Occupation
Copyright (C)1999
by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes
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Scrawlmark Catalog #DMHOCCUP.HTM
ISBN:
LCC Cat. Nr.:
Scrawlmark Publishing
1016 South Third Street
Moorhead, Minnesota 56560-3355
"After Kent State" and "Occupation," were read before The Prairie Poets Association, UofM Morris, 1973.
"Descartes" first appeared in Poultry: A Magazine of Voice, Spring 1992.
"En Apxh" and "Notes to En Apxh" first appeared in One Gallon: Four Quarts, Moorhead: ScrawlMark Press; 1995.
"And You, MacLeish" first appeared in Offices, Moorhead: ScrawlMark Press; 1995.
"The Muses Are Heard," "Kassandra in Ilion," and "On the Virtue of Being in the Dark" first appeared in The Sound of Minds, 1995- 1998.
"On the Virtue of Being in the Dark" was read before the 6th Annual Day of Empowerment, Fargo ND.
for
MSG Robert H. Kingsley
24th Mech Infantry Division
Augsburg 1964-1967
The most powerful drive in the ascent of
man is his pleasure in his own skill.
-- J. Bronowski
TABLE OF CONTENTS
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1 Rain Dance
2 Missa pro Defunctoris
3 Encounter
4 Amendments to the Constitution: II
5 Armistice
6 Waitress
7 Tank
8 After Kent State
9 Occupation
10 Rat
11 Pain
12 Meet the Press
13 Ten High
14 Instrument Flight
15 Term of Employment
16 Om Mane Padme, huh?
17 Uniform
18 Death of a Revolutionary
19 Complete Edition (i)
20 Mud, Glorious Mud
21 It Goes With the Turf
22 Descartes
23 Rana Pipiens
24 Phoebus Appalled
25 En Apxh
26 Notes to En Apxh
27 And You, MacLeish
28 Glossolalia
29 It's Greek to Everybody
30 On the Green
31 Nine-finger Joint Lubes
32 Holy Saturday
33 Night Watch
34 Gorge
35 Sweet
36 Word's Worth
37 Rabbi Ezra
38 Dr-I
39 Enzo Ferrari Responds
40 Revolution and Independence
41 Ancient Music
42 Crock
43 For Fredericka and Kathleen
44 Goodbye, Old Paint
45 The Muses Are Heard
46 The Trouble
47 This Has Been a Recorded Announcement
48 Retiring
49 In His Image
50 Genesis
51 Aftermath
52 Wedding Symphony
53 Eclipse?
54 Incident
55 A Thanksgiving
56 Executive
57 Carving
58 Scrapping
59 Live in Concert
60 This Business
61 This Longa Ars
62 The Way
63 Patently Absurd
64 The Reason Why
65 Smoke Walk
66 Weighing Nails
67 To a Young Punker
68 Donny Brooke
69 State Teacher
70 Project
71 Career
72 Viewpoint
73 Naked Ape
74 Just Bitching
75 Mate
76 Compression Ratio
77 Orphans
78 Why
79 To a PostModern
80 Record
81 Shaman
82 Altamira
83 D.J.
84 On the Virtue of Being Cold
85 For Robert Louis
86 Dead Friends
87 Lifeboat Rules
88 Millay
89 Sterkfontein
90 G.I.
91 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
92 Mary Leakey, d.1997
93 Trophy
94 Leftovers
95 Kassandra in Ilion
96 On the Virtue of Being in the Dark
97 Music Man
98 Library Trip
99 Poetry Stacks
100 Broken Promises
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1
Rain Dance
Whirl of red feathers and a little fire.
A frenzy of feet pounds clods to clouds
to a hot drum on dancing day.
The stone knife rises and the bowels twitch,
twitch and settle :
a flash from colored glasses,
Oyez!
the shaman :
"Blood to rain and heart to thunder!"
(Our crops are dry.)
The hushing rain
washed red from Aztec streets
after Toledo steel.
Whirl of gray fans and the feral sun.
Juleps cajole the feet from melting asphalt.
The needle rises and the fingers twitch
at phosphorescent pictures in dimmed rooms,
twitch and settle :
a flash from colored glasses,
Oyez!
the weather :
"A twenty percent chance."
(We are dry.)
Hush :
the rain washes
through the grass
to the sea.
2
Missa pro Defunctoris
Say, can you see beyond green grass
Your flag flung over a Christian mass
Liturgising how came to pass
You died protecting sinners?
Boys plink silver plates through pews
And after nibbling at neighbors' news
Grunt glory wasn't theirs to choose
And go home to suck dinners.
The wet black snake surrounds the hole
Where you await your final dole,
Sprinkles grave solemnity
On you, and your private tree,
And presses the stud to release your soul.
Well, we were the winners.
3
Encounter
I
A gray wedge stutters at the edge of sight
Beyond two windows only known by quiet.
A metered sip of gasoline
Engages in the tubes of my machine
The hurricane : one to fifteen,
Second after second in proportion;
Hour on hour, rolling out our question.
Night-stunted sight strains after changing shadows
Event has traced behind prescription windows :
And I must guess; and I must guess
The shape and source of each caress,
The thickness of the glass, and its distortion.
Behind my eyes the ions come and go
Recalculating chiaroscuro.
The chat of four air-shrouded cylinders
Is not enough to shroud the reel and howl
Of prowling tires that hail the hard macadam.
A gray wedge lurches with the edge of shadows
That slink by guardrails, hail in dottled hollows,
Until fire-eyes declare in bright green light
That one guess out of several has been right.
The eyes flick backward, small and oversoft --
I will remember them. As if they fathomed that,
The points scoot toward the bushes, winking out.
II
Something I've seen and something I've seen
Prickle my back with something in between.
Is this a tattered coat I find before me,
Its empty mouth stretched toward my hungry hand?
Its scales still pattern what it left behind
A skin to skein the memory of days,
A skein to scorn in mummery of phrase,
A scorn to seine the sumptual from the praise,
An insane skinful of unnumbered days
Spent swilling chemicals from these to those,
Made hypnotise
Mere metamorphosis of days to doze
By alternating simple yellow eyes
Around the doubt until the will to choose
Will roll the question in a little snooze?
The castoff self a violence to leave,
Or merely shrug, a violence of greeting?
One dry snakeskin cracks the forest floor,
Replica of part, a part, apart.
Now the hairs are graying fast
and homestart programs hurry past
and we must count them all before
they can beget us many more
to leave the vapor of an age
to blur the vision of a cage
and in the grain the cells divide
and chest to chest have multiplied
and taking in and passing out
have turned the sugar into stout
and passing through and passing by
turn rye to man and man to rye
Teach us to shed skin.
III
The dials shed numbers to repeat their numbers,
And shed events to stutter of events.
The roadsigns say men went this way before.
But not the score.
And if we know so much more than they,
Then they are not the whole of what we know,
And whence this knowing, wench, and which
Is they, and which is that they know?
And whom did they?
The father, touched, imparts the spirit, touch,
And what is born of union but the touching?
What is there can feel without a touch?
Oh, whence this knowing, wench? Or we but blush
This knowing wench?
What evil is there gives man such a chalk
That he abandon birthright to his press
Against the backside of a fig?
The nimbleness of limb and love of line
That makes the mammoth swoon into a dress
And emperors succumb and marble walk
In caryatid, Victory and Triumph,
That strikes this knowing, wench, into a stone
Whose touch will live until the stone strike,
That rends the veil of time with a long look,
And rides a pillar to a promised land,
Caressing planets with a casual toe,
Yet, rather always more or less than promise,
Strikes this knowing wench into a stone,
Halts at a leaf.
In a room Dionysus reclines,
Remarking grapes and marked by all his wines.
In a room the ions come and go,
Remarking Michaelangelo.
What touch more casual or more intimate
Than turns us into us inebriate
With what we think?
Take ye and drink.
What resurrection is there in a leaf
Unless a salad sallies at the teeth
Of coming into being? What's in the word
Until the tang's a tongue, or what name heard
Until the animal announced the animal
With more than bleat?
Take ye and eat.
Ah, whence this knowing?
Who cannot feel for holding to a willow
Has ears to hear, the mouth for taking up,
And stops him with a leaf.
The leaf command
Who tell the leaf?
Who cannot touch for holding to a leaf.
A gray wedge flickers, makes an edge of sight.
The rib may flutter and the rubber scream,
The road is longer than a six-volt highbeam.
IV
The border stripes slip down the exit ramps
To trimmed and gravelled picnic camps
Catechismed in graffiti,
Where appetite resounds the tables,
And trees grow scars to cover modern fables
Of initial entreaty.
With the Word repeated in the rows
Of agegroup chronicles and glossy magazines
Girls spurned books, with rounded eyes and "oh"s
And stabbed their jeans
While those Passed Over by the cults
Sighed, and consecrated malts.
Costumes cut, they played scenarios :
Bottomed belles angled in the streets,
And britches stretched across the seats,
In spite of buttons, blouses, cloth, and belts,
And other faults.
A skinnydipping place, where ancient bets
Left bubblegum for drooping cigarettes;
Where girls globed limp on fenders, propped by boys
Who slacked their lips today with rubber noise
In darkened patches in the street;
In darkened patches on the seat.
V
and I am in a middle age
and every mile a tempophage
and every road a way one is
no more disposed to salvages
whose imprecisions mum the arts
that mess at feeling naming parts
and every part returns the urge
to recapitulate the surge
of those who dared to turn their pants
and backs on three white elephants
and toss the penny to the guy
and breed the lilac on the sly
Behind my eyes the ions come and go
Recalculating chiaroscuro.
And those revised the vision of the world :
On a dashed and dabbled canvas where he'd hurled
The motley mottle of a globe in swoon,
One afternoon in eighteen-eighty-one,
Saw riper sunset carried in a tone
And reflection : a lady on a terrace,
A red hat in a golden graying place.
A lady on her gray-railed terrace -- hers
It is although she wears a hat --
Is waiting eased and forward; undisturbed
Hands would calmly answer my bonjour
As well as his whom she awaits so surely;
Or just as comfortably right the hat --
Set hers or her child's to proper place
To show it sure advantage on this terrace.
Something I've seen and something I've seen
Gray my eyes with something in between :
(I say "your child" : you would be her mother
To sit so at her back, to smile her wry dress;
And the few chaste flowers at your breast
Reflect the happy heyday on her head;
Likewise the lilt of hat : I think it would
Not match so well the color of a stranger.
(The giddy bit of ribbon, or red mums ?
Still tumbles in the press of paler blooms
But promises today that she'll be warmed,
One terrace afternoon, by the hierloom
You have set above you : mildly formed,
Strong in hue, becoming in its being
Part of you, and promise of your evening.)
The night rolls back along a wedge of light
And time reels into being past my wheels.
A yellow glow looms over the next hill :
What has he seen that I may never know?
He goes another way, and yet we share
The same monotony of ancient tar,
The tick of white and black dividing road;
Though many only drove the oval track,
And most still hold that numbers are real facts,
I would read my guages by his light :
His fire eyes have known this road by night.
Between what I have been and what I've heard
Squirm hurricanes of embryonic word.
Don't pass yet! The pupa hasn't . . .
formed.
The hands trace shadows in the afterblack :
My prowling wheels still growl for more macadam :
A gray wedge flickers on the edge of reason :
The road is longer than a six-volt highbeam.
4
Amendments to the Constitution: II
The nitro-pungent whiff of oiled-gold cartridges
Sealed, long and cool, away from the Garand
Dissolves this panelled wall to fields where partridges
Fell from the long voice in my father's hand.
He raised his hand, and left for numbered ridges.
They sent his things. He's healed of blisters and
The nitro-pungent whiff of oiled-gold cartridges,
Sealed, long and cool, away from the Garand --
But left ballistics law, and other drudges,
That we will green a state paid on demand,
And smell again, when children cozen judges,
The nitro-pungent whiff of oiled-gold cartridges,
Sealed long and cool away from the Garand.
____________
Garand: U.S.Rifle, caliber .30, M-1.
A big, chunky weapon, more suited to
stopping the beef than shooting the bull.
5
Armistice
Seven stroppy logs of oak
Were propped along the wrought-iron rail
That rings the hearth. Each puffed smoke
Though some scratched lumps or spat, and spoke
Of evenings on the trail.
Their cookhouse camaraderie
Was joined by feet (two large, two smaller).
Sweet rolls and two cups of tea
Mellowed the bitters poured for me
And chased scotch for my caller.
Steel and wood now weight the wall
Their outline wonce made lighter,
And slippers scuff the darkened hall
Since the captain came to call
With praises for my fighter.
6
Waitress
Out of the wrap of winding sheets,
The warm, blank room
Ionic pressures pop me into streets
Corpuscled by doctors, law, and cops;
The Darvon in the veins the urban rabbit
Town will have, or quiver as its habit
Stops.
White blinds me with a backhand
And windchill brims my eyes :
Into February like Abednigo,
Ergo cogito,
I walk to work in almost morning.
With retouched teeth and lips a pretty prize,
I venture out to keep my date with Corning.
Two doors down the Johnson's baby cries,
Having lost his crude grip on his sleep.
The spit and mumble of the radio
Mixing hayseed with the price of hogs
And laundry chat, left for surprise
Apollo's chariot-chasers, opal dogs
Whose million-mile jowls snap the snow
And snicker at the forecast five below --
On each third street, occasional surprise;
On most, the toast.
Snow snakes curl my ankles, roll the floor
As Charlie's hullabarogue explodes the door :
To snickering hinges
he raises, to rattle the counter,
The bull bale grinning
with confident, clever opinions,
Consenting consensi
of three cosmopolitan minions,
Presuming to orient
spices from Occident races,
And flesh out the features
of flashgun-skeletoned faces,
The rumours of traces
from fairly-reliable sources
Of council-room games
for the edicts of alien places,
Directing the counters
directing the movements of forces,
Policing of vices
mixed up with the price of valises,
And promise of pleasure
and plentiful produce and prices,
Erupting in raptures
that ravage the ice-ruptured senses,
The simple declarative
semiglot snot
Erupts the fountain of the vacuum pot.
I turn down the heat, and stem the crisis.
Brown-Briefcase breezes in each day
To carefully choose what he will chew
And toast his jellied future with my brew.
We make our little boast our little way :
Harvey's fried what we already knew
Two years ago what Homburg-Hanger'd do --
The lucky egg and tombstone toast,
Courtesy his friendly Hiway Host.
Does he wonder why the service is so quick?
Can he be so thick?
He's never come early, never leaves late --
Does he merely believe, and wait
For his very important portent?
If I offered bareribs, browned or rare,
Or slid aside his purchased cup and ham,
Slipped his tie, unbound my ordered hair,
Would he lay the works of whirling windmills bare
Or take it on the lam?
Or would he stare, demand a waiter,
And cool my navel with a quarter?
Careful . . .
damn. The coffee slops
Across the polished spoon and shining saucer.
If caring twirls the world, the world stops,
And I am forty fading lines by Chaucer.
7
Tank
Does it matter, now, what kind of cannon smeared
Its blooded cargo, or who flicked its string?
The bronze-fisted arm accuses skyward,
But for death (its? theirs?), or our poor practicing?
We shattered pellets on the fearsome thing
Exhibited by the elders at Grafenw”hr,
To try the shiny bore too small for bear;
And, failing that, we shuttered it on film,
A flicker sent to bash the unabashed
With our bright, flickering moment. It was dumb;
I mean the beast, mute, pictured king of the smashed
Hill still -- well, there it is. But freshly gashed --
The one we shot at with a cub's false lust
Was one that stained the whole earth with its rust.
8
After Kent State
a swallow-up report
We sat, simpering, on the pockmarked path,
Away from where Doc Bettelheimer's math
Made such as we gouge plaster from the walls
With blunt-bit fingers. Not that we had balls
Enough to leave the mortarboard machine
Or blank Brink from the Victor Silverscreen :
We didn't. Oh, we'd bitch, call shovels spades,
Buy Mary with the beans we got for blades,
But kept the grapevine peeled to hear our grades.
Now we are cooked. Replacements for a nation,
Predicted interest keeping the inflation
Spiral one belch past hunger, prim-row teeth
Gleaming at girls in personnel. Our breath,
Yes-tested, brushed, and bonded, now declares
Our eager, ripcord packaging as spares
To be plugged in when Ralph quits, Fred is fired,
Mort crashed his insurance; having inquired,
Looking forward to the day when we've expired.
9
Occupation
Though we'd signed treaties, some were yet
Destroying papers, scrounging a set
Of underwear,
Or pointing pictures. None was a Jew;
Still, we'd had to have a few
To walk on air.
Deprived of their he-manly toys,
Boys went back to being boys,
Store clerks, and robbers,
While we watched so that Bundes-boards
Beat no dictums into swords :
The peacetime jobbers.
After the bombs and bullet scars,
Twenty years rebuilt the bars
In downtown Munich;
A split arch prods the unafraid
With victory, and that methods made
It largely Punic,
"Delenda est." The always prize :
The plain applause of net-sheathed thighs.
In reborn Bonn
The browning streams turned into beer,
Fasching went off with a ragged cheer,
And drink went on.
Before we sat, I and this German
Had antipathy in common --
Nothing other.
But beer-talk plucked our eyes half out,
And the new view was more than doubt
Though less than brother.
Smooth whiskey played a Scottish skirl
As each approved the other's girl
And the Pie'ta,
Though we'd seen neither (took our word);
And, as sublime became absurd,
Misquoted Goethe.
He showed his tattoo with a grin,
And I mine : these approved us men,
With hides of leather;
At wiedersehen, our apocrypha,
The eagle and the swastika,
Were shaken together.
My ears distort all sound. Indeed,
The whole earth howls on my right side,
Providing data;
I watch schnapps dissolve my watch
To wool, as world becomes a blotch
Of bright errata.
10
Rat
The feet are still soft,
pink and respondant.
Take a message to the seeking brain
or fry trying :
The deep ruts lead to all the lettuce,
and Someone has prepared the wrong
turns with surprises.
But the nose prods the wall
and the eyes goggle and won't
look down.
The rewards curve turns down, though,
reversed by boredom :
Today it was worse than the last time.
While the clouds rolled
about like sheepish folds
in some technician's overcoat
without much purpose
I stooled for hours
to make it all come out.
Like some official starter
this rat-caliber twenty-two
snickers at my head :
Time yet to start over?
My eyes goggle the calendar
but no one has prepared
the next turn.
11
Pain
A cursive carie filled my head with thunder.
The pain attacked
My basic stuff, awoke a nervous wonder
Whose cataract
Of pulsing sound dissolves all thought, compresses
Things I've snacked,
The radio, and undulating dresses
To single fact,
Until the scroll of universal law
Is hammer packed
Into the angle of a knotted jaw
Whose molars cracked.
The fulcrum local, effort is intense
And strongly backed
Enough to drive selectiveness from sense,
And sense from tact :
The tablets gritting tight against the teeth
And down the tract
Initiate a death, compose a wreath,
The nerves all blacked.
Now, limber limbs elicit eyes half-mast
(Despite how stacked)
Because my congress cringed, and passed
The Aspirin Act.
12
Meet the Press
The crankshaft of the world rams round, drives up
Uncompromising surfaces of state,
My State : compressor of the challenge cup
To mere defense of gas my state sucked up;
What wonder then, that engineers of late
Find fractures in the bearing of my state?
13
Ten High
It's midnight's gameroom, and I find I've racked
A marblebag of facts worn smooth and round :
They have no hooks, are fondled, grouped, and stacked,
Their histories reviewed, their each coup counted --
And always tumble from the piles I've mounted.
"At this cage, we will watch the ape propound
Rock strata from ten pebbles he has found."
14
Instrument Flight
A shield-field prods the space around the compass,
Fingering the photons in its flight
To bring the blind a sort of second sight :
As long as radar's curl's not kittywumpus,
No foreign matter sports the spring to jump us.
But flowing lumens won't dilute the fright
That fiddles pips for knowledge of the night,
And knows the course, but can't predict the rumpus.
When lightning shrieks, or hammer of the sky drops
Around lone wings, it feels somehow insane
To hope a future with a groping Cyclops;
Spooked, I swat the switches of the brain,
Your sonar sings, and soothing rhythms dance
To echoes from the nether of my pants.
15
Term of Employment
This doubled span quadruples the straining sea
That swims brain's taut antenna, itself a moot
Sea fan of gaps spaced out; the sole bound foot
A second's stress away from floating scree.
Straining, or free but broken. Or broken free.
The sway of choice mine, though the mime is mute,
The grain stressed into color, resolute
In indecision, chosen by the sea
That flows my networks' throats this golden bock :
I drink its diatoms, and they are me.
The thickened root that anchors me this stock
Not sustenance, not millstone chain, but fee
That alms the water's smooth, self-soothing shock :
Adrift, this flow of foods could never be.
16
Om Mane Padme, Huh?
Oh, Eb was existentialist enough --
He muttered matrix sums, and gave his nod
To leopard frogs that learned electric prod
And other stuff;
But he Had God
And some were far afield and far too wrong
To come along.
The atoms rattle : Ebenezer trots
Beyond his scruples against Hottentots,
Unholy hair,
Out-bandish boobs, and bangles in the thoughts,
And everywhere.
Was this his heaven or his Midnight Bell?
He is things now he didn't like so well.
17
Uniform
Though not for standing, still, the script's to blame
Whose candle stutters in your strident voice
That struts so easily its legs go lame.
That mouth of air obscures the pen, the flame,
Time, sight, and tallow that became our choice
Though not for standing still : the script's to blame
That gives its actor such a ready fame
For what is mime, it lets an one rejoice
That struts so easily its legs go lame
And so becomes an unbecoming hame,
Upstaging playbills, props, and the invoice,
Though not for standing. Still, the script's to blame
That lets its gesturer forget its frame;
Costuming daily breath in an ancient voice
That struts so easily its legs go lame,
It stands off ignorance's ready claim,
A ghost of blood and bone that beckons choice.
Though not for standing, still, the script's to blame
That struts so easily its legs go lame.
18
Death of a Revolutionary
Looking in the corner of the mirror
I see a quarter of a face
that knows no quarter,
clipped from the front page collage
of a slick war article,
The eye a dirty gun barrel
resting on a sagging sandbag
behind some foreign foliage
and a camouflage net
that shouldn't be red :
a seedy sniper needing sleep,
familiar only with fatigue
and targets out of reach.
The brain behind its breech
broke its back with promises
of warm rooms and meals,
of warm girls and clean carpets
and creeds that need not
be whispered in secret
behind the barrel of a careful eye :
And the eye that met
ten thousand real dark midnights
dulls over
hitches the branches once or twice
and stares.
19
Complete Edition (I)
This about me : you have thought so strange
That limp discourse or digits rage me so,
And that I spent a season at the range
Of one mere notion, seeing how it change
The tones of song. It is not hard to know
This about me. You have thought so strange
That it should be : indelicate exchange
Of thyme and tempo, dithyrambs and dough,
And that I spent a season at the range,
Still scatter flour before the title page
As mushrooms stutter steak sauce. That I throw
This about me you have thought so strange
Without my death parenthesis arrange-
ing all the labors in a tell-and-show;
And that I spent a season at the range
Should cause that essay on the cartridge flange
To lean beside my villanelles, although
This about me, you have thought so strange,
And that, I spent a season at the range.
20
Mud, Glorious Mud
Without, then with, and then again without :
Here is a scheme beguiled to graven doubt
That being with produces only loss
As dust is only dust that covers gloss.
If it were left as dust, it would be mud,
Clean stuff of radish in the springtime blood
To lilacs, plums, and clover, stodgy vrouw
To every tree or tuber courting "wow!",
And here and there a cheetah-shrouded log
(And this, and this, is "putting on the
dog"?)
And every thing that ignorance makes bold
To dress, and strut, and court, and go home cold.
But not to lie in peace. Nor even pieces.
The stuff is gathered, wrenched to lumps and creases,
Battered with exhuberance, and then
Sent out upon its crazy course again :
From dirt to grass to hamburgers and hides;
From bulbs to bowers, bouquets for the brides;
From mud to millions, hard coal into cars,
Chops to concertos, guts become guitars,
Hides to heels, and hairs are purged to pants,
And tusks to keyboards : elephants can dance.
And fingers creak, and breasts caressed sag flat,
And once again to dust. And that is that.
And that is what? Again the boisterous bunch,
A megabillion brawls from dawn to lunch.
From scum to nooners, dust is on the prod
Adance to be bacterium or god,
Areel to be philosopher or dunce,
To try it all. And try it more than once.
Begetter of begat, outrageous flirt,
It wasn't god made Eden -- only dirt.
Not satisfied with boning up on Adam
(And being dirty), ordered, "Call me Madam."
In sun and sorrow, dust is on the make
And, coddled right, the whole is for my sake.
Not that it has a central mind; it doesn't,
Unless you count what mine is that it wasn't,
But it is not enough, and that is all
I need to know to know a little gall,
For I will cease before the question ends
That I must solve for certain dividends,
And go to gumbo, barley, and sweet clover,
Thence to milk and start the cycle over,
Ignorant. I'll learn the words, the notes,
And with my brand-new songs I'll cast my votes
For those same things that any poet sings:
Essentially the same, eternal things.
But could I live for aye, I'd wipe me clean
And start me over with a younger sheen
Enough to get a grower's view of growth
(For stagnant age cannot enamour both),
But with enough of time to learn the earth
And all men make of it do they leave birth,
For even the stars have changed about a bit
Since Hammurabi signed that legal chit
That bound some men to law and some to bench
(The former must abide the latter's stench),
And stars are all we cotton when we start,
And stars we'll have if but we play our part.
21
It Goes with the Turf
Ten rival towns contend for Homer, dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
22
Descartes
How odd that we should know that you have died
Who, when you said you thought you lived, but lied.
23
Rana pipiens
"Tweak the brown bead,
watch the tongue's quick shoves,
"Or pull a dummy past him on a wire:
"She moves a long leg, and the man-frog loves.
"The frog can't see an object 'til it moves.
"It makes no difference if you use a fly, or
"Tweak the brown bead.
Watch the tongue's quick shoves
"For instant food, and frogs appear in droves."
Well, thank you. I can throw away my lyre:
She moves a long leg, and the man-frog loves.
And that is that and that; the research proves
It doesn't matter how you care to try her:
Tweak the brown bead,
watch the tongue's quick shoves.
He closes up the cage, and strips his gloves
To write a memo and an office flyer:
"She moves a long leg, and the man-frog loves,"
And takes his hat and coat, his checkbook, roves
To purchase flowers for his girl and sigh her.
Tweak the brown bead,
watch the tongue's quick shoves:
She moves a long leg, and the man-frog loves.
24
Phoebus Appalled
No sore or insult has the song
That will what will occur will not
Deter the verse that swing the throng
Or bay the fashioned polyglot
For being what the baying long
And willing out the common thought
Rehearse the little verses wrong
That will what will a cur will not;
No sorer insult has the song.
25
En Apxh
"Things fall apart, and what rough dream
Now slouches toward its Bethlehem?"
The poet quoth,
Who pray the lord his soul to keep
Two million years of stony sleep --
But here are both. 6
What shudder in the soothing loam
Pop forth this child so far from Rome
With other wrongs?
Here from the breccia there pokes
Another of our daddy's jokes,
Who speaks in Taungs. 12
Old fogey. Prodding at the dense,
But who, for all your eloquence
Despises phones:
The eons come, the eons go,
And still, what you want us to know
You write on stones. 18
For thou art rock and fortress, art
In stone the stone that dangled Dart
Across the rand
To come wherever you had drawn
And made your face to shine upon
Your servant's hand. 24
We grunt beneath a contrailed sky
Whose firmament washed Olduvai
And wonder what
Small spark to speak has prodded you
To prod the stupid stoneware to
This polyglot : 30
A flash of light and there was sky
And forty billion grew the eye
So you could see,
But what a lonely sight it was.
(I say it must have been, because
You made it "we.") 36
Four million years, that last day took;
On strata layered like a book
It draws and draws;
We read the image that you wrought
As though you saw it good but not
Quite what it was. 42
At Swartkrans, Folsom, Spy, Lascaux,
We watch the scribbled image grow
Without a curse :
No infant who begrudge a day
To breathe the still-reluctant clay
From dead to verse. 48
We see our teeth begin to shrink
And smaller muscles make us think
Of throwing rocks,
But what is it ties them to bones
And carves new canines out of stones
If not your vox? 54
We tire of tearing at the treat,
So chip the chert to chew the meat
And chop the wood :
Our flint strikes sparks that strike our pants,
But do we beller, slap, and dance?
We cook the food. 60
But nothing in the world enjoys
Your longing for a fellow voice
And you begin
To screw the larynx from a screech :
Oh, hear the adolescent speech
Icumen in. 66
And going out. It hasn't time
To marvel at the clocks of rime.
It is not dumb,
But cannot hear beyond its day
And so you hear the breathless say
"I cannot come," 72
But spare the rod. His back's to you
And yet you grant his reason to
This monk you succored :
Homo though his brow still beetles,
He has clothing, knives, and needles,
But no record, 78
So when the stone strike clay to dust
Poor homo sap knows homo must
Find all again;
But can he save a little creed
He only wants something to lead,
And grows a chin. 84
When puss stops purring, leopardy
Becomes a sudden jeopardy
'Na single bound
And then our food outruns our prattle,
We compose the atlatl,
And tame the hound. 90
The thumbs that stumbled yesterday
Prod clever couples from the clay
To mimic you,
And careful pairing suddenly
Grows triple for the monk he see
The monk he drew : 96
At Altamira and Cougnac
The yellow ocher, rust, and black
Squeeze speech from stone,
While knives that never flinched at bear
Now stutter bracelets of bright hair
About the bone. 102
The bison broke our brace of spears,
And so our new invention rears
A palette full,
And each knows how to hurl the dart
For we have gathered at our art
To shoot the bull. 108
But all things tire, and you of gas,
And rocks fall from the heavens as
You get undressed;
You puncture Arizona, do
Atlantis with the other shoe,
Which floods the rest. 114
It's talked about for days. The ark
Bangs Ararat and all debark,
Increase and double;
Popocatepetl bleeds
And Wu"rm turns as the ice recedes
From all that Babel. 120
Then strange at Jericho the seed
Is separated from the weed,
That like Jack Sprat
We take less time to chase the meat
And, having blessed the Emmer wheat,
Eschew the fat. 126
Familiarity released
The word to perish from the priest
And counsel jilt the
Elders who suggested that
At Ur, they rear the ziggurat
Without a filter 132
To separate the growing noise
Of bigger rearing smaller boys
From any proof
Their word was answered at your door
And talked until they'd made a floor
Of what was roof. 138
But there we found another way
To press our story into clay
And keep our temper,
And aleph, samech, yod, and gimel,
Meet to curse the weary camel
Nunc et semper. 144
Well, Dad, you write no stupid stuff
Although you have killed cows enough
To fill La Brea,
But, oh, good lord, the verse you make
Can keep me digging, flake by flake,
Per culpa mea : 150
Look over, lord, your straining crew
Whose head bones are connected to
The one that's gone,
Who feel how far the furrows write
And sifting well in order site
The sounding stone 156
For every word since you began
Your madman's divine love of man,
To read the log
You left your offspring that we learn
This lime-deposit, lime-return
Human phizzog. 162
From every stone the story glints :
Earth hasn't been so vocal since
The reeds found Moses,
But having had our day of laws
The fragiler papyrus caws
The day of roses 168
To all but him whose silence hears
The stone that stood a million years
Ago for Lent
Speak in the present that it prove
Who like the worm can learn to love
Our own ascent. 174
26
Notes to En Apxh.
The facts are in the public domain.
Numbers are line numbers of the poem.
This section is designed to be viewed
electronically in one window of a wordprocessor,
the poem "En Apxh" being in the other.
-- dmh
Title. En apxh hn 'o logos, Jn 1:1, "In
the beginning was the voice."
1-5. "Things... sleep, cf. W.B.Yeats,
"The Second Coming."
3. poet, Yeats.
7. What... wrongs, cf. W.B.Yeats, "Leda
and the Swan," in which a shudder presages the
collapse of a culture.
8. this child, the Taung fossil, of a
child, see next; the fossil itself as issue of
the earth in the present.
12. Taungs, Taung, South Africa, site of
the first discovery of Australopithecus
africanus, and "tongues," cf. II Cor 14.
17. what... stones, cf. Ex 32:15-16,
34:1.
19-24. thou... hand, Ps 31.
19. art in... stone, cf. J.Donne, "God is
so omnipresent that... in an angel, is an angel;
in a stone, is a stone; in a straw, is a straw."
19. Dart, Raymond, in 1924 classified the
Taung child.
26. Olduvai Gorge, South Africa, site of
extensive arhcaeological finds.
31-36. A... "we." cf. Gen and Jn 1:1-14.
37. last day, the creation of man, cf.
Gen.
41. you... good, cf. Gen 1:4,10,12,etc.
43. Swartkrans... etc., Swartkrans, South
Africa; Folsom, in Arizona and New Mexico; Spy,
Belgium; Lascaux, France; sites of important and
extensive finds whose chronology ranges from
about 3 million years ago very nearly to the
present.
49. teeth... shrink, A. robustus and
A. boisei had molars an inch across.
54. vox, Lat. "voice," the proper
translation of Gr. logos; cf. note to title.
56. chert, a coarse flint; with flint and
obsidian the most common material of Paleolithic
tools.
64. larynx, the "voice-box," "Adam's
Apple"; in early hominids, it does not drop away
sufficiently from the lower jaw to produce all
the phonemes of speech; in modern man, this
migration and size change produces, and failure
prevents, the voice-changes in infancy and
adolescence.
66. Icumen in, from a Medieval English
song, "Sumer is icumen in," the inference is
that modern speech is still "coming in."
72. I... come, refrain of a song by the
Medical Mission Sisters, f. Matt 22:2-14.
73. But... rod, cf. Matt 22:7,12-13.
76. Homo, Lat. "man," the genus to
which Archaic, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and
Modern man belong; H. sapiens archaic and H.
sapiens neanderthalensis had heavy brow bones
that met over the nose.
80. homo sap, Homo sapiens, Lat. "wise
man"; see prec.
84. grows... chin, H. s. cromagnonensis
is immediately distinguished from all precursors
in having the modern chin.
89. atlatl, a simple device of wood or
antler that extends the throwing arm, and thus
the range and power of the javelin.
91-108. Cro-Magnon was a prolific painter
and sculptor.
97. Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux and
Cougnac, France, are sites particularly rich
in Cro-Magnon art, ranging from 40,000 - 10,000
B.C.
100. While... bear, cf. W.H.Auden's
"Under Which Lyre," "While nerves that never
flinched at slaughter /Are shot to pieces by
the shorter /Poems of Donne"; editions vary.
See also next.
101. circlets... bone, cf. Donne, "The
Relique;" the prolific Cro-Magnon scrimshaw of
animals on bone tools and ornaments.
104. so... full, many of the Cro-Magnon
paintings depict the climax of the hunt, with
air and animal full of more spears than there
are hunters.
109. gas, whether from verbosity or
vulcanism; see next.
112-120. puncture...Babel. Meteor
Crater, Arizona, is not necessarily connected
with the Atlantic meteor shower, that in about
8500 B.C. triggered tectonic and vulcanic
activity along the Mid Atlantic and
Transatlantic Rifts, at whose junction was
Atlantis, an island civilisation still
legendary in Classical times, which in the
cataclysm sank some 3000 ft. to become the
present Azores Plateau; the resulting tsunami
and volcanic rains produced the "Flood" of Gen
6-9, from which Noah is said to have escaped in
an ark that came to rest on Mount Ararat on
the Turko-Russian border; Popocatepetl is a
volcano in Mexico, whose Aztec-Atlantic
civilisations held blood-rituals atop stepped
pyramids; Wurm is the name given to the last
European glacier, that slowly melted as the
result of Panama's having risen (again) into the
way of the Gulf Stream that today warms northern
Europe, though the stanza implies that this
resulted from the hot air of Babel, cf. Gen
11:1-9.
121. Jericho, a Chaldean city ca. 5000
B.C., one of the first to be founded upon
agricultural economy; the site is in modern
Syria; see also next.
125. Emmer wheat, the first variety
cultivated, has a loosely-bound head of about
1/4 the yield of modern hybrids.
128. The... Elders, a direct quote of
Ezek 7:26.
131. Ur, a city, ca. 5000 B.C.; the site
is in southern Mesopotamia.
131. ziggurat, the Mesopotamian temple, a
stepped pyramid, services being held at the
peak; some archaeologists connect all the
pyramid cultures as Atlantic in origin and as
commemorating Mount Atlas, the "god who could
shake the world with a shrug," now Pico Alto in
the Azores (see note 112).
137. floor... roof. It is common for one
urban civilisation to build on the ruins of
another; e.g. there are some seven levels at
Troy and nine at Jericho.
140. press... clay. The earliest
nonpictorial or alphabetic writing is pressed
into clay with a stylus.
142. aleph... gimel, four of the
letters of the Phoenecian-Hebraic alphabet, they
are still current, but no longer cuneiform.
143. curse... camel, cf. T.S.Eliot,
"Journey of the Magi"; the piece remarks the
effects of new doctrines on civilisation, but
note that gimel is "camel."
144. Nunc et semper, Lat. From the
Liturgy, sicut erat in principio, et nunc et
semper," "as it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be."
145-148. Well... make, cf. A.E.Housman,
"Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff," not merely
these, but the whole poem.
147. La Brea, Sp. "the tar," tar pits
in southern California, rich in faunal fossils.
150. Per... mea, Lat. "through my
fault." Most fossil sites are originally
exposed by geological faulting, and a fault on
Berkeley campus, University of Southern
California, was named "My Fault" by students who
discovered it, but the phrase is from the
Liturgical contrition.
151. head... gone, cf. the American folk
song, "Dry Bones."
154-156. furrows... stone, cf.
A.Tennyson, "Ulysses," "and sitting well in
order smite /The sounding furrows," and the
whole.
157. every word, cf. Deut 8:3, Matt 4:4.
162. phizzog, Am.dial.corrup. of
"physiognomy," "face."
164-165. Earth... Moses, Ex 3:2-4:17 ff.,
13:21, 14:21, 16:11-12, 17:5-6, 20:1-18, etc.
165. reeds, Ex 2:3, but in particular the
papyrus, from which paper was made anciently;
the first five books of the Bible, Gen-Deut, are
held to have been written by Moses.
166-168. laws... roses, the stone tablets
of the law, and T.Lawes, who set to music the
poem that begins, "Go, lovely rose," by
E.Waller, who found favor with both factions in
the Puritan revolution against the British Crown
and the Papacy.
167. fragiler, i.e., than stone or clay.
170. The... years, cf. R.Jeffers, "To the
Stonecutters," "Still, stones have stood for a
thousand years, and pained thoughts found / the
honey of peace in old poems."
171. Lent, the Liturgical calendar
preceding Easter, in which abstinence and self-
betterment are practiced.
172. present, cf. Gr. xarismos, "gift,
grace," also "present" as a condition of time;
the syntax means both this present and the
past's own present.
172a. prove, the object of this verb is
both the person and the thesis identified by the
alternative grammars of the subsequent clause.
173. like, both "in the manner of," and
the subjunctive conditional of "to like."
173-174. like... ascent, cf. the joke
about the worm who meets another worm while
burrowing, declares love, and is told, "don't be
silly; I'm your other end." The construction
requires that the observer's love for the worm
as image of thanatopsis, and his love for his
own condition, including the other, are meant as
the object of "prove" (see note 172a.).
Bibliography.
Biblical material is from one or more of the
following:
1. Van der Hooght, Everardi. Biblia
Hebraica, the "Bagster Polyglot" Bible, Old
Testament, edition of 1705. London: Samuel
Bagster and Sons, Ltd. Grand Rapids: Zondervan
Publishing House (1972).
2. Genesius, William. Hebrew and Chaldee
Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures. Tr.
Samuel P. Tregelles, ed., 1846. Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (1949).
3. Nestle, Eberhard. The Greek New
Testament, 1904. Tr. Alfred Marshall: London:
Samuel Bagster and Sons, Ltd.: 1958. The New
Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
the King James Version, 1611. New
International Version of the New Testament.
New York: New York International Bible Society:
1978. The four texts in one binding. Grand
Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House: 1968.
4. Wilke, C.G. Clavis Novi Testamenti
Philologica, 1851. C.L. Willibald Grimm, ed.,
1868. Tr. Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English
Lexicon of the New Testament, 1885. Grand
Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House (22nd
printing, 1982).
27
And You, MacLeish
quia conturbas me,
deus meus?
If the silver tongue returning
Up the beach of darkness crawl,
Shaken by a little learning
Scribbled at a wailing wall,
Children beacon, belfries butter
Up the stairs youth will not stand,
And the stones of nighttime putter
All the law-pavillioned land,
That the silver hairlines churning
From the virgin nipple fall
To a weak and weary yearning,
Juniper and olive ball,
And the empty hearts whose stutter
Cannot spring the sagging clocks
Cry the molded candle gutter
Even as it slips the blocks,
Watch one hour what woodlands burning
Shade without consuming call :
Maples ringing out their turning
And the mushroom fool them all.
28
Glossolalia
-- on alphabet soup
Suppose the Chinese roshi
Invented macaroni
Or that the Roman clergy
Had learned to read Cantoni:
Oh, how the tasty letters
Would nourish the liturgy
Spell out that they were koshi,
And we could hear the fritters
Interpreting the teaching
Like tablespoons of I Ching.
A mushroom for a comma
Paraphrasing sushi,
An olive for a period,
While never being pushy :
Enough, and it were sure ya'd
Convert the Dalai Lama.
Oh, do not say, "baloney,"
For thus the Pentecostal
Calls every noise apostle.
29
It's Greek to Everybody
"Euripedes?" my tailor cried,
Examining a tear.
"Yes," I replied. "Eumenides?
I hew whatnot I wear."
30
On the Green
I've played the fields at Eton
With sweet Spring up to my knees,
Without my Queen to sweeten
But by thought, such stout and cheese,
And here she matches pitch for
Pitch, and slice for slice, with me,
So what have you to bitch for,
Pilot, where the Spanish be?
The wind is lee, the yards are set
The stays are at their strain,
And it is forty minutes yet
The Thames begins to drain.
So quit your idle clatter,
Pilot; pour you some Pinot,
And all the pins will scatter
From the way you've held your throw.
31
Nine-finger Joint Lubrications
i
Beneath the crosses, row on row,
Is no concurrence of the bone;
But in and out the breezes go
And so I hear the trumpet's tone.
Over everything there is the grass;
Even the moon must slower drag slow night along.
How patiently these tonguelipped cheeks and pens
Bow their headroom to their fathers' sins.
ii
Prosody informs
The ears of Eliots, marking out the norms
Of those who learn to hear, of those
On whom the nuance of the sentence grows.
To them sound speaks.
And then from pullstring dolls the record squeaks.
iii
Two eyes above the timothy and clover,
One black rover,
Bag of questions that the sphinx moths lack,
Stare at streetlamps, seem to think it over,
And throw light back.
iv
On summer nights the sky is parsecs deep
And we secured here by a freak of nature
Footing the soil our fathers favored well;
A waiting mote beneath a weightless sky.
Put your mouth behind your hand and laugh :
Fear revolves in that we may fly off.
v
I would not care what any man would say
About my spending half my time this way
If he could get his mouth around complaint
Without his using "well, I mean, like, aint."
vi
The bug is a marvellous walking machine :
He walks like a windup with wings;
He ratchets the notches of inches and yards
That nothing encumbers and nothing retards,
For when he encounters a rock or ravine,
He flutters right over the things.
vii
The man in whom the atoms swam
Is slipped away;
He leaks to seaward where a clam
Tries consomme'
That swam the oyster yesterday.
viii
I, more than sparrows on a noisy street?
The leavings adequate, the apple sweet,
And none will listen but the parakeet.
ix
How warm to have direction from the first
Laid line, love's pheromones, the infant thirst;
Whatever come, they might succumb to fame,
And there will always be the start to blame.
x
Before the meeting there was only flight.
There is no flock until the crows alight,
And they assemble on the barren mouth.
There is no mention of the waiting south.
xi
The crickets quiver while aurora soar
Less slowly southward than they crept before;
Before these crickets was a master who
Would stroke his steel to see what it could do.
xii
For kids who want their mush without the trappin's,
Here's universe in just two words: shit happens.
xiii
Do not leave silhouettes against the sun
Nor interrupt the speaking of the grass
With importunities of destination
If you would see the chipmunk do without you.
The frog may hide his pence or let it pass
Without reporting progress of the king;
Froglegs are a specialty cuisine
The frogs have learned no other way to learn.
Even chainsaws take the time to talk
With what their custom leans against the bar
Before the business leaves the custom fallen,
Though trees take longest to report the art.
xiv
A great, slow oak, its nerves into the sun,
Becoming just as much as it can stand
Of energies expelled from all that space,
And passing on, leaves timber, flame, or coal
For who will find, and make a use or waste
Will still forget what sun and wood explained,
The essence of the thing that rides the wave
Is not what leave or have, but that it dance
To that same trace that make the sunspot heave.
xv
Though all the animal that ever lived
Thumps through my heart
And I on such an afternoon as this
Remember part,
To any furry thing I try to coach,
The stick snaps yet:
One kind alone will dare to make approach
My cigarette.
xvi
Who raise the dead disgust who raise the din
Of stupid shouting stupid cannot sin,
For stupid only shouted since he knew
One stupid of his sin commits him two.
xvii
| |
| |
Just two
\things / \ I like/
about ----- you
--- ---
xviii
To the fingers of the night the iris yields
As a tabby cat to April, rolling out
With her legs all over in the languid air:
In the morning, hundreds, rolling to get laid.
32
Holy Saturday
"April is the cruellest month."
i. The Burial of the Dead
He bled all over this provincial bronze
(Our promised iron safely out of reach),
As all who raise their hand to smite the state
Instead of honoring the maintenance
Of proper republican and fiduciary
Pluralisms.
Mark you well this spot:
Here we crowned as with a sharp injustice
One who took his students from their practice
To show them prophesy without precision,
Styles of speech that keep the thing unknown.
It is an ending and a birth of fear :
It is his students who are dangerous,
But Philomel is nothing to the noise
The blown dust is.
Now his dust divides your eyes' own water,
Sears their seeing in a grander desert,
Leaving faith like Galilean herons
Standing on one leg with the head acant
Waiting for a miracle of fishes,
It is as though our water never was.
What wash this dust out from the gnashing teeth
That starfish blind around a fivepoint compass
Gripe for taste and shrivel on the sand?
I had not thought a death could undo so many.
Now we lay our swords to sleep with us
And having tasted overwhelming fiction
The wants of aging children rule by fraction
And men so jolly they dislodge no wish
Stuck to their mouths to give it legal face.
You, too, will grow accustomed to your place.
ii. A Game of Chess
Four corners of the world, and four broad rooks
(Removed they can be, but they cannot spall)
To bound the lines of things. I hadn't thought
A wall could be beyond itself so shifty.
No knight but still
A wall's a wall to him that sees a wall
And we infest it all, I beg your lady,
With the wot we will.
Who is that on the other side of us
Who is as much of you as is yourself :
Three white pawns ensconse askanse the bishop
In which a flickering infant wants a passion.
By my nose, yon bishop hath the look,
With lean and hungry lookouts held about him,
Has fienchettoed well in men-at-arms
That block his angles also from yourself
While sitting out the game in splendid fashion
Staring his black, his tabernacle locked.
his cheap chirp
His knight is bootless and without a guard;
And they the while must keep their place or else
The whole fold fall. Salute the nimble boy,
That he invites the creeping king to bide
Behind the walls and arms of Holy Mother!
Whatever game come, he returns his place;
Crown and command capitulate, His Grace
Shall never let an egg upset his face!
But who's that on the other side of midnight,
And this the longest midnight of the year?
I feel a virgin, and my blade is worn
by the sussurrus of steel-bound steel
That slides a man's own blade to blood his hide
To but a foil in your unblushing service!
Whom else must we suspect before the cockcrow?
Words worn by resurrection, what to say?
Moriture saluamus te.
iii. The Fire Sermon
The brook is wetted broad beyond its banks,
Benign in the crash of glaciers into pine,
And what is not to pine weep into prairie,
Sipped in the stalk by timid feet and tiny,
Flown in the veins of insects. What does not fly
Field, fold, or fledgeling, folderols of feeling,
Ends it here, weighs stasis, light like steel,
And objects whom the water hones to nothing.
Those these in whom the river tenders time
Stay this middle stream, pretending term,
Their world leak down the ocean sewer,
Dreams' grave and the world's one tear.
By wasted water we sit down and weep.
Well, Old Man, if we must haul your ashes
Haul we will.
But not on younger foreheads.
Sprinkled on the steel head of the stream
For trout to tout, spaghettiscramble salmon
To squirt and die and trickle to the Gulf
Where all things settle, splaying the one bed
Where bitterness may turn in time to limestone :
While softly, stream, lest that old kraken wake
On whom we trip unheeding in our green
And pesty dawn, that alkaline rock rise
And leach the sap from out another season.
* * *
And all the law trip on the younger tongue,
There is no reason we should choke on ashes,
Nor bow to babes with kingdoms on their hair,
The unearned silver tinselling their teeth.
The lilies breathe their sugar from the air
To root in silence what the next won't bear
To comely orifices, and the law
Out-stare no decisis of random youth
To have its meals on time because it saw.
To the Fall of water we are no more bound
Than water is.
The river is among the stronger gods,
A god whose grip is never broken on
The dance or ashes of the lesser poems;
Silver at dawn and steel by afternoon,
Against whom every battle's always won
To lose the war :
the earth her gigolo,
Leaving of itself at every touch
To be it left in turn at every turn :
And then she to the old god once again
Who give away, revirgin in the rain,
This svelte snowbunny of the great divide
Revealed of nothing but the pending ride.
And that, Old Man, is not a store for ashes,
Shooting rapids in a bit of rubber,
Though we who worship at her fickle stuff
Come always in the very dead of winter,
And find the place unsatisfactory,
Trying most the lips that drink the deepest,
Only to leave, through glacial centuries,
Four notes from Siegfried, while the clarinet
Prophesies the Götterdämmerung.
That is no country for young men.
To lose itself, a laziness of lawyers,
White bodies naked in the low, damp ground,
Squirming through a lesser vegetation,
Scared of spiders and in awe of ants,
And rolling up the armor of its pants.
iv. Death by Water
The mice step often and the deer step deep.
Sweet stream while softly and I wend my song
Or scuttling things will steal us in our sleep :
The shore dissolves for all our way is long.
Severs the stream of time, this bag of body,
And makes now bastard husbanded descent,
Makes of adventure every sip a toddy,
And melts the mayflies of the were we went.
And skin slap skin or sea slap rowdy sea
To wake apart by but this bag of me,
Abraded and afraid, become the god
Who leaks in at a sip.
And then leaks out.
Why let that be a turn to pout about?
v. What the Thunder Said
A clap of time, and thunder ends in pellets,
Puddle of flesh that stains the whole effect.
Was all this mess necessity?
We got the point, Old Man, we got the point;
Already the flies convene to crawl the story.
Nunei de mei, to tria tauta :
Field, fold, and feeling; of these three
The greatest of these is feeling, and of that
A feeling for the limit of the feeling,
A functioning shit-detector.
Old Man, making
Dust of six number-two pencils and a morning,
Dust of dust, ashes of ashes, hope of love,
to tria tauta, why should I give a damn
That accident bespatters foreign place?
You doomed creators of oblivion,
Trying to hide your strychnine in old lace,
Why bluepencil with an ounce of lead
What an ounce of lead will find again?
A mystic paragraph to try to follow,
Parenthesis with one end blown away,
Your participles dangling from the wall?
Send not to know : your residence in me
Is quite as mortgaged as was in yourself.
Too much to write was what it was : the rage
That you would never finish out your page
Before the Fourdrinier of sleeping water
Tore off the coming-out of your most daughter,
This bint lingo.
Old Man, what of it?
The speech of children never goes from scream
Quite far enough to dinner with a dream
In one old man. At any time. So shove it.
The marvel of a dancing bear and speech
Is not that it may modulate from screech
Into Baryzhnikovs of vocal reach,
But that it pull its pucker from a peach
But long enough to thank-you. Not to teach.
Get your head out of your anal phase
Long enough to praise.
Hold tight and let your friend downhill;
One snow is not the winter of a man.
The water in the snow is water still
And twenty weeks will wet the whippoorwill
Into a faultless strut. The fellow can
Make up an egg from half and egg and bran,
What, he worry? the virus of an act
Surrounded by its food's as good as fact.
What senses do we lack we cannot see
The course of children with a steel-shod sled?
I giggle, Salieri, that I'm me
To hear the parts abroad from Middle C --
And that the Count accounts you better fed.
A sack of slush through which there passes bread
And years enough; but then? You can't at least
Confess enough to shock a common priest.
"Put out the light and then put out the light."
As well confess you had designed Suzanna.
The sins we give are but the sorry sight
To hide behind our worship of the night
That overcomes us not. Confess mens sana
You, a-Sinai, know to leave the manna
Vapor in the sun while you seek sin
Enough your sulking fellows let you in.
We heard a janissary bang a sty
And I thought him a generation sweeter;
Allegro! which is he and which is I
Parading this concerto that you try?
September stems obese, bright amanita;
Here, morel hides a birch in sleeping cheetah.
These are the resurrection and the life,
Shaped by the synapse and the butter knife.
A quaver in the air : the veil is split
And looser clothes on smaller men are found
Leaning close for countenance, their spit
Made empty by the quicklimed earth I quit,
Their sense made no less noisy by their sound.
Now you must spill yourself to claim your pound,
For art is no release, but brings the pain
To all of those who'd have the tunes again . . .
And music causes nothing.
33
Night Watch
Three o'clock. My keys. My beeper. Rounds
Allow their sleep to occupants and grounds.
Now cave of basement : pillar, pulse, and core.
The salty breath of gypsum from the floor.
New pipes and water heaters. Hods. The tracks
Of plaster surgeons.
In a footing, cracks.
I feel a heartbeat stutter into shale
To apprehend the rending of the veil :
Three stories settling in the strata's mouth,
Slowly following the sabre-tooth.
Why should the time-pressed sediment erase
That close on midwatch, suddenly your face
Appears above your sandwich-cutting board,
Meticulously settling this hoard
Of care for my least tastebud into place
About the corners of my writing case?
34
Gorge
So say the river is a long brown god
Swollen with the embryo of time :
It has an appetite for lineage
Rivalled only by our own, cutting
The earth's lean loins to bones to spill
The marrow minute, although spitting out
Like we ourselves the all, eventually.
What water drink,
Chewed even to solution, spittles rocks
And piles the delta underneath the tides,
Taste turned excrement.
It is the earth that treasures what takes time,
Holds in the ground's brown bone not quite the face,
But what the lilt or sudden terror hung on.
Here basis owns to old congruencies
Denied by grimace, spit out with the voice :
From empty sockets common stupor stares,
Admits to having licked the hurting tooth,
Loving scapegoats of excuse for scare,
Hating its fear even to seeking out
Something small to teach it be more timid,
Something large to pull down into fashion,
Something useful to drop into the trash.
Such history is not for the faint of faith,
For such this is, whatever we endeavour,
And nothing rears to power the desire
But well-cursed accident.
35
Sweet
I'm bedded, capped, and gowned,
But writhing toes confound
The cringing sheet;
There's nothing I could do
But scratch at one or two
And scrape the peat
Before that chemist found
A powder so renowned
It serves the fleet:
Undecyclenic acid,
That makes the fungus flaccid
On the feet.
36
Word's Worth
There are no English words for woods
That plane to thick and even curls
Whose shape and color are the goods
Of pinafores and happy girls.
There are no English words for snow
Whose thirty flavors all instruct
The lecture of the Eskimo
To keep his children tightly tucked.
There are no English words for thought
That every student knew by heart
When Zeno and his cronies sought
To pick the lexicon apart,
And so no man can hope to fix
The English words for politics.
37
Rabbi Ezra
Since there's no help, let's sit our tails and bitch
The deaths of barons, or at random twitch
Bare cleverness of speech and humble thunder --
But never song. Admit no taint of wonder.
Your age, your end, are not to sing about,
Nor blow more temperate because you wrote.
The some who scared were squirrelling the voice
Away in penury, avowing cloister,
But you admit no map that any were.
Empire gone ape with infant appetite
And noise directing our attention by it
Shut you away from even its infection,
As though to stop not intro-, but in-, spection.
II
And wear six pencils or the measured clock
To prove profession making Whitman Mock,
The mode left Images no more appraised
Than where the day's sneeze sprayed them,
bouillabaised
To common homage, stock that recommend
The liable into a dividend :
Unwilling to put seasoning to Keats,
Declared a diet in raw bits of meats
To keep the sugar from the heated ham
And send Childe Harold on to Viet Nam.
One irritating splinter of the classic
Remained, extolling passion from East Passaic,
Attitude that fashions little men
And dresses them as demigods again,
To cry like Crito that the phoenix burns,
State taketh, and the staring stomach turns
From every ash afoot, that flew before.
What sack such pisspale rice is to the hoar,
Attainting what a taste for words bequeath
To bite an icecube with the silvered teeth.
III
You would have had us ever icecream young
Amazed at paisley, that it bit your tongue
To tell how rulers cherish us exactly,
And will not share our matter with those factly,
Being come accustomed to their standard,
And hear what plan explain away those pandered
Who waste our discipline perfecting squib
Or draw our smile by writing from a crib.
It is no end, to be made mad by muses;
That at end, it is the madness chooses
How it would begin, and how would go
Abiding the swift, abandoning the slow;
That poetry is but a brand, or hardness,
Of the pencil -- not a kind of bardness;
That poems make nothing happen in the dolt,
And feather birdshit when the eagles molt.
The axolotl glottis stung to stone
Uncoiling braids or the recoiling bone,
We bits of gods will wear the stupid flesh,
The what and all we learn to speak with, fresh
Roostered loose and alien with blood.
Allow whatever can be wrung from mud
Retains its mineral in every essence,
Song survives its funeral, and your lessons.
38
Dr-I
The great cast engine takes three chains to lift,
Two men to hold and one to bolt in place;
The tiny one with numbers in his face
And fingers full of notes connects the gift
Of giving orders to a mess of cable
As though spaghetti rose to accolade,
And gave a bow, and fell in for parade:
Stravinsky on the little hangar table.
And sit amid the blade-bright wood, the scent
Of spruce well-spiced with canvas and with oil,
The space exposed to all that little toil,
Still hot with paint and wild experiment.
It even makes the watcher climb aboard,
This claim on credibility, desire;
Mere spruce compressed around a space by wire
Until the parts and air are in accord.
The thick wings pregnant with the thought of flight,
The skinny wheels not built for on the ground
But getting up and getting down, confound
The very thought of gravity, so light
A single man can lift most any part
And often does, to turn the thing around
And aim it at the wind, nor stay aground,
And in return, the thing will lift his heart.
But there are Spandaus just between the wings,
Put there so ammo won't upset the flight
As it is fired off, the plane grows light,
And jocks come home for one more of their sings
And showing how they dropped upon the Brit
From right up sun, and filled him full of holes;
This kind of flying's not for any moles
Nor any who can not withstand their shit:
The life of a replacement is an hour,
And so depends on others of the staffel
That newbies heading up had best not waffle,
Or they will never have the time to sour.
But now, they're lined up redly in the sun,
So bright and full of flight we have no thought
Of war, or flags, or nations, things we ought,
And no time for the truth: We are the Hun.
39
Enzo Ferrari Responds
to Questions About
Foreign Chances in
the Mille Miglia
Mercedes?
We flay dees.
Porsche?
We smorsha.
Lotus Ford?
Got us bored.
Jaguar?
Dey brag 'er?
We drag 'er.
Fiat?
We got.
Maserati?
Chances spotty.
Pontiac?
Go off de track.
Cadillac?
We gonna smack.
Camaro?
Repairo.
Austin-Healy?
Really!
Citroen?
He finish when?
Panhard?
Wotta card.
Honda?
Is no wonda.
Subaru?
Who?
Datsun?
Beat dat soon.
Triumph?
Make 'im cry "umph."
Rolls Royce?
It's no choice.
Jeep?
You keep.
Land Rover?
We roll over.
Scout?
We make 'im pout.
Volkswagen?
On de noggin.
Ferrari?
Sorry. We Ferrari!
40
Revolution and Independence
(The rosebud-gatherer)
I'll lay it on you, gettin' rude
You know, like, what's to blame;
I knew a gnarly awesome dude
With numbers to his name.
"Like, what does it all mean," I go,
"I'm toedully, like, bored."
I mean, it made me want to blow,
But then he tapped his sword.
He goes, "If there were butterflies
Within a waiter's scheme to,
That dreamed vanilla shakes and fries,
Who'd eat, and who would seem to?
And if the waiter -- a vous prètes? --
Had drunk a glass of water,
Would water wot the waiter wet
The what would wit the water?"
But I imagined jobs galore,
And me appointed to them,
And always by so large a score
I'd never have to do them,
And never have to eat no crow
But seniority.
"Hey, dude, like, lay it on," I go,
"This really taps my ki."
He goes, "If sheep who fear to swim
The unpolluted Nile
Prepare their fear a paradigm
To feed the crocodile,
And one goat give them all the lie,
What are the goat and 'gator
And who the floccinaucini-
hilipilificator?"
But I was thinking of a way
To argue with the law
To feed a carp per diem, say
To everyone it saw,
And so befuddle its intent
With fishy chickenfat
That all would fancy my ascent
And wonder my elat.
He taps my blade, my heart, my gent,
And reams me one of those;
"That's why the foil's blade is bent.
Salute." And then he goes,
"To scale the mountain is a sweat
One undertakes at whim,
When every day earth's pirouette
Takes it right under him."
But I was scratching up a steam
To score this scary sport,
And chanced upon the better scheme
Of wage and price support,
So those who dug the buttered Rolls
Would never glut the market,
Provided they'd provide the polls
Someone like me to clerk it.
Then, slipping off his mask, he goes,
"Not thief nor autocrat
Need your consent that they propose
The choice of edge or flat,
And whether live or silhouette
Will mark you where it shows."
And, pointing off his pointe d'arrèt
He pointed off his foes.
But I was thinking of degrees
And boiling him in his
While thanking him for giving ease
To those he gave the biz
And how to tie the school cravat
As easier than loot,
But chiefly for his statement that
He wouldn't need to shoot.
So when the newsmen line the sand
To film a shuttle crash
When I installed a rubber band
And pocketed the cash,
Or authorised a mealy mix
To underlay the tracks
And left the rail to second tricks
And rescue to the jacks,
Or passed for center tenderloins
Grade-A cholesterol,
Or ordered all those right-hand quoins
To fit a left-hand pawl
From men I beat at strokes and putts
Despite that they had led,
And none may but me any but's
If they should wake up dead
Because the tests the Bureau's got
Will never show the Bureau
I magnafluxed the wing or not,
I think about my hero,
And laugh to think I'm what's to say
With numbers to my name,
Just like that dude of yesterday --
Whose black and white had come to gray,
Who wouldn't go and couldn't stay
But muttered in an awesome way
Like growling "Gabriel Fouré"
Or being stoned on Cabernet,
Cavorting like a ricochet
To jangle jive with his epée
Between his bouts of repartée,
Before he let me out to play
With Rolex, Porsche, Perrier,
While flag and freedom rot away --
And how he is to blame.
41
Ancient Music
An ancient music consecrates
A fever in the brain,
For I have caught up Billy Yeats
And put him down again.
But ancient music compensates
A fever in the brain,
For I have caught up Billy Yeats
And put him down again.
42
Crock
How doth the busy little he
Improve his whining tale,
And pours the voters far and wee
On his court's blind scale
And welcomes in a way with laws
By swearing to the pan
Who registered unsmiling jaws
To rob the better man.
But how shall kissing babes deface
The millions struck in stone
Who willed their children in their place
By kissing lead with bone?
43
For Fredericka and Kathleen
Two voices there are: one is of the host
That gloried God that eldest Christmas night
And one is of the after-dinner toast
Of wine, an old guitar, and candlelight.
That bright Fredericka, shadowed Kathleen
Might sing together set my seat afright,
My two ears being of that aging green
That thought soprano was so far apart
As Julie was from Verdi's Leontyne.
Now I have heard, and learned another art,
And though I say to you that each is dear
That brings one music to a dual heart,
Still I would say to you, with Christmas near:
Exchange no gifts except where I can hear.
44
Goodbye, Old Paint
Man had a notion: fire and fuel were brought
Together by design and circumstance,
Controlled in every part by living thought --
And how the cams and levers learned to dance:
Two wheels as big as toolsheds, tanks of oil
(Not gasoline), two cylinders like stumps,
And underneath this mountainous turmoil
An I-beam frame that jiggles to the thumps.
Winter or spring, the haymow lies untouched:
This drinks a jug of kerosine instead;
The engine does not eat, that isn't clutched,
Nor leaves manure of its daily bread,
But still the Greenies call the man a jerk
Who put those twenty horses out of work.
45
The Muses Are Heard
The Muse is your typical wench, always haggling price;
She lounges at lampposts and taverns, out for a night
Where she's pretty and able and willing, if not very nice.
To some frequent flyers,
she grudgingly grants a new flight
While others must plod among words, seeking a thought
That hasn't been stuttered to death in the candlelit night.
Eternally woman, she'll see to it that we are taught
Proprietous speech, but especially acknowledging that
There are some ways to write that we like,
and ways that we ought,
And she is the latter: The lady is no democrat,
For when I have finished, she says I am fairly begun,
And grudges the little attention I pay to the cat.
It's once again morning,
and just when I hope I am done,
The daughters of Mnemosyne call,
and I come at the run.
46
The Trouble
I am to money as a cat to fish:
I don't much care to catch, but what a dish!
47
This Has Been A Recorded Announcement
i
We have no music, most who live today.
We take a disk, and slip it in, and play
The timidating greatness of the great
Still cordial with our audience, though late --
But who is late? Is it not we, arrive
Some decades after playing was alive?
Hear each to each, a playing in the hall
Upon such instruments as hug the wall
And one that stands in its own nook
While I put on a disk, and read a book?
This plastic always makes me feel a stumpf:
What is my play to Kipnis, Biggs, or Kempf?
My fingers bring polite applause or stares:
What is my noise to those who have heard theirs?
A kitten who's been cracking bones all day
Can gnaw my thumb to say it's time to play
About an hour, and then to sleep on me,
And gives me more of living company
Than any boy with headsets on his horns
Who forms his life on what the noise adorns.
And yet the life will also form on Callas
And Kathy, Fredericka, Joan, and Alice;
And Isaac, Pinky, Itzhak took chagrin
At Heifetz' death, and made him live again,
And all because they'd heard the fellow play
Long after all twelve fingers fell away.
ii
These Compact Discs can resurrect the sense
That drove the hands to madness, strings to truth,
And recreate the living audience
That hollered Heifetz in his handy youth,
But easier produce the yowling mob
That cheered at Woodstock for the death of song
And death of culture, death of any job
That needs a mind to haul the thing along:
The plugged-in ear is cheaper now than bread
And they that plug it in are also cheap;
There's nothing civil in the echoed head
Including all those things that will not keep
Except in living minds, for all our books
But map the way, and, sitting on the shelf
Do nothing else to honor women's looks
Or grow the empty infant into self.
There must be mind, and mind must ever lust
To gorge itself, then make itself gourmet
On common fixings, scraps, the frugal dust
Of lives lived well enough to have their say,
And, saying well or poorly, tell a path
To be or not to be, the final choice
Still left to generation, aftermath,
Who learn by going, always to rejoice
In some one thing well-founded or well-found,
Be it original or still renowned.
iii
A life runs out in little grooves of dots
That are not even listened to by snots
Who can't afford to go to see a band
But stand about with Diskman in the hand
So they can hear the antisocial hype
That rubs the attitudes of all their type:
For they're already cosmopolitan
(And far too lazy to produce a man);
They're found on every street of every town,
Puffing themselves up by putting down
But every value that requires work,
Discussing jobs for something else to shirk,
Discussing "punk" and "metal" for the words
That make them stupid, turn them into herds
That meet at night to vandalize the town;
That meet at night to shoot each other down.
It's not the disk or tape that is at fault,
But that the infant hasn't any salt
But what his parents leave him by the way,
Which is quite small when they are gone all day,
School is insipid, and the law insists
That there will be no punishment for fists,
While church insists the world an evil place
Which "you" will "leave" to "see God" face to face.
There is a pop theology afoot
That says a youngster needn't ever put
The kind of effort into growing up
That Granpa did when he was but a pup,
For God and State will care for every each
So long as they do not exceed their reach,
Or, rather, test the reach of any teachers,
And those who preach, and those who fill the bleachers,
But what are we to do when Grandpa's gone
And we are quite alone to face the dawn
And wonder what to do with our today
To bring a little joy, a little pay
Into a life that's emptied by the word
Of those who only wish to be a herd?
CD technology is so damned good
You hear the keypads slapping on the wood
When clarinets and oboes take the air;
You hear the flautist breathing here and there;
You hear the bow belaboring the strings,
And audience response, and other things;
You hear Glenn Gould, his humming right along
With everything he plays, that isn't song;
You hear the music as the artist hears,
Extending almost to his rent arrears;
You hear the notes, you hear their concert, and
That each of them was made by human hand.
And then your hands begin their little twitch,
And you've the urge to satisfy an itch;
You take your fiddle down from the south wall,
Apply the bow -- and it begins to squall,
For you neglected everything to get
The where you are, and rather quickly, yet;
But you have music in your little life,
And for your kids, and also for your wife,
And you can sit upon your butt and grow,
For you went out and bought a stereo.
48
Retiring
An hundred thousand hours I've stood it tough
Beside this Heidelberg as it went 'round.
Four million turns of other people's stuff
Left no room for my own. The final bluff
Is calling, but I think I'll stand my ground:
An hundred thousand hours I've stood it tough.
For all this time, my voice retains its gruff:
I looked for poems in ink, but only found
Four million turns of other people's stuff
And watched my dreams get taken by the scruff
By time and time again; now they expound
The hundred thousand hours I've stood it tough:
Forgive us our press passes. It's enough
To spend my life on something less profound.
Four million turns of other people's stuff
Is, as I learned in chemistry, quant. suff.
To be among the ones who'll be refound:
An hundred thousand hours I've stood it tough,
Four million turns of other people's stuff.
49
In His Image
There is so little this computer does
But ones and zeros on a billion gates:
It is their pattern gives it its because,
And wherefore to the stuff it animates.
The data dances in its ones and eights
To flip fleet input to eternal fact,
And tells the people that its action baits
That this was always how the cooky cracked:
A bit of color or a random act
Turns one to art, another to the dance,
Until Man had what man himself had lacked
As sticks and stones were tinkered to advance.
The stones computers are weren't made by chance,
As were ourselves in that grand grope of motes,
But grown in vats around the circumstance
Of dreams that sought to put themselves in quotes
And clone eternal life, that it connotes
Some permanance amid this madcap whirl,
But that is not the point: a program bloats
With unrestricted words just like a girl,
Exhibits growth, then parentage, then pearl,
Is rounded out with all that it accrues,
Acquires worth and value by referral,
And gets the game on empty CPUs.
50
Genesis
Who grope each other find their faiths Confirmed
And excommunicate who don't agree:
No matter how much world we have affirmed,
There is no any room for you and me.
No matter what deep process loves our touch,
So little past our knowledge ever sticks
To hands that love, perhaps too overmuch,
And, to the rest, announce us heretics.
Those folks accuse us of sheer avarice
When we are but obedient, and our kind
Allowed a token of our genesis
But never access to another mind.
We get our pay, but never dividend,
As old Anfortas fronts his Percival,
Prince Harry gets but Falstaff for a friend,
And even God has nobody but Saul.
Still, still the prize to those who will not duck,
But go for record though the game be fixed:
Let those have Heaven who have learned to suck,
Our works announce us to who will come next.
51
Aftermath
I ask you, rainbow, where the gold is now.
You always touch the earth. And I say, "wow!"
52
Wedding Symphony
The king is gone for whom these notes were played.
The notes have stayed.
The girl he married in that solemn state
Is just as late.
Who play them are the same that played them since
They pleased the prince:
The strokes, the embouchure, the breath the same,
And, too, the flame...
And Baederich himself still writes the score,
The same no more,
For he has gone beyond his early wrongs
To other songs.
53
Eclipse?
Tonight we stand between the sun and moon:
Celestial mechanics lets us know
Our dearest midnight is another's noon.
The moon reds out: we interrupt our spoon
To hunch a bit, as waiting for a blow:
Tonight we stand between the sun and moon.
Could be December or it could be June;
We only reckon by what else might grow:
Our dearest midnight is another's noon.
We steer by magnets or we sight the spoon,
But, having purpose, every course is slow:
Tonight we stand between the sun and moon,
Emotions sunk as low as the spittoon
And thinking, as we sink to OBO,
Our dearest midnight is another's noon.
The universe expands like a balloon
From Nuremburg to Michaelangelo:
Tonight we stand between the sun and moon;
Our dearest midnight is another's noon.
54
Incident in the Life of My Cat
So what do you do with the fur when it's summer again?
Do you get out your clippers
and razor your back and your chin
And flop in my rocker, there calmly to light up a smoke?
Or does it all stay on your body so that you must soak?
You ran from the clippers,
you ran from the shaving-cream hush,
You ran when I mowed my long hair to a bit of a brush,
You ran from the pool of cold water I ran in the sink,
And the shower I took
when at last I no longer could think.
Now it's hot as my blood is whenever I write in a rage
(Though the sweat cannot show
when the singing appears on the page),
And I sit at my keyboard
and stroke when I swear that I can't
While you lie on the coolest
square foot of the floor and you pant.
55
A Thanksgiving
I thank rain and Jack Rabbit for the bean,
Especially those that make the sort of soup
That simmers off three days of our beguine
With winter occupying all the stoop.
I thank god and the stockyard for my brat,
That I do not need stalk and shoot some thing
That knows its own Thanksgiving and elat,
And after winter, welcomes in the spring.
I thank god and Green Giant for this corn
I did not tend through any fickle summer,
That stands instead the garden I'd foresworn
And colors my plate to raise me from my bummer.
I thank you, Betty Crocker, for the spuds
I do not take a half an hour to peel,
But just one minute from Potato Buds
To occupy one whole third of the meal.
I thank Hornbacher's for the pumpkin pie
I did not bake a pumpkin to enjoy,
Nor even spiced and baked a can. So why
Should I bear relatives up in St. Croix?
I thank the Moorhead Library for books
That hold much of the wisdom of the English,
And does for teachers what Ralph's does for cooks,
However they may keep me somewhat singlish.
I thank these fifty States for my small pension,
That keeps my mental illness (little curse)
Away from where it stirs up public tension
That breaks my nose, or costs my job, or worse.
I thank a thousand years for English speech,
That took itself from all tongues known to man
And every writer, screwed it from a screech
And taught it its panache, scope, and elan,
And threw it up where I could get at it
Without ten thousand bucks for any course,
And write a line as easily as spit,
And keep my heart ahead of public force.
56
Executive
Your step-ins trying to climb your heave of hip,
The lace exploding at your shining breasts,
The garter belt, and then the clinging slip,
And all in red, because I passed your tests.
None will see these things but you and I;
You cover all with one sedate, smart suit
That swears you never had a thought to try
A single thing that turns your flesh to loot
And me to pillaging. But now to work:
The purse, computer, and the little phone
That calls you from me with a spastic jerk
Or brings your voice if I should feel alone.
The kids are used to this and don't goodbye
Though I must linger over holding you;
I kid myself you really need my eye
To be so beautiful, but that's ado
And not the living fact: the whole world drools
At you and at the clothing you create.
(For what you wear beneath, I count them fools,
And count the hours to our tete-a-tete.)
And now you close the front door with your back
And look upon this home your empire keeps;
I don't report my lines, nor you your black,
But lip reports to lip -- your beeper beeps.
You get your little phone; your other ear
Wants all the rapt attention tongue can vouch
'Til phone is on the counter, and we steer
A trail of clothing to the study couch.
57
Carving
The bit bites, buzzing in the white basswood.
Another flip of what it's not flies out,
To leave behind the thing, the what is good.
And floating to the floor is what was doubt,
And what did not belong, and what was chaff,
And everything that made the thing a sport,
To leave behind a figure and a laugh,
With nothing left too long, and nothing short.
And practice lets a man these perfect cuts
By eye, in single strokes, without a plan
Beyond the one in mind, no ifs or buts,
Provided he'd the thought when he began.
And so can man use Mr. Occam's knife
To cut the false and chaff away from life.
58
Scrapping
The torch goes hiss on an abandoned plow,
And parts fall into scrap: the useful bars
That someone somewhere surely will endow
A project with; the rest explodes to stars
As oxygen entices it to burn
In two and fifty, pieces small enough
To feed a furnace, thereupon to learn
The shapes of ingots, bars, and other stuff
That rolls about the country, seeking homes
In things with engines, living like the clay,
And by my torch, the living steel now roams
The bigger plows that are in use today.
And one day, like this plow, I'll have my nap
While all my words go circulate like scrap.
59
Live In Concert
The music disappears into the walls;
The sweat begins to dry, that soaks my shirt.
The end of all that concert so appalls
That suddenly we hear an encore blurt.
What is this thing that so abhors a void
It fills it with the likes of me, and then
Bangs all its hands together, redeployed
From gainful work to shatter the zazen?
The music dies, to be requickened only
By other men who spent their lives and sweat
To learn a thing that made them mostly lonely
For those who scraped the screech of sound, and yet
That flapping of the hands at least knows like
If not our love (or was it, we had time?)
(Love made the time, while all else took a hike!);
Enthusiastic, if not quite sublime,
For noise describing nothing but itself
(They talk of "feeling," but no two agree)
And without purpose (certainly not pelf!)
Save, perhaps, this quick community.
To soothe the savage breast is not the goal,
And seldom works (ask Wittgenstein); the parts
Do not express an inkling of the whole;
There's nothing quite so meaningless as charts
(A man must feel, to reproduce the thing);
The clapping dies, and everyone goes home
Except the critics (not a one can sing!);
And I turn from piano to a poem.
What could I not say in the song, that words
Are necessary still to try my point?
Besides, they can't attempt the major thirds
That flow into relationships aroint
The universe for one sublime half-hour,
Nor is obliteration any goal
(We've church for that, and fantasies of power);
It seems these sounds, alone, assert a whole
To lives so partial that they cannot grip
The least of universe without a Face
That keeps it well in order else it slip
To chaos and they blink without a trace.
But how the same twelve tones that, by themselves
Have less of meaning than the chirps of birds,
Put tons of music up among the shelves,
And, using but the same fifths, fourths, and thirds,
Say things so different from their nearest kin
The least familiar love can tell who wrote,
And what he felt like at the time, and when,
And whether the performer might misquote
Or merely pull a sanctioned liberty,
And what should happen next?
And this although their little repartee
Knows little tune, and nothing of the text?
For ten millenia the music died
When man ceased playing with his bones; the birds
Could not fulfil the vacuum, though they tried,
For man alone knew sound that sang as words.
The music died, the mind decayed and fell
'Til love and effort got a new shazam
But silence living sound could not compel.
Then Edison begat a little lamb
And men hear Gershwin who have never seen
The man; know nothing of the clarinet
But what they get from traces in the sheen
Of lacquer, vinyl, and the tape cassette,
And then DeForrest put it on the air
That, even without money, we can get
Dolly and Eiji, in the whom we share
A part of brain that is not finished yet:
We play with sounds that say what words will not
With half a mind that cries another half,
And calls with instruments across a polyglot
All men may know, no matter how they laugh,
For like tongues differ markedly in jokes
But not in music (if they share the range;
I cannot speak of those unfriendly folks
Who wear out style while all the rest lie strange!):
B-flat has got no flag, and instruments
Know no provincial accent. Though each voice
Sing quite unlike another, and the sense
Might not appear until the whole rejoice,
The sung song sung, the singing moves a man
To ways the word will not (unless they sing):
The orchestra does more than Matthew can
To justify the world, and everything
That makes a music makes it to that end.
Everything sings something, what's it to ya?
The world, alone, awaits your dividend:
Sing life and loving, joy: sing Halleluia!
60
This Business
The oil lamp hisses at the ready night
And night stays back to the extent that it
Does not encumber what I sit to write.
There is no wiring I must manumit
From Public Service with another check;
The whole thing is complete, right where I sit.
It burns what burns (I use a diesel spec
For ready purchase and a super price),
And so I feel my freedom. That's "high-tech."
This old computer's something else. It's nice,
Relieves some hours of typing every day
And does all files, is many books, no mice,
Was cheap, is paid for. But it will betray
Whole stanzas to Great Printer In The Sky,
And is part of the power I must pay.
(But I must run the furnace. Wonder why,
When wood or oil do not need any juice.)
But when the vote is cast, it seems that I
Don't care to write without my keyed cayuse,
Despite the pad and pencil by my chair
That, on a lazy evening, see some use.
For thorough edits, nothing can compare
With the control of WordStar. Find a rhyme,
Peruse the books of some long-dead confrere,
Tap the thesaurus for the more sublime,
While staying out of way so I can think.
The pad and pencil's only major crime
Is hauling back and kicking up a stink
When any word wants changing. Which is all
The time, of course. I have abandoned ink
Except for printouts, which I seldom call
Because I even publish on the screen;
I cannot really stand the New York brawl.
And all this leaves me with the slow beguine
Of word and word, and what they want to say,
And how to make them sing as well as mean,
And try to make the lilac last, bouquet
That, trapped in magnets that can sing my tongue,
Lasts longer than one heady summer's day.
I think of this machine like Aqualung,
For I can dive without it: not as deep,
Nor near as long, and not quite as among
The words I use, that swim and fly and creep
Through consciousness, just seeking out a home
In some idea, living in a heap,
Unfed, unwanted, wild, inclined to roam,
Bereft of grace but having appetite,
Until I catch them in a little poem.
61
This Longa Ars
I bother at the word until it breaks
And tells me everything I wish to know,
Like how to find the world, and what it takes
To make an art enduring as Lascaux:
The words say I must simmer in a cave
For years enough until a little girl
Should shriek with fear and wonder at my Dave
Not that it had the stamina of dural.
For stamina is not enough: the shock
Of being yet first or best to later days
Must be as wet's a baby starts his clock,
Nor dried by time, nor motley boullabaise.
The real wonder is that voice, so fragile,
(Though with the help of paper, ferrochrome,
And folks who like to read) can stay so agile
While outlasting fashion, Reich, and Rome.
And though it will not make your juices run
The where that you are well and truly fucked,
And is not detailed by the adverb "fun,"
This art still wants your lifetime to construct.
It will not treat for less, will not allow
Your fancy feed it fillips in between
A comfortable career, a comely vrouw,
And kids enough to satisfy a queen
And normal genesis, whose block just can't
Skip centuries to speak itself again,
But must leave chips to replicate its rant
Within its tutelage, that they maintain
That they've their own lives yet to sing in peace
From such demands as it would have them be.
And these are life as long as song must cease
With short and longer sleeps, the way that we
Go sloppily about our consciousness,
So sometimes there and sometimes not, it seems
We must lose touch with all the whole damned mess
And live in longing for our lonely dreams.
62
The Way
I cannot care that this is for the gold.
The placement of the hands is everything.
Thoughts of medals leave performance cold.
It's rectitude alone, makes sinews sing.
The placement of the hands is everything:
The pig is where you left it, and the math
Will find it at that place, to slap and sting
The palm, and interrupt its precise path.
By now, I'm sweating an entire bath
In less than half a minute, but the course
Must be precise, right to the aftermath...
Let nature help, and use your mind for force...
The judges stall, while I grow very cold...
The gold! The gold! The gold! The gold! The gold!
63
Patently Absurd
The music still goes round and round, the twelve
Tones chasing one another into rime:
Their combinations infinite, we delve
Dull notes and yield an art to rival time.
Produce the stuff we do, 'til sparrowfart,
Seeking what has not been done before
While knowing but that past about our art:
We put two notes together, then some more,
To say in series what they won't alone
Or pile upon each other to a voice
Impossible to solo parts, the tone
Still subject only partly to our choice:
We cannot write what Mozart schmaußed already,
For it would only be a singalong,
And yet we have to keep his hotline heady
For all the ways he's echoed for so long.
The masters force us into singing here's
New ways to sing about the same old songs,
With copyright and patent on their tears
Reminding us of where our noise belongs.
And it belongs to us, who find a way
To clatter just beyond or in-between
Despite the thrill of all our yesterday
And how it rubbed our bellies with beguine.
We want to make new rules and try their sound,
For Bach and Haydn beat out all the old;
It's hard to clap together the profound
When we come on a premise quite so cold.
Far better let the racket make the rules
As Ellington implied, then did for pay:
It was but numbers, founded all the "schools"
That dug their "premises" from beaujolais
And said that this here note must follow that
Without the interference of their tears,
'Til grummidge kibitzed the gzornenblatt
And boys wrote every method but their ears.
We may dissect the cochlea and brain,
But none of that announces what we hear,
And numbers do not tell the private pain
That music is to those whose atmosphere
Is interval and sequence, tone and tempo:
All their language, too, and every teaching,
A universe as far and strange as Kimpo,
With rules the more exotic than the I Ching.
But we run out of rules before do notes,
Run out of folks to play them all, indeed
Well out of time to hear them, out of votes,
And out of lawyers ere the notes concede
That we have written all that we can write,
Although we try with every passing breath
To turn it into song in death's despite,
Who do not know our aleph from our cheth
But have a mind to mean what tones can tell,
And tell with what we muster of elat,
No matter that we do not know so well
Just how they mean, as long's we're certain that.
And mean they do, the roar of tickets provin'
Every concert has a lot to say
To several hundred folks who were behooven
By several thousand notes along the way
From all the different places they were going,
And all the different ways to get there, too,
To listen to the scraping and the blowing
And still to leave me stuck with tone-deaf you,
Who chant the lyrics of the honky-tonk,
Sing like a hinge accompanied by wheezes,
And have more music in your nasal honk
Than all the noises you give off to Jesus.
But give them off you do, as though one word,
Included for its shibboleth, excused
Your every fault in every man who heard
And thought he understood. I stand, bemused
By this belief in magick Words, indeed,
Quite stunned to silence by their utter want
Of interplay and syntax, by their greed,
And claims of depth from every dilettante.
And I must shrug it off to sit the keys
To tell my little Mozart from my Strauss,
And spend great labor to acquire ease
Even if I cannot share the schmauß,
For music circulates as much as blood
In all the little eddies of my brain,
And washes out all other kinds of crud,
The long day's noise, and most of any pain,
By showing me another kind of mind,
A mind identical with how I feel
When I am least like others of my kind,
And in my highest thought, most corporeal.
The moderns have it easy, stringing notes
At random, for they voted out the rules,
And they're "composers," for the campus votes
They've taken all the courses in the schools
That store the instruments upon their shelves,
And fool the public into concert once.
I wonder if they really fool themselves.
They've fooled near almost every other dunce.
But revolution ruined milk and honey;
The patrons of the arts are now the masses
Who pay the piper with the god, grant money,
And don't remove their fingers from their asses
Before they sit to hear a concert. But
The real musicians still get bread and cheese
Despite they are required to play that smut,
By playing all the oldies for CDs.
And there it is, with never any doubt:
The man for whom the mob's anathema
Can still get all his music quite without
Hobnobbing with intelligentsia.
They're passing laws, now, to invade the home,
But nearly every household is still armed,
So, while we have established NeoRome,
Man's loss of soul depends on how he's charmed.
And nothing's charming in this modern noise
(Just watch the quite uncharming flock about!),
But vandals in the guise of little boys
Who paint themselves, and jump and scream and shout.
But just the same is practiced by the grads
Who've plenty education and no sense,
Who stay completely taken by the fads
And awed by the mere sound of instruments!
I think the music lovers bide their time
For when taste is Politically Correct;
Just now it is a lesser social crime,
But look around: just what did you expect?
64
The Reason Why
I settle down with pad and pen
And little else to do:
I settle for a Pussy when
I settled once with you.
But pen and keys took half my time
And all my love to try,
A fact you found insulting crime
And would not wonder why.
Much more concerned with how I felt
Than who I felt it for,
I loved you in a state of melt
But felt for words still more.
You wanted to be all my mind
As though you'd cease to be
The moment I would cease to find
You being all of me,
But I was pushing words about
For that they'd capture you
And hold you where I could not doubt
I had your deep ado
Most anywhere you'd give it me,
For I did not believe
I could compete with liberty,
And you would up and leave.
And so you did, without a note,
To go for a degree
In something specified by vote
Of the Department. Hee.
Well, now I have you in these words
That took such care of you,
And though you sing in minor thirds
Why, sing and love you do.
65
Smoke Walk
I walk the block