Wet Cake
Did you ever get the impression
standing in the supermercado
that an awful lot of people,
in California, want the water
but they’d just as soon skip the rain?
What Will Be Historically Durable
About Nixon3 there was
Something grandiose
Although this peevish society
Failed to even blink at it.
Nothing illustrates this
More than
When he stole the post office.
An Opinion on a Matter of Public Safety
Air Bag sounds like eminent sickness
This device should not be permitted
General Motors was right to suppress it
and wrong to have relented
and Nader should stay out of it.
Driving is based on alertness
whether that be loose or tight
Those who let their attention wander
must not be encouraged to survive
by a bag full of air.4
You’re Supposed to Move Your Head, Not Your Eyes
We now live next to the tennis court
Yellow green balls seem to be the thing
this season. For phrases we get
Vicious shot! Or, I knew
you were gonna do that!
Last Saturday we watched
the finals, inside. Vilas has got
an arm like a gorilla, and
it appears, it also serves
as his main instrument of thought
since it returns the ball
so often to the same place.5
Outside, on our court,
the less consecutive thocks and thucks
labor along on raw audible time
dramatized by the brain’s impatience
with bleak, netted balls.
Connors’ paranoid study of his strings
reminds the nation that tennis
is the only game in which the instrument
suffers the blame for error.6
ALASKA: in Two Parts7
From the rear window of the Lockheed
we begin to pick out the Islands
of the green black archipelago
while inside the wingéd cocoon
a wild laughter issues from those
who go forth for the first time
cheered on by those who return again
to the expectation of this inflated emptiness.
This might feel like a certain moment
from the history of land grabs.
Another sublime promise
from a faithless future.
But the mode of transportation
changes everything except the mentality.
The desperation of walking
beside the household luggage
is lacking here, this is rather
a laughter of fraught nerves
not the undifferentiated search for space
we’ve always served.8
This is starting from the shacks of Burkburnett
not from the salons of Kansas City.
The biggest single overcast
the longest white line
on the green tundra, the maginot
of this occulted place, like
a bumpersticker too famous to repeat.9
And the largest single cabbage
whose image is distributed on a post card
but as symbols, vegetables are dumb.
Across the gridline from The Voyager
stalwart stands the Captain Kook
“trusty” blondes in adamant short skirts
50¢ coffee, passable in extremis
1$ egg, a tradition from the Rush.
The food tastes like it was just
shipped in from Mars.10
Two men of equal height
appearing in pioneer beards
carry a vinyl couch11 downtown.
Idling taxi outside window
speaks to a moose far out in the bush
night falls, more gradual than slowmotion,12
this place is sultry
like a sunday school class.
The stories are thin and complicated13
destinations restricted.14
Brand new cars, hoodsprung, rimsprung.
Telephone dial tone an insect’s buzz
an echo of the summer evening.
And then one day one wakes up sharp
with a great lump of ones in one’s poke
a residue left over from the evaporation
of volatile fifty dollar bills.
II
We would have somewhat more interest
in reincarnation if there were
less insistence on mechanical joints
in the transmissions,
but it is perhaps too touched
to dream of a return as a glacier
where that is a deeply turquoise dream,
a resonance of outside time.
Here we witness
the rumble of constant adjustment
here the earth moves, not
from the keenness of our perception
but from orogeny, its natural employment.
The blocking out and stringing
of the continent’s shoulder
where the river is the mainline
and the island chain a broken arm
bent awry from the body.
A few natives will learn
to be its undertakers
among the horde of hikingboots15
Will this be, as it is publicised,
the last great land adventure?
Generally that’s meant real estate.
We’re not working with an exception
but for those who want the real thing
they’re going to get it out of a can
or disappointment will rap their knuckles.
Trucking is not an adventure.
It’s a service.
The creatures of ice feignt and advance
with a consciousness a great deal more
pervasive than the rise and fall of wages.
The tremendous pitch of their crystal stacks
the vast smell of their lunar coldness
the mammoth draft of their freezing humidity
the highminded groan of their polar turns.
From a beer-ad point of view
the fauna are impressive, evolved
to crush jeeps with a single swat,
and that’s well enough, while socially
Alaska acts as the pardoner for every
haywire merchant with a will to get there.
But the power we behold is in the blue ice
and the delicate flora of the permenantum.
The people whose tradition it is
to live there will do best to carry on
picking up the threads of snow
from a system which is the book on survival.
That work will not be read
by all the cancritous Tej-okies
nor by the national geographic natives
in their copters & sanscrits.
The Burr Quote
Law is anything which is
Boldly asserted
And plausibly maintained
The Sociology of Games
In soccer
when you do something good
you get a hug and a kiss
In american football
when you do something good
you get a slap on the ass.
A Variation on Vallejo’s #III
The layers are stilled by water
The waterhens are killed
And the entire general world fills
The night of the earth
Resting between glaciers, blocks,
Joints, the shoulder of the system
The stillness in the ice,
The grand specimens trapped there.
&nb
sp; We are the children of weather maps
Our only book is a canyon
In twelve volumes, a work
Widely available in a shorter version.
Palms, Victory, Triumph, Excellence
My L.A. began in 1947
when I was in high school
and the derricks were still up.
I was fresh from Illinois
enlightened by Malinowski.
The excitment was not
in The Light, even then
beginning to be obscured
but in the Palm Trees
those companions
of the dinosaurs.
They are as snobbish as ethiopians
in their attitude toward man.
They follow him everywhere
except where it gets uncomfortable.
My favorite palms are in Riverside,
ol’downtown.
When someone told me
they are the preferred dwelling
of rats
I was emphatic in my disbelief
and in my disapproval of the possibility.
But of course, rats are smart.
FROM YELLOW LOLA
A Discovery
The extremest pleasure
(is) to step on the Devil’s neck,
and yet to enjoy the use of him
29 September
Public Notice
Don’t use my name
Unless you love me
But if you do & you don’t
Send me some money
Whereas
Poetry is now mostly government product
the work of our non-existent critics
is unnecessary, the grades assigned
to meat will do nicely:
Prime
choice
good
commercial
utility
canners
(Listen, if anybody out there’s)
Listen, if anybody out there’s
saying, you know, there’s
something new, and something
else or other’s not, well,
they should look it up.
A Mild Threat
I’m going to put you in a petri dish
and there I’m going to grow you
not all of you, though, for instance
I’m not going to grow your head
and I’m not going to grow your body
The Whiner, Obnoxious as ever, at latest report
The child was even weirder
than the progenitors,
Loud, Spitting,
Rude and Offensive
with multiple and brittle defenses.
No wonder they caved into
his every devious whim.
They knew, because he was their offspring,
he was the test of their very worst aspects
and that non-compliance
would be a repudiation
of their very own worst selves
and so they supported a social menace
in order to hide their own, inner catastrophe.
Success?
I never had to worry about success
Coming from where I come from
You were a success the minute you left town
Alaska Revisited
I would have a lot more interest
in reincarnation if there were
less insistence on meat in the transmutations
But perhaps it is too ambitious
to dream of one’s return as a glacier
Not so bad after all
The keynote speaker,
A Theologian from Somewhere
Explained that “one”
Could have pleasure
And God too.
FROM CAPTAIN JACK’S CHAPS/OR, HOUSTON MLA
Deplaning, & getting learnt
“Some supervenient cause of discord
may overpower this original amity.”
Shaving lotion fresh
we nonstop into Houston:
Hughestown, the tool company,
the Cobra Bit, the bit
that bites the Springhill Formation,
Sugar Sand to the trade
wherein lie the cretaceous corpses
back of traffic jams.
Dobro lost some instruments
somewhere between Denver
and the ground under his feet.
A lot of bystanders, craning
their necks, had “Serves Him Right”
in their dodgy eyes, high twitch profile
all round Houston International
said to be the most thieve-ridden
airport in the universe.
What did he lose? A delicate Plains Harp
and a joke piece which was best lost.
When aimless personnel assured him
All was Gone,
Dick merely stood with his arms full of cases
manifest blinking, and probably
an intense thirst for sugar
pervaded his jaspered personeity.
Of all the hits, sugar levees
odious reality the most. That’s crust.
Everybody likes a good crust,
and from this we deduce the super-ficial
should be more, not less, in abundance.
And it’s a very good substitute
for confidence.
So at this point Dobro
unwrapped a kilo of halva
from under his montana hat
and had a good chew,
and out of the yellow door
of the cab he hailed
poured the sugary beat of calypso
when Down-Town-Hughes-Town
he drawled
with a ludicrously sour curl
on his mouth.
At the Cowboy Panel
“I have no sympathy for poets.”
Max Apple
About an hour before lunch,
a little late,
we entered the curtain walled chamber.
This crowd numbers about two-hundred,
western specializers of various breeds.
Several genre novelists decant
the vintages of When I
Was Growing Up in Houston,
and: The Change Has Been Radical.
As if a blind horse couldn’t see
the forum of Pennzoil Skyscrapers
among the weedy trees in their holes
all sprouted 5 minutes ago
in the ash of real-estate riots.
The Word, more succinctly put here,
was Cowboys is done, prepare yourself
for the Oil Novel, of which there are
only a few, hand fed, examples. At least
let us pray it isn’t The Novel of Oil:
in this game,
Squeeze an Arab and Houston Shrieks.
The panelists were at a table
along the wall, slightly elevated,
I mean, by a platform.
For every Larry McMurtry
there’s several thousand babblers,
Max Apple being just one of them
spewing gratuities all the way
to the Pecos.
Ricardo’s nerves are not designed
to take such bargeloads of tedium.
And I was too tired to laugh out loud.
Lapsed into a coma, his tic rate dropped
precipitously to an uninterrupted
horizontal line. It made me
as anxious as a TV doctor.
His neurotransmitters
had gone to McDonalds.
This was a one-man epidemic
of Encephalitis Lethargica!
The limbic system under severe strain,
I had to get him outa there, even
across the street, to the Sheraton
for, our hopes dashed, we would have
a quick orange juice inste
ad
of the horror and agony we had counted on.
Sunday Morning in the Murdered Territories
This poor, old shoetrod
piece of paper
blowing in the Houston breeze.
Trash trying
to individuate on Main Street,
in full view of a population
of bright-eyed & nude manikins,
their privacy protected only slightly
by dingy storefront glass.
Scrumptious meals, it says,
prepared completely from scratch.
But who wants to eat scratch?
We’ve just come from Don Wesling’s
room in the provocative Hotel Lamar.
A lively party with the La Jolla bunch.
Dobro played the banjo
and laid out the stunning propaganda
of a life of abandon to several candidates
who had spent an elongated day
interviewing for jobs the size of
needles in haystacks, and in the end
taking what solace they could
in tales of the motile.
Maximum Ostentation