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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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