Written by Mel Reichler   Copyright 2002

 

The Collected Poems

 

 

Hieronymus Bosch on Television   

                

Sarantino comes riding, tan chaps flapping against the hide of his mount, slavering dogs harrying his flank, toward

roses beyond beauty, petals sweating an alcoholic mist

hung over

fences, regally positioned at the edges of softly tilted lawns

(drooping points, unevenly lined up

anticipate a serrated welcome)

toward virtue’s frail, distracted, thorny reward:

dividends, Daisy Mae’s, certificates, bonds, paper.

 

Language is smeared on his face.

His face is blacked with it.

Wai. Wai.

 

Wanting to speak we have no recourse but to a

figure of speech

totally wrapped in the image of his own action

welded in ecstasy to the horse

riding towards the shimmering line of

other horsemen

obscured by our hand on the dial.

 

 

We nurse a glass teat

are filled up

with horsemen from one channel

fenced 1940’s lawns from another

Lucille Ball from a third.

Stagmant tidal flats at the end of the dial.

on television.

 

2

 

Have you,

have you,

have you seen

on television,

someone’s mother,

waiting,

someone’s mother,

on television

being talked to from someone,

waiting for

her son who is spread eagled dead on the street

waiting for

her son to rise up on the six o’clock news,

on television

on the Six O’Clock News, to tell her

where he is,

what has happened.

 

3

 

Victims pour out of the tube, into the living room,

onto the Karistan carpet from Japan

chunks of skin on pieces of the sky;s

criminals, lost childeren, homosexuals, soldiers,

bloodied, crazed,

spill out of the tube,

climb the chrome lamps ,

cover the faience,

pile up on the plush sofa,

doze on the love seats,

fill up the living room:

march in circles,

fall,

rise,

fall.

 

4

 

In the vast space

between the picture and the surface of the tube

miniature suns orbit, tan our skins in the dark.

Scales form on our eyes.

Across the face of the tube

on the diagonal,

in Pleistocenes of 60 minutes,

in technological time,

we evolve again.

Across the face of the tube

against the glass mountain

on the diagonal, a new species mutates.

 

5

 

On television character exists.

Off of the tube, in front, behind,

edges dull, outlines smear

but

on television,

on television

stroked in the same direction

definite dimensions of character toughen

deepen,

are exercised,

run and rerun and rerun again

until we can trace their shadows in the dark;

until the lightest random fingering causes them to leap

from the darkened box

muscular, distinct, well defined

and, half turned way, stand next to us

giving advice.

 

Starved for character

we try to crawl into the set

but it will not open

only its sides become transparent

and we can see its insides.

Grains of sand.

We molt,

become

beautiful collections of sleek dots in phosphors

tough

supple

flexible

fluid.

Swarm, become

motes, a swirl of dots on television

(the hangman, the rope, the condemned, the drop,

dots in phosphors.)

 

6

 

Asshemovesherfingerbetweenmylegswalksitslowly

sensuously over muscles,

leaving perfumed trail of ripples and spasms

like an erotic snail

she

turns distractedly to change the channel and brings famous people to bed.

 

7

 

At the beginning of the day

a pattern stumbles casually onto the screen

as if from an all night tryst,

a little drunk,

bestubbled,

caught, it oscillates vigorously

it shakes comically.

We meditate in the half darkness on the signature of a great intelligence.

Eventually it dissolves

and the world

reappears

made small and precise and perfect.

Mother and father are reunited

on television.

We are again a family.

True, father is small.

True, mother is small.

True, son and daughter are small,

at most 25, 30 inches on the diagonal (with their shadows)

But that there appear on television people at all is

a mystery:  reminds us (we remember)

that though linguistics is a queerest science

we have no science at all of what the two eyes see.

But master one eye

sticks a philosophy to us,

a zen of entertainments.

 

At the end of the day another pattern appears—or the same one  (it’s hard to tell).

 

8

                                        

An arm drops in a tender arc, a leg thrusts itself at us

obsequeously

death has a pushy motif and often consequences,

on television. The knife disappears,

the body curves into a him or and a her

drinking beer or pepsi

while

a dectective takes notes that are found

on another show three hours later

during which time, a relative comes to claim the body

which because of a snafu

 

Translations

                                           

As

after words are spoken we require

more words translating into a language we can comprehend,

released toward rather than said,

I will translate for you

through English to English and back again.

 

A translation

as a white cotton hankerchief in which to sneeze,

as a pale blue silk lined pocket in which to tuck ourselves,

as,

wanting mercy we receive justice and white bread,

pronouncements and aspirin—

and those only from nine to five Mondays through Fridays.

 

I will translate for you

through English to English and back again,

as hearing poetry read

we wait for the words to be said again, aloud—

to be translated,

because,

between us, within us

there is a gashed and splintered word scarred barrier

against which language crashes, rebounds and

injured, goes astray,

wandering

into the dusty tunnels under fingernails

burrowing,

into the pores of skin

which remembers suddenly

oils and rinds of fruit eaten years ago.

 

2

                                                                  

I will translate for you from English through English to English

to capture that which words held prisoner,

that which was bound between words en route to the short sentences

along which words progressed

but which escaped from words

and disappeared without a trace,

as a deciphered code disappears into a message.

I will translate for you the indelible marks on air beneath works.

 

3

                                        

Old Simcha walks with words, singing

recognizing in his friends a woolen foolishness

discovers poetry dressed and encoated in black letters of the alphabet

needing translation,

drinks as priests drink, sees what priests see

and is beaten for his pains,

 

while, at the zoo, between pages

the book carelessly left open,

words wander and without malice

take visitors and keepers casually for their dinner

and we,

mauled and bitten by the toothed animal that curls and waits between senteces,

sweating and wounded

say our lines

and wait for the translation.

 

 

 

A Response to a Request for a Bedtime Story

(for My Daughter Elyse)

 

 

DAUGHTER:

 

Daddy, tell me a bedtime story,

not too funny but not too sad,

of tailors and cobblers and fame and glory,

of danger and courage and good and bad,

 

A fairytale to start me dreaming,

with heros on horses and fairies and fools,

with dwarfs and giants and witches scheming,

and rings that talk and dancing stools,

a princess enchanted, an unhappy kingdom,

a charming prince who sets her free,

a knight who gets what he wants and then some,

a wizard with visions of what will be.

 

Daddy, tell me a story to sleep to.

Start it, “Once upon a time,”

in the middle put something to weep to,

a brother’s betrayal, a stepmother’s crime.

 

At the end, let the kingdom ring with laughter,

the world secure, its wrongs set right.

If ou finish it, “Happily ever after,”

I’ll put my head down and say goodnight.

 

FATHER:

 

Once upon a time, daughter, it was simple.

A prince on a horse rode out with a sword,

and for love of a princess faced a dragon and slew him

and claimed the princess as his reward.

 

                            

All the dragons today work for large corporations

and do awful things at authorities’ call,

or quiet as mice they do the king’s bidding

and a sword against them counts for nothing at all.

 

Now the horses of villains are all packed into engines

that make the earth twitch and drive people mad,

but the horses of heros belch smoke and confusion

so that no one can tell the good from the bad.

 

And rings talk only in T.V. commercials,

and knights sell something to buy at a store.

and all of the princes are in law school at Harvard

and the princesses just won’t keep house anymore.

 

And giants are products of glands misdirected

and dwarfs are the same error compouded it seems

by a firm manufacturing drugs for enchantment

for magicians to use to capture bad dreams.

 

And all of the fairies are out of the forest

and the cottage is empty and the closet is bare

and the witches all have been liberated

and a wolf in a woods is exceedingly rare.

And charm and color belong to the atom

and strangeness is something that is seen by a few

wizards of science in chambers of bubbles

and only computers have the future in view.

 

There are no cobblers to speak of, darling,

when our shoes wear out we throw them away

and little old ladies who make clothes in Korea

are all that is left of tailors today.

 

And fame and glory belong to figures

who run with a ball when bowl games are played

and boldness and courage are found only on Wall Street.

in princes whose killings are made with a trade.

 

So sing yourself to sleep my daughter

for a modern child such tales won’t do,

yesterday’s news is to fantastic

and what happened today will frighten you.

 

“Happily ever after,” I’ll worry

whether there’s much of an after at all.

Tommorrow they may fuse their atom

and the sky fall.

 

 

Sunday Morning

(for Vera S)

 

Sunday morning before the Times

walking down Spring Street, East to West

I see, across the street

someone 20 years dead,

walking down

Spring Street,

West to East.

 

And desires, 20 years imprisoned

released by the perception,

claim satisfaction and

turn me,

uptown,

towards her.

 

While

glands,

which do not discriminate between mystery and threat,

which do not make judgments beween degrees of dieing or modes             of dead,

flex

and having prepared me for every emergency save meeting             someone I

loved

20 years dead, on Spring Street

turn me,

downtown

away.

 

In the breach of a Sunday morning, before the Times,

midstep

beneath the turning toward, above the turning away

in desperation, a part of me twists to find

some other way to fall than up or down,

searches

for the ground on which to complete a turn

finds

only the gap between what I loved and what I found merely attractive

and sprills sideways onto

disappointments, betrayals, indifferences

anticipating a death 20 years old but still to come.

 

But SoHo

claims the encounter as its own

imposes a sense of commonplace upon the impossible

 

draws out of the mysterious only its artistic possibilities

sketches the unimaginable as two figures against a slow

SoHo Sunday landscape

colors desire the shade of passion on canvas

and proportions fear to the fear of being  tasteless.

 

How do you call to someone 20 years dead

and if they turn around what do you say

and how do you make excuses for a mistake.

 

I sing out to her,

I call the only hallo appropriate to the dead,

her name.

 

And, at her name, she turns reluctantly

as if against desire

slightly annoyed perhaps but not surprised

no sign of recognition in her eyes

only a tone of familiarity in her voice

acknowledges the need for explanation.

 

“I came to brunch at Berrys and to see the gallaries.”

and whispers something else that’s hard to hear.

 

Which explains nothing at all.

 

Distracted still by reason I remain

only inclined to roll down hill.

Passion, held in rein by habits foreign to the neighborhood,

trips on observing little things.

That I have aged 20 years but she is still the same, only

her flesh is tinted gray around the fingers and the brow

and how,

the dead are still governed by the

 reflexes and customs of the living, and look lonely.

 

But you have been dead for 20 years, I say.

 

“Well it’s boring, and besides, you never wrote or called.”

 

Almost hysterical I cry,”But at your funeral I walked behind the  coffin wept and mourned;

Where should I address the letter, and whats the number to call?”

 

But not convinced by logic she complains,

“Why don’t you take things as they come, not as they are.”

and just as easily I defend myself.

Two lovers on a stroll we turn the corner of our argument.

 

Catching myself, I scream, for God’s sake this is stupid, why are we standing here arguing.

“I’m not,” she answers, “I’m walking to Berrys for brunch and then the galleries.” 

 

And for some reason lost to me, then and now

but final none the less,

the most important thing for me became

to convince her that she was dead, had been for twenty years.

This can’t be you and I can’t be talking to you.  You’ve been  dead for 20 years.

“A waste of time,” she says, and turns and walks away.

 

I love you, I call after her.

But only slowing slightly and over her shoulder, she replies,

“You said that 20 years ago and it didn’t keep death away.”

“Are you busy tonight?” I call after her.  Then, as an after thought, ”the galleries are closed on Sunday.”

 

She shrugs her shoulders and continues.

 

I find myself in front of Al and Sam’s

The paper’s there and the morning’s half complete.

In front of the Charcuterie, a couple complains about the cost of  pate

behind me, someone curse’s the lottery.

And I overhear a conversation in my head.

 

What kind of a neighborhood is this

which will call forth the dead from the grave

for brunch and a display of art and not ask questions?

To which the answer was:

“What kind of fool would loose his woman twice

demanding of love that it be sanctified by logic?

What sort of a person asks of the dead risen.”Are You Busy

Tonight?” What fool would demand of the dead returned that they be real?

 

 

 

           

 

Epitaph For a Civilization Botched In Its Teeth

 

The frightened birds they calmed with effort and taught to   glide upon the surfaces of lakes

and not make waves and not stir up the bottom

took to the air at once, all cawing.

The fragile human needs they planted

in gardens they cultivated with such care

flowered all at once and suddenly

the smell of human wanting filled the air

 

and the piles of metal they collected

and placed with such precision on the ground

then shifted again and again from place to place

and the devices they spent so much time finding

and the delicate mechanism they repaired, oiled wound

and set in motion carefully, were for an instant neglected

and slipped and came together grinding

and the birds came home to roost.

 

The first thing that they asked was “Whats the special?”

and “How much does it cost when its on sale?”

“How soon will it come if you deliver?”

then,

Whats it do, whats it for?”

They announced they had caught the sun, sold plaster mirrors and reaped a million;

They made what was simple complicated

and reaped another;

They made what was cheap, dear and

pocketed millions more,

on paper, in credit.

They amused themselves by calculating interest

entertained themselves by opening accounts and

getting gifts

Economists became their silver poets

brokers became their philosophers

accountants the critics of their literature.

 

Everyone had the same thought.

If wheat is cheap and sand dear

what good is planting wheat.

Better plant sand.

 

They planted sand.

and the birds came home to roost.

 

In every house a dog guarded the kitchen

lights were left on to keep the house secure

alarms were set to keep the vandals distant,

yet, somehow they forgot to close the door.

 

Their tragedies all had sensuous endings,

All of the photographs showed people laughing

with the wind blowing in their hair.

 

But in every family portrait there is someone

out of focus, off to the left, something horrible, a

relation without a head, turning, talking to a friend,

They thought if they called plastic steel it would hold up concrete buildings

They thought if they could pay for electricity the lights

would never go out

They thought if the weatherman predicted sunny weather

the sky would hold the water forever.

When it rained they all got wet

and the birds, the birds came home to roost at once.

 

 

 

Before Us People Worked

 

Before us people worked

we went to the heart of economics.

Before us people worked,

we become corporations.

We incorporated everything,

poverty, old age, the body politic

any number of strange diseases

unusual ways of being sick.

Finally, we incorporated ourselves.

We sold shares in our aspirations

mortgaged our wants for working capital

floated bonds backed by our breathing in and breathing out.

 

We bought ourselves back to drive the price higher

and sold ourselves when we could find a buyer

and found, one day, we had to ask permission

of an institutional investor when we wanted to laugh

and when we wanted to make love someone else owned

the necessary parts and we had to pay a commission

and found out that unhappy as we were we couldn’t cry

because that apparatus was hedging a bank’s position.

 

And when the crash came and we tried suicide

we didn’t own enough of ourselves to be able to die

and were sued by our stockholders in court

for mismanagement.

 

Before us, people worked.

We went to the heart of economics.

Before us people worked

we discovered the secret of making money.

It was simple, we became a mint, coined our own.

Engraved portraits of presidents on our needs

seals and slogans over the signatures of our desires;

In God we Trust,  E Pluribus Unum.

 

And found when our insides were printed upon

we had millions but nothing to spend them on.

There was nothing we wanted because our wants were in bonds

of large denominations

and our desires were cash in vaults drawing interest.

We found that all our wealth just left us more in debt

and needing wants and wanting needs we resorted to counterfeit.

 

We forged desires, counterfeited impulses

inked over whim to look like need

and loosed a flood of bogus upon the nation

of two hundred million money makers—

and inflation.

 

We found that skin itself has much to recommend it

as a means of exchange until you try to spend it;

found we were stuck standing around like idiots

not able to need anything real or want anything genuine

boring ourselves with fantasy

eating ourselves to a fat starvation

going crazy watching our capital grow, daily compounded.

 

And when the crash came we found we didn’t have the need or desire

or impulse genuine enough to want to die, so the banks just closed out our accounts.

II

 

Before us people worked,

we went to the heart of economics.

Before us people were happy to hear money talk,

they liked to listen to it tell of the places it had been

the things it had seen, the miracles it had worked.

 

Before us money only talked.

We made it sing.

 

We found it could speak foreign languages

take actions, make decisions

We found we could read in its entrails

the poetry of the future and the past.

 

Before us money only talked

we made it sing—

only the songs it sang.

 

Before us people worked, we went to the heart of economics

we discovered money was slow

that it had to be printed, counted, sent, arrive,

that it had to be passed from hand to hand

that it could be hoarded, drooled over

that it had to be imprisoned like a thief,

protected like a child.

 

We found that people liked it for its designs,

for the netting that hooked the numbers,

that people found something esthetic in it

taped it to the pages of books, collected it,

bought it and sold it for the way it looked,

for how scarce it was.

 

Before us people worked, we went to the heart of economics

and found that money’s little fet couldn’t take it around

fast enough

that it tripped and stumbled and fell into some old lady’s     purse and stayed there forever

that little kids saved more of it than they needed

to buy something that they shouldn’t want,

that it wore out jingling in pockets, being passed from hand             to hand that people put it in their mouths waiting to make change.

 

IV

 

Before us people worked, we went to the heart of economics

and realized that money didn’t matter

that it was a nuisance

that we could do better,

that human debits and credits could be made

to dance and sing

at the speed of light

on the head of a electronic chip

in the synapses of a computer

that accounted every transaction

whose truth was indistinguishable from fact

who forgave no debtor, took no risks

made no bad judgments

which remembered everything, which forgot nothing,

was able to take its pound of flesh

without a drop of blood.

 

Only the electricity,

the electricity.

We thought we could pay for the electricity and the lights

would flicker and the tape would run forever

but when the crash came and the juice went off

billions on billions stopped and disappeared into wires.

We couldn’t hunt for change in closets or under seat cushions

because there was no change

and we couldn’t rob the piggy banks because thee were none,

only numbers on cards

and because all the electrons stayed in their holes and

all the plugs were dead in their sockets and our pockets

were empty

we couldn’t run down to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread on credit

and we couldn’t even burn money to keep warm because we had no  money

and we went bankrupt and froze to death with

billions to our names.

 

Before us people worked

we went to the heart of economics

then

economics went to the heart of us.

 

 

 

The Right Eye Never Marries

 

The right eye never marries, never divorces

three times a groom, never a husband.

 

Three times the same promises spoken

three times the toungue wags and marries

three times the tongue’s a husband.

 

Three times the right eye blinks

three times the right eye snuggles in darkness and

leaves the bride at the alter.

 

II

 

Three times waves of passion rise up like a great storm and

fling themselves upon the sea wall of marriage.

Three times the wall collapses,

three times the sea floods in,

three times the sea salts the earth,

three times the tide recedes.

Three times the right eye blinks.

 

III

 

Some men are sailors by profession

for others  it is a hobby

     some because they hate the land

     some because they love the sea.

Some men are husband the first time,

some are rescued the second,

for some, like errant whales,

it takes three to beach them

on the sands of matrimony.

 

The right eye’s a sailor

who loves the sea for the sea’s sake

and seeks ports away from home

only to conjure the sea wall’s memory.

 

 

 

Robust She Was

 

Robust she was, big and big around

and flavored deep,

and, when she moved, her weight in air moved with her.

Her depths were still unfathomed and unplumbed

but ripples hinted at

perverse dimensions harboring the source of jokes.

 

Floods of passion left watermarks only

up to her backside

and it rained downward of her upper parts.

Water settled in puddles in her pudendum

and she made waves when she laughed.

 

There where and why she moved was a mystery

and how was paradox.

She bobbed on streets like a cork to the height of the mouths of buildings

rode and rolled in water wet air,

her navel a naval artiface, semaphoring she was

negotiating a destination unmapped on charts;

people like ports waited to be called up

to lay to and slide in

tectonic motions wowards her.

 

Body of wrought iron peened with the mongers mark

the irony was her face,

a vivid lace of silver, sheer as the damp on a baby’s bum,

washed and lightly dried.

Face, flesh and skull

floated on the ambient light,

suckled and weaned translucent shadows.

 

But when she said, “take me,”

she threw a darkness on the ground

on which to labor.

She made you think of China

blessed with prodigious hordes;

measureless numbers gathered and exposed themselves

and all of evolution flashed in view.

When she said, “Love me,” she posed as natural a challenge

as volcanos hissing just beneath the skin of the earth

or monsoons or hurricanes emerging from the womb of quiet air

over a lagoon.

 

Afterwards her memory was a reminder that

even man’s carnal knowldge is incomplete.

 

 

 

This Little Poem

 

This little poem juts out at right angles to my life

and casts an odd shadow and pushes wildly into my gut.

This little poem sits on the parapet of my breath

threatening to jump and smash itself on the hiddle of a blank page.

This little poem exposes itself and

gets all the other little poems in trouble.

 

II

 

This little poem is ugly

this little poem is sad

this little poem is excited

this little poem is bad.

This little poem is wily

this little poem has class,

this little poem is stylish

this little poem will get kicked in the ass.

 

III

 

This poem’s for Nancy

This poem’s for Jane

This poem’s for pleasure

This poem’s for pain.

For headache,

for grief,

for tension,

for relief.

To be written,

to be read,

to be spoken,

to be said.

whispered

sighed

sung

cried.

IV

 

This little poem is nasty

this little poem is fun

this little poem is misisng some parts

this little poem is done.

 

V

 

(This little poem’s transparent,

this little poem you can’t see,

this little poem is a poet,

this liittle poem is me.)

 

 

 

 

 

Dancing Songs

 

FERMENT

 

Too much Shakespeare on the noggin

too much Tennyson in the bean

too little nose upon our morrows

too little thought to where we’ve been.

Insurance for Cadillacs, cataracts,

contrracts, constructs and sorrows

(Insurance covers the small of the rose.) (sic)

 

The smell risen

reasons like raisins in bread in the oven,

the smell covered with briars,

with beer with pralines and with sonnets

eleven, twelve in octal numbers.

 

Spirit of Shakespeare’s ghost reclining , stretching

lurks, shadowed and unseen, unseasoned

asks three questions out loud

and one silently; where, on this day?  why on that day?

how, on tomorrow? and, why not yesterday?

carrying us swiftly to the brink of estuaries down which drift 

     branches of trees with unopened blossoms

     (for the which, gifts are returned unopened

     for the where, we right clauses and write songs.)

 

LUSTER  (KREBS)

 

No one reads unopened letters

Writers repair to lick stamps and

stamp their wounds.

Shakespeare’s ghost cancels our vision

envelops, develops, discovers, repairs;

thirteen, fourteen in hexadecimal

rising,

risen, in digital remorse.

 

Shall play our fashion on film

a movie in infinite, indefinite, empty frames,

the dream of alabaster statues

which do not move;

     ‘what we record cannot be replayed,

     what we receive cannot be transmitted

     but we are wired for sound anyway” or

     reduced to the orientation of molecules on tape

recreated in the image of

velocities of dots in phosphors

follow electrons in rebellion

over and against edges of

orbits on orbits around tension rods and three heads

and fall condemned to lie

in semi solid states on the ninth track in cassettes.      

 

FUZZ

 

The nose of my noggin reconstructs the smell of the rose

salt over beer numbers glasses unseasoned

unopened estuaries (to be discovered)

take wrong passages on maps

and are opened and still not discovered.

Remorse fashions lofts into which we roll

like rocks and dance

desperate, obscene dances

against which another bar opens in SOHO.

 

Letter appears from the state office of gifts and punishments;

to wit

therearetoomanyartistsandnotenoughtalenttogoaround;   

we wishtobetrutallyhonest;honest,notalent,nomoney;  giveitup;forgetittakeupreading

regretingit; signed

Shakespeare, too much, in the noggin, Tennyson,

too much in the bean.

Sorrow,

a little for my morrow salts the season I hew from dreams.

Get the rag and shoot the table,

wipe yourself but send the cable:

Cain; Stop; for God’s sake think; 

Abel.

Rose. Snow. Ascending. Wrong, wrong, in octal numbers

Descend. Right, write decimal remorse.

I save the stamps (you can reuse them)

I save the bombs, (you can refuse them)

but of the glue only the taste on the tongue remains.

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas

 

He said,”We have to patch the holes in the river, lay down

squares of rushes and ride the back current.”

I took it for the crazy talk of a dieing man.

 

He said, “Her love surprised me, it was so uncalled for.”

He said, “I did something that called for it.  It too was uncalled for.”

 

When he awoke he rumpled the tin foil of the morning gently and put it in his pocket.

At night he smoothed out the silvery sheet he saved

and folded it arround the evening.

He left each day as he found it, complete.

 

He insisted and insisted, “We can make a place for anything in our

lives.”

“There is always another inch to move over,

a little room to crowd together if need be.”

He insisted and insisted,”Flesh is compressible.”

 

“There is always an extra dollar to be found,

a scattering of coins under the rug, behind the cushions

to be brought together to spend on a new toy,

always beautiful in the memory of the first moment we held it.

 

When he had a choice he chose the noisiest thing

especially if it were brightly colored.  He used up the time allotted him.  When he died the space he left was small but it retained his shape.

 

 

 

Making

 

Making

making conservatives, making conservatives out of us all.

We hang, hang from the skeleton of many images of a tree

the noose a harness for our sight.

Garroted.

Dimming vision through purpling eyes.

Garroted

we turn, turn slowly, slowly to the right, as the landscape turns,

turns to the left.

To the left

the landscape turns,

out of sight,

out of vision.

Out of our vision a golden land,

a promised (golden and ochre in the sunset) land

drifts to the left out of our vision

as we twist slowly, slowly in the breeze,

as we stretch slowly, into our future.

Dressed for riding, we ae saddled and ridden

by the wind as we turn,

as the wind makes,

makes,

conservatives out of us all.

 

     Yet we hear things said to us that no men ever heard before.

 

II

 

Holographs,

holographs shall not,

holographs shall not recover our vision.

Computers,

computers shall not,

computers shall not recover our vision.

Tape,

tape in infinite loops shall not recover our vision.

Only,

only the wind

only the wind can do that,

only the rope twisting and untwisting in the breeze can do that.

 

     Yet we are told things that no men were ever told before.

 

III

 

 Is education

is education for the senses

while

in the distance, in the blackness, behind our backs, in our backness

the golden vision going flat, goes flat

goes to dust, to dust.

Out of our vision, out of our sight

the cities are looted and sacked.

 

Is education

is education for the sense, while

in the distance the town collapses.

Cowboys, indians, addicts, artists, teachers, lawyers, professors, doctors, poets

carouse, doing their dance,

for advantage, for position, for politics.

The golden vision grays, falls in on itself

the salemen, the stockbrokers, the merchants, the speculators, novelists

carousing, sightless

bumping into one another.

There are things to be done, profits to be made

things to be done, profits

in education, in divorces, in sickness, in ignorance, in advice,          in pork bellies.

 

Yet we overhear conversations no men ever heard before.

IV

 

Disappears,

when the wind swings us back facing only the image of the landscape turning to the left

out of view, into view

as a television set comes on.

On television

on television

we become moving imges only,

synchronous lines of dots, scanning.

In computers,

in computers we become data in binary numbers.

We do the hustle at the end of our rope and wonder

why the noose does not pull tight and why we ae not engulfed

only gulled and gutted,

gulled, gutted and twisted in the wind.

What is in front is on tape

and what is behind is instant replay

and wonder why the noose does not tighten.

 

Yet we hear arguments in languges never spoken before.

 

V

 

Erased,

rubbed out,

smeared,

smudged,

sentences, paragraphs, whole words,

erased, rubbed out.

Wording and rewording descriptions of things.

We recognize sense and sentence only between words.

Wording and rewording

one sentence.

Only one sentence

written and copied, Zeroxed, dittoed, mimeographed

over and over again, and rewritten

the description of turning.

Erased or clear,

only the punctuation

the punctuation is education

as if the punctuation is the name for the place we are, the time we are at.

And wonder,

and wonder if at the end of our journey on the rope

there will be a vacancy

a vacancy at the place it stops turning

and whether the food will be fit to eat and the water fit to    drink.

     And we make errors no men ever made before.                       

 

 

 

The Survivors Song

 

Lay down the tool of the trade of being human, rest.

I’ll teach you a song

The damndest song I’ve ever heard

the only song I’ve ever heard worth singing

the survivors song.

A jazz for those who hear with their eyes

dance music for those without legs

a march for those returning disabled from the war with themselves

the celebration of being able to sing at all

which is the only thing that’s worth a song.

 

You can sing it to yourself on the subway

squeezed by bodies like damned souls on the express to hell itself

stalled between stations

when silence sucks sound dry

and words

drift and accumulate in piles between people

like dead leaves between trees in a forest

or

when the train is rolling again,

and noise floods speech

and words bob and toss in the briney ocean of sound

as useless for communication

as bottles without messages adrift in a stormy sea.

 

The survivors song, a song without words or music you can hear,

a drinking song for swallowing more than you can swallow

a work song for bearing more than you can bear

as good in church when you are miming faith

as in bed when you are faking pleasure,

a song you can sing with a cigar in your mouth

or when that cavity is filled with someone elses sweet flesh

or brimfull of blood and froth and fragments of yourself

 

The survivors song,

a song for singing after the house next door burns down

and the char and foam and water leave a barely recognizeable mess,

a song for humming to yourself after you hear the screech

of brakes

and a scream and thump in back of you

off to your left, not far, but far enough.

It’s the song that pushes out of you on the way back from the

cemetary

after you’ve buried a friend your age

and you’ve cried out all your tears

and rage sits on your lap with fear

and with each bump wisper wet tremors in your ear

and

after you’ve lost so totally

they give you losing as a trophy for your very own,

bronzed and shining with your name engraved

and failure glimmers in each shadow when you catch the light

and winning is an image in a dream

receding beyond the speed of memory or desire

it’s the song that finally sings you, softly, slowly rising.

 

 

 

                            

 

 

FOR C.A.F.

 

This is a poem

for the wild animal that calls Carol home

the animal that burrows deep in the winter of everyday

to avoid snows of parents, the sleet of husband to be

winds of academe.

 

The animal that creeps out into the spring of night

and stretches sleek beside her, ready for a go at anything.

That loves to wrestle, be tossed, laughs; loves to love.

 

She got this animal

from a grandmother

who married into the line way back and late in life

a woman who tried again and again to be only

a good Jewish peasant wife.

 

A woman who while dressing one day, discovered she was a                     woman, discovered against her will

between milking and being milked that she had brains,

discovered during a progrom

pursued by a cossack, that she had class.

 

And,

after she uncovered these facts she covered them up again

with lies

and sadly backed back into her good Jewish peasant wife’s

disguise

and hid herself from her husband, her mother-in-law

her daughter; from mirrors and pools of clear water;

from herself

 

But

to keep the woman in her alive she made this animal

she made this animal to keep the woman in her company

She make this animal out of air, out of misery

out of tears, out of parts of her own body

to keep the woman in her company in the depths of

dispair.

 

She taught the animal to burrow deep in the winter of                     everyday to escape the snows of mother-in-law, the sleet of                     husband, the winds of family.

 

Carol

got this animal

from a grandmother who married late in life

and even later still came to America

who watched her daughter grow up and America

overwhelm her

until she became her fathers daughter and a husbands wife

 

One day hoping it was not too late

she offered the animal to her daughter

who asked, “What kind of animal is that?

it’s not a dog and it’s not a cat

and whatever it is it’s not pure bred.”

And her daughter laughed at her and said

“If I brought it home my loving spouse

wouldn’t even let me in the house.

He wouldn’t let me keep that kind of a pet.

Mother, leave peasant things in the old country, learn to forget

This is America, there are too many good things in life

for a loving mother and a caring wife.”

 

So

the woman in the Jewish immigrant wife disguise

took the animal back and closed her eyes

and fed it memories and cried the animal some water

and waited for her daughters daughter.

 

And

later dying in the back room of her daughters house

struggling to be free

of disguises finally

grandmother called granddaughter aside

took the animal from inside

and spoke clearly to the woman in the child of three.

 

Here

is a gift for you.  Who knows what Czar you’ll find

what regimes rise and winters come to this America.

Give it a home, keep it alive, this woman animal

It will comfort you in the terror of yourself, remind

you when you let it out, beyond disguises what you are.

 

I kept it in a space inside, she said, penned up and hid

I thought I tamed it but I never did

Remember, it can eat your sense of duty in two bites

consume your conscience whole without half trying

It’s not yet a domesticated household pet

It wants to roam not stay at home

in bed, with you crying.

 

Perhaps, she said, before her disguises fell full away

perhaps, she said, a woman dying

you won’t have to keep it chained and out of sight all day.

I fed it on dispair and dreams

but I think its natural diet

is loving and being whole

but I never dared to try it.

and whispered, ‘Don’t tell your mother that I gave it to you,’

she doesn’t understand the things we do.

 

The woman in the child of three

not caring if the animal was wild

the woman in the womb of the child

reached out her hand for it

and the beast leapt to its new captivity.

 

This

is a poem for Carol

and the animal that calls Carol home

the animal that she hid in the cage of her body

until one day, by accident

under her Baycliff aristocrat disguise

she discovered with her grandmothers eyes

she was a woman with brains, class and pride

and decided she wasn’t old enough to be wise

and keep the woman animal penned up inside

 

This

is a poem for Carol

who took a key

and breaking a tradition

set the animal free.

For Carol who opened the gate that divided the two

and locked both kept and keeper in a zoo.

And for the animal who broke a tradition

and let Carol in, for the animal who

liberated her keeper.

 

This

is a poem for Carol in whose voice I hear

the purr and roar of the beast al last free

this is a poem for Carol in whose eyes I see

the fire of an animal quick and untamed

This is a poem for the both of them

stretching out sleek ready for a go at anything

for the single shadow they cast

For Carol the woman animal and the woman animal Carol,

at last.

 

 

 

Renfrew of the Mounted.

                

Renfrew of the mounted,

stapled to the north

to frozen wastes

to whiteness

startled by the mottled violence of his thoughts

thinks of Rumplestilskin,

reinvents fairy tales,

rediscovers inaccessible places he had been to,

women he had known

prays for violence

for disaster

 

     Sensibility is not a blessing

     sensibility is not a curse

     some things are better, somethings are worse

     it depends on where you are

     your surroundings, your place

 

In the west, on Pampas even

mulled by the smell of cow sweat

on the plains, on the trail

Renfrew would have been blessed

 

But in the north country

sensibility pressed out to an extreme

he could see clearly past the far edge of his vision

no haze obscured his sight.

 

     Clarity is not a blessing

     clarity is not a curse

     some things are better

     some worse

     it depends on where you are

     your surroundings, your place.

 

 

 

On the prarie, on the dry range

vision obscured by smoke

dust mediating far and near

on meadowlands or grasslands

Ranfrew would have been blessed.

But in the north country

clarity presented only the possibility of more clarity,

clarity held reality from  reality like the surface of a soap bubble      holds air from air— and burst.

Things are what they seem only when they are half clear.

 

II

                                        

Renfrew of the mounted

stapled to the north, to frozen wastes

to whiteness,

rocked gently to fear by drift and floe

thinks snow into straw, straw into gold

spins rumplestilskin but forgets his name

 

     Memory is not a blessing

     memory is not a curse

     somethings are better

     somethings are worse

     it depends on what you remember

     your surroundings

     your place

 

In mountains, in hills even, 

oiled by mist and damp

stream and river would have polished

the memoryof Rumplestilskin

until it reflected all the possibilities of the present.

Renfrew would have been blessed.

 

 

But in the north country

memory only counterfeited perception,

only reproached the past.

Renfrew imagined only what he remembered he saw.

 

     Imagination is not a blessing

     imagination is not a curse

     somethings are better

     somethings are worse

     it depends on what you imagine

     your surroundings, your place.

 

On tableland, on upland range

dew soaked, cloud brushed

on bluff, in gorge

Renfrew would have been blessed

 

But in the north country

memory only insulated the present

held past from future like the surface of a soap bubble holds air  from air

and burst.

reality has to be imagined to be real.

 

III

 

Renfrew of the mounted

stapled to the north, to frozen wastes,

to whiteness,

cradled by cold, blanketed by dispair,

thinks of Rumplestilskin but forgets his name;

hesitates,

and a nameless wind

blows gold into straw, straw into snow and ice;

 

 

     Certainty is not a blessing

     certainty is not a curse

     some things are better

     some things are worse

     it depends on what you are sure of

     your surroundings, your place

 

hesitates

rembers he has forgotten names, directions, places

turns,

turns,

realizes,

he is lost,

takes out his gun,

hesitates,

turns,

turns.

 

VI

Renfrew of the mounted

stapled to the north, to frozen wastes

to whiteness

imagines,

remembers,

duty has an answer

even to unanswered questions.  Duty has a retort to unmade comments,

duty survives temperatures at which passion, desire, interest freeze.

 

Duty shades what sensibility illuminates.

Because of indifferent geography and unbroken sameness,

because to every territory, however featureless

duty provides a map; directions, routes, distances.

 

Because duty is certain,

 

 

 

Renfrew of the mounted, stapled to the north, to frozen wastes

turns to duty

which back is sure,

waits, listens

for duty to rescue him from fateless meanderings

 

from endless pursuit of nameless quarry

from the north, from frozen wastes,

waits,

for Rumplestilskin, to whom he promises himself again as a child, to relieve him from his appointed rounds.

 

 

 

 

 

How Come

                                        

How come every loving wife

screams at her husband, not on your life

only a beast would do it like that

and I wouldn’t sink to your level, you rat.

 

Whereas if an old boy friend

happens to mention he enjoys that end

she sighs, “what a sensual thing to do,”

and paints it colors and perfumes it too.

 

How come it’s a sure bet that a woman

with a mouth full of a man

that she’s just happened to meet

swallows and says it tastes sweet

 

Whereas her husband trying the same trick

will end up with tooth marks on his stick

and what’s in her mouth spit over his belly

with the complaint that it makes her sick and is smelly

 

How come the woman only recently wed

with someone else’s spouse in bed

get off before he does and squeals with delight

though he only lasts a minute before he drops from sight

 

While her husband who’s twice the size

like a long distance runner pursuing a prize

chases her for an hour and finally drops worn

and wins from her for his effort something between a squeak and a yawn

 

                                            II

 

How come the wife who at home will only do it on a new sheet

and complains after her husband’s bath that he really hasn’t

washed his feet

and tells him she finds sex tiring and slightly vulgar and they

should stop

because he’s always too heavy when he’s on top

and insists that making love is just a lot of trouble

and makes him shave again because she can’t stand stubble

 

and demands he close his eyes and not touch her below the waist because it’s not refined and in bad taste.

and says in the middle that she feels oppressed and doesn’t have her heart in it and they should stop again and rest a minute,

 

and says she wishes he would do it slower like Mary’s husband Jim because she never has to rush to catch up to him,

and, as he’s coming, criticizes his technique

and says he doesn’t have to prove to her that he’s not weak,

 

and, instead of an orgasm she gets the point of a joke she missed and can’t understand why he gets pissed,

and says, tommorrow, and turns over and shuts her eyes

and says, marriage requires compromise.

 

Whereas with the man with whom she’s having an affair

she’ll do it almost anywhere

and prefers the decor

of a public place like a washroom floor

or a roof somewhere or the back of a bar

or a nearly  empty subway car.

And when he comes in at a slant and misses

she hardly ever groans and hisses

‘You jerk, you’ve wounded me

open your eyes don’t work from memory.’

She doesn’t  ask if it was meant to kill or merely maim

just shifts her body so he doesn’t have to aim

and tells him she gets excited when he dresses up in a disguise

and he insists she rape him with her eyes,

and tells him she adores his favorite position

(the one made famous by the Spanish Inquisition)

and when he flops on her and give a shove

its his technique she says, that won her love

and says, she’ll pay whatever price

because, she says, true love demands real sacrifice.

 

III

 

There’s a moral here if you forget it

I warn you brother you’ll regret it

You know it already but you’ve suppressed it

so I’ll tell you again though the ladies protest it.

 

If there is someone for whom you really have warm feelings of love and devotion,

for whom you care deeply with full honest masculine emotion,

someone with whom sex is everything it’s supposed to be and then someone you can give to as well as get from ,

someone who’ll satisfy your every whim if you let her,

with whom the first time’s good but the second better;

if there’s someone you’d like to settle down with to live a sensuous tender domestic life,

someone you’d like to marry and make your wife,

for God’s sake don’t—it will ruin everything.

 

When a woman marries she gives her heart

but raises the price of the other parts

and while she’s grateful for what she’s got

it’s never as good as what she’s not

and the man she’s caught, she thinks can’t match

the speed of the ones she couldn’t catch

and any man who’s free to roam

must be smoother and smarter than the one at home.

 

Before you do anything drastic reconsider

a woman’s always won by the lowest bidder

after marriage things are never what they were

a woman changes when you marry her.

The moment that you say, ‘please be my wife,’

her mind turns to the one who said;, ‘not on your life.’

If you really love her let someone else wed her,

she’ll love you more each time he beds her

let her take someone elses ring and name

when things go wrong it’s him she’ll blame.

Let someone else change with her seasons

when things go right you’ll be the reason

let someone else get pushed and do the shoving

its you she’ll run to when she wants her loving,

let someone else stay husband if he can

stay single and her lover and her man.

 

 

 

 

 

Select a word

 

Select a word.  Good the word is….

Now think of sheep’s eggs.  Sheep’s eggs and of course—‘Bullshit’

You say in modern times a word’s as much an egg as  ‘Sheep’s eggs.’

Sheep’s eggs to boot.  You read my mind.

     ‘Nonsense.’

Nonsense.

     ‘A game.’

Perhaps.  If games played players, as players games, if words played poets as poets words, if dreams dreamed dreamers as dreamers dreams, then we would have poetry to spare

AND SHEEP’S EGGS TO BOOT, OF COURSE.

The word is ….

‘A choice.’

A choice.

Time dissolves in language, language in time,

Action dissolves in choice,  choice in action,

and leaves as residue… and

sheep’s eggs.

In this world poets make of random words

poems rich as sheep’s eggs,

laid in haste, in nests of one night stands

which hatched bring forth politicians,

making of random words ‘speeches’

and sheep, of course

great milling sheep

with clothes of wool,

and hoof and mouth disease for poetry.

 

Chance as random as probability allows

produces from poets

sounds, quick to break and cry and echo sheep’s eggs in your ear,

or poetry as quiet to the touch as random patterns on the printed page.

 She was Blond

 

She was blond and she was neat

and what she offered was poisoned meat

and I said to myself “you shouldn’t eat”

but I was hungry and it was sweet

and I didn’t think about tomorrow.

 

She was short and she was pert

and the meal she served was sand and dirt

but I ate it all and each bite hurt

and I didn’t complain about dessert

because you can’t tell about tomorrow.

    

I hoped it wouldn’t but tomorrow came

and if it’s anyones fault then I’m to blame

that my tongue feels like it was made of flame

and I’m blind in one eye and deaf and lame

and only God knows about tomorrow.

 

Someday I swear I’ll go on a diet

eat coddled eggs in peace and quiet

but my appetite’s strong and to satisfy it

if her menu’s the same today I’ll try it

because

who cares about tomorrow.

 

 

Song

 

Perfume and quiet music, a soft silk sheeted bed 

help when the spirit’s willing but the body’s nearly dead

but when the jisms’ rushing and the rip is on the vine

a place on the floor by the open door

will do for me and mine.

 

Perfume and quite music, candlelight and wine

stoke the flames of passion when the body is supine

but when hormones are flowing and the rip is on the vine

standing up in a china cup will do for me and mine

(or squatting down with a crowd around

will do for me and mine.)

 

                

 

       

I Knew a Woman

 

I knew a woman who looked a fright

the pieces of her face weren’t right

She had a body just as queer

with three parts there and two parts here.

Vertical she was a mess

and what was where you had to guess

but on her back she had a grace

and everything fell into place.

                 (not beauty but delight

                 redeemed the lady in the night.)

 

 

 

                

 

Sage Advice Poem

 

How often have you heard some wise guy suggest

pointing to a lady with a well developed chest,

“you ought to give her a whirl, she’s an easy score,

no matter how much you like it, she likes it more.”

“When the lights are out and the room is dark

she’ll play the fish to any shark.”

“She’s not much on brains,” he’ll say of course,

“love’s gain was a public school’s loss.”

“It’s not that she’s dumb she just forgot

which end is up and which goes into what.”

“If her shoulders weren’t attached to her head

she’d lose it, and probably in bed.”

“She doesn’t know her ass from her elbow.”

My advice to you is forget it.

 

Now and then you happen to find

a passionate lady with love on her mind

who doesn’t know the difference between her ass and her elbow

or your ass and your elbow

but says she’s willing to learn if you’re that kind.

 

     Passion is good and ignorance better

     she’ll give you heaven if only you let her

     but when the evening is over and morning comes

     you’ll have three green thumbs.

 

Every once in a while you meet someone’s Mrs.

who loves caressing and is heavy on kisses

and doesn’t care much whether it’s her ass or her elbow

or your ass or your elbow

as long as it’s not his’s.

 

 

     Looks are good and willingness better

     she’ll give you heaven if only youlet her

     But when the new day begins and you get out of bed

     you’ll be one quarter living and three quarters dead.

 

Occasionally you happen to meet

a sensitive woman who’s willing to cheat

and knows the difference between her ass and her elbow

and your ass and your elbow

but says she’ll forget it if you’re sweet.

 

     Endurance is good and inventiveness better

     she will give you heaven if only you let her

     but after it’s over you’ll wish you had not

     because you’ll remember what she forgot.

 

So when you meet a woman who isn’t quite sure

of which is which or doesn’t much care

my advice to you is exit the nearest door

or make believe she isn’t there

because,

the morning after the night before,

even your toenails will be sore,

and you won’t want to, anymore.

 

 

 

Soho  Ditties

 

                 The women of Soho are sheik

                 and they dress in a style that’s unique

                    but the group as a whole

                    has the heart of a troll

                 and the soul of a pussy in heat

                

                                             2

 

                 Some people like it belly up

                 some mouth to mouth

                 some with their heads tucked in

                 some with their middles out

 

                 Some like it standing up

                 some on the ground

                 in Soho artists like it best

                 going round and round

 

                 A gives it to B’s wife

                 A’s wife to B’s best friend.

                 When C spreads her legs apart

                 A  catches it again.

 

                 Art is art, you can not keep

                 an artist from his calling.

                 (Painting is their hobby dear,

                 their real profession’s balling).

 

                

 

 

                                             3

 

                 Of Soho a critic once said

                 its a place that reality fled

                    and left a profusion

                    of convincing illusions

                 exquisitely dressed and well fed.

                

                                             4

 

                 As a breed the tourists unclean

                 noisy, ill mannered and mean.

                    In the rest of the city

                    the tourists are shitty

                 whereas here they’re merely obscene.

 

                 So the tourists of Soho can claim

                 they put all other tourists to shame.

                    Ours come from strange places

                    to stuff art in their faces.

                 (I wish they’d go home just the same)

 

                                             5

 

                 Though lacking in medical smarts

                 for esthetics artistes paint their parts

                    so you’ve nothing to fear

                    all you’ll catch here

                 is an illusion of a dose of the arts.

                

                                             6

 

                 At parties in Soho we fuck

                 and frig or bugger or suck

                    but don’t get excited

                    you won’t be invited

                 they’re off limits to tourists, tough luck.

                

                                             7

 

                 The painter believed he amused her

                 but she complained he abused her

                    She said what they’d done

                    was a great deal of fun

                 but the flick of his wick had contused her.

                

                                             8

 

                 The Soho man is sleek

                 and stylishly clothes his physique

                    but naked he looks

                    from the back like two books

                 from the front like a troll with a beak.

                

                                             9

 

                 The women of Soho are sheik

                 and possess an alluring mystique

                    but they wheeze when they suck

                    and squeal when they fuck

                 and when they’re shot into they leak

                

                                            10

 

                 The people of Soho appear

                 somewhat strange and a little bit queer

                    the ones that I’ve met

                    I forgive and forget

                 its the ones yet to come that I fear.

 

 

 

                                         11

 

                 J— is sick but JJ’s sicker

                 Stv— is quick but Dck— wicks quicker

                 Frk is thick but All—’s thicker

                 Sing So Ho, Soho.

 

                 M— is busy, Mar— wife selects

                 D— whom J— rejects

                 W— watches S— screw

                 while he peeks at JJ—’s views

                 Sing So Ho, Soho.

 

                 In— tries whoever’s new

                 and M— says Hi, how did you do.

                 J— takes them when they’re through

                 marches them backward two by two

                 Singing So Ho, Soho.

 

                 N— hunts sailors in the park

                 J— marks them with her mark

                 (and M writes quickly in the dark)

                 Sin So Ho, Soho.

 

                 One walks upon wires

                 another stands until he tires

                 A gallery opens, another expires

                 Sing So Ho, Soho

 

                                         12

 

                 Post urban, premenstrual, post scene

                 the Soho woman is lean

                 and ready to fight

                 when thing go right

                 and when things go wrong shes mean, mean,                             mean.

                

 

 

Pavlovs Dog

 

Pavlov’s dog remembers

when it ran barking after carts

chased rabbits.

The memory persists.

It thinks of birds taken

bitten and bleeding

strains,

twists its head

and drools.

 

Skinner’s pigeon

remembers

the circling starts of long ranging flights

ribbons of grasses

flattening under the wind

always under breast

running straight in the

direction home,

flexes his head

and pecks.

 

Engorged with memory the world splits

at the level of the eye.

In what we repeat and what we do not do

our bodies brush the

boundaries of someone elses mere history

and we are changed into frogs or swine,

short sighted and forgetful with long tongues.

 

Pavlov’s dog remembers

when its master

with the smell of

fresh cleaved earth on his hands

reached down and roughed his coat,

and in response

he licked the hand.

The taste of dirt and skin persists,

pricks memory

and the dog drools.

 

Skinners pigeon remembers          

the curl of air on wings

pressing the eath up,

the wheat tenderly touching the earth

at a single point, hesitating

before growing up and down,

remembers the distinction between ground and sky, between

grain and everything else,

and pecks.

 

Pavlov’s hands

divorced from the smell of Pavlov’s hands

reminds the dog of the butcher behind the counter

and the butcher’s bones in a pail nearby

and Pavlov’s buzzer states a condition of

his master’s voice

hanging in air, working its way slowly around curves, as

 

to the pigeon, in false perspective

on Skinner’s apparatus

appears the image

of the farmer strewing grain 

on wooden fields.

We discriminate our pleasures and respond

with the memory of pleasures that were to come,

drool as the square and circle merge,

peck to release our minds from the cage.

 

 

 

In The Face Of Death

 

In the face of death some of us grow bold and others of us become afraid of soft noises and shadows.

In the face of death some of us weep and others blow their noses.

In the face of death some of us shit in our pants

and others develop constipation.

In the face of death some of us whistle and others sing.

     But death he has no preferences at all

     no matter how you stood, you fall.

 

In the face of death some of us pay our debts and

others of us fogive our debtors.

In the face of death some of us drop our pants and

others of us forget howto work belts and zippers entirely.

In the face of death some of us develop a taste for gourmet

foods and others of us lose our appetites altogether.

In the face of death some of us walk and others of us run.

     But death he doesn’t give a care

     He takes you where you are, anywhere.

 

In the face of death some of us become quarrelsome and

others of us lose our taste for argument.

In the face of death some of us start a diary and

others of us forget the morning by the afternoon.

In the face of death some of us sleep a lot and  others develop a taste for jogging.

In the face of death some of us smile and others frown.

     With death anything you do  is okay

     He just takes you anyway.

 

In the face of death some of us find reasons and

others give up excuses.

In the face of death some of us buy calendars and others of us give up seasons.

In the face of death some of us acquire a hobby and others of us give up activities.

In the face of death sdome of us laugh and

others cry.

     But death never is distracted

     He takes you anyway you’ve acted.

 

In the face of death some of us grow sick and others give up all diseases but one.

In the face of death some of us grow shrewd and others cultivate stupidity.

In the face of death some of us hear voices and others begin to listen to silence.

In the face of death some of us roll and others yaw.

     But death he never is mislead

     Anyway you are, you’re dead.

    

In the face of death some of us get our sleds out from the basement and others of us burn all our old letters.

In the face of death some of us develop tics and others stop stuttering.

In the face of death some of us make appointments with doctors and

others start attending church.

In the face of death some turn out and others turn in.

     To death it doesn’t matter how you lived

     he forgets and he forgives.

 

In the face of death some of us start collecting things and

others of us give away possessions to passersby.

In the face of death some of us begin to remember things and

others break up their memories one by one into little pieces.

In the face of death some of us get their hair done and

others shine their warts.

In the face of death some of us bend and some of us break.

 

     But death he don’t give a damn

     he takes you anyway you am.

     it doesn’t matter how you lived

     he forgets and he forgives.

     death has no preferences at all

     no matter how you stood, you fall.

 

    

Letters to My son: The Pessimistic Letter

 

I was thirty when the message came; Stop; Prepare to get ready; Stop.

I was 31 when the lines started getting longer,

32 when they stopped putting exits on expressways.

I was 33 when people started leaving

34 when people started coming back saying there was no place to go.

 

I was 35 when money became obsolete

36 when computers replaced poets, politicians, farmers, soldiers,

37 when the electricity went off and the computers

suddenly forgot how to write, argue, grow things, protect.

 

I was 38 when another message came; Stop; no one could read the rest.

I was 39 when all the telephones started ringing at once,

and 40 when it hit the fan.

 

I had 10 years of clean air, more or less.

I think of the poor bastards who had one or two,

whose lungs have always smelled like latrines,

who never knew what air smelled like.

 

I was  41 when the ride ended.

“Everybody off,” a voice said, and everybody got off.

But I had 11 years of a bumpy ride,

I think of the poor bastards who just got on

and the engine stopped, cold and dead, and no refunds.

 

My son, I would gladly share those years with you

give you the fat and settle for the lean

but it just won’t work

(it doesn’t work that way! it doesn’t work anyway!)

You’ll have to take the memories and they’re not worth a damn.

 

We who were supposed to know something turned out not to know  much of anything.

We who were supposed to have convictions had only interests.

We who were supposed to be concerned were only curious.

We who were supposed to know how things worked knew only how to throw switches.

We who were in charge of things were in charge of lists.

 

Reading, writing and revolution

didn’t do anything for me at all.

The typewriter is in the attic

my gun is in the hall.

(Take what you can use, throw the rest away.)

All the advice I can give you is bad;

Most of what people say is just talk

If you have to go somewhere important, walk.

 

                                

                              

 

 

Old Gentleman’s club Lament

 

We used to talk about niggers and kikes

and how they were lazy and caused all the strikes

but now we don’t talk about them and their likes

they are just like us and boring.

 

We used to talk about tits and asses

now all the ladies are wearing glasses

and want to be doctors and teach college classes

they are just like us and boring.

 

We used to complain about commies and queers

but oddly enough it now appears

they have all of our troubles and most of our fears

and are just like us and boring.

 

We used to tell stories about how we were jewed

how chinks were dirty and japs were crude

now they own the banks and we’re getting screwed

they are just like us and boring.

 

We used to tell jokes about polacks and wops,

they were crap on the bottom and we were on the top

now their lawyer says that we must stop

they are just like us and boring.

 

But we know what it’s like and we can wait

for the last laugh’s ours, it will be their fate

when they’re on top and humor their hate

and joke about us, it’ll be too late

they’ll be just like us and boring.

 

 

 

Lowell Thomas at McCleans

 

Was it Lowell Thomas who spent time in McCleans

and, adrift in his mind wrote about the shapes of the

sea and seals and harpoons and friends.

    

Maybe it wasn’t.

Thomas?

 

Drifting in the sea of McCleans towards shoals of poetry which blocked landsview couldn’t see land.

All the ships at sea were no more at sea than         

Lowell drifting caught windward without his motor on

in McCleans toward land away from the shoals of the news.

 

Perhaps Robert.

broadcasting a warning of a war being fought

for all of us by hardly any of us in the holds of

ships adrift in McCleans seas.

Dancing, so sure of defeat.

 

Hominids

occupy my spaces in the minds of men

display their influence to humanity while Lowell

adrift in the sea, up the river without a paddle

tries to paddle his way out with  words.

 

Waking up to find himself walking on water

on MCleans sea,

and in England turning Mrs Welatate properly down

amazes at his feet and promtly drowns

only to wash up, word caked on McCleans beach

as turn puts bag over his head

and sighs inward until he hears the hog wisper to him.

 

 

                 

 

 

An old gentleman sings  two  Songs to celebrate Spring

 

Spring sprung, the sex is ris on me

straightens me up like some big maple tree

Christ if the season thought to bring

a girl to fuck to celebrate the spring

 

                             2

 

Spring springs the rain and breeze compete

to raise the lust like sap in me

nature’s victory would be complete

could a  cherry grow on an olive tree

 

her buds are small, her limbs are bare

lust blinds me in the street

Christ, could I raise my eyes and stare

at her, not where I put my feet.

 

 

 

LOVE SONG

 

What’s a poet without a love song, or a

love hum or love whistle at least.

So here’s a love sorry to my broken hearts beloved.

Polished, polished to reflect her

who smoothed herself down to receive it

and then just as it was finished

upped and packed her clothes in a jar

hung it from her belt on a string

wrapped her essentials in a paper towel

and walked out, on the tides, to the moon.

 

I got a note from her, pro bono, postmarked space.

“Shining brightly,” it said.  She knew it would break

my heart.

(It is her way of saying that she wants a divorce and that

our relationship is over.)

Released from commitments she will play at being a

dead planet and communicate by reflecting light.

When I look at the sky I will always see a new moon

but think of astronauts orbiting

her dark side, collecting stones.

 

 

Obituary of a Poet

 

A saint he wasn’t but which of us is, racked as we are in the womb cracked and broken by our mother’s labor

repenting and ready for salvation and rebirth,  we are only born.

Which of us who first reached for this world with the top

of his head and shoulders is not mean spirited and sour faced.

 

He complained that the rabbis were complacent.

He complained that the priests did not complain.

He complained that the explanation he received was

fit only for gentiles.

His complaints were a constant buzzing in our ears.

 

He dropped his pants when he had the chance,

and made poetry, on occasion,

when he had the chance

and confused the two successfully.

Passion is passion he said.

 

In the war with words he was our general.

What he knew best was how to stem a retreat,

to keep a rout just that.

On the attack he was less successful. Logic always got the best of him.

His lines were to long, he never could keep track of the troops—

of who was saying what, where.

 

When he stopped complaining and retired it was to the city, to Soho.

He fished in pools of stagnant street puddles

for urban cod and city trout.

He loved to see them break water and dive

striking to spawn in estuaries of hydrants dribble.

 

He wrote his own obituary;

“I have rendered unto Caesar what would have been Caesar’s

had he recognized its value and spent the rest.  I resisted

the tax man and saved nothing.”

 

 

A Memoir

 

Even that memory is gone

the memory that I husbanded for a day like this,

a day

fragile in the morning

taut and gray in the afternoon

by evening, shattered like an archeological object

into pieces of minutes and seconds to be

patched together to make

24 hours.

 

A day scrubbed clean of city life

a day devoid of easy city spectacles.

No store windows were being changed

no bag ladies scavenging

or old gentlemen propped up on benches

perfecting dignity.

No one collecting for obscure charities

or arguing causes on street corners.

No policemen staging performances of the majesty of the law

no weddings spilling out into the street,

no Harikrishnas, no Moon children

no musicians waiting for a line to form.

Even the bums were brooding and sullen;

A day not even charity could command.

 

Dead adjectives growled and moved through city streets

attaching themselves to objects,

Damp, distraught, algebraic,

Archaic words that you never could use

because they never quite fit anything

suddenly applied to everything;

woe, pall, melancholy.

 

I tried every trick I knew to bring that day alive

every minor pleasure and a major one or two

but nothing worked,

so I dug for the memory,

the memory I had counted on for a day like this,

the memory I thought secure

and found

even that memory was gone.

 

Beached on the island of Manhattan

beyond the line of incoming waves

that memory had seeped out of me

like the evening tide caught in a sandy hole.

A fully explicit day.

a day when pious Forty finally arrived

prodding, tedious, foreboding,

a day for which I had laid down a memory

the memory I thought secure

and found in the place it occupied

like the tiny crabs that colonize abandoned shells

an idea which scurried across my mind.

“You have reached that time of life when

experience will not suffice and

memories will not endure,

a cruel and killing time.”

 

 

    

 

THINK OF WORKS OF ART

 

Think of greed

think of good will

think of works of art.

 

Think of artists, think of disaster

think of works of art.

 

Think of dialogues between non-persons

think of prison camps, think of summer camps

think of camps of art, think of camp.

Think of soft drinks and hard edges

think of photographs of steaming coffee

think of painterly bowls of soup, think of good will

think of bowels

think of works of art.

 

Think of gratuitous violence exercised on innocent bodies

think of peace,

think of masterpieces, think of holocosts, think of art.

Think of pieces of bodies lost in rivers

think of rivers of pigments running dry on frames

think of bones made into pigment.

Think of holograms.

Think of art.

 

Think of the smell of perfume that lingers on clothing,

think of the smell of turpentine on painted ladies

think of disaster, think of art.

 

Think of dialogues bloodied among Incas

think of layers of pigments hardened to stone

think of stone in washes of grays and ochres

think of dreams that reappear on waking

think of danger

think of disaster

think of good will

think of works of art

 

 

 

            Songs of Madmen: Simka’s Song

 

I

God’s breath stinks of tobacco.

Nothing to do, no where to go

everything forever done

he takes my space and time to do his nothings in    

babbles and murmurs and mumbles incessantly

and makes up stories

and makes them come true.

 

Trapped in the curve of God’s attention    

the smell drives me wild.

“Give me a cigarette,” I cry.

Then he becomes an awesome,

an awesome, angry, refusing, silence,

becomes a turning,

a turning away,

then he becomes a somewhere,

becomes a somewhere else,

leaving me a crazy man

disheveled in my craziness,

spilling words on empty air.

 

2

 

And slowly silence slips his mind

slow as smoke dissolves in air.

 

3

 

Simka, Simka, he asks quietly

you wild Jew, tell me this;

They’ll do it to you and they’ll do it for you

but will they do it with you?

 

Uncle, I answer

if wanting and believing are the same

if to and for are different than with

if you and I can talk only here and not be driven out

then

what does it mean to be sane

and what is it worth to be sane

and where’s the synagogue?

 

Give me a cigarette.

 

4

 

Then

he becomes an awesome, angry refusing silence

becomes a turning away, becomes somewhere else

leaving me a crazy man, naked in my craziness

spilling words on empty air.

 

5

 

And slowly silence slips his mind

as slowly as sense slipped mine.

slow as smell slips smoke.

 

6

 

Launder the mind and make it clean

Insanity is being mean

Ingless, ingfully, for, to, with

(excuse me uncle, I have to pith)

 

7

 

But he makes up a story for me

(not letting me go, I pith where I am)

makes a creation,

creates an evolution

evolves the world to smoke, inhales

shapes a finger, shapes a ring

exhales them to motion, drifting.

8

 

What good are all your stories, I cry

all your creations and evolutions if the simplest of needs

can’t be met.

Give me a cigarette.

 

9

 

No one believes any more, I say

and threaten him with disbelief, yet I believe.

Caught in the ring of his attention

tethered by my believing, fingered without relief

his breath is over me, everywhere.

(Anything with breath that powerful must exist;

I smell therefore I believe.)

 

10

 

I have a day long dream that lasts a week, from week to week

lingers month to year.

I cry, give me a cigarette,

and from God’s pocket (where cigarettes are in the world)

two cigarettes appear.

And smiling at some private joke

he grabs me roughly, lovingly

and makes my craziness a match and strikes

it on the rough edge of my mind

and I burst into flame

and light the cigarettes.

 

11

 

And I breathe in God’s face as he breathes in mine

and we talk as equals and equally we babble

and murmur and mumble and make up stories

and make them come true.

 

12

 

Crazy faith denies all simple truths.

Should God who speaks all languages

not know the dialect of the insane?

Should he lack syntax to speak

plainly to the crazy man?

Should God who ransomed the world with words

withhold finally something so small

as sense and a cigarette from one poor crazy man?

 

13

 

Give me a cigarette.

 

 

 

 

The Whale

 

The whale as a species’ defunct, spurious, deceased dead,

sloshes in seas now like streaked boots slipped from the

rotting feet of drowned sailors

or like matted sunken ships captain’s hats that have grown

fins and tumble from sea weed haired heads to lurch at

tenuous shaftless hooks baited with sunshine.

 

Defunct, deceased

like a mad sea dog grown sick on shell bones and seaweed

the great whale dives to release its sickness in dark and

colder water and is caught there.

Spurious,

lives on sufferance of good breeding behavior

is allowed to sound

as long as it dives no deeper than

the bottom of the chart on which its numbers are beached,

sings,

on sufferance of treaties, agreements, congresses, parliaments.

 

As a species defunct, spurious, deceased dead, the whale,

a slightly living testament to the human therapeutic,

dives deep,

retraces its birthing motion, gathers up its evolution,

down deep, down deep, down deeper, enough to roil the bottom,

begins the motion up

changeling as it rises slowly

streamlined as it rises from the lumbering barnacle

plummaged hulk to the

lean, inedible, unrendable, terrifying great shark

with pointed snout and rows of sharp teeth shredding

our security to bits on celluloid while

it tears up the surface of the ocean as its rises

completely out of the water into the wet air

evades harpoons and guns but is caught on strings

pumped skyward in plastic reincarnations but is

held earthbound on sticks, takes to the air as an

awkward wingless reincarnation in plastic

with a message tattooed in its side.

 

Spit into the ocean twice and have done with the

whale as a species which is defunct, spurious, dead, tired

and wait,

wait for the leeward wind

to turn the message so we can read.

 

 

 

 

 

To a Politician: RN

 

Your anatomy fits you like a glove

you wear

on your crotch      

so you may finger love.

 

Your Adams apple recreates

the serpents apple

that Eve ate

(then spit up.)

 

For mouth

two suckers

set together

which undulate and throb

when biting needs to be done

rasp and beat when flesh needs to be broken

(shiver over sounds when words are spoken,)

a slimy sheath

where a set of knives

are kept as teeth.

 

Your nose

a fleshy grate

over a hole

where smells

fornicate

then rise up.

 

For eyes

two rimless holes

to catch the light

and snuff it

and stuff it out of sight.

Two lids

thick tissued walls

of skin

to keep

the darkness in

so night

may come when it is called.

 

For ears

two flaps of flesh turned out

sift noise from sound

and suck it in

and take it for advice

urging acts of avarice.

 

II

 

The price of pork bellies shall fall on your birthday

and rise when you get sick.

People shall forget your name but remember what you were called.

Your memory shall be a distraction between parts of a sporting event but all the games scheduled in your honor shall be rained out.

Your name shall roll off the tongues of corrupt judges

but stick in the throats of bakers of bread.

 

Your picture shall appear on the label of tainted pet food

and be drawn perfectly on the floor of privies.

The post office will honor your name with a canceled stamp.

 

Children shall complain you Pied Pipered their childhood

Old men shall complain you seeded the acres of their

final years with pebbles and salt

and your name shall become an abstraction

referring to; a hurt without place or form or cause or cure

referring to; a person of oscillating, ambiguous sex

referring to; anything irremediably bent or out of shape.     

 

 

THE JINLING BAT

 

A bat has found its way into the lobby of the Jinling hotel.

Order dissolves.  The girls in their tawny uniforms move away from

their posts and cluster like deer,

the doormen in their freedonia uniforms with the gold braid,

siddle up.

They stand around gaping.

Even the attention of the black suited

security people is caught.  They observe it

stoney eyed as if it were a breech in security,

and whisper to one another over the devices they hold

in their hands.

The girls jump and giggle as the creature darts from one place to another; the boys stand bravely demonstrating their manhood.

 

The bat realizes something is wrong; it misses his usual darkness.

It has made some horrible error.

It tries to unmake it, looking for some door in the ceiling,

a back door that will release it

to the darkness again.

 

The manager frowns.  The foreigners may complain.

There may be a letter to the China Daily.  He thinks,

“You can never tell what upsets them.”

As if to certify his worst fears a bus filled with

tourists swings through the gate.

One big traveller with 100 arms and 100 legs

and 100 eyes moves jerkily into the lobby.

The manager has no quarrel with the bat.  There were many

in the straw roofs of the houses.

It is only a little bat—but the tourists….

It is impossible to know what offends them.

He feels sorry for the bat but maintains a stern face.

The girls in their fawn colored uniforms let go of the excitement

reluctantly and return slowly

to their posts behind the desk.

The tourists, tired from a day of sightseeing crowd around

The manger makes a decision.  He whispers something

to the maintainance men whose shift is over and

who have already prepared to go home.

A net appears from somewhere, a tall ladder from somewhere else.

“Try not to kill it,” he whispers loudly, to no one in particular.

It will not be his responsibility if it dies.

 

The workmen chase it, moving the ladder

clumsily from place to place.

Finally one corners it behind some ornament—an ornate dragon.

Angry at the fact that the fluid, elusive animal has made him stay after his shift was over he smashes it angrily with the rim of the net,

making no effort to catch it.

It utters an almost human cry,

a sound utterly foreign to the Jinling, clings for a moment

then falls into the net.

The tourists confused stand still momentarily

then pull away.

Once dead the bat holds no interest for the manager and he turns

and disappears quickly into his office.

The ladder is taken down and things ebb to the edge of the wave of

the evening rush.

Only the echo of the bats cry lingers over the coffee and beer

on the second floor lounge.

 

The Old Man of Duling

 

Why should the emperor get such good report.

It’s not to his credit that reason dawns: he

should have known better all along.

Honest spies are a people’s best friend.

 

Postumous honors, postumous relief,

taxes, comfort that comes too late

are the marks of civilization.

Short pleasures after a long wait.

Plumes of grief

always arise from human fires,

then quickly dissipate.

 

The emperor turns, deftly lifting his brush from the

white hempen paper, feels the high of

having done something good; he is

filled with imperial grace.

The old man of Duling sighs in pain.  He clasps his

emptiness knowing, even

if the emperor is just there is no justice.

Official winds never blow straight.

 

 

Dear Bai Juyi

 

I like your poems.

A mirror, better than a mirror.

My face stares back as if it were

reflected from the silvered bottom

of a mountain pond.

No glare from a sun dim one thousand years

but enough illumination.

The features of my face are softened—yours too.

A breeze gently ripples the surface of the mirror

my face peels from the glass like a tiny wave

and falls on the dresser in

my room at the Jinling.

 

I like your poems.  The text:  how to ask simple, unanswerable questions.

I like your poems but I want to ask you what, in Chinese fashion, did you neglect to mention.

What filled the gaps as my lady sits in the gap of my life.

Passion in china.

It is easy loving her.  It is not easy loving me.

I am traife—a foreigner—an embarassment.  Her passion jerks her around to face those who stare at her.

She is forever in motion.

 

Outside the window of my office they are

building a house.  The architecture:  brick walls smeared with

cement.

The walls are up and the bamboo poles to support the roof.  They are laying corrugated panels for the roof—plastic.

There is a crew of nine, but only three are working.  Six are

kibbutzing or grousing.

It will be an oven in the summer,

ice house cold in the winter

but it will keep the rain and wind out.

When they are finished it will look as if it has been

lived in for centuries.

China is an instant antique.

Outside the window of my room at the Jinling

they are rebuilding all of China.

The architecture:  Cement smeared brick.  The walls are up

they are waiting for heaven to provide a roof.

 

On Zhongshan Lu, battalions of ladies with brooms, heads dressed for a country fair, bottom for daylabor, raise clouds of dust and keep them in motion.

China is a net,

space held together with string.

It lifts people out of the water

and tosses them on to the sand

where they gasp for air.

Times change.  There is dust everywhere and the smell of progress is in the air.

Times change.  Rice is cheap and there is enough

but it is served with grit.

 

I am writing because I thought I saw you

twice in the last few days.

The first time, “in white gown, short boots,

hat pulled over your eyes,

Sichun walking stick hanging from your belt.”  You were in the  crowd waiting for the number 5 bus, making a fist with words.

The second time, lying with your back to the sun next to the scum covered pool near the red pavilion at the institute.  A peony clung respectfully to your foot.

Illusions, I know—yet I recognized you clearly.

A incorrigible habit but innocent enough.

What harm can come from seeing dead men.

The live men here are ghosts often enough.

I am afraid I am drunk on China.

 

I am 51

not an official, not a poet, not even a Han

I am entangled in disorder.

My children and my ex-wife are coming to visit in July

My lady is in Shanghai looking for a doctor

who will not ask questions.

Wu fights Chi.

 

I am 51 picking at a loose thread but try not to pull too hard lest

my clothing unravel and leave me naked in China.

I am 51 and lovesick, not sensible, not reasonable.

Like the emperor, passion has left me bereft of common sense.

Court is of no matter, matters of state, inconsequential.

I am hung up on a Sichuan Road,

no army to move me forward

no army to carry me back.

 

Everyone is an official, now, though few hold office.

Everyone is an official, now, but without passion.

But look where passion has gotten me.

My lady lies on the bed

crying about what she cannot have.

It was not easy.

She longs for a child.

The most I can do is hold onto her tightly

and greedily imitate a child.

It is not the same thing.

 

Dear Juyi, write me about pain and love

and a society gone wild.

I can use the advice of a dead man because

the advice of the living is of no value at all.

 

 

The One Armed Old Man

 

Sometimes the sound of the army recruiter comes

as a growl, low over the hills, skimming the trees,

sometimes it rings smartly like a bell through

the village, a brisk command.

Sometimes it is not more than an urgent whisper,

growing louder as it echos off the bodies of

stunned men hectored into bushy lines.

Patriotism is the rage today;

We believe in just wars, wars of liberation

wars to prevent war.  Honorable wars.

 

Our choice is never between better and best.

If we are lucky it is between horrible and

terrible.  At worst, it is between the

unthinkable and the inimaginable.

One should not agonize over a decision

between the shadow of something improbable and

the afterimage of something impossible.

It is absurd to think such a selection is a choice.

One should decide in the fashion of children,

“One potato, two potato—-”

 

Usually a heavy stone is not of much use.  It

gets in the way.  At night one trips on it,

during the day one mistakes it for something useful

left in the grass, a basket, a coil of rope.

Heaps of heavy volumes of old books, like stones

are also nearly useless.

During the day, one wants novels

Nights are for stumbling over technical books,

something useful at work.

 

When the sound of guns and swords drift down to the valley

and the recruiter calls in that soft demanding voice

that will not be dimmed or denied by shut ears

a heavy stone is a useful thing.  It makes a real choice possible.

An arm smashed at the shoulder, falling of its own

weight, a bloody stone on the ground or dying in Yunnan.

The old man gives good advice; don’t hesitate.

Hoist the stone.  What war means is a lot of

dead bodies in Yunnan waters

dying admist scattered bones.

 

 

 

 

Abiding Sorrow

 

An emperor dreams dreams and makes them come true.

A beautiful woman is a dream.

Both have a terrible awakening.

He awakes to find his dream slipping from him

in an ooze of blood and dust.

She awakens into a blood damp nightmare that lasts forever.

Our dream is abiding sorrow; our awakening, to realize that

there is no abiding sorrow only a pain that lasts a long time.

 

The air is rose colored in the Jinling’s Plum Garden.

The erhu spins it’s  song more sorrowfully than usual.

A man walks in looking like the emperor of some corporation.

On his arm a beautiful lady.

Moth eyed exactly, dress like the opalescent covering of a moth.

He glows full of the pleasure of her, yet is not sated.

She reconnoitres his desire.

Dinner is an unwelcome respite.

 

Will it come to a bloody end on the Sichuan Road?

Probably not.

But there are other painful awakenings, dusty roads in other places.

Someone should tell the emperor;

Emperors are prisoners of empires.

You can not trust soldiers or lawyers or accountants.

They don’t give a fig about the emperor’s pleasures

or his abiding sorrow.

Moth eyes do not usually last any longer than moths.

 

Sorrow may not be eternal but what there is of it last long enough and repeats itself.

 

CHINA RAG

 

When China applauds many hands clap.

When China deplores many feet pound the earth.

 

When China is restless, millions toss in their beds.

When the nightmare passes, millions snore softly again.

 

When China ponders, millions scratch their heads.

When China decides, millions are certain.

When China changes its mind, millions are unsure again.

 

When China forgets something it is forgotten by millions.

When it is remembered, millions remember it again.

 

In China a secret is kept from millions by millions.

In China a rumor passes from a million tongues to a million ears.

In China gossip is told by millions to millions about millions.

 

In China when people have time on their hands it is centuries.

In China the day before today is not yesterday it is the 12th century.

In China tomorrow always begins next year

sometime, usually on a Tuesday.

 

No small ruptures, no small breaks; privacy is a wet dream of children who instead of blocks receive a set of ambiguities to build toy houses with.

They learn an architecture of contradictions; they learn the back door is always in the front of the house.

 

In China what appeares to be order is merely regularity.

 

When China applauds many hands clap.

When China deplores many feet pount the earth.

When China is indifferent millions of faces go slack.

 

II

 

Culture of Motley

Culture of dull.

Culture of Putitan,

Culture of Unbad.

Culture of Spit.

Culture of Snot.

Mouth Culture

Culture of indirection, culture of unstraight lines.

Culture of arcs with infinite curvature.

The rule holds:  Victory passes.  Defeat passes. 

Only what is official endures.

 

III

 

In the absence of a revolution the workers must take

jobs—whatever they can get.

It is only temporary, the revolution will be back again.

 

Mao passes me on the street, disguised as a

professor, great coat pulled

back by a gust of wind, barely hiding his disdain for the

crawl toward the 21st century.

 

Lucious, languid, frigid shopgirls

bored to death dealing pounds of candy

doze, while winter creeps up on them.

Mao regards them with disdain also.

 

He stops before the Jinling, marvel of Nanjing.

Because he is Chinese and has no business there they will

not let him in the gate.

Later, through a backdoor, he makes his way to the

revolving top floor.

In his honor the 36th floor stops turning and all of

China revolves around him.

His glare is pitless.

Imitating Groucho Marx he asks, “For

this we made a revolution.”

He mediates loudly.

“It is not enough to make a revolution.  It is not enought

to remake it.  Is there anything that can save the

revolution from its successes?”

The waitress brings him a brandy.

The liquor loosens the lute of his tongue and his

complaints become characters on the wall behing Jimm

King and his Hawaiians.

 

“Those who want to, shouldn’t.

Those who will, can’t.

Those who should, may not.

Those who can, won’t

We are always having to choose between getting things

done not quite well enough and getting them done at all.”

 

In Fudzemiao, in a restaurant, a beggar begs by banging

his head on the table, thump, thump.

Mao slips him a few fen and the revolution and the beggar

gives him small change back.         

 

IV

 

Something appears on the mountain in

distance, indistinct through the dust.

It appears to be a man on a bicycle who seems to be

carrying something.

It is hard to distinguish the man from the bicycle and

easy to confuse him with an ancient poem about the

mountain or the latest party directive about mountains.

 

Obscured by dust it is not easy to tell what he is doing

on the mountain and the bike rider throws up his own

dust.  It might be better if he did not ride so quickly.

 

As we get closer, it turns out to be really only a large

sign on the mountain, a picture of a man carrying a box

of bicycle parts on his back.

Dust provides the illusion of movement—the muntain

point one way, the man points in another.

 

V

Li’s Song:

I went to the countryside for a vacation.  Not a vacation

exactly:  10 hours work for 7 cents a day, the value of a

plastic button.

In the evening I taught illiterates to read.  They slept as

they learned.

 

My father’s father owned three factories.  My father

managed them for the state.   Then for a vacation he went

to work in one of them as a cook.  The factory managed

itself for a while then it went on a vacation also.

 

When my father became a rightest my mother took off on a

vacation.  Before the country went on vacation I raised a

brother and a sister.

 

I came out a backdoor wide but not wide enought and fell

into a hole, not deep but deep enough.  I found a place to

hide, large, but not large enough.

I would like to paint but teaching English is my ricebowl.

 

VI

 

On the day we came, the first day we heard the tatoo of dull empty thuds and asked, “What were those noises, what’s making those sounds?”

They said, “children playing;

perhaps a house is falling; thunder,”—although the day was clear—”fireworks maybe,” and looked chagrined.

On the second day when we went out we heard the tango of

sour percussive sounds and asked, “what kind of sounds are those?”

We insisted they answer, demanded the truth not a fairy tale.

“Guns,” they said, “weapons are being tested, far from the Institute; well, just near the city wall-

actually, just outside the gate.

Unfortunately, next to where you teach.

 

When we first ate, our first dinner

when the plates came we asked, “What’s in that dish, what kind of food is that?”

They said, “vegtables, spices, doufou and meat,” and

looked chagrined.

Next day at supper when the meal was served we asked, “What’s in that stew, what kind of food is that?  We insisted they answer, demanded the truth not a fairy tale.

“It’s not cow,” they said, “not goat, not sheep, not pig.  It barked,” they said and struggled for the noun.

 

When from our window we first saw people passing, when we first went outside and walked and saw the people walking, we asked, “Why are the people so sad, why does every person over eight wear a disguise of dispair?”

They said, “Summer has gone and winter is coming

fast—though it was Spring.

On the second day as we sat and watched the people

forlornly watching birds and watching us we asked,

“Why do the people ooze unhappiness, why does every person over eight wear a mask of dispair?  We insisted they answer, demanded the truth not a fairy tale.

“Dancing is forbidden,” they said, “husbands and wives

live somewhere else.  Some want to write but they are

engineers, some want to paint but chemistry

is what they do.  Some want to sing…”

We turned away.

 

We do not ask questions any more, settle for what we

happen to be told.

We do not indulge our whim for clarity.

On clear days when it thunders we look for rain.

We settle for culinary ambiguity.  Now that winter has come reunited families seem happy again.

During the vacation, while we were away, we heard there was dancing every day.  Someone’s novel is about to

appear;

the exhibition of paintings merely has been delayed.

 

We do not ask questions any more, we settle for what we happen to be told.

We do not ask questions any more and are not told

more than we want to know.

 

 

 

 

 

Lu Shan poems

I

 

Thinking of summer I wanted to go south.

I went south, took only light summer things to wear

went south but up, Lu Shan’s mountain’s chill

taught me the limitations of horizontal thinking.

 

II

 

(Lu Shan)

To close, can’t see, not close enough

can’t see.

To far can’t see, not far enough

can’t see.

Just right—see a blur.

Above, can’t see, below can’t see

outside, can’t see, inside can’t see.

Just right—see sea changes.

Sun to mist,

mist to rain,

rain to snow,

snow to sun.

Bu ren shi Lu Shan jen mian mu.

 

III

 

Dog’s feet in paw caligraphy.

Hen’s feet verse on bamboo themes.

Melting snow makes rain beneth the trees.

As we two alone await the fog which advances slowy like an ancient army,

we write with icicles in the snow;

unnamable longings, impossible dreams.

 

 

IV

Snow

 

Taut crystals primed to implode into wetness

(pent up wetness.)

Restless, a blanket for the mountain.

Blown sugar as it melts in the mouth,

gives the trees a tongue to gossip

about Lu Shan’s magic.

 

V

 

Scrubbed caligraphy on buildings

mark recently obscured, barely historical events.

An inventory of ancient poems complete the scenery.

The snow covered mountains seem to labor gently

to be born again tomorrow

and drift up stream slowly into memory.

 

VI

 

Kurtz, in the twentieth century, in China

his memory repeatedly suffering minor deaths,

telexes over and over

in caligraphic breaths

what he cannot remember but cannot forget;

The net, the net.

 

VII

 

By the lake

we make an inventory of what we lack:

a place to smoke

a boat

a way home

and, although we are sitting side by side,

each other.

 

A boulder on a distant mountain

frames your face.

It appears precariously balanced

and about to fall.

 

As we talk I wait for it to tumble down your cheek

knowing it has stood that way for centuries.

I look first at your face, then at the boulder.

Appearances are deceiving but not deceiving enough.

 

It is impossible at this distance to read the ancient inscription

chiseled on the rock.

I look first at the boulder, then at you.

Mirrored on your face the words are clear.

No tree or flower planted here can root.

Men who have passed have tried to move me.

All have failed.

Enjoy the pleasure of my shade.

Enjoy the sense of danger.

I am safely unmoveable.

 

VIII

 

Li’s Song 2:

 

In the evening unable to rest

I pace my darkened room,

As I walk North, images of

old lovers appear

grow stronger then fade as I reverse

direction and your image appears.

If only there were no wall

I might love you forever

but my room is small and I must

stop and turn.

Darkness is a map of

a territory between lovers.

I find my bed from memory           

sleep from habit.

 

SLOW DANCES

 

Mountain

 

My memory plays tricks on me,

remembers things that never were-

you and I on a mountain, half stone, half air.

Smell of pines on your finger tips,

flakes of mountain flowers on your breast.

Abruptly, in a single absent minded, forgetful turn the mountain

drops into the water,

and we plunge into one another.

Later, pines remind the mountain it is dirt and stone.

My memory reaches for you but grasps only a cloud caught

in trembling leaves of bamboo.

 

Debt

 

I borrowed you from China.

I knew China would have to be repaid someday

but I did not keep track of dates.

Suddenly the loan is due with interest

and I find I owe

more than the fishes owe the ocean,

more than the birds owe the air.

 

 

Game

 

We played a game on the board of our flesh

made up the rules from move to move.

We played by shifting pieces of ourselves

from square to square.

The game is over now.  I replay it in my mind, move by move

to see how I could have played so well

and lost so badly.

 

 

Chop

 

Flesh stamp

stamp on flesh.

Teeth chop

natural signature.

Love’s mark

crimson on flesh.

I think you think-

Wu ke bu wu ke.

 

 

 

 

 

J.R.

 

For all the years of couch and therapy

for all the women’s groups and sisterhood

for all the liberation and raising of consciousness

her head is filled with unexploded munitions

from the wars of independence she’s fought.

 

For all the years of couch and therapy

in her fantasies her body is a scar

from battles lost then won

on beds like fields where wounded men

were left to bleed themselves to death

between an uncertain armistice.

 

For all the liberation and raising of consciousness

her breasts are marred for her, like hills where

soldiers fought hand to hand

rises over which batallions advanced and retreated

sweat soaked in victory and defeat.

 

Her head is filled with unexploded munitions

her sex a place where men entrenched themselves

and sought a refuge from the noise of firefights

in folds of flesh beneath the surface of her earth

secure for a moment until she, like a mine

exploded underneath them and shrapneled them to death.

 

From the wars of independence that she’s fought

her sleep is filled with nightmares.

Generals direct assaults upon her.

Colonels liberate her liberally.

Captains put cannons to good use.

Lieutenants take her prisoner and abuse her beyond conventions.

 

For all the years of couch and therapy

for all the womens groups and sisterhood

for all the liberation and raising of consciousness

her head is filled with unexploded munitions

from the wars of independence she’s fought.

Like a good soldier she waits out her peace

as a stranger in a foreign land

a fighter in a peaceful time

yearning for war to bring her home again.

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

For Elyse

 

In the palace

the gypsy girl

left newborn on the doorstep of the princess

grown to dark beauty

whirls and moans to music only she can hear

 

while miles away by a campfire

the princess’ child,

stolen as an infant by the gypsies,

grown in encampments to pale luster,

practices courtly motions,

weaves and embroiders cloth only she can see.

 

My daughter,

which band impatiently awaits the return of their lost child

and what is my own flesh and blood crafting while

dark eyes examine her strangely.

 

 

    

 

 

 

New York City

 

When the New Age begins it will begin in N.Y.C.  (or

someone from N.Y.C. will buy the rights to it, exclusively.)

 

New Yorkers have seen it all or know someone who has

seen it all or have a cousin who knows someone who has seen it all.

 

They know life, New Yorkers, even the children.

The smallest can identify life in any form, for what it is.

Tots are familiar with the living in each of its disguises,

exploding in the cracks of sidewalks, floating in puddles

alive in the zoos of 42nd street arcades.

They feel it struggling in tufts of grass on the tracks of the

subways,

evolving rapidly under layers of debris in wire baskets,

clinging on the polished surfaces of marble in the    

lobbies of office buildings.

 

They recognize

even the germs as kin.

 

New Yorkers know how far to jiggle the string, down to the

millimeter,

even the children.

The smallest knows death for what it is, in every form

They know death of every kind, even the kinds that

don’t appear on television.

Dark formal death, slack informal death

death private and death public.

They know all the signs, all the parameters

scraps of paper, legs askew in the street, all tones

of gray, the merely not being there one day.

 

Even the old people for whom dying is no difficult thing

come to New York City where they practice dying 24 hours a day every day of the year, weekends and holidays included

as if they were perfecting an art form.

In New York City people learn how to ignore things, to

disattend

This yogic discipline comes with the news in the morning in the ashram of Manhattan.

It comes with living on the brink of an indelicate balance.

 

And in New York City people learn how to attend to details,

to discriminate.

That discipline comes between the lines of the news in the

morning

 

In New York City there is always a crisis.  When a new one fails to materialize, they rerun an old one.

 

One never knows, someone asks.  You can’t tell, someone answers.

They complain, “When someone wants to protest something, he comes to New York to explode the bomb.”

 

Nothing can be taken for granted.  Everything is uncertain.

New Yorkers snatch cat-naps on the job of waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

There’s always a piece breaking.  Someone’s always finding

a new gem of a hole into which part of the city has disappeared.

Miniature private disasters, public disasters in epic shapes

and forms, flickering subliminal chaos, continuous beneath a flow of events held together by bridges and tunnels, bingo and banks, faith, credit, habit, doubt and politics.

 

In New York City even the educated are superstitious.

Everyone walks around with his/her fingers crossed.

 

None of the laws of nature work here.

New Yorks have a physics of their own.

Some people take energy and make time with it

and other people chop this time up into minutes and move

them around buying and selling

and someone else scavenges the seconds lost in

moving time around and bootlegs an hour to someone

whose time as come.

 

In New York nothing is wasted.  Someone is buying and selling waste anything.

Everyone knows someone who is making a fortune

buying and selling nothing at all or has made a fortune buying and selling nothing at all and  retired to Miami Beach.

 

In New York City people know four languages;

one to read the paper, one to converse in private

one to talk to visitors

and one, half movement, half silence, exchanged on the streets

when there is no time for talking.

 

Buying everything, people, places, things, selling what has been sold again and again until there is not much left of it to sell

selling what cannot be sold, under the counter, at a discount.

 

Inventing, buying, selling, selling, buying, inventing, 

improving, anything, people, places, things, again and again.

A primordal soup of difference in every form,

a ferocious compressed ecology.

 

Streets divide centuries,

avenues, worlds.

 

A teeming prodigious excess

ready to collapse on itself like a burnt out star

but not collapsing; enduring; persisting.

 

In New York City miracles happen.

A man walks on the sea of air between sky high buildings.

Private images appear in public places,

“A gull riding the garbage looking for the river.”

From Queens, the skyline washed clean by rain on a spring

afternoon.

 

 

Finger Music: The Small Pieces

 

I.

Bereft of reason, love abandoned, drunk

he walked into a fan, eyes open, masturbating.

Her voice was his vice, his verse her applause. 

They said it was a suicide but I don’t know.

They never found all the pieces and the fan

started a paternity suit.

 

II.

 

When I went round the bend on sweet Thursday when Jesus

modern rose and made a speech

DaVinci fell but that’s no concern of mine.

When I went round the bend I saw banners and strange devices and mechanisms —but no people.

I have searched for them since, they were so stark and

separate, sere and strong.

 

In the war that began that day I captured a

word with a garlic baited lung breath

but it was a bruised and wounded word so I let it go.

All of the breaths I could breathe that day were used breaths

and all of the words used and wounded words

so being a hero was tarnished.

 

I, fishy fish, heard the firing of pistols on islands

lost in seas I didn’t know existed,

and the whoshing of blood in my veins was blood

in the troughs of the abattoirs of the world.

The world was soaking wet so I wet my pants.

 

The only flag I could find was my belt so my pants

were the first casuality of the war.

 

I was a hero and went over the hill, and over the

hill I went round the bend

and round the bend I was captured

but in the panic and confusion

my mind fled.  An unknown prisoner of war.

But they found me out, discoverd my hut

set a torch to the thatch of my roof and I burned.

Then someone came and cooled my ashes.

 

The men came to my wife,

“He’s gone round the bend, you know.”

and she said, “He’s always been around the bend

what took you so long?”  “TAKE HIM AWAY.”

Then she cried and they consoled her

one held me and one holed her.

I was confused, for what, for what.

 

III

 

What is my horoscope for today,

how do the stars lie, am I dead,

is it a good day for a risky enterprise?

It reads, “Muffled shall be the drums sound

over the snow fallen quick.

Sagitarius is in Virgo

and Virgo is sick.

 

 

Old Men

 

Old,

are old

old Jewish

They are old

they are old Jewish men dying

they are old Jewish men dying in Brooklyn and not wanting to die

they run

run up

they run up to death and

they run up to death and yell to him in Chinese.

Chinese,

thinking they can confuse him.

 

Death takes out a Samuri sword

Death takes out a Samuri sword.

Death takes out a Samurai sword and ends their days.

 

(You are wondering where

You are wondering where death got the Samurai sword.)

 

A,

a Japanese

from a Japanese general

from a Japanese general who he caught

from a Japanese general who he caught in a rice field in

China with blood

on his hands

with blood on his hands and feet

with blood on his hands and feet and face.

 

Death isn’t easy to fool

and he isn’t fooled often

and he speaks Chinese,

he speaks Chinese

(and he has a sense of humor

and he likes to collect things.)

 

 

Meditations 1: Naming

 

The morning naming begins.

The word lets laughter

loosen it from itself.

Each things own gravity pulls it down and away from itself.

 

An unknown fragrance drifts gently between a world

arrayed in double ranks

from nowhere yet to nowhere.

A restlessness rolls and smells and bows slightly.

“Not today,” it pleads, “today leave the unspeakable

unreachable by words.”

 

No voice answers but paths shudder as names

spring up and pierce the hearts of things

and the world, wounded

falls and embraces its shadowed self.

An odor slices like a broadaxe cutting the day in two

and objects and people slip into the formality of their existence.

 

The evening naming begins.

As light withdraws  noises that held things to themselves, quiet.

Gaps form and darkness insinuates itself between molecules

pushing things away from themselves.

 

A restlessness darts and twists and thrusts forward.

“Not tonight,” it pleads, “tonight let the world

rest in its incompleteness. “Let it dream its unrealizable potential.”

No voice answers but space crumbles as memories brandishing names spring from behind images of trees

and beat flesh into bone.

 

In a panic things thrash and spin trying to locate all of the pieces of themselves.

A sigh like a screech of terror rises and people and objects stop and casually enter the formality of their dreamless sleep.

 

 

Quick Notes:Poetry 1

 

There are things said easily, straightforwardly

hardly the stuff of poetry so not said in poems

or, if said, passed over, just because said by a poet

as if

as soon as a poet says it, everyone knew it already.

 

Thoughts distorted just by being written down

thoughts that disfigure a poem that carries them

thoughts that can be straightforwardly said

so never said poetically.

 

Thoughts so fine images cannot contain them

so gross images cannot support them

so common they disappear on paper

so clear we see right through them.

 

Transparent thoughts never seen in poems

make up a mysterious underground

the resistance to the secret police

of the regime of the everyday

in which, as poets, each of us plays

the role of double agents;

wanted men in uniform

pursuing ourselves.

 

 

Park Songs 1: I Like to Skip

 

43 and skipping

I skipped into a wall

which was where I was not looking

which was backward 35 years or so,

 

and knocked myself out

and lay there imposing myself on passersby on the street

identified as helplessly

hopelessly drunk

waiting for a sale

on good sense to

start soon in the store

north by north west of my head,

 

until a friend

negotiating my sprawl

embarassingly recognized my face

as belonging to a 43 year old

architect of words—

(who shouldn’t have been skipping

who gave skipping a bad name,

who had neither credit card

nor cash

and never shopped at sales

of any kind of sense

unless accompanied by a grown up adult)

—and dragged me to my bench and left me.

 

I like to skip but my feet get stuck

twist and tangle in too long arcs

on paths that have become to short,

At 43 I walk

in intricate trenches on the surfaces of streets

and am supported by to little air to skip.

I have seen too many movies

in which skipping is always out

with someone’s heart in a paper bag

or down,

the last indelicate motions of a man leaning on a tree by

his neck from a rope,

whose horse has just decided to go home without him.

 

And, while for children going up and coming down

are the quick halves of the same act

for me they are solutions to two diferent equations

and at 43 the possibility exists that mathematics may fail;

one can stay up forever.

 

Later I am tried in secret by my former peers and found guilty.       

I am condemned to become 45 more quickly and

spend at that age some additional years;

prohibited from skipping during daylight hours and,

ordered to buy everyone some candy.

 

 

    

 

 

Pure SoHo

 

First possession.

A sleepy mornings blitzkreig.

 Fence leisurely surrounds the tar cot and grass urinals where

bums hostled behind parked cars.

The permanent street shop of the corner man, outflanked, retreats  West.

A coil of steel barbs is hoisted and unfurled along the top of the fence. The lot surrenders.

Possession.

 

Then occupation.

The tar sprouts shrubs, graffitti veined broad leaves,

flowers.

Nomadic highwaymen, come to slit the purses of

tourists come to mecca SoHo,

slip in at dusk disguised as potted trees,

squat down and root instantly,

found a dynasty of greens and ice cream.

Occupation.

 

Then commerce.

Import of machines to make coffee and ice cream

export of cups and cones.

Travelers pour into the forest.

The drift of business shifts the woods ecology.

Plastic table legs drive out saplings.

Bright colored bulbs seize the flowers niche.

Thinned and shallow the forest sags,

becomes a drawing of a forest sketched on the steel

mesh canvas of fence.

Commerce.

 

Then return.

Local upheavals in the thin urban crust

register invisible Richters on human instruments.

Fissure of desire, spring of credit dries up, invisible pox,

some unseen force twists and pulls and everything stops.

Gates are locked and Darwin is reversed.

Out tables and chairs, out lights, out machines, out nearly everything. Only the remains of the forest not worth the repossessing are  abandoned to the neighborhood to be scavenged by thieving little girls hoisted by parents through a fairy door, forgetfully left in the sketch of the forest leaving finally, the fence with its barbed bunting, the tar lot, grass urinals and space.

Return.

 

 

 

 

THEORY OF POETICS: I

 

The license

is registered at birth

death does not cancel it

only it must be renewed,

replenished.

The license

seals, signatures

imprimature of the state

metallic,glossy, catching light

certified.

 

Eyes do not see,the mind remembers only

people and places stained with color

where something with a ragged edge tore light

and it burst and colors spilled out of a hole in the spectrum

yellows, blues, purples.

And the mind tried to reverse the process like a prism

put tone and tint back to white.

Registers, scanning spanning the spectrum trying to

locate the precise red of a dead mood that belongs here.

A trick.

The mind picks up the wrong things and holds them the

wrong way trying to remember.

A trick.

Nothing perceived but expectations,

no one knocks at the door but who the mind expects to arrive.

Green’s green for want of imagination and

the mind refuses the ears charity.

 

Distinctions fade,

with distinctions minds also disappear

lines loose their form become sounds

poems become mathematical

aromatic images become the final lines of proofs axiomatic and well defined. We look up the answers to novels in the back of the book, and porcelain looses it memory for swirls.

Just so, enough, in exact measure not enough to estrange the senses only enough to discolor the image the mind remembers  the eye sees, only enough to lace with thin noises what the mind remembers the ear hears only enough to distract to recognition, to nudge with a fine lacy vector, to encourage to navigation in strange waters, to blow out the sails of frail, waterlogged ships, beams half rotted out, only enough to avoid the smooth beach and reach out past the tender rocks only enough for the smallest fraction of experience to catch like an anchor the deep water itself.         

 

 

 

 

 

SOHO POEM: PART I

 

SoHo becomes what it was not the day before

becomes what it never was, will not be,

becomes

something else.

Boundaries marked by walls change direction daily

as walls slip, as businesses blur and collapse softly

as SoHo shifts,

snakes and leaps

along walls.

 

Art is politics,

something it was not the night before

is invention

is someone’s

theory of the praxis of businesses collapsing and

new businesses practicing a new technology

of

dreams of art

adrift on SoHo streets looking for the dry ports of the rich

float on tides of bloody marys.

into harbors of brunches

fashioned for sailors who sit on the shores of the stream of the

imagination

dreaming day dreams

copying copies of a dream of art.

SoHo.

 

Walls lecture on art.

Posters repeat lessons by rote.

Time, rain, dirt vary the message,

recreate the lesson, make the copy original.

Art.

SoHo

offers itself to be moulded to arts desire

like a lockered lady

to be shaped to someone’s imagination,

to be

mounted by someone’s dream

pressed, taped, glued onto walls of an extended labryinth

with endles

walls,

not where they were the day before

or what.

SoHo.

Into SoHo pour

great temporary migrations; Pour into SoHo

tours,

the SUBURBS

come to do the stations, to rediscover

what was bartered for the peace of suburban life

transformed by television

find, on Wooster Street

television in FLUXUS.

 

The walls lecture on art to matrons

coming to complete their continuing education.

They say, “Art is the politics of queers.  GO HOME.”

The women write something down in a book and move one.

 

MIDDAY FUGUE

 

Westchester ladies

and dandies disguised as workers

who whistle from black, backlit caverns

where paper waste is mined like ore

observe each other observing suspiciously

workers from the factories of the imagination

on a permanent coffee break complaining about...

 

AFTERNOON FUGUE

 

Tourists, disguised as refugees from tourists,  see, reflected in flowered windows of restaurants images of artists, artfully disguised as…

 

EVENING FUGUE

 

Find we cannot fly on Wings

or eat Food

or be cured by Dr. B

and transportation to and from these places is to be hoisted up and smashed down

and camouflage is to be seen

walk or crawl but not on feet and

 

Dog turds fossilize in dead bocci courts.

Evidence marking turns not taken memorizlize

ethnic changes.

Old men rise like steam from cellars and congreate

like a cloud in meat markets.  Over chuck steaks and sausage

they review games played.

Post urban, post hippie post SoHo figures

appear among them and take their place as shadows on murals and complain.

 

SoHo’s a disaster zone

of people divorce prone

no one I know is married anymore

to the person they were married to before,

SoHo.

 

Art demands sacrifice, the walls say

husband, wife, children, lovers, self,

art itself, if need be, for ART.

 

Stay away, the walls warn, it’s catching.

 

In the streets, people scribble on walls

inside scribbled on walls, people scribble on each other,

grafitti is raised to an art form.

 

My almost ex-wife writes on me,

“To a ferocious ecology people adopt ferociously.

Fish that swim in water will not survive the night.

Fish that swim in polymer emulsion, might.”

Her almost ex-lover writes on her,

SoHo sucks, bring back the trucks.”

 

We write on each other;

SoHo has been sacked by tourists.”

 

In SoHo

the 21ST century rushes West on West Broadway

the 19th century greens Greene Street

the 20th hides out on Wooster Street its back on walls

in fear of SoHo

where

seven storied buildings

tenuously hold the entire spirit of an age of a short

time to come and

languages are spoken which no one will understand until

the day after tommorrow

(and people worry about fires.)

 

On Mercer Street sex looses its grip on beds, flows from lofts. Over sexed SoHoites flitter and sting, roil and roar, scratch and hustle looking for a way to hump consciousness,

knock up history and father a movement.

(The stollid thrust their portfollios through the doors of

galleries, the shrewd screw assistant editors of ARTFORUM.)

 

In Shanghai, trapped between mountains

and

in the valley of SoHo

smeared between towers

walls have mouths.

Posters five deep

proclaim new regimes.

 

Who knows which new prince will ascend

the wall under the sign of Goldman’s Steam Processing

Machinery Corp.

 

Notices of coronations of kings and queens of art

arrive and rearrive as paper wets as walls slough off the new growths of paper skin to reveal the old regime clinging tenaciously underneath.

 

The avante garde communicates by word of wall

in a slow language which peels, tears and runs in

shreds.

Nothing happens tommorow, it happened yesterday.

 

Then suddenly, Goldman’s Steam Processing Machinery Corp. disappears, in a single night its ruins are razed and a new palisade  erected, stained and varnished planks that whisper blankly that SoHo has been elevated to the bishopric of the saint of tourists.

The next day pilgrims appear.

 

Bribes made it possible.

Krebs, do you hear it, baksheesh.

Bribes,

 

to fire inspectors for not noticing

exits went nowhere

to policemen for disattending openings and closings

to building inspectors for mistaking

stainless steel kitchens and tiled baths for

lockers and washroom basins,

for omitting reports.

 

Urban indians hunted city buffalo on plains of lofts

tenant farmers harvested crops of children in cellars

itinerant traders bought and sold from dumpsters

until the slow drift of settlers pacified Houston Street

and beat down a path through the scrub forest of Canal Street

until,

the land was secured for fences and titles and the country tilted.

Then,

the doctors came and the lawyers rolled in

and the teachers came in station wagons

the accountants came and the speculators,

and respectability came and certificates

came

and dean came and delucca came and food came and

Mama came and Bizen came and

Steve came

and Zachary came

and a New Morning came

and

with one bound

Soho became what it was not the day before

become what it never was, what it will not be,

became

something else

SoHo.

 

 

 

Inventory of Knowledge: First Inventory

 

What poets know:

 

1. What knowledge is of uncertain color:

Some knowledge is of uncertain color, sometimes silky green in the tenuous afterglow, sometimes, contrary to expectations, grimy blue in the preliminaries, sometimes an indefinable faded color, mostly between changes.

 

2. What we knew but forgot:

Words are just that and those words are just those words, and the people into whose care words have been entrusted often are distracted and busy with other things.

 

3. What we guess is the truth:

Money runs in ruts and circles but lives ages and looses a little hair by the time it gets back to us again. Wisdom does come out of the mouths of fools but also much foolishness and a lot of other things like sponges, shells and reserve clauses: and out of the mouths of babes wisdom but also considerable babbling and childishness and the names of politicians.

 

4. What we might believe if we gave it any thought:

What we know for certain is the first casualty of doubt and people rarely survive the bite of butterflies (although the scars of the bite of the butterfly are at least as beautiful as tattoos.) Poetry bounces checks.

 

5. What is of doubtful truth:

The names of things change when you turn your back and most of what is worth learning has bad breath and a ferocious mien.

 

6. What knowledge is obviously true:

If we listen carefully , long enough, to sufficient facts one of them is bound to sound true enough to believe.

 

8. What children know:

Children know that there is a turning toward and a turning away and a turning both ways at once without moving a muscle.

 

9.What knowledge we learn too late in life to do any good;

The best things in life may be free but the store is always out of them and they spoil when you take them out of the box and you can’t claim them as dependents on your tax returns, whereas: the worst things in life cost ferociously but are available on easy credit and are childlike and cling and never grow up and go away.

 

10. What knowledge we never forget once we have learned it:

When the light comes on it is wonderful but sometimes, later, you yearn for the darkness again.

 

11. What is the tiniest bit of knowledge we know;

If you listen long enough you can hear the heavy breathing of sounds lusting after words.

 

12. What knowledge you hold only in desperate straits:

Words grow under the roots of every weed and some vegtables. Some things are easy to forget and other things are  difficult to remember and Umber is a slow color.

 

13. What knowledge we get free ( for the good it does us.)

Most bits of the world are tints of pink but the hues of our knowledge are flecked with purple and words have babies as easily as they grow beards.