The Poet Lets His Tongue Hang Down
I would Enquire of you
The Slinger leaning forward askt
One of the 4 Great Questions
Least troubling my mind since my arrival:
WHO ARE THE BARBARIANS?
As if in a space elapsed
between our sighting then hearing a jet
The Poet grew pale
and his blazering transister fell
from his Ivory Fingers
four of whom
jumped off at the knuckles
and ran off with all his rings
and straightaway sent notes
to the six who stayed
expressing contempt and dismay
And the temperature fell in his veins
and his mouth weakened
and grew slack
and his eye left the track
and wandered about the landscape
unlocused and his tongue
fell out over his chin
and his nose migrated
even as Gondwana too gorged
on the immensities of time to be observed
so that its movement must be proven
by the striations of its slippage
as they are the Scars of the Earth
And his ears floated upward
as if Helium was all they heard
and his feet come off and sped over the horizon
leaving the wings of his ankles behind
and his shoes filled with dust
an instant ghost town complete
with banging shutters and peeling posters
Announcing the stark Indifferentist proposition
DEAD or ALIVE
when behold! the galloping Cosmographer
dropped under his mount
and blew out the OR
Then his hair fell away
in a dust bowl condition
Like in the Grapes of Wrath
and things come to that
all the people of his barren scalp
packed up and found their way to California
around the craters in this once rich terrain,
the High Planes we shall call them
And his brain snapped shut like a greasy spoon
When the last customer has et his chops
then gone out the door wiping his chin
with one hand While the other buys The Times
which he reads standing on the corner
toothpick in his mouth Rams Clobber Lions
in his eye
and turns the pages to the comics where Rex Morgan
is performing and can’t be reached
as his hand comes up from scratching his ass
to catch the pages in the Michigan Winde
But the poet’s Head was during this lapse
busy with alterations
and when the job was done
the bang of hammers
the whine of bandsaws gone
And all the baffling pulled off
his Head was a pyramid
the minimum solid
And his eyes came home
trying to look like the trip had been a bore
when signs to the contrary
were all over the floor
And he smiled
But the eye atop his pyramid
Would say no more
Executioner, Stay Thy Cold Blade
As knowledge grows
it becomes apparent
that the brain
is a machine
of a type
very different
from those made hitherto
by the thotfull
efforts of man
Its success is largely due
to the richness
of its parallel circuits
and its redundancies
This makes it very difficult
to assign particular functions,
especially
by the technique of removal
The Octopus Thinks with Its Arms
Out of the total of some 500 million nerve-cells
300 million and more are in the arms
The script in the memory
does not include the recognition of oblique rectangles
In the optic lobes of an octopus
we meet the first great sections of the visual computing system
a Mass of 50 million neurons behind each eye
and encoding system and as the Seat of the Memory
The male Octopus Vulgaris fucks by putting the tip
of his third arm
inside the mantle of the female
who sits several feet away
looking like Nothings Happening for about a half hour
The females are impregnated before they are mature
the spermatophores survive until the eggs are ripe
Both animals are covered with vertical stripes during their session
and move not at all.
The History of Futures
The long horn was an automotive
package of hide & bones, a few hundred
pounds of dope which delivered itself
entirely free of moral inconvenience
known otherwise as fat
yet with a memory fresh enough to market
The Bloody Red Meat Habit
dates from about 1870
Before that we were a Sowbelly Nation
feeding off the wisest of the omnivores
Beef is the earliest element
of the crisis, a typical texas imbalance
Importations, trash beef from Argentina
are meant to satisfy
the Bloody Red Meat Habits
of our best friends, and in fact
as pet lovers secretly understand
you Can fool fido
With Foodstamps we have pure script
the agricultural subsidy farmers have enjoyed
under every name but socialismo
since World War II
Which brings us
to a truly giant dog named Ronald
the most immense friend conceivable
a Fenrir created by beef heat
and there you have your bullshit apocalypsis
One morning, in his mythological greed
He swallows the Sunne
[for my students at Kent State
Spring, 1973]
The Stripping of the River
The continental tree supports the margins
In return for involuntary atrophos
Which can now be called the Shale Contract
Not only are the obvious labors
In metal and grain and fuel extracted
But the spiritual genius is so apt
To be cloven from this plain of our green heart
And to migrate to the neutralized
And individualizing conditions of the coasts
That this center of our true richness
Also goes there to aberrant rest
Bought by the silver of sunrise
And the gold of sunset.
This Is the Way I Hear the Momentum
having touched the Slaughter Stone
of the Henge of Stone
Rock
in the memory of
Memory Rock
in the memory
of Brittany Dolmen and then across
the return into a people
woe to them who eat too much
from a people who eat
too fast as
tho it were an exercise
yet
well being arose
from
the emptiness
of the stomach
from the universe
every change of placement
the shift of every leaf
is a function
of the universe which
moves outward from its com
posed center
40 bilynyrs. Then returns
the pulse
and location will have changed
The location free of reference
except this obvious measurement because you can feel
completely a straight 5 B. years
from some moment now which is not
an apparent edge
but as mappa india anna
as the source of speech
is no simple explosion
our given pulse
hits inside this
everymoment we live
to hear this
COSMOS
the soul of the universe
calls indifferently the populations
to proceed
from the tincture
to the root of the natural
in the present effort
to arise into the light
ness of these limbs
these parts of the universe having growth
So the foot of this book
is grown at last for the book to stand upon
thrown from myself as my life was given to me
with sharp aim
right across the quality/quantity question
When I reached the Tor
and walked up to
be elevated
enough to sense the zodiac
of its configured presentations
of itself the lit
and distant hills simply
the joy of expansion
which is what we’ve experienced
for 35 billion years
and can take in
the moment
approaching when all of it
will be stilled in a shimmy
of its own distance
as the thing holds so
with the delicacy of water tension
to avoid dispersal
of all thats here the wholly
beautiful seizure of the coordinates
of its distance
the scansion of its trip
as we come around again to feel wide open
on the arc
RECOLLECTIONS OF GRAN APACHERIA
First Lines
It is bright to recollect
The first law of the desert
The children of both sexes
They are of many clans
There is a season of gold
Along this spine of dragoon mountains
Tallow shampoo so the hair is sleek & obedient
When Victorio was killed accidentally
Victorios seester was no pocahontas
We call his mother Juana
Friends from boyhood
Great hardness in old age
When Geronimo was in Washington for the Inauguration
Gen. Crook proved to a skeptical world
Who can tell what a traitor is?
Captain Emmet Crawford,
When the Boundary Commission
A treacherous fiendish look (Bartlett
This material yields
There was a time
The longest continuous run
The women circle the men in conference
The original monuments of perception
Out of the Sunset movement
So The infant is bound
They were sentenced to observe
The train has come to rest and ceased its creaking
It is bright to recollect
that the Apaches were noble
not in themselves
so much as in their Ideas
The first law of the desert
to which animal life of every kind
pays allegiance
is Endurance & Abstinence
The children of both sexes
had perfect freedom
And were Never punished
They were wired to the desert
And they were invisible
in the mountains
They are of many clans
They usually take their names
From the natural features of Localities
Never from animals
Victorio
There is a season of gold
before the energy of a people
comes to its ritual close
and this is a metaphor not satisfied
by the mines
There is no call
to mourn the death of Victorio
he was spared the trivial meanness
of imprisonment and slavery
No principles generated
by a moral quandary in time
and in fact Apache heads
were rather amused by Oklahoma
See the pictures of Geronimos band
riding in dormant automobiles
or holding the biggest pumpkin
Yet his taste for Death
is the bitterness we find on the tongue
when we consider La Gran Apachería
He is the most dreaded
The most terrible
The most famous
Nana & Victorio
Along this spine of dragoon mountains
the pains in Nanas bit off leg
a wound inflicted by the vicious teeth
of the Alien Church, their thin line
moves north then south
across the rio bravo del norte
the winde driving the wild fire of their loyalties
and in the cruel vista
I can see the Obdurate Jewell
of all they wanted, shining
without a single facet
upon our time
and yet the radiance marks everything
as we unweave this corrupted cloth
Dress for War
Tallow shampoo so the hair is sleek & obedient
Vermilion for the face and Blue micaceous stone
whose dust glitters weirdly
From a conejo deer an inch wide band of blood
from ear to ear
Copperore for green stripes
The best army field glasses
with which to sweep Hades
The most absolute of the predatory tribes
Apache policy was to extirpate
Every trace of civilization
From their province
Bounty Time
When Victorio was killed accidentally
by a breed named Mauricio in Chihuahua
the smug governor of that province
awarded the killer 3000 silver pesos
and a nickel-plated rifle which several
years later another Apache was to grab
from the hands of the bearer and blow
a close range hole in the stomach of same
this was not the importance of Victorios death
For at this point Victorios sister
assumed joint command with Nana, then 80,
of the Incorrigibles
who flew back to Tejas to clean up the landscape
The Provoking Figure of the Horsewoman
Victorios seester was no pocahontas
She must have been Something besides
the product of vicious unfair reporting
that she could split a barrel cactus
with the sharp edge of her glance
like to see whiteye throat tore out
like to smell that Mind spill over the ground
and all over Mexican ground
most of all, terrible dreams of Janos
where Mangus lay out dying and the mexican surgeon
under commission to save his life or
get the whole town burnt down
because it was old ground
where everything whiteye policy strives for
from the south: to mix himself, disappear
Tom Mix in relentless numbers over the horizon
blue endless coats turned
like everything else in the present century
to something khaki looking vaguely like shit
Geronimo
We call his mother Juana
She had him near Tulerosa
Rocket Country still
Notorious through his opposition
To Alien authority
And by Systematic
And Sensational advertising
His Pleasures were widely known
As Depredations
Among the Invader
Eyes like two bits of obsidian
With a light behind them
Juh & Geronimo
Friends from boyhood
In Chihuahua and Arizona
Perfecting their senses
In the portable forge of summer
Got down to the Mother Mountains
Their obsessive democracy
Blown out at the points of control,
Crazy with permission
A noiseless ecstasy
Only they can hear
Each man permitted
More than a man can bear
Against the true as steel
Military Republicanism
Of the Norte Americanos
Nanay
Great hardness in old age
He can be imagined
Straight from the flaking slopes
A strong face
Marked with intelligence
Courage
And good nature, but