of the churl as plodding she shifts from Yule berries
to centerpiece, nothing more’s in my craw.
How did I come over the last time? I’m all confused.
Besides, you got me when I was just out, and you were all going to say
I waited, plaited at the formal garage, all despair
and too tidy to come out. But I do. I’m like the
bashful bull, my bicycle has hindsight, my ass is clean,
I’m being raked over the coals by an uncertain
hand ceremoniously, the curtain’s a riot, it could all
be badly blistered. Look, I have a vacuum cleaner.
In the janitor’s hand some prurient
fun must be planned and I’ll go where the washer decides me
into small dovecot openings that are for the birds. Please,
accept kindly the running board of my road
to you, the lucky dusk that was over Fifth Avenue. They chanted
variously, the lights separated into grave reminders.
Well I am coming up too and don’t much like
your progress with the waves. Seems they are dividers,
or something, something that was cherished long before
you and the odious others came to think about it.
Come to think of it I know that man’s name, but not his station, but I am
working on all those orders. If we have to come, he can come.
Meanwhile before the fire one putters and absorbs so much
of the floor it’s like returning to a natural Elysium
one was meant never to have left. So long, it’s so dry
in the dells that dust can’t get accepted and we three
under the umbrella of stars shout down the well into the next
performance, which will be more varied.
I’m so glad the tocsin assimilated all the calls to order that must have
been found wanting under one odoriferous tree or another, it’s all
the same, sample. My britches are wanting suspenders
and I too want, where it wanders, under regular
bridges and pavements. We seem to buy flowers
but are erased from death, it passes over
into the lovely material of the sky I get used to wearing.
The man I love is ready here in the faceless backrooms
under ground and by his shining, in the trees of heaven too,
a final note. Gorged and empty. Dissatisfied,
yet rolling in sleep’s tresses as never, and in front of a junction
of light to lunar light, to folds of earth’s sleep.
He’s one to know. You’ll all wear me out. I’m green and gray;
the current is voiceless and occasionally.
JOY
Think of it as some god-liberating whimsy
that heaven and the emperor’s mice detain
in the province of boredom. The signor’s wrath
is cold at these times, to nail the fizzle, explain
exactly what went wrong in clear, easy-to-understand
sentences. Besides, an imperfect embrace continues
from the past like an organ-point. So it was not you
in the original documents attributed to “I,”
and was no safer to pursue our advantage albeit
a mild one. The scene is classical;
the last twister corrodes into terror.
To be living on this scale. An old drum
collapses like ash. Seek it tomorrow
in the diversity of sleep,
the promised landscape.
IRRESOLUTIONS ON A THEME OF LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
“we are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.”
We leave out old regrets
that when they be found are almost blended
in the grass, shadows of apple stems
they might be or collages from another country.
We shall, at the steeps, commandeer all
that bed is good for, then sink into a platter of sleep.
Bringing water to the fountain, a hot day’s
rest, and too soon is it excluded
to the delight of those sitting near us, who,
on the verge of bailing out, decided to approach
the argument again in a spirit of fairness this time
since we all have to cooperate, or else the earth
will get slightly out of kilter, its revolutions
a few seconds off, enough to produce climatic changes
in places you least think of—
One day the mice became suspicious. That was all
we needed to get going again, in plans
of luxurious travel this time—on foot, by plane
aching through the deserted night for its
imagined double, shot against the sunrise
with blips to read by, a miracle—
One should be filling out
the forms, but tension has lessened, though
we need to know we live in explosive times;
we can see our way around corners to where
we dressed the birds. They liked the clothes
we gave them, liked us, but still they
wanted to go home, not to a forest
or savannah, but to the place of captivity
they had always known, a cage somewhere inside a school.
So each day the predicament
emerges different, yet the same—you want
to have birds at your shoulders and wrists, to connive
with nature in her song, but something always
leaves you. Suddenly there are no more disappointments to be had
and the laziest are crowned and anointed for their efforts:
somewhere we see in this something which is shyly wrong,
some corner of the heart, bird-
haunted, by birdsong haunted, as though we two
were far away, and these others strangely near—
a paradise, if we had the facts to open it.
And when an elf
sits on a golf tee before you, and someone
behind you asks to play through: then, then
it doesn’t matter much which of the old gypsy crones is
really a princess in disguise, with flowing
chocolate braids, and olive-dusted complexion! O may she
redress our wounds, and leave
connivance to us, where we shall find
it a suitable burial ground and all
will be as if we never had lied,
never hounded our mortal parents with persistent questions
and all shall be as though dawn came easily
any time. The mountains fall apart
in my hand as I hold you: there, three
are smoothed over already with
five more to come before a delicious breakfast,
and I try to cherish you.
A CALL FOR PAPERS
It buttered no parsnips that it was raining
on some statues of older men. The call had gone out
and from all across the country, papers
kept blowing in. The little crazy guy converged
with a very interesting man who was right here
in an antique perspective:
The appetites were enormous, the provisions limitless.
Fifteen read their papers
last year at this time, the group said.
In the case of Boston-Cleveland or Hartford-Philadelphia
you don’t get arrested for heavily kicking a sign.
But as daffodils and raindrop-preludes fall
from the symbol-laden heavens, you can be charged
for forgetting, for ignoring the very basement of your and others’
ideas until they come at you like stray cats
and it isn’t their fault. Remember that.
The scale descends
to a kind of landing, then de
scends some more.
Cooler heads prevailed
and something that the work was not resembling
gave you a distaste for discovery.
Whether I’m fooling around or not it is incumbent
on the brothels of history to raise up their sheets
and vote with a bean for or against capital punishment.
Don’t you see
it’s the only way to measure
the zebras moving to warn us,
reptiles in rep ties at the pass?
Carry on, crow.
Meanwhile sleep binds us lightly
so that we can easily slip away as the season
approaches on tortoise feet. Around the corner
of midnight, and a thousand miles away this morning?
What good are hygrometers, and what men need us
more than they need air or defense?
We’ll see you at the end of the month! they cried.
Small waves broke as they re-formed
across the bay’s lumpy waters
in time for this session and for the next
one and for the one after that.
LOVE’S OLD SWEET SONG
Because if all of life is just a blip or some kind of exclamation
mark at the bottom of last week’s weather (an almost snow-filled
field from which some weeds extrude; should we persist in
trying to find a home for these?), it means, doesn’t it, that we’re
allowed to backtrack to the slough we were backsliding into
anyway, and really learn about ourselves from it this time? I mean a
quagmire’s a tidy place for pausing between highballs; there is
so much more to everything but this is a not inconsiderable prison
yard for getting that all-important exercise.
Meantime, one comes
bearing an envelope that is fresh and blue; one salivates; even
if it’s not a stay of execution but an order for the immediate putting-into-
effect of same, there’s something to learn. It’s not like two cats
ignoring each other in a basement areaway. By that I mean it was
going to lead up to something and then did, quite quickly. Better
than scanning hirsute sands for plumes announcing the arrival
of reinforcements; in those cases one invariably skips forward to a
time in the near future when everybody is happy again and an engagement
ring slips onto a ring finger of its own accord. But back,
I say, the heck with endings. I don’t think I want to wear those socks.
On any other day of the week my attitude would elicit a few stares;
my value-judgments are like what they used to call an “overdressed”
woman, and it has come about that my shadow is invisible to me, but
I don’t know this yet. The conventional wisdom is that we
desire what’s unattainable (reclining clouds, distant factory chimneys)
for precisely that reason. No allowance is made for the goodness
that might be lurking therein, like love in a tongue-tied child
whose cheek one pinches as one passes along to bigger and better
disappointments. We never know what we could walk back to except
when we do go back, and then it’s as if not knowing and knowing
were the same thing.
I long for more weather around us,
but it’s just not going to happen till we’re in the middle
of its happening and know the results without being able to see them.
The time for passing is past and none but an idiot would think otherwise.
Yet I see I shall be needing some appraisals, tall and lucky
totems foundered in taller grass.
WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD
“Why, there’s the well where the message fell apart:
its rusted chain gleams still. And there’s the happy one,
so little she was excused from most occasions.
The blinkered sun circles it now, the last act,
noting how little its motions will be called on the carpet
(or it will fade the carpet), with the resulting freedom to act
like a knife, or a snake in the night. When it’s all over
we say I could drink it now and then,
about three times a week. But the heavenly uproar
is heavier; storms mean business
in this day and age. The only viable
mode is to walk out; you’ll find the slick streets keep time
with your advancing to what is really seen when it is sold.
“Fresh air will have noticed the pond waterfall, how
the trillium darted out from underneath but
had nothing to say, no excuse for being there,
though perhaps one for what was there before, as a henchman’s
eyelids close just before the deep fact of one
sitter’s enduring, to pass the test, and then
everything is all right; the sun seems to have shifted
its position, allowing gray skies, crazy boys to bloom
all over the place, and yet we are here, safe, unsleeping,
perjured to a man but that’s
what gets removed I guess. You have to
return to the old. And age builds it shining new for you.
We have too many things to think about
not to notice the dull horseman’s color of coming
back to check once again. Besides, the lilac
flavor of after-shave stood up, grew him a new one,
and all cattle, all sentries were dispersed from the yard.
It’s hard being in an epic but harder still
to hold on to the thread as it whips like a kite-string,
and some of us do get our deposit back. But for the most part
there is only land and that is obvious,
too near the lunar chasm to be depended on
and too smart not to give us the slip
as the occasion warrants.”
When all is said and done we avoid our friends
not from fear of us but from a holy desire
not to cause a commotion. Poor boy, you thought
to have sipped from the center would be such an easy, exact thing,
like kneeling in church. But you see now how the watchman
destroys whatever it is one happens to be made of, purloins
curious pebbles in their place, or better
yet, no things, nothing of which the touch
can be determined: strange, elliptical events
with no name for them in the glossary. How the vegetation
would take over now: we’d be stalled again, the bad
smell on the verge of happening once again, the tin
posy in the doorjamb as unconcerned as if this
were a hundred and fifty years ago. Something has got to stop,
yet I tell you the enemies are for us, shouting in our ears.
The leaves are too little at the top,
and the years, well they come to seem little too, little and nifty,
though I suppose not for long, and I seem to hear
something will wring us, wrench us from the extremes
of piety on the one hand and salacious diffidence on the other: just
enough for the sing-song to get along, as we were,
nice and easy for us, stone plinths with fringe of grass.
LE MENSONGE DE NINA PETROVNA
This slave brings me tea,
and happy, I sit for a moment, a spare
moment. Time under the tree passes,
and those things which I have left undone
find me out! O my spirit shall be
audited! and unknown readers
grasp the weight of my words
as their feathery hulls blow away
leaving the crabbed and sullen seed
behind. And how many of these shall grow?
Really I thought it was autonomous
as the birds’ song, the vultures’ sleep,
under crags to whom virtuous
dreams come and torture them awake:
all alone lest someone
approach too near, in a fever
that binds the edge of sleep
where it blurs to hysterical necessity,
in these hours I am someone.
A patch of damp cannot ever overcome
the hurricane that blows where it wishes,
and the Christmas tree ornaments may well be
dispersed, that look so perfect,
hanging together,
as must we all, to the distant cheering
of high-school students at a game
who mean no harm
but their kind words cannot save us
or quite leave us alone
as one hand of the clock homes
in on its chosen numeral.
Costumes and memorized poems are the order
of this night
as through an enormous pastry tube
clouds ooze around the stars, lest
(so brittle and unimportant are they)
the wherewithal be lacking
to bring earth into some semblance
of unity under the sky
that mocks us and will never
let us be entirely
all that we were someday to be.
OF LINNETS AND DULL TIME
You said you don’t want to know any more
than you do now, of every thing that might be
a person. It would be cheating. That is urgent.
If we are going to mean in so many ways
let them all be lopped off.
That way we’ll know you’re getting older.
I feel sorry for anyone that has to die.
The lines of what’s expected
fan out like beaters. That’s all,
I think. But I lose things, now.
The beautiful shape of the toilet interposed
a viability as the air-raid drill ended.
We’ve got to do something.
He may be up there now, trying to find us.
If you let me, I’ll drive you back to the fairgrounds.
KOREAN SOAP OPERA
My sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore.
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals