Grace seemed flabbergasted but she couldnt have been more amazed than I was. All her exhortations not to speak which were so hard to keep to before, seemed to have their effect on me now. I couldnt say a single word. If I’d thought Grace were even sitting on her chair, I might’ve thought at that point she would just fall off of it, but since neither of us seemed to be subject to any of the effects of gravity or any normal thing at all that we knew, we both seemed to float staring at each other for an unaccountable while and then we burst out laughing. Just before that I had had the thought “but the elevator’s broken” and then we laughed so hard and so long we thought we would die laughing and lose our minds and by the time we could conceive of stopping laughing we were moaning from so much laughing, we began throwings things about the house in such a way, if anybody’d seen us, they’d have thought we were lunatics. Finally I grabbed Grace’s arm & shouted as loud as I could, “What did you find out!”
Concluding Unscientific
Postscript
The pluralistic yellows of fall’s sun
Scare the wits out of me and my daughters
In between the artful leaf shadows
You dont wanna mention slow reactions
To the merest daily sounds
You can feel a new device in your mouth
With wonder liquid bread with healthy head
If clean the art that’s wrought by pen or type
Day after day why not relent to love scared
In silly cleanliness new artifact hence
By all that’s kind I beg a natural helper
As a valuable book falls sophistically to floor
Of the joint we share without equal metaphor
Till August heedlessly makes something end
I wish my friend you’d love me against
The wishes of everyone sensible
I am certainly not so beautiful as to presume
Like the meanings heard on streets & avenues
& trials on country roads I learned about you from
That I would be more well from your acquaintance
Like the fooling afterthought of a notorious well-wisher
The glass might know what its warmer heart did not
& if I meet with men who dont believe in even speaking
Phosphoric, I’ll expect a relentless well-nourished neglect
Like the natural equation of lovely lakes to swamps
& red the rug it falls criss cross without
Seeing heraldic my dumb ass so-called suffering
Cause I look ok but I cant continue on
So let me fall by form of spurious need of end
Near your cock & cunt, transforming friend.
Watching the Cornplex
Train-Track Changes
To Men
You put on an ornate ballgown
You say “someone has to do it”
You take me to where you work,
The inside of a pyramid with chasms,
Watching the complex train-track changes
Products and objects make love to my father
Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy
You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely
You get on the plane, both clown & wizard
And then get off in a comedy of manners
Our dates become a comedy of dinners
Your name rhymes with clothes
Your plane folds & flies away
Without us, I’ll make the next one
We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks
& still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks
Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep.
A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what
And you in the train’s opulent rooms
Switch your cock to a baby and then say
“Must there (not) be a law against this?”
You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head”
You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of
A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you
You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make
Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes
You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods
We go down in the car through threatening snows
To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place
You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie
Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident
I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi
Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director
Holds up each actor & describes his physical being
I talk to your father but only by telephone
You have the royal blue 8½ x 11 notebook with the lock on it
I want one but you say you cant get them anymore
I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before
All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons
A Woman I Mix Men Up . . .
A woman I mix men up
In my dreams & other ways, I wonder
If this is the same as knowing
What is & is not socialism, a man I’m sure
Does the same thing, mixing up
The mother for the lover or
Vice versa not to mention the mighty
Homosexual mix-ups which happen
Just as much, oh god whoever
He or she might be, I ask you
Why is David Lewis or Lewis Ed?
Why Anne Catherine or Catherine Ted?
Because I am not or dont want to be sure
I raise these questions to the heavens
Wherein I might, as proposed by a child
Sit on a cloud risking falling through
Should the child know a cloud is not solid
& should she bring no parachute, I feel
The risk’s as great in loving as it is
In voting & your my lover’s meeting even in
Dreams this other woman or man of your own sex
Seems like the newspapers, all too predictable
What types in what outfits’ll appear
Doing what in what postures, suits & poses, to remake
The world is something not enough people dream of, one
Shouldnt use the word dream & one shouldnt use
The words should and shouldnt, cast off the book & find
No expectations, understanding liberalism’s not
The same as conservatism or (god forbid) mysticism, there is
Morning and there is midday and there is night, there are
Phases of this one moon factually attached to the earth
Scatter the dictionaries, they dont
Tell the truth yet, I mix up words with truth
And abstraction with presence, who cares
Without a form who I am, I know I will timely die
But you two, God and this his image the junky bomb
Live forever to destroy the eternal the immortal
In what they used to call Man, now not.
Eight Blocks
for Bill Kushner
A very nice little purple dress
A box of colored film cans
A man with flowers for his Other, then another,
European women walking arm in arm
How lonely I am in this long line
Cops saying it’s not sensible to be
Pretty women of ethics, she sighs, I gesture,
She says, if you walk fast you get tired and if
You walk slow you still do, she forgot I forgot
The elevated fingers of the sun we sang
In just voices to virgin Mrs. Kerchief-Cane
(To backtrack on a walk’s ok) who was that man
Who knew what was behind me, now it’s gonna rain,
Wind on the fat man’s flat sequins
There are two different sides of the street
B
etween them is the traffic of the avenue
There are four corners on which to meet,
French cigarettes in the Arabian window
Then safe in the sweaty public school
But mothers and fathers are too early
To rescue each baby from a day of rigidity
Parents mass as at disasters and hide on steps
They peek in the window of the locked room’s door
There’s that woman I saw this morning
Carrying her cigarettes like a wedding bouquet
The Garden
for Adam Purple
Close to a house on a piece of ground
For the growing of vegetables, flowers & fruits
On fertile well-developed land
Is a delightful place or state, a paradise
Often a place for public enjoyment
Where grows the alyssum to cure our rage
Oriental night of the careless developers
Carpet of snow of the drugged landlords
Basket of gold the city’s confused
Royal carpet of its bureaucracies,
Bored with bombs
Political ones of the complicated governments
Now stick up the very orb
For its nonmetal yet golden remains
Competing with the larval corn borers
The salaried test-borers
Imminently lead anti-sexually down to the foundation
Of the annihilation
Of a circular garden in which live members of
The mustard family
The tomato or nightshade family
The poppy family
The geranium family
The aster family
The mint family
The thistle or aster family
The violet family (heartsease)
The lily family
The cucumber or gourd family
The rose family
The composite or daisy family
The parsley or carrot family
And other families
(I dont think the pokeweed family lives there,
It earns too little or too much money per year)
We are told to swallow not a rainbow
But like the celandine the juicy proposal
That the lemon balm of low income housing,
Applied like ageratum to the old Lower East Side
(As early matured as the apricot)
And probably turned by deeply divided leaves
Like a rape of grapes before it’s all over
Into the poison tomato leaf of middle income housing,
Cannot coexist with the gleaming black raspberries
In an ancient abandoned place
Around Eldridge, Foresight and Stanton Streets
We’re asked not to think, like pansies do
That the pinnately compound, ovate, lanceolate, non-linear,
lobed, compound, toothed, alternate, opposite,
palmate, heart-shaped, stalkless, clasping,
perfoliate, and basal rosette-ish leaves
Can heal like the comfrey
And cause to grow together
The rough hairy leaves of the city’s people and
the rough hairy leaves of the sublimity of
a gardener’s art
Made with vegetarian shit & free as cupid’s darts
If all our eyes had the clarity of apples
In a world as altered
As if by the wood betony
And all kinds of basil were the only rulers of the land
It would be good to be together
Both under and above the ground
To be sane as the madwort,
Ripe as corn, safe as sage,
Various as dusty miller and hens & chickens,
In politics as kindly fierce and dragonlike as tarragon,
Revolutionary as the lily.
Sonnet
Love is a babe as you know and when you
Put your startling hand on my cunt or arm or head
Or better both your hands to hold in them my own
I’m awed and we laugh with questions, artless
Of me to speak so ungenerally of thee & thy name
I have no situation and love is the same, you live at home
Come be here my baby and I’ll take you elsewhere where
You ain’t already been, my richer friend, and there
At the bottom of my sale or theft of myself will you
Bring specific flowers I will not know the names of
As you already have and already will and already do
As you already are with your succinctest cock
All torn and sore like a female masochist that the rhyme
Of the jewel you pay attention to becomes your baby born
Sonnet
It would be nice to lose one’s mind my mind
I’d like to lose it I wouldn’t mind at all
To be in the lunatic asylum at last
All for you and for the taxi drivers
I’ll go and be asked what year what day it is
& who’s the president, how come he’s a resident
I could teach prosody there but nobody
Knows what it is
So send me away to anybody
Anywhere who might
Not know something I might not
Since I must vice versa live
Whaddya mean perforce?
Army or navy or marines?
Warren Phinney
A little boy on August first night
Got into the colors possible in the light
Of this universe & of his cock
We spoke the words the little boy
My little boy like in the liturgy & in the litany,
Than any of the daily concerns, his soft skin.
And losing my judgment I forgot about his Volkswagen
Which was needed in the morning to carry his father
And his mother to work, it was not his car
But the drive wasnt far and before you left
After the phone calls we answered
From friends to find you there was time
For another mention of the Russian Revolution
Then I wound up with my feet at the head of the bed
Knowing hippily about our stars, your guitar
& the meeting from which we fled, the proper porcupines
Having eaten enough of your parents’ car’s gaslines
To give us time to make the little more love
We’d dreamed of before the tow truck came.
Holding the Thought of Love
for Bill DeNoyelles
And to render harmless a bomb or the like
Of such a pouring in different directions of love
Love scattered not concentrated love talked about,
So let’s not talk of love the diffuseness of which
Round our heads (that oriole’s song) like on the platforms
Of the subways and at their stations is today defused
As if by the scattering of light rays in a photograph
Of the softened reflection of a truck in a bakery window
You know I both understand what we found out and I don’t
Hiking alone is too complex like a slap in the face
Of any joyous appointment even for the making of money
Abandoned to too large a crack in the unideal sphere
of lack of summer
When it’s winter, of wisdom in the astronomical arts,
we as A & B
Separated then conjoin to see the sights of Avenue C
Sonnet
I am supposed to think of my personal dot
I do and it is dull if you won’t call
Who cares Angel I could find you even within my wrist
Nobody minds because of sleeping, I detest it myself
Why doesnt anybody want to demand to make lov
e
Female to actual famous female or vice versa
Warm indoors is the repeating of the trivial of something
It doesnt matter what, I’m tired of not
Absence like parents is the astrophysical
What who knows come in I’ve got my birth control out
Come by get lost the curtain if fictionally red is not then real
Nor’s the blood shed why for what, we warn televisions of it
Dont say anything bad like fuck or shit or otherwise & besides
You might have to wear ostensible clothing & hairdos all your lives
A Chinese Breakfast
Is it so far to the door?
Does Max’s sandwich diminish my confidence to reach it?
Do fears as unnatural as dreams to waking
Reflect something of anything for everyone else?
Should madness ensue, would the tiny hole
For a dislodged nail in the wall be its focus?
Does the belong world in you?
Did the finch devour the bluejay
Right in the cleft of the dead bird of paradise?
Did a she slip the awful cup?
As spring comes a man’s apple juice emits an ankle bracelet
And you’re as forlorn as the mean dentist’s smock of our culture
Plus a he can’t find a parking space cause the ice is still thick
As the thief of the way a day might memory look
Sonnet
You jerk you didn’t call me up
I haven’t seen you in so long
You probably have a fucking tan
& besides that instead of making love tonight
You’re drinking your parents to the airport
I’m through with you bourgeois boys
All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but
Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set
Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time
Wake up! It’s the middle of the night
You can either make love or die at the hands of
the Cobra Commander
____________
To make love, turn to page 121.