III.
o river sand,
sink deeper and fling yourself
into my whirlpool!
blue sunflower gas-ring octopus—
what brings you
to the rain forest, amigo?
IV.
Well, that came out a bit like BashÅ imitating Corso
but the thought is what counts when it is 10:45 and you are drunk
enough to believe a poem scribbled on a festival program
could change the world
and when someone says time is an invisible marauder
I shout Fuck you! and everybody smiles.
V.
This poem will change the world.
This poem is a revolutionary anthem to global insurrection.
This poem is an international pop sensation, over twenty million sold.
This poem saved the baby from the burning building.
This poem knows how to howl, to hoot like an owl.
This poem refuses to throw in the towel.
This poem is an imposter, down with this poem!
This poem has been weaponized.
I am breathing its evil fumes, its paralytic murk.
This poem twists my arm until I cry uncle.
This poem will never help me no matter how much I beg.
Help me, please, somebody help me!
This poem wants to kick some ass.
This poem is going to mess you up so bad.
This poem will bury you, my friend.
VI.
But this poem really digs your sister, with her pigtails
and her songs about polar bears and fast rides to immortality,
your sister is someone to run away with to live
in a castle in a dark Teutonic forest or a cheap apartment
with no furniture but a futon and typewriter in the city
underneath the city that is underneath this city.
VII.
Take a swig of wine and it is 12:15.
Another and it is ten past two.
Fuck you!
But where was I?
Ah yes, Bratislava.
VIII.
At the Mayor’s Palace we are instructed to visit the Apple Festival,
a “new tradition” created by the Ministry of Culture
modeled upon the actual traditions of the Slovak country folk
who feel, one can only assume, quite strongly about their apples.
Try as we might we cannot find any sign of the festival
and when we return to the Ministry of Culture
the woman at the desk denies any knowledge of it.
Not to worry, she says, next week begins the Cabbage Festival.
IX.
And tonight is the big national soccer match
and the exuberant crowd watching on jumbo screens in the square
is drinking Coca-Cola from minuscule aluminum cans provided by girls
in red jumpsuits and Afro wigs as a promotion but where was I?
Ah yes, art—art is what we came for and what we got
was a reminder that this is how it begins, no, not in fright wigs
but a communion of scars and charms and midnight plunder,
a reminder that even our most profound individual suffering
amounts to little more than ashes on the grate of a city
engulfed in eternal flames, which is certainly not this charming
metropolis of beer gardens and trolleys and long-haired Slavic angels
whose golden swords glitter madly above the Danube at dawn.
X.
Ladies and gentlemen, the bar is now closed.
You’ve been a wonderful audience
and I want to thank you all
for coming tonight
and to leave you with one last piece,
if I can find the right page, ah yes, here we go.
This is a poem that needs no introduction.
Poetry and Fiction
Their affair has been tempestuous,
and then some. Like us
they like to get it on,
to rut and hump, bang a gong,
but then grow sullen,
wondering not if but when
You’re not all pretty flowers
and hippie skirts, bitch!
And she: If you want to switch
genres go buy a thesaurus,
don’t just mope around all morose
and quasi-narrative. And so it goes.
They criticize each other’s clothes,
her eye for art, his ear for music,
then they hit the sack,
and pledge to give it one more chance.
Theirs is a heterotextual romance.
Hemingway Dines on Boiled Shrimp and Beer
I’m the original two-hearted brawler.
I gnaw the scrawny heads from prawns,
pummel those mute, translucent crustaceans,
wingless hummingbirds, salt-water spawned.
As the Catalonians do, I eat the eyes at once.
My brawny palms flatten their mainstays.
I pop the shells with my thumbs, then crunch.
Just watch me as I swagger and sprawl,
spice-mad and sated, then dabble in lager
before I go strolling for stronger waters
down to Sloppy Joe’s. My stride as I stagger
shivers the islands, my fingers troll a thousand keys.
My appetite shakes the rock of the nation.
The force of my miction makes the mighty Gulf Stream.
Maizel at Shorty’s in Kendall
All shift them sugar donuts
been singing to me,
calling to me something crazy in a voice
Dolly Parton’d be proud of—Maizel, honey,
eat us up! Like that.
Friendly. Nice and sweet, all
glazed up together in that box, as if they was
happy about being what they
is, surely more than this
jelly-junkie waitress hooked on
Krispy Kremes can say. Halve the moon,
leave a frosted crescent for some other girl.
Maizel, you ain’t kidding
no one, honey.
Of a certainty you’re gonna eat that yourself,
probably soon’s you get these BB-
Q
ribs to them boys at table
sixteen. Nice-looking boys, too.
These days we’re getting the,
uh, Cuban mostly,
virtually all what you call Hispanic-speaking.
White folks gone moved up to Broward County, like my
ex. Maizel, you shut
your mouth about that man! Sweet Gee-
zus, honey, ain’t this ring of sugar gold enough?
What They Ate
All manner of fowl and wild game: venison, raccoon, opossum, turkey.
Abundant fishes, excepting salmon, which ws. found distasteful.
Meat of all sorts, especially pig, which roamed free and was fatty.
Also shellfish: quahogs and foot-long oysters, lobster, though considered wasteful.
Wild fruit: huckle and rasp, blue being known as “skycolored” berries.
Parsnips, turnips, carrots, onions: these sown loosely and rooted out;
while these were cultivated in orchards: apples, peaches, apricots, cherries.
Cabbage—favored by the Dutch as koolslaa, by the Germans as sauerkraut—
was boiled with herbs brought from England: thyme, hyssop, marjoram, parsley.
Pumpkin, dried, or mashed with butter, where yams grew sparsely.
Corn, husked with beans as succotash; called samp when milled to grist;
in the South, hulled and broken, as hominy; or fried with bacon as grits.
Maple ws. not favored; loaves of white sugar worth considerable money
were kept under lock, cu
t with special sugar shears. For honey,
bees were imported, called “English flies” by the Narragansett.
Capitalist Poem #36
We’ve got this cheese down here to give away,
tens of thousands of pounds of cheese.
We’re trying to establish procedures and specifications,
rules to discourage speculation and hoarding,
guidelines to foster the proper use of this
extraordinary resource. What we need is a system.
I mean it. Not one damn piece of cheese
leaves here until we get this thing figured out.
Ode to Bureaucrats
I cherish tongs
and scissors.
—PABLO NERUDA, “ODE TO THINGS”
Practitioners of oblivion, signatories
of arcane regret
without whose seal we may not enter
into paradise appropriately
entailed,
fated duty, the onus
of their diligence,
the layers of it,
sanctified and sacrificial,
rheum
of pallid eyeballs
immured
in fluorescent cubicles,
municipal camouflage
of coffee rings
and uniform collars,
vestibules of onionskin,
reams and sheets
and terminals,
inkless stick pens
chained to gouged linoleum
as if to strike blood from a twig,
their codes and initials and #2 bubbles,
verification and secondary verification,
their official contrition,
their sorrow, for
there is nothing to be done,
the renewal date has passed,
the balance is insufficient,
the identification numbers do not match,
the procedure is not covered,
the check is in the mail,
the scissors you ordered have arrived
in your office
and they are blunt and monstrous
as the bill of a stork
gone mad
in mating season,
scissors an irascible child might have fashioned
from humble elements
as a plaything,
hinged flanges forged
from metal too weak to whet or hone
bloodied by thumbs
razored
on ragged iron finger-rings,
low-bid scissors
procured by central purchasing,
scissors only the immortal
Chairman could love,
cheap scissors, bad scissors, apocalyptic scissors,
these are your scissors,
Mr. McGrath,
sign here,
please, front and back,
in triplicate.
Because This Is Florida
Because this is Florida, we can be what we choose to be,
say, Dixie-fried Cubano rednecks. It’s that kind of place.
When the heavy metal band plays “Rocky Top, Tennessee”
they all stomp and sing along—I should say we
sing along, at the annual State Fair, a very weird place.
Because this is Florida, I feel like an anomaly,
but the truth of it is I’m them and they’re me,
and now we’re stamping and hooting all over the place
while the Texas swing band plays “Rocky Top, Tennessee”
and Haitian kids dip kettle candy beneath a live oak tree
in historic “Cracker Country,” apt and ironic misnomer for the place,
because this is Florida, after all, not Texas or Tennessee.
Florida, Florida. At times I can’t believe what I see
and don’t know how to feel about living in a place
where a bluegrass fiddler plays “Rocky Top, Tennessee”
while Rome burns. Is it just me, or an epidemic of mistaken identity,
the state of confusion that plagues this sun-bedeviled place?
Because this is Florida, I beg you to believe me,
the steel drum band from Trinidad plays “Rocky Top, Tennessee.”
Villanelle
Bouncing along like a punch-drunk bell,
its Provençal shoes too tight for English feet,
the villanelle is a form from hell.
Balletic as a tapir, strong as a gazelle,
strict rhyme and formal meter keep a beat
as tiresome as a punch-drunk bell-
hop talking hip hop at the IHOP—no substitutions
on menu items, no fries with the chimichanga,
no extra syrup—what the hell
was that? Where did my rhyme go—uh, compel—
almost missed it again, damn, can you feel the heat
coming off this sucker? Red hot! Ding! (Sound of a bell.)
Hey, do I look like a busboy to you, like an el-
evator operator, like a trained monkey or a parakeet
singing in my cage? Get the hell
out of the Poetry Hotel!
defeat mesquite tis mete repeat
Bouncing along like a punch-drunk bell,
the villanelle is a form from—Write it!—hell.
James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest
At least they died of smoke and age and not some awful, active form
of suicide. To keep sight of the forest for love of the suffering trees;
to damp the black or bitter ashes; not to surrender one’s humanity
to callousness or grief: this is the hard part. There was much hardness
in their lives but no bitterness so terrible that what remained
seemed not worth having, no fatal poison in their pure American
wellspring. Where did they find such faith? How could America
retain its luster in eyes familiar with exile and war, the informal
inequalities of the factory floor? Why do the bleached remains
of Montana farms assume the character of barren cottonwood trees,
equal testament to the harshness of the local winter and the hardiness
of the will to endure, what Hollywood likes to call “the human
spirit,” though why confine such a universal instinct to humanity?
Why believe it’s we alone who suffer? How can the native American
ash and alder and Sitka spruce not possess some inkling of the harsh
truth when serpentine logging roads and clear-cut scars form
the totem shapes of grizzly paws on slopes bereft of trees,
when of the great, fog-shouldered forest so little still remains?
Or does it? In Broadway stalls I’ve seen their work remaindered,
cut-rate and still unsold, disregarded by the very people
they spent their lives extolling, and yet there is more in their poetry
than the ghost of the trees killed for paper. There is more to America
than wastefulness and greed and abuse, which are merely forms
of our inherent human weakness, manifestations of the hardship
we suffer when forced to choose for ourselves. Freedom is a hard
row to hoe, our cross to bear, individually and with whatever remnant
of communal will remains to us, whatever common vision yet informs
our deepest dreams and beliefs, the solitary will or the deeply human
dream of community, this central paradox, so typically American,
between the good of the wood and the rights of individual trees.
For me, they loom like redwoods or Douglas fir, the last big trees
of the endangered forest. The timbre of their voices, their wounded hearts
still large enough for sugar beets and four-door Buicks, all things American,
all things of simple dignity. Alone or gathered at the r
iver, what remains
is the democratic song, their rich, vernacular empathy with the people,
a common thread of praise. Jim and Dick, in keeping with this form
I carve your informal names in a Western red cedar, totem-pole tree
of the original Americans, because it is sacred and strong of heart.
What thou lovest well remains distinctly, triumphantly human.
Allen Ginsberg
I met him only once, at a party in Vinnie Katz’s old apartment above a Thai restaurant on 55th Street in Chicago, spring of 1983 or ’84.
Earlier that evening he gave a reading at the university, finger cymbals, ashram chanting, not as much of the early ecstatic genius as had been hoped,
not the majestic anguish of “Howl” but a serious performance nonetheless, warmly greeted by an audience of many hundreds.
It seemed even more crowded at the party, where Vinnie’s band, the Throbbers, a loose-jointed, Velvets-inspired power trio,
rattled the walls of the linoleum-tiled kitchen as we did our usual thing, menthol cigarettes and aggressive dancing,
cheap liquor sloshed from aluminum ashtrays, a lot of ironic social commentary on secondhand couches smelling of smoke and cat piss.
Ginsberg sat hunched in a back room, Buddha-like, holding court; the omnisexual dimension of his Socratic shtick was a bit unnerving,
even worse was the way Peter Orlovsky would flick the tip of my nose with his finger as I posed burning questions like Why did Kerouac have to die, man?
He seemed tired, sure, how many times had he been through this routine, how many earnest young poets dreaming of glory,
looking for wisdom or validation or whatever, how many dim bohemian scenes edging toward ash-blistered dawn,
but his patience never faltered, his tipsy smile, he never sold out the night or the life or the art that counted him as a bead on its prayer-string.
And then it was dawn, or something like it, near dawn, Chicago—though it could have been New York, Denver, San Francisco,
the American city in all its splendid yearning to be lost and longing to belong, its sidewalks of dog shit and sparkling mica,
a train passing over the viaduct, the embankment spectral with waif-paper and what I took to be ghost-weeds trembling in the vinegar light.
Not weeds but coarse flowers risen from the pavement. Not ghosts but souls seeking voices to greet the dawn.
Pax Atomica Triptych
From the imperium, eyeless, tongueless,