I don’t even ask these questions myself.
Why are the shutters drawn
over that restaurant?
The moon’s backwash is like a deeply incised
hairnet against the stadium.
Bats drool into the gutter.
If everybody is so intent on illustrating what they know,
why is the ant syllabus closed?
TROPICAL SEX
Yes, making a point of using it
makes a point, and otherwise all is but fish scales
and fish delivery—the clear-eyed blue trough of song
in whose pit I stumbled. O Lord,
help me to get over it. That’s better, for a minute
there I thought I was a goner
and now I brushed up this interesting world
of lutanists and lunacy, and afterlife
not unlike the one we were used to—
Gosh, it’s so thrilling,
everyone is so nice,
one had almost forgotten chiggers existed,
and bedpans, and dumb ugly coffers
like the one we lived in.
But that is only a sign now.
Be warned. A slight distance.
Or picture an insect struggling.
But it’s going to be all right, I tell you.
We can live in The Heights and conjecture interestingly
about how life is made, how a man is paid
after all the contracts and ledgers are signed, blotted
in the sun. And surely one can stagger then,
get up and stagger to the nearest public telephone
and make slurping sounds at an invisible opponent: gone, warned
away, washed away. This siding came in with a crumpled
building already on it. Now only frogs can compute
the earth-sign that led gradually to dementia and panic.
The storage place is over there. I can see thistles
out of the corners of my eyes. It must be we are waiting
on another’s aggression, handmaidens to the very plot
that would destroy us. We can
manage a giggle or handshake, but in the end the ink seeps through
and the person who did this wants very much to believe it,
has put himself inside us for this purpose. O chilblains,
weather vanes in the aching March wind,
did you want this ending? For this to happen
even as we were sitting all nice inside
the house, and by its hearth, and the brutal call
of the scarecrow fell like a hush over everything?
My friend thinks so—tell her
the bad news: “up to our ears in debt,” playing a little
on the tidal lawn, abashed by our failure
to keep track of the consequences as they happened, and now a little
girl goes out to the squirrel. Hey, kid,
can I see your—
Sorry, time’s up.
We get to place a small white stone here at the crossroads;
it can be any one you like. Remember to vote. The clothesline has fallen
to the enemy somewhere. Yet the awnings are still prim and conspiratorial.
My chapter met and discussed you. Any number can play, the fleet’s in,
and with the recyclables, our starched T-shirt.
THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT
Keeping in mind that all things break,
the valedictorian urged his future plans on us:
Don’t give up. It’s too soon. Things break. Yes, they fail
or they are anchored up ahead, but no one can see that far.
As he was speaking, the sun set. The grove grew silent. There
are more of us taking ourselves seriously now than ever,
one thought. We may never realize about our lives
till it’s too late, and a man with a dog comes to shoot us.
I like to think though that everything is its own reward,
that liars such as we were made to last forever,
and each morning has a special chime of its own.
Thus we were pitted against the friend who came at midnight
and wanted to replace us with a song. We resisted furiously:
There was too much food on his table, the night was too black,
while all around us shrinking bands of outsiders
entered into negotiations with his darkness. It
seems to omit us, his reasoning, or in the well of time
we may be overdrawn, and cosmetics come to put a good face on us,
asking, why this magic wind, so many angles
To which one answers, nothing is adrift
for long. Perhaps we will be overtaken
even in our happiness, and waves of passion drown us.
Now, wasn’t that easy? A moment’s breath and everyone
has gone inside to ponder the matter further.
Outside, children toboggan endlessly.
STUNG BY SOMETHING
but my advice is—be comfortable.
Wear a smock, with fractals. Be native!
You’ll find people are more interested in your story,
and they will, too. Revisit
the recurrent tragedy of life.
Make sure it has its priorities straight.
Then—ziff! Jump off the end of a dock.
Color a monsoon yours, to do business and pleasure with.
With Smokey, everywhere seemed like pastime.
Girls in their girdles wandered up
amazed—they had never seen so many cheekbones.
The irises on the dump bloomed surlier that year—
too many tin cans. But you and I were deriding
ourselves, therefore it couldn’t be over yet
and the past never happened here. Pounding
on his front door, one day or other,
the jasper eggs somehow knew my name.
It was all over, in fits. The tree-house
curtains were drawn, laughter strangely spattered the mist,
stippled the tenement wiring. Oh it’s been gone
too long, tragedy again visits the dying shires,
tells one to hang in, it’s over the top
with you. Looks like
we’ve been invited to a party. Treason peppered
the masts of my little skiff. Help! And then
an eternity of silence. Bores
shifted on the upper floors, there are not
enough spider-crabs, spiders of the sea,
for this embroidered doormat to clinch the departure bell.
Surely all’s well—
we’d have heard about it otherwise. Strangers tell
this in shifts, for a little pleasure, a brittle hour.
THE LAST ROMANTIC
Not to stumble, to get to tell you something simple
about the way the grass was being waves, how we broke
the world after we made it. Then it was a thorn-bearing crescent.
Now you must be funny. Paranoid gigolos and candy,
lots of it, over the airways, in fact how could you,
you knew he was coming today. Well, better to squash
it once and for all. I was a fool for coconuts, I said
coconuts. Nobody believes me anymore, they think I’ve been
let out, but I haven’t, I’m still locked up, and lovelorn.
Pretty please promise me a dish of scrolls.
After that one nip everything will be nasty and then it will be romantic.
They pass him with muffin heads down along the winter beach.
So many characters. They told him there were too many characters
in your novel, that the plot was still complicated, but still
they keep coming on, there must have been a leak, wait, it’s not even that,
there are just too many peopl
e out there. Well I suppose it seems
so to you, who are not normal, but if you could see
it all from the outside you’d find how many are glued
to your coattails, and not too many, never less than enough,
and that includes children. My stars well I
never counted on all this being here. No, and neither
did your daddy, and it’s quiet in the city,
too quiet, except for the largest vans and convertibles, and these
are safely filed under “European”—we can let everything go, really,
and then come back and look at it and pick it up.
Well it sure was farther the way
you always insist on taking us, me and one other person, but in
fine it was not a great distance, only a matter of some blocks
in one ward of the city. Say, I had a great
idea and now it’s gone off and become useless.
So may I someday, sitting at play in my little unknown courtyard.
So may we all, while cats whine and grapes mature
and a prickly dust of unknown origin seems to rise upward from the seats.
SHADOWS IN THE STREET
She bit the bridge. A photograph can stomach it. I’ll be in
some time in the middle of July. Now the best time
of the year is around now, none can gainsay August
and Mr. Random’s tooth running in the street, he liked to say hi, it was just
him running, which is a bit awkward. A diagonal lipstick
chased him across the street. From there on in it was just damn melancholy,
no anchovies, nothing in particular, nothing to say. If so why, why do it,
says Peter, who fought hard for the post, fought it and won,
and why we are here, in the middle of a secondary terrain, mad and absorbed
by life, by the truth, as always.
But the nice part
I was going to say is fenced out. Take to the hills then. There goes
one petal, the tree is falling apart, zounds I can do almost nothing
while the hills come and separate us, plant us in tomorrow
or until the last dish is unearthed.
Out crept a third one.
Savannas that have been dangerous, now no one remembered,
the evil shifting of feet denounced the lady travelling salesman
to our liposuction expert. A single afternoon cooking at the stove
and all is more or less gone over, too bad
the futile Molotov cocktail exploded
but in any case in another land, with more furniture than we expected.
So we said, grant us this, it shall be done in another kingdom
as in the king’s den. Don’t let the roof fall in!
I was kind of sidelined by the barber pole
but explained practically about the dark petal, that it was good
and we were appearing in its time, and shall be heaven, about time, about
that point. Rockets lifted. Read me. There is no point to all this listless
hive. He took off in a manner that betokened bats
when it was over and they came over. It’s time, now, some are good and alone,
lost up unto the rest. They can go and cancel
around it’s too moot to be played at. They are, for the rest unsavory,
thyme in the corral, three jumps from last school
the patio ignited, sworn to safe-conduct, like bread out of a school
conducted at last to here.
THE EARTH-TONE MADONNA
What were you telling him about,
and why were veins implanted in the marsh
where everyone looks? Today
is the first day of spring, I think.
Sailing near us on a monocle,
the spray tapped and jiggled,
forever like a lifeboat.
And true some were found perjured
in cornshocks, there was no meat left that day,
no edge one could run around on.
There were peepers in the loose chaos called
oblivion, and not much else on the table.
Miss—er—Jones, what is the order of events?
I think not sir she cabled
from a vantage point in Toronto where all ships
and trains have their terminus. And if it’s Wednesday?
Then man the egrets, the snowplow is coming
to rest where all of us have our workshoes on
and it will be a tough call to divide up the rope
and Saturday.
There was no hope in the statue
of the saint, eyeballs collapsed, sloping forward
like a scythe, and yet we came to know
how he was doing, and appreciated a chat
at his knees. Now this was only the fourth time
any had done so. So we squeegeed
the happy-face off home plate, and bunches
of aristocrats all around us applauded
what came to seem fair, and in time
were whisked away—the ox in his pumps,
forgotten for daydreaming, the tangled marl
of old Sol’s beard. Everything was decimated,
which was devastating, yet we went on
living, along the row we had been set down in
and soon we had reached the end. A conniving quiver
set compass needles skittering, prize lists
fairly glittering. And I looked to thee
to see what a retroactive spouse might be
yet we got lost somehow in the confusion
attendant on the formal victory. We were back
home, in fact, but no one thought to look
for us there. We were let out to pasture
in the shade, and six more volumes dovetailed.
The first part of the novel was now complete,
a hundred years in the making, yet its style
seemed chaste, if not downright lackluster, in the best sense,
as many terriers were starting to run,
yappingly. If there was a space for us
in all this fireside, it got debunked. We were kept waiting
right up until the announced departure,
and so became part of humanity. Part and parcel, I was going to say.
In the dim
eclectic din, beaters waited.
Let’s handsel it, love, O my love, I said.
DEAR SIR OR MADAM
After only a week of taking your pills
I confess I am seized with a boundless energy:
My plate fills up even as I scarf vegetable fragments
from the lucent blue around us. My firmament,
as I see it, was never this impartial.
The body’s discomfiture, bodies of moonlit beggars,
sex in all its strangeness: Everything conspires
to hide the mess of inner living, raze
the skyscraper of inching desire.
Kill the grandchildren, leave a trail
of paper over the long interesting paths in the wood.
Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself
in turning into your love-soaked opposite. Plant
his parterre with antlers, burping
statue of when-was-the-last-time-you-saw Eros;
go get a job in the monument industry.
THE LAUGHTER OF DEAD MEN
Candid jeremiads drizzle from his lips,
the store looks as if it isn’t locked today.
A gauzy syllabus happens, smoke is stenciled
on the moss-green highway.
This is what we invented the suburbs for,
so we could look back at the lovable dishonest city,
tears clogging our arteries.
The nausea and pain we released to float in the sky.
The dead men are summoning our smiles and indifference.
We climb the
brilliant ladder toward their appetites,
homophobes, hermaphrodites, clinging together like socks
hanging out to dry on a glaring day in winter.
You could have told me all about that
but of course preferred not to,
so fearful of the first-person singular
and all the singular adventures it implies.
DISCORDANT DATA
for Mark Ford
Still in spring, my coat
travels with the pack, unbuttoned as they.
The weather report is useless. So,
sigh and begin again the letter.
“This is the first time in weeks
I’ve had to communicate with you. It all
falls, in balls of fire. I guess the
North Dakota landscape doesn’t do much for you. Have you
no conscience, or conscious, conscious conscience?
May I remind you that every sentence, everywhere,
ends with a period? A disclaimer of sorts?”
He thought we’d gotten to the middle of the grass.
His glass fire hydrants can have no end.
Oh it was just an idea;
there, don’t rail. The posse is coming
by for drinks, we can skip enslavement today.
Concentrate, instead, on this day’s canonicity.
It has to be from somewhere,
right? Many prisoners have left downtown, the old man
assents. He was tremendous and bald. Liked a practical joke
now and again. Look, the white rain is writing on the wall
of his saloon. Could be he was over the hill,
we’d assumed, but the flapping in the net’s too
strong for that. Don’t you agree? Have you
had any further ideas on the subject? Yes, you
could well afford to give up a few.
BOGUS INSPECTIONS
The things that were in the drawer were dispersed a long time ago.
Some were wetted by snow. Others were dry but could not refract the light.
On the harbor’s side a frazzled touch obtained.
Peace of mind fell through a grating in the sidewalk
where it lay visible for a few hours
and then it went away. Anyway, what can I tell you?
Not the things you want to hear, I suppose.
Nor can your interest deflect my moodiness. I shovel all the things you want to hear
into a wheelbarrow and leave it on your front step.
Perhaps some of it will reflect on me, on you, hell,