“Be sure of retail,” he says. “The life insurance
building, the pickle garden. Heaven knows they
attack our radar too, swoop down on us like bats
and the mystery illness.”
Are you Big Bang?
Point Lookout
The object of the game is, after all, not to die but to grow into easeful
death, winning. Forty shopkeepers sinned and for this they were betrayed.
He seems not to have understood the rules of perspective.
We have the technology to tame the edges.
For this we must become hedgehogs again, blindly entertaining all the
philosophy of light.
It goes nice and easy like a drink, or remark in a salon.
All this time we were wishing, we
wished to hazard an accomplishment or two.
Come, I’ll play you an old comedy
of the bartered bear and soothsayer, no ways to be out of doors, no
thing on the milky plain, the wind dropped. Soft
from my curlicue she bounces around.
The animal traces hovered and steamed. The soft shell of a particle
twists itself off from the name, stands defiant, budged.
We mourn those who do briefly paddle.
Poor Knights of Windsor
Say it was any day.
A knock on the door, a neoclassic cannonball flies past.
The hall is done up in scarlet; something more powerful
than just plain good taste is obviously at work here.
I agree to share your game with you.
We saunter on the terrace (Emerson
said a man should “saunter”). We eat some trail mix.
Gosh, what a limited bunch of things to do there is.
Anything that can be done with stale bread
will sometime be done. The English like to
twist it and dip it in something till it hardens: the result
is called “Poor Knights of Windsor.”
It’s some kind of savory.
They don’t have those much anymore,
and we, why we never had them.
That applies to most things. Not plumbing, though—
if anything we have too much of that.
But those knights,
having to stand by a checkered cloth, pretending
it was OK by them, this really not much more than a scrap,
like the rarebit the hunter’s wife tosses him when he comes home late,
his game bag empty
his fun exhausted
ready for a round of Monopoly—
Does the heraldry impose itself,
trickling on the forehead
for all to see?
Do brands ultimately matter?
Are the lasses more froward? The lads
bent over backward? What is this thing
you wanted me to see? Oh, a shovel. You might have said so.
And the way back is polluted, the spears
almost indecent.
Quick Question
We took to the lake
in small boats.
The once-in-a-lifetime flood
was approaching on dainty, centipede legs.
Something about the gestalt
told me not to release this comment to the wire services
before the various motivations were rehashed.
This was the next day.
Only a few empty cans met the gaze.
“Sprinkle it!” the children advised.
“Oil quickly becomes rancid.”
Matter of taste, he thought.
Or matter of boobs.
Sometimes an old woman is coming to get you
through the boughs that were her home.
It’s enough if the summer night light
can chasten, the tree-barbs sustain you
on their perjured breath.
There’s no returning to haggle,
then. The sea is like pale green linoleum
and all the grenadiers have returned to Sicily.
Detraining, one thinks: This house was always haunted
by porcupines, which is as it should be.
Waiting for people to get down to business,
put their cards on the table, can be such a random act, like a minuet
of gnats against a blistered sky.
That is something to stare at: neither squat,
nor a tenement. A block of some often-penetrated material,
a liquid of another density, crawling along like honey
to greet its forebears—
better to leave ribbons of sand behind.
The journey becomes you, but is its way of becoming,
valid until the gold pinprick
comes to a head further along further night?
Shall we embark tomorrow,
when a favorable wind rustles the sheets?
Reverie and Caprice
It seems very unlikely that my wishes will
be accomplished “in the name of the Lord.”
Couldn’t He have foreseen this? What is this?
Tragic mealtime preparations
beneath a paper-bag colored sun that wants
to cast no light. And pockets
or strips of difference, fresh from the paper shredder.
How much cleaner would it be now,
O my works, if to be left alone
had been the original thrust, not this
woven screen, like wicker or billowing fabric,
tense but loosely dwelling
in the hostile night from which we took directions.
And after we climbed
a certain distance it was only a boy
in a suit with his bird. Unidentified youths
set off after him and were never seen again.
The banyan tree loomed large, and nothing came of it,
only a preposterous jelly made of shards
of boiled facts and unkept promises. Promises
that were never intended to be kept—she had a saying:
“Never stay in the pantry
while the mill is operating.” Pure, putrescent poetry.
All along you were trying to make me give up the other.
Safe Conduct
The coast is clear. Bring me my scallop shell of quiet,
my spear of burning gold. I am definitely setting out tonight,
unless someone calls, to immerse myself in the Great Lore,
which I should have been doing all along. Never mind,
it can wait, it’s been around long enough. I am afraid
it might involve cutting a swath through the fruited jungle.
That was the other thing about him: how many times
he avoided using the word “eclipse.” It was as though
he bore his personal darkness with him, furled
like an umbrella, but ready to snap to attention
at the fall of a wombat’s tear. It would be sufficient
to engulf us for centuries, thanks. The innocence
of his position, as laid out by him, before God and the elders,
drew delighted applause from the sparse crowd at the racetrack.
“And if we come home with you tonight,” one beribboned lady caroled,
“will you tell us about Midas and the seltzer bottle? Pretty please?”
I am annoyed before each investigation
that will definitively clear my name. A toad watches me
from a lily pad, its lidded eyes plunged in despair.
“Was it for this I tamed you, brought you up from mere pollywog
to outstanding frog prince? Alas, the mists
that gather now are of the old kind, from the Iron Age,
and every instrument you practiced then
is being fine-tuned for tonight’s one-person recital.”
Salon de Thé
Some time before you wore that belt
on a bo
at, with a tree branch covering half the Caucasus,
I asked if she knew the Caucasian Sketches
of Ippolitov-Ivanov—“It’s like looking at a distant aviary.”
Yes, and the chords are like bullets
that can reach halfway to Siberia.
Very committed they are, and faithful
to their idea of the troops.
The troops need no notion
but a path through the rocks always helps,
like dessert and laundry. Oh, if you were going to change your shirt,
but I like this one. It’s time to buy a new one.
Does my lemon-zest-patterned tie please you? Oh, I implore you,
no talking on the phone after 9 p.m.
Then the ladies got busy,
hung rugs on the metal clothesline and walloped them,
a good afternoon. Your sister was waiting on the shore
to tell me it was time to get to my job as busboy
at the Cloak and Dagger Tearoom. Makes me squeamish
just to imagine it. And it was a hard time,
but in summer, at least, you could dress cheaply
and look just like the rich kids
in their darkened limos.
I’ll hear no more about it.
and all along I thought we were playing for apples,
but the reward money came as gourds, plastic-colored ones.
The kittens showed some restraint
and the shade was lowered as it is every Doomsday.
See How You Like My Shoes
Two twisted dry turds on the sidewalk;
the weather one’s gray dropcloth.
What town is this?
The weather has a choke hold on foreseeing
what happens to it.
Heck there is nothing but the alike
except persons are not. Things are
like institutions. Stumbling from perjured
personhood, all seem alike
but the fugitive person has got things
his sisters (in Olympic
statehood) haven’t got: to mimic
two legs like a dog is out
and times three sheet music in the door
is to planting. They really resist,
soaringly. The salesman head
is two whole shoes, and that be
the graveyard by the flame talking,
earnest ouch spelled by night.
The great symphony fell down before it could be revived.
On this oceloted tree they still think and wonder
how the person caved in
yet remained so spick-and-span a presence
all during the end-of-century doldrums
someone forgot in the telling.
They was many of same left out.
Many felt left out
their beat repealing to the besotted orbs
left out in the rain. Yet I am this person,
you. I like to titter.
Sleepers Awake
Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.
Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.
Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.
Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.
Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby Dick.
Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,
but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.
Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.
No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.
Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben Hur.
Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst.
When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed.
Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t.
Maugham snored on the Riviera.
Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part.
I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving.
I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much.
Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water.
Birds make poor role models.
A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it.
Slaves make good servants.
Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance.
Store clean rags in old pillow cases.
Feed a dog only when he barks.
Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink.
Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a word-less implosion of sleep.
Something Too Chinese
for me now.
And I thought how strange, one is always
crying after this and that,
against all odds.
As in the sex game, shimmering
like a peach—the impératrice
measures your guns, the townspeople
shuffle around, the one who will be the hero
is still viper-thin, and green
as hope. We all need a change of scene,
she said, a change of air—
try the sea. It is good for some persons.
A closet works best for me
with a view of an abandoned apple tree,
a wedge of porch. Here, take these—
running with the hare, I’ll be back instanter,
before you can observe you, wipe the grime
and tears from the mirrored clock
over and against time.
These are mere cavils.
It’s so easy to be attractive when
you’re young, even if not particularly favored by nature,
even if nerdy, spotted, and pacific,
even in the wrong clothes, rumpled with anxiety
like a maze, even if without interests
from the wrong side of the street.
Standing with one’s bother,
wiping off the strictures of dark, demented doubt,
one believes what one lives in.
The air freshens the rooms.
I float from the dormer down
to the brick path darkened by the lawn sprinkler.
It seems I was inside once.
Oh I’m careless to tell the advantage of that pact
with truth I made as I undress.
The truth is it would have gotten to me
after five or six seasons of that sort of thing.
But it wasn’t to be. Baby blushed anew at the air’s demands,
and the pine tree fell over on the back porch, causing it to cave in.
That wasn’t in my list of grievances though.
In fact there was never any list;
I coped by coping, living out life shred by shred
until a magma caught up with me. In the broken alley
one passed strollers and people pushing them. One comet caught my eye
but it was too late, too late to praise she always says.
My pants were wet
and someone is coming up the road, some zombie
or other.
This tune I never asked for
is a different one, a furious clarion
shrilling a hornet’s nest of replies.
The others will be older, othe
r rapists
than the ones that were put down.
It would be time to plan an escape.
This is difficult in a hotel.
There are bands of bullies waiting to frisk
you, and on the esplanade the scenario doesn’t get much better:
Even the little girl with the balloon is planning to annex half of Western civilization,
and the ticket-of-leave man has his eye on the colored bastions
we plummet over, seeking release in the sea, the sea!
Two dolphins like two colons in a sentence
are rinsing me now,
pouring me out from myself.
I feel as though I’ll never be big enough
to efface scars as an adult ideally should—
wait, though! I’m coming to the corner where
pockets of jasmine and lavender inhale—
Be my scope limited, it’s something
just to have been in the intimacy of all the stories
down the stairway to where it ends, to have worn
linen and passed as a man in suits.
I’ll tell that one too
though you don’t want to hear it,
though it’s as old as the hills,
though displeasure is now rage, I’ll canvass
for funds for it, not giving up,
not showing myself up this time,
too close to Mother and the difficult calm,
to the overextended fruit of this day,
this dream.
Taxi in the Glen
You throw matches on the floor.
I collect antique lard cans.
“You know, some day there’ll be an interest
in these, though it will peak, like the tide,
in infinite relief, and be back next day.
But somebody will surely remember them—
the succinct red of that metal.
Then we drink everything in, avidly,
yet we are not thirsty. Some mechanism declines
our auroras, and so must it even be
until the day of waking up and not finding out.
I’ll be a spruce-god by then, but you, you
should still be savoring the advantages
of belated puberty.”
And I’ll dress you in grass
and sing to you, a song where the words are the music
and the music has no point. Let me chafe your nipple, I …
And time will be happy. Quiet, runt.
The world’s most astonishing plant couldn’t