Flag Day in Vicksburg Mississippi

The “thing-in-itself” (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable.         Friedrich Nietzsche

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.         Frank O’Hara

Here I am on a southern sidewalk

Standing at a lamppost and holding an umbrella

Thinking about the words of Frank O’Hara

And of you again

Distant as drizzle over the Pacific

Near as night mist rising from the Mississippi

Fog pooling in low fields and lapping at the hills

I remember you

Wore a dress of Turkish cloth

And a tunic edged with fine gold braid

You were laughing and laughing

Blue eyes white teeth very red lips

A face with the colors of America

I am writing a poem

Not about a flag

Nor about a song about a flag

I am writing a poem

About mystery flowering into any ear that listens

Things blooming in strange domains of language

O lovely stranger

I’m writing a poem

About us

Our story’s noble as a tattered flag

I remember the light of your metropolis

Was a little bored and disgusted

Like the landscape’s hard beige hills

Light lost in the alleys of your yellow city

Light that wanted to be near us

Now that I’m back in Vicksburg and can think

The night grass is gray when street lights come on

Here where fortuity blesses our difference

Here where to be not what one seems

But what one quixotically becomes

Here where Heal-All and Prairie Phlox bloomed

On Independence Day 1863

When Pemberton surrendered his sword to Grant

Flowers that gave the lie to a fallen city

And gave the lie to ironic guns and the sorry rig of 
     refugees

That gave the lie to twenty-thousand killed and 
     wounded soldiers

Remember how your poetry teacher

Made you believe in never getting bluer

Or greener or purpler and never going on and on

Like nightfulness like the dark?

She believed in the rules of poetry

An elaborate but fake symmetrical order

Like the old courthouse in Vicksburg

With its big portico and inflated columns

Yet with the real work done in back rooms

Where in the decades after Reconstruction

White landowners contrived to disenfranchise

Generations of black Americans

Many decades passed before the town

Officially celebrated the Fourth of July

You live in a place with no memory of an enemy’s boot

Is that why ennui haunts your city’s light?

I remember the cadence of your steps up a blind 
     staircase

Ending at a door that might have opened on the void

Maybe you were reading too much

French poetry

Words you still feel but can’t remember

And may never see again

Like phantom limbs

We have dreamt a space within us

Dark and small enough for infinite silence

You’re so beautiful

Who would ever dare to love you?

Caught Up in Absolute Gravitation

It’s true

Antonin Artaud told us

Life consists of burning up questions

Sharp sensations in our limbs

Stilettos of ice lodged in our throats

Night’s blurred voice

Scraping against the earth

A low mutter over cold stones

A thin untethered scuff—a moonlit scrap

All tangled up in the toils of desire

Igniting tiny constellations in our eyes

A word like what?

Just like a naked foot

Rippling the black water of our love

A shivering pane of star-swerved sound

Immoderate ecstasy or anger

The whole goddamn milky way

Hurling over us

I See You Walking Into

A sweeping meticulously white

Frivolity O these wind-tossed petals!

Yes it’s tough when we’re here

Always wanting things to be beautiful

Momentous events are just

One two three trillion flakes that keep

Falling off these pear trees 

Now you a little troubled

Rejoin the others and a quiet

Adolescence when you tasted wonderful

Air every morning before school

Yes and those days were still

Irritating and boring and svelte

Perpetually ardent like spring

Blossoms trodden and run over

Far Away Lips upon an Armpit

When you come to Vicksburg

Will you take a boat?

The possibilities for visions grow

The closer you get

Vicksburg’s lousy with quizzicalness too

You might like to know

That’s okay

My door's open to midwinter rain on the magnolia

Come on in

Put out your hand

Isn’t there a poem suddenly there?

Each day’s a new line in the poem of our life

The purest fragments the clearest

Residue of mislaid sound

You could say dawn

Sometimes revives a curious plant

Which might symbolize possibility

Or half a dozen other ilities

And then again sometimes dawn

Unzips a sleeping dog

Vicksburg’s lousy with those too

Unzipped hounds

There’s a haunted mansion

We should inhabit on a promontory

Remember when you said

You don't really get me

High anymore

I said I do

Four because one’s not enough anymore

It wouldn’t surprise me

If I had a vision

People have them in Mississippi

More than you’d think

I wander drunkenly here

Going up for a change

Was all we really wanted

That afternoon on the escalator

Now it’s always the last heist 
On this escalator where I’m only slightly 
Piqued to find my only slightly sullied wings

Hidden in your garretless eyes

Vicksburg’s lonely without you

Your irreprovably sour smile

How many teeth have chewed this

Little piece of eternity

As if beauty’s a thing

That keeps going up for a change?

My solitude has your face

Your sigh-colored hair

Your silence which comes as a kiss

What I really want to say is

This place could be

The happiest moment in all infinity

When will your boat
Arrive at the landing?

No Further Than Forgotten

When as if entangled in dry air

A memory opens like a dark rose

And again you lean close to whisper

Your breath caressing my neck

Your curls touching my cheek

I can’t sleep

Night breathes darkly on my face

And unbuttons my mind with dreaming fingers

I think of your lips

Your mouth a pink rosette

O sweet cockade of passion!

I have several festivals inside me

One of whose doors

Only your voice opens

My heart is a cavernous ballroom

Where silk-slippered acolytes

Dance among the mirrors

I have tombs of air inside me—

Hear my dry mumble

Echo in your city’s yellow canyons

Until I saw you

I never knew a woman

Without a shadow

O fire of naked flowers

Far from these avid fingers

What good does it do

To hold out the hand of my thoughts?

Since I came home

Spring squats on bare haunches

The hungry season waits

Like a dog in the road 

The Pernicious Advice of Dreams

Tonight I take no interest in the dark

Thundery torrent
Of angry decimals pelting the window

Tonight I feel like Hindu numerals

Before there was a symbol

For the missing position

When zero trembled brightly

Just out of earshot

Where music turned to noise

I remember you sweetly

Took the corner of your napkin and wiped

A prime number from my lip

I remember how you stood

Suddenly before a tribunal of angry algorithms

Having found among your many blonde hairs

A gray one

O fire of naked flowers

Far from these avid fingers!

In the rule of three

Multiply the fruit

By the desire

And divide by the measure

So you get the fruit of the desire

Deciphering These Snow-Ridden Thoughts

Certainly this able-bodied day

Fills up the page

Distance always occurs

Where light comes to rest

Imagine how to write it

The ill-fated sentence of a still-

Born affection squeezed between

Parentheses O demonstrative act

Of love be adorned and so forth

Be but some tender estrangement

Ceaselessly deferred and given

To simplicity given to simple words

Maybe too a common prayer

Or a double dash why not--

I haven’t had a hair cut in weeks

I haven’t even cut and cleaned

This intractability of fragments

A necessary return to distance

A space where I might find this

Inscribed date happening in silence

A precise imprint slowly forming

Right here on the very spot

Imagine a dome of cavernous air

Imagine!

Phosphorescent volumes of thought

Moons among demolished moons

Light in the Attic

Gustavo says it’s qualities of light

In whatever he looks at

The way someone’s past glimmers up

The trunk and into eucalyptus leaves

The way broken sunlight carves

A throat as radiant as yours

Or how a cloud shadow tills

Tender alleys in this yellow city

What does he know

Holding on to it for grace

For your silence!

Gustavo goes walking

With some intent to knock

He goes walking towards the sky

That passionate suffering can’t wrinkle

He goes walking

Where the sun blinks its infant eyes

Aflame in this immortal desire to die

The Sun Scalding the Little Day

So you promise we won’t die

A flashing bolt

A sudden kiss

Just laid onto the page

Just there you say

In whatever form

We can find it

Perhaps like a snow fart

Perhaps a tiny city

Drowned in a snow globe

Shake well touch on

Anonymously statuary

Watches us you say

The way we look

Our faces

Emblems of weary futurism

All winky and all kissy

All wet with digital ink

This isn’t paradise

It’s just another way of saying

Clouds consist entirely

Of ice-crystals 

And lateness

You say isn’t just

A book of poems

David Shapiro wrote

No way not at all

It’s also colors

We see through waves

As we stand by the balustrade
Admitting that this hotel 

Will be the death of us

For the Silver Leaf

Tonight time withdraws

To the naked lamp’s blind kingdom

You feel the weight of inenarrable events

In an era before spoken things

Where nothing thwarts the wind

And you find the moment

At the exact midpoint of your life

Evening in the Coppered Hills

Your fear of not being

Makes you intimate with stones

And your fear of missing

The slow movement of shadows

Their quiet breathing

Their whispers

Makes you kin to silence

Insects pause at your hunting boots

Nothing’s out of season

How to Love a Poem

Jazz it

but don’t

razz it

Wiz it

but don’t

jizz it

Yearn it

but don’t

learn it

Spare it

but don’t

wear it

Lay it

but don’t

play it

Shout it

but don’t

spout it

Spit it

but don’t

shit it

Spite it
but don't
shite it

Cock it

but don’t

lock it

Chew it

but don’t

spew it

Lust it

but don’t

bust it

Thirst it
but don't
burst it

Lose it

but don’t

booze it

Piss it

but don’t

miss it

Carve it

but don’t

starve it

Lick it

but don’t

stick it

Trash it

but don’t

smash it

Tease it

but don’t

seize it

Grab it

but don’t

bag it

Slap it

but don’t

trap it

Hold it

but don’t

fold it

Own it

but don’t

loan it

Hear it

but don’t

fear it

Slice it

but don’t

ice it

Find it

but don’t

bind it

Fight it

but don’t

bite it

Sex it

but don’t

text it

I Write Your Name

I write your name

On profundities of night

Lost as daybreak

Shrugs its ancient aching shoulders

I write your name on salt streets

As they unfurl and yawn

I write your name

On dawn’s gnawed crosses

When air trembles with a scent of musty laughter

I write your name

On the bicycle spokes of morning

Whirling in search their gleam

Their fugitive sparkles of time

I write your name

On a blurred noise

A tired moan of low reproach

I write your name

On the waking river’s naked fist

And on the barn swallow’s panting wing

I write your name

On the sun’s lusty ascent

And on day sumptuously

Consuming itself

I write your name

On the city’s dirty linen

On the city’s unmade bed

On the city’s tarnished eyeglasses

On the city’s thick indifferent heart

I write your name

Where you are not

In the poor murmur of a poem
In a fluttering of useless feathers

Little Elegant Doubts a Thimbleful of Fluid Might Erase

Let’s not look feasibly

Worn around the edges

Nor predictably clichéd

Let’s be half air like these insubstantial thoughts

Let’s blow for instance

Dry words at each other

Gaseous puffs colliding

In the space between these open mouths

Or elsewhere down

Silent corridors we see

Dimly as at twilight

The true pretense of these archaic faces

Let’s be frozen gods

You so beautifully keen

I so full of latter-wit

Feeling kissy like these fragile statues

Let’s be luminous beasts

To see and to be seen

And we will only speak

The ancient language of these incandescent eyes

Hey Dude

I wanted to say hi

But I guess you’re too busy

Farting onto the mirror

To see if it fogs up

Protip—

It totally does!

Call me back

Bye

There as in the Water of a Mirror

Never again to trust the solitude of rivers

Nor open fields receding from either shore

No more murmurations of starlings that rise

In one many-winged whirl to settle again

With a single instinctive mind on tilled soil

Never again the blank blue sky empty

And cloudless like your last-time eyes

When we stood there discussing spiders

Found in birds’ bellies and the sentence

Where we prepared for whatever might

Happen in the aftermath of introductions

Never again our frost affected thoughts

Turning toward tropical erotic zones
Where we'll meet again in paradise