The Wild Goose Goes
by Dennis M. Hammes
SCRAWLMARK PUBLISHING
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
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THE WILD GOOSE GOES
A ShareBook by
SCRAWLMARK PUBLISHING
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Wild Goose Goes
Copyright 1970, (C)1997
by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes
All rights reserved.
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may be reproduced to hardcopy by any means
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Scrawlmark Catalog #DMHGOOSE.ZIP
ISBN:
LCC Cat. Nr.:
Scrawlmark Publishing
1016 South Third Street
Moorhead, Minnesota 56560-3355
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for
Carol
For in much wisdom is much grief; and he
that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
-- Ecclesiastes 1:18
Facts become "threatening" only when the
fantasy they challenge has become too dear.
Children are not challenged by facts.
-- dmh
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Table of Contents
I Got to Walk . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
/Ecce Piscis/ . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Private Investigation . . . . . . . . 6
Some Say In Ice . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Wild Goose Goes . . . . . . . . . 8
Encounter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Drive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Visitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Bit Part . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Worms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
September Rime . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Stalking Moon . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Postcard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Jam Session . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Worm in the Apple . . . . . . . . . 28
Minute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Guppy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Nerve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Dry Snapping . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Ecosphere: Limited . . . . . . . . 33
Dottle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
War Relics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Reflictions on Fishhook [iv] . . . . 36
Wings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Reflections on Fishhook [vi] . . . . 39
Foot-Stomping . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Soft Landing . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Petal Point . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Dominion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Biscuit Trap . . . . . . . . . . . 44
/Jesaja Singt Dreizig/ . . . . . . . 45
Two Swords . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Open Season . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
He Played One . . . . . . . . . . . 49
159 (from /Eurydice/) . . . . . . . 50
Sleeping Beauty . . . . . . . . . . 51
/Logos/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Eternal Father . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Night Train . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Pueblo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
/Asturias/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Saging Calves . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Concerto in C-MOS . . . . . . . . . 58
Kitty Hawk . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Moving In . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Heaven Can Wait . . . . . . . . . . 63
Fort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Saving Face . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Decisions! . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Beehaviour Trait . . . . . . . . . . 73
In the Beginning... . . . . . . . . 74
Flashes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Group Grope . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Salt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
In the Dark . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Multum in Parvo . . . . . . . . . . 82
Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Through a Glass, Darkly . . . . . . 84
Autumn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Best Friends . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Feeder Flight . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Tabula Rasa . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Sun Bath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Conch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Unicorn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Comfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Acropolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Percival Lowell . . . . . . . . . . 112
Accounting . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Quandary . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Tango . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Bells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Sequoias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Diploam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Featherweight . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Pow Wow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
North Dakota . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Horoscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Berkeleyan? . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Azure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Dear Bob Frost, . . . . . . . . . . 131
Country Graveyard . . . . . . . . . 132
Geometry Lesson . . . . . . . . . . 133
What Fifty Said . . . . . . . . . . 135
January . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Vitamin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Adventuresome . . . . . . . . . . . 138
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
1
I Got to Walk
I closed the office at half past five
(My day's work being done),
And caught a snowfluff kitten
Rolling away the sun.
I had no car to carry me
Through this witch-kitten's brew,
So I settled my muffler closer
And set shoe ahead of shoe.
And as I walked, I wandered back
Past yesterdays I'd known
And found this snow like all the rest
The wind had ever thrown :
Sometimes light, or else so thick
The road can't be discerned;
But whether wet or dry, once dropped
It couldn't be returned.
But this was fair-to-middling snow
On a fair-to-middling day,
That only would be thought of as
The first that came to stay :
Just snow; precipitating ice
To measure and write down,
And say it was this November day
That winter came to town.
I had slithered several blocks
(While others only drove)
When I heard the vacant lot
That had the maple grove,
And saw a sentry warn some folk
Whose winters were but few,
To watch out for the Frankenstein,
But let the scout come through :
A fortress was erected
To a breast of forty feet
(It looked more like five inches,
But I thought I'd be discreet);
The village crouched in terror,
Ammunition running low :
The Empire had forced their retreat
And captured all the snow.
No Boers came to the rescue,
But the fortress never fell :
Far mightier than Jan de Smet
Was Churchill's dinner bell!
Stride on stride, and yard on yard,
I reached the village edge,
Where flaking masonry entombed
The highway's dark gray wedge.
I tired of the metronome
Of boots on gravelled shoulders,
And stopped to breathe the silhouettes
Of homely trees and boulders.
The end of sight was less or more
Than a summer-bordered field :
Snowspill had dissolved the horizon
And earth and sky both reeled
In field and fence and up and down
And all that whirling frost :
A palette-rag; if walked by eye
Would surely get me lost.
Suspended in the swirl I saw
A herd, cut out from black,
And pasted in a crooked row,
With the wind blowing their back;
Some upflung strokes were added,
A surrealistic rush,
As though the man who signed the scene
Were but a blowing brush,
And I felt I should mend the piece,
Should finish up the frieze,
But time outpaced my easy strides,
And dark consumed my ease.
I knew no need to hurry with
A holiday ahead,
And no one waited my return
To break my evening bread;
But my beard was white with weather,
And snow had come to stay,
So because my house was the only
Place to go, I walked that way.
2
/Ecce Piscis/
My fish-faced mouth moons
Before my fish-blinking mind.
Wet wind walks through my
Two-billion-year-old gill-slits
Lately become nose.
Two billion years of
Luckless labor sentenced my
Cerebrum to come
Up With The Answers, but the
Questions are swimming :
Inverse seahorses
Missing my mouth and wasting
The /Matrix homo/ :
A Pleistocene of program.
I sit here and float
3
Private
Investigation
for six months i left
my house without opening
the door today
i peeked out a mole
blinking in
unfamiliar sunlight
the earth round
my burrow warm
wet and crumbling with
life bore the footprints of spring
and a robin made bold
promises me
too
4
Some Say In Ice
White birch limbs, clamped in glass and light
Blast my eye with fractured white,
Catch and elevate my stumbling sight,
And stop my breath.
Last night, standing plain and gray,
Their wooden-rooted views were wrenched away
When white ice whirled, bequeathed them in a day
A brighter death.
That one, third in from the left
Might have logged in record heft
But for white weight that cracked its back, and cleft
It, base to crown.
Momentous ice is photographic
In fresh light, and may untangle traffic
In neighborly gossip. But then the sun
Moves up, and votes its view. When day's done
The trees are down.
5
The Wild Goose Goes
The gray geese fly above the hunters' guns :
They've summer in their heads, though it is autumn.
When feet begin to chill on familiar runs,
The yellowed reeds crack where mere growth has caught them,
And white bears embrace air, to gaze like nuns
Awaiting nones on knees, as though they sought them,
The gray geese fly above the hunters' guns :
They've summer in their heads, though it is autumn.
Though lemmings sleep the tundra's missing suns,
And gulls debate the dole the Humboldt brought them,
Some dare cold tears to watch these southbound duns,
The gray geese, fly above the hunters' guns.
6
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.
7
Drive
Over everything there was the dust --
The gray clay alkaline Dakotas, treeless;
The grasses stony, even, with the dust
Hove by the hooves of five thousand head;
And we plodded, nodding, sucked dusty vacuum,
Gorged on the foul bellow of our leaders.
The swing riders were back there, somewhere,
Dust glued to their sweat, bandannaed,
Horny in their saddles, ordere, nodding :
We had no compass, sucked ourselves along,
Drawn on our vacuum, moved away from spurs,
From hated "hey-yah"s and the waving hats.
The iron-stained sandstone of Wyoming
Ground to powder, swooned before our hooves :
The moving crushed the moved. Oh, we were mighty!
We pounded Kansas into dust; the ground
Rose up in vapors, ate them. (We remembered :
The swing riders were back there, somewhere -- )
The golden glue made rings around our noses :
Five thousand sterile steers with golden noses :
And our breath was sedded to the dust.
8
Visitors
He didn't have a teacup,
So never served Orange Tea;
He didn't have a sidewalk,
So couldn't sweep it free
Of snow in winter's blizzards
(And the neighbors didn't ski).
He didn't buy new records
So the player filmed with dust
And never swooned a squirrel
With the crooners' grist.
His ivory sonataed
Under Mozart's bust.
His cabin wasn't painted,
Only glazed and caulked;
When rain grew knobs on the river
His hair ran, while he walked.
While cats loved cats, and lizards
Slept, the silence talked.
He didn't wear his clothes out
Until fashions changed twice;
Friends he'd never met proved
He'd been a village vice :
Anyone so single
Couldn't be so nice.
One Halloween three goblins
Staggered through his door;
When he asked a question
They broke him on the floor.
We keep him on a lawnchair.
He doesn't work any more.
9
Bit Part
I have been the wide rye bottle;
The apple-blossom, curling in brown chaff.
The limping tractor scythes, and roadside dottle
Thatches the afterimage of a laugh.
I have oozed through trees, only to rattle
September eaves, my solo fall become
Someone's moment of autumn, or have gone
With pinecones to the moldy storeroom home
Of oak-snugged appetites, the gray who prattle
The life of April, but take me along.
I play to squirrels and the low fall smoke
Going from air to air behind the scenes --
Why must it be that I become an oak?
To be an acorn, not to be with dreams.
10
Worms
I lay bark-bellied where the birch leaned straight
At whatever light it is that birches lean to,
Burning maples redder by their white,
And wondered if striped army-worms or pinto-
Colored wooly-bears had meant to eat
Warm afternoon, unconscious evening into
Sightless, humus-bloomed moon-mushroomed night,
Before they ate the birch. Was tasting green to
Writhe from succour, spin the double plait
Of their own nooses, sleep : then rise again to
Plain white moths, who stunt the birch with flight?
11
September Rime
The dock creaks under September rime
And ducks sneak south before the time
To open season;
A knock-kneed squirrel declares the fight
Is his : the cat will not go out
For any reason;
Nuts hang brown on hazel branches,
While they skirt for autumn dances
On a hunch;
A bug-eyed spider under the stair
Tries to quilt a crib of hair [spit
Before the crunch.
Time wound the earth; seasons whirled :
Browning morning-glories curled
Spring in a day;
The polka-skirted hollyhock
Flirted, turned her back and walked
Summer away.
The world spins, loosening the curl
Of chromosomes the cell must fuel
And split, or die;
The mainspring mother-molecule
Flings seeds to spare, and now we swirl
The autumn sky.
The squirrel might wonder, if he could,
Why he filled his house with seed
And grew his fat
When the long blind was finally drawn,
Deciding he might as well have gone
To feed the cat,
Or any winsome, furry fling
His hormones offered in his spring
When blood was rising;
But caution, oozing from his cells,
Caulked his cache in warmer spells
To put off freezing.
I was Cro-Magnon's archer, trying
Stonetipped arrows at the moon,
One of the brave;
I was a mayfly, squeezing June
Into a cloud of breeding, flying
Above my grave.
12
Stalking Moon
Creeping out across the borders of the dottle
Where the long path leaves, the limits of the lake
Break up in sequins, and the loud moon's mottle
Mimes the pattern of an old loon drake.
The birch breath catches in mid-nod : a tattle
Stick snaps a stalk, and grouse explode from crack
Creeping, out across the borders of the dottle
Where the long path leaves. The limits of the lake
Shaken, I stir to let my contents settle,
Eyes white; exhale, my ears about to ache :
A short, pink, embryonic axolotl
Creeping out across the borders of the dottle
Where the long path leaves the limits of the lake.
13
Reason
/And if thought . . .
has even there so limited
a sphere of action,
with what propriety can we assign it
for the original cause of all things?
-- David Hume, 1779/
Magnified hunters leaped about the walls
With the double-gaited magic fire gives
The main among them; the meek drank numbers
When the points picked out the molded bulls :
Hands slipped along the sweated shafts, pinched
Beside the thrusting thigh, aligned the knee
And cast.
One quivered by the shoulder.
Two sagged, two pricked and bounced, but these made sport
Of all whose gleaming stone lay short
The mark. They bowed the artist back to mold
The magic in again, while they discussed
With grunt and grimace as the winners told
How to place the thumb, to stride the thrust
And follow the shoulder through the cast.
Again the flint lay short.
Some cursed
The hunkered one who only watched the embers
And artful dodges soothing the wounds shut.
A glance askanse saw fingertriggered thumb
Flip a pebble at the fire, and spat
And leaned to listen to the longest spear;
Another watched another pebble split
The sparks, arced sparkling through the air
From the back of a casual hand.
He dared.
/Marada!/ Even if he was Kayuga,
Wierd; even he might add the final luck;
You could never tell what trick
Of art would turn the beast your way,
And then you'd better know your thumb, chum!
When he drops his head so the breath blast
Dusts the grass between his hooves and yours,
That's what we're here for : too many boys
Grew smelly from their wounds; too many boars
Dragged off the long hours chipped
From our lives, when one more spear
Would have rolled them were it only there.
He was Kayuga; sat among the mumbles,
Flipped stones from thumb and hand into the embers,
Remembered thin pain in the elbow's hollow :
The cords jerked just before he moved his arm.
The artist backed three times around prediction,
Erasing footprints so to make it so --
Kayuga pawed, particular of sticks,
And dumped the bundle. Fire and hunters leaped,
Broke the huddle, crouched before the beast
Again, each to his place, to shift and heft
The haft; and, as they cast, Kayuga left.
* * *
When Cro-Magnon's men came back, limping
Or holding closed the edges of an arm,
Peering under the large leaves for the heady beer
That was always ready, green and warm,
Or brandishing the bloody head, to scare
The wise old children (it was only daddy),
One brought from behind the meager back
(Whose stringy muscles snared the delicate dik-dik,
(Stole the dingo's bone, and fooled the walleye)
Brought out the flower and the flowered fur :
And the fur pooled golden, puff of dust,
Flowered brown and blooded at her feet,
And she picked it up.
Making in her nose
A little rising up and falling noise,
She draped her shoulder, led him to the hall,
And hung his atlatl on her wall.
14
Water
Knowing of ice, wind weeps
Washing grass to the sea,
Raining green in the water wheel.
Sea dome, my brain-corals
Carry my sea in tunnels,
Muttering loss of gills.
Sapped by the slick boughs,
I fell from one tree's shroud,
Bruised the pliocene ground
And woke to water tricked
Through the clocktuned heart
To fool the tight faucet :
Breath's poem, red sensation
Tombed in the cell's grass,
Straining at roses.
15
Postcard
Crazy Horse could not have pleasured here --
Stepped small when still and bird-hung trees meant silence,
Soft leather pressed to earth -- nor touched the air
Where Corfam clicks at concrete's yellow violence.
A totem-bottom paraplegic points
At cables where the money-metal talks :
A twelve-inch elm-arm ending without joints
To bring voice where obeseness bounces boardwalks,
Ripples in mime the seas's soft, lazy swells,
And stifles with dimes the children's ancient hunger
To lick at ices, who once looked for shells,
While sweets shellac the curling lips of anger.
A wave rolls in and breaks on the rolling land,
And, turning, rolls away one grain of sand.
16
Jam Session
Strobes porridge these players; hormones sport
With goatskin and plastic under fingertips,
Stretched tight as our wonder at this concert
Of sound pounded under drooping lips,
Tightened eyes, and schizophrenic hips --
Although one anarch melody may roam,
Bound at its bottom slams the dancing drum.
17
Prayer
These thesis-glutted thoughts, a thirsty thrush's
Taut dream-image that implies result;
Premise minus action, formed in the rushes
Of nerve on nerve; this bread smelled in green malt,
Unyeasted youth's round future without fault --
Oh, bless this dreamday, else the skull's thin lime
Will crack before the hard, bright bolts of time.
18
Worm in the Apple
All autumn-awed, a shrunken shoot
Dependent from the family tree
Considered snow and sought to fruit
Its own morose mortality.
Nine months beyond, the baby squalled
His judgment on the ragged act
Of parents who had lately galled
The mortal husk from taste and tact,
Forgetting even bone's hard lime
Will show its marrow to the worms,
That sprinters totter sprinters' times,
And housewives winnow business firms.
The child matured, as they had done :
He gained his head, brought home his lass,
Then hawked his wares and ran his run,
And scored his own name in the brass.
19
Minute
Having lit my pipe and leaned
Out to recycle the match,
I saw my head elongate
In the long humidor.
Dome to dome, the crown
Of a long evolution was golden :
But the humidor's bronze
Is thin electroplate.
By some trick of the metal
I am bald.
20
Guppy
When I flake the tank with food,
The guppy and her gulping brood
Still taste the stones in ancient test,
Sucking slime to spit the rest.
Bits of cake prick up the surface
That reflects her goggled, dour face,
But she damns her dimpled sky
Because she's flat from eye to eye.
21
Nerve
This soft organic marble,
Scraped by all the amateurs of time
From bright, aseptic table
To project's end, in powdered mounds of lime,
Becomes its fable.
Stirred with instruments,
It succumbs like oatmeal into parts
But, lofted by intents,
It bowls the columned sciences and arts
And leaves its dents.
Iconoclast, I quibble;
But what hand knows if raw stone holds a calf,
Trussed god, or powdered rubble
Inherent in its homostylic chaff?
And am I able,
Crouched in the sublime
Armchair after brandy, to derive
The trinity of time,
Event, and moved that, moving, is alive
As much as I'm?
Mike Angelo began
To delve his quarry, chiselling his girth
To fill out his short span.
His stone struck, David youth stood forth
And slew the man.
22
Dry Snapping
Allow the special alloy of the Special,
Double action double checked and hollow,
To alloy the eye, rediscipline the forearm,
Last the special reflex to the bloodline,
But not yet spit the pine knots from the wall.
Practice while the bloodline is still social,
If not the species' sense of being special :
Straight out from the hollow of the gut,
Let it find the knot and barely snicker.
Do all of this until you get the point.
Hard and hollow on the wooded wall,
The knot is the bare hollow of the gut :
To be less knotted in the wooded hollow,
To slide less when the sliding foot
Presses to the ground the snickering wood,
That last the last sound one of you will hear
Is a dry snapping.
23
Ecosphere: Limited
The sun is cold, coming through the windows,
Pouring to freeze the February floor
Around the spot a dervish spindle goes
On orders from a mind-rind semaphore.
Tank full, the switch drops; empty, it starts more
From levels lower than the frost can feel,
So frost's a figment : only pressure's real.
This strong-willed switch has, really, none to soften :
Shoved by its spring, or pressure-pushed, it flops
From 'yes' to 'no' and back, and that not often;
But when it trips, valves, motors, and whole groups
Of powerful equipment seem mere props
To want cold water past the heating tape
Through pipes swell-bellied from some winter's rape.
Could pressure-switches strike, I'm sure this chore
Would furnish them a socket-slapping reason
To refuse to choose; to rattle their flanges, roar,
Demand gold-plated contacts for their treason,
Though ignorant of voltage, iron, or season.
Still, I must care the well won't freeze, pipes burst,
Because I've been acquainted with my thirst.
24
Dottle
Thrown gray with crabskins, conch, and ambergris
Was always driftwood for a child to vault,
Or man to fondle for his like to this.
And reading the slow work of sand and salt,
Guessing its breed and suckling years, find fault
Or /fait/ with craft a rough mother's caresses
Etched in the scrolling grain; invoke the cult
It grew between itself and natural forces.
But though the wood whirl still, my private choice is
Reed; browned bulrush. This, compressed by fist
Alone, is fit for praise from fleeting voices,
Distorted days, fast lives, and it be missed
If boys should find it reeling in the future :
"My father's world grew of a slower nurture."
25
War Relics
He rolls a highball, holds it on his heel,
Then wraps a kneebolt up behind his head.
The untouched frosh flesh drops its eyes to squeal
The clown-elect, a derelict half steel
Who props his tubes, then tubes himself for bed,
And wonders why Jud Frye is only dead.
26
Reflections on Fishhook [iv]
/The Russian noble is serf to his autocrat,
and autocrat to his serfs.
-- H. Spenser/
The earth sags in its gimbals. (Where they bear
On pietin illustrations in the sky,
They tilt.) Eased south by equinox, I dare
New lilacs, Mayflies, the expanding hand
Of honeysuckle; competent to spawn
A plow-shared world, with room enough for dancing,
And still succumb to plums and plead the dancing
Fireflies. /Terpsychore!/ The bear
Turns somersaults, while walleyes dance their spawn;
Casseiopea's chair wheels round the sky;
Legend allows Andromeda's waved hand.
They call that dancing! -- and the paid Kildare
Dispenses aspirin, so if we would dare
Be counted cool, attend the pills. Dancing
The early bed butters no clocks. Backhand
The Book of Verses, tongue the Bread. No bear
Who tastes fall fruit stays standing. Fish smack sky
To suck the fly. The earth consumes its spawn.
But though I am the autocratic spawn
Of gravid gravel, shall I never dare
To more than grovel to the track-tricked sky?
Shall earth that's plotted for the plum and dancing
Back its share? The cosmos does not bear --
It only spawns and leaves a share at hand.
I wield a share while carried in its hand :
Potentate, and yet the tractor's pawn,
My canon appetite; a dancing bear.
Each solstice, I watched a white world dare
The whirling atoms rise from frost to dancing
While stars poured milk to prodigal the sky.
The force that fathered (some say /mad/) Nijinsky
Was more than organ, brass; and I would hand
Such madeness if I hold my atoms dancing
For reasons other than to sack my spawn --
Or do, and still accept the cosmic dare
Though earth may grind its gimbals where they bear.
Fish smack their sky. The stars consume their spawn.
My pen and candle hand the night a dare
While mama Cass goes dancing with the bear.
27
Wings
Crouched at a birch by a fingerling firth
My father and I watch a dragonfly fight
From the chitinous cast of an earlier birth
And the feathers of fear that tethered the sight
To acceptable happenings. tearfully trite
But bloodlines have broadened the cellophane wings
With their Cambrian camber and Permian right
To struggle to fly after earthbound things.
A sun-browned airport. Cheap rides on the Fourth :
A dollar and children turn into delight.
Compelling propellors cajole at a youth
And the feathers of fear that tethered the sight
To the back of a seat too big for a mite.
Is it only the banking the final glide brings,
Or does he compilot small dreamers of height
And struggle to fly after earthbound things?
Crouched by the runway with little but girth,
An aluminum pupa still reaches for height,
Curling its wingtips away from the earth
And the feathers of fear. That tethered, the sight
Is suddenly common with Langley and Wright :
If worms ring its pistons, this spread eagle clings
To a posture of flying, a notion of light,
And struggles to fly after earthbound things.
Such creatures as these are have known how to write
With the feathers of fear that tethered the sight;
Pluck them from vultures and bind them in wings,
And struggle to fly after earthbound things.
28
Reflections on Fishhook [vi]
Northwest, the Great Bear dominates the sky.
Overall, the ancient legends do their rounds
In stellar census, reeling with the hounds,
Content to bay and never wonder why.
From west to east a single firefly flows,
And blinks once, just beneath Orion's nose.
29
Foot-Stomping
City-sick, I took to walking.
Caught in brush and cursing, purpose foundered,
And I let ice to all the talking.
Squaw-wood cracked and dropped, the tundra thundered.
Jackpines choke their lower limbs
With growing pressure -- pine itself is soft --
And gray stubs littered nature's whims
To push the many-branching crowns aloft.
Little froze but Spring came back
To turn pine stubs to pulp, and dirt to grain;
Water, sun-blasted from the Jack,
Returns root-cooling rivulets of rain;
Earth turns into life, and life to loam.
I go out for a walk, and come back home.
30
Soft Landing
Thin vapors harden past the place I sit
At a window just behind the wing.
Like this contraption, I don't really fit
Just where I am; like it, I must wring
My flights and fancies out of common parts :
A ton of math and gasoline and steel,
Wrapped around the beat of twenty hearts.
Seated so high, I am supposed to feel
A transcendental kinship with the view,
But I'm myopic, and can't get past the small
To sonic-boom thoughts, drop the other shoe --
In seven hundred miles, this was all :
Fog slithers in behind propellor slideways
Just like a bathtub vortex, only sideways.
31
Petal Point
The alien corn now greeting
Our constant meadowlark
Is rising to an anthem
Still seven notes from dark,
A spastic flit and twitter
Fouls the sleeping earth
And hops the haggard bedding
But fails of giving birth.
Still lilies store the solstice
To hoard the rainbow's share,
And that dark love of daylight
Will peal the flowers to fair
If slow worth will not wither
In temporary vice
That slow worms taste the tuber
Stilled for tasting ice,
That in the twelfth of summer
The dowdy iris ring
The minutes into lavender!
And how the grapevine sing
Of all who wrought in silence
The uniform ground tone
To stand to peal a concord
Out of the cold stone.
Now in the twelfth of darkness
The sundogs bark of light
That lays the corpse of color
In pieties of white;
But in the snowblind darkness
I've hung away the hoe
To taste the toil of tubers
For carols under snow.
32
Dominion
And death is no dominion : never over
Those who swallowed green Aegean fire
Past the gasped judgment or long terror
That shoulders straining at the callused oar,
Long servitude to pain, and thanks for swill
Were better than this genesis of self
Into the sea's quick voice, less quickly stilled;
Nor these whose blood made ribbons on the Ruhr
That minutes past trailed ribbons from a roar;
Nor hiding at a heavy hull, held out
The voice of water driven by a can
Past timidness or welcome for this union,
This bang, met with a whimper or a shout,
An end at least to fear if not to doubt.
For seeps through spring to singing in the birch
And through the thrush to animate the cat
This sea; and here the hare's precocious twitch
Or that opossum's long blind grab for half
It sees when shuttered eyes get round to vision,
The sea comes home, and articles of self
Again assemble into constitution.
33
Biscuit Trap
The wheat consumed becomes the dying flesh
That part the soothing earth to learn to rove
And step away from loving for the fresh,
But flesh without a season wants the flash
Or heritage of law that it conserve
The wheat consumed. Becomes the dying, flesh
That will no root to root but waits the wash
Of roving to the fingers of ground's glove.
And, step away from loving for the fresh,
Shall prodigal have loving, that would rush
From sumptuary memories to prove
The wheat consumed becomes the dying flesh?
Let careful coursing keep us from the gash
Of despair's doubt and diversions, else the drive
And step away from loving. For the fresh
Is not unnatural to law : that flush
Of found excuse for fear but dies above
The wheat consumed, becomes the dying flesh
And step away from loving for the fresh.
34
/Jesaja Singt Dreizig/
And though the tulips sleep, there shall be spring,
And April, /timor mortis/, cruel to peace
And cowardice. But where shall be our singing
When none of voice will make its song itself,
None sing the center, the /sum/ that is /art/,
Our mouth become the dragonfly again?
And what reflect our singing, when again
Our eyes are but the garnishments of spring
And gratitude become their only art?
The word breed the seedling of my peace
But not myself, what song shall make itself
When I am not, and it cursed with my singing?
Rare deity! who squalls the sword to singing
Against its fear of swords shall fear again
The singing of that sword against itself
When swords have done with turning up the spring
To aging pieties, that peep of peace
And pule that plowshares ever turned their art!
What gratitude shall that expect that art
The eater of the singer and the singing?
Rare deity! Then pray thy parts for peace
When still arms will not sing, and chant again
The leaves of me to pacify what spring
When my peace is become beside itself!
Peace it is, that does not see it. Self
We are not, save what learn the lonely art
That knows what's lost by sleeping into spring,
And what is kept, nor struts to ancient singing
That prods the emptied flesh to jerk again
With song pretended, twitching in its peace.
And I will leak into the teeming peace
That has not me, and so starves on itself
It strut me forth, but empty once again,
And petulant with sleep. Cherish the art :
That we are ever, only I am singing,
And that is ever murdered by thy spring.
And the stars sleep again, I fear not spring :
Though Thou art nothing I'm, and we are peace
And past itself, shall come my sword and singing.
35
Two Swords
/Basho~:/
Liveliest blade, /katana/'s gem
Is passed precisely through the stem,
And watch the blossoms drop like blood
In pseudotemporary flood,
They stain the ground, and scent the rain,
And fly back to the branch again.
/Luke:/
But since, to bother things in bloom,
A larva's lung is little room,
About the iris I will go
For blossoms unconsumed by snow
With one light sword and pocket fire
But not the let of those I hire.
36
Open Season
The finger on the trigger pokes
At skeins of wings and flying stalls
Still certain there are other jokes
And other wheels with other spokes
To spin when the long gambol calls
The finger on the trigger, pokes
The pinions through the stinging smokes
To speak of sport and fading falls
Still. Certain there are other jokes
That flying flips at lesser blokes
When having tired of legal scrawls
The finger on the trigger pokes
A sentence, Betty Crocker stokes
The belly, and the baby squalls
Still certain there are other jokes.
And reattached to normal folks
Whom nothing but the gander galls,
The finger on the trigger pokes,
Still certain there are other jokes.
37
He Played One
I sit in and the season curse outside :
After this fall is another fall
Whether I take a bride or take no bride.
And first the trees and then the land grow pied
And then myself, as crickets plunder all
I sit in, and the season curse outside
As weighted boughs to weighted eaves elide
While sparrows spread their daily breed and gall.
Whether I take a bride or take no bride
The squirrels consume their bounty in their stride
While woods decay, and words decay and sprawl;
I sit in and the season curse outside
For all man sees but only to confide
To that secure confessor alcohol
Whether I take a bride or take no bride,
But five good cords of wood are cut and dried
And ancient friends dispel our /petit mal/:
I sit in, and the season curse outside
Whether I take a bride or take no bride.
38
159 (from /Eurydice/)
Long on the loon green dark of booming ice
Not thick enough to bear the trembling flesh
Hudora steels rush, throwing out a sash
Of where I've almost been, where almost cris-
Is, far from navesides waiting under rice
For their own hope to kiss the steel or crash
The party, but who have no wish to splash
Or tender stretch marks as our gambit's price.
It is the worth of daring, daring worth,
And dark has no dominion under it :
As stroke by stroke the stripe extract the fear
From ignorance, the shape of earth stand forth
And strop the straining to a perfect fit :
Who has the steel to stride it, he will hear.
39
Sleeping Beauty
The butterfly prince
Goes hither and yon
And flashes and glints
Of dawn after dawn.
And asters and mints
That wither and yawn
Awake at the hints
Wherever has gone
The butterfly prince.
40
Logos
A word is just a little way
Into wisdom, not enough
To taste. A time I put away
The parables that I could stay
Still shows the centuries how tough
A word is : just a little way
Past other noises of the day
Returns a beating breath, a puff
To taste, a time I put away
As it went out, and you to play.
Another penny on my cuff :
A word is just. A little way
Beyond what people want to pray
Is what was said : sufficient stuff
To taste a time. I put away
The children's words in coming gray
However, for the book to rough
A word is just a little way
To taste a time I put away.
41
Eternal Father
If one galled up and rammed, all Arthur mad
The little grins behind the belted bullets;
For my suckling sake strained long at shapes
That would or would not answer gleam from gloom
With jellied gas to kiss the bubbled flesh;
He is my father, for these fathers made
The world their gate before the senses scattered;
Who got this wheat their blood are more my blood
And I their get, my garden by their guard,
Than goat-glad fluid in the groping dark.
42
Night Train
When the ice is released on the river to crush
And the river released on the land
Comes the crooked express in a waver and rush
And no one to raise them a hand.
And they dawdle with little but dottle and strand
Between the horizon and me,
For the geese are returned to the promise of land
That promises not to agree.
Low over the stoop and the stubble they stutter
Strung out in a long allemande,
Amassed in a gaggle to cast for their butter,
And no one to raise them a hand
For the calendar, clock, and a stick and a string
Have fathered a foolish decree
That gathers the geese to fly south in a spring
That promises not to agree.
Allow that the love of the fool is more clever
Than faith of its mountains of sand
And the lot that they leave to the love of the lever
With no one to raise them a hand,
For the river lets go of both garbage and brand
And the seasonal still referee
Whatever shed feathers as season command
That promises not to agree,
But out on the heather the feathers will be
With no one to raise them a hand,
For faith and the feather will father a land
That promises not to agree.
43
Pueblo
Our father's house is old, and he moves slowly
Showing us our coming through our ages
Scattered in layers, glowing from the walls.
His house is high, and there are many stairways.
Here we made a home among our people
Bringing up from where all stone will tumble,
Tucked beside a shoulder for our sleeping
Leveled on a mountain for our seeing
One great ear for the whispers of the evening.
Now our father has these halls to listen
Remembering a dream that was his people
Remembering the men that were this dream
For half a life of any of the people
Planting corn, and bringing stone and timber
For half a life, and then the water left us
That must seep up to shape a man from sand.
We left the corn to honor him of this
But he, who knows what fathers have to mind,
Is busy with the making of this place,
Is busy with this place that is to make us.
The rats have had the corn, as busy things
Are ever set upon by things that bother
But give them little of their dear attention.
By this we know the business of fathers,
And that their business is not quite with us.
Forgive us as we get on getting on,
As best of children have to turn to trades
When they are more than is their father's house;
Water and fire express a shape from clay
That hardens, is of use, and suffers changes;
Here in our sun we learn what we become;
Our kilns burn out too quick to shape a people.
44
Asturias
How comes this wonder with the icegriped night
From mummied thumbs in Andalusian bars,
Or urgency this adamant make light
The same sham theme at which our ice land spars?
When wailing water strides in shatter shod
And squalls itself to shards from shrilling threats
In petulance its anarch splinters spall,
What southron hails, or sunmulled cordial treats
That unalive, malevolent dark fraud
Whose lurch seems come to ram one cracking wall?
None who confound a friend may linger here
Where ice can creep the boottops to the will
That some succumb the midnight of their year
To weight our memory with winterkill:
What can that Andalusia know, this dread,
Whose chords must cozen and whose hands adore
Terpsychore, lean solarheated miss
Whose thunder in the heel, the bull, the blood
Turns, quivering to frost the one guitar
And it alone, has loved enough to kiss?
One man alone can midnight so engage
He cries the dawn, and only he let spit
At nights so cold their lotion sears his rage
Who knows the shot will snap before it hit;
And he alone imagines overmuch,
And he alone will whistle up a tune
That will outwalk the fellow firelight
And in the midnight of the desert touch
The core of chill in fire, that afternoon
Ring with what deserts also know of night.
45
Saging Calves
Of what of late do bathroom mirrors accuse
These legs once modeled on the Parthenon?
The curves of calves sag toward the socks, refuse
The arch displays we so once counted on.
As form is function, so testosterone:
The jig relaxes into these /garandes/,
A middle viewpoint, easier with the bone,
And settles into pulling with both hands.
Baryzhnikov might hold this air more chill,
Whose urgent lumps so well admit their height
They blurt Nijinsky even standing still
As herons leap from posture into flight;
But my intent's to climb into my age,
And if that bent must leave its curves behind
That it arrive, I'll not reverse the gauge
Just so my stockings don't look misaligned;
And those low curves anticipate their cup,
Is that why youth that advertises youth
Makes so much effort just to keep it up?
The mound is the most primitive of truth,
But what would have the lout Achilles turned
Had he not fallen for those lesser eyes
Whose small reflection of himself he spurned,
Though multiplied, for all its want of size?
46
Concerto in C-MOS
A little square of plastic in the hall
Has wires behind it, running through the wall,
And wires before it, spreading through a box
Where something leaps this waterfall of shocks.
As in a stream electrons come and go
That once attended salt, oregano,
Or General Patton, so I do not find
It strange they prod a megabyte to mind;
But let them roam from Homer to my disk
Through Charlemagne or any lesser RISC,
I'd rather have one from the man who found
Out first that these electrons run around.
47
Kitty Hawk
From there and there the air is from the sea,
To strike the stare
And dare again the uncrossed threshold be.
And there and there
The message is the same to heron me
And will I dare.
The sea that does not worry at the rocks
To take them off,
That strikes with the monotony of clocks
To take them off,
Will wash away the issue that it mocks
And take it off
That two who took an issue to this place
Or took it off
Took issue with the fulcrum and the brace
And took it off,
Took too the tissue of the human race,
And took it off.
"Just here," in bronze, that riveted to rock,
"This is the place."
As though the tissue, flailing at the clocks
Had flown through this
As well as through the other cute remarks
That would not kiss.
And let our tissue aircraft trick the clock
And butterfly,
And every day that dream, wind up and try
A feathercock,
But who of those who try this way can fly
Around this rock?
And issue fair from ocean all who may
Kill devils still,
But not with prayer -- nor ever those who pray
Kill Devil Hill
Give down to jealousy the air that they
Who keep it still
Recall among the meadowlark, the gray,
The whippoorwill.
48
Song
Who hear the mermaids singing find the song
Is always more than instruments allow;
The fingers' chalk clogs even that small flow.
And so we fling our get into the stream
To try their start ahead of ours by us,
In hope that one, at last, will learn the tune.
Who hears the mermaids singing, has been sung to.
49
Moving In
After the flood there was the olive branch.
Now from the throats of lesser men,
The threats of night return again;
The east sky glows
With declarations of desire
To soak us in a sickly fire
Where nothing grows.
Our only light is from the common blanch.
Poets stutter, singers gasp
The fist that falters out to grasp
Is merely nettled;
Keys go lurching out of tune
From being moved four times since June
But never settled.
The glove's among the kittens. And the bet.
If mere monotony of fall
Can burn our spring to browning gall,
The mulch of dolor,
There come the asters, singing still
The pointillisms of the cell
That we uncolor.
Our fingers will grow empty with regret.
We scrape this house they left to rot
And sow a little seed to clot
What decomposes,
Caulking cracks against the stench
And doors against the /untermensch/
And plastic roses.
50
Heaven Can Wait
Turned tiny spaces, tiny atoms go
Like kittens at their tails and at each other;
In bigger ovals, planets seem to know
All things to which the aether is a mother.
The seers say they know the planets know
And also know the way of finding out,
Their Special Words remove the domino
And fifty bucks removes the last of doubt.
For none would pay good money for a fraud:
The fact can make a preacher of a clam
And such proliferation of a god
That worlds of priests can profit on the scam.
I'm up to here with "being good for God,"
Some one or some thing else I've yet to meet
From passing up the finish for the plod
To burping beans to Lent out all the sweet :
Some how I never think to want the prize,
But keep on sweating when the course is run;
I study things my pals all ostracise,
And go to bed while others have the fun.
The carrot out of reach above the sky
Is placed that serfs can't taste it and explain
The economics that their work imply
But give it to the church and start again.
My sixteen-hour days have brought my sight
So far beyond That Yea-and-Nay accounting
That every time We speak, We have a fight
On some new way to What We are amounting.
Amount we do, for everything We touch
Turns gold of one kind or another; why,
We fatten on the stuff that others' crutch
Calls Sin and tells Its worshippers to die.
/That/ God can't make a weight so heavy He
Can't lift it all, a fatal failing, so
No matter what thy God can do to thee,
He can't kick /Us/ without a purpled toe.
And so We dicker for the coming years
In strategies that have become a game
(That once would kill, no matter prayers or tears)
'Til each new contest has become the same:
I the assailant, We the waiting trap
Or little pot of gold that gets me by:
He tells me which, I listen for the snap,
And Rumplestiltskin's name if I don't lie,
From chili time to chili time the game
So variegated, hell so boring plain
And heaven but a single frozen frame,
That when I "die," I go around again.
Up from the wheat and out from any book,
We rise to ruckus, never pause for grief
And add ingredients to let them cook
An endless oval meal, but no belief.
Who wants relief from living? Only they
Who have confused their dying as a goal
And think to worship angels in array
Is better than to live (or shovel coal).
For what is worship but a way to loaf,
A Voice that will not say a sucker wrongs
(According to the comfort-buying oaf
(Who minds a place where he alone belongs)?
I'm glad I live again amid the choice
Of what to have and hold, to shun or try,
Though there are those who spend their dying Voice
To see that every Christian has his Bligh.
If Dark Nights hit with good old Christian Doubt
At least I know as much as my old cat
That life is tasty, worth the purr about,
And living's where the only game is at.
51
Fort
There were four bushes when I was a boy,
That met above, their stems become a door
Debouched upon a ditch, a total toy
From which I fought, or fed a bangalore:
A baseball bat in either case, but not
Your middle kind, for it would ever poke
Them out of park for real, or wipe the snot
From any who would make my life their joke.
Three times a day, I lay and thought a bit
Of private notions in a private school,
And then one day, the door no longer fit:
The world was not a playground, I, a fool.
Only a little fool. So much to learn!
I got the year's material in a quarter
So I could study at my next concern
Free from any pause for what I orter.
Then every day, I'd nibble at the means,
While every night, I'd gobble at the poop,
Content to push my pen and let the beans
Commit whole blocks while eating their own soup.
Now I've a thousand poems and eight degrees
No State has sanctioned with its rubber stamp;
Though not, I will continue to reprise
The formula: one man, one book, one lamp.
I saw those bushes, little more than weeds
(The janitor was cutting with a knife)
Since I replaced my dreams with other dreams,
And those with deeds that took up all my life.
52
Saving Face
These dancing-figured rocks that men call "bone"
Still tell him after twenty thousand years;
They chime his time and tools and where he's grown,
And know his world, having forgot his fears.
The heart has leaked away; the mind is sped
With other photons to the fringe of space,
And yet this rock so reasserts the head
An archaeologist applies the face.
And what looks back from such a different time
Is we, ourselves, still alien to thought,
Still looking for the pap from kin and clime,
And murdering who reasons as he ought.
Still wanting love, but settling for sex,
Our monk does not let stress address tomorrow,
Nor grief the laurel wreath a moment wrecks;
Content with theft, he does not ever borrow,
And tells his children only that they win.
Not that they lose for being indifferent wise:
He knows the world entirely by skin,
Succumbing always to the least disguise.
And when our manimal stands up to sing
In words and notes that puffed another cheek,
He thinks them novel to his little fling,
And says his "I" and strokes himself unique.
Always the block, not ever any chip,
For never will his mighty soul adjourn:
His God has made him solely for this trip,
And anxiously awaits his glad return.
His shoes are never any but his own,
And let no ego wear another face;
All time goes from his crib straight to his stone,
And universe is but a sense of place.
He leaves no self behind; he wakes up dumb;
His face is all the face he ever had;
He has no sense of where he's coming from
And all his ignorance but makes him glad.
I, too, am glad I do not know my face
When I wake up behind an infant pan:
There is new wonder in each commonplace,
Fond knowledge has become a tough koan
For youth to learn in months, that took some years
To gather in the covers of a book
That two semesters turn into careers
Professed by youths who would not even look
A generation back, nor saw creation
No matter how they stared. Of course the frauds
Proliferate with every publication,
For most can do no more than hang our gauds
Across their walls, and claim to be profound,
But parrot noise that changes over time,
Leaving their beaks adrift to suck the sound
And trying every call without the dime.
As towns are different, but the folk alike
In almost every exercise and speech,
Or many roads, and but one way to bike,
And many rooms, and but one thing to teach,
So meat is different, but the soul's the same
That struggles up the bloodline to its source,
Then coasts its length to lucre and to fame
And leaves a better map of all its course.
As I am all who went and all are I,
Our love makes one of any place and time;
Its words let us increase and multiply
In other souls who carry on our rime.
The ancient had but stone to leave his youth
And thirty-seven years to come to term;
What could he teach with ziggurat and tooth
And what, that public buildings could confirm?
At Alexandria the scrolls flamed hot
To give the little folk another bath,
And we were thrown again to what we'd got
In one brief life because a psychopath
Had seen his God, and said that all the folk
Should suck the same or perish by the sword;
The crime of difference was the fertile yolk
That grew the sheep to men to bolt their lord,
And was to be suppressed with school and fire.
It did not walk. No matter how it's dressed,
The truth trips want, and turns it to desire.
And truth exists, and will not be suppressed,
Ignites two souls millenia apart
Into identity and high ideal,
A oneness of the mind, the same strong heart,
The same exactitude in what they feel.
While littleness sucks slops, its parrying
Experience /something/ lesser than its soul,
Its betters fly the everlasting spring,
Parading in a little camisole
For kind and kind to have its way with it,
And when the weather turns, flies back to May
And leaves behind recycled chickenshit
For places where the soul can say its say
And not be burnt for blasphemy although
It must still guard its vowels for the small.
And then the dance wears out, the domino
Falls off, that served its spirit through the ball;
Soul dissipates, and ego takes a rest
Before it wakes, quite ignorant of it
And everything except its former zest:
There is no thing the same except for spit.
To wake again, and find out who it is
Is all the /schmauá/ the wit will ever want:
A strange new puppet with the stranger phiz,
Its only crime to be a dilettante,
The fresh meat grunts in ignorance of all
That came, and went, and came right back to it
An alien, to tickle or appall
But always to assault the kiddylit
Successful brats impose upon the game:
The endless life that no event reminds,
No two with equal rights, no two the same;
Eternal Fathers dwarf their little minds.
And every one of these loves nothing much,
Not even his most fiddled construct, God,
For who could, after all, love something such
As changed each time it got his little prod?
And so we have this alien phizzog
(The only one we've ever seen, though, right?)
That shuts us from the living catalog
Of minds to be, become, with any sight,
By saying we are only so-and-so
And never any else. The old souls tease
From where they sleep amid the books, but go
For years without a conversation. Cheese
Was never so alone for quite so long.
But this is sleep so absolute it dream
Pure nothing: self, the past, the present, song,
Are memory without recall, nor are, nor seem,
And do not care, they sleep so blasted well.
To life, this is sleep's half antithesis:
Now bound to other substrates than the cell,
It sleeps until awakened by the kiss
Of charming love for language, /`agion/
Not just for words, but contents and their dance
With one another and the paragon,
A love whose shit-detector breathes askanse
For every tatter in the argument.
What grows is "I," as every other time,
No matter that it wears a stranger gent
And tans its tuschie in a stranger clime.
The soul ignites, and burns a pretty flame
For each new substance in its memory,
And every fire and pretty is the same
Since /africanus/ had that fantasy
To whack a rock in two and use the edge.
There's much we have forgotten, and so what?
No longer are we crouching in the sedge
With too-slow rabbit covering the butt;
The man who struck the stone grew tired of age,
And traded in his face on something new:
And every child could crack an edge, a mage
Before he took his woman or his queue.
The thing learned young that first appeared to years,
The face continued on its search for fact,
Now multiplied in eyes and hands and spheres,
Begetting self with every artifact
And starting master research in its youth.
His fiddling having now the edge for tool,
Invents an art and clothing, deepest truth
For all his people, even, yes, the fool.
And then one day drew noises on the stone,
And boys spoke that they did not get from Dad,
And whole tribes grew by saying it their own,
Until in time they knew not what they had.
The voice of man become a sovereign Word,
To change as much as stone changed, not a word
That wraps itself around a living age, a word
That changes the age, is changed, denies the Word,
Begetting factions, that had once got race;
Begetting Unions, that had once got craft;
Begetting Law, that age would once replace;
And naming what was thought as merely daft.
The new face learned to keep its words itself,
To roll them softly, well behind the lips,
To keep its parchment on a hidden shelf,
And thought no further than its fingertips.
Still, song will out, for people like to sing,
Whatever sings being well outside the Law
But never criminal. And song can bring
To any man whatever singer saw,
And got to lyrics, in Accepted Speech.
Between the words is something, made them true,
And singing them as he did lets them teach
What is between, that waits to grow as you.
It grew as someone else and grew as me,
The voice being not my frog but that of songs,
The same in me as in I Musici,
That knows no home, but everywhere belongs.
Whatever looks through windows at the world
Sees only world, and it becomes but he,
His nose pressed into lilac, petals pearled
With morning rain, one nose, one thought, one me,
One set of windows for the world to teach,
The same responses that we choose among,
And one dear thought our senses must impeach
Or happily confirm while we're still young
And put into a song that all might sing,
Not only now, but when we would awake
A trade-in, ignorant of everything
But with our lives arrayed for us to take
And take up where we left them or fell off --
Back on the horse, boy! -- ever so much quicker
This next trip through the kissing and the cough:
My god, it loads a fella more than liquor.
So we discard the bone but save the face,
The looking out, and everything that looks
Beyond the different nose, the little place
That wants to be the point of all that cooks,
And wear what we are given, that the soul
Will reignite, inflaming all the same
Sweet springs to life, that it had long made whole,
And breathe black blots of song to living flame.
53
Decisions!
A brown-capped sparrow fluttered from a twig,
A clover in his mouth, the blossom brown;
He didn't care for flowers, but the big,
Straight stalk quite had him up and down.
He checked a crotch, he checked a nook and cranny;
The downspout got attention for a time;
The hedge was low, the eaves were too uncanny,
The apple was too bare and unsublime.
Oh, where to build when instinct yells the fact!
Near food? A bath? Or in the sight of beauty?
How such plain choices complicate the act!
This little stalk is such an awful duty!
The second one is easier, I durst:
He'll simply prop it somewhere by the first.
54
Beehaviour Trait
The bee that bangs against the windowpane,
In love with flight or but a busy part,
Will either way succumb unless my brain
Be more than bee, and add to insect art
The love of plan that's simple for a man
Until he sets to find his own way out.
And then he trips on errors he began
So long ago for want of caution, doubt
That what looks clear may be in fact a death
Of straining at the infinite or blank
Until the beaten soul must curse the breath
That knows not when to quit. Or whom to thank.
I scooped the bugger up, and let her go.
What is my window? I will never know.
55
In the Beginning...
Poor Mother Nature had to learn to live,
First putzing with nucleic acids, pro-
teins disconnected from the formative,
And sugars in profusion. Not to grow,
But surely not to quit the carousel;
No, just to have a group-grope, see what might,
All oceans being come a single cell
And eating not invented yet that night
When sun and lightning were the only power
And evening and morning were The Day.
The globules grew each hour on the hour
As molecules continued with their play,
Wrapping the double helix in itself
And wrapping that in things that could compel
This molecule and that down from the shelf
And wrap all in the swaddle of the cell.
Oh, boy, the things biology did then!
(With some experiments done just to spite 'em),
Increased and multiplied and yet again,
And also combinations infinitum
To see what worked, and what went back to swill
To try another patch, and see if it
Would entertain itself to whippoorwill
Or, like so many others, fail to fit.
A billion years went by; atomic dance
Gave rise to both the cute and the bizarre;
And every one the lone result of chance
That found itself a mate from not too far.
From sacculi to worms, from worms to fish
(Do worms regret their offspring?), and from there
To lizards, birds, and mammals, and the dish.
(How beautiful was Eve? It wants, I swear,
How ugly Adam's older sisters were!)
How we then ruled the world! The highest life
Had servants in abundance, each quite sure
Of his own place, and whom to take to wife.
With some to build the house, some to catch fish
And tend the fire, see all the rain kept out
And fell the venison into the dish,
And see to it that we should never pout,
We had some eons in the lap of posh.
But then some slaves begat appliances
And masters of them then begat the frosh,
Who, in their turn, coined other sciences
Begetting more contraptions for the folk
To pay attention to, not serving us
As they were bred to by the Cosmic Yolk,
Made for the purpose strong and omnibus.
But they did not forget us totally:
An Industry provides us with our food,
And towns provide our aristocracy
The rats and mice we need for attitude;
And slaves can still be told to scratch our chins,
And some will listen, fewer understand,
Because they've other languages for grins
Than what the cosmic whirligig had planned.
But we're content, though we no longer rule;
We've lost our law and gained degrees of sloth
Impossible to Old Ways and their school.
And someday, we will wear again the cloth.
56
Flashes
The thunder crackles right across the sky,
Scaring the Kitties, who worry at my socks;
The rain says, "Hush!" by way of a reply,
Washes off worry, and resets the clocks.
The world moves slower when the rain speaks out,
As thought keeps pace when everything can drink;
The rain can muffle the most hateful shout,
And in the hushing quiet, man can think.
The thoughts like lightning flicker through the mind,
Strobe-frozen clarity that lamps can't match,
But suddenness of notion makes us blind,
And afterimages are all we catch.
No matter that my dearest thoughts escape:
The living afterimage keeps the shape.
57
Group Grope
My friends all pressed the living flesh
To keep their little knowledge fresh,
And now their causes only mesh
Through little men:
They get to do but what the least
Will let, including the deceased,
For passing up the greater feast
For /pukka gen/.
The lilac teaches color, and
The ep‚e teaches all the hand;
The tractor teaches all the land
And then the wrench;
Piano teaches hand and ear,
The target teaches all the scear,
And teeth will teach the destrier
As will the stench.
The sparrow teaches industry;
The rocks teach all about BC;
The music teaches how to be
A ballroom dancer;
The iris teaches things come back;
The cat, the aphrodisiac;
You only taught me that my SWAK
Would get no answer.
And then there is the poetry
That teaches any how to be
By pressing people long to sea
As molecules,
And finding that he feels the same
As folks who lived without your blame
And learned without your little game
Of primer schools
That culture bullies for their arms,
Administrators for their charms,
Cheerleaders for the little harms
They can imagine,
Who sic policemen on their betters
And gobble at the men of letters
For that they do not speak like setters
Or take to hajjin'.
The world will teach its smallest thing
To any who will learn to sing
In harmony, not chorusing
But his own kind;
And all that learn what world just is,
Regardless of his little phiz
Or the objections of his ms.,
Have the same mind.
When pressed to universe, a man
Can anticosmopolitan
Or learn what template law began
And so continue
To love the all that he can find
Since birth had left him realigned,
And, loving, can rebuild his mind
From any menu,
Or flesh can press the empty flesh
In which the ignorance is fresh,
And blank to blank will always mesh
If never stick,
While fantasy can pitch a fence
No other fancy covenants
And you feel all the difference
Just make you sick.
How different when the world at large
Takes plastic mind into its charge
And swages girl against its marge
To make a dame:
A girl who passes nature's quiz
Needs no mean rule to make a Ms.,
For every little difference is
So much the same!
And "love" means "same" in every tongue.
It's why the ignorant and young
Can fall so far in "love" they're sung
By other folk.
But those that world has made alike
By pressing them along their hike
Make every youngster's lucky strike
A standing joke
By bearing all that world may heap
(A load they always choose to keep!)
And making culture on the cheap
From what they're given,
And being still the same as they
Were any other yesterday,
Take old and new but to parlay
It into heaven,
Just where the bible says it is
(Between the rainclouds and the fizz
Should some "believer" pop a quiz)
To be enjoyed
By every man along his way
Who writes a word for his next Cray
For having reason to replay
What age destroyed.
58
Salt
One-eighth a teaspoon at a time,
I ate a pound of salt,
And sweat it out, and washed the rime
Back to the primal fault.
The salt came back up from the sea
In little tuna cans,
And, once again, it washed through me
For we had set no banns.
It flew back overhead; I shot,
And down there came a duck
And I cooked up my same old snot
And sat again to suck.
A farmer bought a block of salt
That dried out from the sea;
The butcher made his own assault
And I came back to me.
What is it with my salt that it
Performs this chivaree?
It comes right back by holy writ
For it can only see
In me.
59
In the Dark
Stupidity of roots I like:
They are but little rooms
In which the chemicals of life
Turn into blooms.
The roots are stupid, dark and deep:
They bump against the water,
And chemical bumps chemical
And gets a daughter.
And chemical bumps chemical
In dreary little rooms,
And man gets population bombs
But nothing blooms.
60
/Multum in Parvo/
I met a bird who sang a merry tune
And rummaged in the bushes as he sang;
His eyes were bright, for it was early June,
But all his notes were over just as soon,
Reiterated in a short harangue
That left him in the wild, and all alone,
/For he had played too much his mother's music
And it had filled his heart and stilled his own/.
I met a man who sang a merry song
And played a stomach Steinway as he sang;
His eyes were far away, and all along
With all that noise, his face did not belong,
And made the gayness but a mere harangue,
His voice-cast but another homophone,
/For he had played too much of others' music
And it had filled his heart and stilled his own/.
I met a boy who dabbled at a noise
And left a punk tape playing while he sang;
He let his licks be carried by the boys
He so admired he let go his own toys
To lag along their infantile harangue
That led him on by offering a bone,
/For he had played too much his brothers' music
And it had chilled his heart and stilled his own/.
I met a man who sang so women wept
Though he would laugh and hold them as he sang;
It was for all the company he kept
That had not changed nor rendered him inept:
He'd find the music even in harangue
And listen well, but father it alone,
/For he was never any other's music
Though it had filled his heart and thrilled his own/.
61
Circle
The elms are yellow on the blue,
All yellow held in black,
With blackbirds perched between the two,
For winter's coming back.
The spade stands by the garden plot
And bags of bulbs stand by,
For spring is coming back, I wot,
And so, by god, am I,
And I don't feel like all the work
To make a life from scratch,
So I will what I must not shirk
And tend my little patch
For when I reinhabit it
With other eyes than these,
And it will make me out of spit
And anyone, agrees
Blackbirds belong in longing flocks
And elms on azure sing,
And everyone rewinds their clocks
When tulips greet the spring.
62
Through a Glass, Darkly
What have we learned by looking with a lens --
A lens of skin and water for a start;
To Leuwenhoek's small drop of glass, the fens
Gave up their fauna to the leaking heart
That sought extension of its little art,
First into space and finally into time;
The world is closed to those who play their part
And all are held by the gravedigger's lime.
To pad the part without extending crime
Is what the act is all about: to see
And know the fundamental or sublime
Before we make our little Agassiz
Is what this lump of flesh is for. To flee
Is death for never having woken up;
The body lives to keep the eyeball free,
And fed, and cleanly with the little cup
If necessary, and the heart's /lub-dup/
To flush the brain of preconceptions, too,
For only then can eyeball take its tup
Of all that seeing wonder can accrue.
The eye's to make the foot to fit the shoe,
Or so to speak, but how fit universe
Who cannot see it for our small halloo?
It takes a lens, to bring what we rehearse
The stuffs of stars and planets, to converse
Real place in all the winking heavens,
Not some everlasting Daddy's curse,
And not the "planets'" stupid little sevens
Dicing with the minute of our leavens
(Though some get rich for merely saying so!).
And so I take this telescope of Kevin's
And see the best that I can see, although
It turns the stars to rings if not set /so/:
It shows me how a /real/ telescope
Must measure for astronomers the glow
Of something cosmic, and stir up the hope
That this exposure really gets the dope
On that damn thing, whatever it may be,
Despite that some well-lobbied misanthrope
Reduced the funding. Aristocracy
Were quite as fickle, bounded by the See,
And scared of priests. Our government is not,
But still is scared of voters, one, two, three,
Who do not want their jobs to go to pot.
Aside from that, there was no caveat
To fund the world's biggest piece of glass
To see the shoreline from our little yacht
Still not to know if we're alone, alas.
To universe, we're kindergarten class,
But never will we graduate with those
Who bind their lens in leather, faith in brass,
And count the men of seeing in their foes,
Who lay what they have learned in little rows,
Never to disturb the lot again.
We must learn not to want their brief hellos
To make us feel another citizen,
Nor their opinions on the Saracen
To make us think we know him well enough
To loose the dogs of warfare once again.
If need be, we'll be thought us rather gruff,
But take the microscope to other stuff,
The other end of cosmos to the eye,
And time, to writing wonder on the cuff.
Before we bid the stars a brief goodbye,
However, give the Pleiades a try,
To see what simple beauty there's in stars.
And then to microscope, there to defy
The ignorance of all that's small, from scars
To crystals, animals like cars
That drive their way through swamps in search of food
With not a single thought for any Mars,
Indeed not any thought they may allude,
Reserved for cats and mankind to extrude.
As cups and bullets they assault their day
With no least thinking even for the brood,
For all their reproduction's by the way,
A chemical reaction they can't stay:
No matter what, there will be more of them,
Divided parts not leading to dismay
But growing up into another BEM.
But what's the meaning of this QRM,
This putting glass between the living eye
And universe, this human diadem
That is the one most human thing we try?
What is the meaning of the Gemini
Or any little water-sucking bug
Expands the meaning of the butterfly?
Can Black Holes add a whit to any hug
Or stellar sequence deal with any thug
A notion better than a length of pipe?
Well, "yes" and "yes." What makes a fella snug
Is all the background for his little hype,
The knowledge that he's not one of a type,
But can abide the law with any man,
And law be larger than a little gripe.
And that is why, since humankind began,
He's tried to see, and do it with elan
Despite objection from the neighborhood;
Already he was cosmopolitan,
And knew that seeing was the greatest good:
If he could see a thing, he knew he could
Achieve it for himself, and all his race
Would benefit if they but understood
Nor strove to make the thing a commonplace.
And so we fit our lenses to a brace
The steadier to see with, come what will;
We even fit them to the human face
So that the face may better fit the bill.
And "fit" is what it is about, or kill
The germ of knowledge with a "tut, tut, tut":
It doesn't take a dose of Mellaril
To set an observation on its butt,
Superior feeling in the infant gut
Will do it every time to any datum.
That is why the clearing of the nut
And finding out that little bit of flatum
Is requisite if you'd skip the erratum
Your heavy bear brings to the least of sights,
Let well alone if you'd observe the atom.
But thus the eager eye stays well up nights
At microscope or telescope or rights,
And sees what it can see, and takes it home,
And gives his wife the fits, the children frights
Until, at last, he tames it to the comb.
And then he tries to sell it down to Rome,
And none will buy. They try to string him up
Because they've quite forgotten their /shalom/,
But our old hero's not a runner-up
And won't take that from any sort of pup,
Let well alone the sort of brats are these.
He takes it home: if he alone will sup
On what he found, well, pass the pepper, please,
And not too much. Keep your Eumenides
For those their threat can sway. Not ever him.
He does not seek his sightings to appease
The sort of brat whose world's a nasty whim.
Leave him alone with any paradigm,
He'll find new ways to use it just to see
What else there is to make a world less grim
Or else remove another fallacy
For those who must inherit company
By spending all their lives among the books.
For all of this, his pay is memory,
The stuff that, by itself, is man, gadzooks:
We all have the ingredients, he cooks.
His sight subtends the planets and the germ,
And all because he loves, because he looks,
And, having seen, he simply doesn't squirm.
At every sight, he sees if it affirm
Or else deny the little that he knows,
Is not afraid to flush out the infirm
And live with nothing 'til a new one grows,
And when it does, he positively glows,
For universe has told him something new:
He does not need to put on any shows.
I wish I'd say the same for me and you.
63
Autumn
The first frost killed all things that have no fur,
Stopping the worms in burrows, and the moth
His final molt, to spend the winter sure
Of spring and flight, arising from the broth
His worm became within his tight cocoon;
The field mice likewise roll into their sleep
And trees seep down into their smallest roots.
All things await their lives, but no time soon;
Spring's time enough that worms resume their creep
And all wait out the ice to see what foots.
The brightest flowers slumber in the bulb
And birds have talked it over and gone south;
Fat bears have found a respite from the cub;
The very soil finds respite from the mouth.
The rotifer slips down the thermocline
To wrap the lovely mud about his shell;
The frogs have joined him in the lovely mud;
The fish are torpid in the cooling brine
(The colder chemicals don't live so well);
Most things pay homage to the slowing blood.
Man and the cat do not give one least whit
That winter is icumen in; to them
Winter but simplifies; to say that it
Is cold enough is hardly to condemn
When folks have stoves and fur. But these are not
Yet needed, quite; the office windows gape
To smells of yellowed leaves and browning fruit,
And everything a shrinking world has got
To speak out for itself. It is a jape
And ignorant to say death wins its suit
This "dying" season: everything but sleeps
However deeply, even to a stop
The cat can't emulate, although he keeps
Trying. For, turn the living world to slop,
Autumn is the season of the fruits
In which life slumbers into wanton spring,
Or gets into a man -- and wakes as him.
There is a transformation beyond shoots,
Known to the moth, unknown to copying
The parent in the seed, a paradigm
That all who turn their food into a thought
Know. Although it probably is done
Without their knowing any words, and ought
To be curriculum for everyone,
An owner's manual of ways and means,
Or else a life must be forever fall,
Awaiting sleep. For, does the being wake,
It spends its life aware of sleep and beans
Instead of just the beans. And, for its gall,
It spends its life in chronic bellyache.
But after sleep comes waking. Worms don't brew,
And neither does the moth, what they will be
After they sleep, or even that they do,
Or even that they throw themselves asea
Upon the laws of universe for this:
The laws know all of these things for them,
And they will wake as what the laws conserve,
And stretch, and yawn, and go about to kiss
The whole of world that law has laid before them,
With solid effort if without our verve.
It's man, alone, greets waking with a scream
And spends his life to try to crawl back in,
Because he does not hear the law, or seem
Ever to want to. Thus, his only grin
Is thinking up some thing to get away with,
Believing that he actually does
Although the world's bright law cannot be broken.
Or give him something simple just to play with:
Wife and kids, economies because,
And he's full of himself, and loudly spoken.
But let a man leave patterns for his soup
Like law has left the moth before his sleep,
Recall that map before he is a stupe,
And he is up from sleeping on the cheap,
Fully a man before the age of ten.
Of course, he must put up with all his fellows,
Who smell the difference (it must be smell,
For they have little thought, and less amen)
And leave him wearing all the blues and yellows
They can manage. This is called "hard sell."
For they're in love with sleep. It has no problems
They can't solve with nothing but a whine,
And all their universe is shades of pablums
Waiting for the mouth to realign.
The worms they fear do nothing but the same;
Perhaps it's competition. Off the cuff,
I'd have to say they've no more souls than worms,
Or dogs who grow their children to the game;
However little, it is soul enough
The thought of "dying" gives it major squirms,
So they imagine places that it "goes,"
And people that it "meets" when it gets "there";
It "burns," it "worships," everything but /grows/,
And spends its life in other people's hair.
It's coming on to fall, and I shall sleep
In perfect safety from that little mob;
I shan't be "going" anywhere but "out,"
And leave this map for all who care to keep
The little part of me that was my job,
Shriven of mistakes, false starts, and doubt.
The rest of me, they will supply themselves,
For eyes are eyes, and see the universe
As well as I, who had my little shelves
To tell me what I saw in words as terse
As any I have set myself to write;
The half that turns to pudding like the moth
Will reassemble just like all my life
Behind another smell, another sight,
With thought arising not from any broth,
But from these little words I took to wife.
64
Best Friends
I like my books. They're best of sports:
I read them in my bathrobe, in my shorts,
In ways that would have lawyers filing torts,
Nor they nor any author thinks it rude.
They take me places I have but construed,
And there they treat to all but local food.
They visit in the morning, late at night,
At home, and other places out of sight,
And tell me that I'm wrong or that I'm right,
On every subject that a man has pounced.
Whenever I come to call, I'm never bounced.
And they don't ever drop in unannounced.
65
Feeder Flight
Intent on work, the Pratt & Whitneys drone:
This plane was new in 1936.
The props still bite, the landing gear still groan,
The blast still scatters baggage-boys and sticks
As we swing out to taxi to the road
Whose other end is sky, with our small load.
66
/Tabula Rasa/
The atoms dance offstage,
The data flicker out.
Fame says "Turn the page,
It's time again for doubt."
You wake up in a crib
With Faces so intent
On every little squib,
You think you rule their bent,
For all that now appears
Submits itself to you,
And feeds and wipes and cheers
Dear spastic little you.
67
Sun Bath
The sun finds out my every secret place,
The breeze caresses every little hair,
The grass is pressing up against my face:
My life and world are having an affair.
Extend the human nerve to comprehend
The why at all we live, what we may do
(This bag of chemicals aware of self
So fond of purpose fit for a weekend!),
Who, bored with every rose and morning dew
Invents the cyclotron, the God, the elf.
His words and numbers are unique to him
But change the world for every thing that lives;
Long down from trees, he still lives on a limb
That anything may saw unless he gives
Attention to result beyond mere taste
And first-approximation fantasy;
His words and numbers are his only gift,
But they, with him, will only be erased
As species are, who love too much their tree
And use but noses on the things they've sniffed.
The fly's aware of self, what sullies it,
And what to do with things that shouldn't stick;
Just now one washes in a little spit
His front and back and all that makes him slick.
And buzzes off to put the world to taste,
Where hap can kill him in the midst of suck:
Where atoms rule, only the atoms dance.
Perhaps it only seems a shame men waste
Their little minutes, unexcused by "luck,"
When all have means to dowse their circumstance,
For natural selection takes our culls
As certain as slow flies will feed the sparrow.
And we reply: we laud our little trulls
While bitching out those on the straight and narrow:
It is a "power" words have given us
To stick our fingers at the living world,
Be instantly superior to all
(Our Gods in this same image, ominous,
Able to hold what we have lately hurled,
And speaking "Words" scrawled out of alcohol).
I could imagine grass as being purple
(Some cabbage is, one stinky indoor plant:
The chemistry /exists/), but here the maple
Stops for it is red /enough/, not /can't/.
And here you stride across my purple grass,
Moving all ways at once, a wicked grin
That knows damned well just what it now bestir
To raise its head from looking through its glass:
Delicious weights stick out and welcome in
My self: we have a species to ensure.
And then we lie and wonder how to share
The joy in self no dragonfly can lose
To ill-fit words that leave a being bare
To things he can express, but cannot choose
Thereafter to ignore, for they might get him,
No matter that, in forty thousand years
Of trading scares around the homely fire,
A couple thousand more of wearing shoes,
No single one of them has ever bit him.
But fear's a thing can always find a buyer,
And other "angels" make such fine excuse
For never needing find the balls to try:
They let the childhood keep its future loose
Despite its deaths increase and multiply.
I cannot ask the dragonfly for words;
It does not verbalise the swerve and bite
By which it lives on slower stuff, then grooms:
All that the sun slams in, it turns to turds
And action that depends upon the light.
It stores no papers, for it has no rooms.
I am the one who wears my fathers' minds
For choosing to, because I wish to live
Beyond the solar jerks of other kinds;
As me, they see what sunlight has to give
(And you, that other ages would not dare!)
What midnight candles hauled into my light:
What life can build, but given them for start,
How far their species progressed to the fair
(Your fair!) without each meal involving fight,
Because a man can trade his aging heart
For youth that wallows in the thrill of stuff
Announcing self to eyes without a lie
Yet built in by excuse for not enough,
Or worthless that they think that they will die.
You interrupt my saving of the earth
(It saves itself, I save enough of me)
To tease my mouth with stalactites of flesh
That dare me to spelunk your deepest worth
Beyond even our latest blasphemy
And give myself to start us both afresh.
68
Conch
This is the color of the twilight sea,
The "statement" of a creature without voice,
Whose parts assume one face of entropy
And build this form without a single choice.
Sheer laws are what produced this numbered rock
From molecules that crashed into a cell,
Were given order, and then spit back out:
This is the curve of growing by the clock,
Of food so certain calendars compel
This perfect curve in something kin to grout.
Cell grown from cell by seeing what would fit
To different "start" codons, DNA
Has cobbled out a gut with cells that spit
This lime along one side for all their play,
And, given its direction by its cells,
The tiny being crawls along itself
To lay a loop of lime when out in sight,
But not when it is home, for that compels
Its edges shut, the Continental Shelf
Receiving one small shell that didn't right.
But this great Queen was right up to the last,
The nacre pink and pink of morning hues
Across the flange it couldn't get quite past,
The thing it grew instead of wearing shoes:
For decades, here is nothing but the curl
Expanding in a regular parade
Of spiral and small cones that grow in size,
And then the flange takes over like an earl
Beyond all law, and eats what it has made
And, having reached its living limit, dies.
For once the flange flares out and cries, "adult,"
The curl must stop, and every other growth,
And all its action but maintains the fault
Of living in a thing whose name is sloth,
Oozing from meal to meal and shit to shit,
Its artwork finished though it clings to life
With chemical tenacity of kind.
No action of its own can further it,
But if it should embrace the butterknife,
The magic of the numbers builds a mind.
And if that mind should think upon the shell
And on the little meat that built it up,
It's just god seeing that his work goes well
And taking home a limestone loving-cup.
And love it is, that makes these colors glow
If love is dedication to a sight;
But how call "dedication" what is part
Of a machine includes a sea so slow
The stupid shark can eat him to a blight
And most of all that eats it has no heart?
And how to call it love, whose every art
Knows nit of color, never takes the knife,
Whose key to world's a robot, clutchless fart
That grinds out lime by continents for life?
How call it love, that at its peak of form
/Reverses/ every choice that made it splendid,
Defiles the living curve with one great splay
Renouncing all the numbers of its dorm,
Repudiating all that it has ended
With one swoop clutching, no, /becoming/ clay?
Design /does/ "govern in a thing so small,"
Design and accident; but what design
Contains the point at which it says, "that's all"
With such rejection of itself? The Klein
Flask isn't quite so goddamn convoluted.
It is not accident: conch, whelk, and murex
All binge upon the lime to spit the leaven.
And never was so much so well-refuted,
Not even by depressives drinking Purex:
At least the human thinks he "goes" to "heaven."
Perhaps it is the story of a failure:
There's much that lives, whose life goes on forever.
But death is progress when you cannot mail your
Errors to the city dump, your clever
Findings being elbowed out by junk:
By girls that Wouldn't, then took them a jerk;
By all the folks insisting on their slops;
By kids who think it's great to be a punk;
By every man who'd rather have the perq;
By every criminal who calls the cops.
Perhaps it's best to do it like the conch:
To take the house of human knowledge down
With every death, and wake to learn the ankh,
And Public Education as a noun.
The joy of learning all the same old swill
That ever passed the mouth to form the shell,
As though we were the first the stuff assails
As evening comes upon the whippoorwill,
Is how a child would ride the carousel.
I hate in man what pisses me in snails.
69
Unicorn
Though it alight here for a sparrow while
A dirty age has no least claim on it
And does not make it frown, or even smile
Superiorly. We are nothing. Flit,
And it is here; flit, gone. It does not need
A single thing from us: acknowledgement
Nor moral stature, sense of worth, itself
Sufficient, and its every little deed.
The world alone is all its nourishment:
It has no need of virgins, law, or pelf.
It makes no wishes, does not ever call
On "higher powers" that its work is just;
It lives on what it finds, for that is all
The living have, and all they ever must.
It found a woman in a forest plot,
Comely in her study of the knurled
Raw wood, so bright of form, serene of face
They called her "virgin": surely she was not;
She dearly loved and was more loved by world,
So stroking her in every secret place
Her juices ran, and this brought forth the suit
(His smell was keen, although his nostrils fumed):
They talked, they danced, and then they ate the fruit
Forbidden virgins, while the violets bloomed.
And then she turned, her body still aglow,
And proved still virgin, that she still could eat
Forbidden fruit from the forbidden tree.
But who forbids what all must plainly know,
But coddled children, jealous of the feat
Of others' knowledge of the true and free?
She tasted it, and then she ate the lot,
Arched to the horn, the belly where it grew,
Her breasts so hard they stood, though she did not,
Its face agraze on them, she pushing, too,
For lips and teeth and proof of its desire
In most unsubtle pressures on her form
(What need was for more proof? The horn had stood...)
Until the horn exploded liquid fire
In all the depths of her most earnest storm:
She tasted of the fruit, and found it good.
Slowly the sun intruded on their peace,
Some thirty whole degrees from where it was,
And leaves and grass continued their increase
Beneath their lazy gazing just because
At bluer sky than ever was before,
And whiter birch more yellow in the crown,
And aster petals in a perfect ring.
She lay atop it, reveled in its snore
Because she'd learned her beauty from its frown,
And that was worth the silent savoring:
She'd hurt its eyes with just the way she looked,
With breast, butt, belly, legs that went clear up
To where her shadow started and she cooked;
She'd merely been herself: it took the cup
And drank and drank, and still she was not dry.
As asters were still purple, bees had buzz,
The sky was blue, and air had oxygen,
Of all her looks, she'd infinite supply,
And so could offer everything she was
At any time it might want her again.
The only thing she could not give again
Was never having known the thing before,
But what was that to her? Before that "when,"
She'd had no purpose, nothing to adore.
But would it let her ride its /wunderhorn/
Now that she /knew?/ For knowing was a change
In her whole being. She was not the same.
Would it still want the thing that it had torn?
She was familiar. Must it want the strange?
Was it but emptiness that overcame?
None of these she had in more supply:
It had to want her for this novel she
Who knew this thing they did beneath the sky
(Must do and do and do, /I Musici!/).
It simply must. And so she pursed her lips
And poked and woke it from a troubled sleep,
And offered it her lately-knowing breast
With both hands cupping out the pinky tips.
It stared at them, then her, began to weep,
"So beautiful," it said. And then caressed.
She scrabbled back. "You speak," she shrieked.
"I am the animal that named the rest,"
It said beyond the naming. I critiqued
All that I found, and formed the anapest
For purpose that I did not know 'til now.
In all my naming, never did I find
One of my own, who had the lonely horn,
Nor did I salve myself upon the sow.
Now, now I know a beauty that can blind,
But what are you? Of what thing were you born?"
"I call myself a 'lilith,' for the sound
Rolls loving on the glottis and the ear.
And sixteen summers have I known the ground
Without a fellow warmth or voice to cheer;
I thought the world was nothing but a grunt
Until thou spoke, and shocked me from my wits.
As for my kind, was something warm and brown
With hair all over, big, but rather stunt,
That fed me from a pair of tiny teats
That, even full of milk but flopped straight down."
"I know the ones you mean," it said, a lurch,
For it had stared throughout her little speech
At hair as yellow as the glowing birch
Both there and there, while trying not to reach
For what had been the subject of her sound,
And slowly failing. So its silence grew,
Until she reached, and squeezed its horn a bit.
The horn reared up; it rammed her to the ground,
Her knees astride its shoulders, jaw askew.
Much faster than the first, they came to it.
And so she had her answer from the horse,
Or so to speak: it liked her as she was,
Knowing the thing they knew as but of course,
Not liking her for ignorance; because.
"Because" was good enough. They'd come a sweat,
So went to where the river ran from when,
And it found it a thing quite different still:
A woman in the water. Hungry yet,
It gently hooked her on its horn again.
They floated to it with the whippoorwill.
And still she had to know. And so she asked,
"You like me, that I know this thing we do?"
It only gawped like it had been unmasked.
At last, "I've only made this thing with you."
And then, "I want to make it 'til I die.
I want it though you are not quite my kind,
All yellow hair, and those, and have no horn."
"Where would I put my horn," she asked it why.
The first time in its life, it had no mind
To say a thing, that named all that was born.
"A horn for one of us seems just enough,"
It said at last. "And now I think I see
It's not the horn that made me lonely. Stuff
Like talking what would not talk back to me
Was loneliest of all the things in life."
She kissed the horn. "Be sure I will talk back."
Time passed. Birds fled the sound. Her toes were curled.
It said, "I name this, 'love." I name you, 'wife'.
A name for my own self is all I lack."
"Adam," she said, "I want to know your world."
70
Reflection
The spiral stair is mirrored in my cup:
It goes up backward, but it still goes up.
71
Mask
Wanted to be so mightily important
They made my face a mask in gold and lapis,
Telling people what they ort and ortant
Three thousand years beyond my winding drapis.
Wanted to be so thought a child of gods
My guts were well-preserved in little jars
And all my women threw their lovely bods
Upon their knives to see me to the stars.
But pharaohs disappeared as men got words
To say the way things worked by their own rules
Instead of how the pharoahs ruled the herds
And hucksters made their noises at their fools.
Now I am but a bard, and for my sin
Men mouth my words as long as there are men.
72
Comfort
Comfort, you words, my panic heart with names
Of men who live three thousand years by love:
Ulysses foxing wine-darked minds of dames
And Chaucer certain there was less above
Than Bath's Wife stroking buttons on her glove
And stories novice Friars came to know:
Less destination than the how to go.
Comfort, you flesh, my panic mind with fact
As Buddha touched the Earth to rout the gods
With things they could not alter for the pact
All things make with each other, their ballades
Unchanging never mind their quick facades:
Beneath the whole is ever nature's law
That is the same nor mind who says he saw.
Comfort, you Gods, my panic self with war
That you must start and I alone may win
If only I can trade the panic for the core
Of knowledge touched by every man again
Despite his lifely bout with that First Sin
That wakes him at the teat a total blank
With nothing but Your want of soul to thank.
Comfort, my dear, my panic soul with love
That reignites no matter that it dies,
Like any oth