Mercury Astronauts
By Gregg Glory
BLAST PRESS
Copyright © 1994
LILLIPUTIAN TRAGEDY
A fetus of dreams
Bunched beneath an ear, a cauliflower lump
Or dim moon displayed
In construction-paper shadows. Cut-outs, fakes.
Its real teeth grind glass to whispers,
All night.
All night
Nickel-plated smiles loop in the dark.
The baby snickers mathematics in its strawberry fist.
The low moon cools.
The asleep fetus curls at the cold like a prayer,
Shuffling train wrecks and Freud. Its eyelids
Flutter dumbly, transparencies of fear.
Blinking a stuck note like a stoplight,
Red, it is a red
Ache towards abortion, a birth of swords.
Eaglet-frail, the locked embryo separates the
neck-skin
In dewy cobwebs. The small god steps forth,
On awkward paws,
In Olympian littleness. It prays so hard
Its follicles widen to craters
Hungry and empty.
The red head winks.
Its miniature
Testicles shrink in the air like nipples. It shrieks
A silver umbilical of dust from a dust-dry mouth,
Its blasted hair scattering time-lapse as stars.
Contents
Warped arcs of blocks
Warped arcs of blocks
Fall in unresolvable sentences.
Wood-dumb they spell
The wavered intelligences of animals. WXDSQTZCR.
Little Merc mumbles in his soft paws.
He saunters in diapers
Uncertain as a questionmark on his rubber feet.
He falls, A, B, C,
Into a charbydis of ducks, maternal flutters
Of a pressed bedsheet
That rises around his face in a lassoed halo of beaks
Whirling at his eyes.
Gorilla-thick, at a loss in the cloth waters, his
taut
Throat opens in wounds, vowels.
His dove mother
Wavers whitely above him, a feathery chalk
Scratching the blanks.
Her gargantuan breasts tilt until
He surfaces in her unfocused arms, in silence
To a moon of coos.
Contents
Color returns to the kitchen, color flares
Color returns to the kitchen, color flares
In the weddingcake interior,
A bag of glitters.
An unattended blender
Roars in the air, grinding towards take-off
With its metal. laughter.
A loose
Noose of volts, lazy as a snake with its plug head
And forked tongue
Rivers over
The waterfall counter to a crab hand that grabs,
Clasping and clasping
For the tinfoil prize.
Merc jerks
The heavy trophy into its shadows
A flood of gutturals. The bladed motor base
Flashes like foxhounds
Over the counter with its repetitive whine.
Dragging its master's whip of wire, it is
A lace of furious slashes, whistles.
His chuffing arms are useless, sacks of marbles.
As he tries to cry, a bleak
Radiance leaks
From his horse teeth.
His suede head pulses purple.
The dull syllable
Imitates oblivion.
Contents
Jackknifing after a rabbit
Jackknifing after a rabbit
His dad threw into the pool.,
Merc wavers, waving his sunlit hand.
His folded body follows
The scalded rabbit in its pasta surf
Coiling after concrete edges.
Merc circulates around its wet kickings like a pulse,
Calculated as a planet
Centered on a fur-flame sun.
Articulate water wrestles
The dark pupil- of effort to hieroglyphic whites,
Foaming its slick aches to a star.
The stung sun
descends with its turbines
On the cosmos of water,
The shrill. will
Of the rabbit on its treadmill, shredding papers.
Merc explodes its bloat throat,
Hammer-handed,
Unable to do anything else.
Streaked in chaotic water,
Rising in red plumes from the wound in the pool,
Merc's eyes
Are full of the sun.
Contents
Faceless in my mirror faceplate
"Faceless in my mirror faceplate,
Stars stick
To my tarred cheeks, bright as pins, kindergarten
approbations.
The curdled
Milky Way escapes my hips
Like gunsmoke.
Slick moons strip from my eye like band-aids, scabs.
A blank cateract
Revolves in its cracked stone, a broken abacus bead.
Freeze-dried
Planets balloon from my luminous belly, blue baby,
blue baby;
0 sun, o untouched sister,
Your far golds develop an unbearable face
That melts sweats
Out of my body until I rise like bread."
Contents
WINTER WATER
The lake falls off into blackness.
Leaves, trash
Skim my surfaces, a fresh exhibit.
Soft clouds scar their faulty reflections.
The fast
Crows row over, a renewable graphite.
Cries, incomprehensible metals --
All. day,
All day, ineffectual passages,
Bees ringing the icicles!
My muds darken a distance, the white
Clouds claw from my sides, numberless.
They dare
To reduce me to a place
Lightless and leafless, a warm blank.
Contents
IN A WHITE ROOM
Heavy doves decant against a window,
Hungry after the cold sun mirrored there
Repeatedly, in desired pages of the sky.
"Uncontrollable music shivers from a net
Of music, roundly played by light
That lights a tumbled mystery
Fallen from ourselves."
“words,"you say,
"Resist intention, speaking for themselves
Out of an alien self, left uninvented."
Light leans against the pale glass
As you confer your burden to a table where
Anonymous hands renew a lion's claws.
Our old controversies still ignite
Luminous music from these plain happenings.
But through a wavered pane of cold rage I see
Angry memories, confused as the swirling rug,
Rise and unwind; and our voices race
Like disconnected engines in the idle air,
Mocking models of our proposed, our true
Mock-lust, mock-hate.
And now,
Decorously swaying to the crowded ground,
The leaden doves move slowly among
The sideways slanting shadows of themselves.
Contents
HISTORY
Upright in nostalgia's vice,
The newscast knocked me flat; I am
Hammered from
A stiff expectancy that the past,
Under augers and a strong carpenters hands,
Could endure
Into significance like a three-legged stool.
Contents
SPEAKING OF SERAPHIM
Self-Consuming Angel
Black sky, and every bodily signal-- rent
Out of joyous communion to one stone
Hood clapped shut upon the brimming world,
Turning and turning as desires rise,
Consummating nothing.
Everlasting Angel
These stars
Are dank indications of an intenser light
That revolves above smoke cabins on neon nerves
Of words laid bare.
Self-Consuming Angel
Upon the glassy screen of this
Perennial cinema, amplified clouds
Dissolve in sleepiest whites, and then repeat
Their meaningless accumulations.
Everlasting Angel
Larger and larger
A significance encircles the silver semblances
Of militant vapors, flashing into bliss
Like the rose pulses of candied hands.
The greater light of pervading thought
Bloats to globes, including those
False dispersals and their stuttering repeats
That clatter sticks against a picket fence
Announcing annihilations of fiercest reductionists
In walking circles. Tom Sawyer stalks
The increasing forests of his flaming mind,
Bare-foot among the beams of burning trees,
Chawing creosote tobacco and a red rye stem
To its hollow center.
Self-Consuming Angel
Out of all that rural ruck
A final obelisk of blank is burnt:
Twisted alphabets of snakes made meaningless
Torque their scented pairs of strings, newly purple,
On blast-white paper sand to write
The doubtful origins of our philosophy.
Contents
GENERATION
Starting sex up out of books, pale apparitions
Act again the hairy rounds under always weary skies
Straining sweating eyes for a typed text
Al-ways the same. Always the same
Ghost upon their heaving backs like nets igniting
Spines of blue fire, turbulent on the doused skin,
Falling with hope of the dead on locked hearts to find
Coffins of beating victims too glad to die.
Contents
TIN CAN, ROSE HAND
Shattered trees under a cracked white sky
Cycle men to their old delight,
Mocking age with hooking trunks and hunching buds,
Scrape nothingness from a star-cramped night
Whirled into open day. All men create
Themselves out of dark and naked fright.
A wasted clarinetist in an alley squeaks
Man-shaped castles over asphalt streets
Frozen water cracked into a paint-stripped stage.
Barren buildings curtain it, and voices enter
Rhinoceros shadows of the concrete shells.
Stumbled figures dream of sleeping sages.
In scrubbed country and stark city simplified
To its ungovernable essences
The fire-spirit of a gold man imposes
Inextricable image of an isolate will:
Superhuman wisdom or beauty beyond desire
Staggered pistons tympannied on steel—
Banged oildrums beaten into bells
A scalded landscape can't contrive to shake
Out of starry wheels or barking gears of trees.
Thick coal marks of ashes, shadows
Leaked from blank facades or the rusty sky
Dwindle like matchsticks into a few
Familiar, fiery faces.
Contents
ATTITUDES IN A CATHEDRAL
I
Hydrangeas of crabs
Linerally skitter
Fandango reefs
Of mutible colors---
In underwater weather
Carapaces scatter
The one mood of blue;
Damson residue of
Drowning moons.
Polynesian motions
Sift from the shadows,
Indecipherable shadow.
Contents
II Old House
I thought chaos a good theme enough
And wound my mind in buckshot of design,
Evoking order from the slant hazard of events--
Events that heated every coil of my being
With intense belief--
Cool statues of statistical intellect.
Bees abandoned to fields, trembling with flowers,
Retreat to the imageless mosque of their hive.
Bohr pronounced the quantum atom and doubt ended
Until. an uncertain Heisenberg rescinded
Reality to clouds. This misty synthesis produced
A regular randomness that increased and dwindled.
What superconducting image
In this sliding scale of images will. end
The magnetic hysteresis loss of man's perennial
Repetition that resembles a leaf and a flame?
Energy is eternal and matter ceases.
Unless some unknown auditor apprehends
These ink tattoos of a bodily will, any rain
Can decay them to a watercolor that descends
In black-and-white
To the grassy unity of a gutter-stone.
Ginger as atoms a cloud of bees surround
This page of fertile moisture spilled to ground.
Black and white intervals of a silent film propound
Stiff lilies of countenances on an icy pond.
Caught in sweet tremors of the emotional round,
Lovers drone to their histrionic height and die.
But this scattering stone
Of projection, my stuttering heart, readjusts to a zone
Of the besieging sky, large with windy giants, to erase
All memorial of order from the statued face.
Contents
III
And hanging by the broken draperies of light,
Stained leopard spectrums and barracuda arcs he did not choose,
Throttled in love, and garroted in introspection,
This immense man
Curled beneath glass feet of Jesus in his saint-thick nave,
Projecting realest greens, sheer reefs of hue, until.
A sudden thunder dense with speech popped the holy faces out,
Gemming him in calcium.
Contents
IV Bandages on an Unconscious Soldier
Bone of the mind
Beats the body back
To its irreducible essences.
Troubled blood
Pumps its lyric chord,
Outimagining philosophies.
Wavicles of light
Wash oceans of skulls
With adumbrations of the dream.
Contents
V Night After Fire
Dry abstracts crack in a tin cup,
Chalky aspirin of the sun, dismissive of shadows,
Of the leonine rompings curled beneath the altar there,
In nude dark. The day has left its traces.
Consummations of the lunar room resist
The grainy edges of loss in definition.
Moony attitudes slip along the marble floor
In evasive shadows, always changing to create
Half-silvers of the every day; solacing whales
Swell from the clumped pews, watery exuberances
Flashing their half-lights like the sharp shelving
of a bay
Cradling its handful of boats. But there is also that
Which floats in us, at evening, murmuring among
tones,
Half-decided as a sleepy body in its yawns,
Breathing effluences of moonlight from
Flat corners of the church, its throaty pillars,
That which rocks in daylight fervors of a baby,
Waving its sunny fists in the midnight nave.
There is that which is buoyant and decides.
Contents
THE FIELD AS A UNIT OF ACTION
An ox moved, resolute
Among the wheat.
Bereft, a man
Set searching for his children,
Set searching in the weeds.
Cicadas detached the seeds
And left
A prognosticating pause.
Scattered by the green
Politics of wind, the wheat
Rushed back.
And the ox moved,
Resolute
Among the wheat.
Contents
FINGERS PLAYING BACH
His tremolo shadow, shading memory
Blue electrical exact
Gives merest indication among the leaves
Of pack-animal rhododendrons.
Swiveled ink, the shadow's crust
Puts a projectionist's zinnias
On the braille vegetation,
Flat floral-abstracts of a horse-hair couch.
And all. these changes of the nightly small,
Harped quarter-notes, impossibly quaint,
Half-note emptiness of eyes,
these few stones,
Increase in repetitions of a scale
Among the shaggy rhododendrons where
Gold-apportioned dolphins sequentially appear.
Contents
UNDULATIONS IN A SUMMER MEADOW
I
Summer sweltered on a weltred face.
The wheat made hornet-noise in thundering heat.
Insects blistered with a sound of rain.
And eyeless inchworms among metered miles
Of unattended fences, rotting in their sockets,
Creeped in ticking leaves, repeating as refrain:
"Summer came to meaning as perished bliss,
Squandered fruit flashed crystal by this hiss."
II
Abstractly insignificant, whole in handsomeness,
The solar bridegroom teetered under ruddy skies.
And summer hunger, that compact animal,
Sleek with pride, thudding in the dust,
Avidly fell, in Hyacinth calculus
Of disaster, on picked paws, through
Vodka washes of the air in grizzly pantomime,
To lick the wounded salt of winter's bone.
III
So that even the summer, hugely one,
Dwindled in the frosted grass, a blue dew
That dots the lion-anger of a mantis.
Summer hunched, wrapped by water-pools,
Into the stippled selvage of a lemon buttercup
Lustily- in arrowed rays, zeitgeist beams
That X-rayed from a outer sun
A reddened rabbit apperceived as foreign.
IV
Summer crumbles and winter comes
Shaking a broken stick. The empty bush distorts to snow
In uneven glitters, hale emanations
Skittering light to a chrysalis sky, remorselessly.
Searchlights of insects, buried in themselves,
Barb complaints of August in a rabbit's ear;--
Meticulous divas, abruptly clear, they
Chitter barbarous knowledge on the sunburnt face.
Contents
ARCHITECTURE
The wind cries.
It arises as a moment of concentration
In a meditated pool,
A swift, compelling leap
And leap away from origins.
Complete conceptions of bluest mind
Are pasted and pasted
In angles of light.
To steep sides. To stones.
The wind cries
Through thin bricks,
Whistling scratched Manchurian dirges.
Sluggish slabs of laborious blue
Leap' like words,
Into reddest configurations.
And a few, red leopards,
Chased by cold leaves
Abrupt as rabbits,
Shrink in distorted corners
To gauntest gargoyles.
The wind cries and is subdued
By the slouched shadows of the building,
Its angular blacks.
Nothing walks through it as it stands.
No light ignites its atoms;
Makes its heavy blues burn.
Contents
>MERCURY ASTRONAUT
Full sun in outer space
Dazzles nothing, recorded by an eye
Stuffed with brilliance, crinkled lights
That never boil round leaves to green
His mouth ahs on nothingness, exhaling
Oceanic eggs of air, stale, while
Boiling green, the biosphere
Shakes its metal forest grandly in
Uncinctured space.
Buoyant midsummer, that fiery eye,
Crest across his helmet
In crackling, kaleidoscopic hues.
Plaintive Pluto in aquarium colors, he
Aches in a stationary orbit,
Unobserved hermit,
Aches and ceases to ache.
Contents
COPPER PENNIES
A tin earth, diminished
To its tumbled essences,
Rings loudly in an empty sink.
A moss earth, bloated
To its profoundest provinces,
Makes mock of the morosest moon,
The circular sun.
Contents
REPETITION IN SPRING
Watery crenulations and puny violets
Purple among myrtle, say again themselves
Under a circular sun.
Freaked azaleas unpack their sang-froid fronds.
Crocuses crouch at a buxom sky,
Unnoticed in the noxious new.
And the same whitened clouds progress against
The identical, angry blue.
Slow winds
Move heavily, and heavily,
In leaded bushes burdened with blossoms
Heavy and heavy.
Contents
THE READER IS A RED PROFESSOR
It is in time of evening, the feral recitation,
That one finds, among aptest fossils of the day--
A trash of lights-- the animal renunciation,
The inability to be consoled.
It is among dark corners
Of a book, the mocking brag
Of boys around a dog, one finds
The essence of the image of the self
Is false.
It is in time of evening, the midnight bray,
A shelf of shadows, indistinguishable
From a shelf of shadows
Will allow, among empty sounds of paper,
The self to be the sound that is nothing.
Contents
BRIDAL CORBEIL, A
He knew the world's ochre caresses
And the sibilant moon in a gabby sky,
Ultraviolet in silence, never to extend
Its convulsive, milky condolences.
He knew summer's horn and autumn's marches,
Saucy consummation of his antipodes,
The celestial spit whereon he spun
His day, his night.
He took the moon,
Like a pale crystal. of the insistent sun,
Complacently, between his hands.
He was a lashless innocent among
The watery solitudes of the clouds.
Chalky sleeves traverse a chalky residue.
II
An uncertain woman rises; her incandescent hands,
Affixed in the momentary sun, contain
Skeletal clarity of August's sticks.
Broken music follows their melodious fall.
Command the plated trumpet, loud
In the streaked straws of day, to prick
A trope of love from the heart's triage.
Pile high the bridal corbeil and make
A scepter of it, a nod of goldenrod,
Chrome daisies shattered to their milk,
Dark morning glories darkly cresting
Fleets of crocuses, coronas of jonquil,
Springing obsequary on the hilarious spike
Crisp with chrysanthemums.
Last night,
Skipping like a copper phonograph, glyphed
In brass, her instant voice arose to praise
His manny motions. He left, as ochre afterburn,
In wicked vases, among stone roses,
A dense, globed love.
Contents
DENSITY OF IMAGES
There is, intently, in the jig of things
A tantalizing licorice
That is like
The strings of trees in winter, levitating.
The familiar disembodiments
Of sandy afternoons
Are like
The minutest conversations of our hands.
Don Pardo: a mind of roses, rolling
Under unconfined skies,
Will confess:
The crimson ball invents the hill.
Contents
BATTLE IN BARITONES
Fiery oakleaves in annihilated elegance
Grip like men their sledges,
Their last, dwarfed branch.
Molten wind makes moan against them,
Conspiring. Its aptest blues
Sigh like d rasp, and say: unprofitable.
Electric in the tree's cornices,
A scarlet concentrate
Whips it wormily back, a slug.
Contents
FEBRUARY ASSAULTS THE PARK CUPIDS
Round and round, the sky precedes>
Its imaginings, its trees, its clouds,
Stiff deposits of a stony light.
Sleepy children in the fireplace weave
Incantations the snow conceals;
Crushed absinthe and minty winds.
Flaming palms of their minutest minds
Melt the mildewy attitudes of evergreens
In the immobile landscape.
Their unconscious concupiscence brings,
Instant from the machinery of trees
The welded statuary of the spring
With purple, mayoral, immeasurable hand.
Contents
RED LECTURE TO THE BOREALIS
I
Angering, aurora, eat this candled word
Or be devoured by its controlling image and its
might.
Your snaked light, swimming over road flares
That splutter their dickering minutes out
speech red and oceanic green, flicker wormy bells
of lights that shatter, splintering into stars.
Impressive eel, ribboned over acrylic stairs
That saunter rip-tooth from my blank eye,
Blend your staggered kneelings with the meaning
I impress. Mutable emperor
Marching drunkenly down to bathe in this
Black Atantic: Innocence unbinds the mind from truth.
II
Is it rancid singing in a gestured scale
Depthlessly rusting an abandoned sky?
Scatter-shot chaos fatelessly swinging these
Intenser lights, chanceless, out to a winter sea?
Are iron determinants among these casual indulgences
Of prism tints, advancing, receding, there, here?
Or is it a feeling that confines
Its expressions to their unpatterned gatherings?
Final home puffs from a final trash
Of details; fat candles hidden in a closet,
Dusty linen creased to tomes, awaiting
The silvered outline of a guest who dies.
III
These auroras are the outline of a guest
Who touches us, hovering honey-hued
Above a native sea that stings our feet.
Iridescent ridge that images
The mountain-motion of the clipping waves and sea,
Velvet green on green, tilting in the air
Our comprehending minds assigned, we
Project your peeled appearances perfectly,
Used whittlings of an idea that once occurred to us,
That we made. Our glowing rock is this:
The candied selves of childhood on plum plains
Expanding with our watering wish, our invented rain
IV
So fate in the end comes to this: bright metaphor
Of mini-inconsistencies, giant in themselves,
Increasing in us, pantaloons of wettest weather
Sliding unevenly, erratic economies of air
Or faded sun, sifting red romances, the dead
And wobbled tracers of impassioned gold
Lapsing in the grass. Jagged winds
Simmer in the dirty pewter of the stubbled straw,
Ululating syllables of a hobbled frog
Until the scrolled aurora of a man,
Bellicose in solitude, complete, articulates
The uncertain sun, the trembled moon.
Contents
BOAR HUNT IN THE KITCHEN
Postcards from Orlando
Bristle in the barrack;
Bric-a-brac of oriental. scents
Clatter in the tropics.
Steam marches blankly from the musical kettle.
Occultly titters the snare.
Darkly unaware, ruddy hinds go hunting
Over the hill, the high hill,
Of the stove's iron legs, crudely carved.
Misdirected by the radio,
Copper horns twirl in archetypal pines
Pinned up like postage-stamps.
Standing there, emptying his pockets,
The bitterness of the bitter bacon, burnt black,
Strikes the timid oculist.
Contents
PICK-UP STICKS AT THE OASIS
Brunette fish smack in the sty
Of dirty water.
They turn thickly
Their squiggling tails.
The pond is dry, almost.
Dry as this moment is dry,
Leaning here, between you and me,
Like sunlight on a few dead reeds.
Meanwhile, here and there,
One, or two,
Mercury streaks
Sharply flare in the vocable mud.
Contents
MOUNTAINEERS THIS APRIL
So, Caramunga, this
Is the rough height of rocks
In West Virginia,
These green-browns and greens
Sipping the possible oxygens
Of flashing eagles falling in the West?
It is. It is.
Do the delectations of this light,
This spray of returning whites,
Returning edges to the stones on which we stand,
Speak to the remoter blues
Charging over the oceanic East?
Yes. Yes. They say of bronze,
Of farthest bronze,
The oozy metals of our skins, muy distant,
That glisten here.
They speak. They speak and are still.
Utter & scrawl
Contents
ROBERT LOWELL, 1917-77
Words more skilled than we; Robert Lowell,
stiff even among the great dead, massively
intelligent
in his lusterless long hair and stare.
New England put a weight upon his soul and bolus!
December insanity clocked him wide with style; it was
your madness made you glisten!
Separated from yourself by a shack of girls,
so far afield with the scald of your lost talk
and built historic monsters, bulling a Caesar’s
cruelty
of public auction your sold heart itself
would mumble heretical and refuse to listen.
You tracked your life-jags like ambushed bowling pins
spinning schooled as compass-fish
in every direction except consummation.
Contents
PRESENT TENSE
The words are fragmentary, used & blue:
here in this room... the pencil- rubs its nuzzle
, shiny, like a cooled volcanic cone in coal,
spent and boozily enlarged--- its dark outline
flies from the paper, unable to hunch
into its black identity anymore.
Some vacuum of humanity could trace its dust....
The old Abel, blowing his sons' grain
gold into gauche golden air,
burning in the brilliant diminution of his heirs.
With a yellow fold of hair my daughter dawns the room,
too shy to stumble, awkwardly upright, grand-dame
nursed in her Ovaltine bones. This page
will survive in perfect mimicry her father's false waste.
Contents
SICK MOTHER
Glancing down the Valhalla that we live in,
eyeing the chute; we are connected
as Newtonians, downed in your square hospital bed,
deaf spaghetti rushing water at my back, you follow
the optic split and shift shaft of rosy light
that mirrors your image to me, mother.
Tilting the oven door, open as Auschwitz,
marooned in steel. like your eyeglassed eyes;
the burned vomit of heat yawns....
Now it is talking like you,
in an endless fake; your skirr
of sorrow and remembered slights your diamond,
cresting divorce like a poisoned arrow, ringing
your iron trapeze triangle with your wedding ring.
Contents
GRAND CAYMAN, 2 WEEKS PER YEAR
Heat clamps us shut like a turtle shell.
Dad weaves his one-man oligarchy
in the sleepy shuttle of a hammock.
Taking the Boston whaler, like the slow jet
that spun us south
over the clumped hazards of brain coral
clear as our shadows beneath us.
3 boys' black shrunk heads wrinkle
with the underwater turbulence
of the continental shelf.
Striped fish scissor in the water.
A barracuda needles
a sealed circuit
under our oblong floating hull.
Death in water
is a completion, scaled like God's eyes,
dulling out unholy
amounts of too pure light.
The shore
shocked us with its diminished harshness,
sharp as a birch-leaf
between 2 blue mountains.
We hovered stutteringly
above the paper-thin
angelfish and universal. sand.
Landbound,
my dad was a black
dot like a dollar sign,
twisted in his dreams, swinging
between 2 drowning trees.
The stitching barracuda tied
a noose beneath our feet.
Contents
THIRD PERSON POEM OF TEXAS, or TRAVELING
We strafe through the oil haze of Texas.
Pterodactyls codified by rust lark the burnt land
like fireflies snuffed from mating.
My infant hand was scabbed by cactus.
Teasing her sweet mouth with a punctual hand,
absent-minded as a ticker-tape
in her automatic tan, a girl
toys with her unemployment check in a blue dress.
All night the clock ticks.
My hotel cell hums like a radiator.
Dry summer air
skinned a lizard on the skillet
of the concrete porch outside. Against it leaned
the feathery bodies of three cauled chicks,
easy in their sutures. I dived
naked in the swimming pool-- a solid cube of cool.
The detached Spanish hotel manager's head,
smooth on a sheet
of pure blue,
dropped out of view like a satellite.
My liquid eyes spun
aqua above
a tinted sunglass lens. An Exxon sign
chips and curls beside a new Cadillac
the color of water.
Twitching in its mirror windows, nervous
on a high-tension wire, looking for its baby,
the hysterical desert sparrow
whistles an operatic note.
Contents
DIELLO DAYS
Trapped and tapped dry in the chilly north,
Tommy, you live beneath the mirror,
permanent under light as a hidden fish.
Dead on pot and the cocaine
afterburn of fame your high-school. band
had brought you. Girls whose spines were cartilage
shaded your groin with their hair,
swayback and coral under stagelights clicking out.
Cornered into college by your "smarts,"
the limit of your relaxation
became espresso, goggling your eyes toward light;
dimming the antecedent of your granddad, "Frosh,"
whose muscled calves were baseball bats
foreshortened age had knotted
you nosed
your way through schoolbooks like a scholar.
It is my heart that burns a yearns!
Tacking our way like a sailboat
down the yellow stoplights at 3 a.m.
Asbury Park thought of as safer
in your yellow V. W. bug.
The unpaved
landing at your home was grace,
crunching through me like a dream
Time the dentist had never yet pulled free.
You knew me lonely
among the dumb
frat and brat
packed rat-tunnels of M. C.'s traditional dorms.
Mahler wallowed like God
from your new CD and speakers!
Waist-high in mud boots, I sank
hollow as a hearing horn
into the knotted whirlpool of your gifted carpet.
Contents
WATER-SKIING
My father's leg was lazered open
by a speedboat on the lake.
The thudding witness of his heart displayed
what his arteries allowed.
Caught on the motor's open air intake,
he tumbled under water.
We arrowed toward a drowning son
he cursed for a weak daughter.
My younger brother
bounced in the prow,
open-chested and half proud
to be a laughing Bhudda among
the inexhaustibly dumb.
Madonnas may, with gathered haunch
and horse-high head,
deny with unconscious stately tread
the downward tug of earth and dirt.
The clapping water whitened
under us.
My older brother's
head was treading
like a poolball above the lake.
So handsome he was "feminine"
in his good looks and grace, the world
turned to his kind eye or shamefully adverted
from the stilted scorn of a boy
aged fourteen years old.
The agitating skier, stranger
to our closed globe of blood,
angled his advance
at the tilted, shiny head,
invisible.
The waves' polymath equation
was ribboned by my uncle Richard's
hand-on-engine aim.
Images retain what mothers throw
away, disdaining to possess,
they keep the cluttered feathers
of an abandoned nest. What bird, what eagles toss
--- in counter-measure like a feather's fall,
each splintered mind's sharp outline
into a consuming all?
I kneel beneath
the white spray's slice of air and stare
at my swamped brother's seaweed arms stiff against
the sky.
My recovered father's leg
was a red
hash of graphs.
Contents
SUBMARINES
A blind football punctures the dusky sky,
almost as high as the trees. The gathered babble
of unchildlike children's voices
was transmuted to a murmur
by the throaty g]oaming of wood-shaded mourning doves.
We would play a sideways, condescending
tackle with the girls. Deft and absolute,
we built tall treeforts, too high
to toss a stone in
or monitored our block on bikes
as cops and robbers. Occasionally, among
the massacred masses of dead leaves
skimming our black pond like wines
everyone would sink their wooden submarines with sticks.
Contents
MY DAD
Even father floundered under Reagan's
New Deal simplicity and 'gags.'
Nobody survived
his corporate raids and diverse
“plans to 0WN Kingdom Come.”
Money stitched his thigh like Dionysus,
a second heart and homunculus embryo he'd sewn
atom to atom in his 1943 physics classes.
He spent
a frugal World liar II by the touring and dark dank
engine shaft of the U.U.S. Saratoga.
His awful., chewing tobacco breath
spit in the risen sun
of "My Jap."
Anxious and self-serving at forty,
he looked for a girl. who'd be docile at parties,
who could "talk,"and seem
martini clean and clear as gin---
and found my mom.
The combined poison of his poise....
He'd wanted three boys "like him."
He hovered his flotation waist and buffed head
above the barreled over
boys at the orphanage.
He took us as the starting sequence
of his moneymaking rosary.
We got a quarter for each 3 and 1/2 acres
of meadow that we mowed.
His abstract derision was precise and impractical:
I graduated with an endangered
English and Philosophy B. A.
Absenting himself from the ceremony,
he'd asked if the diploma came
“equipped with a meal. card.”
Parentless, I picked
up my scrolled bone and Gothicscript
degree in a June-jammed and 100%
tensionless circus tent.
Work for him will end in the grave.
I can even see it, dime-thin and empty
as the intimate, open, unprofitable ache
of an idle arcade slot machine that tilts beneath
the narrow necessity of a hill.
And even in an ice Heaven, my dad
will be the roly-poly policeman
breaking every law they made him read
at college. Abandoning my Jehovah mom,
even engineering
swayed away from his private zeitgeist and "charm."
His very chemistry was clogged!
As if in heat, every bossiness friend praised his acumen
and ran. Japanese dry goods mob his malls
and real estate divestures. He stalled....
And here I sit,
Caligula-rich and jobless,
with my fat sack of memories
to dote and gloat on.
Contents
DREAM (SANDRA)
Walls rise and define us. Define you,
locked in memory and panicking like a dove.
Wrinkled in a uniform with seven painted badges
dribbling down the left-side shambles
of your dull as waking shirt.
You are here to arrest me; steel
morning bleeds through my eyelids.
Your bird eyes escape a nest of tangles,
what you thought the world would be.
My heart traces your winglike agitation like a geiger;
a cold globe, half steel, rises like a air bubble
from my chest--- to lodge enlarged in a speechless neck.
Sharing your surmise at death, I hold
your plain tan and spangling T-shirt and cry us awake.
Contents
SELF-PITY
All upstream
I scream into the sheltered
non-existence that I craved
and nothing in me needed
and circumstance
made me ride like a salmon’s back.
Windless, I unwind
towards the pointillist TV screen
that shows how
a salmon shoves
the wadded egg-globes
of his red sister up to be
swaddled in his pearl
mantle of fertility.
Tons of scarlet guts
pile up like shingles for the blind
babies to rain over and eat,
hazy in the plastic frame
of the television's perceptions.
The house resounds...
Everything but the roof is coming down!
Outside, no sky
and dul.1 weeds razoring back and forth
at the dull. level of my eyes,
or hip-high
in the invisible stream that weeps
in weedy static as I drag
my kicking, black
boot setzered in 1-ime.
There is nobody here to rise
and kill myself for.
chiseled like the rubber Hercules
the psychoanalyst gave him free to beat
and stretch like a lost Zion, repeatedly,
tore my treasure-blanket to its bitten, linen
center and exited.
Owning and unconsolled,
I coddled my ripped blanket
among half-colored coloring pages, and never
scribbled past the borders.
Contents
THE BLUE FAN
When mom graduated to the hospital
he said he'd sue
the 20,000 in back taxes back
and hung up. The ceiling was ice-blue
like her corner room at home.
That was Dad. He relented.
Dad always played the Damoclean
sword unbalanced on a steel string.
My Mom hugged her thin
right-hand, broken, twin and hidden
ribs like exorcism---
cursing Adam back to dust, consoling with real pain
her angled, empty
arm tucked under like a new wing.
Insurance evaporated like the rubbing
alcohol they lavished on
the raisiny skin disease in the next bed.
The airplane ambulance, blurring into red,
transferred her to the settled house
on hover air.
Dropped in her electric bed, trapped by June,
she swiveled to the spasms
of her Guilleone Beret leg in summer sweat while
we watched the cheap
electric fan span the room
with its oscillating
blue eye.
Contents
MR. _____
Your car crunched the city's lacquer flat.
Driving to the cautious sea-side
resort and sporting town
you grew up to spurn
and stay in,
your razoring voice recited
above the roar of the open window
the commonplaces of a poem
you loved and wrote.
Silent under the sheeted hail
of abstractions, I listened
as the sandy road sizzled and you announced
that a Wyle E.
Coyote and Ph.D
in psychology had dubbed
it a "work" of "geen-ii-i-us."
Punctually over the phone
in your seasonal vice of paranoia
and drop in Throazine,
you'd ask,
nervous as the cigarettes you littered
the unadoring world with, if an
FBI taperecorder hissed in my right pocket.
Ill, ill,
you always mumbled after
the aching paintings your intensest youth had prayed
into perfection until
your tidy mom had tossed
them, like you, into the metal mental institute
of the growling garbage truck
shuffling to the stacked-up dump
of 2 by 4 ambitions
like a bear.
My friend, strapped like Christ
into the unpainted grade-school chair
of Marlboro mental hospital
you knew
heavy bees were gathering
to your overloaded
India inkpot and universal oils.
Contents
WORDS, PAUSES
The book's
new clean edges hiss
like a quiver of arrows, a stand
of just-fed, purple-backed, arrow-headed snakes
set squiggling over pins.
Night
lifts from the wet land, drowns
the tree's green existence. Outside
the world dies. I sit in
and nibble.
Sacredly,
our doubles winnow into one.
Day after day
deep ,rows more. "His
old joy grows a man."
Tired ire, tired ire, I turn in,
and velcro-shut the stuttering
steam of dreams. 0 closed
book
do not bite back.
Contents
From the “Nine Songs” of Ch'u
RIVER LORD
We swim
in Nine Rivers.
Straight winds
lash waves.
My water chariot,
lotus-covered,
drawn by dragons,
crests river snakes.
From K'un-lun:
the four quarters;
my heart rises
restless as leaves.
Sun departs
and sadness holds me.
The far shore, thinking,
restlessly wakes me.
Fish-scales on the house,
dragon-halled;
Purple gates
on the pearl palace.
What Spirit
in the water?
On a white turtle
among speckled fish.
We swim
the river isles.
Wild waters
slash down.
Our hands
and the journey east,
following your fair one
to Florida.
Repeating waves
rise to us;
reefs of fishes,
be my bridesmaids.
Contents
BLOOM DOOM
Bloom is powerless, in his assumptions,
Stripping given vision
To intolerable "gumption."
The rose undressed.
The rose undressed
In six stages;
Tailored, chalked, and pressed
Into ageless (inter)text.
Nothing adheres in the mix--
Arid in constellation air
Searching like Schopenhaur for a "quick fix."
Trading eyes for ovaries.
The cunning critics caught him,
In necessity of nakedness,
Puffing beauty's praises:
The rose assessed.
In whittled ovations
Where steel will
Cuts short its own applause
With a tin whistle,
Certain flowers find
Starved scholars prepossessed --
All mind a flatulence
---Unutterable "mess."
Choice confined to brutal boils!
No light fields of cowless clover
Unless inherited, or stolen.
The rose thrown over.
Contents
LYRICXX
I
Time mocks me like a rabbi
Hooting perpetual Jaws
The sweet death-prayer of minutes
Twixt centuries-- of pause--
Slow-- as Amethyst-- melts
Its rudimentary dew
So the Public day descends
In Purple solitude
Its bald gold face extends
Mathematical helium
Multiplied by billions-- then-- erased--
Signifies my Sum
Contents
>II
Awake in a willow wide awake,
The tall clouds opened a failing space.
I touched the bark of a mare's nose.
Birch paper answered a burnt heart's cure.
Stone entered an easing lung
As I entered it.
Sky upheld the acorn's grandeur;
Leaves spoke to leaves.
Love slithered under
The mockingbird's foot.
November took its notes
Above the shell of scene.
A cooling lizard swirled
Around an opaque egg.
A stone tree opened
Sweet valves of song.
A mouse jumped into grass.
Perpetual grass.
Contents
III
Tender as Discretion
reversed to Reticence
--- imperial--- the meadowlark prefers
the branch-- awkward---
yet-- as agile
as the wind that it--- begets
Contents
IV
Nothing is a sudden Voice
puts powder in your ear
--- Vast it echoes-- like the Fall
of Eternity---
Contents
12 PALACES
Desolate the provincial palace:
Garden flowers red in loneliness.
On the steps,
white-haired harem girls
Idly sit and talk of His Lord their Majesty.
YUAN CHEN
Contents
End