this before bass drums calmed the beatifics
he stripped the blue bead from his pen
gallant of us to stand about wasn’t it?
before the distances were Galatea
A hum before the ship flagon wall scavenge
this the color I thought bronze was
turned out a fluvial wash or supersonic pan
we all wheat up through the stove
my manual said eat while a beam improves Benny or Andy
makes as if a final ear to the level exits
tweetmowers for saturday
Hi-Fi still to be penciled in
In which I discover the second war through
powdery flowers in my vagueness
following him on impulse nights to pinch
everyone at the least of them
the pleasantries of quietude to even construe a thing
But would he hook a harm to me?
I preferred Reg Butler and his batman sets
later rock rimming by the soft quotient
gone oval to the cemetery malinger
so out of him in this ground
pendant one less cigar or other
I’ll make it hobbling on one lung
and a Pepsi gentian
A Za-Rex commotion in the attics of pebbled-glass
jugs with finger grips you’ll toll a long time from
he’d pasteboard up from plush vespers if held neatened to a priest
but never a marmalade of such novel disparage
the morning ran to batteries and a blockade manacle gun instead
the marriage of games never to be lost
or found either, he had cellars full of the strain
misnamed railings, a couple of terrific beads
his head like a warning collector
mine a beaming limiter
Were you my ace in the malefactory, no
the casings came later, ocarina with armholes
prices after farming’s forgotten
and the fame of the old wood’s made out
then I really rang it up, didn’t I?
argued over the obstacle gun and baywindow switches to the carbarn east
or skip the blimps to south, one
it makes no odds that Yankee wisdoms make them on everything
stop telling me things, then it would brighten
Coughed the hose out from under the gulf of the whole house
silence of a blind pew
storm load sliding off gradually
the pill rolls and Vaseline sundays
coil of the codfish template
the gray snow lateness on car tracks in Brilliantine
I thought it was time nobody knew anything
but a touch of the spear minted clear
He sat by windows ate back to
sundays repapered the mood
rooms escaping to a spare
I would rather have hollowed my own then
open cabins by flush chain keep
his nose to the empty box he faced
a sharp or flat exemption
so paid less to load his production
I couldn’t stand the side of the house
bordered by tickle of the manual families
shoot down a load of bricks while dutying
bring your strings into pall
Beyond his bed door seemed
like not much was being entered
meanwhile I summered
was there the journal to tell about it somewhere?
certainly not Bogardus Waterfall Trail
the portions brought from Paris
the dawn chimes in his lower caste chest
peeping from the case I made
go home instead of dessert
the silver briar substitutes
Wish he’d got so far off I’d remember it
hindered by fin & haddy pan dowdy
and cans of limestone hedge pack solvent
the soots turned wasps as they came
he gave up smoking not minding
really raising the family guard
at early table as he thought to us
didn’t I mind all your names?
2.
He was eager to see wood sawn beneath his nervous
the house had moved over in the night
left a felt marker where he left
the plectrum of old stump continuous
mirror lamped his own clothes till conscious
the member of the desk set travesty
loaner of the wide hips a corollary
then gas escaping from a sound
He was up but never till
the sides of his housing came together in consideration
desert he knew not
not even west
and then we waved him
I keep thinking he was born in a knee-high cabin
wasn’t everybody’s?
and now all the placements are loose
Needs learned from fire engine captains
lolling on the south side
there were women in those windows
but pretending fronds a partnership
near to drome havens and the gasometer
down forever in indulgences and backbone
had his limiters and so do I
blink
Stop sounding as if you, and others
charming combiners and no notions of the loup garou
an entablature of savior
young mental wander home and strike
the doctor coming out of Maidsville in a trance
look down, these are the blackening onions
he never, he would not
Hornets a swing to the salacious
pinhole barriers in every one after all
the wall, the tubs, the sack of Truro
and name you Marge and in the going bituminous
a ribbon drips from the viol
I’d have to frame you in the front window to apologize
pacing it out in tiny lifetime gales
Sumerian to the winners but in the losing Trojan
won’t mention the imperious Perseus
red cutlets of the Gaul
then his wind let up, he was pressing
and further blows of insect at the galleon wall
seal with silicon
the hole but not him
Go to cufflink school and how
this won’t be printing out from you
no one to hoard those basement hours
a perimeter to every scab
you have to stop weathering to live
chorus or no baton
Dreamed of getting his own security goat
but such too plain over with
daydreamed the window was in liquid spillage
coins out of plaster as you watch
along the corridors or wrist release a special swatch
velvet in intent, the purpose conspicuous
the helmet on loan from a clown
In the attic in a chest there
is an alien predella
place of worms as long as the Waste Land
should anyone be of such a shag-cut intent
my father watches
telegraphs his pauses
But he was never ready
as if his doorways on loan
rather a clubfoot treater comes to market
watering cans and Studebaker rules
was in his study
he didn’t have, why not
the burden too emeritus?
Trotted in shorts through a garden of hornfels
they don’t have them anymore
now one arms doors and watches for creases
his glory was in not being a whiner
lollygagger, dreaming toad in a rile of the spurious
those gleams and hastes
these goal lickers each asserting the metal
then a partial head leered out
Group of young
undergrowth parting the waterfalls
member of which he was never
in the days the carnivals grew together
and oldman slim dons
dark threads to fiddle and crane
comes to the pitch of twelve shoes
spinster lab by ice cream socket
new market new position whatever
and elbows grown spent as they’re clad
he knew the man well
Feldspar chips in that cream anyway
close to the alternate spelling of gong
and nightwear
and gracelessness
and small things
the father had to come home I guess sometime
rounding the chain gate get shut of his day
His hands have the look to care
for one of the fractal acids
locked to advantage that way
spiral shoals under varnish rules
a click of a meeter palming the governor
treating his sound to the bad end
the one his master dad said grease
Two Poems
Gustaf Sobin
A SELF-PORTRAIT IN LATE AUTUMN
… through that ever-
expanding interval, were never more
than these
late bees you’d
scribble: what hung, like sucklings, from the
fat,
dangling clusters; than these desolate, verb-
studded landscapes you’d
murmur, even
hiss into
some other, some ever else-
where’s
ear.
TRANSPARENT ITINERARIES: 1999
that interval, you wrote, between the inadequacies of the
given and the imperatives of the inferred.
(that additive without which isn’t).
_______
through that veil, that
billowing gauze, that interface with face-
lessness it-
self.
_______
language: a density, you’d called it, in the service of its
own evanescent releases.
fabricating as it went the otherwise inaccessible.
_______
was always in the
elsewhere, wasn’t it: in the
rented rooms of those
out-
lying districts that you’d begun drafting the
portrait; begun restituting—feature by feature—its
oblit-
erated mirrors.
_______
as if destiny weren’t the unravelling of some predetermined dictate but the patient reconstitution of the intended.
the resuscitation of so many suppressed ur-words by the bias of a yet-to-be articulated grammar.
(what lay secreted within the parched hollow of our each and every exhalation).
was why you’d lowered yourself into those ruins, wasn’t it? why you’d tape-measured whatever vestiges remained in an attempt to interpolate—from their least sequential sections—the full thrust of such an obfuscated dynamic.
_______
… were roots, the white irises’, you’d
discovered, that had
gagged the
idol’s
eyes.
_______
far too late for anything, now, but those earliest ideations.
the unearthing, therein, of the eventual.
wasn’t this why the bodies grappled the way they did?
cherished the incipient against their own ineluctable
depletions?
their teeth bared; their breath broken.
why, too, you’d have uttered—just then—that word with-
out words: that elision glittering in the very midst of so much spent syntax.
and heard, so doing, the silence—thus solicited—sound.
Four Poems
Alice Notley
AMID THESE WORDS I CAN KNOW
canyon and spirit mountains peaceful spring with springs; not paying attention to
glyphs. there are rabbits the springs are damp circles on the sand among greener
bushes sunlight a lovely tone what can i do with it one says. musnt. try to know
amid words which are deep and alive large as dolmens glyphs whose lines cut deeply
into the past which is not a gone thing linear but a depth and a returning power
thing think but standing in place where i am been will be not using words not making
them not being them but being among them as they are nature. past may be a gracious
door always open skylike but in place a, wind in place or as a massive invisible process
is both carven and calmly fluid the sky moves. i never move. chunk rock but not ice
will never weep, when i cry its to break open to. you will not know if you dont suffer,
why, a closed system cannot know but a knowing sky can be a mountain a knowing all
can be carved as well and the words, the words part of all are like these.
use me suddenly i might say, and the canyon of my youth goes mosaic, i’m in the
basilica by rights. walk toward that mosaic, as far as the spirit mountains,
flickering light, across the glass cubes of. precious stones have been used in places, the
mountains themselves are partly made of.
agate, jasper, quartz.
and you have disliked me last night in a dark hall. meaningless or not? if
i am a thing and you are, the forces between us those emotions are the small
winds of the universe lines or forces between things but undiagrammable and
being an aberration of the lines of like or a part of. no, you have disliked me disrupted
me last night in a dark hall, is abstract and whats real is, that i am not a thing and so
not dislikeable and cannot dislike on the real plane. where the glyphs are, and
the dolmens, left to tell, of what is permanent, messages of, from the enduring
“feelings,” such as existence itself.
go on a little faster now in the wind the blank blue and theres a rabbit will he shoot it
so we can eat it tonight jack rabbit cotton tail eat cotton tail. all these rocks
pebbles in the mosaic from the past when i was a child one april in grapevine canyon.
lines of motion and emotion telepathies and paths all intertwined like
grapevines with leaves of and the purple globes of, the
telepathic the sending of all the messages all the thoughts ever and going on all in
those little lines scattered toward and blown away ever everywhere everything ever
thought at all blown about
in the canyon the glyphs
are paradise as preserved in the mind thats why theres the past.
i mean why theres no past
THE ELONGATED HOLY MOTHER
but in the next moneyless year there is a nearly fully grown snake of mine snake
what is this snake, this principles nearly large enough to bite me has a head like a
rattlers. you want some other symbol made out of modern fabric i dont have it no
life principle in you if thats you modern fabric. this snake is nearly large enough
to bite me, so i should turn it loose in the building to hide behind the furniture in
the dark where it lives best now. sister life cuts hers truncates hers though, before
she sets them loose, and she beats them, beats them into submission, i dont want to
do that. the snakes hide behind the bookcases making slime and skin in the dark
shedding and shedding
making more and more new years. in this new year i can find the buried person
the oldest person or year but the year the new year is
that old one, the pieces
scattered throughout us and irretrievable, unless reamassed whole in a vision
and so the dreams and so the peculiarities of them.
the men who lived only with each other said to fear their room it was full of naked
men, i said i was afraid but i wasnt. i was searching searching the house, what was I
looking for? certainly not the department of gender
what is
a gender what on earth what is earth i was looking for what is earth in a world a
modern fabric
how is all this depicted in the church cant you see
a serpent asleep in the dark protects the original nature,
or vision. old mother python. there was a castle.
on a shelf in it were heads, sculptures and one was of joan of arc, next to it under a
sheet, was that of king she served, i peeked at him under the sheet and so
he came as a ghostly wind, to terrify me in my sleep. the wind of the dead king
plucked up my own sheet from the bed and tried to strangle me. the principle
of the king tried to kill me, as my sister life keeps trying to bludgeon into submission
the snake
my sex is still involved.
superficially as the fabric of this world lies, the lies by which we
always why death is so important. the only life the
second world entangled like coils of always in this very one. death is so
important its freedom from us, the figures on the
walls know this being dead
snake piss behind everything can you like that as i do
hes killing the snake again for the pure maiden? what is she, she is himself hates
snake piss, the feel of old skins to the bare feet, have you ever walked through a yard
full of sloughing layers and layers, with bare feet? and feared both pollution
and that something live was there a real snake, amid the shed skins the real life the
first nature, under everything. the naturally slithering mosaic as the light takes the
walls of the church or as a candleflame takes them at night
serpent of enclosure of our mystery, here I am inside and cant
know it without the old symbols, like that, its like that through layers and layers, the
skeleton of the person is there but is the principle still there beyond symbols and
principles is it still i am i there?
sheds us the universe will shed us without a “thought” we are dead in so many coiled
faraway futures how many are there are there am i like them too? but i am not like,
skimming gold toward. and what did you say,
lib-by, in exile
so skimming and inviting like night of the stars in a small garbage quartier