One is rejected for refusing to bend.
He circumlocates in a prosaic sermonicism.
Bending to the wheel at times;
While those who worship black divinity
Prepare for their supper (white face and all!).
He hides inside the Moon: no one can find him.
Not even the latenight call can make him surface.
She wants to sleep with him; he must not go to her.
He invites her to sleep in his bed,
Opening his house to her.
She refuses.
It is her house wherein she rules,
Her house which is her harbor.
Yet, her house is up for sale.
In three days' time she will have to move.
(Where will she move, this Moon who both loves and fears him?)
He asks her to wet him.
She takes another boyman.
She screams that he is dull,
That he cannot comprehend her.
Someone hides inside the Moon.
The Moon abandons one, seeking control.
This Moon dons a black cape.
She tells him that his poetry has failed.
He wonders why she feels she needs to destroy him.
29 April 1986
Their
Love is Near Death;She Only Smiles When He Speaks of Magic
THE
SURLY MOOD OF APRIL
The surly mood of April brings the contest close to home.
All elements appear in congested dimension:
Face to face, like rocketing canine.
Bulls for the hercules' mate.
Cows for the hedonist's seed.
Antlers to keep the chorus.
Rocks in a salty marsh.
Surly moods among menkind.
Profiting from the women's presence.
Wounding each other for elements of joy.
Loin eerie and built for speed.
Powerheritage marks the muscular walk along the broadways.
Down the boardwalks people freeze and fall.
Pockets full of rhyme.
Flowers in craving hands.
The caterwalk of children, in the futures of present romance.
Sperm whales along the corridor.
Ishmael thinking to knock off hats.
Looking for his Indian friend.
In the surly mood of April storms.
Warming trends and lovers' retreat toward islands.
The dark hand of Cancer hovering like nails above the brain.
Set to fall on the crawling primitives on fours:
They who live below the sight line.
Small men confronted by images.
Power vacuum filled by sleepers,
In the bodies of discourse and heart.
Content in contemplation.
For Death cannot reduce them.
And empty temples are forever filled by the meek.
The surly moods of April come:
She believes her man is dead.
She wants to escape him.
He longs for the open seas.
The surly moods of April dawn:
The bull is found and mortifies good conscience.
The light is hurled by Titans
From the mountain into the sea.
The only indication that progress is seen
Is the way in which my love softens her anger
When I speak about our children.
13 April 1985
The
White and the Red
GLORY
IN A CRUMPLED ROSE
Glory in a crumpled rose.
Flowers sent to his lover found cast upon the concrete.
An effort of love, meant for water in a marble vase.
To be gazed upon for days.
Sisters White Rose and Red Rose and a sprig of camellia:
Scattered on the driveway.
Found by himself that night upon a visit.
Too much cymbalism for comfort.
The crashing together of diet tribes.
Unending metaphors: names designed to cut and kill.
The two not eating of Desire,
Instead of War.
Each ingesting spurious worlds.
Uneating contest: hours together meant for crisis.
And, through the words and tears:
Flowers scattered on the concrete.
She claims he is a ghoul.
Flowers scattered on the concrete.
She cries that he lies, that he sleeps and cannot be known.
Flowers scattered on the concrete.
What happened to the flowers?
She declaims you a fool,
That you have no sense of mind:
An idiot heldfast to the womb.
"You are not my mental match!"
She proclaims you damaged the night,
Which was meant for tender affection.
Flowers strewn upon the driveway.
She says that you are a child;
That you need to see a doctor,
For your mind is not receptive -- to her genius.
Somewhere, flowers cast upon the concrete.
At six o'clock that morning,
The young man had cut white roses and red roses
And a sprig of camellia from the bushes at his home.
He had mounted his bicycle,
Ridden two miles to her home,
Left the flowers near her door
With a poem he had written.
It was the young woman's birthday.
He was sure that she would like them.
20 April 1985
He
is Again Alone
THE STUPIDITY OF TALK
The stupidity of talk moves me most when I am lonely.
The stupidity of weak phrases,
Designed to calculate petty imagery,
To deify cloven pettifoggery and dreamconsequence:
I am solitary.
I am lonely.
Words are not found to describe my only sorrow:
Separation from easy talking.
The winter has claws it uses to mark the silent ones.
Spiders of life, weaving threads into a gown,
Living within a strike zone.
And finding talk stupid,
For I have no response.
21 December 1985
Moved
More;
And
Becomes Remote
LOVE,
IN A FIELD OF STONES
Love, in a field of stones.
The unbelieving one believes
She thinks and is therefore real.
Being the victim of each Thought,
Each Essential Being,
Incorporeal,
Who twists her moods.
She gleans from plastic experience the coil;
From the sea she harvest stones alone,
Scattering on the beach the precise image of her ordering.
She tests the man who loves her most,
Freezing him solid when he threatens he might know her;
She comprehends the imagery of knives;
She believes her mind sees most clearly the thing
On which she gazes
But, instead, she sees her thoughts.
Waxing and waning.
He has her love, and then she recoils.
Whether she dreads possession more than she yearns for touch --
This he can't tell.
Each in its own time;
Each element of experience in its own arena.
He is not rapturous any longer.
The woman on the beach, standing in the stones,
Is much too real for rapture.
She guards her doors;
She condemns her man for being a guard.
She shrieks that he is dumb.
He hears; but he is moved more by the remote.
Listening to "The Boys of Summer"
He no longer hears here.
21 May 1985
Again,
He Begins to Walk
HER
POWER IS DONE
Her power is done.
Her power to choose two men,
To use two men to please her,
And to shower her with treasures,
Each only partly true,
As to satisfying her demands:
This power is done.
Something has happened:
The one she loves the most,
Whom she tortures and bleeds,
At whom she screams and proffers accusations:
He has turned from her.
Other women wish to be with him,
Less critical women,
Less vengeful in their order.
She punishes him for days,
Accuses him of irresponsibility:
Then invites him to her bed.
Victory in her hem.
He says no.
He invites her to his bed,
But will not go to hers.
She had controlled him;
Her will and her womb were conspirators.
But then he said no.
He was concerned with her infidelities,
With her tyranny and self-appointment.
It was a game to her, this angry manipulation,
This frenzy to change, to re-create,
Rather than to know.
She determines to cure him;
She does not know him, but determines to save him.
There is no equality here:
She is the doctor,
He is the patient;
He is the loser;
She can help him win.
Yet, she has lost her power.
He is no longer desperate to see her;
He no longer cries of his love for her
(At which she so often scoffed);
He seems alone now.
Her flesh is good;
Yet, she must grow up.
She cannot have two men.
She cannot have her way.
30 April 1985
He
Understands the Luxury of Melancholy
COURTING THE MISTRESS
SORROW
I court Sorrow.
She is a queen with a broad face.
She is soft, with wry features.
Her body is a graceful arc,
Yet does not appear as a sexual creation.
She almost has no form,
At least to the ones who court her so.
To others, those who recognize her virtues,
Her physical peculiarities,
And imagine the wealth inside their elements,
She is probably not Sorrow at all;
Rather, to these, she is Love,
She is Sex,
She is Desire,
As queenly as Sorrow,
But without the quicksand skin
And the eyes as deep as water wombs,
Which trigger reflection,
Captivity of the past,
Even when against one's will.
But to me, she, at his moment, becomes Sorrow.
She will give one, as Sorrow, many gifts.
Yet she will demand solitude, for these gifts.
She will make your airs dark, brooding,
Alone, capable of violent explosions,
Of graceful trances lasting aeons
Along dark waterways,
Rivers of endless philosophical
Amphibian soliloquies.
She is proud of her trumpet,
Delighted with her animal-capturing glory,
Her skill in procuring such a trophy as yourself.
She delights in depression.
Like Isis, she resents that hot outpour of a
Spiked hungry man;
She desires the man motionless and filled with
Weighty antagonisms,
Incapable of flight;
For, thus, she can control him,
She can have her way here,
Rule the world,
As he falls into that void of
Sightless connections,
And slips into the world ruled by
Angry diatribes and hairy metaphormonsters, t
Those who conquer gods in patalas
And shells of everlasting storms:
For, she lives where epics lie.
She presents pain, to the fallen god,
In accord with legends.
She smiles.
She loves his loss.
She idealizes his hurt nature.
She forces the Sun to end his day
In such a way,
Lying in the straw,
Eyes closed;
And, of course,
She holds the candle.
30 January 1986
Analyzing
Loss
THE HISTORICITY OF SORROW
I.
Is there an historicity of sorrow?
Is there a consideration of each emotional transaction,
Each emotional tradition,
Which leads the morose,
Leads into maladdiction?
The archives of sorrow are immense.
The archives of the tradition of sorrow even grander
And made more for the multiplicity of extreme unctions
Than any real historical appeal to form or format.
Yet, it is sorrow nonetheless.
The missing bride, the missing matter.
The lost ghost of Love;
The established ghost of function.
Looking down all alleys to find the historicity of sorrow --
That is, the elixir through which such emotion,
Such tradition,
Can be known, broken, beaten, given appendices alone,
As an afterthought, a footnote,
Something once real and necessary,
In terms of juxtaposition to present fact,
Giving the present pleasure some confines
In which it might find valor or justification
Or, at the very least ,appeal.
II.
Sorrow never leaves totally.
It is fatigue, on a personal scale.
It is the swift wound, the slow foraging momentum.
It is built on Love and on Love's clear building.
It is built on Pleasure's grainy memory,
As if Sorrow, herself, were merely shadow and uncouth mass,
Negative mass,
Which, when placed beside the empty quality
Succeeding massive attraction, flowered action,
Describes not so much what is lacking
But, even more, what never was.
What was always near
But only an approximation of the taste
Compressed by imagination
Into one second of unreal anticipation
And scent.
2 June 1986
He
Does Not Move
RECAPITULATION OF
PRINCIPLES
Recapitulation of principles:
The woman would change
The man who won't move.
He is anchored to God
And to God's eternal precision.
She desires most that he recognize Virtue,
That he see her own precision.
He does not move.
He exists, and challenges Change.
He loves her, but will not accede to her will.
She fights with him, accuses, derides him.
She hurls brutal invective; he will not move.
He loves God first and Sari next.
She would have no God to guide him;
And Intellect to rule his analogical impediments.
The Heart comprehends God through the imagery of tangents.
Spokes upon a wheel, touching parts upon the cylinder.
There is a madness in this vision,
A madness she would destroy,
In hopes of escaping her own Chaos.
Yet, he will not be cured of poetry.
He will not be cured of journeying to God.
This woman is in his destiny;
And he hers.
It is through trust, however, and not in derision,
That she is freed
From her terror.
20 April 1985
Moving
In the Town Amid Rejection
I AM IN A HURRY NOW
I am in a hurry now.
All the wheat has come in and the lions have appeared.
To eat the wheat, and to shadow the stew.
If not for I.
If not for my harvesting hands,
My rigorous wry ways,
My metaphor-gathering inclinations,
For the wheat is a wheat of shades.
The day has grown rough.
Music is in the taverns.
Rhyme is in the fortress now.
The Jay girls have given up their pretty skirts
To stand like beasts of certain folly,
Arm in arm,
Against enchantment.
They wish not to be touched: so be it.
It shall be so.
I shall walk in to the mountain,
Carrying a gun to slay the beast there.
I shall provide sounds of rhythm from my own words,
My prosepoetry which is not understood.
I will find means to regenerate vision,
To burn the coals in my belly,
Higher and higher,
Until they make a star.
I shall turn my light toward those worlds
Which appreciate my humor,
Which can appreciate my honor.
For I am poor only to the rich;
To the poorer still, I am a wealthy man.
I am witless only to the witty.
I am unwise only to the profound.
I am illiterate only to the educated.
I am foolish only to the smart.
I am ugly only to the beautiful.
I am useless only to the productive.
I am sad only to the joyful.
I am mischievous only to the prim.
I am lustful only to the virtuous.
I am sly only to the forthright.
I am in a hurry now.
I have been told the truth by those who seek
Only truth.
If I believe that they are vain,
Well, they must be vain only to the self-effacing.
And I am not self-effacing;
For there is wheat to be gathered;
And I have a song about ecclesiastes.
'Tis a pity:
Not even logic is true.
21 February 1986
Surveying
the Broken Glass
THERE IS NO DISGRACE IN THIS
There is no disgrace in this,
Not in this folly of sorrow
Which leaves you grasping at some momentum,
Leaves you hideously bloodied by Love.
There is no disgrace here.
For Sorrow heals what Frivolous Accounting might purchase,
Might distort,
Might disqualify through its own unfamiliar lore.
She might walk from you;
She might call you with calumnious accusations.
There is no disgrace in this.
She might insinuate your secrets,
In the company of strangers,
In the company of friends,
Among men hardened by anonymity.
She might even lie about your own conspiracies
With nature,
Your complicity with gaelic nights,
Through which you inseminate your dreams.
She might calculate the clothes of tender affection,
To make a garment of your affections,
Which she might ware in a bare summer dawn,
For the world to honor or to shame.
She might do all this.
And it would bring no dishonor.
For Love is, itself, honor.
Nothing done for Love is not done
Without some semblance of honor,
Some noble intention,
Even if buried beneath jealousy,
Hidden by indiscretion,
Misshapen by furious happenstance.
To love is to live.
A life without love is not living
But too much discretion,
Too much control,
Too much kingship where kings are falling leaves.
Let the leaves fall.
Let the kings pay homage to their own fear of failing.
Let lives pass without contact.
You shall not;
You shall not be one who recognizes only safe association,
Who makes league with inactive monotony,
Swearing only by critical chance,
Unable to create, or move or scream
But only to smile superciliously,
As if you knew what you can never taste.
No.
You shall rise and fall and eat and be eaten.
You shall laugh and weep and kill and be killed.
You shall run and walk and swim and sleep;
And make love to the feathered imaginings of Love,
Turned to skin and bone and soft flesh and warm hair.
And a soul.
A living being, inside your passion-arena.
Yes: there is no disgrace here.
There is nothing to fear.
You shall walk on, for ever.
You have given Love,
And Love will never forget your courage.
And she will save you.
25 February 1985
Talking
to Himself In a Moment of Madness
SHE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THAT I AM SLIPPING AWAY FROM HER
She does not understand that I am slipping away from her.
It did not come at once.
It did not even come out of her indifference,
Not totally.
It came because some clock so deemed it.
It came about because to wait became a dream.
And the dream became thick with real sustenance.
And she became smaller, less dense, by comparison.
She became unreal, standing there, in her Parisian clothes.
She feels insecure that she is not European:
She finds Americans less regal, less intellectual;
She tends to apologize, for being who she is;
Who she pretends she is not, speaking too loudly).
Her body became less dramatically tense,
Less womb-holy;
Her breasts did not peak and pearl so,
The way they had when we had dined,
And spoken words of affection,
Words of titillation.
When she asked if I liked her hair,
Which fell across her breasts.
Her hair, in the dim light of an evening out,
Over a table approaching Midnight,
Streaked with red, exotic scarlet strands.
Then she told me that she would not spend time with me,
That she had a man;
We could be friends,
But not lovers.
Coldly.
She told me.
It was no surprise.
She told me: "I am out for myself!
I have plans!
My plans come first!"
So it was.
I drifted away from her.
Because of this, she became angry;
That I did not continue to pursue her.
She wished it both ways.
She wished me so enticed,
So wondrous with love,
That I would continue my fall,
My mad can-can dance
Toward her sweet pedigree.
She announced to me that she had genius;
My poetry she found lifeless, false, without merit.
She wished to play the role of Genius;
I was to be supporting cast material.
She wished to control the scene.
So I drifted.
She hated the West;
She spoke with wonder of the Orient.
It all seemed so stylish, so stereotypical:
A ground over which I had walked for many years,
Before salvation.
So I drifted.
Now, today, in a public meeting together,
She wanted me to look at her with desire.
She showed herself to me, openly,
A long dress with no panties.
Wishing me to beg.
I did not.
Perhaps I am cold again.
Perhaps I am unmoved and becoming tragic again.
Perhaps I resent her indifferent ambitions.
I do not resent her other love.
She is spoiled, self-willed, full of temptations
But not active, not real:
Speaking self-discipline as if it were some guide to perfection
And not some guise of spiritual self-investment.
Selfishness, in the form of virtue.
I spoke desire; she dismissed this as "romanticism."
Something parricidical.
And so I drifted.
Her anger at my drifting only inspired more distance.
We never loved one another.
She collects men friends,
Keeping them on a safe string.
She enjoys having other women admire her men;
Yet she fears men, wishes them tame, amenable to her will.
She dresses and moves to inspire lust --
But does not enjoy love,
Finds it messy, meager, too real, too harsh.
And so I have drifted from her.
Her coldness made me fly.
Her coldness and her resolute tyranny
(Her celibacy)
Made me fitful;
And then eager to wander.
The game became oblique.
She had her power;
But she would eat her cake alone,
Or with some other suitor,
Some other friend:
But she would not eat with me.
17 March 1986
Without
Water There is No Attraction
THE PASSING OF LOVE
I.
Love has passed.
The wand of magic addiction to passion
Passes to hands which transform wine to brine.
And the sky falls.
And love's liquid potion is traded for love's bitter aftermath.
Love is gone.
Fever follows.
Lonely trodding among the chaff
Who cannot love and annihilate faith.
For Love has passed, in her train
And her long hair and verisimilitude.
Love is golden, and passion blood-red.
Bitter acid blackness follows.
Bitter as hell; black as doom.
Horrible as clockwork.
Hard as iron.
Lethal as gas.
Unlovely as April's brutal consternations:
Storm gods wounding Love,
Sending her, shattered, from the garden.
I am here, alone,
Without the guardian of Love,
Without the society of Beauty.
It is not hard to imagine her return.
But the surroundings lose their water;
And, without water, there is no attraction.
II.
Love has passed.
The eve builds forts and stars beyond cognition.
Evening is dull, and promises winter winds.
Without Love, to guide me.
Without Love, as eternal sentry.
The damagers of Life gather in fields
And march on towns.
Invaders have their patrimony.
They live lives without Love
And they believe that they are real.
And enduring.
Until they blink.
And fall away like dust.
24 March 1986
Re-Discovering
Despair
AN ERA OF INTIMACY
I.
An era of intimacy has ended,
Giving way to the beginnings of a freeze.
I have sunk to the levels of severe aridity.
The only women are smiling blondes,
Who move in a serious frivolous carnival despond.
The men they carry in their smiles
Are all strange, bizarre creatures
From a blue lagoon
Or from a legacy of used car lots.
They wear undershirts with straps,
And show muscles and black chest hair.
The other women are out for themselves,
Have no time for intimacy now,
Have retreated to a land of bitterness,
Angry education.
The blondes have too much fun for me.
They have not tasted madness yet,
Have not touched that brutal hysteria
Of too much time alone
Or too much water in the mind.
Too much diving into blue pools and ocean eddies.
Too much hunting with waters-spears
In a world governed by subtle violence,
Subtle water-muffled catastrophe.
II.
It is cold in here,
Where the intimacy fashions its armor,
Clothes itself in a shell
For a further divinity.
I walk sideways.
The old ways of days in the sun seem gone.
A dream has passed.
There has been some conclusion.
There has been some epiphany.
Madness has come close again --
Yet I war with it, and find it weeping,
Whimpering,
A man without a cane,
A woman in some idolatry of crime.
And chaos.
As vengeance against man.
Undone by supper.
Uncomely and insipid:
Courting the occult,
And shattering every attempt at affection.
The black god in their veins;
The black god in their pouch.
Wishing blackness, and getting it.
Wishing chaos, and finding it.
Wishing unharmonious noise,
Unsymphonious corporations.
They come.
And go.
Without love;
Armed for power, for dreary
rhetoric,
Based on equally dreary knowledge.
It is too much for me.
I can withdraw from them.
I can stare into the ball of life,
Pick fruit from a tree of fruit,
Near the Rock of Hathor.
I can count sheep and calculate dreams.
I can build a new future to inhabit
When the clouds fall.
18 March 1986
The
Terrible Territory of Memory
THE WRATH OF DECEPTION
I.
In the Wrath of Deception there are nails and friendly bites.
All funerals are sanctioned as edification for the heap.
Two men document Spite.
The spittle fills the shoe.
Love is believed a temptress only.
She, a comic dragon, with territorial ardor,
The salvation of a twisted moon:
Coming on two feet, her yardage unbecoming.
Two sides of one face.
The blistered and the meek
The sistered and the bleak.
Sheep-forming, with a quiet word.
Hark the ere olde ain jails sing:
Two octaves higher
And I would be a husband's workload.
In the Wrath of Deception the young man finds his blade;
The old man finds his exit.
She is not hard, or dishonorable.
He slept with her -- this man of whom she speaks --
Without passion: he who is but a friend.
So it is.
It is feeling -- it does not matter.
So she says.
Twisting her words, and heating their proportion,
Like bacon on a grill.
The cook of trouble.
The menu of woe.
Hearing that Night is still a fresco.
The Day torn down like paper by Producers.
Ripppppppppppppppp!
Dusk.
A lack of trust.
Money for Monday: to keep her from bleeding.
Angels sitting on a car.
One plays the jew's harp.
Another files each insight.
Speaking only to his padre,
In a language meant for brokers.
II.
She dishonored me.
Yet I no longer love her.
She foresook my name, my honesty, for a stage.
Perforated hour.
"The world is going to hell!" she says.
Pope Ixtus bending on a knee.
The crucifix given to St. Martyr.
Go faster! Go faster!
She watches from a window.
Godiva now has a parchment for clothes.
And a window for discretion.
Announcing the walking her of candles.
The Ministry of Was: calculating the winnowed grain.
Priest of airy soil and clay which builds a sky.
Too numbered for virtue.
Fatigue.
To the boy who trusted eight.
A figure of endeavor.
When Metatron rose: a flower beyond the throne.
Sinking like a stone: the stone of Love dropped to the lakebed.
No wife for me; no husband for thee.
The trumpet of annoyance:
It shakes the wasting from their leaves.
"Do you love me?" he asks.
"Yes," she replies.
"Will you miss me?" she inquires.
And the sea becomes a crow's nest.
12 March 1985
He
is Moved by Lonely Silences
ARE YOU THERE, PLEASE
Are you there? Please.
Someone asks the fountain to bleed --
To salvage his belief.
Only water from the mouths of lions.
Water, and so much braggadocio.
Water, and currents of opinion.
Looking into the memory of twos.
Love: a frail epic.
Water from the mouths of lions.
Of flesh and mostly braggadocio.
Wanting the sea to part and to emit Salvation.
But she is not there.
Pleases do not matter.
Pleases are indiscreet to her.
She is not there.
She wonders what his name means.
He thinks he sees that the lions speak in signs.
26 May 1986
Standing
Before the Void
(IT IS A SHAME) THERE IS NO MOMENTUM HERE
I.
It is a shame there is no momentum here.
The rich calorie of motion, so harmonious in the earlier age
Gives way to a thick stagnation of muscle,
A porous escaping of sterling will.
Leaving the beast strong,
The vehicle through the forest unarmed
And guarded only by heroines.
Leaving the speed of discovery
But a bad-named memory,
Desecrated by the wisdom of the age
Which canonizes catatonia.
In the name of salvation.
II.
There is no momentum here.
There is motion, rigid, stilted, twisting,
Bent, pained, hurried, gaining no ground.
There is in some that desperate progress,
Leading back on itself
And crushing its own spirit,
Which is progress not at all,
Not even movement really,
Rather reaction to stationary understanding.
There is in others an inability to choose:
One road becomes a maze,
A graph of possible movements,
Chess-insipid,
Amazing and deflating,
Making choice impossible
And possibilities much too numerous
To be productive.
III.
There is no momentum here.
There is the grinding of the wheel,
At the end of which stands thee and thou,
Stands Arch-enemy and thou,
Set to battle, in the sterile void,
Inaugurating movement,
Inaugurating the next creation.
And so you fight.
5 June 1986
She
Comes To Tell Him That She is Sad
HEARING A WOMAN'S TRIANGLE SORROW
Hearing a woman's triangle sorrow.
There is no solution, no swift reply
To trace each piercing wound,
Each bursting prize,
Which transfers Hope into geometric woe.
There is no easy accusation,
No kind gesture or rebuke.
There is no word to achieve a peace,
No harmony to rise above issue.
The triangle sorrow is there,
An entity, as rich as blood,
As real as ghostly tissue.
It is a being of Memory,
A being of Chance,
Self-accusation,
A poorly rendered dream.
It is a drawing of a master,
Lines turned on a wheel,
Freezing manylayered impediment,
Many frayedandgray Phantasmagorias
Into eternity.
A frozen look.
A painting in a mirror.
Self-portrait: frozen in crone,
A wheatspewing scene,
Beyond Christina's world,
Into a world empty of form.
Triangle sorrow:
A father notdead;
But deadending ways
Out of each mantendered impediment.
Phallanxtasmagorias.
Sorrow for the crib,
The first rendering of tears,
Weeping ricepaper on ink.
Sorrow.
The aging of the princess.
I touch her shoulder.
Agony in each bone.
I stand beside her,
Through this madness,
This breaking of cartilage and clairvoyancy.
Madrampaging picture.
The mind mimicking translucence.
Terror in her hands,
Veins out like rainbows.
I look for the word, of comfort, of knowledge.
She wants me to speak, but will shriek at a sound.
There is no comfort, no solace in a word.
She dares me to speak, to embrace her, to move.
She will kill me if I move, and accuse me if a stone.
And so I watch.
My eyes embrace her, caress her,
Touch her hair,
Whisper lovestories to her ear.
Erring not in my tone,
My silent story with only ayes.
I do not move--yet I move her triangularity, h
Her misplaced hilarity
With my stoical absorption.
It will end, this Sorrow.
In a day she will forget this.
I am slower to forget.
Yet the skills I learn in psychic sculpture
Shall not be forgotten,
And, again, will be tested.
22 June 1985
What
Comes Was Called For
SOMETIMES IN WISHING
I.
Sometimes in wishing for the obvious contagion,
The more current elation,
One undoes the morbid frame
And lets loose the tyranny of motion.
Change.
Twofooted and twinnamed.
Burly and burlesquer:
Frequenter of harp interiors
And bottleemptier romanticisms:
Framed duly by both Chance
And that weathereaten Certain Opinion.
II.
Marching in twos beside the fernridge.
Frequenter of unidentified filial objections
And possible mensurated sindomes:
Walking clearly between both projections,
Both mirrors made of chaff.
Reflecting fertile and likewise farrow.
Marrow and likewise merchantile and vast.
Hastening calculated reason.
Unending season of trumpeteer formandstance.
Promoting bleating of sensation;
And purveyorconveyer of comatose Eros.
Twin names for heated orators:
Vast and cast;
Wind and rind;
Holiday circus and falladay mime.
Lust's brother and Lust's blanket.
Wishing for the obvious persuasion.
The woman's red dress undone;
Unbuttoned and undone.
Her brown summerflesh unburdened.
Naked in the wind.
And windrind.
Near a tree.
By an open window.
Waiting, wild, but for your motion.
An ocean of cure
Is worth a peninsula of correction.
A potion of pure tension
Is worth a century of perfect lessons.
Categorically said.
Unadorattically unspoken.
The soundless obvious wedding of intentions.
Waiting for the sound of two hands napping:
Energy lashed to the wheel:
From the scrotum to the sensesail.
The belly for the wage.
The wound of the man Christobull Colon.
Pierced by a world of knives.
Solar Plexus craving.
Blood into wineofword.
Bloodheavy with obligations.
Looking forward to that intimate waltz.
Man and wife: endeavor in a clan.
Children of priestcult:
Maternity of words:
Modernity of transitions.
III.
I am alone.
I am free.
I desire pretty Marie.
I am bold, old,
A dreary contagion.
I am lustsleuth, bustless,
Eerie and likewise
Earliest to the show.
The show of mirrors:
Both wheat and chaff:
Appearing only as wheat,
Then only as chaff.
Reincarnation.
Looking for the ministrations of Love.
The Fall.
Unconscious peri-persiflage.
Looking for the meat of provocation.
Looking for life.
And sometimes wishing.
As if not knowing.
That what comes was called for.
20 June 1985
What
Was Once Love Becomes Spiritual Warfare
I
WALK WITH DISAPPOINTMENT
I.
I walk with Disappointment:
She is a broad being,
With shoulders as large as trains,
Hands as big as fields.
She has a back the size of a sea,
On which ride twin winds,
Hurling spears which foment the waves.
She has teeth the size of trees
Which she has pulled from unsuspecting kings.
She has bones in her pocket:
Love has magnified her parts.
And I walk with her,
For she has faces and shifting natures.
And she picks her partners,
Choosing those most able to prognosticate and tire.
She grasps with tender ideas:
Chains which bind minds to stones.
She is the capable tyrant:
Her lips are shaped by naked maids
Who are bathing.
And, thus, she seduces me.
I walk with her, this dank tremorer:
She tells me of natures and fatalities and untouched laws:
Hoping defeat will become my next girdle;
Hoping accession to Necessity shall warp me.
And twist me into her child:
Grim bearer of seductive sorrow.
She scatters broken stars on the Earth
And calls them towns.
She rolls her cape into clouds and floods and sparks:
Filling blue domes with the sound of her fury.
Striking down whole regiments of children's dreams:
With the droll humor of a mortician.
Selling manacles of candies;
Propelling grainy circles of horror,
The matron of news,
Along frozen lines of telecommunications:
Announcing Hope has been torn.
She instigates dissension;
She abwhores the sun.
She strikes God with her calendar;
Blood and the festering sensation,
The furious wrath,
Of menstrual panadora:
Throwing straw on the fire of thought,
Raising images of destruction
From the plains of snowyease.
II.
She takes me by the ear:
Her song is a delicate plaint.
Psalms and psalteries; solitary soulentries.
She is fine, with her hands of lace,
Her ivory capabilities,
Her unique bosom,
Her frozen crotch,
Her forearms of iron.
So the story goes.
Flesh into iron.
Hagridden: the seed bearing childinchiffon,
Girlinherbra,
Motherinhersorrow,
Into hagboundforcaves,
Bound for Hades with dog and horses,
Lions in her brain,
Furious cadmium and bouts of herpes,
Carp,
Gonorrheaed incisions.
Eyes tantamount to scones;
Conical perceptive illusionary device.
Striking the penis with licorice.
Smiling: both thankful and vicious,
Both conciliatory and livid.
Horny and smooth.
A vat for a heart; a cudgel for a hearthstone:
Being the very weather she redeems,
Intoxicates with her mythology.
She takes me, this vamp,
This angelic reunionannouncer:
Her hands are quietly sure,
sumptuously organized,
Wise with direction.
Her loins are burdened with anonymity:
Concrete in the 14 days beyond conception.
Breasts like leather steaks;
Breasts like flower wreaths:
And wine to sip from.
Heat; corollary Aprils.
The mutinous advance of Time:
Autumn's slippery religion of doom;
Rejection of whitegods and penultimate affections.
Harnessing the blackmood,
Like twin steeds to the serpentide:
Running the race to the East
With a shriek.
I hide in her window.
And produce light from a tiny magnitude.
I break her spell.
26 November 1985
The
Creator of the World Re-Creates From the Power of His Pen
THE
MEDIATOR'S DEATH
I.
The Mediator's Death brings the eagle to war with ice,
Sends the lion to meet the air.
The world is easily transformed.
The middle god exits, seeking silent abodes:
The void is filled by early grim warners.
Descending from heights.
Expanding through turfs.
All watchtowers making claims.
Boom. Boomandboom.
Bells pealing skin from the sky.
Feet scattering on brick.
Television's meal.
The Mediator's phall: selling the coming of peat.
October is bold.
October is pallid.
The Mediator is less full.
Organized with retreat.
II.
The Mediator's Death brings chaotic insistence to the brim.
The cleric loses the pen he writes by,
Having controlled the world with the wand of his poetics.
He screams, but has no voice.
Someone writes, some invisible being,
Whom many believe to be the Mediator himself.
From the sacristy of his table,
This man conceives of the world which will be,
Beyond this discord,
When he agrees to stop scribbling.
17 December 1985
The
Brothers Light and Shadow Collide
THE TEMPERAMENT OF MY SHADOW
I.
The temperament of my shadow is like the world
Which has no ghost.
It is faceless, bold, yet without incentive.
It is doomcentered.
It has no life; it has no shade, no color, no hospitality.
It is ponderous in thought;
It understands that mythology is a map of
Lifetaking creations.
It understands that logic has dimentias and edges;
And is not merely a way to better justification of law.
It--my shadow--is quick to seek explanations,
Yet rejects Hope, that horrid achievement:
He is leery of happiness,
For dread excites him.
He endorses news of disaster.
He projects the collapse of pillars.
He worries that no consternation might find him.
II.
The temperament of my shadow is like the world which has no ghost.
He never leaves me, this substanceless form,
This illusionless mattershatterer.
He tells me that I am but chaff upon his stave.
Yet he knows that Time, by me, is borne;
He understands that, in terms of rhyme,
The magic of the Sun is much more potent
Than is the Moon's.
3 December 1985
The
Son Battles Himself
THE TURNING OF THE SCREW
The turning of the screw.
No more endorsement.
Your image in a word, by which your flatter each future
And steal a solitary gem.
A place to stand in Time:
Standing two widths before each occurrence.
The parting of your waves.
By which you place yourself
Beyond the reach of the farrow.
Muse-making and invoking blonde Time.
Harkening to the Moon.
Soft in her clairvoyance.
Hard in her opinion.
In whom you hide while the gloaming men
Beset sidewalks and angry channels.
Blackfaced harlotry:
Murderers without chains without names to guide them.
Illumined by each hatred.
Blaming others for their own disappointment and loss.
Seeking to kill others in order to be free.
Stalking the mirror with a scale.
Unbalanced scale.
Baling memories on a cart.
Bodies of Thought in a bundle of death.
To be buried beside the sea.
Unforgotten act.
Besieging the meek.
Possessed by Satanic cultism.
Loving the Dark and then becoming it.
Unbecoming Darkness.
A monster in the shoe, driven on by the Female imprecation.
Punishment for the doomed.
Finishment for the damned who forgot Change.
As the idol sinks into a landscape of mud.
Too much rain.
Too much self-infatuation.
In the turning of the screw.
In the spurning of the shrew.
Too much desire for embellishment.
While the Moon comes close and shows, inside herself,
A growing child.
And everybody waits for the Sun, again, to come home.
18 April 1985
Intimations
of Ishmael's Ride
GLORIOUS DESPAIR: HEDONIST OF ANNIHILATION
Glorious Despair: hedonist of annihilation.
Carrion of each positive endeavor.
Carrier of cold wind to each leaf lacking color.
Bringer of color; bringer of crude image, abstract brain.
In whose hand is held a clock.
Measurer of Time versus Memberer of Time.
Autumnal manager: Reflection's Venusuvian girdle.
Producer of Sorrow.
Sorrow's producer of verse.
In the belly of the whale, below Ecuadorian waves.
The abyss of the Moon.
In which Jehosabaoth roams.
Obligations for the night mare: the white horse on the chain;
The white house on the moor;
The door from the Spanish manes:
Arabian scale and the mounting of Doom:
Riding toward the Mountain of Spoons.
Riverliver Anthology: written by the King.
Of Sorrow.
Poetry's model.
The seeing eye and the seeing cane.
Abel's sacrificial tune: all lived beneath the Earth,
Beneath Despair's governing sobriety.
Whitewomen with the breast of men,
Shoulders of bricks, thighs of sturgeon.
Despair's twisting mirror: measuring all on a primitive graph.
As though the measurement itself were categorical imperative:
Counting stones on the beach;
Counting flares on each horizon.
* * *
While Despair pour draughts of magic influence on the brain.
Another season of love is gone.
I shall build my own discovery.
And ride a rocket beyond Sadness's sovereignty,
'Ere I recline.
Said he.
Laughing proudly.
Before the moon.
26 May 1985
Writing
Not From Choice But From Need
A LONG WAY FROM MY BEGINNINGS
I am a long way from my beginnings.
I am cold.
The Earth has some tragic aroma now,
Some curious Autumn in its veins.
So far from Tranquillity's Easter shoes,
Taken off for the luxury of the swim.
The mornings bleed ice.
The birds race into unseen clouds,
Vanishing for ever,
Leaving behind but a melody.
The melody of mortality:
Becoming the melody remaining:
Immortal beginnings from a sash.
A cloud.
A crown unsevered.
A crowd departed.
The sun of Summer now wears a shawl.
Wood is in the stove.
Horns sound in the square.
People are in autos.
Looking from their windows.
Having gone inward.
In to the cool memoryzones of some comfort:
Self-protection has some logic,
Some insistence,
When the loins are done.
A Summer of mist: looking back on some sheen.
Having seen old memories become new tracts
Of flesh and bloom.
Beyond Easter's girdle.
Through the garland of fresh girls with tight suits
In a sweltering river extravaganza:
Tight flesh everywhere,
And suits filled for mere accent.
The breasts swelling to plumpness.
The zones of mystery covered by mythology and lace:
Heir apparent to the pleasures of neptunetude.
High tides and low tides.
My pipe unlit.
The rain in the wind.
Beyond a supper with a beauty.
Nearer still to the ravages of Poetry,
That savage sister, demanding fears and despair.
Winter's hard ravaged hair.
Pussy willows are sweet.
Ice is not magic.
Weeping pillows and hairs: left by sweet Adolescence,
Beyond the ecstasy of Night.
Hands left on the thigh, disappearing toward some treasury.
All memories from the porch: the Sitter has his heads on.
Thoughts weaving past performance.
Reflection has braids; chandeliers light his passions.
For which he waits, like some minister.
There is wisdom in words,
And salvation through mail, perhaps.
But it is the wild sense of hammers and soft acceptance
Which makes him smile.
2 October 1985
The
Writer Gains An Insight
WHEN THE SLEEPING DOGS WAKE
I.
When the sleeping dogs wake
The colored hands are blessed by knaves.
The naked plains raise blanched leaves
And drop these shreds in wind on cities.
Wind rules here.
Bleeding wind.
Productive wind.
In my hair, my hand,
Holding cities, holding centuries:
The language of a thousand days,
Combined with the calendar of symbols,
Painted birds and dogged quadrupeds,
Lions and stallions,
Scalded scallions and armored kites:
These paint the lurching land and air
With reigns of tribes and circular penchants.
And I watch this, unbeknownst to the actors,
Busy in their heat of talking.
I say nothing; I watch:
I see ghosts in the clay skies,
Moving cabs in the vacant zones,
Rich meteors and mines along barriers.
Historical extradition.
Indian paintbrush and a caloried prose.
Grandmothers gathering on clouds,
Directing the world with breadth:
Quietly mothering the children who rush,
Like quail, breathtobreath,
Breast to measuring breast,
Talkingwords that free essential pain and penetrance.
I watch it all.
The sleeping dogs lie, steal, eat fruits out of season;
They dream ogres into being;
They burn houses with their minds,
Manufacturing fire from the colleges of fears.
I know this.
I see the hand upon the wheel.
It is a Spanish hand.
It speaks in a language of stones.
It is fixed on the manner of murder,
For the sake of Goods and Goths.
Goods: rummager of rumor;
Harbinger of harm;
Unbetokened betokener,
Who seduce children with harloquinity.
Goths upon a steed.
Amid the Russian blandmanager: mitrereligion in his craw.
He circulates his tees:
And marks each destiny with a cycle and a saw.
Hammering out cold opinions and producing,
As his children,
Several centuries of....graceless obliteration.
And I am there, watching the seabirds circle harshly,
Com-com-comically, in a spire.
Wind everywhere.
In the hair of beautiful beings: women with roses,
Held prosaically, like analogical prayers.
The day full of Europeanformed phantoms:
Everything raised, like a painting, and praised.
While the sleeping dogs fix grim images
On the throat of the maid, so quiet in her state of addiction.
To her obituary.
To her ideal manicured oblations.
Grievous as a cure.
Oblivious to actual practice.
While the Arab pastminister hocks his horse
For a steel conical braid.
And I see this, in my dream.
But I do not speak.
The clouds are bold and the trees shed their incentives.
When the sleepers awake to the sounds of the hounds
All the images I've borrowed,
As a means of description,
Might melt like a snow.
And leave me nourished in the clay.
If I am lucky.
And if I am wed.
24 October 1985
The
Writer Ridicules His Brother
I AM NOT THE CARPENTER'S AUNT
I.
I am not the carpenter's aunt.
The wind blows across my home.
The grass has become golden.
Trees bang limb against limb,
In angry Autumn's last tirade.
All the membranes for peace
Heave a sigh of circuitous relief.
Autumn's last rage.
Although the Winter brings no friends
To the Architect of Depth.
He says, this builder:
"I am not the Carpenter Ant.
I am not the shoe of the dancer.
When the building is transformed,
From naked wood into slats of inhabitance:
Who will perform the next soliloquy
To make the masses understand their own obloquy?"
II.
He has no sense of humor.
The peacemanager arrives,
Asking names for his petition.
He is certain of his own virtue;
He sees clearly the manner of unanxiety.
Yet he is anxious, lest he might die.
The unworldly minister:
Direct line to the Professor of Goodness.
The Architect of the Depth
Has no words for this beseecher of equanimity.
He has looked far into the face of that creature,
Future Enormity.
He sees himself armed forever
Against the creeping in of Sorrow.
He does not hate Sorrow,
Does not imprison her;
He stands everalone, watching beside some borderland.
He is not the carpenter's aunt,
Not an aunt at all, nor uncle, nor functional wageburier.
He is bannercarrying maidmarionadmiring daredevil comparer;
One who looks, like Prometheus, into fires of stoneonstone;
And offers his spleen for another time upon the wheel,
And that splendid procreation.
The peacemanager re-arrives;
Circumference is not his gambit.
The diameter is his shield.
A whole sea cannot be seen,
Because of this reliance on private invective.
He is not the carpenter's aunt;
Yet he knows the carpenter's aunt.
And holds her memory in high regard,
Especially when he is sad.
25 October 1985
Two
Men Performing Tricks
I AM A BLIND MAN
I.
I am a blind man.
I have wandered amid stones,
Over unstately shores,
Through woods and into havens
Not yet heavenly.
I have walked through city streets
In black-top finery,
When the sun made an ocean of tar
From my carbondated memories.
I have wended in early morning days
When the Sun was young and bold and clear,
Before the Noon meal became his current of descent,
A boat on wheels,
A Niagara before his sleeping.
It is all too soon.
It is a night curtain falling on a man's fine vision,
Leaving him lynx-eyed and poised
And not a hawk and with no owl's finesse.
Eyes made to see in all the fontanel surgeries of the day.
Made black by gloaming night: vision shrinking to a nonce.
Vision compressed into a fist, a landless eyesore,
A feeling of hands, slow movement, an eerie waltz,
Into a dream.
II.
Dear God, make the dream good,
Make the dream a lyric,
Save the nightmare for some other eve.
I am a blind man.
Love has betrayed me.
I hear the milkmaids who worship the moon
Alone shout their cheers when the Dusk comes
Like heavy wine.
Making the Sun heavy with burden,
His twin stones,
Which send him sinking in a sea.
He is blind, the Sun.
Not his brother, the twin son,
Who rules in the South:
They exchange stories as they pass,
One rising up from the sea,
One going down toward monstrosity.
Sea-bound.
Night-visioning.
Blind, except by signs, except by symbols animating dreams.
Some walk with me; yet none know me.
None penetrate my clerestory;
None is forelorn enough;
None so capable of flight.
They merely trade words with me,
As the two sons trade worlds,
Trade bodies into worlds,
One becoming Day,
The other re-becoming sorrow.
III.
I am blind and I understand.
I will walk for ever on this river
That we have misnamed Sadness.
I will walk for ever on this river
We have re-named A Baby's Joy.
It is the walking which makes the waves break.
It is the light which changes names.
For the Hours produce the lights
Produce the names
Produce degrees of blindness.
The Hours produce the scenes by which
The sons remake earlier obsessions;
And then again blind themselves.
19 March 1986
No
One Is Prepared
PREPARING FOR THE UNPREPARED
Preparing for the unprepared is not easy.
Preparing for the anguished culmination,
When those for whom self-love disintegrates
Into a vast empty quarter of the world.
Torn by immediacy.
With dreams turned into gutter stones.
With harlots and harbingers and meager liars all converged.
With bankers and doctors and wive's of fishermen sharing life-boats.
It is not easy.
Especially when the Manager of Fates
Comes and asks who has his passage.
Into the New Land.
Which is gained only by sight.
Unattainable to the bleary.
For light is swallowed; and then one sees by feel.
Marking a map by metaphor.
Leaving those unblessed with a less predatory feel:
As they make their ways along the river
Which freezes in June.
It is sad, a sad indictment to Winter.
The hemispheres inversioned:
Translations based on the quaternary.
Translations based on a query, a sigh, an unmoved piece.
Because there is no right, no certainty,
Only movement in a bottle:
Each a quarry:
Each undelivered.
For no one is prepared.
13 April 1986
Those
Who Pray For Rain In the Time of Flood
I SEE THE BRINGERS OF CHAOS WITH THEIR WHEELBARROWS ARRIVE
I.
I see the bringers of Chaos with their wheelbarrows arrive.
They have numbers in their brains.
They are surcharged by anonymity.
They are speculators in undoing creation.
They are perplexed by Hope.
Their perplexity is mainly logic:
Self-annihilation is their crux.
For, if they were to see, really,
To see the open land,
The corner which flowers from the box manger of Daedalus,
Into the meadow of flowers as yellow as a sun,
As red as painted lips,
And sweet-smelling as a woman of love,
With her hair licking the wind,
Her hips channeling dreams toward their socket,
Beyond that closed land of thought
Which demands the death of things,
Which concedes everything to destruction,
But garners nothing from existence,
But harbors of boredom and responsible sequence,
Which frightens those closest to disaster,
The Tragedy-hoarders,
Who find in Shakespeare only bayonets and blood,
Not love truly, for love is an avenue to light,
An avenue through an open window,
Where the breeze is not bone-shattering
But light, quizzical, friendly,
Leading down past orchards
And to a river too real now to flood,
Too wizened to excite,
But slumbering in a liquid feast,
Beside which I walk,
Knowing nothing is redeemed
Except by the conquest of Fear --
If they were to see, really,
To see the open land,
They would that Death is but a transposition
From noun to verb.
II.
I see the bringers of Chaos,
Who think that thought manages the dream.
They believe that ideas are unmeager pressure points,
Upon which and by which a tent is approved,
As an abode of rest.
Victims of the last book they read.
Too benevolent to love; too universal to breed;
Too intelligent to believe:
Like pedants who stand above the act of creation,
Measuring its screws and miscreant hinges,
Often understanding that the miracle exists
As precedent to critical insouciance.
III.
I see the bringers of Chaos arrive.
Their wheelbarrows are filled with air,
And plans they carry in their brains.
Their love is skeletal, in the abstract.
Their love is without flesh, without passion,
Without carnal associations,
And incapable of touch and fluid anger.
Their measurements are livid.
Their wheelbarrows are rusting, resting in Spring rain.
They admire Chaos because they fear having children.
Yes.
They love Chaos, because they fear Life,
They fear the annihilated rebelling childhood of the soul.
In another.
And they are now defending a world growing old.
Chaos offers them nothing really,
Except a wheelbarrow in which they might carry
Their own corpse to the grave.
And that is really nothing.
5 March 1986
There
Is No One Here To Talk To
SORROW IS A MAN'S LOT IN THIS DAY
I.
Sorrow is a man's lot in this day
When the bright brag of brightness
And the dull seek clairvoyance.
When the brittle make claims to power
And the sensitive must announce their sensitivity.
When the intelligent discuss their own intelligence
quotient,
And the meek proclaim the genius of mercy.
Sorrow is a man's lot.
Sorrow is a man's lot when he sees each extreme
Totally unapproachable:
One for its vacuous pride;
The other for its extreme hatred
Against all things reasonable.
Love is not enough, were she here,
With her splendid thighs and body parts,
Her wonderful smile and hieratic gowns:
But she is not here.
Sorrow has come,
The queen of evenings without gamesmanship.
Sorrow has no facade, no mask by which to elude essential meaning.
Sorrow is bone-naked, tone-hardened,
A clone of Melancholy Apprehension,
For she is wandering, and eschews vaunted anarchy,
Even as she rejects the naked harlotry of
Eternal wisdoms.
She seeks lonely men:
They, alone, bring golden wheat for her bag,
Words for empty books she envisions.
She dispenses sorrow from her bosom.
A wisp of a friend,
With breasts of young girls,
And thighs without desire:
Dispensing sorrow for a cup of nails.
II.
Sorrow is a man's lot in this day
When each self-announcement is void.
When each manipulation of self-exactment
Becomes tertiary, without completion,
Like a lie, but not a lie,
Not an untruth, merely unknown,
For the speaker quails,
And does not know that
What he does not say
Marks him equally,
In the eyes of Truth
As the hunter is made by the times he does not shoot
As well as by times he does shoot
And is true.
3 March 1986
The
Walk In Darkness Continues
ANGST
UPON THE RAFTERS
Angst upon the rafters.
Thought.
Troubled Eve.
Surcharging Othello.
Demanding that he move.
With her blonde hair unmoving.
Demanding Night as a whore demands surplus;
Demanding meat to feed the mouthsofall.
With her blonde hair circling the seas.
The Moon of Armageddon.
Making black into a sleeve.
In the words which few can recognize;
Which few believe;
Those who know make the sign of the cross
And then somnambulate.
For it is an eerie angst upon the rafters.
If it were Justice alone,
Which she sought for her supper,
And not the blood of her own kin,
Then her tradition would be of saints.
Instead, it is of thieves,
Of denizens of Discord,
Who blame their father for his triumph,
Hating his deeds for their questions of his own.
Othello's blue temper.
And the plotting against his destruction.
As the somnambulists all agree,
Although without words.
Seeking Moses' diction to a land remembered.
To a land unspoken, unseen, unintroduced
To the violet of ways.
Beseeching May.
Motherofgod MotherofHod.
Where has he gone, this true man with his ability to see?
Making waves part with his attic staff?
Making serpents blush with his bronze phallic marker?
It is a dream which I record.
When the seaworld is parted from the terminus
All is made.
25 May 1985
Believing
Anything
I MOVE INTO THE ICE AGE
I.
I move into the Ice Age.
The fruit has been spoiled.
The calculations of imaginative minds
Have left great machinery
Unable to move.
Faith has been soiled.
The clerics gather to discuss imagery.
The laws are changed, to move the curriculum.
Nothing changes.
The Ice Age becomes tangible,
Thick with white airless fury-to-come.
I walk without caution.
I have walked this snowblind blizzardcountry
With wolves at my feet and bear in the hills.
It is like counting to ten.
I have moved, without arms,
With only moving legs
And minds fashioning tents and fires
And maps without tactile notions,
Without nations to find,
Without creations as my sanctuary.
I have walked, and have found sticks,
And found hidden suns to illuminate horrible zones.
I have struck at wolves,
Damaged bear,
Shattered that curtain of doom
Which is fashioned by wicked women
Who stitch together a history without men.
II.
I move into the Ice Age.
The Moon bears reluctant children,
Who arm themselves against her reign.
She is cold, and shows no emotion.
She strikes at her children with the instinct
Of a tyrant.
I pass beneath her shadow.
She rules like a bloated ship,
A crazy zeppelin insisting on degeneration,
In the name of moral living.
She kills the fertility of kings
And demands that her father pay tribute
To the council.
And the ice blurs all distinction,
Making distinctions blurry, unseen,
Seeming real,
Seeming a cold real world of ideological preoccupations,
By which the cauldron is stirred,
To which the children are bedded,
Ritually, in hypnotic administration.
III.
Marx is blessed here.
The East is nourished by the corpse of the living.
All good-thinking people agree.
The ice is best.
Ice-heritage is a garden,
Inherited by mannequins,
Created by a surly season.
12 February 1986
Further
Angst Upon the Rafters
LILITH IS HEARD
Lilith is heard.
A voice and a name;
And an history of monster and deed.
The blonde woman ruling Hell.
Matter of fact and matter of diction.
Fiction's eerie truth;
The pearly lining inside each creation:
The structure of Truth as a garment, a lineage:
There is a boundary of Thought;
And a structure is detained.
Lilith's blue perjury.
The Accusations being the chorus.
Singing the Hero's grave lament;
An ocean full of porridge:
How de do, how de do?
When, verily, no one is watching: t
The lyric of the gale.
And the hail of merry roarambulating visions
(Pulled from the fire with metaphoric tongs).
Chinese bracelets.
Chinese shoes.
The terrorist of Adam.
Firstblood and firstmourner.
Suckling at the stars
Where numerous kings are laid
In vaulted constellations.
The unfortunate blackface becomes violent.
Living in a well.
Nurtured by Lilith's anger:
Her sense of justice, in a can.
Looking for a fertility victim.
By whom the world can satisfy the crow.
Trading the eagle for the raven.
Waiting for the owl to raise its nest up.
Into Lilith's vegetable crown.
Walking in a land without snows,
But with a white carpet of infection.
Where the blackmen sup on tyrannicide autocracy.
Relieving that by killing the old
They somehow are not guilty
Of the murders they perform.
If it were Justice alone for whom Lilith made her motions --
And not the bloodrite of Hatred, the bloodquerulous appeal --
Then legends of Lilith would not paint her bones with lye.
22 May 1985
My
Shadow Fills the Void
THE COMING OF THE CROW
I.
The crow comes.
It is Spring;
And the dark fields of October's once ripe onion nests
Have become ice and again fertile networks
Of living crustaceans and elements of vitality.
It is Spring.
The crow comes.
Craving darkness alone.
Proclaiming himself king,
Proclaiming himself real,
More real than the dove,
More proud than the king, himself,
With the hawk-head and the talons of eagled iron.
The crow comes.
He is filled with talk of death,
Of the perjury of love,
Of the noxious nature of creation.
The crow knows every opinion.
The crow knows each righteous attitude.
Yet the crow is a harlequin terror,
More harlequin than terror,
More alienated ghost that alienating surgeon.
Surely.
He comes to throw fear
Into the face of believers only.
Believers in his might.
Believers in his capacity.
Raising his icon onto the head of the scale:
Into totemic oblivion.
Making darkness out of cloth;
Out of bright cloth, making shrouds.
II.
He is not real.
He is not comic.
He is not substantial,
A ghost stuffed with rags and no song
Except the song of culminations.
He cannot leave his place in hell.
He caws, and has no song.
He sterilizes thought with his one-dimensional meaning,
Expecting the worst,
Predicting always the carnival of carrion
As wealth.
He is dead flesh, dead thought, dead nature,
Dead and dying.
And he cannot be destroyed.
By another hand.
Only through suicide will he fall;
For he builds his own gallows,
Grasps the rope,
Survives only within dread.
He is lost.
11 April 1986
The
Shadow Fills the Void
THE
HEGEMONY OF CROWS
The hegemony of crows.
The multilateral feasibility of black birds
And the hail of black rain.
A winter of cures.
The unalleviated modality.
Summer in a frame of grace.
The multiple accordion thunderer in clouds:
Partaking of the grateful deadknots.
Partaking of the hateful ways of association:
Dreadnot and dread-cleavage.
Walking with muscles gripped for combat,
Making the streets a cave of horrible primates;
Imprimaturs for galleys.
Gripped for cohesive mutilaterality.
Gripped for curse and cure
And also stripped by inebriated love.
The casual grain: combed for clear sight
And cushioned for falling lace.
The black feathers of disgrace.
The black rain of Blake's early blanket,
Making everything related
But nothing classically real,
But for the crow.
21 July 1986
He
Meets Mister Brink Again
IN
THE DRY VOICE OF A MAN
In the dry voice of a man long butchered by dreams
Of lions and void appearances,
The speaker of atrocities comes down the road
To remind me of the Virtues.
He is blackfeatured.
His hair is full, but has stains of blood in it.
He is fortified by drink
And by the misrepresentation of God.
He is powerful from Hate,
Incensed by horror.
He is not true.
He miscalculates ages;
He makes vengeance to be trim justice.
He is cold, cannot love,
Is ruled by ideas from which
Absolute Law is turned and fed.
He is Russian; he is Persian.
He speaks Spanish at will.
He has the names of ascetic worldviews.
He would kill those who do not speak truth,
For he loves goodness,
He lives by ascetic rituals.
He is not bold, but speaks about boldness;
He is not old, but speaks about age and wisdom;
He is not so legendary as they say;
But he proselytizes legends,
By which the map can take on features.
He is small, a mere dwarf of a man;
But he stands so near the light.
This makes the background curtain swell.
8 February 1986
Intimations
Of a Love To Come
THE
TIME OF CRYING HAS COME AGAIN
I.
The time of crying has come again.
The time of joy, of flesh, of pretty natures
And days long with expectations
Give way to a new sort of unflattery.
Compressing life in through the eye of the needle.
Vanishing of parts.
Compressing built experience into a drop of silver stone,
Glistening like quicksilver, y
et due to harden,
Unable to run:
Mercury's fringe messages to men and gods and back again.
It is a time of crying: Love is gone.
The world becomes dark, gray, winter-harbored.
There is talk of love, talk of a woman from a distance,
Directing her associations toward you.
Future life: in this land without light now,
This land governed by women who resent men,
Women who hate the penis.
It is so.
They quarrel with what they love,
What they need,
Hating themselves with such a virulent pride
That self-destruction is as inevitable
As is Ahab's quest.
It is done.
Accorded.
Unacceptable, but not evadable.
And so the tears come.
And the expanding dimensions of the heart.
The disagreeable tremors of the dim process
Of alienation.
The cliques of persecutors celebrate their triumph:
Doom over glory, death over motion.
There is no love.
There is beauty;
There are women of great soft clarity.
They have no need of me, no need of men.
They are lesbians' cloy.
Diminutive in knowledge,
Yet proud,
Full of blame,
Vending to grief,
Seeking demolition.
II.
The ones who praise Peace the most
Are the ones most filled with hatred.
The ones who praise Love the most
Are the ones incapable of giving.
The ones who praise Equality the most
Are the ones who seek absolute authority.
The ones who weep the most weep due to loss;
When the crying time comes,
A secret door opens up to save them;
They are swept away.
And then a hurricane comes.
31 January 1986
Ancestral
Sleep
THE BODY ACHES; AND THE CULT OF SIN DEVELOPS
The body aches and the cult of Sin develops.
For the Babylonian Sirius circles the moon to calculate his rice,
His rain and rails to carry the mail.
In the circular disease, down the mountain toward the town.
Replete with no animosity.
For the emergency Emotion
Comes to strain the women in two.
The river of tears.
The flood of the beast.
Emotional wrangling.
Two steps and a tempest of accusation.
Sin.
With a cult and a cul-de-sac of thought.
Sac-de-monde.
Blood of the world.
With a dead-end of unseasonable nonmetaphorical cylinders.
As the body aches.
And the cult of Babylonian water
Becomes animal, first, and, later, animosity.
Hoping that the season passes dryly.
And the havoc caused by Sin is really slight,
Before the flood-gate opens,
And Fatality finds his humor
Torqued by furious reaction.
12 May 1986
Each
Extreme Is Chronic
THE
CAPTIVITY AMONG SWORDS
The captivity among swords.
Drawn to bang against the shields.
An holy unproductive ruse.
In the weather of Everybody's Sorrow.
Love as a blanket of words; Love as a cistern of opinion.
The element of will.
Hot bakery of intent.
Resisting the role of slave;
Consisting of a heart of staves,
To be rolled and then bandaged.
As a fissure and a grave.
As a clean impresario.
Captivity among drawn swords.
Drawn to bang against the shields.
Of Heaven and of Man.
As an elemental fuse:
Love against love, sex against sex,
Type of mind against the stationary pose.
And, in it all, there is some grace,
Some discussion of proportion,
Some position of endurance.
Those who hate and who wish to blame the queen:
It seems that they come closer.
Each would strike the other down,
But for a law which cloisters balance.
There is a poetry in the freshest word,
The most clear elemental phrase;
Transition to concupiscence passes
In terms of words
From beginning to memory of decency.
The woman lifts her shield to rule,
And finds, in this void, that the kingdom is a maze.
1 May 1985
The
Son Describes a Workmate
WORKING WITH A FURY FRUSTRATION
I.
Working with a Fury, Frustration.
She is the mistress of stones,
Carrier of labels in Idea Nations.
Ruling sectarian blastfemality;
Her drooping candidacy prospers among boors.
It does not prosper among maids,
Among women built for love.
It is deaddreams which bite;
This lure is for the bleak.
Hard times associate blame.
She, my Fury, casts hatred against Evil.
She would kill Evil in a blow,
Without thought,
With even less pity.
She would wipe hands on Christian soil:
Blood on a lily;
Error on proxy.
She would kill to be freed:
Released from her driving fire by cloy.
Sadhearted.
Madtotorture.
Herself: a bean in a field of beans.
A hat in a mad sad hatstore on Vine:
Habberdashering.
A meanparting among friends.
Tearing her hair: private annihilation.
Putting on weight: judging slender parts as raw, unlimber.
Judging limbs with axe of words:
Mitre of burnished snakes;
Announcer of truth
(A small "t", by the smell of it).
She is oldborn: hating movement.
Furious to crush.
Hating Love: Love demands submission.
She hates submission;
Submits only to Anger, Hate,
Excruciation, PainExactment.
She is a Fury, a queen of bizarre quids,
Withorwithout kids,
A mother by deception,
A lover by disease.
Never by choice.
Never by firstchoice.
Her face becomes misfeatured:
Frustration leaves its crevice.
She walks to shake the ground.
She threatens with synonyms;
And edifies symptoms:
A demon in her sheets,
Black and oiled and fully quaint:
Whispering illusions to make a profit;
Offering addendums to every message.
She is Firespouting Venery:
Flesh, not by choice, not by soft deed,
Or hard option:
Flesh by angry accord,
Flesh by striking coals and markers.
Keeping score.
Screwing the turning screw: to punish her father.
To eat the cock's crow for scorn.
Punishment's eerie feareating features.
Each moan according to dictate: ideology.
The ideology of sects.
The written elements of Marx:
Orgasm for the healthy state.
Climax for a club of enlightened selfworship:
Clubwomanship.
Master tuber-ation legation.
Words unclean and wounds unabounding;
Preferring Virtue for a garb,
Instead of real thought,
Instead of gauze.
Crazy against sin:
Walker in cleanclothes:
Manufactory of ills.
It is she who decodes,
Believing ever that she is golden.
II.–
I sit beside her eminence, in the room of throneless toil.
She answers telephones, types eightywordsaminute.
She growls about menabusingwomen:
Womenabusinglowerclassgirls:
Snobssnubbingangrysecretarials.
Growling.
Fat with vigor.
Cleaning her knife on her skirt:
Frustration to the core.
Despising wealth for its prerogative;
Despising poverty for its obsessions;
Despising work for its injustice;
Despising life for its kin,
Plaintive sorrow.
I sit beside her eminence.
She glowers and sends cloudsonpatrol.
Paroling only otherlesbians and women who do not know:
Ideology.
Making muscles in her arm.
Taking charge.
Driving men into the grave.
Toughcardigan.
Muffledmetaphor:
"In our culture."
"In our society."
"In our way of life."
Barker's Banquet.
Speaking without regard for the exception.
As if life were mere generality: and knowable.
And she having knowledge;
Which makes her a viper,
For her knowledge is bitter.
Call her monster or moon or Lilith or Grendel's mother.
Call her night or wedded water or the south or Hecate's dog.
By whatever name, she is droll and always trolling.
I know her from work.
Her body stiffens.
She builds wars.
12 December 1985
The
Citizenship of Complaint
THE OPPONENTS OF LEGAL TECHNICALITIES
The opponents of legal technicalities
Promote the vast expanse of anarchy.
They romanticize the void,
Seeing not in it Chaos,
The force of the fullest hand,
The hardest whip,
The cleanest wound,
But the "nature" of Thoreau and Rousseau.
They are children in the woods,
Minds vague with imagery,
Hearts wooed by myth
And by the antelogue of metaphor.
They crush rules with the heel of their scorn.
They make rules only for themselves,
Believing that mediocrity is the
failure of ideals
And not the success over Chaos.
Mediocrity, as a measure of Life
Unmarried to their own demands, that is.
Life,
Unsanctified by the mental imagery of the first form,
The infinite heaven,
The unsullied idea.
This they call mediocrity.
They scorn the "mediocre" as the mass of associates
Who cannot know,
Who do not know,
Who are not enlightened.
They are pure somehow,
And can make choices for that moleish existence
Which elevates the worthless
And pleases itself with the trash.
For they are wise, these opponents:
They will rule the world,
Because they alone understand.
And because they are forceful.
Until the mass again absorbs them.
11 June 1986
The
Appearance of Grace:
The
Son Is Looking For a Wife
THE END OF THE DAY
I.
It is the end of the day.
I am tired.
I am predisposed toward the extinction of dreams,
The white melancholy couch upon which one descends
And asks only questions of romance.
I meet a fine white woman.
A blonde queen who embraces my hand.
Her smile is fine.
She is clean as the sky;
She is a forager of words.
She loves to write.
She has a tiny scar upon her lip.
I press her hand as I speak to her; as she leaves.
I wish to see her later.
Someone who met her arrives
And asks about Constance Clark;
I have to correct him:
Her name is Constance Jones.
Apparently he mistakes my name with hers.
There is something in that.
Something ominous:
That he would assume she has my last name,
Be it error or be it profound.
II.
She is blonde and eager and lovely
And unaware of her beauty.
That is the fine key: to be unaware of her beauty.
For she is noble in her features.
She does not think about her fineness.
She is open, honest, dedicated to similarity,
Bounded by nothing but the fine latitudes of sincerity.
She is golden, good, rich but unjudging.
She is lovely.
Perhaps she does not know me.
It is gracious that she not flinch
When I press her hand too long.
And still smile when she leaves,
Even if I redden her somewhat:
The probing insistence of my hand.
Afterall: it is the end of the day.
I am tired.
And in need of some comfort.
Is she a wife to the tired man?
She is capable of a great wonder.
She is capable of being fresh.
And, even in middle age,
She is capable of enthusiastic grace.
I wish that she were nearby now.
I would hold her hand.
And speak of desire.
23 May 1986
Somewhere
Between Dream and Memory
I
HEAR THE BELLS OF MORROW
I.
I hear the bells of Morrow.
Sad bells, coupled with old women
Walking naked dogs along dustlivid mexican streets.
Old women in blackshawls,
Dresses girded with dust,
Fathipped like enchantressesinyouthgoneripe:
Gone beyondripe to that heathen atmosphere
Of olivecolored Postmidlifebecomingwaifwearyandcravensurlypostmistressofdesertedstoriesofold.
Yes.
Fat into thin.
Laugh into cadaver.
Humilitarian epoch.
Old women without old men:
The bones of old men having gone
Leery, hard, crimped, broken.
Leaving behind crippled formation,
The ribs showing,
The teeth gone,
The beards an unsceanic stubble.
Lurid faces, eyes of perverse dustmadness.
Beneath bells of Morrow.
Bells of untrust.
Bells of unholy cathedrallingo:
A town without heart,
With old women washing away Time.
Memories like grim axehandles.
Termite-riddled words.
Loves of cloudyvariety.
Breastsgonetohagbreasts.
Bitchcoagulant, in the wind.
Sisters fighting for best childhoods.
Children secure in dreams,
Living beyond Morrow,
Beyond the choked streets,
Beyond the Luciferian insanity:
Old women in black shoes.
Talking about God,
But prognosticating only blackbeatitude.
Crushing spirit with mere impression.
In the town of Morrowbeyondmorrow.
A town without virtue.
A town I have walked in,
Met old women,
Eaten chili with fleshy young wenches,
Who, in a matter of few words,
Became crones.
II.
The mountains full of thieves:
They hear the bells of Morrow and become hard.
The doctor will come by Wednesday.
There will be illnesses to cure.
The oldyoung women will raise their skirts up.
The doctor will feel their breasts,
With moreorless interest.
He will stay for dinner perhaps.
The bells will sound.
The woman will walk, in black, to the well,
Collecting dust like a microthief.
The men shall never come down
To greet the bells which prophecy their graves.
Not until the women are young once again.
And when the men come down again
It shall not be, this time, as gods.
3 July 1985
The
Old Woman Understands
ASKING DIRECTIONS TO ELYSIA
I.
I ask directions to Elysia.
Time is the color purple there.
Rain is unheard of;
Documentaries speak of historical foreshadowing.
There.
I ask directions to Elysia.
The continent bends, thrashes wildly beneath waves.
Mountains evolve, out of grainy collisions.
Trees rise and profit.
The sun heaves wheels into natural odd arrangement.
But no one knows the way to Elysia.
Artists color calendars;
Transform days into shaded spectacle.
Events take on the import of purple violets,
Cranberry shirts,
Felt hats,
Roofs with nicks,
Bruited vanes.
Children reach for fallen bikes;
Eakins' surgeon cuts, and catalogs ills;
Melancholy guitarplayers operate the marionette in dirges;
Delacroix conceives of Arabic drayhorses;
Van Gogh is himself, playing someone else,
Conceived in literature.
Women are sublime.
Mountains are Japanese woodcuts.
It is done with a flare.
Everyone's pleased.
Everyone bows.
Yet, none of these has walked
Out on the way of the road to Elysia.
II.
I ask directions.
Kings are impotent to show me.
They ask me to make them laugh.
I laugh: asking for Elysia.
Dancing girls from Scheherazade proffer me
Nightlife in a cup.
I hand them quarters,
And tell them beauty is surely only sin deep.
They smile.
And take my number and promise to call.
Counts count titles.
Europe is under water.
Who knows where Elysia is found?
The prophet wanders, unknowing:
He cannot speak.
I ask directions to Elysia,
And am told the roads have been closed by the snows.
The old woman pulls her socks up.
And asks if I would like soup instead.
17 December 1985
PART FIVE.
MARRIAGE
________________________________________________
Preparatory
to a Second Birth
THE BEGINNINGS ARE IN THE END
The beginnings are in the end.
It is said.
I believe it, I suppose.
As the Spring lies hidden within the Winter.
Such comparisons are obvious of course;
Life hides within Death,
Within the rupturing of rituals.
The beginnings are in the ends,
As the ends are, themselves,
Wholly inadvertent, wholly planned
And unchanging and unpredicted.
The ends are in the beginnings also,
As the seed contains the created existence
And the passing back beyond creation.
It is all so true, all so profound,
Seemingly profound,
Although somehow not important also.
Somehow it does not matter.
Somehow profundity, itself, is like a shoe
That no longer fits.
Once it was great and glorious and also practical,
Necessary;
Yet, lying by the road,
Discarded by someone passing,
The shoe is like a ghost,
A form of cloth, which, in emptiness,
Returns to a void,
Both in meaning and also in acuity.
27 May 1986
Coming
Through the Land of the Dead
A NEW SEASON HAS MANY DARK FACES AND EVENTUALITIES
I.
A new season has many dark faces and eventualities.
I walk in this heaven.
Many of the angry men gather nearby,
Cataloguing atmospheres,
Preparing diseases.
There is much here which would make good sales
For the papers,
Good sails for the boats of demagogues.
Some are sad, and truly undone by Eventuality,
And, thereby, waiting for a kind of birth.
Others are killers who wear the cloak of victims.
Some are capable of nothing but grapes, dirt,
Savage associations.
Some are like Jesus, gentle and clean,
Wise and unworried.
Some are between work.
Some are filled with the work of the black god:
Death is in their purpose,
Whether for judgment against existence,
Or merely anger at all creation
(They are sons still, who have not forgiven,
And, as such, become their fathers).
II.
A new season has many dark faces and eventualities.
I might drive this dark man away from the world,
And send him into drifting,
Into realization that I return.
Like Ulysses, a world of dark faces hovers near,
Each analyzing Penelope,
Stealing to her bedroom by the night
To try to catch her unweaving.
but I am home now.
26 May 1986
The
Power of Music
RITUAL AND RHYME
Ritual and Rhyme: all else is mere accentuation.
All else, but for Meaning, which is found through Rhyme,
And is the inner garment of Ritual,
Merely accedes to
these two.
The Unproductive Beast find Ritual and Rhyme provocative,
But fears it.
For these have the capacity to demolish whole fortresses
With their immensity.
As Time ungirdles itself,
Leaving only the carcasses of the forts,
And the naked elements of this title,
Raging and quietly ruling,
And always real, like the stone.
The doors open.
The wind blows great heavens through the doors.
The fine wheels watch, become clear, become new.
All that remains is to find the wife,
The one who will build your sagacity.
30 July 1986
The
Dream's Structure and Cognizance
THE SCIENCE OF MADNESS
I.
The science of madness is a very clever creation indeed.
It is thought to be wise, inculcated with prescience.
It is thought to be adult, willing, advanced beyond mere speculation.
It is thought to be ripe, untried, a very frontier into miasma.
I do not speak here of the science of treating madness,
Which is another matter totally.
Although the above descriptions (phrases)
May apply also to that science.
I am speaking more directly about the science of madness itself,
The science of art, if you will.
The science of the dark trajectory,
The dark penetration into sound.
It is a science surely, as surely as is its offspring,
The sciences dedicated to "solving" the ancestors' peculiarities.
It is like a man carrying a thousand pound boulder,
Sinking in mud,
And being told by his grandson
That the earth is giving way.
And why?
Because his childhood rituals are unresolved.
Boulder or cross or helix or globe, it is all the same.
It is the pain taken on by the man
Who would lift the world into the heavens.
And because he would lift the world,
He must also sink the world,
Or sink with it, to be more accurate.
And so he sinks.
And he sees something new now, something unhopedfor,
Something dark and tainted and without easy maps to read,
For the light has been changed.
The light is swallowed up;
The boulder, which he carries, as it nears the Sun,
Casts greater and greater shadows,
Until, at last, there is no light at all.
The map is gone.
Blindness becomes universal.
Only those gifted at symbols and clairvoyance and religion
Can find their way.
And lead the mass exodus from that shadow-side of earth
Back toward the light of heaven,
Toward the science of life,
Away from the science of madness.
II.
It is all quite plain, quite easy, quite imaginative,
This journey through the land
Without geometry and numerical objectives.
Braille can be learned, even by the living.
Braille as an unchronological touch of associations.
With the straight line swallowed by the circumference,
Leaving only a mass of water and dream imagery:
Floating in a sea.
His seriousness rises.
Can he swim?
Or, like Narcissus, the frail boy,
The one wondering at his own clear nature,
Will his reflection be too much;
Will the water mesmerize him;
Will he drown?
Clearly, that is the danger.
He watches hi performance,
The crowd,
One of the crowd now,
Enjoying each unsurly applause,
For genius is rife
In the land of seven million stages.
And when the curtain falls,
Only the scientists of madness re-create.
Procreation can cure each ill.
It is true that the body's fall leads in to Chaos;
It is also true that the body can save.
And so the map you desire most
Shall be the map you shall have.
And if you have sons
You will be most blessed.
28 March 1986
In
Salutation To the Brothers Wright
A TIME FOR FLIGHT
There is a time for flight, a time for discretion.
there is a time for Memory's high grief,
Memory's correct gait.
Time unravels each predicament, thread by thread,
Until the core within is left exposed,
Clear to the view.
It is then that either gore or glory is found;
Both gore and glory.
Bold waiting, bold certain rockbound stolidity.
Amid the flood of venerations and categorizations.
As old men bemoan the lack of consensus;
The women curse men's social conditions.
The one is strong for certainty;
The other is doomed to fury,
And to Fury's requisite house-dismantling.
And you are between the two furies,
The one demented for the lost memories,
The other crazed for that beatific ideal
Which solidifies horrible utopian calendars
And platonic preachments.
And Russian enormity of rigid moral horror
Or satanic elegiastic reaction of Germans
Tend to come in.
And you are within their gaze.
This is not the time for flight.
This is the time for unmoving grace,
Unswerving power of right.
Discretion is the ability to verbalize forms
Out of desperate Chaos,
Thereby providing leadership
To those who flounder in voids
And seek solid ground.
The time to fly is when eagles are prepared.
Flight is not retreat.
Flight is the power to soar, to strike,
To not be pushed, to never surrender:
To dominate the air.
Stand and plant the spear into your coat
Behind you, deep into earth:
Do not be moved to budge.
Strike the fear which pursues absolute reckoning.
Strike the twin energies which seek displays of
Opportunities for truth.
Each is run by death:
You alone can give the world the requisite
Necessity composed of balance.
By the power of your word.
And by wings, beyond Despair.
29 January 1986
A
Time Beyond Even Vision
I WONDER WHAT IT ALL MEANS
I wonder what it all means,
This veil of tangibility:
A cleft, a spoon;
Upturned belief:
As though vacancy were the state of existence,
Not some passing between states,
Not some void which transforms eternities.
The veil of tangibility:
It is as though I can reach into History's cradle,
And touch the child of each legion,
The mild offering of the Sun,
In whose hand the world is made.
As though the notes of song become tactile symbols,
Escalating prisms,
Through which I see my fatality in stages:
Fourteen men
Transpiring from each
Outworn frame.
17 March 1986
Sight
Returns in the Form of Words
THE CALLIGRAPHIC EPISODE
The calligraphic episode.
All else is mere motion.
Like birds on a flock of clouds over prisms.
All else is moving sounds: sonic histrionics.
Yet the calligraphic episode builds a meaning from a source.
A path through a forest of manners.
A forest of epistles: down a road toward a seaside.
Abrogated frieze.
He is long and lean and lives but to breed.
He is large and hearty and matters move him gently.
This rite.
This calligraphic entrepreneur.
He draws up the well and builds a dune around his water.
A spike on the top.
Writing calligraphic odes in a language which few can find:
Sitting beside his pond.
Thoreau would find him abstruse.
Whitman might find him civilly unabusive.
Melville's eerie watergazers in garb of Midnight's
Rigorous vendetta might blanche.
He is drowsy, hard, vigorous, laughing.
He laughs beside his pond.
With his calligraphic expositions.
He raises the world, like a shell, upon his back.
And walks beside his ocean:
Going no where;
Appearing only upon the completion
Of his epoch.
He creates himself through the word.
12 March 1986
God
of Percussion
EVERYONE RESPONDS: ODE TO AN AUTUMN WINDSTORM
Everyone responds to the quaking of the trees.
Trees are blue in the bright fingers;
Acid seeps down caloric bark.
The music rises: saphorns and leafstrings,
Elegant, brutally coined.
Twigbass and the mortar aftershock.
Beethoven had no harlequin shade.
Had no wife to call his scullion.
Mozart (like I): stenography's mortarboard.
And the whip of love, thee skull of worship:
Pendants hung on the hungpendantonian.
Words.
Words of sound.
Notes.
Clear, facile.
Trees aching, near frost.
The think skin calling out in frenzy,
Like Mahler's titanic wench,
As the shades conspire to freeze her,
Omnimutual,
In their icemerittrance.
Shaking trees by the hair,
Like childreninbrain and braunamateur
In horriblestature:
The God of Borealis makes his emissary (Staccato)
Invoke his overture:
And everyone responds.
29 October 1985
Talking
With a Friend
MY FATHER'S GHOST
I.
My father's ghost is climbing in the rain.
Dylan Thomas is close behind,
Quoting speeches from Brutus to Portia:
Words not spoken; rhymes unadorned.
Winter places bells on the feet of the cattle.
The air is peppered with mists,
Exotic scenes from Holland, in icing:
Children gathered 'round the fire.
And my father's ghost is climbing in the rain.
The Welsh have dreary heavens, on the seacoast,
In rocks and gales.
Clarks and Thomases; and those for ever never English.
The clan of strong songmakers.
The clan of singerdrinker poetlaureate coastalwaterwalkers.
Son and such words; rains and forever ghostlings.
It is the wrongful stuff of tragedy,
Were we not such inveterate laughers.
II.
My father's ghost is laughing in the rain.
He feels no pain, no dreary necessity for valor
No irreverent intoxication with style.
He laughs and calls out:
"Mike, get your ballglove!"
He is lefthanded, plays firstbase in heaven:
On a team with Ruth and Musial and Mays.
He swats flies with the grace of a danceman.
He sings in the fields, evergrowing, lilac and rye.
Welsh coastline.
Wyoming summer.
Father to son: Oldland to Newland.
His own father's ghost is singing in the rain;
No Bing Crosby surely,
For the whiskey has made his voice dry;
And harmonized his tenor into cardigan and shale.
III.
My father's ghost is clinging to the rain,
Indeed, is the rain,
Bringing life to the valley of sorrows.
He is not sad.
He says: "Mike, there are other fish in the sea."
"Mike, there are other mermaids you can catch."
"Mike, there is another whirlpool you can enter,
At a whim."
The fishlike delights of the women in my tea,
In my autographs, in my workplace:
My father's ghost just smiles and says:
"If it pleases them, do it three times.
If they like it, make them rich --
And take some pleasure in the mermaid's laughter."
My father's ghost is crying in the rain.
He is not sad; he does not cry because of pain.
My father's ghost has seen his son;
And this produces a smile.
26 November 1985
The
Thing That Does Not End
THE HIDDEN CATEGORY
The hidden category comes on like a passage
Of a ghost.
It touches all, every leaf,
Every trembling lip,
Each lie,
Each horror,
Each noble deed.
It touches each face,
Each woman's breast,
Each flank,
Each crystal of hair.
It passes through each season,
Each embrace,
Each embarrassment.
It passes all,
Passes and does not glance.
It is a category, a being, an entity;
It is always hidden.
25 March 1986
The
Son, Ineluctably, Grows Older
THE ANTIPATHY OF THORNS
I.
The antipathy of thorns.
Broken sails and a ruptured humor.
A stone born for mirrors:
Several centuries built for straw.
Umpteen analysis: Nineteeneightyfour is lore.
Lore of minds seeking boons from an enslavement.
The circuit of the dream; the analysis of the rose.
Seeking tragedy in a shoe.
Seeking blue self-appointment.
Self-torture in a breezy brew, for two.
And so it is.
II.
In the antipathy of thorns: some protect and some are gored.
Boredom has several incentives to share.
Several histories are produced
From the bark of the River Turmoil.
And then the captain takes his shoes off.
He leaves the boat in the harbor
And looks for love.
He has had enough of Sorrow;
Tragedy's trajectory has finally been appeased.
He dreams of a land where the darkness is stalled.
He dreams of his own children.
He hears his father's voice,
Which seems to lead him toward some woman
Who is his wife.
25 May 1985
Someone
Dreams of Being Wed
THE DELIVERY OF THE CLAUSE
The delivery of the clause.
The string is broken, and the music ceases.
The clause becomes a hanging grandeur,
Aggrandizing meaning with the subtle lingering
Made from possibilities.
The unknown ending:
Mystery being the equation of that which is known
multiplied by that which is inferred.
Shading being the inference,
The form multiplied by potential.
A garden of sand.
A garden of sumptuous evidence:
The craving of tempers for the raving of clams.
An unsung feature:
Harp playing the essential natures of queens,
The celestial vapors of airy angels
Unknowing and angularly prismatic.
Words without a conclusion.
The clause, broken and never whole:
Always waiting for completion,
As a promised-to waits for her promised.
At the church with a quiet bouquet.
Knowing (essential knowing) that her delivery as whole-scale element,
Married to opposite quarters,
ill not provoke, in her, real union;
Still she waits.
The clause waits for words,
Waits for subjects and objects and verb and contemporary sentence.
The words culminate in the rhythmical epiphany:
Clause-angular is the sentence;
Unfulfilled, until the world spews angry diatribes
Into the wild land.
Re-creation in the wilderness of worries
Spawns new formats:
And the clause, in time,
Becomes the paragraphing entity.
And all is new.
23 June 1986
The
Number Becomes One Hundred Eleven
SATURDAY BEGINS TO SPEAK A NEW LANGUAGE
Saturday begins to speak.
The sky unveils itself,
Making Time a ladder of ascendancy.
Rings about Saturn, each tier being a newborn:
A reflection of a reflection.
One dark and one light.
Reflecting like mirrors in a gallery of Eden.
Only one movement; and the rest parroting.
Distorting the first move,
And giving rise to new movements,
The time between one and every other
Making motion.
It is a sorry state.
A state of Sorrow perhaps;
A state of confused endeavor,
For understanding is so fragile,
So limited by ease.
The Sun pounds down: a hammer of gold blessings.
I love its length, its breadth, its lion in the veins,
Its harpoon in the loin.
I love its furious residuals:
Lust and beauty and leaves and dancing felines.
Saturday begins to speak.
It is a new day, to be sure;
It is a new language which Saturday speaks,
Yet available for comment,
Truly wise and open for observation.
30 May 1986
The
Grace of Living
THE TEMPTATION TO BELIEVE
There is a temptation to believe,
As great as any king,
As humble as any saint or loving mistress.
It tempts each of us,
Unto unbending association.
It makes us bold, strong, wild, compassionate,
Even loving for a time.
It makes us capable of great humanity:
The temptation to see in all things one thing.
Love.
The great shield-carrying goddess,
Too beautiful to be captured,
Too noble to be untrue.
The temptation becomes flesh.
And it is good.
For were it not flesh,
Were it not true,
Then no worldly temptation might lead us
To find our degrees of perfection,
Our satisfactions with our selves.
At least for a time.
19 March 1986
Re-Believing
In That Thing Proven Not True
LOVE'S LOGIC IS A TREE WITHOUT ROOTS
Love's logic is a tree without roots.
It is calumnious, abbreviated;
Its source is uncovered,
Without coverage, and without calm.
It is a stone above a sod;
An impediment and, also, a greatness.
But its roots are gored;
Its rival is Time and the Wind.
Rain and the teetering of the topheavy corduroy.
For the tree without sufficient roots merely tilts in the wind;
And when the soil is soaked,
The heavy pending of the tree
Pulls the shorthairs from the sodbottoms.
The tree falls and is pronounced sorry.
So the story goes.
It is not as if you have not heard it before.
It is not some great secret, not some mandatory rendering either.
It is a story, a moral, a painting, an ephemera.
A memory most of all.
A thought, a dream, a fear.
The tree which loses grace.
Yet it is only Love's logic afterall.
And Love is not logical.
Love is rage, and claw, and touch, and friendly obliteration.
Love is category, and sound, and opinion, and mostly lust.
Love is mad, and bold, and quizzical, and a maker of song.
And it is not logic at all.
And so, when I say that Love's logic is a tree without roots,
I am not saying that Love is a tree without roots.
Love is a tree with deep roots,
A tree with conditions deep in history's verdant cradle,
Deep in Man's blemished nation,
Deep, deep, as deep as a word, as deep as a moan,
As deep as the first blush, the first fury,
As deep as the primeval vicinities,
As deep as blood,
As deep as Time
Before clocks were forged at the first anvil,
As deep as the woman's vestige,
As deep as clay's migration,
As deep as forest shades,
As deep as Death itself,
As deep as fear,
As deep as clairvoyance,
With roots magnified, twisted, torn,
Tearing huge caves into the modified womb,
The carriage of Earth,
The fields of November,
Great light lines to grace,
The Milky Way,
The galaxies of the north,
Lifelines of heritage,
The conquest of freeze.
Love tears all options, all restrictions, from the crown,
And plants them like seeds.
From the burst girdle of her fury
All the world is re-done.
And only Her logic, Her ideation,
Is groundless.
14 March 1986
The
Son Understands His Fate:
He
Begins To Search For His Wife
THE PRESAGE IS KNOWN
I.
The logic of the unencumbered memory,
The sweet jurisdiction of remembrance,
When Love comes down vacant pedigrees
In the form of a flood,
Unencumbered by remote satisfactions
And even less remote emergencies,
Make the analogy of a passed womanfriend,
Returning,
Seem but a prayer,
Like wind on a window,
Like rain watering gardenland.
There is no logic in Life; only in memory.
The only logic in Life is the circular round;
The primary responsibility of the line drawn between cause and effect
Is like the windmill in its preconception,
Without reality except in abstract imagery.
Life is bold with accident,
Rough and handsome and categorically unknown:
Yet approximate, like a drawing
In which vague images of dreams,
By the clever hand of attitude,
Remorseless atmospheres,
Makes a precise appearance,
As real as fantastic visions,
Made real and touchable and pragmatic by willful nature.
There is no logic in preconditions;
But the rounded edge seems to make it so.
II.
There is precision in vision however.
A number, a face, a recondite facade:
Behind which angle black and white proximities to fatality,
Like stooges fighting for squares,
Like chessmen angling for questions,
Compete for a queen's domain.
Yes it is there, this eerie magnitude,
This dominant surcease,
Knowable only in the glimpse;
Then salvaged, in memory,
When the dream takes only skin,
And flesh and blood become memory's voyager:
And there the presage is known.
24 February 1986
Postcard
and Stamp:
Appearance
of the First Candidate
THE PREDICTION OF LOVE
I.
There is a prediction of love.
It is in a postcard,
From a girl who once rode horses in Wyoming.
A ranch near Saratoga.
Only miles from our family cabin.
I met her once.
She visited the school.
She had black hair.
I saw her through a door;
I could not stop looking.
I looked intently.
She was dark and light at once.
She stood at the door, with her aunt and her uncle --
The Dean of the school.
My stare caught her eye.
She looked at me.
There was some recognition.
She was brought back to meet me.
I talked with her quietly.
She made me somewhat nervous.
She was beautiful, with the kind of beauty
That can take one's breath away.
She seemed unaware of her radiance,
Innocent of her power,
Perhaps embarrassed by it.
We talked.
I found myself pulling away from her,
Trying not to drive her away by being too forward.
She did not hesitate.
She seemed to enjoy the closeness.
I explained things which seemed to me merely repetition.
To her these were whole new notions.
I wanted to keep her there.
She had a sweet smell, and a fresh heat.
We were fixed, for a moment.
I asked her to have lunch with me,
If a planned lunch fell through.
She did not return.
Later, I wrote her a letter.
I forget her beauty now.
Sometimes.
Forget just how powerful it was.
II.
Today she sent a postcard,
Notifying the school that she would be
Attending in the fall.
On the postcard was a note she had stamped:
"FALL IN LOVE. With stamp collecting."
13 May 1986
The
Son Begins to Understand Women
A TONIC FOR BOREDOM
She is a tonic for boredom.
She is a new face, a new expression.
Her body is a tonic itself:
Ripe, formed for enjoyment.
Her mind is a tempest: trite, horned employment.
Yet, still, not boredom.
She is clever, sardonic, playful.
Full of play.
If you are too old for play,
Then you are too old to shout,
To sing,
To fight bitterly,
To remain sagacious.
Use her.
Enjoy her.
Do not pity her,
For she needs pity less than she needs attention.
Her great tragedy is silence,
A night alone.
If you break her heart, she will heal it.
If you make her cry,
Like a child she will recover.
If you spurn her love,
Whether out of principle or for kindness:
She will not forgive you.
Worse still: you will not forgive yourself.
For she is your companion.
She can bring you pleasure,
A kind of lightness,
In a land beyond thought.
29 May 1986
Contemplating
A Sculpture
THE GOLD MONKEY
The gold monkey entrances me.
For he is attainable only to few.
He is within the reach of myself and my angel,
Presenting himself (this monkey)
Through an avenue of worship.
He is not an idol;
No false idol surely.
He is not a graven image,
Although grave sometimes in feature.
He holds a treasure in one hand;
And he holds a cross in the other.
He has a sword in his belt;
And Saint Michael's medal around his neck.
The gold monkey entrances me.
He can give every gift in the world.
He is featured by laughter, tears, anger, veneration.
He has four seasons,
Giving one to take another,
Relieving one and inventing some balance
Of ice and heat,
Winter frost and summer excess.
I love this monkey, not for what he is, really,
But for what he suggests,
What he encompasses in his virtues.
I dream often about something great,
Something wild and ambitious, and real:
Love, glory, conquest, sainthood.
It matters not what object.
Sex, money, prophecy, fatherhood:
It all is real, given a time in God's garden,
Given as reward and punishment also.
I take it all.
It is all in His dream,
His great vision of completion.
I listen to this monkey.
And I try to learn by his unmoving visage.
7 August 1986
The
First Candidate Re-Appears
THE PROCESS OF SILENCE
It is the process of silence which renders the oblique unlearned,
Renders the heavenly coalescent.
It is a story of calm,
A tale of the approach of a lass heavenly-bound,
Made out of sand,
Out of leaves,
Out of clouds and purest rains.
It is a face which is a fortune,
Which fells ships and surmounts mountains.
It is a face which bargains dreams,
Which hearkens musical enchantments;
For the Anna who is promised
Is named Nina;
And this manufactures romance.
Perhaps it leads to pain.
Perhaps it leads to loss also.
Perhaps it leads to marriage, and eternal union.
I talk with God now, where before I did not.
Before I fought God, fought the upright means;
Now work is not so low,
And disease has not been raised.
And so I now approach this love with a respect
For the woman and for God's precious dictate;
I approach this love and search earnestly for victory;
Before I sought the life which led to the tragic meal,
And in to the blood of self-destruction.
25 July 1986
A
Second Candidate Arrives
LOVE AND THE SOUTHERN GHOST
I.
I talk about Love, and the Southern Ghost arrives.
She is liquid in the eye, a face as frugal as the Moon.
She answers to many names:
Natalie, Harmony, Francesca, Beatitude,
Apollo's Consuming Grace.
She takes many men, makes them small,
Contorts their failures.
She is limblight,
Frescoed by a history which conjugates
Mere latitudes,
Evoking gates from the discipline of juleps.
The smell of magnolia,
Blossoms as big as a giant's family mansion.
She makes love only with Italians,
For they emit quaint harmonics
Of European twilights;
She hates men of braun,
Men of harlequin steadiness.
Give her poets, mathematicians, oracles, brainweary musicians.
Give her homosexuals, if you will:
Agents of flaccid and loinweary breweries.
Minds which manipulate the female sequence.
For she has no breasts, no body, no beltline.
She has no hidden parts
By which men might rule her variety.
She is the Southern Ghost:
Made by dreams,
Made by lowland preoccupations,
Mississippi rituals;
Slaves and ghouls and landmasters and rebellion.
Plantations in eerie Louisiana quailfactories;
Dixie and folklore;
Folktales and pasthistory,
Linked with France and the gallant tradition,
Nor the whiteproxy of northern Brittainia.
She balks.
I touch her back, her cheek.
She runs.
I speak of Love, and she quails,
For she is childlike.
I speak of Love, and horrify her fragrance.
The hot imagery of precious union.
The black night of adjoining sins.
Moontenderless: pretender of virtue.
Making friends dressed in cages:
Restricted in touch,
Restricted in honorable intent.
Acting the queen of ideals:
Those pre-platonic forms,
Baked by minds intent on precision.
Geometry's pedal:
A shadow on the wall being
Rectangular blurred figuration of a square:
Shaped out of lesion by Time's burlesquing motion.
Not precise;
Not real;
Not idea..
The thought: the precious thought:
Bodiless and oblique.
Like the temperament of gods.
Like the atmosphere of islands.
Give her that!
Give her Renaissance impressions:
Art and craft and occult girded pastimes!
She dreams.
She believes.
She abhors the pragmatic.
She raises artists to heights approximating kites.
She sees poverty as submission, transmissions into Muse --
For she is rich:
The rich ennoble pre-platonic corporations.
Built by metaphor into bones, flesh, grain, Marxian concept.
I speak of Love and she speaks of limits.
I speak of Love and she speaks of youth.
I speak of Love and she speaks of Genoa, Milan, Rome, even Venice --
As though these places were peopled by ghosts in a heaven;
And not by flshbearing skirtwearing shirtbartering marketeers:
As hard as stone, as soft as sod,
As real as pain, as ghostless as watercarriers elsewhere.
She hides when I speak of Love.
She fears my entry,
My forced climax of charm.
I speak of love, and she speaks of freezing.
I speak of Love; she claims she has dreams:
Riding her cycle,
Her brown hair trembling.
II.
I can see that this Ghost from the South cannot love me.
It is not that she cannot feel,
That she has no soul.
She merely expects rice from wheat,
Expects canyons and receives coal.
I cannot love a ghost;
Neither can I hate it.
It flees.
And believes it is saved.
26 November 1985
A
Present of Sorts is Received
THE LOCKED BOX
The box is locked.
The man with the key has gone away,
And I am forced to try to urge the box open,
Mainly with wishes, possibly with force.
Yet the box is lovely, hand-made, finely textured,
With soft grains and lacy fringe.
It is hot, this box.
The heat rises from it, as if some life were within,
Seeking escape; or, if not escape, expansion.
Demanding recognition of its content.
Which I recognize, running my hand across its taper.
It is fine.
I could not force it.
What if I were to do damage to this feathery line,
Its cushioned extensions.
If there were a word to open it (some riddle to solve),
I would find it.
If flowers, alone, brought to the box as a sign of devotion,
Would work, I should build a garden.
If money, even, were its measure;
I have some saved and do not fear to let it go,
For the right pleasure, or a supple cause.
Yet the key is made of gold I fear.
And another has it.
Another who is gone,
Who does not even realize that the key
Is in his purse.
The box is locked.
One would think it were Winter,
The frozen hinges on this treasure.
I shall not retreat.
There is always some way,
Some real kindness, to open clams,
Some treat to tempt a tortoise's seams.
Inside this box is an ocean of expense,
A continent of dreams.
Inside this box is a pleasure for every decade,
A scent for every second.
It is strange this box can have such appeal,
Such mystique, even when it opens.
When it opens, a part of it closes.
When it is locked, a great well of it gapes.
26 June 1986
Two
Worlds of Antiquity
I SING HER GRANDILOQUENCE
I.
I sing her grandiloquence,
This tiny beauty from Houma County.
She is a dreammaid, pettyproud and twoschooled.
She is touched and broken and built up and hard.
Defenseless: surrounded by stones.
The brick is her barrier:
Brick of the fortress and cultural amputation.
Southern irony:
Made by the dream:
By surrender to cats.
The ambulated moondipping walk
Down a muddymississippi.
The banjo is a dream.
The claygated slavemade phantom,
With suspenders and talk of deboogyman.
The ghost of her grandfather riding Lion, his horse,
Over shrubbery in the dawn.
They all saw it: Patriarchal reunion:
Guardian of his estate.
All the former slaves saw him.
She loves this ghost,
This clayless man (redeemer of Clay;
Worshipper of Henry Nationhoodinourpockets
Haymakerthroughoratory Clay):
Prime Phantom of the Old South.
The plantation still has honor.
She walks with a laugh.
She is not pretty, yet she is lovely.
She plays with my advances.
She warns me of her love for European men (only);
Her delicious friendships with gaymen --
Penisless provisioners --
Who will not pop bubbles
Made of either flesh or ice.
Still, I walk beside her,
Armed with ardor's flame.
Generally.
Like a man about to fix passion's armored succor
On her frail dreaming compulsions:
She desires to be alone.
II.
She does not love this man,
So large, filled with horrible activity.
He is not her cultured type.
His hands are large, his fingers big.
His shoulders proclaim danger.
He has ancestors who still smell of Indians' blood,
From passes where Jim Bridger ran guns along Green River,
Turning hills against squaws and ancestral gameherds.
Where his relative, William Clark, in his diplomatic squadron,
Passed whitehaired futurity through the badlands of Laramie County,
Into the equally badlanded heritage
Of General Rawlins And Grenville Dodge:
Southern Wyoming and that frontier without gods.
He has the smell of legs and ambitions,
This descendant of war.
Who announced to this precious Lousiana child:
"I intend to be your lover!"
It was too much.
He has Indianblood, no doubt;
His black hair so unleveled,
His beard so amphibian.
His body inside hers,
So grieved,
So invested:
It shall not be!
She runs.
She makes her face become sour, twisted,
Sends emissaries of Pure Expression,
Restrictive, brutal, seers of gallows in rainbows,
Against that man who would make her cry.
He knows this, sees it, understands it.
She has dreams that are centuries old.
Dreams of gallant, cleanshaven men
On quarterhorses and in velvet hats,
Broadbrimmed, from New Orleans,
Bringing kind declarations and civilized discussion
To her doorstep.
The western honesty, naked, deplorable,
Leaving a woman with no zones of comfort:
This makes her feel small.
He is gone.
She had responded:
"I do not wish to sleep with you this weekend!
I don't wish to do anything with you this weekend!
We are not compatible!
You are not my type!"
III.
He was gone.
The desire for intimacy equals, in strength,
Only the desire for the goodness Solitude.
The struggling of waifs:
Temptations to attenuate the pleasuredome.
She barely speaks to him when they pass.
He is either out only for her rose
(A metaphor nicer than fine tissue)
Or else he does not comprehend her condescension.
She either desires him to pass;
Or she is angry that he has acceded so quickly,
Without struggle, or, at least, without further discussion.
1 November 1985
The
Fragile Snow
THE SOUTHERN GHOST IS ILL
I.
The Southern Ghost is ill.
I chased her though a wooded fall.
We both fell down through the forests of December;
The rivers of January froze.
She fled, for a child is weak by movement,
Is rife when caged by ambitions.
Her foreverheld memories of Louisiana seemed shaken.
She worked, a student, swamped by a sense of failing.
She wished to be an architect.
She tried to train her inflexible mind:
Structuring structures, defending the anachronistic.
To me she was ill all along.
Her spirit flew;
But she was chained by her vision,
Too precious in flesh,
Too rigid in intellect.
But using the intellect as her sanctuary,
Rather than the flesh,
Rather than the heart,
Rather than the scream, the dance, the kiss, the explosion.
She drew up the gate, filled the moat with screaming demons.
And then became ill.
II.
I sent her a valentine:
'Will you have a friendly dinner with me?"
For days, no response.
Then I found my valentine, beheaded, with her name gone,
No tracings of her,
Lying near my door with the declaration:
"No!" scrawled across the front.
St. Valentine wept.
It was not to be so:
This day was for the good of heart,
The generous,
And not the twisted lament.
He grieved;
And punished her perhaps.
For she became sick.
She called to tell me she was sick.
I did not respond.
I thought she would recover.
Today, a week later, I am told she is living
In the hospital.
She broke down.
All the tension;
All the castles to uphold, top-heavy, in her cloud.
I took her a present: two books.
Dylan Thomas poems;
William Faulkner's selected stories.
I tried to see her.
They would not let me pass.
Visiting hours were over.
She was not only ill;
She was in the psychiatric ward.
7 March 1986
The
Second Candidate Withdraws
THE SHOE DOESN'T FIT
I.
The shoe doesn't fit.
It is too loud, too boisterous.
Some believe that the clay imagery of Love
And Love's progeny
Is too hard cold to really be true.
And they are right, no doubt.
Love's progeny is not clay,
But florid trumpet and embellished paradigm.
Love's clay heritage is not through fleshy accord,
But in the end of fleshy accord.
The gate of death does not open to he who sends flowers,
Who writes flowery cards of declaratives;
The gates of clay open only when he is done,
When he has pierced the secret gates of his love,
No longer secret to the man of his age,
Yet always new, always different.
II.
The shoe doesn't fit only if he views life
From some angle of perfect fallacy in contrast.
Yet Life is Life.
The shoes are large and small,
Have many odd angles themselves.
The rich panorama of produce and recede,
Of picture and fixture,
Evolves into some heritage;
And the callow inherit their juices from above.
III.
The shoe does not fit.
It is not because the shoe is too small,
Or because the foot is too large;
The shoe does not fit because it is Summer;
And the shoe is not required.
24 July 1986
Presage
of the Next Life
I MOVE IN A LAND OF MAIDS
I.
I move in a land of maids.
I am utopic, conquered by love, equaled by smiles.
I am prone to minute discoveries.
II.
In a far land a shell explodes.
A people arm themselves to fight me.
They are far away.
They have a desert to eat and oil to believe
And a God who hates creation
And a leader who dignifies murder.
Arabic conquest.
Multilateral obligations.
Carrying the shield into hell.
To fight with the frightened purgatorios.
In the modest will of oratorios.
Talking the good war of preyers.
Capitulating to non-romance.
God of Death hacking arms off to pauper.
Cutting lips off the pretty teenage girls
Who stooped to Western lipstick.
Fallen women, without lips, behind a shroud,
A holy veil.
In the name of God.
In the name of God who is not God
But a Satanic creation.
Out for blood and blackened fury.
Burned buildings.
Demons of conflict.
III.
I move in a land of maids
And find this distant drum like a ship at sea,
Far from me,
Far from my land-locked vision,
My land-locked obsessions.
I am on an island:
And they explode in hell
Their visions blue and black,
Preconditioned to excess,
Presupposing mutilation.
They are ogres, for the righteous,
For the easy,
Hating God and hating man.
And so they shall be.
Until I rise from my bed of dreams
And find them shouting at my gate.
I will raise the silver trumpet.
And blow.
And strike their idol.
And make them bow.
25 March 1986
His
Fiancee (Unknown to Her)
Has
the Power of Smiles
SATURNALIA'S GRIM CIRCUS
I.
Saturnalia's grim circus pulls up its tents
And prepares to leave.
Having just come,
Just driven stones into earth,
Having drunk water from the sea,
Leaving fish dried on the tempest memory,
An ode born truly once and foolishly carved,
Dry bones,
Into History's dust.
Then a matter of blood.
II.
I feel pain now.
My whole body begins to ache.
And I think it is Love, true Love,
Not mere Physical Delight,
In which Love is generally kind, and generally solid.
No, this Love is the vengeful kind.
The kind that tears souls in half, tears
Hearts into strings on which the lions
Compose their minuets of devouring.
I watch.
I have seen her before.
I knew her then, when she first appeared,
In her black shirt, with her dark hair curling.
She has come again;
And I feel her presence inside me,
Hammering me into some salable form again.
I fear to trust Love, to trust happiness, the dream.
I would leap, but I have leapt before.
I have leapt into great holes of devotion,
Great canyons which have no ladder of ascent.
I have thrown myself beneath the wheels of Love,
And been ground into dusty lattices of emotion.
It is emotion which turns me, churns me,
Renders me pained and almost angry
And certainly searching for this newest heart,
Nina Beardsley,
On whom I fashion this adoration,
For she is light itself,
She is Life,
And can make the self-rented
Whole again.
And so the greatest pain is not the pain itself;
It is the fear that I cannot really trust the dream
That I worship;
The fear that such belief shall only render me
Another fallen Adam,
And, thus, retire me.
17 July 1986
Listening
to His Children
TALKING IN NUMBERS
Talking in numbers, so all souls can see.
Talking in shale alleyways and the rigid impressions of coal.
So all's old can seed.
Seeding the arid ways of memorial appreciation.
Talking in travesties of shades,
Expecting the ritual to find its way errorborn.
Hearing voices in the wind.
Voices of the unborn;
Voices wishing to be,
Wishing to establish bodylife with a word,
A name, a nonnumerical vow.
It is my name.
I hear it clearly.
I look.
It is gone.
Just wind.
I see the wind, its inner sleeve, velvety, succinct.
Children inside the sleeve,
Awaiting my sperm to make them cleave,
And wed their voice to an egg of propriety,;
And beg the sea to teach them beyond dreams.
I hear them again.
Is it the living in the distance,
Or the soontobe as they come close?
Both?
Ineluctably?
I look for a wife, a partner, to set them free.
Cries of delight.
Fright.
Each emotion, but also some clarity:
I know these tiny voices,
As broad as clouds,
As deep as winter nights.
Plain heavy.
Hollow wild.
Yet small, delicate:
Imprisoned in the thin sails of nonexistence,
Pre-existence;
These children who wish to complete me,
Who wish to grace me with their prime natures.
Send my wife to me,
With her womb fertile,
With her heart rich,
With her embrace a silk prediction:
And make me worthy of her,
Worthy of the beauty in the wind,
The honorable calls from the yettobe,
As they make believe with numbers
Turned to days before conception.
Summer afternoons come rife.
Somewhere, inside a cloud,
Walks the voice of a woman
Whose body slowly comes to find me.
When all the other days are gone,
She will be there -
And she'll remind me of my earlier illusions.
16 June 1985
Intermezzo
(She Is Not Lasting)
SATURATED WITH PROSE
He is saturated with prose,
Manufactured by words,
Both wealthy and equally impoverished,
Both pleasant and unequally poised.
Saturday is sweet.
The local ammunition of being and ecstatic unity.
The logical amelioration of seeing and seeing plastic entities.
The sweet duality of love, of lore, of local aptitude.
Seance with rites.
Seance with ritual rigors.
The lure of the blonde apparatus.
Oily and vegetable in tone.
I am loved by a beauty.
And not loved.
I am needed; and not needed.
I am twice found, once lost,
Twice foiled, once appreciated.
I am not worthy of many associations, it is true.
I am worthy of many true associations;
It is perhaps requisite.
I am blue, and true as rain,
And right as shooting,
And sure as a blue streak.
I am akin to several seasons.
I have a lover who has vanished (in this I am not unique).
I have a lover who has not appeared (in this I am not alone).
I have no lover (in this I am, perhaps, in a majority).
I have wishes and desires,
And sometimes I am mostly tired.
In this I am especially altruistic.
For the most part.
I am tried and foolishly nice.
I am equal to the task of romancer;
Yet unequal to the cask of oblivion.
I am new, appertaining to qualms.
I am vengeful, in heart, but cheery in spirit,
Not out of deceit,
Rather out of depths,
Empty oceans in my midst
Which give great reefs and further voids,
In which my wrath executes itself
With less graceless furrows.
I am near a local blonde girl who is twenty-two years old
And who took me to her house over the weekend
And undressed me and undressed herself
And took me to her narrow bed,
On which we lay a Saturday night and Sunday morning
In a strange interweaving of legs and tales and kisses
And muted screams and moans and laughters
And sweet scents of pubic strategies;
Her nipples so sensitive,
The backs of her ears so responsive,
Her vagina so young and warm
And her body so muscular,
And shocked by pleasure,
Twisted by pleasure,
And not coy at all in pleasure,
Not distant in pleasure
But tremendously close,
Tremendously sweet,
Her mouth so succulent,
Her neck ripe for the bite.
Do not rebuke pleasure: it sometimes comes so rarely.
So it is.
t is a new day.
She now moves away from me;
Yet, for one night, one morning,
We were locked together,
Both strange and both near,
Both beautiful and both afraid,
Both loving and touching with care.
It is a shame it is not eternal.
10 September 1986
Talking
With Another Friend
SHE ASKS ME TO HAVE LUNCH
She asks me to have lunch.
The thicklipped women are approaching me now for love.
Melda: Sicilian earth.
She is thick in body, robust in her laugh.
She has long hair, thick enough to build a forest with.
Her breasts are round, full, swollen, immediate.
She claims that she is not made for love,
for adulterous behavior.
I do not believe it.
Her nostrils flare.
She is made for flesh, despite her claims to devotion
to mystical truth.
That is all talk: high-minded fashion.
She is made of flesh and hunger and lament.
She is woman, afterall.
All the clouds of discipleship
And all the winds of opinion (the intellect of fog)
Come down meekly to the Earth
When naked bodies collide:
And the kiss wins.
30 May 1986
Out
Of Retirement
THE SOCIABLE STAGE
The sociable stage comes on
And makes me green again.
Trying to soothe an appropriate element.
As the Summer comes on and the undressing begins.
Making me naked in the light of day.
Making me civilized amid civilities.
Women made for light clothes; blowsy, rumpled.
Rich and expecting riches.
Light in morality.
Light in erotic candidacy.
Barbecue's eve; and Eve's essential twilight.
Invitations to the ball.
A heaven which I hardly trust,
Since the memory of Winter conflict
Looms so near.
It is hard to trust happiness.
I wonder if it is wise.
August 1986
Preparing
For the Surprise
I TRY TO WALK IN THE WAYS OF CLAY
I try to walk in the ways of clay.
The hippopotamus has masks; and sells footprints it makes
To the gnats as cover against rain.
Burying mountains of symbols deep in clay,
In the damp imagery of brawn:
Uncautious rummaging across the straits of malaise,
As if Memory were nothing but a bank of impressions
In which a gnat might hide should the sky conspire
A flood to significantly wash him. Away.
The colloquy is bright, brine-heavy, acid-eaten.
A new romance.
A new meaning for breathing.
A wife in the air, sent by God to you
As a reward for your observations.
A new romance, between clay and hippopotamus;
Between gnat and sky and clay.
The Moon is golden.
She is regal, like a lovely day;
All her smiles are reserved for you;
And her heart is real and expository.
8 August 1986
Talking
With Another Friend
THE DIPLOMATIC RESOURCE
I.
The diplomatic resource.
The calendar full of holes.
The Islamic Army of God.
Painted black to merge the Day with Night.
The continental amelioration.
Bridges made of pattern and plaques.
In the high sky of fatigue.
Searching the desert for clues,
Clues to eternity and to eternity's breadth.
Alone.
Walking away from friends,
From convenient conversations.
The border of loneliness,
The border of management of fears:
As a diplomatic resource.
As the screaming entities of thought,
Those who demand precision in their worlds,
Who declare life as a shadow of precise ideas,
Perfect ideas,
Platonic bonds,
De-scale virtue into an objective treatise
And prescribe it for all.
II.
The cleavage of we and they becomes raw.
Real, and as apparent as the vestige of God.
The clamoring of horsemen on the walk covet bridges.
The coalition of brains; and the whip of the
Unclocked savage.
Time's mercurial management,
Heaven to toe,
Hell to halo,
All circuits undone,
Except the colonial myth,
The going out to find the pallor.
The harbor of sand and colloquial sea,
Ringed by love ardors and free girls
Looking in skirts.
It is a banquet to see,
A colorful spectacle of virtue.
Walking on loose boards, wet with cleaning.
The dusk fully done, fully graced
By the trumpet of sweat.
It is a diplomatic pleasure,
A resource of unempty conquest:
Walking in a young girl's arm,
In a watertown somewhere near dream,
Neighbor of Plenitude:
There I am walking.
17 June 1986.
Never
Too Proud To Beg
THREE PRAYERS FROM THE AUTHOR
I.
WHERE IS MY WIFE
Where is my wife,
That one with the brown hair and ivory arms?
She has left her station in my dreambed,
Carrying with her the tiny eels
Which carry dreams down the road
Between tears.
Dissolution is not unkindly.
The dream is spent on tangents:
Rubbing wounds with the potion of chromium.
Shining up the visor.
Making the Sun reflect his insanity.
Until the dreamboards of the dreamhouse
Swallow twilight's stony perfection;
And her voice is not heard nor held.
Making hair but a scent.
Making sweet flesh of breasts
And hairhiding sequences
Even more oblique
For their touch is so near.
And she is gone: logic states it;
Poetry spells it;
Metaphysics describes it;
History predicts it;
Mothers warn against it;
Fathers berate it;
Lovers deny it;
Predecessors prove it,
As regal as any mathematics
And as bestial as any clay lust
In the vegetable lifestyle.
Time of a circling winch.
Wrenching wench and wrenching lad.
From the lap of luxurious candlemassing:
I will walk; but her voice was once wax.
1 October 1985.
Three
Prayers From the Author
II.
SEND ME A WOMAN TO PLEASE ME
Send me a woman to please me.
Send me a woman with long black hair,
Kinked, full, and flowering.
Send me a woman with ripe breasts, the nipples stiff.
I see them beneath her soft brown blouse.
She has a strap on her purse; the strap grazes them so lightly.
The nipples swell as she breathes.
Send me a woman with full smooth thighs.
Her buttocks need not be tight, unstretched, of a girl.
Her ass can be broad, remorseless, situated for fun.
Send me a woman with a full life, a proud watershed, a harried metaphor.
Let her loose pants conceal, for a time,
A delicately haired treasury, rich with heat and caress and motion.
Let it be soft and nice to touch, and deep enough for pleasure.
Let me kiss it.
Let me be lost in it.
Let her organ of pleasure be fresh and exact contortions.
Let her cry when she's moved.
Let her call when she's freed.
Let her body explode when she's right and extended and found.
Send me a woman with graceful stature,
With humor and with warm feeling.
Let her intelligence be that of life, the wisdom of living,
And not some scrutinizing detailunveiling ponderous affliction.
Let her woman's heart be florid, ever unveiling new creations.
Let her limbs be as dreams,
Her dreams be as lambs walking daily upon a mead.
Let her lips be eager, even wild to find affection.
Let her desire children.
Let her be capable of love, not married to her ire,
Her isolation from her childhood.
Let her be physical with me.
Let her be spiritual with me.
Let her emotions be full.
Let her be honest, not hidden, not obsessive.
If I ask too much, then send me someone less expressive,
Someone less precise and good.
If I don't ask too much,
Then I shall wait for my reward.
3 January 1986
Three
Prayers From the Author
III.
WHO IS COMING TO BEFRIEND ME
Who is coming to befriend me?
Is she bold, suggestive, menacing?
Is she horribly lovely, couched with pearls and lyrics;
And, even more, with certain ken?
Truth in her veins; her touch like a bath of grace?
She is bold, suggestive, only menacing to porousfalsehoods.
Her hair is reddish;
Earth is in her atmosphere.
Souls abound within her district.
She has rather small breasts, round buttocks.
She has children who are like facile ingredients:
Genius, designed by mercurial imagination.
Wearing clothes and smiles and the intrigue of laughter.
Mother watching from a field.
All is well.
The wind slaughters innocent twigs, leaves leafs
Lacerated and bellicose:
One last word before the dissection.
None of this can touch her.
For her spirit is rejoicing.
She is bold, suggestive, menacing only to the psaltery.
Yes (anticipating me): she is saucy, rich, and ripe for love.
She has the smell of veins and of dove's hair;
The down of a fleshbearing bird,
Beak filled with furious stitching,
A cloth bearing tales of the stone.
Her cheekbones flash.
She is coming to befriend me.
Her children are like fresh factories.
Life comes from their teething mechanisms:
Stories from their brains make the world see in hues.
They build furious windcastles,
Curious twinmasted ships which carry Alice far from Eve,
Far beyond Kansaspedigree.
Filigree is in the bird's beak.
She reads this.
And she whispers manhandling storyglories
About cranes erecting nests
And the bigblueheron, alone,
Whose prodigy confined her.
For Leda has her stockings high.
On the grass she did lie,
Her legs up,
Awaiting that sole heronhearted striding mannerstandard,
Who forced his way back into her cadillac,
Finding meat there to eat,
And also wine for his curdled palate.
Her luck was almost impeccable.
Her lushwinery made him bold, suggestive,
Fired for discovery:
Exploration is a symptom of bounty
Even as heartburn is an evidence of some portly insurrection.
His thighs alive with impeccable patronenmity.
Explosions reconsidered.
Wanging wild and ultimately wordless:
Gasping only a moment of truth,
A splitsecond of masterlyminutude.
She swallowed him like a screw:
Bitten by the wood and handled by the fast'ner.
And he was glad, this sadheron,
Who spent toomanydays in silent Panadoration:
In ghostscattering banterramming silence and imprecation:
Wealthy in a welt of air.
She caught him: took him: purchased his rock.
He loved her for it.
She taught him penance for melancholy.
Her down was better than his own, he found.
Her inversion was wholesome:
Wholly invigorated and made for cries, whispers, simple ecstasy,
Sanguine equanimity.
I am cold on this riverbank.
I have wings, but seldom fly,
For flight is no spectral hyperbole
But to those who crane and desire it.
It is her mindearly winterbreaking,
Her autumngone sighs and banquetthighclammerstammering,
White and arced for wine,
High and parked for eternity's guard tendering,
That make my wings begin to float
And make my equanimity produce real featherlunacy.
Yes: the lunacy of Love is like the delicious feast
Which proceeds all contractions.
The winter is broken by this woman of flames,
This fleshscented roundbodied womansword beyond rains,
Who builds cities out of coral breasttips,
And makes nations out of simmering arrownuts,
Fallen for the sake of those eating.
Filled for the bold nutseeking friend,
Partner of windeating aerials:
She who smiles at me coyly,
Walking parkwise with her kin.
She walks in shoes, making smiles elegiastic fluorians on trine.
Tootrue for the bugler to find when he wakes;
Equally rare as to be the only circus on the midway.
28 October 1985
The
Woman From His Lost Years
THE DOCUMENT HAS COME
The document has come.
It is not a document in writing.
It is a document of notification:
A dream document.
She appeared.
She was a prime figure, moving in a cloud.
She was my love, eight years from my sight.
This dream said she was coming:
That I should be brave, wait, prepare, expect her.
It said that love was lacking; she wished to find me again.
It is a letter I expected.
A letter of sound proportions.
A letter unsent but received.
She states that she is coming,
Wishing to see me,
Girded for uncertainty.
It is beyond dreams, beyond curiosities.
I have not seen her for eight years.
And now her ghost becomes prescient.
Again.
An
Explanation of Her Appearance
THE RE-APPEARANCE OF AN OLD LOVE
An old love appears.
It has been eight years since I have seen her, spoken with her.
She is married, with three daughters.
I loved her when she was first wed.
I met her two weeks after her marriage.
We loved one another, in a reckless way,
A passionate frustrated abandoned love.
She could not leave her husband.
I went mad.
For eight months I was cursed with this love,
Graced with it,
Fashioned by it.
I ran.
I ran from the madness this love created,
From the ecstatic madness,
The furious distortions.
I loved her as I have loved no woman.
I have loved women since; yet, not like this.
And now her name crosses my desk.
Her husband wishes to join the faculty where I work.
He lists his wife, Leslie,
As his next of kin,
With his three daughters.
She named her second daughter after Gelsey Kirkland,
The dancer she so admired.
She danced, herself, when I first knew her.
It made her sane, to dance.
It made her laugh, able to love herself.
Eight years have now gone by.
I have taken the address from his file.
I could write to her.
I could call her,
Awakening ghosts which tormented me,
Which took more than five years to disarm;
Ghosts which now appear again,
From one thousand miles away,
Three thousand days from their origin.
Still powerful.
Still able to destroy me.
What becomes of me when I crash?
What becomes of Love,
When a flame is roused to burn a hole in the sky,
Then sent into exile,
To consume for ever its own shadow?
And to re-create abstract solitude,
A means by which cantering ghosts
Are finally quieted and reconditioned?
But this does not happen quickly.
It does not happen easily.
29 January 1986
He
Thinks He Sees Her Walking Toward Him
I CAN TELL YOU ABOUT THE PORTRAIT
I.
I can tell you about the portrait.
She is a woman of my youth,
Who succeeded in some venture,
And then fell out of the world.
Fell out of my acquaintance.
Out of my immediate phantasy and recognition.
Giving the world to her children;
Taking the world away from Love.
In the great sacrifice of Youth,
She offered up to the flame of a greater exposition.
She is gone.
Her flesh resides in the dreams of her children.
Her hair is short now.
She moves with the same grace,
Although with less ecstasy, less exhilaration.
She does not recognize me now.
I walk past her; and her thoughts do not find me.
She has immediate needs now.
She does not live in the bones which she had then,
Or in the mind which dwells on reflection,
For Life has given her an inheritance.
II.
I can tell you about her portrait.
I loved her and lost her;
And so I write her existence in lines now;
I paint her face in the virtue of form.
Colors and the tender hues,
Which Memory makes become nothing.
But the rain.
And the leaves.
And the lilac heritage of Spring love
In a late Wyoming afternoon.
Scents.
And touches still forming histories on the skin,
Still proclaiming the greatness
Of daring to be moved.
He
Writes to the Woman From His Lost Years
I LOVE THE WOMAN WHO LIVES FAR AWAY
I love the woman who lives far away.
I knew her once, back when I was a boy,
When she was first married.
For nine years now we have not spoken.
She has three children now.
I am preparing to break the silence,
To send her words through the mail
Designed to touch her again
To stir her in to madness.
I love the woman who lives far away.
The women who live close only choose to play like mice.
They are girls, never old, never fair really,
More equipped for discussions of Love,
That abstract hoary Beast.
For abstract Love is old, grizzled,
A woman who carves wood,
Who wears an apron, and annihilates memories,
Preferring solitary queenhood, fleshless, totally free,
To the rigorous mutuality and brutal passion
Which come and go in arms down here.
Down here where nothing is free.
The touch, the tender association:
She idealizes it.
She cannot manage it;
For flesh turns like a moon, rolls like a symptom,
A river which turns her boat from the harbor.
Leading her deeper and deeper into whirlpools.
She lies; and discusses:
Wanting always to rule in her quiet queenhood of Ideals.
The woman I love is flesh and bone and banquet.
Silence has been her house amidst me.
She is decades away, centuries older, aeons precedent to me.
Yet her voiceless name comes sneaking in from somewhere.
It is cold when she arrives;
Her husband's name;
And her silent address.
* * *
She knew I was here;
And she sent her husband to try to find me.
He desired to make my acquaintance.
I see her blushing.
And angry to see me.
The silence has become a dream.
She must break the dream to find a voice
She once was made by.
And so I write her.
He
Sees In This the Hand of Some Magnitude
UNEXPIRED LOVE
Unexpired love: the casket has no lid,
For the memories are blue as seas,
As open as drifting skies with no end.
The brain might purge every remembrance of touch,
Every ascent,
Every category of feeling.
Yet each purging is but a lie,
A veil cast upon a golden calf,
A fog vested on a mountain.
The mountain lasts much longer than does the man
Who dreams it.
The golden calf endures even longer than the man
Who would cast two stones to kill it;
For the memory is too true;
She merely sleeps quietly,
Avoids her struggling destroyer until he tires.
And then Fatality,
The unwinder of cloth and rugs and whirling galleons
Made of thread,
Undoes the grainy Futurity to show
That what was there is here,
What was imagined was made and framed
By the single idea.
The element of Desire builds every carbonated world,
Every image, every mountain,
Every road upon which,
At mysterious junctures,
Miracles occur.
30 January 1986
It
Is Done
I HAVE SENT THE LETTER
I have sent the letter.
It was written on lavender stationary,
Inside a card of a daffodil and courting bee.
It was written to thee,
Love of nearly a decade before.
Love with three daughters in white lace
And dancing shoes.
Love with a sturdy husband, an engineer's brain.
One thousand miles and nine years away.
Whose address fell into my lap one day.
I waited for Time to make some commitment.
Then, as if ordered by God,
Directed by some fatality,
Which made me restless and moved to act,
I sat and wrote, and opened up a memory.
I road into a strange town, to mail my card with a foreign postscript.
My instinct carried me blindly to town,
Blindly in the rain: I rode blindly to my destiny.
I stood at the end of my journey.
I dropped the letter in to the mailbox.
And now Time waits upon me,
Waits for some commitment,
Some response.
Indeed, it seems the mail can also bless me.
10 March 1986
Receiving
His Letter, She Remembers Him as a Young Man
THE SONG OF TAURUS
The song of Taurus comes on and portrays.
Like a horn, in May's fluid brevity.
Nature begins to dress in loud formations.
Colors, productive of pentecostal ecstasy.
The legions behave like bulls in a froth.
Women are arrayed for ecclesiastes.
Tempting the buoyant braggarts with sweaters and sweet increments.
Of leg and leg's beatitude.
As the Sun comes on and performs.
Moving each, yet being moved most by May herself,
That lovely woman-girl in her birthday vegetation
Who walks mostly lonely evenings in dreams
About a man gone from her nearly a decade now,
Who recently wrote to her a letter.
It is her day again.
She is older, less frivolous, less moved by passion.
More bitter perhaps, although not bitter,
Not governed by loss.
The letter he sent moved her mostly into memory.
She wonders what she must do.
It is her habit to do nothing: to wait.
She might wait for a thousand years;
Still, he might write again, when she least expected.
That is his nature, it seems:
To wander; yet, never to forget.
So it is, when the song portrays wisest feeling.
8 April 1986
She
Does Not Respond to His Letter: He Chooses a Woman Named Nina
GARDENING THE HEART
I.
Gardening the heart:
The ecclesiastical rose.
The sumptuous memory proclaims
That the feeling of feast and the temporary craving,
The unrestricted yeast,
All make the garden a friendly venture.
Gardening the heart:
The sea of fantastical superfluities:
Ungardening the rose
And uncovering the hidden atom.
The hidden attraction.
In the garden they walk.
She is so tempered;
He cleaves to her bosom.
He is so sure, so unmildmannered,
That she smiles and finds him fresh.
Even against her better judgment.
Gardening the heart:
The foolish talk of friends.
They are not friends really; beyond friends.
There is too much straight talk,
Too much electrical courting and crowding
To bind these two in friendship.
Hips are too active,
Too flirting and too close.
His memory in his clothes
Makes his love of life become strong.
The smell of beauty.
The smile, which she cannot hold back,
Cannot disarm.
He undresses her with his smile.
She is pleased to be so naked.
She was naked when he first saw her,
Stripped by his intensity,
Naked even before she could plead with him to stop.
He was naked too.
Naked walkers in an overproud garden.
Furiously full.
It is there: the garden of feast,
Of untemporary craving.
Of passionate laughter:
A world made for two.
He touches her shoulder.
Her body is warm, supple, moving under his hand
Like an ocean.
He touches her deepest parts;
His hand contacts her core.
Her womb spins: an ocean of choice.
He finds her eyes: his intensity remakes her.
She is living; her blood is new.
She wonders why distance was never between them.
He appeared to embrace her, as though he'd loved her for ever.
II.
Gardening the heart:
The ecclesiastical rose.
The sumptuous memory is never done.
When they rise, again dressed,
She is smiling;
And he is bouncing.
The same notorious first coupling.
3 January 1986
He
Meets Her Family -- And They Are Wealthy
SUPPER IS SERVED
I.
Supper is served.
The dogs come home;
And all the visionary bakers
Build cakes to the missionary breed.
Time has cloaks it wears in quiet hues.
The cold April evening is gone.
Supper is served;
The cook is clean and made to produce veal.
As if a meal were a goldenrod of imagery.
And the dessert a banquet of a stationary grail.
Inflationary monetary grimness will be discussed:
Politics being merely a boat in which the lost might float
Their mighty discordances.
The calling is for the great to come.
Dinner is served.
Sweet girls are waiting,
For masculine friends to grace their eve.
Supper is served.
The father shall come and indict a treasonous world;
And then the asparagus will be served,
And the corn,
With a pyramid of bread.
II.
The guests arrive.
It is August.
The guests are men of means,
Men of swift accord,
With lovely wives, and German cars.
It is August.
The hot afternoon has become the silent evening.
Music comes in from the garden.
It is a sweet day;
The house is filled with children in white clothes,
Dresses; and shirts with black bow ties.
It is a dream,
A painting done by a sentimental old man
Whose great days of ambition and crude power
Have turned into imagery of calm life.
I remain, a man in the hall, waiting for a friend,
A friend who does not expect me,
A friend who knows me only as an admirer,
Surely not yet as a fiance.
There is a secret she can't know,
Not yet.
A secret which to me has come in a dream,
And not a dream.
It is a sight, an understanding, instead,
Which has nothing to do with sleep.
It is a present from God,
A gift for my forefathers,
Because I love them, these earlier heritages,
And this God,
Who endures for ever.
III.
She arrives.
The house does not notice her.
She is taken for granted,
This child of a girl,
A woman in her twenties with brown hair
And a large bearing:
Graceful; clear water.
They take her for granted;
And I desire her, I adore her,
I explore her with my heart,
For I am greedy for her love
And powerful in her presence.
She starts when she sees me,
For I am out of context here,
For ever in the halls,
For ever waiting in the halls.
Waiting for her.
She understands this,
Although it does not seem to relieve her.
For I make her uneasy, when I come near.
She moves back several steps, after approaching me.
I have some power in my heart,
Some force which moves her,
And makes her fear me, as well as smile.
It is love, in full throttle.
She has learned to live in the land of light alone;
She has learned a balanced technique,
No one being eaten by passion,
No one really alone.
In me she sees someone lost,
Someone who has tasted living;
In me she sees someone found,
And walking upright.
She knows that silences inside me
Might please her;
She walks with me into supper --
And the house grows wary.
23 July 1986
Wedding
Night
NEW SEASONS, NEW WORRIES
New seasons, beyond the veil.
New seasons of appropriate endeavor.
Seeking children in the well.
With names and face-names and appropriate burgundy
And weathered domain.
House and home.
Myriad imperial series of new proximities.
As the wheat-catchers go to rye.
As the meat-chasers go to urns.
Bowing and scraping the turf with their conceptions.
Beat-lechers.
Heat-fetchers.
Round and round the marry-go-ground.
Sounding the sax and manipulating fury.
Happygolucy.
Light on the playground.
Sunapparel.
Flesh bronzed and beatified.
Honored heat-warrior in the downangeled triad:
Hidden in a phrase of cloth.
The musical womb.
Harried.
Hot for fluid.
Touching thee.
Thoughttouching and fleshcrushing.
Bikinibred and wedding ricebread.
And new worries.
New worries.
Not the hellflight and deathritual of winterbecomespring.
Of Dawnode and fallenangelrite:
Across the plains of scurried rain
And pounding clouds on each horizon.
War into health into marriage and new worries.
The lovebed of his ace:
Her breasts and productive magnitude.
Soft and hot weddingnight.
The open window.
A midsummernight breeze.
Soft words of love, between the punctuated flamboyance.
Heandshe as one.
YouandItogether.
In the meaning of pounds and the heartweathering of shared thoughts.
New seasons and new preenings.
New fanings and new faces:
Names made of locks and pictures on the mantle.
Mickie Dee in your thoughts.
Mackie Doolittle in your interred predations.
And baby makes three.
With new problems.
Grave uncovering of braids.
New lands, new cameras.
Shadows like wealthy diseases are gone:
Driven to the wind by thee.
In creation of a day in heaven.
With your wife and her flesh and the open window and the thought of a son.
But it is time for work and more.
Time for the clay banquet,
Made to free thee from sadder doctrines.
Trees bear colors and flowers for the world.
New seasons bring new frustrations.
Yet the love of your mate makes each problem but a theme.
And making each, therefore, redeemable.
For every theme, by its nature,
Recircles and remains exactable.
17 June 1985
He
Dreams of His Childhood
TALKING IN NUMBERS
Talking in numbers, so all souls can see.
Talking in shale alleyways and the rigid impressions of coal.
So all's old can seed.
Seeding the arid ways of memorial appreciation.
Talking in travesties of shades,
Expecting the ritual to find its way errorborn.
Hearing voices in the wind.
Voices of the unborn;
Voices wishing to be,
Wishing to establish bodylife with a word,
A name, a nonnumerical vow.
It is my name.
I hear it clearly.
I look.
It is gone.
Just wind.
I see the wind, its inner sleeve, velvety, succinct.
Children inside the sleeve,
Awaiting my sperm to make them cleave,
And wed their voice to an egg of propriety;
And beg the sea to teach them
Beyond dreams.
I hear them again.
Is it the living in the distance,
Or the soontobe as they come close?
Both?
Ineluctibly?
I look for a wife, a partner, to set them free.
Cries of delight.
Fright.
Each emotion, but also some clarity:
I know these tiny voices,
As broad as clouds,
As deep as winter nights.
Plain heavy.
Hollow wild.
Yet small, delicate:
Imprisoned in the thin sails of nonexistence,
Pre-existence;
These children who wish to complete me,
Who wish to grace me with their prime natures.
Send my wife to me,
With her womb fertile,
With her heart rich,
With her embrace a silk prediction:
And make me worthy of her,
Worthy of the beauty in the wind,
The honorable calls from the yettobe,
As they make believe with numbers
Turned to days before conception.
Summer afternoons come rife.
Somewhere, inside a cloud,
Walks the voice of a woman
Whose body slowly comes to find me.
When all the other days are gone,
She will be there -
And she'll remind me of my earlier illusions.
16 June 1985
The
First Separation
I LOVE THE SOUND OF THE OSTRICH
I love the sound of the ostrich, rioting through a fishergrove.
Leaves tremble, offer themselves up to the rich lunacy of that call.
I love the smell of the sterling feathers, and the regal idiocy of their walk.
I love the surly impresario; the Machiavellian rumba,
By which they conquer bits of turf.
I love solstice empires, baked in extremes,
Like clay in the fire, making men out of sticks.
I love women with tight breasts, thick thighs, tumbling movements.
I love spades and early diamonds.
Baseball's historical leverage.
Love and the passing out of Love.
Damage to the state of pride.
Prodding the girl with tissues:
Is it true that you say what you wish you believed?
Issues from the coldhead and heatednoil.
Loving the touch of warm skin.
And the smell of hair fresh from bathing.
The full ass, this side of angry,
Fulminating: the glass of a crone.
The young girl's hightened plenitude.
The moans of love.
The crane's solitary stand.
The plenty of a pass thrown at a stationary target.
Unitas has taught me: the pass is mightier than the run in the rain.
Running heavy, in each direction.
The sound of the ostrich in love.
The ostrich in flight.
Fighting for a mate.
Fighting for ground.
Territory.
The angel of mass.
Loving for the sake of sound.
For the quaking limbs, the sovereign expression
Of the climatic reign:
Hearing the bedgarments expire.
Dreams.
The woman you love has gone and you are sleeping.
Yes.
Ostriches abound here;
Where the water is still, the ponds are in virtue.
Yes.
The woman offers you milk.
You drink, in your dream.
There is no ostrich in your life.
Yet the cream you drink, in your dream is rich, spectacular invention.
And the sound comes,
Through groves of cottonwoods, beside a dull thick river.
The Platte.
It is Autumn or Spring.
It is a dream.
The women are plentiful.
Cornucopia's brief.
A pun on calculations.
Who will appreciate such willful disunion?
As the ostrich rises: in the dream.
The woman you love--your wife--in the dream she is not there.
In life she is gone, for your despair makes her weak.
She leaves you in dreams and goes away to not be torn.
Leaving you with an absence of ostrich.
I see.
The sperm shall be given to maids who enquire:
It is children you seek.
Children of the loins.
Children of the Clarkheritage.
Beyond dreams.
Beyond vacant metaphors, and the vanity of intellect.
Children in the rich red soil;
The hot fantastic orgy, in which you fish and catch a star:
The clocking of the empire.
lt is true.
To rise is to wake.
To wake to a land mocked by snow.
Lacking ostriches.
Beyond Winterautumn's gray touch.
The acid of frost.
Standing on your porch in anxious solitude.
Your love gone.
Where has she gone--this dream who develops you?
A million miles on a star.
To catch the rhyme of what is new.
So that when you return, she returns:
She shall freshen you.
23 October 1985
Can
We Trust Such Happiness
ANALYSIS OF THE FRENZY
I analyze the frenzy.
There is none.
I analyze futurity.
There is great futurity;
And there is deep water in the pool of obligations.
For there is no future, no futurity's gainsake,
With no school of obligations,
Such as children become.
There is no future without children.
There is no goal, no direction, no preservation or honorable succession.
There is no inheritance.
There is no bloodcondition in Time.
There is no heritage of genetic decencies and genetic geniuses.
There is no prospect other than doubt, despair, the secular inception.
I analyze the frenzy.
There is none.
It seems like heaven in this heaven.
It seems like peace upon the Earth,
As I gaze upon silentnight with wonder.
Wonder-worker and wonder atmosphere.
There is nothing to hate here, n
No savage invention to battle;
Yet, there is memory here, dim, like a tree,
Without roots,
Without brittle leaves,
Without bark,
Substanceless,
Ascetic,
Etherized.
Yet a tree nonetheless.
Forged into stone (by abstract condition: memory itself).
I remember what is not heaven.
I remember what is not futurity.
I remember what is frenzy;
I analyze momentum,
Understanding that memory builds shells,
And carves out icons for repose.
3 June 1986
No
Longer Afraid of Success
PLAYTHINGS CAN WORK
Playthings can work.
Playthings can make magnetic pandemonium
The true nature of every step.
This energy is real, magnetic aplomb.
It is a fruit in session, one might say.
It is nascent, preadamic.
It is cool in heat and warm moisture in the arid oblivion:
Always becoming but never the saturated voidfullness of consensus.
They can work, these assimilations,
These factories of joy,
Manufactories which create pleasure.
Whether I can accept these joys,
These lackofpain ecstasies as real entities,
As real as defeat: that is the issue.
Whether I can accept the kiss as much as the curse, t
The flesh as much as the frost;
Whether I can find the easy love within the eerie nature;
And, having found it there,
Whether I can recognize it as such,
And not twist it in my mind to make it less
Than I am prepared to tolerate.
And, so, be calm, and seek my bounty.
The
Moment of Conception
THE GREAT DILEMMA OF BIRTH
There is a great dilemma of birth.
The dilemma is not so much whether or not to be born,
For there is really no choice.
As the vulture approaches to eat the egg,
The child inside either shrieks for Life,
Or is devoured by the unsagacious brute,
The irrational magpie guarding the gates to Oblivion.
The dilemma comes later.
The dilemma surrounds, more truthfully,
When to give birth, not to yourself, through yourself,
But to another, through yourself.
The son to come, with a name and face,
And destiny as true as your own,
Indeed, the same as your own,
With your blood and brain and shale and iron
And vegetation and fins and warfare and orgiastic love organs,
And the same dedication to ancestors who have passed blood on for ever
Through the clay veins of a family treeline.
When does that happen?
When do you pass the sperm into the fertile membrane
Of the wife you have chosen,
Who has chosen you, or been sent to you by God?
And, once done, what then do you do?
You cannot turn back.
And so you go forward,
As eager to move and to attain as before;
Yet, with a new dedication, to the birth of another,
Through yourself,
Who is you, a
And, still, is someone other than you.
And then there is no dilemma.
7 July 1986
On
Becoming Older
THE TRANSPORTATION OF SORROW
Avoiding the transportation of sorrow.
Someone knows that imagery is rough.
Rough and handsewn and ardored:
Ordered for the pendulum.
East and West as cradling portals.
Doors which emit some emotion for the wheel.
With Door-Keepers in robes:
Asking for words of virtue.
Asking for verbs of suture.
Bringing together the poles of extremes.
The burgundy of feeling: I have loved and lost;
I have loved and discovered.
Speaking not a word of pain.
Not a verb of declaration.
He who understands Wisdom
Does not transport his sorrow.
He who understands wisdom
Makes of Sorrow a transposition.
25 May 1985
He
Remains Himself
THE
SOUNDS OF CHARITY
The sounds of charity come down:
Frescoes of spoken vowels designed to give what is not available:
To the unfortunate face, the ungrasping hand.
The sounds of charity come in.
Some of it is real charity; some is social self-adornment;
Some is guilt of affluence;
Some is the denominational prerogative.
It sounds good, even when it only implies real affection.
I hear the sounds of the abysmal conceit.
It is the talking mother of the foundation of Herod.
It is the talking mouth of the Herculean discovery:
Stables to clean; Python to fight; mountains to rend.
Hera has a clean mind, a veritable constabulary of proposals.
One of which designs a cleaner face, an unbearded look.
It is the Hero's mask,
The beard,
The unfrozen chain by which the world and the work
Are ever linked and ever distanced.
She wishes him naked.
She insists on his performance.
Hercules beams.
He has muscles for each month,
Miracles for each season.
He has a voice for each year;
Each manacle and each freedom.
The sounds of charity don't touch him,
Not in the way that Odysseus is tempted,
Tortured from his rod,
By the sounds of the sirens.
Charity does not come, whether real or imaginary.
He has sounds inside his brain.
Sounds of God.
Which frame his nature.
29 May 1986
The
Family Gathers For the Birth
THE ARRIVAL OF REPRODUCTION
The arrival of reproduction.
The old woman in her shoe.
The New Woman in her diablo.
Forks hungry for air and flesh.
Broad amber eyes;
Breasts with nipples made for attention.
The talkers seem to surround him,
Each one singing his own rich elegy.
Birds without feathers.
Weather without alteration.
Men talking and women waiting.
Waiting for the broad stroke of Time,
The clean stroke of elemental genius.
Waiting for children from the Void.
Creating a future from Desire.
Becoming visible again.
The vintage of clear understanding.
From the vantage of a king
Rich with experience.
27 June 1985
A
Son is Born
THE NEW WORLD
ONE.
SHE HAS COME, THE FIRST SOUND
I.
She has come, the first sound.
The first word is uttered,
And the first light is adorned.
It is I: I come to greet the greetings.
Swimming fish and tree and stoneworry:
It is I.
Swimming toad and croaking flashlightfish,
Wandering ashore when radiation has made me rise and weep.
Inauguration of chrome:
A dome in the sky from the green vegetation.
It is I.
The comet giving sperm to the whale.
It is I.
The hellion marking his clay in my brevet:
Cascade of a globe in the water of my belly.
Leaving the womb: it is too early.
My father conspired eleven months to give him numbers.
It is I: having picked Michael and Nina;
Having picked them from the mud,
Grand Ilus,
The Muddy Mississippi,
Homeforage of the bug,
And crawler into history.
It is I: picking my moment.
A Clark to further the line of Clarks:
From Joseph of Arimathea,
Through John Clark, the Mayflower pilot.
Abraham Clark, William Clark,
George Rogers Clark, Mark Wayne Clark.
I have heard these stories for ever:
Pen in hand, clock in pocket,
Riflerocket on the wall.
Through Jake Clark and his soundingson Michael.
(My mother's name remains a secret.
So I propose it.)
My time coming.
The darkness of rest being broken.
Being broken by my pressure to leave it.
A monster living on the edge.
Through which one must pass
In order to find allegiance.
In order to find his home.
I am ready to be hurled.
II.
She has come, the first sound.
My mother, Nina: bless her beauty, and her performance.
She would pilot this boat as Grandpa John
Would pilot the first boat to shore,
As Grandpa James Abraham would pilot the next.
It is true that my ancestors
(Through the power of their echoing voices;
Feminine entities to be sure;
The first sound strung out for ever)
Have conspired to influence Michael's world
In order to bring about my birth,
For their own sakes,
For I am them surely.
He had no luck finding a wife on his own.
When he prayed to them, they heard him.
When he heard me pray, he prayed to them;
They began to use their echoes.
(Echoes move not merely the listener,
But also the world of objects,
By changing the tenor of their receivers)
To draw this woman out of her distance,
Toward the man, to be his wife.
I have watched this.
It is all quite subtle,
All quite true.
I watched them mate.
I watched the woman hate him in their courtship.
Fear him -- for he was so sure.
She came to love him.
Anything is possible.
I watched them mate.
I watched him love her body furiously,
Give to her his promise, his anointment.
I watched her come to love him.
I watched it all:
Her family's disapproval.
Finally, they came to see him;
And to accept him.
I waited.
I have been waiting for centuries,
As my own children wait,
Hidden in my body,
Waiting to unfold.
It is time.
The sounds I hear are my mother's prayers,
My mother's tears and cries of pain.
I shall have a sister and a brother.
I have seen it before,
Somewhere hidden in celluloid.
I shall walk this weary world
And raise it out of sorrow
With my laughter.
A
Son is Born
THE NEW WORLD
TWO.
ON
THE BIRTH OF A SON
I.
Honor comes, when it will,
From understanding of proportion.
Each Day is a century;
And the hammer is the Sun;
And from the forge are drawn
Seven curious and somehow lasting stammering sons.
It is not Wealth which makes us age;
But it is Thought which makes us weep.
Children cannot be Lions of Virtue except through
Severing their own hearts from their vigor --
And from their conceptions.
Time draws burly images from its oceans:
Saviors of rock and saviors of notion;
In the Numbers of Creation
God gave Adam alabaster.
II.
Six sons create; and one son rebels.
Yet Rebellion carries the Wind through many houses
Back to his own.
Imperfections was once a crime;
Now it becomes our way to add.
The Distant will always appear to have virtue,
Because Distance, herself, is the Woman
Demanding dreams.
III.
One leaf falls on the high plains in Wyoming.
A desert is made from the bones of the whale.
It was not Jesus who was holy --
But Jesus died for resurrection.
A child is born on the high plains at Noon.
A
Memory of His Own Youth
APPROACHING CHRISTMAS DAY
Approaching Christmas Day with my hat on and my boots up.
Without the skill to be surly;
Without the gifts of an early sermon against giving:
The cynicism of knowing all,
Damning material, crass rich practices.
Knowing all at any early age.
Knowing everything.
And then forgetting.
Forgetting, and, thereby, learning.
Living.
The grace of smiling: angular notremembering.
Learning to remember childharmony.
The flashing skates on the icewater pond.
Hockey sticks raised.
Body checks and Brahms playing.
All ages and all coats.
Gloves on frozen fingertips.
Snowballs from behind the skate shack;
Out of shadows.
Brahms playing waltzes.
Metal speakers proclaim the icetempo.
Falling children: snowy coats.
Bent ankles: running stiffly.
t is a memory.
It is Sinclair, Wyoming, before Christmas, in the Nineteen Fifties.
Away from the cross and the star and the staff.
In the cereal town where the oil is made rich;
Made beyond rich, into productive fibers.
Refinery ode.
Smoke from the stacks.
Smells of rich fires,
And acrid smells of cancer boilers.
Noise.
Trucks.
Frozen roads.
Ruts.
Fourwheeldrive.
Trees holding breath in frost.
Wind: a thousand acres of stars.
From the backdoor to the rink:
Skating on streets so cold and sheeticed
As to make the world one world of frozen water.
Disappearing from the civilized treeoriented world
Of packages and wreaths and creamcheese cookies,
Down paths on blades of steel,
Over county carpaths to that nightarena of light:
The icerink.
Where all the world is, compressed,
With differing styles.
It is a memory only.
Perhaps memories are fortuitous.
Giving
and Taking
THE ROUGH COMPLICITY OF LOVE
There is a rough complicity in love.
A complicity in vision, which expands one leg
Of the body of vision, contracting one arm, expanding a toe.
The complicity is in detail, is in the pandemonium of parts.
The same totality of vision is always present.
Degrees are the issue.
And accentuated joints.
The complicity is in emphasis:
The heart is expanded;
The loins are infused;
The abstract mind shrinks,
As abstract elements become less noticed,
Less influential, in the description of one's placenta,
The definition of one's real existence.
There is a true nature of love, to be sure.
It is as real as any other light, any other accentuation.
It is sometimes rough, to be sure.
It is sometimes mere approximation, categorical stimulation.
Yet it is shared approximation.
Perhaps, in this alone, there is some truth which transcends each limitation.
September 1986
A
Second Child is Coming
AN AUTUMN DREAM FROM A HAMMOCK
Love is a dry hammer in the loins of unsuspecting twos.
A round clamoring vegetable; a sound, stammering fruit.
It is equal, and rough, and edged with variety.
It explodes with presentiment: the hair of satiety.
The sweaty palm and the calendar date.
Loveritual of expectation: the breasts large and heaving in her blouse.
Inviting touch: the touch of hands: fleshcadets: early for worry.
The lovehammer falls like feathers on a beach.
Knocking Sun from a boiling morning.
Scattering raiments of cloth on the village of repetition.
In and out.
Up and down.
Sleep and wake.
Her hair curled on the pillow:
You sleep with arms and thrushes:
Swallowing her virtues.
She complains that you crush her, smiling, feeling need.
It is a fine memorial: mind fashioning weal to smile.
Healing heaviness with a constant.
Memory absolving hate with ken:
Parochial saintmaking;
For the lovely flesh of this young girl has no equal
On either this or that side of feasible immortality.
Childrenoftheloin call out for you to twain.
The seed is given; the maddened ocean receives.
Swallowing up bull and burial.
Proclaiming justice and deed are one.
Cushioning male happenstance with female
Incredible membraneoflife:
Giving couch to the son in weeds and waiting.
Livingfleshoffutureprogrammatics.
From the hammer to the anvil
To the sea of blood and bakeryfestivities:
Baby in the soup and the making of a man.
For he is made by his passion,
By his passing of history to his mate,
From his father to every motheroftime.
Love is no hammer, no crowning of nailbystone.
Love is no arid banging of bones, no clash of ironwillandwhim.
It is not.
And is.
And the loins love attention.
And the child is not far from entering pajamas on the lawn.
The day is not far from early summer.
The garden is not far from planting.
It is all a fair dream.
There is no reason to worry, to doubt.
The first flesh was the best flesh.
Marriage is not so trite as some say,
Not so fierce as one might imagine.
It is nice to watch her stomach rise, beneath her sweater.
It is Autumn: in the waterclock.
In the airloom.
Not far from where the pears rot,
Diamonds, round vibrating gems.
Someone is hammering, down the block:
The knocking murmurs.
She was your first love.
Nights with her are like miracles in lace.
Years become long, stretching toward Elysia.
This all seems so real, yet dreamy.
And only the sounds of the geese haven't come yet.
14 October 1985
A
Moment of Rest Lasts for Years
WHY DO I LISTEN
Why do I listen to the calling of dogs, free beyond the buildings,
Chasing rabbits in the frost,
Courting Wind with a furious excitement?
Why do I listen to the blind emergency of the trains,
Banging disks of sounds, round obelisks of appointment,
As they pass by the station on the outlands of town?
Why do I hear the Winter bridesmaid -- snow, white
And undelivered, untouched, unused and unabandoned --
As she weeps in her first falling?
Unviolated, each flake a perfect island.
Why do I abandon memories of fury:
Youth's particular boundary, uncalculated, bound by speed?
Hearing the words of particular love, a girl in a car,
A backseat filled with frenzy,
The words of a playful April,
Panties on her perfection, the raging ritual of livingandlearning.
She is gone: a memory of form.
Ringing true in its many inventions.
Yet gone.
As I look out from my window,
Opened to let in air and coldharmony.
Coyotes mark the Wyoming plains.
In the heart of my boyhood.
Fish uncaught; Spring untamed;
Homeruns unhit; skirts unchased; puns unintended.
Windows left undone: the wind brings in bits of snow,
Manageable bits of cold clear mercury.
As the dogs run, barking, hunting blindly,
With noses of perfect diction,
Through the sage in a land of dust.
Cottonwoods quake.
Leaves are far from this October.
Buried in September's solitude.
The Winter turns brutal in October,
Having been placid before.
Brutal and alone.
Sexual energy; the infamous cow, a symbol and supper.
Wombs built for accompaniment.
Accompanying Beethoven on his sonatas.
Suntanned and Autumn.
Listening to music on the wheel.
For everyone is blissed, in the ragged melody of Iislandofferings.
Islands.
Islands of sounds.
Why do I listen?
Why do I find such angularity in this music?
Why do I find such splendid order
When the dogs bark
And I am golden?
25 October 1985
The
Gathering of the Family
WASTING TIME ON WINE
Wasting time on wine: Sunday evenings.
Liquid imagery.
A feast and words about pragmatism.
Where family ties are made and blindfed.
Cousins and uncles.
Squalls and fighting among boys.
Fried chicken in the deep pan: grease along each edge.
Uncle Gene making the gravy.
In his apron and his crewcut.
Football in the air.
Television's graceful way: the sound of the making of folklore.
Okay.
It is done.
The carving of families in stone.
The walking to the wellspring.
Words shared by the elders:
Children have no understanding about drama.
And so the talk flies; Czech has been set aside.
My grandmother's family heirloom
Is a legion of syllables and historical vowels:
Set aside for the newworld heritage of stars.
And stripes.
Glory.
And Duty.
And so it should be.
Czechoslovakia is gone.
Wyoming is not the child of an Austro-Hungarian metaphor.
Indians' blood is on the stones outside my door,
On the bluffs of space.
Pioneers' scalps have been weighed.
My relatives of measurement: correlation and convergence.
Cooking chicken over Sunday stoves:
Battleheritage and the raising of centuries.
General Crook and Grenville Dodge.
General Rawlings and General Grant:
Giant manaphors who fill the plane.
Where the wind blows.
And the snow blindfalls.
Sunday evenings fill with history.
And the smell of chicken.
And gravy.
And sounds of the Broncos and Raiders.
Life against Death.
Wind against Water.
Crook against Armageddon.
Custer against Crazy Horse.
King Ferdinand in a shoe.
Franz Joseph in a blaze.
Beyond crossings and deeply imbedded:
I wonder if some other sense might emerge
And consume us.
The wine is a courtesan burgundy with a bite.
I am small, but the game is close;
And dinner makes me understand real values.
And then I sleep.
18 October 1985
He
Finishes His Great Novel
I HAVE WRITTEN AND NOW AM DONE
I have written and now am done.
The fire burns in the imagery of noon.
All the horrible possibilities have vanished with the doctrines.
Doctrines are like doctors who must convince the patient that he is really ill.
So, I cast the doctrines to the wind.
Hemophiliac wind: bleeding always its stories.
Tales of the northwind:
Borealis has Russian surnames.
But the southwind brings a woman,
Dressed in skin and carrying fog.
I have written and now am done.
The wind bangs against my window.
It is late and I am sad:
And when words are finally spoken,
Then, I know, they shall lose their pride.
And become mere entities.
Awaiting explanations.
26 October 1985
He
Gives a Reading At the Literary Guild
THE ESSENTIAL UNITY OF PARLORS
The essential unity of parlors makes the harbinger a lucky mentor.
Bringing tea to every prophecy.
Looking pottery in the eye: the magic words
By which the wheat is shorn.
And the longeyed mates of masterplanners
Bat heavyblack eyelids and intimate intimate splaying.
Dresses like blown gauze.
Barely there.
Twisting.
Sexfeatured.
Silky.
With wealth.
With satisfaction.
Red on the cheek.
Hair blustering.
The talk about the lexicon of metaphor,
The tantalizing blackvision,
As though the demons these conspire cannot touch beyond the skin.
Cannot lacerate the heart.
Cannot pierce their berry treasure: liberality.
Love of self.
Love of esteem.
They stare into the phase of their own fantastic demise,
With a logic to stun the Devil;
They make eyes at the maker of flowers.
In his words, symbolic fusion: highenergy into woe.
Thinking they possess his genetic closure,
By flirting with his language,
By practicing with his pencil: touching fleshonflesh.
The smile; the cute phrase;
The protestations to knowing Art
(That great Artificer, who turns his cube on sides,
And delivers words on illusion).
Artwhom?
Artwhich?
Art wonders, and conunders, smiling ever,
But smiling wild.
Artmanners.
Artclanmongerers.
Painting clouds on every eye;
Painting frowns on each disciple.
Then proclamations.
And arid Wisdom.
Sleep with the maker of phrases in a dream:
He shall resurrect the wain and the plainvisaged norns.
He shall wrap you in garments of earlyintroduction;
And pin you to the sheet from which oldnightmares have lately 'scaped.
And you will see that he was best left sullen,
Best left 'armed:
No one stirs the snake without a plank or with a swallow.
And the mansions of Love have no pity on the shrew.
21 October 1985
The
Neighborhood
THE BLOCK CONQUERS EACH VENERATION
The block conquers each veneration.
Each calling is judged not only on its discretion,
Its outcome,
Its vicinity,
But also on its judgment.
It is so.
Judged by whom?
By the ones who know such things,
Such heraldry.
Those who know good from evil,
Those who know vicinities from more conjoining occurrences.
The block is a section of life.
It conquers each veneration,
Precisely because it is life;
And veneration is merely the ritualized
Idealization of the block itself.
The block is loud and troubled
And wet and eerie.
It is filled with love and adultery
And sin and death;
With murder and hostility;
With art and laughter and children --
Yes, mostly the block is the children.
A veneration comes along:
Some call it style.
That is enough.
Some call it reiteration:
Cycles and patterns and seasons and re-occurrences.
That is enough.
The block calls it nothing;
It does not speak in grand forms of description.
The block enters life and becomes life
And is life;
And veneration is an act,
And not something named through abstraction.
7
June 1986
On
Trying to Remember Proportion
I WALK IN THE WAY OF THE MENTOR
I walk in the way of the mentor.
It is a shrewd way, a way of unequaled proportions,
A way of delicate understandings.
All my children understand me,
Understand that I am wise,
Unequaled,
Not ever comprehended,
Evolved beyond their frailty.
Were they to understand me truly,
My own mentality,
Shriveled into idle worship,
Twisted into selffascination,
They would see that he who
Believes himself a teacher
Must soon be taught.
19 March 1986
Contemplating
A Sculpture With His Daughter
ODE TO PORTLANDIA
Consuming the patience of old men:
I am young and my fires are bold still.
I demand motion, a circling of sails.
The nation moves by rote, categorically:
Like women skirted for a Sunday.
The women are fine,
Ringed by atmospheres of grace,
Legs insinuating movement.
Flesh is protective of spires.
Categorical miles: moving in passage through angered moons.
And through the patience of oldmen getting older.
I am young; my desires are bold still.
The breasts of girls give eyes unsubtle gifts.
Hands make moves to stifle grim clocks.
I am cold only among old men;
Among young men who act consumed,
Act angry against transgressions,
Act crazy to ransack the smile.
I am young and I speak of verbs.
The old speak of nouns and articulate pasts.
They tell me with furious frowns and complaints:
The patience of ancients is tried and unwinding.
And I smile.
They are courageous, to spite me with ageattitude.
I forgive them: they once were bold too.
Before the fires of eageraptitude
Gave way to the ploys of contraction.
Before the muscles of earnestendeavor
Did melt into factories of sitting.
And staring.
Into Memory's succored shoe.
And into pronouncements of uncoupling grace.
I am young; and Pleasure is noble.
When Death comes this way,
With his axe formed by Anger,
With his net formed by words
From the old men conspiring:
I shall stand upon the throne,
The whitestallion of intimateunions;
I shall prophecy successive childhoods;
I shall marry my godformed and triumph.
Until Time unmanages my lexicon.
And transforms my comparisons to wonder.
6 November 1985
Disillusionment
Comes
TANTAMOUNT TO NOTHING
It is tantamount to nothing,
This scurrying about the elevator,
Rope in hand,
Song on lips,
Memories like nails collected to build the scaffold.
Tentative reminiscence.
Tentative everything.
Managing to smile,
To say words not uncomplimentary in themselves.
Bowing.
Nodding.
Looking for water.
As if the unnecessary arrangement of badflowers on the table
Were something ordained from the beginning of time,
Having such necessity,
Such durable and heavy fatality in the leaves,
In their spine,
Accrued from some age before,
Like acid in the air and carbuncles on the hand,
Much larger than the homemaker's tiny will
To rearrange her arrangements.
Tantamount to nothing.
Noting, casually, that the flies trapped on the backwindow
Have been dead for weeks
And will need to be removed.
12 September 1986
He
Does Not Understand His Own Language
THESE WORDS NOW SEEM FOOLISH
I am not in the position to judge meaning of course.
But the real aptitude in writing comes
Not only in being capable of hearing words
And hearing rhythms (series of sounds, elementary addition)
But also in learning the meaning of the rhythms.
It is called self-education.
The writer splashes paint across his canvas
(Paint, in this case, being word-colors),
Looks into the chaos,
Draws from the configurations the meaning of the act,
The image which the configuration
Is trying to draw out from hiding.
The words seem foolish when they lead not to discovery.
The words, as mere sound-emblems, seem lost and wandering,
Lost and unrenewed.
Yet, as sound-emblems which evoke thought,
Which evoke a sequence of actions
(Thought being a series of abstract actions),
Leading to sight, leading to meaning
(A glimpse of direction), they become,
Rather than nothing, everything.
The greatest destiny of self-creation.
3 April 1986
Two
Worlds In Opposition
A DAY FOR FANTASY
It is a day for fantasy.
The wind is not real.
The clouds come in like oysters to fill the bay.
The kites play all day in highest currents
And find they have no anchor.
It is Spring.
The day is young.
Some are bitter.
The Winter leaves glowering ghosts,
Armed with ideas once young
And now no longer real,
No longer relevant, ghosts themselves,
Once invigorated.
They are shrinking, these ghosts.
Lethal in one violent purging,
One violent spring against the sky.
Carrying a blanket against the light.
A dark nature: a fantastic urging.
They are gone.
A puff of smoke.
A whip of variety: they are gone.
It is a day for fantasy.
It is a day for pretty women in clothes made out of all colors
On a white background.
It is a day for balloons.
A day for lipstick and blonde hair perhaps.
The catholic repose.
A day for Irish setters and unmowed grass.
And bicycles, and bicycle riders
Who do not wear European riding gear.
Not far from here, Libyan murderers kill children who ride in planes.
Kill dancers in a German bar.
Believing themselves of God.
Satanic in coloring.
Brutally cowardly in their stealthy annihilation.
Assuming the rags of religious killing.
As though a God would forgive their well-timed ambush,
Killing unarmed civilians and speaking of honor.
There is no honor in your planting bombs to kill the helpless,
In throwing grenades to slaughter the unsuspecting.
You are a fantasy also.
I cannot forget that you stand upon some throne you have erected;
And that you laugh, and feign piety,
And treat human decency like a slur.
It is no longer a day for fantasy.
The cur who calls himself Righteous Judgment
Has hollowed out bones for children's gravestones.
He arms his private animals to stalk and kill the festive,
To hunt and annihilate the weak,
The quietly living.
It is a black fantasy.
It is not judicious.
It is not forgotten.
If the kite would ride on the wind for a day,
Think how long a puppet might riot
Until the strings break.
7 April 1986
The
Father Follows the News
I HEAR SINGING IN THE CLEARING
I hear singing in the clearing.
It is the voice of thieves,
The voice of solitary religious fakirs:
Fit for service but built for adornment.
Adoration of the bomb.
Blackbeard and unmannered: Islamheinous in grace
And trueheavy in aplomb.
Armored to kill.
Throwing bullets at the wind,
With religious lashing of wisdom.
Calculating the crucifixion:
Wheels;
The arid recompense of harppellucid antagonometry:
The arithmetic of blood.
Quaking, but for God.
The blackgod, who makes them shake,
Makes the plead on rigid knees,
Tells them murder is the doctrine they fruit in.
A body thrown down from the plane.
Men shackled by fury.
Islamic insanity on a breeze made of pisses.
Iranian contradiction:
Fundamental screws tie a rope to a brain
And then give a tug -- so Mohammed says.
Walking irerapid miles to find the blacklord has taken tokens;
Tokens but no bones.
Only rags for the ragbearers,,
Who live by Death --
And who worship the indistinct armory.
To kill the bearers of happy treasuries they lack;
These, who have been murdering for millennia;
Who blame the child of Earth for perverting
Starry destiny.
Cainhatingtemplewaiting: the lyric of chrysanthemums
Never crossing the lips of our Ishmael.
The blackIshmael: not the child of Melville's brain,
He who watched the adumbrated sea,
From his limerick upon the crow's nest.
Not animated Ishmael,
The one who lives,
The one who is found.
The savage Ishmaelian rage:
The Haters have a menu:
They will find their food is burned;
And when the vengeance of a murdered boy
In time falls upon their house,
They will see that Sorrow is legend;
But murder solves only Sorrow's pendulation.
I hear singing in the clearing.
It is different now.
The murderers have been purged.
It will be spring soon.
The sacrificial boy, on the Beirut airport floor;
He rises beyond every temple
And drops his shield upon so many.
1
July 1985
The
Two Worlds Begin Approximation
INTEGRITY SEEMS ABSTRUSE
Integrity seems abstruse to the baker.
He traveled into unparalleled lands
And found Arabs holding rifles
And utilitarian religious lapidary encyclopedias.
Quoting from the golden calf.
From the lamb regarding everyman's supper.
Banquet of thieves; banquet of fiefdom.
Heaving sighs for the politicians.
Weaving thigh-thick apollonian scenarios for newsmen
Who barter with grim phariseeology:
Each with a color, light transition, quality of paint.
Painting a world for the reader:
Literature of action: literature of agnmomen.
Bought quietly at the parlorstand.
A quarter in the cup.
A world, abrupt and servile, rude and filled with sensation.
Enough to make one whimper, were it not so obviously real.
As to make it unacceptable.
For the baker, whose son spent his last breath in Beirut,
In a grave of rubble beneath Arab mortiseenterprise.
Lance Corporal Robert Pendergrass.
Dead from too much mortar, too much brick and squalor of air.
Knotches on the belt of Khomeini's prayer cassock:
Death vacuum in the eyes of the Satanic authority.
Hell is born in Iran.
Ayatollah! Ayatollah!
Remonstrance of death.
Angel of self-annihilation.
Persian pestle and mortardurum.
In the arid trump of death-longing.
Feeding boys to the lions of Despair.
A national hero.
Hitler.
Khadaffi.
Khomeini.
Stalin.
Hussein.
Tributes to national heroes.
Black cloth surrounding each invective.
Beyond the borders of working with Death.
To savage Earth;
And to prepare Innocence
For the doctrine of Hades.
It is not over.
The last card has not been played.
While doors are ajar,
Find some air and find some limestone.
The baker goes to work
And believes that crocuses are fairer than lilac.
18
June 1985.
The
Father Is Responsible for the World
WHO KILLED LEON KLINGHOFFER?
I.
Who killed Leon Klinghoffer?
The old man in the wheelchair
Who used to pass before my home?
He was with his wife, on fine days,
Passing beside the lake.
I would speak, raise my hat,
Speak of weather and business
And the latest baseball scores.
Who killed this old man?
Who shot him in the head,
And rolled him in to an ocean filled with sharks?
Who are these men, these killers,
Who speak of freedom?
These patriots who kill children in Kiriat Shmona?
These noblemen who kill Leon Klinghoffer;
And then laugh when his wife is wailing?
II.
Who killed Leon Klinghoffer?
He would some times bring a paper;
And we would speak of events of the world.
He was taking a vacation.
The Middle East excited him:
An odyssey into ages.
He left with a friendly wave,
A curled newspaper,
A prediction that the Cardinals would win the Series.
He did not return.
Arab loversoffreedom took his ship
And charted its course,
Sailing in circles into Dante's inferno.
They drew lots to see who would die first.
My friend, Leon Klinghofer, was chosen,
A Jew: the hated nature.
He was taken to the top deck, separated from his wife.
The Palestinian warriors slipped up behind
This man in his wheelchair.
They shot him twice,
Once in the back,
And once in the head.
They forced the ship's barber to lift the old man
Over the railing
And drop him down in to the sea.
It was done.
A man's life was wiped away like to much dust.
Religious men killing a living man
Without a note of sorrow:
No apology; no shame.
No shame.
You warriors who stalk helpless men,
Laughing children, pregnant women.
You who kill your own and call it God's will.
Shame shall find you, shall deliver you to justice.
There is a god of destruction perhaps, whom you worship;
There is a God also of Life, who shall strike you in angry reaction.
Leon Klinghoffer used to pass by my house.
He was my neighbor.
He loved his grandchildren.
Now he is gone.
Someone has sinned.
16
October 1985
Expecting
a Reaction
UNDERSTANDING THE NAKED EXTENSIONS
Understanding the naked extensions of man.
A league of formations and a cloud of angelic horns.
Clouds leagued with sky entities.
Wind armored and venting ribs and hoary calculations in hairs,
In feet, in pockets of movements,
Making the Wind both adversary and ally
To the rotating Mind of Earth.
Pushing, pulling: doctorial hands surrounding
The birth of the world.
The naked extensions are not so much the volatile, vulnerable nudities
By which all hopes are laid in ruin;
the naked extensions are more the passing of every intention
But that of gain, or power,
Of holding land against the precision of invasion.
The siege carried on by questors.
Resisted by the hard-arm of sight.
Making the darkness appear in inquisition
And angry pejoratives.
Surrounding the woman of light associations
With eyes made out of maiden preoccupations;
And the horn of the man who would desecrate the disease.
Grabbing the horn for power;
Blowing the horn as a clarion.
The vengeful beasts hear horns
And know that now they are hunted.
It is true.
The hunter shall drive the corpse deep in to the sod.
Making escape possible only through layers of death coats.
Deeper and deeper into sin and beyond.
Deeper and deeper into the soul of the world.
Then out again.
Where all things become new.
Re-Establishing
the Cure
THE APPROACH OF CANTLIN
The approach of Cantlin, the character of bold urgency,
The character of religious inspiration,
Brings a sense of awe to the gathering
Of frightened townsmen.
Cantlin is large, angry, furious in judgments,
Rapacious in imagery.
Cantlin is cold and hoary and whiteheaded.
He is capable of murder, capable of indecent terror,
In the name of his God.
Cantlin is horrible to sinners,
Horrible to those who live, for urgency's sake,
Close to the skin,
Close to the marrowbone of human contact and affliction.
He will raise an army against idle rituals;
He will raise the head of spiritual torment.
He will raise his own head;
And proclaim the color of right.
But will he fight the adversary who appears
Beyond the sea?
Cantlin does not see;
He merely conquers by roteexistence.
He cannot see beyond sequestered ideals,
Beyond ideology of ruin.
He is bound, gagged, blind, without God's ear,
Without God's true incentive.
He is bound by literality.
He is conquered by boisterous oblivion,
For he sees only Death,
Sees not light beyond the cradle.
Cantlin rides his roan
Into preliminary jurisdictions.
He has power because he shouts;
And those who should shout back
Have been captured by Heaven,
And, so, are dumb.
And there is but one noise.
24 January 1986
The
Worlds Collide
THE BIRTH OF CHROME
I ride the wounding winds and find that birth
Is preceded by pains.
And I feel such pains:
A tearing in my chest, a weight,
A corresponding pressure.
The clear sky makes for fancy;
And flights in to a classical posture.
Perhaps.
I write about shoes.
I think about dues, about frosty apparitions,
About barnstorming pilots
Selling futures to the footbound weary ones
Who finance each operation.
The Saratoga flings angry arrows at the arrogant one
In Libya.
There is a fight not far from beginning.
I am ready, in my vision.
Yet not ready, not fully scored:
There is no chrome here, no blessing;
And the real emergency, the face of blood,
Without apologies, does not come to measure my ceiling,
By nights,
And leave an X on my door.
26 March 1986
Retaliation
THE STRIKE HAS COME
The strike has come.
The darling of Chaos has spoken and been hit.
The night aerial display of might and replenishment,
Of anger and intense apportionment,
In the form of fire's obitual power,
Has come from England
And from Mediterranean carriers.
The strike has hurled smart bombs at a night
Lit for the silent carnival.
Tripoli flames. The striker has been hit.
Khadaffi's unsilent uncarnival breaks as blocks of concrete
Fall; and a town burns.
Khadaffi is dead! some cry.
A flight breaks out, between those loyal to the corpse,
And those urgent for deliverance.
From his association with evil.
Machinegun battles carry on in to night.
Khadaffi's daughter is dead.
His sons are wounded.
He is not seen.
And old film is shown, without speech;
No time credentials;
Old footage.
He is gone.
Has he been punished for Leon Klinghoffer?
Has he been punished for the baby girl
And the recently-wed Greek-American girl,
Both blown out of the sky,
Landing horribly on an air-strip?
Was he punished for the black American solider;
And the German citizens bombed by his agents in Berlin?
Was he punished for the tourists slaughtered in Roman
And Athens airports?
He was punished for his past sins,
His past crimes against innocence.
It is better that he is dead.
For he is Hatred personified.
His death should bring no undue sorrow.
He believed that he was Death.
God has taken his wand
And given it over to birds
To build a song with.
16 April 1986
Debate
In the Senate
THE SPEAKERS HOLD THE CLAY VASE ALOFT
The speakers hold the clay vase aloft.
It is a symbol of their own mortality;
Although they do not understand this.
The speakers hold aloft the text
Which contemplates real meaning.
Passages are noted in underline.
They speak, yell, underscore their own rightness.
Yet the clay vase does not lie.
The clay vase, as a symbol, paints a vast forebodiing ode.
Lucky for them they cannot know this.
Lucky for them that they can smile,
Even within this obituary.
14 February 1986
The
Father Silently Watches
THE FUNERAL URN
I.
The funeral urn is porcelain-made.
It sits on the mantle.
It prints concurrent odes: Homeric soldiers.
It precedes each burial rite.
Each descent into the casket
By which production of words becomes habitual.
It is gold, with brown men, bronze harps, blue eyes.
the women who wait on clouds,
To claim the victor from the grave:
They are tall, with fair skin, light hair, ample breasts:
Dignified beings.
Goddesses in flesh: mortality's bundle.
They wait, Penelope-like.
Porcelain maid: appropriate metaphor.
For Homer was a warmtongued master:
The athletes perform to inspire each epoch.
Men acting roles, in History's Shawl,
By which they transform the contexts of worlds;
Then they return, epic poets, singing glory.
II.
The funeral urn is porcelain-made.
It is held by my daughter.
She understands intrinsically that the story
Is of considerable choice.
The men fascinate her dreams,
Horrify her thoughts.
The women in the clouds make her promise
Real fidelity.
It is gold, this urn:
The men have muscles as large as a lion's.
They have faces bold with duty,
Cold and heartily bent for fame.
And for the prize of women who choose
Only goodmen,
Fertile and honored and powerful of limb.
The dog turns, to bolt;
To strike the Turk who would unman Ulysses.
It is enough.
The vegetation blushes.
The sky is tremorous, without breath.
She touches the smooth conditions;
And places the urn in her sacredest of thoughts.
III.
The funeral urn is porcelain-made.
My son builds scenes from the sword he has seen there:
Mighty in expectation;
Choosing plainhardened lore and extinction for his chalice.
The women in the clouds are the loves he has scorned.
Adventure, beyond limbs, lovely skins, hair of waves;
For he is a soldier,
A warrior long for stars.
It is gold, this treasury.
The women are beyond him;
The soldiers are careworn, free, unburdened by laughter.
They slaughter avengers of foreign dimensions.
The Turks are God's chosen victims;
The Greeks overwhelm superior numbers with valor.
It is simple.
The rain is near;
The trees are windbroken.
The women are dreams which shall die with these men:
Never returning to their soft bosomed minion.
IV.
The funeral urn is porcelain-made. My wife cleans the urn, dusts it,
Puts it back on the shelf.
It is a shelf to my wife, not a mantle.
The bronze quality of life itself she sees as merely age,
Dust, predisposition to murky stages,
Unclear expressions.
She thinks of earlier tendencies:
Love built for men, made by war
As the conquest of hearts.
Is it gold, this urn?
Is it fool's gold; or the trumpet of Obituary's cleaver?
She sees her son, impaled by a Muslim.
Turks, Indians, Persians against children.
Her son never a man;
Her son always a boy with braces,
With cowlicks and sneezes.
Heroic man as a symptom.
The women in clouds look for quarters in the raingarden.
There is wash to be done.
And the laundromat costs money.
26 November 1985
Understanding
How the Town Works
THE COLONY OF STRATEGY
The colony of strategy:
It is a town with many buttes,
Many correlations of the cantankerous whim.
It is rife with hierarchy, as if the town were a series of limbs
Graduating to a life at the topmost.
The highest of all strategies isolates the king
In a crown of gems,
From which he looks out over ecclesiastical corners,
The four goldmen,
Who hold mitres each Sunday at Noon
And proclaim their cornerstone mythology.
The inner strategies harbor the central stage,
Creating it out of sorrows,
But supporting it in laughter.
Here there are many;
And each has some small task which is not especially stern,
As a strategy,
Not especially callow -- but, still, necessary.
The highest strategy is an apex in the colony of strategies,
Decisions made by buglers, crows, callers, walkers, lions, trees,
All conspiring for the sake of the strategic necessity.
For the house is one;
And those strategies which are destructive to the house
Are isolated near the main gate,
Asked to leave,
Sent in to the wilderness:
They are deadly.
The colony of strategy invokes angular judgments against those
Who do not see the subtlety of their guise;
Yet, they are not death;
And they are not unjust.
The colony of strategy ingest huge sums of information;
And, from these, draws conclusions,
Whereby the hilltop endures.
29 July 2986.
Contemplating
A Sculpture With His Son
THE CITY ASKS FOR COPPER
(A Second Impression of the Sculpture Portlandia)
I.
The city asks for copper.
It is an age of rain, of raceages,
Of ironore and beathammered momentums.
Of dire emergencies:
Gunshots:
Blackagainstwhiteagainstblackagainstwhite.
It is a city of nightinvesting felonious gestalt,
With the requisite calls for understanding,
And the salesmen of doctrines of hanging.
As youths walk in chainarmor,
Hairs slicked into mohawkhammers,
Pockets full of rye.
Saturdaynight special.
Music to match the wet grayness.
Trenchcoarts for the pimps,
Who sell girls fastened to speedball wizardry,
Comic plenitude of jazzmen,
Caustic imagery of liberation's doll.
Faces plastered with jazz:
Lipstick, frenchmimicking berets;
Artists are in need of costumes it seems.
Walking Tenth Street with bars and stargazing.
Sandwiches of humor.
Flesh cold and illhumored.
Feet made for hotbaths.
The walk and crawl of monotonous straits.
As the city asks for copper,
To paint the iron redlike.
Copper to fill the ditch,
Making wheatfields out of ruins.
The age of bronze.
Bronze skin.
Bronze age: without a white horse.
Ruminating about grains:
Skin borne for calcium.
Acid rain to feed the birds' beaks.
An age without belief.
An age where Marx is believed;
An age where Khomeini p;performs oblations of murder.
Rasputaining against monotony.
Big want swung by the most recent fallen messiah:
False profit fleeing to India,
Land of serpentsuppers,
Land of oldmeninbeards -- speakinggodhood.
Hiding in the Himalayas:
Hiding from torture with grits.
As the copper statue rises:
A daughter, as regal in imaginary breastwork,
As her mother is in Liberty.
Two costs: sensation and advantages of duty.
Two coasts: Hope and libertine endeavor.
The city, the Port Land, evoking ritual gold,
Godlike copperbodywork.
It is good.
The beggars, in sooted overcoats, paper the streets
Like wallets of badmemories: without rhythm.
Being the cancer in the brain;
Being the poison in the blood.
Walking, rainritualers: prognosis of doom:
Prognosticating selfextinction:
Without the seeds to give them futures.
Where there is no childbuilding there is no life.
The winterelementals bark, breathe, threaten, rebel, declare war,
Carry knives, harken hitlerian reflective solvency:
The skin being burned by disease;
The brain being burned by inaction.
As prophets burn listeners at highstakes;
Listeners buy walkmen,
Hearing music instead of deathchants.
Walkers on the street do not need Disease
To proclaim its greatness.
And, so, the statue rises;
The sculpture breathes.
It is an age of honor, an age of the heroic.
The sleepers in their trenchcoats,
Seeking butts to make their imagery complete:
They wander beneath this beauty
And ask when the missionary diner accepts them.
II.
The city asks for copper.
In the complications produced by contact,
Histories are made, worldviews compacted.
In the life being borne of conflict,
Newworlds spring out of garbage,
Out of weeds and discarded overcoats.
The mother declares freedom;
The daughter declares courage.
The mother declares honor;
The daughter declares love.
The mother declares love;
The young girl declares laughter.
In the thighs of copper girls,
One might find the keys of motion,
Which unlock the divinity of Sorrow;
And release his brotherhood Joy,
Without which all sorrow becomes mute and selfincisive.
And ignoble.
And worthy of rejection.
III.
The city asks for copper.
I give them a penny.
I ask Portlandia to give me splendor.
And at lest one night of sleepless pandemonium.
What
Happiness Costs
HAPPINESS COSTS A HALF-PENCE
Happiness costs a half-pence.
Happiness is as dry as a moment,
As dry and as great as the desert and its canyons.
Still, it costs a half-pence.
It is given by the Graces
To he who is looking for love.
To he who is looking for significant production.
To he who seeks no scapegoat.
To he who fights against obsession,
Who fights against possession by evil dragons
And foiled and flabbelating demons.
To he who loves velvet women;
And who adopts the world as his child.
Happiness is given for free.
Happiness has children,
Builds worlds out of the deep,
By the spoken word,
By the smile of tenor.
Building hope and fomenting courage.
It is a dream, a by-word, a secular association
And it repeats itself.
Happiness.
And it re-creates the one who dreams it.
So why does it cost a half-pence
Rather than one complete thought?
The
Father's Other Life: It is Hard to Raise a Family on Words Alone
THE APPOINTMENT WITH HOLLINGSHEAD
I.
I descend in to prose.
A fall worthy of note.
A waterride in a lowly waiter.
Toosure to be stunted.
A growth: a wooded glen --
As if a glen without woods could be could be.
Some miraculous contribution to language.
The meaning of ten.
Divided by alert principle.
Conceiving of relative gain.
A tree on the ground.
An appointment with Hollingshead.
The Cedars of Lebanon were measured by girth.
Birth in a cellar of the laughter of mice.
Sharing cheese with the birds.
Sharing air with the sea.
Productive of much discourse.
Conductive of meager energies.
Serial endeavor and graduated accomplishment.
A jobwelldone.
A jobtosavor.
And a meeting with Hollingshead.
A promotion, some say.
A watercase.
Secretarial thighcase; and a show at the water's edge:
Makes the diplomat in kneesocks discover some serious new angle.
A new angle.
Of appreciation of the world.
A fig is not so good as this.
The sweet salvation of imagination.
With Hollingshead in his room, door closed:
Waiting for emergency.
Timing.
The crisp handshake.
The moments stretched into oblivious temporis.
Miraculous ease: talking with the godsend.
Workwellrespected.
Although the name of LeRoy, nee Hollingshead, is known.
The girth of the door.
Suzanne pivoting on her wheeler.
Smiling.
Insinuation in a glance.
His name has risen.
What would the nuns say?
Spelling profits with numbers:
The one who misses first must weep and sit down.
Yes.
It is fine.
Waiting for Hollingshead.
The boss.
With the pretty secretary.
Who might give you her number,
You being so good with figures and all.
Yes,
A cup of coffee might be good.
A Russian sentry has shot an American spy?
No I hadn't heard that.
What about the Trailblazers' game: did you get a score?
II.
In Hollingshead's office there is a smell of overwork.
He looks down at the world from the thirty-seventh floor;
And he asks his friend
What was Time like
When he was young.
18 March 1985
He
Dreams of the Red Desert
BELIEVING NOTHING
Believing nothing, the herdsman moves.
Believing only the wind, the dry talk of the vegetable morning,
The glistening crest of sky,
Toward which he walks,
Seeking nothing so much as air
And glorious crescent dementias as companions.
He is a fool, it is true.
No more so, nor less than, the rest of us.
Urban poets and romantics find in his bearing
And in his image some respite from their own
Turgid audiosyncrasies.
Something remote; and, therefore, delighting in it.
Yet the herdsman, moving on the plain, in the Red Desert,
With his dogs and his horse and his sheepwagon,
With his Basque name,
And his knife in his boot,
And the sheep below the cloudly crescent,
Believes nothing.
And cares not for literature.
Perhaps this is why the poets love him --
Because he cares nothing for their art.
Because he has made Life a primary value;
And has exiled literature (grainy unfeeling words)
To that station so far from him, so remote,
That he thinks no thought of it,
Having no need or inclination to idealize remoteness.
He cares not for the poet because he has not time for him.
He this not about those immense responsibilities
Such as literature.
He thinks about the voices of his dogs,
His supply of meat and coffee.
The weather is of prime importance,
Not because he must determine at the start of day
Where an umbrella will be needed --
But because the weather might try to kill him,
Or might wreck his wagon --
And this might kill him.
He believes in nothing, not because he has no imagination.
He believes in nothing because he is lonely,
So detached from the movement of Time
That he can think of nothing which needs his belief.
Love is gone now.
He loved once, and lost;
And he did not learn that Love is a being,
A goddess if you will see her so,
Who comes many times, in many forms,
The many being the sum total of the great goddess herself,
Not once, not in one form only, but recurring for ever,
Bringing new gifts every other season.
He did not understand this.
He understood only immensity,
Only lonely pursuit of silence.
He does not hate, does not love,
Does not dream, only walks, rides, eats, prepares for sleep.
He does not believe;
And, in this, he is much like his admirer.
His admirer does not believe, however,
Because it is the fashion to have no beliefs.
19 September 1986
An
Evening Walk in the City
THE LAST RIVER IN THE LAST CITY
The last river in the last city
Breathes fire on the leaves
And shouts mild apologies to the women in their windows.
It has come and gone: the Wind.
Leaving some hearts heavier than when you,
First grieved here;
And some more porous, now that Love has filtered
Grim stories through their
Naturalistic brainwork.
The last river cries out, like a minstrel who cannot love again,
For his woman is not here, does not float in air
So ministerial and so gay that
The banquet of abandonment is unfinished;
And the air sours.
The city is no longer cold, no longer noisy,
No longer flushed.
The river floats verbs into the quays,
In to the docks where all Time is fertile,
Explored before it opens.
The rich key to erstwhile discovery.
It is new, done, pleasant: the river moans.
The last city on the river breathes icy brain-matter
On the leaves,
Rimey tea-calories on the grainy grasses.
The river flows on, never ending, never known.
The city heaves, a last innocuous phalanx of thought.
The Autumn curls it in its palm.
Fortunes are told.
The water makes worlds from the banquet of reflection.
All is told inside the militant's wrath;.
The man of gold walks a beach;
And, in time, he finds his wife.
Finally, he is able to smile.
6 August 1986
The
Husband Loves His Wife
IT IS ENOUGH THAT YOU ARE NEAR
It is enough that you are near.
It is enough that your sing, you laugh, you ask me about other lovers,
Other lives, other dreams and other continents.
Experience is dry in the dry mouths of knowledgeable creatures.
It is moist and rich, like Earth, in the questions
Of a fertile company.
It is too valuable to describe.
And you do not ask for a description:
You ask for the real nature,
Not from explication,
But from excited announcements,
From looks in my eye,
From incentives, graces, appreciations, exponential reasons;
And you do not begrudge me any joy I might have found
Simply because you were not here then.
14 August 1986
I
Hope I am There
HARVESTING THE PLANNED ENAMORED RULES
Harvesting the planned enamored rules.
The autumnal light, and the draconian solvent.
Scrubbed from every page of existence,
In one bracket,
In one fuse.
Scrubbed.
Iodized.
Idolatried, like the seance in the bridge country.
The walking wisemen, coveting the girls,
So pretty in their smiles;
In their colors and silk walks.
It is Life, this pretty energy.
There is another side too, the rife with fear.
It is not gone,
Even though now it seems distant.
It returns, they say.
Inevitably.
The side of trouble, with the dark visages,
Who announce themselves with roars,
Like beasts from a wood.
Perhaps they are near.
Perhaps Love will not endure as planned.
One does not know for certain.
One lives, and lives accordingly.
The air is thin and bright: so be it.
Let the harvest of Love last for me,
For a few more centuries at least.
Let the young women with bodies like prizes
Continue to come to me, seeking nubile flavors.
I have fought for centuries, it seems.
When I come home again, I will love,
I will seek pleasure,
I will find pleasure in the arms of Beauty,
For she is soft and warm and enjoys my preoccupations.
* * *
Harvesting the planned enamored rules.
Nothing changes.
When the wheat is taken and lain upon the hearth,
And the girls run in to find the fire to knock out cold:
I hope I am there, to share their laughter
And to drink their rum.
17 September 1986
The
World Begins To Fit Him
THE DEMAND IS NEW
The demand is new and the autocrat rises.
The Dutch head and the French foot.
The shoe of gold branded in a city serial.
Common everyday appendages.
Crown and equally corollary, with craniums.
Downtrodden in the gulf:
Hedonists are gold;
Velvet is worn by wives.
Time is silk sold by vendors to the king's valet.
Times rough with corduroy despairs:
Ridges and vats, riders and flat heritages in plateaus.
Hate given to children, protecting them from the Sun.
Old age becoming some vicious preoccupation.
The hard sell and the skin of iron.
The dance at the end of Summer,
With the blonde young woman
Whose body was light and warm,
Whose breasts were small but tight, sensitive.
When I touched her nipple she moaned a deep hungry pleasure.
Making me glad to be alive, to be with her,
Venerating Youth, and the ecstasy of two.
Looking for his wife, among the queens of Night,
And finding.
No new demands.
The old demands smell like a garden.
The old demands smell from accusations of fatigue.
Yet he is not tired.
He fills one world with Life;
And, when old, fills the other world with insistencies.
He has two women who love him, who guide him between
The poles.
Lover of each impression, both eternal monotonies.
One giving him softness;
The other giving him words.
One giving him a bed of kisses;
The other kissing him, braiding his resistance.
One giving him day bread;
The other occupying his parlor.
It is a day of few remorses,
A day for viewing the town.
He danced; and will dance again.
He loved; and will love again.
He has come of age.
The world begins to fit him.
He accepts the woman now,
Imperfect perhaps,
But perfect in her formations.
17 September 1986
The
Son Has Become the Father
BEYOND MEANING THERE IS STILL MEANING
Beyond meaning there is still meaning.
Beyond the spoken word,
The vowel extended in diameter,
Parallel to the sounds of its object,
Descriptions of the shadow and mass,
Dual tendencies to run or fight:
There is the speaker.
Beyond the speaker there is content needing speaking.
Beyond content there is sound.
Beyond sound there is extenuating circumstance,
Seen by some as random motion,
But, in reality, unrandom locomotion.
Beyond unrandom circumlocution, there is parallel construction.
Beyond parallel construction there is the need to refashion sorrow.
19 December 1985
He
Contemplates Running For Office
I LONG TO DIRECT THE FACTORY
I long to direct the factory.
I long to strike redhot iron of bolts into kneejoints;
Cars into formations.
I long to pour ironhot steam on thighs of carbonated steel.
I long for fruition.
I long for the unblemished accordion of growth:
Flowering of tributaries.
I long for Life, unembellished with scorn,
Inexperienced with remorse.
I long for the word and the way,
The scaling of the hill,
The tropical extensions.
The factory would sit idly unless it were leashed to motion.
The factory would moan, would complain,
Would exhale great turgid complaciencies.
Men would dry like wood in a heap.
Wasting to wish and spit.
Were it not for the fire of direction,
The epitome of proportioning.
Drive.
Forecast.
Push.
The midwife sections.
The swollen self-restraining unbirthing complacencies,
Driven in to Life,
Driven in to large vision,
Accentuation,
Completed dream.
I long to direct the factory.
When the whistle is not blowing,
And the world has been starving,
I do not regret that the lamb has been lost.
When the whistle sounds, like a cock at dawn,
Pronouncing orders and directives:
The men in the village rise
And make the day fold open
And be charged.
4 February 1986
A
Man of the Congregation
THE LAST SERMON
The last sermon has been spoken.
I am a listener: a man of the congregation.
A man of the people.
I listen with belief, with great refuge in the words.
Yet the speaker gets old with soliloquy;
And the visions of exile are so great that
All the children begin to build empires
In their imaginary silences;
And I begin to build servitudes.
The last sermon is a glorious pursuit of something ignominious;
And, at the same time, something truly great.
The last sermon is the trial of Ahab.
It is the discovery of brine
In the medicine jar.
It is accusatory.
It looks for the stolen strawberries;
And seeks to make, from the stolen strawberries,
The magic strawberry wine.
The last sermon lasts for centuries.
It moves at the speed of a slumbering dream,
Without evident measurement,
Without disbelief in its preconditions.
He does not hold me, this speaker:
For he is old from plotting disease.
It is the words: the words are like bold irons
Double-handedly drawn from a fire of passionate speech.
The words are living beings,
Great entities which fashion literal existence
And also the echoes,
Each a subtler rounder reminder.
The words have skins and fashions and unmutilated degrees.
The words are like children playing on a hill.
They are like lions on a plain.
They are like armies approaching Death's lyric.
They are like a woman in a silk dress,
Naked beneath her distress.
They are like a whole symphony of merry-makers.
They are a nation of weepers.
They are a city of worshippers.
They are a town of laughter.
They are a house of cards,
A house of plenty,
A house of ill-repute.
They are a totality, from the sea to the sea.
They are blown and re-blown, like glass;
And create existence.
The Chaos comes; and the Word remakes conditions.
Chaos comes; and the last sermon becomes the first sermon.
19 February 1986
He
Returns To Visit His Birthplace
I AM STANDING HERE, BEYOND BYZANTIUM
I am standing here, beyond Byzantium;
Here, beyond Elysia.
The dust is not golden here.
The ice is several centuries long.
Collecting on ledges.
Where the skin burns and the sun exacts.
Walking on ice:
The wind no seasonal ecclesiastical horn.
Trumpeting no vice.
Tromboning no darkheights.
Lowering Rumination, a king, in to storms.
In Wyoming's backpocket.
Where the trees groan, and demand tribute from the public.
Scoffing walkersby cough, knowing trees can never own them.
Knowing trees become mad, in stardeluded November.
Far from the thawing rains.
Far from the skirthappy laugh of girls in June.
Waiting for go to come
Again.
Shaking in the frost.
Visibility nowhere.
Shake, maker of day.
Shook, doctor of harbors.
Shankhardeningdaydream.
Drinking air into the pores: iceage cometh.
A comet on skis.
Standing far beyond Byzantium.
An acre in his brain.
Greek in his vocabulary, perhaps:
An acre in his pain;
Cold Melville in his remembrance.
And paintings of prairie wastelands.
Cold colors of blue and pearl:
Pureblue is an iceaimed Adonis.
Red making him warm.
Redcoat; redhat.
Gloves made of sheepskin: curled and cleaved in ironworks.
Warmth: not far from here.
Where ears become ears again.
Near the fire in the pantry.
Where his wife creates her mitre:
Ruler of small byzantium,
In the hall with acres of cloth.
Smiles made of wisdom: clear, planed by Maternity.
A child in her womb.
This is Byzantium.
The turning of the clock:
Day and Night are friends in Byzantium.
Day and Night make love like children:
Perfect timing, beyond belief.
I am standing here, beyond Byzantium.
The teakettle squirrels its ellipse
To fill the house.
I have walked a road of ice.
I am here, now:
Penelope smiles, and suggests rewards.
Beyond Byzantium, all is well.
Beyond Byzantium, Life endures.
And then, as always, re-creates.
5 November 1985
EPILOGUE
________________________________________________
MY INVESTIGATIONS OF INFINITY
(Looking for Truth Antecedent to Breakfast)
I.
My investigations of Infinity touch uncalculated rims and ravenous portages governed by dust.
I drink excessive porridges.
I congregate in strange calendars.
I am not unwise; I am not surreptitious.
Blind perhaps.
Blind calligraphic portent of wandering unschooledman walking
Over rocks condescending support please:
Biennial chessmenÕs pettymany markers:
Blackwhiteblackwhite.
The square: stretched.
Cubical rubies.
Turned again: quadrangular missedunity.
Calculated by dwarfs: a language promulgating evenhandsumness:
Prognosticating sanityÕs shadow.
In precision of highGreeks hollowing spatial advantage:
With the whiplash imagery of symbolic pies.
I walk, touching deserts and vanquished trees.
Seeing with my hands, my fingers, each abode, each oncehaven.
Centuries are like tents.
Each millennium has a shoe.
A carpenterÕs aunt: uncovering babyÕs papers.
In Bethlehem.
A star is borne.
Wisemen wandering in circles.
InfinityÕs equivocal rainbow.
A storm stolen from the canvas.
Crassssssssssssssssssssh.
LightningÕs billowing millravager.
Investigating Infinity.
A child as frail as a galebaggager;
Child blown by insidious northwinds:
Hilarityless iceburghundy coastal showerwinder winterwindstorms.
Risen from ash into seven elevens.
On Christmas DayÕs Eve.
Raised into manofautumn.
Man of staves.
Man of armored eaves: with corporate arms.
The brain of a century: a stew for geometrers.
The heart of millenium; a crew made for storage.
BarometerÕs rising.
Fallen hens balk in a yard built by straw.
Herod is brainweary.
His axe is broadhatted and mainly shreworiented.
He rests.
A body is born.
Years.
Beyond InfinityÕs girdle.
Walking assheavy and contemplating Virtue.
I.
A lad about to bolt.
A cad about to embolden pitted knowledge with his stone.
Seeking InfinityÕs rainbow:
Reginbrow:
Ragandbroom, cloisterwise.
All colors from one.
WisdomÕs acrid plenitude.
All colors out of one.
Beyond infinite searching.
Beyond words.
On words.
Drinking portentious brew: eyeheavy and unregulated.
Walking through landsofunplenty: a desert of myopia.
Unlearned associations.
Images: ingrained in sand.
Seeking EternityÕs bosom.
Making a face dark from Sun.
Snowsun in WinterÕs equalarium.
The depth of all mankind: shadowed by Braille.
Walking.
My face browned an astonished mint.
My heart darkened with peace.
Each year is a supper.
Each year is a second: Time is extended.
Seeking Automan's regal missedcalory of Time.
A second in width and numeration and beseechery.
A man born under a barnhouse star, to rule quietly,
With bloodunencumbering stolidity,
Until the remakery comes to find him,
Standing facedown in sand,
Seeking his shoe, his delivery,
Seeking his stableless stable,
His starless star,
His humorless stoneworry beyond unaffiliated remorse.
Candles and the playing of jazz.
He arrives, unbeknownst to the mealvendors.
Dinner is for all friends.
Yeats would have been proud: his imagery so rife:
His untamed falcon talking dryly.
2000 AM.
Watching the calendar,
I congregate in strange alleyways,
Uncovered chambers,
And talk with children,
Regarding InfinityÕs slipper,
Which they saw amid lions,
On mainstreet,
Before the freeze came.
II.
My investigations of Infinity leave much to be desired.
I am not quick with wit, not easy with words, not diabolical with ritual;
Not sassy with handdanceclapping.
I watch the sandmaker build shadows out of....stupendous advances.
The clerical aptitude marks my clothes.
Before Ash Wednesday begets BlaiseÕs paupery.
Uneasy looker.
As if Infinity were a woman, freshly made, beyond a door.
A window.
A lace curtain.
Legs fully done: naked beneath blue silk.
Breasts of ruby solace: two suns upon her ruse.
Her smile has in it glory.
She is real.
More real than the twin lecheries
Which camp down
In the cablecars of old Frisco.
Doomorientors: it is so.
The twin fabledbars of lost angle ease.
Greeks to the bittenest of ends.
Down where water runs into dust:
Not far from my search:
Grandest caverns in grandest dams.
I search for InfinityÕs earlywarningsign.
Military jetmerriment; the clouds oar a heavenly boat out from mooring.
I ask for questions.
Ritual is easy.
I ask for trumpets.
The angels are busy, stroking flesh to beat the band.
An ass so tight one can play Louie Louie on it.
The black bikini bivouac.
It is so.
But where do I find Infinity?
Down by the waterfront where Brando builds a brickdream?
Solittlelearned.
I kid a bended container.
The movies draw dawnvisitors out beyond blueblueheaven.
Claudette Colbert.
Fullfigured Jane Russell.
Stalking pirouette in a smile:
Gelsey Kirkland is a dreammaker.
No brickwick papers from she:
Her toe in a glass;
Her dreamy mass in a wheatfield.
Lying in autumnwood: Christina by name.
In a satisfactory pose.
Before dancing became marionettic;
Before roadwarrioring became immense heartofdarknessabode.
When dreams were freely composed:
The dance, the slipper of drinkers.
Champagne.
Petite fraternity.
A womanÕs hand, her grace, her scent:
Rosehue and rosehemorrhage.
The spilling of loveliquor from her garter.
Bogart of steel.
Unnoticed by she: in her velvet pedigree.
Meant for me and mealone.
Before the lowering of shades.
Turned Gelsey Kirkland into a swan.
And I walk.
My world is not the same as these:
For each geometry is clean, knifewielding, and fullyabsolving.
I seek InfinityÕs mass: the unleavened mass of matter antimattering.
Here and there.
Eight and eight.
The greektomes performing sixteen.
Pythagoras has breasts.
Eight by eight.
Pythagoras has teeth.
Back to back.
Pythagoras has banquets.
Haggard and handsome dual atrocities:
Antidotes to beacons.
Seeking the religion of premail vividcissitudes:
Vision is made for free, but requires coins.
And is salvationÕs cost.
III.
My investigations of Infinity bring me to these few conclusions:
—Tomorrow,
although rife with Yesterday,
and egregiously built by Now,
can be known only through experience;
—The Second Coming,
be it classical case of the fear of notknowing,
or, more likely,
the coin handed to fathers in the offertory of mass,
having the coin always turned to elucidate totality,
deceiving only the foolishlytrusting
who do not know Greek geometry,
certainly not the wise,
armed with compass and epidemic template,
the ruler and the scale.
For he who was wise is alive;
he who was sad is fully glad;
he who sought peace excoriates solemnity;
he who disarmed wields hammersofGod.
The Second Coming,
the great 2000 AM,
predicted by planetary lords and silver anniversary goalorientors,
well known for their seaquestering,
and for the answers derived from their splinters;
predicted by poorarmoredfarmers and waiters exceedingly wary;
by those who operate grain hatcheries and welders of mental irons;
by those who investigate the brace of dreams,
the one dream, derived of many;
the educators of scripture,
the historians of habit,
patternmanagers who cultivate cribs,
herolorians who prognosticate returns,
riverwatchers,
sunvoyagers,
clayforagers,
loversofsymphony,
themerememberers,
Joyceanpolydoors,
scholargarchians,
mercury-suturers,
even calendar-salamanders,
congregating in strange fabric,
the one city beneath the sun—
turning on a spit, with colors of ecclesiastical forestry:
anglicans and the mint of Sebastopol.
Circe is and Circe does.
All colors from one.
Yes, all colors from one.
It is done.
The rummaging of the walker,
the author,
fully freeformed,
forming windwheels to transport him,
watersporeadores to transform him,
in his search to find the grail,
the gray haydaymailmarrybefore-noonteatimetheme Infinity,
before the scones come.
The Second Coming,
for which I search,
over rocks of condescending purport,
pleasing to no one,
only to noonwatchers hungry for cones,
breads, bakeries, and the like,
in my dustweathered coming to terms
with futurelife amid dreamgothicism,
beyond the shower of presentday animosity to sage
(the logic of claws: postmanagers of that feasible futurity),
even with Greek forebearance and Russian futurebearer marksheritage,
the cadaverprone monarchy of Arabia,
with the lance and akinakes of Persia much used,
beyond EuropeÕs big sleep, not unakin to Mister MarloweÕs,
but even more associated with HerodotusÕs lastwalk,
before China was clothedead in Muslim....
The Second Coming brings a godman who shall shake leafcreation into surgery.
He has the face of an angel.
He hears directories from the last mile.
He has armor around his breastplate.
He is the second cousin of Zion: part man, part lion, mostly bird.
Eaglewinged.
Buglehearted.
Swordproportioned.
Ecclesiastical in prose:
his the words of an unmade bard's partition.
Giving worlds a velvet birthstone:
sending one child to bed;
giving the other child a dawngown.
Performing ablutions by the miracle of Lethe.
And through the heritage of Joseph.
It is done.
The clock has talked.
The dust does not please me so much as does the sea,
the velvet mist of a wombforpleasure,
bargained and bought from the Doersofdeeds.
I have walked and seen.
I have ritually acceded to landscapes of doubt,
to precious codereading in the stars.
It is in words placed flat on treeskin,
this pleasurestone on which I write
(paperÕs fabulous folio),
through which I see the 'portioned blaze
of new trajectories common and storied:
one new sunÕs acominÕ
and it seeks its cold re-entry.
Right on time: preceding rain.
The crowd believes me.
It listens as I read.
My poetry is applauded.
Many smile.
And then the scones come.
8 December 1985