Thursday, January 28, 2016

Make Way for the New Odd Number


Here
Take my coleslaw
Only what isn’t mine interests me

Take my stuttering pebbles
And these barn owls waiting for absence
Take this earth listening for silence

Take the slow law of the cartoon cannibal’s kettle

Take this pile of Brasilia nuts
Recently crawling on the table
A question against all catechisms

When will we finally realize
What’s getting in the way of our salvation
Is our clothes?

Take me
Struggling here to stitch
Myself into your wounds


Monday, January 25, 2016

Once Upon a Time


The moon loitered at the windows of the house where you stared out of mirrors, draped in a splendidly cut shroud and worrying over your blond coiffure. In the second floor children’s room, a cat told each doomed mouse a wonderful story before eating it. The children were away in their pajamas, frolicking at the haunted playground recently vanished from the empty lot down the street. There, under moon-whitened rose bushes, a pack of sleeping dogs yipped and twitched. They smelled a hooded figure running in the shadows between houses, a burglar with an over-stuffed pack on his back. I’m not rich, said the cat, gazing out a window while absently biting off the head of a squealing mouse, I’m not rich but I’ll bet every mouse in this house that he’ll go far if he continues. Vanity, all is vanity, you answered from a framed wall-mirror, the teeth of a comb tugging at your curls. And your sister? asked the cat. My sister owns exquisite dresses and bejeweled spiders in her night castle, you said, where servants bear her majestically to bed in the morning to dream Kurt Vonnegut stories, each like a movie running backward and in one of which balls of fire erupting over a village implode into unlit bombs that glide upward into the belly of a military bomber flying backward and chasing its contrail all the way home, wee wee wee!  Then the moon yawned and lay drowsily down on the village, which made night fall black.  The burglar, suddenly unable to see in the darkness, tripped over the sleeping dogs, and they promptly attacked him, clamping their jaws around his throat out of fear not duty, his last choked breath a feeble squelch. The dogs trotted from the empty lot, where the faint laughter of children could be heard. The end.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Let’s Fandango


I dance eyes closed and wordlessly
With strangers who are you and me

I dance little days little hours little breaths
The way you take a little exercise

I dance with hoodlums who steal my grammar
On behalf of winter-stained grackles

I dance insufficiently with the sun in some
Very beautiful countries

I dance officiously with the abbot of unreason
Who rides a dandy-horse into the dizzying void

I dance the presentment of Englishry
While playing tickly-benders on thin ice

I dance on the stool of repentance
Forswearing impetuous flames of book-burnings

I dance with the ghosts of drunk sailors
Carousing on ice-bound ships

I dance where the williwaw blows
Frigidly down the mountainous coast

I dance on Tom Tiddler’s verbicidal ground
Loudly proclaiming the thinghood of the thunderbox

I dance like a gerund-grinder and grammaticaster
Majestically flapping my bingo wings

I dance joyless jimjams and flagrant flamfews
Peevish gewgaws and ornery hogen-mogens

I dance foregleams of the fire-flag
Hints of nocked arrows and chambered rounds

I dance the sockdologer of the thunderclap
With outward-sainted poets and politicians

I dance the lost cursive called moon-glade
Also known as the quiddity of estranghelo

I dance on the serendipitous tint of starlit water
The tintinnabulous glint of silent bells

I dance enwollowed in the mud of memory
Drenched in desire’s dark ooze

I dance in the tree-chamber of childhood
With the recollected echo of a yikkering squirrel

I dance without the winter inwit of the Inuit

I dance inviolable involutions nonetheless

I dance I dance 
I dance a terpsichorean rhythm
So you will dance with me


Friday, January 22, 2016

The Words I Found for You


Susurration’s the sound the scissors make
When cutting from exquisite paper
My most exceptional persona
So distant my step becomes voicelessly loud
So near to you now that it whispers a scream

Colors become muted
Translucent as the moon

Quick! open the window and set it free

Feel blind and hardly yourself tonight
Like the dormant schmetterling
Unshiningly piercing your heart

Pack shadows in a burlap saddlebag 
Because after great catastrophe
There comes a quiet light
The Brazilians call saudade

No one knows my dreams lack eyelashes
Except you and only you can see
Me dupe myself into thinking I’m more
Than an ink-slinging paper stainer
Picking noses and locks and wondering what
Prick nailed his khausillus to my testicles

Who cares if worms englut our gut the day we die?

Sacapuntas is a Spanish word I think 
Which means a man agrin with silly symbols
Tattooed to his tongue
Emblems that have no translation

Pingüino’s the upside-down map
Used by pescadero’s to chart
The infinitesimal beat of ennui’s wing
Briefly casting shadows on our faces

Okay but there’s always oak
A good woody sort of word

Germans like the word genau
I like Germans
Mostly


Wednesday, January 20, 2016

O Panic of Mushrooms in May!

            
Amiability is your quiet cough
Warm when secondhand light finds you
Dreaming chirpy as a cell phone

You see little roses
Parting garish lips
Inscrutably small monkeys
Fleeing sunset
And holy cow
You see a desiccated crowd
Of grumpy old Samuel Becketts
Crowing “Auld Lang Syne”

Three vermilion crows are watching you
Paddle turbulent green currents
Your tiny boat just a vague assertion
Small and quaintly personal

Goo-goo gah-gah
Must mean something
A feeling no longer
Sufficiently decipherable
Nor entirely absent

O forbidden inclination!

Any minute now the plural
Eyes of hysterical river gods will open
The door of your hands
Roughened by what kisses

This historical wind grinning now
Nervously at the window
Wants you even more than I
To be dreaming careless green taffeta
A long silk-sleepy dress you could wear
Waiting at the gate with Mallarmé
Smiling shyly by the shore

Well maybe just a little bit

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Becoming Real on a Wednesday


as if suddenly while beguiling
a troop of cavaliers at the caravansary
you recall my secret name
Twenty-seven Needles Dancing
On the Palomino’s Trembling Flank
and you take your leave
discretely sneezing tiny syllables
while putting on a stranger’s faith
dancing lightly in the air of silent harps

as if you from my heart hear the sifting voice
the incorporeal incantation of Vallejo
gnawing inconsolable clouds in Mississippi

as if you see a troop of riderless horses 
trotting severally over a smuggishly banal
western horizon and holler hey!
where’s John Wayne wearing that Clive
Christian cologne smelling like itty-bitty hooves
galloping up and down my right thigh

as if to avoid an overly octovated entrance
you say I’m right here yo!
looking vaporously personal
plucking your Caparison guitar
whispering dryly resolute invitations
and I say for goodness sake listen to those
ghostly vowels on the skirt of Helen Mirren!

as if understanding the eyes of the elderly girl
she who wears a peach blossom hat and recently
returned from a silent fever
now offering her soul to an open oven
you offer me your hand finally for a change

as if tonight of all nights
we’re simply here together
wearing the happy heads of impossible fish
becoming as with all these beautiful things
real on a Wednesday

Waiting for the Infinite Assignation


To begin a true story people without admitting it
Anxiously awaited day a restless throng
Taking an outdoor escalator up and down
The side of some old building maybe a condemned
Hotel possibly a foreclosed bank I don’t really care
I’m not into particulars tonight but I was there
I saw what happened as I stood across the street
With the air of a man who mislaid a most important
Briefcase watching them going up and down
And spitting and farting as dawn opened
Like an empty wallet and all the people looked
Up at the same time as if to see some sort of cloud-
Lit advertisement some kind of transcendental
Enticement to spend money they didn’t have

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Almost at Once When She Knew the Word


Let me tell you the story

That summer
The grain lay motionless in the bin

All the flowers flamed out
They fell on their stems
They fell on their faces

The girl returned to scratch gravel
Where the midwife buried her placenta

A cloud swam in a lover’s light
And knew everything
A cloud swam in obstinate blueness
Eternally deceived

Like a god in the void

This was when the woods behind the house
Had not been cut yet
Before the trailer park sprang up
Like a field of frozen ferns

I will tell you how it was
When she became a holy pilgrim
When she repented beautiful as a marble saint

She heard the shouts of wings
Shattering sunset
The inexhaustible ceremony of nightfall
The rain of martyred stars

Divine dreams parched her skin

The certainty of roots
Bleeding where two souls touched
An immense life-hungry thought
Piercing a pair of souls

I think her mother said
Bodies understand each other
But souls
No

Here’s the story
As I know it
When at the usual hour
She dreamed a hooded figure

Passing the clothesline
Where her mother’s carpet waited to be beaten
Coming through the barn
Where her father’s cows bellowed to be milked

She heard the wind
Speak brittle leaves
She heard the wind
Say extraordinary things
Tangled in cold shadows

The tip of a cigarette
Red as trough water
Bloodied by a butchered steer

When a voracious hand
Unbound her hair  
She had the urge to sing
A tongue-tied song

She dreamed an Argentine tango
She dreamed
She danced into the thinnest fissures

The deceptive blue of death
Lived in her eyes
True light lived in her eyes

Here’s what I know
Someone nearly nearby said

O daughter of inaudible misfortune
O daughter of the blind thread-cutter
When you reach the border
You'll release the word
Trapped inside your mouth

Untangled from your tongue
The word will scorch your father’s fields
The word will drain his cattle dry
Dropping mid-flight birds at midnight

The word will wither thickets up in fire
Awaiting women at the swollen river
Twisting in their hair until they dance
Argentine tangos on the barren shore

And you’ll be there too
A body dancing a body dancing
A body dancing on without a soul


Thursday, January 14, 2016

Regretless as a Raincoat


Look! do you see these words
Inside me loosely turning

These enormous
Flies I call my blood

Do you see these unzipped trousers
I call American persuasion

Whenever I stand here

Tiresomely shirtless at the swollen
River so dangerously supple this time of year

So soft-muscled 
That three coal-barges
Hit the bridge and they go down

Zip zip zip just like that without

Your lips
So much as parting briefly now and

Have your eyes always been too blue for autumn

Have your hands always been as careless
As these leaves
Exiled on the water

Look! do you see how this gray light
Lulls the sky

Do you see the drowned man
Seek the earth
Set in your clay pot



Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Yet Right at Home


I address myself to the poets who are here
friends Frank O’Hara’s not dead he strolls
all cruisy and nelly along Vicksburg’s levee
watching the river rise and I too tiresomely
got up in last year’s habits and you also
flowering in sunlit windows wanting us
to put you to our noses and make quiet
noises with our right nostrils O we hope
you don’t mind a little hyperbole it’s cold
and blindingly bright today the city holds
its breath like a frozen fern here where one
lives a few yards from friends who speak
the language of Frank O’Hara all wobbly
all droopy like these old buildings and streets