keep winking at me with singular evil eyes,
mouths, ears, noses, and throats.
No need to tell you their names.
I think I have already beaten to death Mr. and Mrs. D.
Better to take a walk and feed my donkeys,
see what’s going on with all things green and flowering.
I salute dead trees as if a dead tree was a four-star general.
I hope a frog or ground hog notices me.
I sometimes sing Mozart or torch songs to my donkeys.
They bray along off key.
I’m blessed not lucky.
I write what I want to know.
These words are proof
how absolutely ordinary I am.
I can switch to meter.
I can curse and say “I love you”
in 5 or 6 languages
including Chinese.
I say again there are no circles
in Chinese calligraphy.
Noise.
I can remember the summer of 1930
in some ways better than I remember this summer:
I learned that summer to swim in Lake Hopatcong.
What am I doing floating, not going anywhere?
It’s hard not to go anywhere just to stand still—write nothing.
I could begin, just write the alphabet:
A for amour
B for bat and bather
C for cunt, calligraphy and Cervantes
If I knew a baby born on this day, I would wash out
its placenta and make a placenta soup:
add a little lemon juice, dill, a spoonful of tomato paste,
a cup of white wine, fresh vegetables.
Reader, you are invited to my house for soup—
call what I have written placenta soup.
I could list the names of those who loved John in ink,
let squid and cuttlefish write for
those who can no longer sign their names.
I think it’s better to be left as ink than ashes.
Music is the food of love. Play on.
ODE TO HOLY PLACES
I will not take the poet Unspeakable’s name in vain,
her erogenous zones are holy places,
blessed are those who have prayed there.
Some speak in tongues with the taste of her clitoris
on every word, the starlight of her anus.
Her poetry is informed by the sunrise and sunset
of her vagina visited by supplicants and pilgrims.
Blessed is her sacred vulva.
The world will long remember the joys
and sorrows of her deflowering.
There was the great schism, wars fought
over the religion of her nipples—
were they Catholic, Calvinist, or pagan?
One must consider a while her mouth.
Whatever ways the winds blow,
the waves always reach shore.
Blessings on Unspeakable, the teacher.
I throw her a kiss wherever she wants it—
if she wants it not, it is
because she is much better occupied.
She knows about loneliness.
So I send her this bouquet of corrupt flowers
to show my gratitude for her poetry and life.
I confess at a Japanese tea ceremony
my misfortune: I never saw her naked.
Naked we were both banished from gardens to dumps,
stinking fires in San Francisco and Queens.
In good time, she considers the penis—it flowers
but it's often a weed in the garden of delights.
Every penis is political.
Many a freeman has a penis that’s a slave
or indentured servant. Some penises don’t vote,
others live in old Chicago, vote a few times,
although love is not an election,
still love chooses its representatives,
a congress, a parliament, consistory.
Love is a democratic party, a kingdom,
a dictatorship. A pest, I believe Jesus lived,
Why don’t the gospels record that He made love
to a lass or lad—He created man in His image and likeness.
Turning the other cheek has several virtues—
men and women turn over, backside up.
I’ve gone off her highway to a byway:
I believe Unspeakable’s behind
is never cruel, it is only kind.
There is knowledge you can find in an apple tree
or simply opening your arms to a lover
to whom you are faithful.
In death, we are not all of one body and mind.
Unspeakable, I refuse to be an earthworm
the dragon Saint George kills.
My last words: “Thank you.”
Listening for “You're welcome”
is not a bad way to go.
BLASPHEMY, OR NOT AS YOU LIKE IT
Religion has assets, relieves the sweats.
I would never say God willing,
I can pour wine without spilling.
I don’t walk on the ceiling as a fly,
I would like to be "God's spy,"
undress the world, but I just see a little:
the oceans are God's spittle.
Blasphemy directs the mouth a little south.
I don’t keep my word given in a dream,
I often forget my dreams—even what is, often seems.
I turn my ploughshare into a sword.
Blasphemy praises the Lord.
I deny creation at the Jerusalem station.
First cause? No word effective as a pause,
the Sabbath, after the days of creation.
God's not out of style like the franc or sixpence.
Reader, come in, come in, wherever you are.
Dirty words don't satisfy, I disobey the laws.
I know the pleasures of disobedience.
I smear my bread
with Philadelphia cream cheese democracy
and Gorgonzola dead.
Poetry, sacred history is becoming geography.
I say, "Beg pardon" to strangers passing by,
I climb the Rocky Mountains of ignorance,
I read poetry that is and is not my universe.
Blasphemy puts planets in my purse.
An orbit is not a road, haiku is not an ode.
I swallow comets, I belch thunder.
Rhymes make sense: a kind remembrance
of nights that rend yesterday's truth asunder.
I follow Zeus the swan with a flock of words
around Leda's bed. I have been instructed
by Paradise Lost in the ambiguous gift
of freedom achieved through transgression
of God’s law. Then words
are wildflowers, I'm a hummingbird.
The great God Pan is not dead,
he likes ladies who do the can-can.
So do I. I try to do what I cannot, and what I can.
The past is present, goes well with fish,
time is a condiment, not the main dish.
“Life is a dream,” says W. S. Merwin.
I say I'm a polytheist, my rosary is clouds, a sin,
I use them as anything, God's napkin.
Manners, manners.
Using chopsticks William’s manners
are specially beautiful. My forks are flaneurs.
My friend in peace, I’ll never rest in peace.
Life is a daydream I can’t decipher.
I am a guy who does not like to wave goodbye.
* * *
I told William at his 90th Birthday
celebrating in a room away from the noise,
"You are more beautiful than when you were young."
He said, "You tell that to all the boys."
Then they wheeled
him away.
My darling dog, I didn't teach you to stay—
stay, stay!
A VISIT TO MAUI
1
On sacred Maui, I walked from shore
into the Pacific through deep sand,
the surf knocked me over.
I crawled like a turtle back to the beach,
where I saw thousands of 2, 3, 5 inch coral,
Buddhist temples in ruin, a congregation of naked
and half naked bathers. In a palm tree forest
I heard sutras, windy prayers spoken,
K, vowels, L, vowel Gods’ names. I swear in the Maui surf
in a Dublin accent I heard someone say,
“Cromwell wanted all the harps in Ireland destroyed.”
I looked up at the sky where automobiles
must turn on their headlights when they drive
above the clouds on a road to a volcano.
I do not know how to speak to a volcano,
but fire welcomes me. Is there something
about my eyes and hair? Another voice said,
“Thou shall not swim in holy water.”
I replied, “I’m a sinner, a mainlander,
I also believe in you, my soul, the other I am.”
Angels fly about me in and out of the volcano
with wings of ice that do not thaw into rain.
I think I heard a lizard say, “Respect! Respect!”
I said, “Of course.” The cedars and eucalyptus
have the same root, the same God.
Lying across holy coral I consider
why I was knocked over by Maui’s surf.
I am unbalanced—why don’t I fall when I dance?
When I was 9, I crawled and breaststroked
across the distant Hudson, rhythmically spitting out
salt and doggerel—then backstroke and freestyle
I made my way across the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa.
Reader, I can hold my breath longer than a bullfrog
that can stay in coitus for 3 days and 3 nights,
unless swallowed by a little blue heron
or walleyed pike, without the distraction of ideas.
How many afternoons have I dived into the Atlantic
to swim with whales beyond the Montauk lighthouse
that keeps freighters like me off the granite cliffs.
2
A visitor returning to the City of Angels,
I lost my way, went to the wrong airport.
I was not distracted by ideas: a porter told me
after he asked, “Do you have rocks in your bag?”
and I said, “Yes”—the percentage of Hawaii’s children
given public school education is close to Mississippi.
I mentioned this to a beautiful Maui white lady,
she said, “That’s politics.”
Despite sacred forests and mountains, I was wrong:
Maui is not sacred, a place of equal opportunity.
I hold my trousers up with my belly of statistics.
In the 21st Century, every sacred place
in the universe has public education.
A Chinese lady told me in Hawaii
mainland homeless and unemployables gather
under the palm trees where it is warm and beautiful,
night and day. No books, no piano.
I write here and there poems not yet abandoned.
I have a flock of them, fledglings barely feathered,
some old birds that can fly a few yards
into the next tree or yard—hop.
A poem can change to a match just struck,
invisible flame when held up to the sun.
I plead guilty: I hold onto the match too long,
it burns and blisters my fingers. Lingering
on what I do not know is closer to truth.
I stand up, my trousers fall and I’m stark naked:
my privates are the bridges across the Hudson,
East and North rivers, under whose supports
the homeless sleep—I need a fig leaf,
12% of New York City’s children
who attend public schools are homeless.
Reader, what you hear out of my mouth
is not a cry of despair, it’s a B-flat.
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT
1
I saw I could not help repeating myself,
my writing suffered from indigestion.
I can’t help it, I repeat what I believe,
what I want to happen or not happen,
something like morning prayers.
Every word that follows is a four letter word.
I am dead and buried with one foot sticking out
of the ground, my right foot four toes left.
Now I’m older there’s no difference
between my word and my word of honor.
There was a difference when I was 12,
when I told lies: what I wanted to do
I often said was done. I said I was older
than I was. A little later when I was 14
I told a hat-check girl at the Bal Tabarin
I was a freshman at Columbia.
I have some memory of telling my teacher,
“I was absent because I had a fever”
when I went to the Main Reading Room
at the 42nd Street Library and museums.
I told her the truth when I thought I lied.
I was in love with my Shakespeare teacher.
I had pains in my belly till after the German Hour.
I told my parents I would spend the night
at John’s house (John’s dad, a Forrest Hills doctor),
when I slept at a Swiss French refugee poet’s
father’s photography studio off Broadway,
a photo of Errol Flynn in the store window—
I was awakened by two whores
cursing each other out, “You got shit in your blood!
You got shit in your blood!”
Next morning—I can still see my mother’s face
at our apartment door, “When I called John’s house
she told me you weren’t there last night.”
My father said, “Liar! You’ve had a perfectly
normal upbringing.” I replied, “What? You’re a sadist!”
The result was war, till I realized war was hell
on my mother. So I answered flaming cannonballs
with a smile. (She refused to see her husband again
six months before she died.) A little after the shot
heard around the apartment, I was making a harp
for a dancer friend out of door keys, violin strings,
a bent wire coat hanger.
My father said, “Don’t you call that sadism?”
I answered, “Wire, not people.”
I thank my lucky stars I had a doctor godfather
I loved. Gently my uncle taught me to tell the truth,
to love the truth—make the world all better.
2
I’m chewing the bubblegum of ideas.
No lie, a short lyric poem is I
and any verb or moody word. There may be
truth in the poem of a single word,
“The,” long since well done, but what about
the poem “But” or the word “And,”
a poem of the hereafter, the last word of someone,
“but,” instead of all the famous “goodbyes.”
I became a foot soldier in the wars
between the naked armies of truth and liars. I sang
Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?
I would not join the quarrel, the long war
between Catholic adios and Protestant goodbyes,
quarrels for a straw. I was anathema.
Why did I think a girlfriend would never
leave me when I said I was going blind?
I made a d
iscovery—to get with child
a mandrake root, I opened her crossed legs.
How long can you lie without telling the truth,
nap or get a full night’s sleep?
Whatever it is, Death is no nap.
I wish I knew how to say “nap” on a long
or short list of languages.
“A long time” in Chinese is chang shi jian.
Zhou Enlai when asked
“Do you think the French Revolution was successful?”
said, “It’s too early to tell.” The truth is
I wrote what was and is too early to tell.
Mandrake Root
A FOUND POEM
Headline: “Dead Stars Collide, Unsealing Clues To Universe”
It was not a dream abed: outside walking my dogs last night, I saw and heard a pair of dead stars collide, my first glimpse at the violent process by which most of the gold and silver in the universe was created. The collision, I’ll call a “kilonova,” jolted the galaxy in which it happened 130 million light-years from here in the southern constellation of Hydra, sent oceans of fire across the universe. It sent me from poetry to my telescope, in hopes of answering one of the long-sought mysteries of the universe. I saw the collision created a cloud of gold dust many times more massive than the Earth, confirming kilonovas as agents of ancient cosmic alchemy. My dogs Honey and Margie barked at the greatest at-a-distance fireworks show in the universe. It was a century ago that Albert Einstein predicted that space and time could shake like a bowl of jelly when massive things like black holes moved around. Such waves were finally confirmed only in 2016, when Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory recorded the sound of two giant black holes colliding. Neutron stars are full of stuff, packed at the density of Mount Everest in a teaspoon, gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves, something for everyone who has a window on the sky. My friend Dr. Kalogera was in Utah hiking, getting ready for August’s total solar eclipse when he got the alarm. He recalled thinking: “Oh my God, this is it. The 50-year-old mystery, the holy grail, is solved.” Together the two signals told a tale: War and Peace and War and Peace, a pair of neutron stars spiraling around each other. Some people joked, “Napoleons and Napoleon! Duke of Wellington and Duke of Wellington!”
But where? Luckily the European Virgo antenna had joined the gravitational wave network only two weeks before, showing a faint chirp at the same time to a small region of the sky at the Hydra constellation that was in Virgo’s blind spot. The huntsman’s bugle blown, the hunt was on, Dog Stars in the lead. By then Hydra was setting in the southern sky. It would be 11 hours before astronomers in Chile could take up the chase. One Mr. Foley, who was working with a team on the Swope telescope run by the Carnegie Institution on Cerro Las Campanas in Chile, said, “These are the first optical photons from a kilonova humankind has ever collected.” Emails went flying about in the Chilean night. When it was first identified, the fireball of 8,000-degree gas was about the size of Neptune’s orbit, radiating about 200 million times as much energy as the sun. Nine days later, the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected X-rays coming from the location of the burst, and a week after that, the Very Large Array in New Mexico recorded radio emissions. By then the fireball faded from blue to red. From all this, I have begun patching together a tentative story of what happened in the NGC 4993 galaxy. Yes, the merging objects were probably survivors of stars that had been orbiting each other, each puffed up, then died in supernova explosions in which massive stars ended their luminous lives some 11 billion years ago. As usual I made a reasonable assumption about their spins: these neutron stars were about 1.1 and 1.6 times as massive as the sun, smack in the known range of neutron stars. As they approached each other swirling a thousand times a second, tidal forces bulged their surfaces outward, “neutron star guts” was ejected, formed a sugar doughnut around the merging stars. I estimated that an amount of gold equal to 40 to 100 times the mass of the earth could have been produced over a few days and blown into space.