Mortuary Music

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MMootthheerr NNaattuurree

JJoolleeeenn OOvviinndd



Mortuary Music for Mother Nature

(collected poems, 1969-1993)

by Joleen Ovind



Harijan Press



Harijan Press

1703 Montura Lane

Frisco, TX 75034

Copyright © 2009 by Joleen Ovind

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

Harijan Press Rights Department

1703 Montura Lane

Frisco, TX 75034

First Harijan Press e-book edition November 2009

Designed by Jacob Bailly



Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 0-9636069-1-3 (e-book)



MORTUARY MUSIC FOR MOTHER NATURE



3

ACID RAIN

I'm a forester,

Morris-green arid-zone barrister,

Touting my tortes in the lee

of the scree.

I won't be insipid.It drives up my lipid

And cholesterol levels:

Hurts me, you see.

But what really stings

Is the acid-green wings

Of the creatures who fly

Through the acid-gold sky.

Their feathers are falling

All over the valley.

Their cries are impaling

My heart as it's failing

In sorrow to see

That birds die at my

Far-too-human

Immensity.



4



5

LETTER FROM RABBLE TO ROUSER

If I sat on privatism's broad and urbane couch:

if I were you, sir, the noted mossback wit:

I could take for granted, as my regular theme, almost folksy,

No Me Moleste.

But I alas find myself ever the unrenowned pest,the real recluse despite having entertained before you did

your various opinions on public morality, pedestrianism,

and the worth of ale in a daily schedule.

This particular set of opinions allows you

the most public exposure with the least possibility of

interference.

Oddly enough it's comfort you're offering, from afar,

along with the Compleat Conservative Self

with which many are tempted to identify.

I am irritated, occasionally allured, but never really

damaged by my chaste opinions in your transforming mouth.

They've acquired a lineage, footnotes, and are now

comprehensible only with an effort....

No doubt airing your isolation so utterly is pleasant,

and the sign of a long and lucky upper hand.



6



7

HEIR TO YE ROYAL MARTYR

The right tone is taken from him.

He cannot find it ever.

(Father, hast forsaken me?)

He wears a cross-topped crown of jewels now,

no crown of thorns. No hero's robes.

His hair is long and black and curled:his frontispiece of fearful armor shines.

(He's risen, as he said.)

A thin moustache graces his upper lip while

I

admiring and more, don my tunic,

bare my tonsure,

beat the floor with my fist,

touch down my forehead

(Lord, is it I?) and

remain,

my spine a bent symbol

(Whomsoever I shall kiss)

of what he won't say

(That same is he) --

my body a genuflection,

a broken gesture of betrayal.

(Take him and lead him safely



8

away.)



9

FAITH

"Fear not the night!"

The raven called in flight.

"Many have come this way before,

Many have found the moon a door."



10

APPARITION

I stepped back,

Filled with fear.

I thought I'd seen a ghost.

But is was just

My face in the mirror,

Stretching its mouth in a noisome boast.

"Begone, foul apparition!"

I shouted to that face

And turned my back,

And sure enough,

It was gone without a trace.

But I couldn't resist the temptation

To take just one more peek.

I whirled around without a sound...

I've been prostrate for more than a week.

The thing had claws and a sharpened beak

And feathers....

It was not at all what I'd come to seek.



11

CLARION

He was born

with a high burnished note,

the note of a bugle,

ripe and rife in his voice.

And he cried,when he saw what he saw,

"Rejoice! All hail, sweet

Mary of the mothered uplands:

a rabbit runs on the face of a rock

in the sun of your smile."



12

THE SCAPEGOATS IN THEIR MIDST

I saw

only my own flaw:

a significant break in the scheme of things.

The truth is I went down to the sheriff's office and

went mad.

I mean how can I ever forget that I went downtown and

went publically mad:

I never expected that.

Well I had been fasting again eating locusts and honey

sitting on a pole in the desert, good citizens don't

do that; but after all I'd fasted many a time, and

never had the magazines on the racks targeted me:

I never expected that.

I flee, am not free, my flaw pursues me behind the

wall, but the sheriff's office was

good about it all.

In fact, everyone downtown was good about it and when

I returned a week later saying see, the heathen no

longer rage, they were STILL good about it a ll; so

that I almost wonder

I mean if I didn't know better I'd think

they didn't notice.

I suppose they see this kind of thing every day

and have learned to have mercy on those who display

their sores, have learned in fact to be



13

grateful for the scapegoats in their midst:

tamed goats, rank domesticated madmen who know the

law so much better than they do themselves.

Who know the law and have forged their own yokes:

citizens, prevent me from singing up the sun till it

explodes in the grandeur of my fiery voice.

Citizens, prevent me from falling into the pit of my

own premonition.

For we go up

and we come down,

run rampant on the free stones and break our bones

on the same scheme

of things.



14

PERSIFLAGE

and flummery,

mimesis

and mummery:

all are the antics

of an ape.



15

SUMMER'S FEET

Spring's feet are clay feet to urge up flags and daffodils. Fall's

feet are waxen dolls dressed up to charm drear chills. Of winter's

feet we need not speak, they're frozen, after all. But summer's

feet are choice and meet and barely touch the ground.

Summer ground is frayed and fine for any earthworm's crawl. Athousand fronded ferns and things fling off the sandman's thrall.

The sand has shells that show their pearl only to the summer sun.

The sea has fish who only flash their violent scales for summer's

gulls.

Summer can gull anyone, I think 'twas Shakespeare said. He said

it lying on his back, a bird took him for dead. "Alas? Poor

Yorick? You'll get burned if you stay out all day." "O piffle,

bird," replied the Bard, "I'll let you have your say." And,

yawning, William rose right up, to end his summer's day, on horseback, as

it happened, trotting round the bay.

Spring's feet are finely formed, fall's feet in wool are warmed,

winter's feet can mutely speak (but no one wants to listen).

But summer's feet are choice and meet and, touching ground, they

glisten.



16

MI SEÑOR CLAVADO: MY LORD NAILED

Last Christmas you sent me the poems

of Neruda to his wife.

I loved them all but one

On the taking up of a gun

To save the general life.

I do not belong to them.

I can't take my eyes off them.

I keep looking up at them.

Only a year has passed,

But your silence is deeper than sin.

--Más tarde que sol bajando.

Later than setting sun.

--Darkness comes fast.




Ex libris nihil(o) est.

--Is that Latin? Pig latin? Tell me.

From the book of life nothing has risen

To comfort the wedding guest,

Miss Haversham, done with her best.



17




Last Easter you sent me the prose

Of Pontius Pilate who posed

As a just judge in Israel.

I hated each weighted wordBut that one which pinpointed my Lord.

You belong in the heart of them.

Your eyes take no note of them

Nor look down any longer on me....



18

SAD LASSITUDE

The Victorians were highly skilled

in writing about lassitude and self-indulgent passion.

They must have spent a good deal of time at the drawing board

on days like today: rain pelting down,

but not hard enough to be at all engaging,

chocolate candy bars snugly in the rotund little belly,a man doing income taxes reluctantly in the next room,

fire sizzling through wet logs,

dog asleep under a table.

Lassitude, lassitude:

hiss of grey water on grey windows,

grey wool sweaters drying here and there,

a grey tin of muffins waiting for the microwave.

Lassitude: and shall I never have the petulance for prose?

Lassitude: menses.

Lassitude: sinuses.

Lassitude: the wisdom tooth operation put off

in favor of a case of poison oak.

Lassitude, the Victorians, and me: a whole age

devoted to the fashioning of knickers

for indecent piano legs.



19

INVISIBLE MAN (To Be Continued)

for Ariel Dorfman

The emperor's unclothed,

The scribe is blind,

The poet's batty, to boot.

The clown's profane,

The divine a clown:

Get down, señor, get down.

Bitterly complain

Professors inane

Of the toll inanity takes.

Bitterly cries

The desert rat:

It's thirst for this,

It's thirst for that.

And on greased wheels

The trainman cries,

"I miss," says he, "the

Unsullied skies

That used to be

Before I set forth

On my smoking spree."

"And I the sea

do sadly mourn,"

Complained the sailor

On his horn,



20

A performing sax

(An obvious fact).

Invisibility is the bane

Of all below

Who follow Apollo.

It means I see

And am not seen.

A spy am I,Who should be

Queen

Of Medes and of Persians.

Instead I'm condemned

To endless

Excursions.



21

BARNEY DEAR, BRING ON THE PAINT!

Please release your lovers.

Tell them to take a walk.

Tell them they've been supplanted.

Tell them I'm lying in shock.

Send them the names of available men.

Assure them you'll never marry.Tell them they've got till the count of ten.

Really they mustn't tarry.

Please oh please release those women.

Temptation's at my door.

If I have to stoop I'll have to fall.

And polygamy's such a bore.

Yes, such a crashing bore.

An awful unending chore.

It turns one into a



22

saint.

(Barney, dear, bring on the paint!)



23

COYOTE SPELL

Coyotito,

ancient craft

of slyness: trickster,

ease my path.

Place the magicon my tongue.

Coyotito,

make me young

Enough to snare

the Hunter's foot,

enough to know

to tear his boot.



24

MORTUARY MUSIC FOR MOTHER NATURE

Nature is a dirge.

All occurs post-valediction:

The centurions, cedars draped to the gills in bad mistletoe;

The pipsqueaks, piñones fresh and hopelessly mating in

Cinder soil;

The others, jays (yep true Pynchon) "stomping around on theRoof" and stealing food from

Productive hens.

The silence of a precedent (predeceased and precious) idea

Is not a dirge

But our poor old Papa, our

God our paper state soliciting

Rebellion.

The two? Too close to disorder to satisfy

Many fan dancers, most editors, all

Of us who hope

That Nature will relent,

Repent

Of that sort of caretaking she

Requires.



25

DISARMED

What do we do

With the wild pendant howl

Of the mercy-till-now

Brigade?

(Hear them calling, "Holpen!Holpen! Holpen!"

Hear them calling, "Holpen!")



26

A PITY

Humane lawyers bid us have compassion on

emaciated hulks in the drinkers' hotels.

These as often as not do not ask our attention,

being sunk in the glow of decrepitude,

blood satisfaction of blood needs:honest because no vice is beyond them,

warm because it is cold.

And we cannot bear that they should go free.



27

POEM MADE UP WHILE DREAMING I WAS DRINKING WHISKEY WITH

A MEN'S CHORUS

Powder is a shrouder,

But diamonds reveal.



28

THE JOB

A transparent elixir

whose job is to persevere

falls to the nib of the bottle.

Who said the heavy alcohol

had such a fate?

I

I

I, whose job it is to fall to the nib of

transparency.

(Oh really now, too coy for us to call our own!)

Says who?

I

I

I, the job whose transparency

is bottled by fate,

for perseverance's

sorry sake.



29

HABITUATION

When God taught woman to think,

He never thought she'd do it.

But now he don't even blink,

He's got so accustomed to it.



30

NEIGHBORS

Interior Monologue's Witty Turn

Was Made Flesh

By a Buzzing

Fly

Whilst the Rude EncumbranceOf Outer Worlds

Was Beat upon Beat

Of Bedtime Stereos;

Speakers on All Sides,

Crushing Last-Ditch Silence,

No Treble

Audible.

And of Resolution between the Two,

The Awaited End to the Poem,

There Was None;

Though the Soothing Burr

Of Neighbors' Pipes

Reminded Me of

Water.



31

AND POINTS NORTH

I'm proud of my isolation.

You'd never guess how the wind blows

here in the lap of natural beauty--

how desolate is its universal judgment

and how pristine.

I'm quite alone. There's no one near

save a Mexican cowherd on the horizon. -- Though one never knows

how many sit in suburbia

(off to the west there)

fixing frybread with white flour

and lard.

But a man like you: I'm pretty sure he will have made his peace

by now, will have turned to profit the pride of a peripheral

stance.

They learned to love the scorn in your voice, I'll bet--those

colleagues who almost pushed you out.

They find it charming, now.

I've been reading your books, of course. First I skim to see

If you pass muster politically. If in your youth you had failed

to cast a sympathetic eye upon the reprobate,

I mean if even in your youth you'd been comfortable,

I'd lose the will to read on. Second, I read the juicy parts



32

such as they are, closely, to refresh my memory.

It is as I suspected: you've never been touched.

Exultation fills me at a sentence in your preface claiming your

wife did everything in her power to aid in the composition

which except for her might not have been possible.

"Might," cur? Wouldn't! No, never.

I realize I'm a fool to take heart at this sentence. Possibly you

composed it unconsciously. Your wife is my sister, we sharedone caul. I could not ask for a better twin. Still...it's

such a BAD book.

The wind blows the fire out. You will not, I suppose, have

known such desolation. Dear Minister:

My name is Emily. I'm an academic in exile. (Tautology.)



33

Being female, I'm called housewife. Gudwyfe. -Old Maid, in

a way. Slavery is a woman's due, you know: and even an academic

in exile, if female, can always serve

and so preserve the flame.

The flame itself, I mean.

When the stripes of my servitude have been scars for long enough,

when the last idol has fallen and every father is dead,

then I'll become a Woman Poet. Do you remember back when I

was an up-and-coming famous philosopher, a radical reformist?

I survived. Do you remember when I was interesting?

Proud now of quietude and girth. You, simmering lotus stews

in the isles of the blest, might still, last face, drive me

--to the Yukon. Yes, for it has a watershed of 333,000 square

miles. It lies silent when the air is seventy below. It

cracks, breaking the sound barrier every spring, stranding caribou

on the murderous melting islands of itself.

I am sorry. I try not to wax lyrical. I have tasted once

too often the pleasure of offending you with the pretense that

what I write could by any stretch be called poetry. A general

rhythm merely.

I am not a talking women with cold blue thighs. Here in the



34

Yukon, we're expected to skin out moose without a word, make

it into mooseburgers, convert the thews to strong thread,

for use.

We're expected to forget about salads and chocolate eclairs,

vegetarianism in general. I know my place.

Have you, going so gravely there about your business, ever,

in imagination even,

seen who dies to sew your cloak? My words are to my own earsthe croaking of a frog at best. My throat hurts. A chunk of

Yukon ice is lying on my living breast.

I'm leaving soon, any day now, for the river.

You'd better hurry.



35

GIFTED

"Please don't dream of me," he wrote,

"I've seen before where it leads."

Well it wasn't as if I'd invited the dream.

I hadn't thought of him in years. But here he'd come, so like

himself, so clear in the night.

I had to write and tell him.

Don't dream of me.

But vision was exhausted soon enough and a human friendship came

with soon enough the old confusion/stagnation/longing/

barges passing in a moonless void

till

"Things not good," he wrote.

Things not good.

So I went in to dream again, and perhaps this time I invited

his shadow.

I hadn't been waiting at the corner long,

hardly time enough to gather my parcels and umbrella about me,

when he appeared, not late, strolling with a quiet smile.

"You're on time," I said, shocked. He shrugged lightly and

passed on.

So, forgive me. I've dreamed.

Twice.

***********************



36

But no number is conclusive.

I sat before the fire,

and watched each log run to etched embers and precisely die.

Three words filled my mind, the title of a book I'd never read.

Three words rose and fell in senseless repetition.

The book arrived next Friday, bound and branded by that very

title.

He'd sent it over my protest that I wanted no more books,could educate myself. From eight hundred miles away, he'd

watched the fire

and disobeyed.

The book is a holy artifact. And a blind man's curse. I must not

read it. I'll send it back. It laughs, it weeps, it

dreams of me.



37

THE THROWBACK

And here is a trio of brown boys.

One is the savage.

The others are smart

and gab away

but the savage looks at the white woman,

slyly.No matter that he is young.

He's bold

and throws rocks.

He is a throwback;

in his parents the move

away from the past

toward American

civilization

is marked by assumption of the clean

Protestant

religion.

The woman, long cloyed

with the dark side of decency,

talks with the two

good boys.

Her back is turned to the

savage.



38



39

POEM ABOUT A PAPERWEIGHT

This is a gift

For _______ ____.

His stinger's not been pulled.

And though his ass is under glass,

It's not because he's old.

Oh no, the noble Scorpio

Can sting you high and

Sting you low.

And if you are a trifle gross,

He'll sting you with his Adiós.



40

THE SACRIFICE

spirits who love me call up at one thirty to ask why i'm never

um stable steady or secure

and hesitantly inform me people are dancing in the streets tonight.

go to LA, I say.

other spirits who love me hinge debates on my earlobes,

mutual efforts in speechmaking and oh what a thrill.

the typewriter is poison, burn it.

the prescriptive temper reigns we squirm in its grasp and are still.

all this i give up for you.



41

TO THE MOUSEY TRANSCENDERS AND PLEASURE CONTENDERS

A peak's a peak--

(A peek's a peek)

(A peke's a peke)

(A peak's a peek)

(A peek's a peak)

(A peke's a peak)(A peek's a peke)

(A pique's a pique)

(A pique's a peak)

(A pique's a peek)

(A peak's a pique)

(A peek's a pique)

(A peke's a pique)

Why squeak?



42

SOBRE LA MAR

The anger of the fishermen

Followed me like a hook of darkness

But the poet

Was a bad influence.



43

PASSIVE RESISTANCE

A white hawk, poised, with eyes of blue

and a silver beak, peaks in its flight,

and falls, straitly,

to the ground.

The mouse is gray with eyes of gray.It stops stock still, at the very entrance to its hole,

but does not go in.

It looks at the hawk.

Now a mad dog dashes at its prey, fangs swathed in

awful foam. But a hawk is not a mad dog, it has the

noble nature.

With sheathed claws the hawk grasps the mouse.

The mouse quivers, it blinks its gray eyes, it

looks at the hawk.

The hawk drops the mouse and rises straitly

through clouds already gathered, massed light, moist,

moving.

Up toward the sun where it started from flies the hawk,

on its mighty white wings.



44

BLIZZARD

The dog looked sad.

Well, dogs are supposed to.

Prescience of death was an old worn habit for the dog,

white of muzzle and dressed in a reddening coat

a long way from the sable sheen of puppyhood.

One elbow was bald: the dog's owner couldn't bear to look too closely

to see if there was still skin on itor if this was the bare bone it appeared to be.

There were benefits to old age, though:

the years of training had come to a perfection which was

on most days

almost sublime.

The dog threatened intruders with a dusky frightening growl.

He walked the miles of forest at heel, except when roving

between rabbit den and coyote's must, prairie dog village and the

last landing place of some jay already squawking high above

in the branches of a yellow pine.

When his owner drove into town in a white International pickup

the dog waited on a hill of dirt, dominating the scene.

Afterwards he greeted her as if absence had broken his heart.

Can dogs act?

One day they went for a walk in what started as a minor snowflurry.

Piñones and pines were dusted for a Christmas-tree effect.



45

Little discrete patches of snow failed to cover clumps of

weed. The woman and the dog climbed a cinder hill in snow-laden

joyful horizontal flashes of wind.

The dog sniffed the wind as he ran in his wide circles.

But at the summit of the hill a harder wind hit,

blinded them,

froze their hair,

stuck the woman's jeans to her thighs.

It was suddenly a blizzard.Flight to the south side of the hill, usually a clement dell,

brought no respite.

The woman, back to the wind, descended sideways, tripping, falling

on loose rock gone invisible under snow.

She stumbled to the bottom, the dog sheltered in the lee of her

legs.



46

The walk back to the truck was quick and grim.

The dog was loaded in back, and almost immediately they were

on a prairie swept bare.

The sun was shining, here.

Turning back her eyes, the woman thought death by exposure

in that slight overcast patch there on the hill

ridiculously remote.



47

HERESY OF JEALOUSY

The hardest thing on earth to see:

Thee, not damned to others,

Damned for me.



48

LET JONES DO IT

A prisoner sits handcuffed in the dock

standing trial for his brother's crime.

"Ahem," coughs the lawyer, scratching his hocks,

"you expect me to defend you for a lousy dime?"

"I've a wife and children to support at home

and I dabble on the side in philanthropy.

And no doubt you deserve this just for being his kin--

you yourself are to blame for the shape you're in.

--Let Counselor Jones take the case."

A woman lies bleeding in your backyard,

a victim of misogyny.

And she'll bear her scars till the day she dies--

"Oh please," you exclaim, "don't put it on me!"

"I'm a good-hearted doctor and I give to the poor

and I'm popular too with the girls.

But my specialty is diseases of the eye,

and I won't be casting the swine my pearls.

--Let Dr. Jones see her."

A forest has been felled by a developer's axe--

the corpses cover the ground.

People write to the county with their temperatures up

and the county makes a conciliatory sound:

"We are servants of the people and we see your side,



49

but there's plenty of pine trees left.

The guy owned that parcel, so our hands are tied:

to deprive him of his rights would constitute theft.

--Why don't you take your grievance to the Jones Commission?"

In the meantime, back on a dusty lane,

poor Jones sits burning the midnight oil.

The full moon rises and shines through his pane,

and he pauses a moment in his weary toil.

He walks outside just to take a leak,

and he presses his fists into the small of his back:

"My mind must be getting a little weak--

I just thought I heard the firmament crack!

--Well, I suppose I'll just have to patch it up."



50

REVENGE

Just howl again, ghost.

Just howl again and I'll remember--

Remember like a shot the turn of loamy river waters waded

By you and me in a summer nightmare.

-By me, that is, wading through mosquitoes with a fancy in myhead

Of naked emperors on empty thrones--

Vowing that the connections I conceived should

Be recognized at last though no one could ever suppose them to

Be true.

Be true, ghost, and howl louder, else you shall fade.

-Shall fade THIS ghost, my father's prouder arm?

Just howl, ghost, just howl up through the oaks and

Headlights piercing the fog where it is usually

Night.

And I seemed to remember how he walked in another

Wood, which I had seen but twice and that by trying.

I seemed however to hear a tone come belling up the glen

And in that tone was the sonorous lament of a king among

Men.

But I could not avenge wrongs I myself had done him.



51

I was losing my hearing, upon which I so depended, and I

Begged him to howl, to howl louder, to howl.



52

HEAL THYSELF

You are buried in your office under a mound of manners.

Only your eyes stick out.

They look like the bright glued-on eyes of an old-fashioned

doll,

and oh how they gleam in your dark.

You are so scornful

( you probly think this poem is about you )

of the gaps in your own knowledge

manifested as matters other people unaccountably

insist on.

You guess your bigotry is a kind of

bulwark,

a shelter in the time of storm.

Thorn in my side,

bold stumblingblock:

don't abandon me in the morass.

Throw down your prescription pad

for the briefest of moments

and listen to what the sick have to say.



53

TO HER COY MASTER, THE OBSERVER

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, sir, would be no crime.

But I'm growing weaker day by day,

For you've got nothing more to say.

I've stolen lines, I'm getting brash,

I'll hit the bottle, have a bash.

For you're so cruel in your timidity,

You've driven me to gross cupidity

And greed. I knock on doors, I pound my Bible.

I write strange letters, am guilty of libel.

I feel your betrayal from miles away,

Oh you've got nothing at all to say.

What is it now? Is it your Wife

Or Mistresses who hold you fast?

Or are you weary of this poor life,

So sad that love can never last?

No doubt that's it. You're mired in guilt

And will not take another bite.

You ascend the scaffold that you built

To save you from a cursed plight.

"Death before dishonor," you write.

The very dogs of the streets can smell

That I'm a thing betrayed.

They circle round, they watch me well;



54

They bare their fangs, rejoicing that I'm so afraid.

They strike, I scream, "Call off your dogs!"

The house is silent. Again they strike, they form a gang.

I escape with my life, but that's all, it would seem.

This wouldn't have happened had you just stayed

By my side.

For, all betrayed, I am your bride;

I have my white dress, my pink shoes.

I sit at the line of the turning tideAnd sing those lonesome blues.

I sit with my suitcase and sing,

I sing the livelong day.

For what have I got to lose?

Oh what have I got

to lose.



55

CHEERS

as the frogs on the roof sound in unison i

offer you schnapps

and the snap of the re-ordained orison

sounds

redounds

to the glory that was rome,at home.



56

TO THE SEVEN MAYORS OF MAMMON

Lay down your silver spears,

Doff your sharp Italian boots,

Forget that stuff on assured security:

All is forgiven.

Open wide your prison doors,Empty your bags of magic tricks.

And please don't use the united news:

It's spring, on earth.

The Huns aren't camped beneath your bed.

Humpty Dumpty's fixed his head.

In the ancient fires they're baking bread:

Take, eat.

You're not wizards with eyes of ice;

You slipped up once and acted nice.

And you'll all die poor: come, shake the dice,

See how they fall.

I say you'll lose one-half your wealth

In the nick of time: a tax on stealth.

And for wishing ill on those who love,

You'll pay, and soon

By seeing your tears from the face of the moon



57

Fall, plummeting down like the hunted dove.



58

CRITIC'S TIC TALKED OVER

You hit me with a bludgeon,

I sighed and stubbed my toe.

You're such an old curmudgeon!

You cause me so much woe.

You swear I won't succeed.I guess you ought to know.

But I've another creed

That makes the high the low.

Just look into the starry sky:

A boring black and white.

Now, pause and blink your staring eye

(That bleary, teary, wearing eye):

Behold the endless light!

Observe the matchless sight

And lay down your red pencil.

For though you're awfully bright,

You tend to try to stencil

The stars upon the sky by rote.

It can't be done. You miss the note

Of grandeur God intended

To sound unsuperintended

By men who cannot make

Even a reasonable fake



59

Or facsimile

Of this infinity.



60

TO E.A. UPON HIS REFUSAL TO RESPOND MORE FULLY

I had a dear old auntie

Who sent me gifts each year

On Christmas, birthday, Easter

Till I began to fear

That if she did not stop it,

Beneath that flood I'd drown.

And so I wrote, "Dear Lady, I

Pray thee send no more;

For you mistake a mouse's squeak

For a lion's lusty roar

And besides, in your profusion,

You've grown to be a bore."

Well, that took care of that, I thought,

For feast days came and went

Without a sign from Auntie.

At last I thought I might relent

And drop her just a note

Inquiring on her lot.

"I'm glad you asked," she wrote,

"For I've been saving up some things

I thought you'd need some day.

I'll send them off tomorrow,



61

And nephew, by the way:

If something doesn't fit you,

Just pass it down the line;

For probably your neighbor

Will think it fits him fine."

I read her letter with a sigh

And hailed a hobo passing by.



62

THE ANCIENT ONES? HE ASKS THE PEOPLE, THEY REPLY

A back-country reticence is getting him.

He knows the Navajos now.

He's riding behind them in his truck

down a long mountain to the high desert,

and he's not saying a thing just looking

at a cinder cone, old volcano up ahead.It's solid, one color, immoveable, untreed,

untried.

He realizes it's awfully elegant in Paris these days, hears

there's a literary scene again and everyone's brilliant

again.

But he's fallen, by a stroke of luck, back into the Old West.

They help each other out sometimes there (it's a tradition)

and sometimes they don't,

but you know they rarely rhapsodize while they're about it.

The bashful buttons on his school shirts have long torn away.

Fate's put him up against broad brown faces.

Anasazi? he asks.

Dineh, they reply.



63

HARBINGERS

Crickets,

birds of the night,

bite the too-deep silence

with sharp wings.



64

AN ESSAY ON IMPOTENCE

I think,

therefore

I am NOT.

Descartes was underconfident:

dared not state the opposite of his theorem.

Had he,

advice to the insanewould have improved

by leaps and bounds.

But since the insane need advice least of all,

it was fortunate

Descartes stopped

where he did.

The mad head is the one with a large

bump

somewhere.

Freud and his afterword Nobby

teach us how to view

the overdeveloped brain

in the light of Jonathan Swift.

Excess is an extrusion

and our heads are all too big.

However, we will now

be sane.



65

We will guide our increasingly spastic movements with an

iron will

and emerge strong,

live long,

and prosper quietly on the sidelines.

Most of the time.

The acceleration of energy which fills those few momentswhen we cannot control

(sink within the capacious brain)

ourselves,

blasts townships from off the face of the earth.



66

When in doubt, go do the dishes.

Do them again, three times for good measure.

--Why, ladies are eschewing all over the place,

doing the dishes thrice. Little do they guess

what daddy is doing:this long hunk of helium filling a barn lies coiled

just beyond the kitchen curtains.

Daddy is tired of waiting.



67

UNSUBMITTED

I like ducks,

like white flannels,

like my luck

in swimming channels.

But how can Ibear the boredom

of this long

surcease from whoredom?



68

SPRING SLAUGHTER

They're cutting up the cow

now.

So what, so what.

I'm tired and beat,

the old man looks up as I pass,

forever expectingmore and more,

worse than a child.

The cow was a cow just hours ago,

then they stuck it and took off the skin.

It hangs from a scaffold, beige in the sun,

smooth under clouds,

tall.

They stand on ladders, the three bold men:

shamed, exalted, doing a job.

They slit its guts and catch them in tubs.

Smoke rises, the clouds gather.

I go out for my constitutional jog,

don't labor for meat,

don't eat it, but I

am the cow myself,

now.

The killers,



69

meat-eaters,

take on its flesh,

and I,

the abstainer who came

with a wad of grass once

to feel the rough tongue,

remember.



70

MISCEGENATION

A blueblood a

redblood a

blend of purple passion:

why has the adding of

apples and oranges

gone so out of fashion?



71

TABBY TRANSACTION

A female feline from Salinas

Was constantly coming between us

Till I in my ire

Found someone to buy 'er

Who pronounced her a veritable Venus.



72

B.S.

Threw a rod in Santa Rosa--

Fate has brought us that much closer.

For I'd never deign to call

If I didn't slip in al-

Most all my earthly ventures.

You're a scorpion, I'm a crab.

Both of us equipped to grab.

But the difficulty lies

In this deity which pries

Prizes from our pincers.

I'll journey back across the miles,

Frowns eclipsing sudden smiles....

If as a poet I'm not stunning,

Maybe it's because I'm running

From this barren bastard punning

To the arms of

BURMA SHAVE!



73

APPEAL TO THE NAVAJOS

Diné bizaad bóhoosh'aah. (I am learning the Navajo language.)

Shí ká anilyeed. (You help me. LIT: You are running with me.)

SHIKA ANILYEED.

We're both well aware that my ancestors

stole this land from your ancestorsand I don't expect you to sit down and smile about it.

But I beg you not to come riding around my trailer

with your torches:

come riding out of the night in your paint and your feathers

laying waste to my livestock and my women.

Da'nimásáníí sh hóló? (Do you have a grandmother?)

Da'nimásáníí sh bidibé hóló? (Does your grandmother have sheep?)

Nimá yázhí sha' bidebé hóló? (How about your aunt: does she have sheep?)

NICHEII DOO NAMASANIISH BIDEBE HOLO? (Do your grandfather and

grandmother have sheep?)

Both sides of that old war

are long dead now.

My grandfather died five years ago at eighty-nine.

He knew all there is to know about animals,

about the heat and the cold.

Only, the land he worked wasn't his.

All his life he was tenant farmer to



74

another richer white man

who got there first.

He died blind in both eyes,

but his arms were robust.

He looked like your old grandfather, now past ninety:

wise stubborn face, invincible nose and jaw, lean.

He even wore a hat like your grandfather's,

only it was brown not black,and he wore overalls and his hair was short.

I miss him. He taught me how to play the fiddle

by ear: now my son has that fiddle.



75

I come from generations of relocated peoples

to this land.

I am quiet, waiting for the day when men again will walk

with respect upon the earth, our home:when men of every race will lie gently as babes at their

mother's breast.

The land is mother to us both. For I am an Indian pulling

corn, and you are a Norwegian out digging

potatoes.

Let us not forget that again so soon.

Diné bizaad bóhoosh'aah.

Shí ká anilyeed.

SHIKA ANILYEED.



76

ODD BIRDS

"Misery loves company," the bold bird said

and took to burning papers in her bed.

Old paper men

in divine paper ties

squinted at her tirelesslyin quaint mild surprise.

"Oh, yessirree it do, ma'am," they spoke without a flinch.

"A good glass of ale and a nice spitfire wench."

"Yes, misery loves company," she said with subtle ease.

"Come hither then and test it.

Don't stand there and tease."

Tease

Tease

Tease

On

Ancient

Bended

Knees

Knobs

Of Bony



77

Penitence

Monotone

Wheeze

Overbold souls fly sudden from their beds,

Flinging little treasures

On odd birds' heads.



78

POEM FOR WALLY

"There is nothing hidden

that shall not be made known."

(My fear,

your grace.)

The face of the councillor,

medium-high councillor,

shone in the cold council room.

Ruddy, black-browed,

a Saxon bass rumbling of

savages at their unimaginable

games of chance: you'd better

not be caught strumming

threnodies on their

thresh-hold, better not be

caught in some poet's stance

hanging around there half in

another world.

Caught, I stared hard

at the face of the councillor,

expecting to be knocked

back on my heels by the shine,



79

the shine....

But it was a cold whitefaced bishop preaching

a sermon on loaves and fishes,

a man about town touting

gravity and glut.

(My grace, your fear.)

His brow was hid in a heavy cloud.



80

POEM FOR BERND

When we got home

to our garret--

Stumbled through the door--

We heard the squawk of our pet parrot,

Ez, a bachelor.

We must admit he gave us hell,

Not for the wine (though we now forswear it).

Oh no. He said, "On your breaths I smell

The distinctive eau de carrot."

He went into a huff, turned his back,

And since then has said not a word.

Like the needle in the proverbial stack,

It's hard to find a bird

With an adequate sense

Of the absurd.



81

HEAVY LIES THE HAND

Heavy lies the hand

upon my honor in a land beyond the pale of

common discourse.

Common day

is dawning o'er the bandof clever men who will

maraud

and lay to waste

in careless haste

the work of God.

For God's a word

to them; the sound of horses' hooves, their

streaming steeds,

drowns out and mocks

all softer sounds,

all lighter deeds.

Hearty sounds the roll

of trumpets. Evening falls.

The spoils of war

are lying on the ground.

In dust and blood my honor lies;

a warhound bays,



82

and quiet drops down from the smoke-filled sky,

and then the smoke disperses.

And heavy lies the hand

of victory upon the conquered head,

upon the

dead.



83

WINTER ROSE

"Spring has faded from the earth:

you are springtime in my soul."

Are these oversanctimonious tones?

reminiscent of Grandmother's Bible,

scented with remorse and lilac sachet?

Spring has faded from the earth.

Look down at the desert, spare land

shrouded in smog, flecked with

discarded beer cans.

Look up at the thick night stars:

they are moving in man-prodded orbits,

beaming down delicate messages

about military installations.

You are springtime in my soul.

I claim my right to every inch of you:

courtly hands folded on a walking stick,

smooth faintly shimmering head,

the pillow on your bed,

shabby books on your shelf,

daughters of your loins,

enemies, all senile,

paychecks,



84

night sweats,

old yellow car.

I claim my right to the depths of your refusal,

and my right to say it as it lays:

haphazard, mysterious, nudged by nothing

but the clumsy and cardinal

out of time

bud.



85

SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Smooth sleep of the poppies,

Petal tip touching petal

Tip-toeing the line to heady oblivion.

On the blond right angles of a 1950's

Davenport,Redding California heavy moonlight

Passes through slats, falling

On a striped cat on a jade

Green carpet:

All so very up-to-date and modular,

Arranged for the barretted girl with her

Case of the mumps and her Woolworth's ruby

Bracelet on the thin left wrist.

The liquid sun is about to rise.

Opium extractors are moving

Limpidly up through the rows,

Knowing the petals will fall

Open now.



86

DAILY BREAD

"A soft answer turneth away wrath,"

lied the holy prophet,

for a woman roiling in anger in his back room

could not stand his hushed recalcitrance,

his well-contained ire.

"Better fire and brimstone," she thought,but he kept prognosticating.

Clover-fed calves loll in the

mythically green meadow,

their mothers standing loyally

chewing overhead.

Pastoral, we call cows

when we want to make something of it.

The amiable answer the mother gave her cowchild

was heard in every sentient auto passing.

The pure poetry arising from her multiple stomach

found echo in our gaskets and turning wheels.

(Every travel scene should include these animals.)

The prophet busied himself

with the labor he had stolen

from the woman,

who had intended to do it all.

She hulked sullenly



87

over what menial tasks he had left her:

the arts and the dishes.

It was not an ideal scheme,

but it did stoke the fiery juices

they used for sauce

on their daily bread.



88

LOST FACE

The face was faded fey

With all around grown gross,

But it had had its way--

And doubt it not.

There was no blame nor sin;The face would never boast.

When viewed by varied men,

It doubted not.

The eye looked out and saw

Its own, a pearly shell.

If beauty was its law,

It doubted not.

For heaven far away

The body was a hell:

But mind held singing sway--

It doubted not.

The lips were caught by sleep:

They rode like rising birds.

The ear soon sounded sleep--

It doubted not.



89

The face was faded fey,

Most mortal flawed by words,

For it had lost its way--

But doubt it not.



90

REGISTER

Where the customer is hiding

And the shopgirl wears a mask,

There's a message more abiding:

We are taken all to task.

I have learned to keep my back turnedTo the world's noise and news.

While I practice how to seem spurned

I have lost the will to choose.

In your pocket's paper treasure

And the ring of my machine

Lies the microscopic measure:

WE could never be so keen.



91

IF A MAN ASK FOR BREAD, WILL YOU GIVE HIM A STONE?

The boy stood on the burning deck

When all around had fled.

A sailor sighed and begged a sip;

The boy presented gingerbread.

"Why do you taunt me, I who thirst?"The sailor cried, aflame.

"To strengthen you," replied the boy,

"In God's immortal game!"

Then fell the sailor down to die,

Consumed in seething wind.

"Forgive him, Father," quoth the boy,

"He must, I guess, have sinned."



92

P.M.

You wouldn't want to speak in a

whisper, unpuissant,

in the evening light,

would you?

No you wouldn't want to pinyour unchanged hopes on the remnant

of a dream if it really were

evening.

You have more sense even yet.

You cling instead to

what speaks in calm tones

in the lighted rooms.

You remain certain your

mind has a breadth to it which

couldn't let you down.



93

SWEET TE DEUM

Sweet te deum: by a particular arrangement of wires and pulleys

the orator is connected

to a regular mob

of isolated technicians.

He admits it freely as it isn't his fault.

And a life of idolatry has turned his subjectsinto Pinocchios all,

so they don't mind.

He speaks, and kingdoms sleep;

crowned heads swoon.

His mother stands weight on one foot

still in the old human style

drying her reddened knuckles in the sunset.

Garbage wafts its ether body on the breeze.

She sighs under a lightbulb

and returns to the unpeeled potato.

Sweet te deum: a phenomenon so familiar by now

that it no longer grates

on the poor raped pate

of his father.

Now are his children required to rinse crumbs from the banquet plates.

They are puling and moaning,

calves who would drink the rich new cream



94

saved especially for crumpets.

Their tongues are not precisely golden.



95

THE WARLORD

(Being the earliest written poem in this book.)

Paving the way for rapture

Came the warlord to his doom.

Raving always of capture

He return'ed to his womb.

And silent now he wanders,

Swords of song his only guide.

And swiftly now he wanders,

For he has no time to bide.



96

SHH SHINY SIR DON'T

Shh shiny sir don't

come creeping up the way between the vines.

I've loosed myself from the temptation of temptation,

a sterile treat,

a warlock's teat.

I'm through with all your howling in the void.

He kept on creeping, hat in hand;

a tear stood on his cheek.

"You've missed my motive altogether, ma'am,"

he said and looked down at the ground, so meek.

"I've grown into a ghost for lack of love

and all my words are winded back upon me

like a shroud. Touch me once, and I shall live...."

I turned and fled. I faced the sun and ran. I ran

into the arms of quite another man.



97

THE DIFFERENCE BEING

Kenneth Burke and Marx call for

"socialization of losses," meaning that

I am not the only victim of this

terrible this terrible

but belong to a class.

Someone else likewise respectable

whose name I forget

speaks of the whore par excellence

who has developed a system of parasitism

which gets her through.

I being none of the above

three famous men

say the first way is much the same as the second way:

the way of the politician in burnished tophat

who spreads the burden around

is the way of the slipshod woman

who spreads the burden around:

the only difference being that the first way requires

a state to administer it,

whereas the second way inspires

a mere

weak single



98

survival.



99

COMMON DAY

I've come round, you see, and lost my luster

To the dust of place, your home: home.

You're right: I really write on bathroom walls,

I scrawl my soul for every caller.

Where is high phi los o phie?And where the highborn scourge I chose

To cloak me from that common day

Which covers o'er the scorned?

Round to a need for cheaper wine--

Yet more! Yet cheaper! Bring it on, I

Only run in secret when you

Hide your eyes, a grace

Bestowed.

But woe, woe, to the final hour--

I would not flower more, no more.

I would not spend my coin to prove

I have no need of money.

"Why listen, lady, didn't you know I've watched you from my tower?"

I felt your eyes, but only eyes: they froze the sullen bower.

The state's fate is my fate: it's Calif. do-or-die.

From his tower he spied my soul and said, "Lady,



100

You lie."



101

THE PRESERVATIONISTS

Multitudes of suns

still shine in universes we have not destroyed.

Lesser multitudes of swirling worlds

bask in their light,

and I don't want you to forget that;

no, I want you to remember on the darkest night of the yearthat we have pillaged only this one little planet.

And I want you to take a certain consolation.

You and I had no idea in our aboriginal childhood, our primeval

cradle,

that we would grow up to occupy ourselves

with whispering to the deaf

(shaking the dead leaf from a banyan tree).

--Would use our opposable thumbs to fashion

words

while our enlarged brains burned to extinction

through the long evenings of winter.

--Would turn out metaphysical copy for this sole purpose:

to save a single world.

"Here," said de Tocqueville, the traveller, lost in the world

of an American thicket:

"Here man seems to enter life

furtively." De Tocqueville deferred to the woods, for he



102

heard what was not there:

the chainsaw,

the bulldozer,

the crash of a hydraulic nozzle blasting gold

from out the bowels,

from out the veins,

of the earth.



103

I, too, have gone out to the badlands

of creation,

trod heavyfooted up into the badlandsof my skull,

clasping my mantle about me;

yea, to the murky caverns.

--Have gone there and there found

bones, the ponderous bones of mastodons who slept,

dreamless,

at the feet of descending glaciers.

But I have camouflaged my tracks, for the relics I unearth

are signs and sacred and not

collector's items.

But while I stray, ruminating on remains, you, no doubt,

thrive.

You are blithe, spirit, bird: thou never wert

in flight descried

along the bed of a river

threading down from the laps of these

local

last hills. (Hail.)



104

I expect the summer cicadas will be droning soon in your

neck of the woods. Here it is almost always

winter,

and when at last the meadowlark returns,

when he serenades on the wooden post rotting away on a

scant barbless corner of unturned sod,

I recall the keenness of the blizzard,

and I take a private, out-of-season hope from the sleet.



105

Oh yes, I like spring

like anyone

but after three or four weeks of it I dust off my

Yukon books. There it is quite often winter:

there the grizzly is theendangered species: the grizzly and the

wolf.

-Here it is the coyote and the hawk,

but not you, bird, who dips and flees now

to the river.

("Dip your finger in the water, come and cool my tongue")

Though I at least am too parched by now to be a

voice crying in the canyonlands,

("for I'm tormented in the flame.")*

banished as I am to dry-farm a low-income lot

with a view.

..........

And the holy prophet, hoary with years, rose up.

And he pulled his robes about him. His mouth was hard,

his eye fixed 'neath a spectral and noble brow.

And he wept not, neither did he reap.



106

"First of all, throw your typewriters upon the

pyre," quoth he. "Ye shall use war no more, nor metal,

nor petrol, nor any nonrenewable resource.

Electricity of course shall be the first to go. Sow not

the whirlwind: you get what you

desire. And for pity's sake, ye that have ears, hear me:

don't play with fire."

Are you listening, Lowland Boy? He said to throw thetypewriters on first. He said,

"He that saves his own sphere

will lose any world at all."

..........



107

We squint out through the billowing smoke.

We hear the fearful cry rise up from the river

and smell singed flesh.

You be first, soothsayer. You just please be

first.

*Spiritual, arranged by Jester Hairston



108

HOP ON THAT

Who but an old Navajo

lady saw me spit on the

Zombie's car?

O it has a tiger in its

tank all right a foldedcertificate on its back

seat a scorpion decal a Dade

County (dreadful Dade County)

plate & it's a

funeral car all right, a car they sing

dirges in all along the Gulf

Coast they're singin

OM old bloodman

OM old dead head burnin rubber 'cause

you ain't got no soul.

Burnt-out peasant crone might've seen me step

on that horseshoe set into the sidewalk in

front of the Bourbon Street Bar, hop on that

horseshoe there you can go over & step on it

yourself only the voodoo luck don't hold so good the

second time around.



109

So in essence it's 2 old crones done spit on your

car: one in secret one in the open watch

out Zombie whose name you're takin in

vain I mean Lincoln you might have

shot him once but you won't shoot him twice oh

no. We ladies are speakin for Lincoln he's

no one the likes of you can drive. He said government

of the people by the people for the

people shall not perish from the earth.

You're pretty fancy all right all right but

I'm the one you're after & I say you're not people,

you don't live on earth,

a Zombie was never even

born.



110

THE ILLEGAL ALIEN

In the sixty fifth year of my father Manuel's life,

he set forth on foot for the north, for the border and for

the land of opportunity.

Urged to stay at home with his children and grandchildren,

he replied that he could read signs, that to leave was

his only choice.

My father Manuel put a pack upon his back and carried the staff

of wood well-polished by his hands since the day he pulled a

sapling at the age of fourteen. The staff sprouted leaves

the first season after it was cut

but no more.

He set off without looking back. I followed him for a mile.

He must have scented me (my father Manuel has a good nose).

But he never looked and I threw myself on the ground under a tree

and hid my eyes in cool fallen leaves.

My father was out of sight when I raised my head and then I turned,

I had to turn back to my mother and brothers.

By the time I arrived it was already as if he had been gone a

year. I went to bed and when I prayed

(Pray for me, St. Jude)

I promised that when I came of age I would follow upon my father's

tracks, until I found him in the north.

I closed my eyes and I dreamed of his journey, that night and

every night: dreamed it until I knew I would find him when my

turn came to set forth.



111

I closed my eyes and saw my father Manuel stopping by a field

and holding out dry grasses to a white burro.

Burrito blanco y bello, with long pale lashes and a hard bone

in the nose which my father rubbed.

The animal said neither yes nor no, while my father scratched

its head and looked carefully to the right and to the left.

My father turned and looked behind.

Then he entered the pasture and cut the tether from the burro'sfront feet with his knife. He swung his leg over the burro's

back and grasped it by the mane and the burro walked along the

road, heading north.

I saw this clearly.

Ladrón! I whispered and crossed myself and forgave my father, the

thief Manuel, and awakened to the song of sparrows in the oleander bushes

under my window.



112

LIFE IN A BOWL OF LIGHT

Passed over Dead River.

Saw an old Model A Ford

crushed and rusting

in the scrub

by an arroyo

under winter afternoon scudding sun.

If you take this land

you must take the settled melancholy of its afternoons

and its rabbit-hunted

(coyote-haunted)

nights.

You must accept also the resurrection of sunrise.

Life in a bowl of light

has long passed over the happenstance death

of each humble thing hugging its rim.



113

RATHER

Rather a pauper in the courtyard of a palace

than a queen on a toadstool.



114

OH WHERE ARE ALL THE HANDSOME RUBES

Oh fie, grandeur is listlessly

fading on the lips of an old girl who really should have been

Henry Miller. With the simple cunning of a saint,

how tired she is

withal

of reading them. No, she wants(no shame)

a pearl cast in the mud to rise

and summon her out of sanctimonious immolation.

Perhaps she belongs in Paree after all: for where are all

the wholesome rubes, olde English

stalwart peasants?

Not in this rural lane.



115

LATE FOR DINNER

He wants he begs

(only you can't tell what he's saying)

the subtlest utterance of all:

fine line 'twixt truth and falsehood.

"Walk it all your life," he says,

"for me."

Only far far too obvious is the

rigor in his voice,

or call it trembling call it anything

but late for dinner. He was

always late. We rang the bell

twice thrice and he came

ambling up the path through

lilies and Indian paintbrush as the last spoonfuls of

dessert were served, the blueberries with spiced

fresh cream.

The cow cried when he passed, he

stopped and tugged her forelock.

"Let another milk her

for me."

Wants he begs the tone's too much.

You pour the bucket of pondwater



116

on his head, he turns his face

aside scourged and rejected

by hyssop dipped in vinegar.

Pour the pondwater o'er his head:

fine grains of mica shining

tadpole

willow leaf

a dun silt of mud:every beauty you can take up

in your pail.

You make a public spectacle,

subtlest thing you can

do.



117

A GOOD MAN'S NAME

Don't believe

a thing I say,

no don't you trust the words.

You're bound to take it wrong all wrong,

the things I fling like flying birds....

Like ravens cutting off the sun

(like sound and not like song).

Like kites upon cruel wires caught

(stout wings to span the fire).

And then you'll come with hat in hand

and scare me from my supper.

You're bound to wake me from a nap,

my cat will leap from off my lap,

my dog will lope across the lawn,

the startled birds will soon be gone.

And I'll get mad,

and you'll be sad,

the lit'ry life will seem so bad--so full of mind,

so hard and dire.

But if you're prone to disbelief,

you'll laugh at last with some relief:

"Well bless me but you've got a point!



118

Hale home, my friend, we'll drink a pint,

for time's a thief and war's a shame

and words can't ruin a good man's name."



119

MORNING BECOMES HER

"I'm not a Hamlet," uttered he,

"my book is not a tragedy.

When I go down to that dark bourne,

they'll smile, and say,

'Here passed a mild

and sunny morn:a smallish soul,

but not forlorn.'"

But on a grassy forest path,

a woman wept in pain and wrath.

"I've taken care through all these years

to turn my eyes from others' fears.

I prune my pleasures like a tree,

this modest elm

which shelters me

and drops its leaves

like sweet stilled hearts

which do not grieve."

She laid her down beneath the sky:

"He loves me not, and I shall die."

He read The Times. He gave a sneeze.



120

He said, "Say, waiter, would you please

remove these flowers from my booth?"

The waiter bowed,

obtained a towel,

removed the vase,

and left the room

with seemly haste.

She dried her tears upon the grass,And watched a furtive spider pass.



121

IN WHICH THE READER REGRETS THE HEAVY HAUNCHES OF TASTE

I have tried not to address you.

But you will understand if I explain

that I have long suffered as

(I blush to name it)

a Woman of Letters.

As such, I have worked out a code for fans like myself:a canonical affair,

unfortunately besmirched by bats in the cave:

Jonathan Swift's girlfriends,

John Donne's last sermon,

an anorexic Frenchwoman's ignored advice to DeGaulle on the

proper conduct of peace,

immigrants' ditties:

"Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds pursued by

one Norwegian."

This code emerges in practice as mercifully vague.

We enlightened readers have a hard lot,

for we cannot help but react.

And yet to react is

in the descendants of Puritans

to destroy.

So I try to read you without reacting,



122

sparely,

from my eight-rock tea garden,

in the spirit of Moses refraining from naming the Name

or from gazing on the shrouded top of Mt. Sinai:

Moses sparing Jehovah corrupt human touch.

These are the fancy pervasive rationales of farce.

And taste.

After all, to talk back from one's private typewriter is apolite sort of pity.

And letters deceive, a black and white exchange.

For to answer once is already a gift.

To answer again is a different sort.

Not answering at all is

an untimely end.

MOTHER AND SON READING KIERKEGAARD ALOUD WITH

LESS THAN REVERENCE

"And oh

that no half-learned man

would lay a dialectic hand

upon this work,

but would let it stand

as it now stands,"

concluded Kierkegaard.



123

And we repented of the way we'd been reading him.

But maybe,

said my son,

it doesn't count:

for he says, "No half-learned man"

but you're a woman

and I'm a child.



124

PENDANT CAN'T MEND HER

"She bodes

to be

a major

writer."

The pedant

meant it.

But the

mendicant

with her

bowl,

earthen bowl,

sat weeping

by the

road.



125

HOMAGE TO BOBBY BURNS

Samizdat.

Same as that.

The underground apes the overground, and I,

grown to a woman's estate, prate

on a' that and a' that.

Fear them not therefore:for there is nothing covered,

that shall not be revealed;

and hid,

that shall not be known.

In Russia

there is an artist banned from official rounds

who doesn't mind so much

for he still has his bicycle to paint

pictures of,

and his Victorian house tumbling down in a dozen

different directions,

and his round wooden table with wine bottles

fruit

cat

typewriter

coffee cup

(newspaper in the Cyrillic alphabet

tossed aside).



126

I thought they only had tables like that in

Paris.

And the State's electricity poles run into

God's trees

which shed red leaves on his Victorian roof

for a' that:

We dare be poor for a' that!

(Our toils obscure and a' that.)



127

In the U.S.A.

there is a singer banned from official rounds

who doesn't mind so much

for all her arrangements are logarhythmic,

though she once flunked math;and she still hears sparrows caroling in Greek,

still hears angel choirs swinging low:

fathomless sound.

(I thought they only had choirs like that in

Heaven.)

Samizdat.

Same as that.

The overground apes the underground, and I,

fallen to the ground,

ground down to the size of a

mouse (wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie),

creep under a toadstool

to sleep.

What I tell you in darkness,

that speak ye in light:

and what ye hear in the ear,

that preach ye upon the housetops.



128

Sam is dat guy over dere in duh fedora, sittin' on a park bench

and feedin' duh pigeons wid duh crumbs from his san'ich. I

useta know him when he wuz jest a kid. He wuzn't good at nuttin'

'cept baseball, den, but he's branched out some since, as you

kin see. Yep, he's on duh ball now, ol' Sam.

Iz dat so?

Dey say so.

Portions are from Robert Burns and the King James Bible.

MASTER'S MNEMONIC

Mene mene tekel,

Lethe and argos:

Ergo, eros.



129

DID THE EARTH SHAKE FOR YOU LAST NIGHT, LADY? or

I SURVIVED THE PRETTY BIG ONE

18 Oct. 1989 San Francisco, CA

Never was a quick touch like Dolor Man,

a pain-sanded equipoisist,

a real reeler-in of the fish of the sea:Spanish eyes, full fathom my father

lies.

Don't diddle me, Dolor Man: I'm a true beatnik

drunk,

tried now and trussed in a trunk like a

corpse washed up from the

watery main.

My main man: don't pain me with

wronghearted cussed surefooted

surliheadedness.

It ain't right, ain't true, no one says

it has to be

you.

He twisted me up into an oddity because I was

weak, meek as Magdalene,

unfinished,

a dreg of some daughterless



130

mother.

He passed me on the sidewalk without looking at me. He said,

"Did the earth shake for you last night,

Lady?"



131

OBSERVING THE SCIENTISTS

I asked one immediately to comment on drunkenness.

He said, "A smell I can't identify,"

and went on discussing slots, wires to lay into.

And the other said,

"Offhand I would thinkinch and a quarter."

Damn. They aren't supposed to SAY, "Offhand,"

especially when coupled with mute sure measurements.

I'd counted on the scientists to be steadier than that.

My love: your resistance is not secure enough,

my love, my love. ("Don't say it," you

say. "You'll only leave me in

Spain.") Yes I will, and my love won't mean a

thing by then.

My love my love: don't you see it's a matter of science bypassed

for me? A matter of science surpassed,

for you.

(My love love liquid love too soon love I'd waited till

way past time.)

Still the scientists are discussing in my livingroom.



132

They don't even realize it's my

living room. But you do,

my love.

"Exactly," says one.

"I think what I'll do," says the other, "is reverse the thing

and hit it with this."

"I don't know what complications that would imply," says the other."It's no big deal," they both say, in tandem,

my love.



133

ON MEETING SAM SPADE, PRIVATE EYE, DRUNK

IN AN OLD BUILDING IN SAN FRANCISCO

B&B's can put you in a fog

so that you mistake an angel for a dog

and a dog for John Steinbeck, jabbering away

in street Japanese the livelong day.

But you're doing OK for having just got out

from your chains and straitjacket and there's really no doubt

as a wheeler-dealer you're bound to make it.

And it's a nice old building. No false

eye could fake it.



134

THE CLOSER I GET TO CALVARY THE MORE

FORE-ORDAINED THESE MEETINGS SEEM

Get this straight.

I can afford easy titles.

I'm awfully difficult.

I jumped down your throat twice

before you even opened the door, glancing out and lookingright back in over your shoulder.

'For God's sake be quiet,' you said on the threshold.

'I've twin infant angels trying to sleep here.

Blond hair and Spanish Catholic skin,

not identical only friends,

like Cain and Abel.'

You didn't say that. Why would I breathe

the curse of history on your seed (Sherwood

Anderson would say seed: the King James ponderous held-back

coal-fire Lucifer of the modern factory would wish godspeed

to that sleeping detail)?

I said that. Why I don't write

for The New Yorker is I won't cut

this for you to Beginning Middle and

America's best fiction's End. Just give it



135

one short shot or be lamed and lost

forever at the Ninth Station of the Spanish-Catholic

cross: Jesus Falls the Third Time.

They'll want to know how, after that, he dared

climb the hill of Calvary.

Your house was for sale.

I drove in to look, while touring,

tried to back out over a perilous moat,hung up the right rear tire of my pickup in

thin air, bottomed out the rear end,

my passenger panicked,

you had to call the wrecker who specializes

locally in hoisting things.



136

I left without waking the twins. I heeded your advice (it did

sound avuncular) to watch the heavy traffic on the turn.

I will never see you again: will, quite possibly, neversee again, and am free to to

too.

I know that college. I read that poet.

I drop the same

name. I've a castle in Spain (mortgaged).

I seat myself politely on a roiled

bed with raisins and bottle nipples and inform you you look like

Dylan Thomas should've: red disordered hair, bulging blue eyes,

big loose frayed unused energy, face flooded with blood.

'I've been running,' you say as my eyes skim your books:

Jung, Alcoholism. Typewriter in foyer. No toilet paper in bathroom.

(I use my skirt.) (Jesus is a personal poet. Pre-emptive,

unpublished. Leave the stone

in the door of the tomb.)

I.F. Stone was recently crucified, too, like your friend

whom Tess took



137

to Europe and tried with some success

to dry out or moisten. (Moisten: the perverse lingo of a child

who makes paper dolls of the apron models in a Sears-Roebuck catalog.

Moisten: inelegant Americanism, as in the Moist Towlettes they

dispense in chain roadhouses.)

Before dying I.F. Stone said 'twas larky

to be a pariah never invited to English Dept. teas, larky

to sit in the bath-tub not needing

any tea. Marx (whose name you dropped) saidrurality is idiotic. Jesus said, 'I come to bring not saints but

the bourgeois to repentance.' I live in the outback and preach

to professors. From the tub....

..........



138

It's Sunday evening.

Church is letting out its crop of the yearning,

yawning bourgeois. Your wife arrives home from her job on theward and throws me (in one move) to the ground, gently

places a towel between my teeth, and when I awaken is mopping my brow

with an ice cube.

There remains one more Station of the Cross.

'Father, father: why has thou

forsaken me?' says Jesus from said tree,

still unresisting, not bitter but

sad at his father's lapse, and the father's voice never

never sounds. Only a raven, grappling,

grackling, gawping, gaping at the

symbol pinned there on two pieces of intersecting timber.

'I think,' you get a word in edgewise,

'strangers owe each other a little restraint.' Is that

you, Ole? -- or some adjunct who never got to

Graham Greene, who thinks Sherwood Anderson has

potential and needs instruction. Who has a rage

for order. Who polishes



139

pruning shears.

Time to move on. Poems end, even this kind.

You have to re-lay a floor. I have to re-paint the two exterior

walls where ill-matched tint from the eaves

dripped down.

See you around, talk of the town. --Yeah, I like Pound.

Named my parrotEzra.



140

STORM

Flailing angry branches

Tear the brittle air.

We hold onto our hats

For fear of our hair.

The children keep close

To our fat winter legs.A homeless hobo sits

In the gutter and begs.

It's winter, my friend, no easy task.

But take heart from this ale:

Don't shiver, don't fail:

Soon summer will come, and we'll all

Bask.



141

THE RESERVATION

All of which would be fine

if only the golden sun would relent,

its veil of vain haze suddenly rent,

its face, fair nuclear halo, half-spent,

revealed.

All of which would be fine

if only the molten moon would split

into fat fragments of spendable silver

for the sake of paupers peering from bankrupt eyes

up at lights which drop from day or night skies.



142

QUEUE

Men go winding out,

Men come winding in.

And it's clear beyond the slightest doubt

They're here by the hair of their chinny-chin-chin.

Here by the hair of their chin,Yes here by the hair of their chin.

O it's clear beyond the slightest doubt

They're here by the hair of their chinny-chin-chin.



143

QUIEN SUSPIRA INSPIRA

Poema Triste y Verí dico

Perdóneme si sean mis palabras incorrectas.

He olvidado mucho.

Soy solamente poeta:

persona sin fundamento,

mujer sin básis.

Pero

no quiero viajar

sin objeto,

aunque esto

cambie con cada momento

que pasa.

")Qué pasa, artista? (quien cambia)."

Poquito. Ships passing en la noche;

estoy muriendo anoche sin inspiración.

-No no, no estoy muriendo, porque has llegado.

")Qué quiere decir? )Adónde llego yo?"

A un desierto terrible, un lugar de serpientes

y árboles secos y piedras duras:

a un lugar que no es lugar. Si exista, es como

falta.



144



145

SUNLIGHT FALLING ON THE STREETSINGERS IS AS YELLOW AS THAT IN

THE

BANKER'S IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING

Tinsel choirs of street dipsomaniacs

Have their pastel delicacies, too.

So lately fallen, some singers: so light.

So lately freed.

Take this one: Henry, a bass, a drudge,

Retired-with-gold-watch from the

Department of Innocence. Has a dockworker's

Cap, neatly knit, of that same incongruous yellow

As the insular class's ecstatic

Easters.

Or take Theodore, tenor (he interprets the dirge): his

Holy socks are baby blue, anemone eyes has Ted, and a tie of

Cerulean hue. It all meshes. Theodore was a tailor

In life; they're called fashion designers these days.

He threw away his money, all of it, on

Francine, who is fattish but quaint and wry,

Won't shy away from those who shy

Away from her tin soprano's cup:

A coloratura's ploy.

"Out of Work, Out of the Way," says the

Cardboard sign pining plainly on her

Curb.



146

And last, ah the alto, Alta, halt and lame, unrelated.

She came to her voice, so lambent, so fine,

The hard way. O stay awhile and

Attend: pale fires; rose, orange, streaked

Aquamarine, run and range down her scales.

A leprous too-varied luster startles the mind's

Eye observing Alta. Turpitude turns

Tail in this voice. Street throngs gather, turnstile-

Graspers pause; it's a big big choir under Alta's

Tutelage. It's the poor, their tinsellated gaudy

Famine, their world-girding street, their sunlit

Limping song: the decorous do-gooder's excuse to

Exult.



147

NG

Oh China:

Blackshoed clothfoot

Fool of a balanced soul.

Give me back what you took:

The open unenclosed eye,Square chopped hipbones of a

Bovine (you don't drink milk)

Woman.

Incongruous New England nose on a cheekboned

Eggface:

Erase the memory of my white unbalanced

Skin. Oh China, I never thought an Eastern sensibility would

Rise in my bed.



148

THE IMPORTANT TUNING OF MAGDALENE

You said, ground of my being... I forget.

I'm not a hapless juvenile with a bad plan.

Every dastardly day I lie here trying to succeed

because you caught me (fisher of men) on your hook and forgot

to dine;

because I know you're fine, finest, fearless.

So, "diamond in the middle of a field full of stones"*

I rest in importunate self, never letting go

of your feet, importuning with my rough hair

into which I pour such cheap

perfume.

*Hank Williams, Jr.



149

THE OTHER MARTYR OF CHOLAME PASS

I live in a clean land,

Chastise with a clean hand.

My Puritan pranks have joined the ranks

Of the Honorable James Dean, man.

I went out in a crash at Cholame PassAnd proceeded to Heaven to have a bash.

I'm lost.

I cost.

I die in the dust

Because I must.

(And what salvation is there

In such a sorry tale?

Just this: I can't succeed

Until you make me fail.)

The car was hot.

I chose my lot.

Died young,

Not unsung.



150

THIRD TIME'S A CHARM

Soul sits on death row and plays its radio,

twisting the dials, this channel, that,

up volume, down.

Soul looks out the window and sighs.

"Bars obscure my view," it says.

Bird in hand spots two in the bush.

"Run for cover," it warns.

But the bush resounds. The man with the snare and the

knotted hair and beard comes up to the birds

unheard.

Swimmer lifts iron arms and plies the waves,

land falls behind, gulls dive, shriek,

sea lions sport.

Sun rushes up to the heavens and beams.

Swimmer rides

the tide to shore.



151

TO J.N.

If you've grown weary of answering letters

from your worsers and your betters,

don't answer this. (It's an abyss.)

But I'll tell you why I "only skimmed" your collected works

of fiction:I crave a measured and pompous

diction,

and shy away from the friable

friction

of the more or less true-to-life

depiction.

(I'm a monolith,

and must have myth.)

Still, I know it was rude to goad you by mail:

"I'm not not a fan," and so on.

It's only that at this altitude,

I have to develop an attitude

to delude

the mere dude

with his visage

wan.

But I thought I'd be safer with _________________.



152

I forked out the dough and brought it home.

And I'm happy to say there's a slower pace, a

curb on the word's old compulsion to roam.

The clerk in the bookstore assured me you'd changed--

that's all right with me, I'm at home on the range

with its spitting seasons and arching light--

and I know what it means to fight to write.

(Or rather, vice versa, if verse is a vice.)

Now I've read every line and there's nothing I owe

except just to tell you that I'm not your foe

but a parallel case of evolution:

a problem which finds its own solution.



153

NOT YET SUBJECT

Emerson on compensation

is quite convincing.

As a man,

it is true,

he might be missing out on the more poetic aspects

of compensation.He is linear in his speech,

martialing his arguments

in orderly pairs.

The unfortunate woman has to martial something less specific

than arguments and theorems.

She must martial moods:

those bodies not yet subject to the tyranny

of grammatical structure.

She is apt to be misunderstood

by the likes of Emerson.



154

TRACE

Snowflakes under a night light

Look like gnats in the noon-day sun,

But something is missing.



155

Song, for accordion and guitar with voice

REVIVAL

Holy savior, Hallelu--

Jesus comes tonight.

From shore to shore the wide waves roll

The earth's all over bright.The earth's all over bright.

Two men in the fields a'tilling

One is taken, one is left.

Two maids by the river milling

One ascends and one's bereft.

Two souls on the rooftop watching

One is blind and one can see

Jesus walking on the waters

Calling out, "Peace be to thee."

Calling out, "Peace be to thee."


When morning sun doth rise,

The kingdom's come and we're made one:

The foolish with the wise.

The foolish with the wise.

So raise your hands to heaven,



156

Send praise up to the throne.

Lift up your hearts till woe departs

And each one claim his own.

Let each one claim his own.


Jesus comes tonight.

From shore to shore the wide waves roll

The earth's all over bright.The earth's all over bright.



157

THE POET

I die in your eye

but I live

out of it.



158

UPWARD MOBILITY

Santa Cruz has its graces,

Flagstaff has its sights.

But till you've been banned in Boston,

You haven't touched the heights.



159

AAH, STOW IT

"I'm not much of a social person,"

Said the poet to his parrot.

"Me neither," said the bird,

But no one heard,

Except the poetAnd he,

As usual,

Didn't know it.



160

FIFTY-FIRST WAY TO LOSE YOUR LOVER

You're a mouse in a hare's hole.

Better turn tail.



161

FABLE

"Let's talk," said the circling rabbit

To the fox who breathed in her ear.

"It makes more sense,

And the recompense

Is fairer by far, I hear."

"Your syntax, ma'am, I deem a shame,"

Said the fox, without a slip.

"I don't talk to my dinner

And YOU'RE the sinner:

Get hip, ol' hopper, get hip.

"For my coat is red and my teeth are sharp

And I intend to laugh last.

So pull in your ears

And keep dodging: I'll cheer,

Then I'll pin your pelt

To the top of my mast."

Well, the rabbit quailed: she shook in her boots.

She lay down on the ground and played dead.

And the fox ate her--it's sad but true.

(You wanted a happier ending, didn't you?)

And the fox, replete, went home to bed.



162

And forty years passed: sun up, sun down.

The animal kingdom lay in deep thrall.

The race of foxes proliferated;

The rabbits' luck had long abated.

(Do pardon the doggerel.)

But then one morning the bugles blew

And the rabbits thronged to the call.

From east to west the rabbity bestHopped down to their meeting hall.



163

Now the foxes, engorged in their cozy dens

Heard the clarion bugle note too.

"Fool music!" they growled,

And padded and prowled,

Doin' the same old soft shoe.

Meanwhile, the rabbits were through with talk

And were doing what rabbits are s'posed to do.

A week or two passed, and the morning sun rose

On a very well-stocked cuniculus zoo.

Then over its walls one day there leaped

The finest and fittest of hares.

She landed, full stop

On the back of a fox

Who sat sunning away his cares.

And that's all it took:

I won't write a book,

I've got my chores to do.

But I noticed last week up at Rabbittown Ranchos

They had foxes in harness, pulling the plows,

Cheered on by the pigs and the chickens and cows.

--They were GOOD at it too, those well-tamed



164

Honchos.



165

APPEAL FROM BIKE # 4072, more or less

Please don't be scared,

I'm just a poet

paying back a debt:

the labor on a tube.

("You only THINK you had no puncture?"

I'm certain of NOTHING at this juncture.)For I'm a HUMBLE rube,

and haven't dared

to place a winning bet.

Yet. (Now, didn't you know it?)

I do prefer old Ravi Shankar

to the City's slickest banker.

But must I also then rejoice

to hear a high and raucous voice

emerge from out in back?

You've got a knack,

I'll grant you that,

of squeaking like a cornered bat.

I've gone too far. Dear me!

I'm picking on a stranger.

You'd think by now I'd see

that that's a fearsome danger.

For you're a comic soul



166

and I'm more like a mole:

blind.

But if you're also kind,

just send me back a note

explaining why you think I wrote

and telling if my debt's repaid

and if you are afraid

you really must evadethis sudden ambuscade,

this awful escapade,

this biker's big

crusade.



167

SIR SOPHOMORE

Liking comes only

vis-à-vis,

said a chap in a personals ad.

But his point was so subtle

I forgot my rebuttal

and things went from worse to bad.

For liking's weak tea,

and this vis-à-vis

isn't nearly so apt

as aft to fore.

And this chap's chat is propped

on illusion. I'll opt

for the proper retort:

Sir Sophomore!



168

LOVE LETTER FROM A SCHOLAR TO A NOBLE SAVAGE

When weariness shows in the eyes of my friends,

then I think of you who wearies not neither do you

lie down in the heat of the day,

but work.

When in times of stress and trouble I remember you and speak incadences:

Yes remember you with the general pitiful willing helplessness

of the great unmet:

Remember you from the comfort of my corner....

And when the vampires rage, the preying manti of

(om)

souls....

Yes when the storms and winds of my soul bluster through dry corridors

of doubt....

Yes in the fraying grayed edges of maladroit doom....

Yes in the game in all the games of acidic preoccupation of the

freighted will, of the

Schopenhauer is the harness of several

lessons and it doesn't take long to find out 'n' I found out

(find out 'n' I found out)....

Yes when the furies rage I remember you in the pastures of the

woods where you used to roam



169

(Flush berried lips and the

lookalike cattle of your dreams)....

Used to roam cave or corner unnoticed in the fields that were a

sort of home

to you.



170

NOT TO THE MEMORY TREE, THAT'S FOR SURE

I.

We were fairly silly.

We began, while living, to feel sure that wonders would

Never cease.

We had intimate goals that came with the spring & surprised

Us no end into talk of rebirth.Shock of awakening became a topic of conversation in parlors,

Over tea.

II.

I played violin this evening and harmonica. The wind is

Restless, someone hangs from a wide oak tree, and sweet is the

Sound of amazing grace keeping the neighbors,

All six thousand of them,

From studying.

What's wrong with me that I can't crave iambs, or lengths of

Poesy from the days of Greece when Eros by God was Eros?

III.

Oh yes I remember now.

Someone in an appropriate red shirt cuts wood and, let's say, sings.

The tones are belling through the conifers, rills: water

Ever water, but not close. We might as WELL consider our

Minds united, our deaf and desperate were I more of a

Liar I would say utterly nonexistent



171

Minds.

Surely with a little imagination we can cook up a quick

Consummation over the miles.

Damn cheap wine

And

Avoid literary ladies:

They talk.



172

IV.

I don't care. It's either this or the street.

Its eyes remind the scrupulous observer that everyone has toGet down get out and walk through the carcasses

Of cattle and hogs being moved out of trucks in sawdust.

Ladies on platform heels admire this fact.

There are sold carnations and spitting cripples.

What?

I said, I don't care I'd rather do this now OK than have to get

Out and walk myself.

Where?

Not to the memory tree that's for sure.

But I thought you?

No dummy that was you.

No way. What I said was.

V.

All right.

Then several seemed to breathe.

They preferred the birds sweeping through fogs who swoop for insects.

They preferred horses and their smell in brown brush.

They claimed to prefer sunsets. It hurt. They did.



173

They preferred red tail-lights down the hill. Rhmmm rhmmm breahhh

Off into the tiny lamps of town.

(There will always be cars with warm engines beside your sleep.)

VI.

I did not mourn. I pulled back my white curtains.

I did not mourn, not morbid motley forms of myriad sinking sorrow,

Did not brag in free verse.

Did not did not mourn.



174

HOUSEWORK

A woman lived here with her mind,

A poet like any other.

And oh so carefully every day

She picked the specks of paper and clay

From floors, just like her motherBefore her: many a glorious find!



175

SIDING WITH AN ANGLO-SAXON

do you care

that the creature lies trapped

in an outgrown incubator

awaiting the ax?

are you indeeda vegetarian at heart,

do you really empathize

with the short gorged life

of a meat animal?

or is the thought of the gravy

paramount?

this is a poem of pretentious latinate words:

empathize

paramount

latinate--

about anglo-saxon

inflammation.

what i want to talk about is this enemy of mine,

hardly worth the name:

nearly a lover only lax

and hiding behind his mama's skirts.

his mama is an ax,



176

his mama is a doctor of law.

he's scared words will break his bones.

'hel-pelp!' he cries, piteously, in the night,

and when his mama looks in he pretends his

bones are broken, he says i've broken them.

but they're not. i didn't.

what i want to talk about is this friend of mine,

hardly worth the name:nearly a lover only lax,

and hiding behind his mama's skirts.

he does not soothe my sudden aches with simple words

the way a strong soul would:

no, i'm stuck with decency pululations loyalty imitations

ire.



177

other women have genghis khan for an enemy and

albert schweitzer for a friend. this is unfair.

my plight is very like that of a chicken awaiting the

top spot on an empty table. i mean i think thepain in my mind is that of a bird conscious

(if they are)

of the impending platter: a blue one, with tiny white

flowers.

ill-used. its life did not go gently in infancy, its blaze

did not show bright in youth:

therefore it spends its middle age on

tenterhooks.

i think i am going to side with an anglo-saxon

again.



178

PAN CONCEALED AS A DEALER IN SECONDHAND GOODS

One imagines this particular gentleman in front of a gilt

mirror looking at himself,

critically as is befitting,

but with a touch of private pride.

This is the one who hoots and makes loudcomments in the movies, while up front in quieter

opposition ladies mutter. This man is not a feminist,

he thinks women ruin the Democratic party. He is

willing to argue with his customers in a voice

that carries.

Sometimes he just glares, does not deign to vociferate

in their faces, stares from under a neolythic brow.

One would say something but he might not take it

wrong.

He adds on a paper not with a calculator, is a wit and a

throwback, exactly as alarming as he

looks. Bet he doesn't like literature. Bet he can't

read.



179

THE NOSE KNOWS

"The golden rule,"

Says Santa's fool,

A woman dressed in red,

"Dissolves the sense

In recompence,

Crowns justice in its stead."

"Why Mrs. Claus,

Cruel Nature's laws

An eye for an eye demand!

For red in tooth

And claw, forsooth,

She takes her final stand."

"Ah well, mein herr,

This red reindeer

Goes clinking through the skies.

Believe in THAT--

In seconds flat,

You too begin to rise."



180

COWARD

If you're a little yellow fellow,

you're not gonna care

if you don't dare.

You'll have a ready

excuse on your tonguefor every time you bung

it up.



181

AFTER THE IDES OF MARCH

The beauty of your absence,

Like the beauty of a star,

Expands my soul with gladness

As three kings come from afar

Bearing gifts of incense,

Come marching single fileTo an infant in a manger

Just to see him smile.

Your smile was worth the waiting

And worth your silence now--

Worth all the sad debating

Of a mind which cannot bow

To its humble, distant station--

Not a station of the cross,

But a sombre celebration

Of the meaning behind loss.

But your kiss was worth the most to me

And if I nevermore you see

Or never hear a word,

I'll bear it bravely through the years

And not obscure it with my tears:

A softly nesting bird.



182

The beauty of your absence,

Like the beauty of the moon,

Plays on my heartstrings music

Which nothing can untune.



183

THE POINT

The point is not that I managed to make it through

more weighty tomes than most before succumbing to the inevitable

toils of womanhood, too numerous to mention herein:

Nor is it the point that it will no doubt take me the rest of

my life to finish The History of Civilization by Will and Ariel(And Ariel, and Ariel) Durant:

Nor is it the point that I resemble Sylvia Plath somewhat:

though after the fifties none of us can ever be innocent, inedibly innocent

like that again, and I was only five in

nineteen fifty four, too young to be innocent

like that.

Nor is it the point that I well remember when Roger tried to

give me his piano in a fit of schizophrenia, I refusing at the

behest of Wendell who persuaded me Roger would want

it back later:

that I well remember when they stuck Roger away for a

while because he tried to drive his car into the deep blue

sea and also because he thought his treatise on mathematics

musically-rendered was a work of genius

(I grow increasingly certain with each passing year that it

WAS a work of genius).



184

Nor is it the point that those around me have utterly

outgrown the need for genius:

how it pules and whines! how it makes them bow rage

and worship in its vicinity! how they forget it three minutes

later for

'tas fallen, fallen far....

Nor is it the point that birds wild and tame know me, try to

get my attention, sit posed with wind fluffing up their tailfeathers, haloes round the behind:

that I sit in the highland winds watching grasses sere and sullen:

that hinds and hares round the bend ingratiate themselves:

that Russian olives respire just though the glass:

that Robert Penn Warren hoary and hale has not cast his mantle

round the white shoulders of a woman.



185

It is not the point that one bleeds by the moon. That one

is considered barely capable of holding the most menial jobs,

maid's jobs (though one can always write a letter to the bossthat even the boss has to admit...).

It is not the point that I myself went mad and considered certain

stock scapegoats to be executioners.

(They've changed, they're wielding scimitars.)

Here are the birds again there they go again it is not the point

that one of the few critics who bothers

has only one eye open,

which is better than none but still

thinks I'll be good some day when I learn to see

the point. (With one eye open.)

It is not the point that the men of my generation

(best minds gone mad)

have all studied zen and are making a living at it whereas when I

found out about pointlessness I fell into a hole--

I mean I really fell didn't I but you were

born blind, borne blandly on the breeze of your own

most holy and public afflatus and if you had said that:



186

I mean I think you must have, somewhere:

if YOU had said that whole armies of the just would have arisen

before water could move through the fine sands of the arroyo

to fill your footprints:

would have arisen and gone out to tear down the dam.

'Tis not the point that a girl named Burden married last

Sunday: I saw it in the paper and then my husband turned to

me and said why'd you stop putting out yourlittle magazine and I replied:

Someone told me I was holy,

Someone said You Look So High,

Someone turned his dog upon me,

Blotted out the sky.



187

"But none of this is quite the point. It's not what we

had hoped you'd do." But how should I interpret this: a neighbor

in a Jeep passed through, just now and saw me

peering out, and WAVED. Is thisthe point? Time's out of joint,

my ass is grass.

I'm not a lady,

nor a lass.

I'm nice.

(The cow next door is also

nice

as from its pen it moos.)

And I've given my only child my thirty-two dollar

running shoes.

(I hardly wore them.)

Take THIS, take THAT, Mr. Hemingway, do:

this ditty of dignity in dearth, of

marlins lashing out in the air

against your hook of unnatural

spite, as it slices their salty seaworn

mouths.



188

Serves 'em right for trying to

bite.

For try as they might, they won't get the

point.



189

LAST ONE TO KNOW

for Arlo Guthrie

Has it

happened then the

holy Transformation?

The Thing that takes thetwinkling of an

Eye?

From west to east the Raped

earth was riven?

And all the Saints were sure of

it but I?

Has it

come to us the

final Dispensation:

the one called Grace,

the one the angels

Envied?

It's the thing bright Lucifer

Fell for

What Tarsus sang in his

Cell for



190

What Daniel died to the

Lions for

Why Joshua rang down the

Walls.

It's the color of Joseph's colorful coat

The ring in the door of a Tomb.

It's the word in the mouth of The innocent babe

Who leaps from a virgin's womb.

But there's someone I Know who said it better,

The son of a Singer man.

When he came to my town in the Bloom of renown,

ARLO called it Waking Up Dead!



191

GARGOYLE

I was playing--said Evelyn Waugh--

Dominoes with the poor.

As I sucked up my drink through a straw,

There came a knock at the door.

--Why, the good Bill Buckley!--I gasped.--Sir, what brings you this way

(On such an otherwise wintry day)?--

Said Bill--It's not that I'm ill,

Or wish any way to intrude, or be rude.

It's only that, on my way up the lane,

I spotted a mutual friend.

And I fear he was near his end

(God forfend).

He was shuffling, he smelled like a wolf;

Had a gangrenous growth by his eye.

--If this isn't good enough, sire, for you,

I've given it quite The College Try!

I am old, Father William-- the gargoyle said.

--And all that I want is to find my bed.--

Waugh roared like a lion, through open mouth.

--You've come to my door to say that?



192

The fellow was doubtlessly wearing a hat.

I know whom you mean. He sits and begs

By the curb down on Broadway. Just throw a coin in

And give him a speech on grace & sin, and pass by....

Or say! Just to cheer him, also say Hi.

Where was I?--

You were playing, dear Evelyn Waugh,

Dominoes with the poor.You have sucked all your drink through the straw....

There's a bed behind that door. You ever have with you, friend,

The poor.



193

CAESAR'S LIEGE

The Queen opened her mean

eyes and looked at her Perpe-

trator.

"O fearsome Lord 'tis you

again," she said to the alli-gator.

"I've been sailing this lissome

Nile awhile (it's thirst for this it's

thirst for that)

but a lizard as long as you I've never

seen,

as yet.

"Your scales are a silly shade of Army

green, I'll bet

you scrub them down by night with

Brillo pads? Your children three all thrive on

lily pads? Nyet?

Would you like to brush your teeth and be my

pet?"

She dangled her hand in the water,

thick with its foreign mud.



194

Her hue was olive, her eyes aslant, she

turned her skin to the sun:

her face that was made for profile,

her orbs that were made for fun.

The amethyst jewel in her pyramid nose

flashed in the glare of the muted sun.

"The hardest part is practically done," she hymned to that

stony, sullen sun, then

glanced at the alligator(glanced down at the crocodile,

glanced at the armored floating shape

submerged to its snout in the silty

Nile).



195

The Queen opened her mean

eyes and looked at her Perpe-

trator.

"I wonder, Lizard, can you evenswim?" she said just a little

later; and plucked the gem from her

nose (a nose just made for profile),

and tossed it (under a muted sun)

into the ooze of the tossing

Nile

And watched it sink quite out of sight,

and pinched herself: "I've got it right!

He'll have to dive, go to the bottom,

and while he's down there, by Caesar, I've got 'im!"

So saying she took up her spear.

He perceived her with something like fear,

and something like appetite. And sank to his

sockets, and one went under. The other gazed green

like hazardous thunder, like desert

ice, it wasn't nice to observe. Then he

sank like a stone out of sight.



196

And was down a day and a night and a day.

O by the way:

The Queen had Eunuchs who bent to her will.

The Queen was cousin to Jezebel.

The Queen had pillows

up in the prow, 'pon which she reclined

(then as now)

to practice reciting her Wedding Vow.

.............



197

Up from the slime, with weeds on his

pate,

the alligator rose.

He rose slow-motion, in increments.

His snout was wounded, a thousand dentsflowed red from that gash of a fang-filled

gate.

Up from foraging came King of the Nile

with a jewel for his Queen. He couldn't

quite give her the crocodile smile, but he

spit out the stone at her feet, and was seen

by the host of her vassals, some

million last counted, half-fused by the

heat.

The First Lady of Egypt

will henceforth evermore hear

this spent and saturnine

hiss

he emits at the flowering thud of her spear,

her scale-piercing sharpened spear,

as he sheds that infamous crocodile

tear. And the awful throngs convulse in a



198

cheer. --Are you listening, Dear?



199

AFTER DAVE PALMER (FOUNDER OF CHIROPRACTIC)

The skeletal lord is a big one, Dave thinks the biggest.

He gaze is steady. His back is in the nature of things straight.

He has less soul than he used to (calcium attrition, or, to us lay,

a hunger for milk).

He'll get to die in bed, now. Later.

Take up thy bed and walk! said the healer after one quick jerk of my

nodding head on its stalk and I was afraid my

art was gone when I saw I could walk, six whole blocks with nary a

dizzy step, directly afterwards.

Doctors should heal the body, Dave, and you've my life

long gratitude. But let the soul-dealer, stripped of only the

littlest modicum of it, heal yours with the bit

iteration (I mean a rhythm) that the blood lord, the heart

lord, is even bigger than the bone lord.

Which is why I can say Thanks, Dave.



200

MISOGYNIST AND FANS

His women are ghosts

Or at the most

Inveterate eaters of fish.

He watches them walk

Beside the dry dockAdoring the supper dish.



201

FEE FI FO FUM

We lumpen, wee willie winkle's

kin, prefer the people

but the people aren't too sure about us.

We're a class apart, in America a class devoted

to the remembrance of that ratty tattered

edge of the social quilt.Our social guilt's an awful term,

the term of ants constrained to success.

A mess, success, a malformation

in a world where dogs sleep

through the afternoon and crows

calmly feed in the garbage pile.

We lumpen lovers, the giant in the beanstalk's

Englishmen, give to our life an aching

back, and talk

back, and sway

the straight back of our dictator:

pointillist greed, needy sad

sack of money.



202

DIVINE COLD SHOULDER

I intend to go back to the

nematode stage

of is it the brachiopod?

For the trouble is, pain

has invaded my game

or is it just age?Ask God

who won't let me regress

to the place I belong,

won't let me go back home:

"Your pain is acceptable in My sight

but I do not like your poem."



203

ABRAHAM STAYS HIS HAND

If you're going to refuse me the flash and dash

of your dramatic personal life,

then to keep my attention you're going to have to become

impersonality incarnate, the old gem,

eh?

That, I suppose, was a POETIC sentence

requiring the elucidation that destroys?

Fear not. I usually DO destroy my firstborns these days

and never remember afterward that there was anything in them

to stay my hand.

Come now: courage!

Don't come boasting to me of your guts in quitting

after the first year of writing.

-Your gentle and acrid irony,

your tenderized heart...

and that's all, folks?

Take Mira, now, Gandhi's disciple.

Poor Mira, worse off than me.

Her thousand and one letters

never

shook his assurance. I wonder if she ever grew up,

found herself mourning a lost fanaticism.



204

Or heroism.

So now if you're going to be

this way,

I won't show you my stories. They're not tailored to you,

not personalized... will I place the weapon

in your slack hand?

Ha, not me.

Anyhow they're not that good. Just antinuclear sermons.

Pity the poor antinuclear sermon: could if ever be efficacious?

And it dare not be stylish.

(Efficacy and style, old concerns: guilty sins for

liberal and conservative theologians, respectively.)



205

If what I say is confession, and if I have shame, or have

learned how to use

shame:

then I confess to a genuine anonymity,to the masses,

or to a friend bought sold and implicated

in similar sin.

There you stand in the neither/nor position, promising

but not granting

deliverance.

You have a talent for longevity.



206

A WRITER DRIVEN TO POLITICAL DESPAIR NONETHELESS RESUMES

I read in the paper that Evil is real

And that scars on the psyche seldom do heal--

Than an Empire of Evil threatens us all,

And that Eve with an Apple brought on Man's Fall.

I stayed up all Night 'neath the Dark of the Moon

Fighting the Demons that crept round the room.

I dared not get sleepy for fear Mr. Hyde

Would heckle the Jekyll who deep in me cried.

Yea, it was dreadful. I gave up all hope

Of singing with Angels or meeting the Pope--

For Earth was an outcast and I most of all,

Thrown out of the Garden, roamed round the Wall.

And did I meet Evil in that dank thorny Waste?

Will I swear that I know now its rank musty Taste?

Or is Evil no more than the absence of Good,

As Death is the vacuum which Life once withstood--

And will once again if I lay down the news

And take up my Pen. I have Nothing to lose.



207

IN MEMORY OF W.

I weep again at night.

It is not that I'm now only mortal: all is safe

and grave as usual in that victory.

But my father no longer walks in the forest.

The forest is burning.

Mary's brown babe did not rise for his mother,and words have I spilled: they are tears to a wind

which carries them short of your window.

The wine is half gone. I sink to provisional glories,

discontent.

Still, fragile night like a knife is tender

to the flying soul it strips,

and the heart dips its wings as in love.



208

A LITTLE REPLY TO PAVLOV AND SKINNER

"I don't believe in negative reinforcement," said the

trainer rather smugly.

The parrot sat there.

"He used to be nervous all the time, but then I began to

reward him for good behavior. He soon learned to associate

it with food."The parrot sat there.

A child shrieked and stiffened his knees because Mother

would not let him pet the parrot.

The mother whacked the child

on the rear.

The parrot sat there.



209

HAD YOU LIVED

The chased bird pants faster, he tires, he will fall.

The campfire burns and consumes the wood of the hunter,

an eager boy.

I look at the author's likeness on a book jacket--wry, self-assured

worn, the frown gone deep, eyes unafraid:the face of a survivor but not of a savior.

This is what you'd have looked like by now had you lived,

I tell the boy, for all traces of him are erased from the

author's likeness on the book jacket.

The man's a success. The chased bird pants faster, he tires,

he will fall.

The campfire burns and consumes the wood of the hunter,

an eager boy.



210

BY AND LARGE IT'S A CLEAN COUNTRY

America is a clean country.

If you get worms in your gut here it's your

own damned fault.

But my soul how my soul longs for India

With its gods and its fevers, with its poor who

refuse meat and protect the sacred cow, hey rama rama.

But my soul how my soul longs for Africa

where the high sun hits bones tied round the ankle of a

soft-voiced headman who runs through the grasses and doesn't

talk about war or about

peace.

But my soul how my soul longs for the Caribbean

all tainted so I'm told

with Marxism and witch-worship, where boys with joints in the

corners of their mouths sing syncopated things

and where the beaches I suppose are really

white.

Well I have enough at last though I've gone into debt for

life to get it: to relations who whip me about the flanks with

(o please no more)

Christmas presents.



211

Yes for a few years here I've had plenty to eat,

for a few minutes each day the men's missiles move over

my head,

and I've just bathed.

By and large it's a clean

clean country.



212

POETS BANNED FROM THE REPUBLIC

Plato has excised the image

because metaphor

is pure confusion

to the mind.

Something is always like something, eh?Bah,

metaphor makes you split-brained

so you never see

the thing in itself

and wander around all day

in dire pain.



213

THE MASTER SENT INTO EXILE

I wonder if the newly enfranchised students of the zendo

might be unaware

that there exists an unbridgeable difference between

master and student.

For their master's abdication was all but deliberate.

And his exploitation of his servitors awarded themtheir martyrdom, their fine ascetic

faces.

I suspect he knew he was losing nothing by losing

position,

but rather gaining in what might as well be called

might.

His students are still frozen at the old

proto-puritan stage:

they consider what we used to call

free love (so long ago)

expendable not in general but in

particular.

They should all calm down

and realize that a man who displayed such

blatant exercises in desire

had passed the point where desire is

binding



214

and that therefore he,

like all aging potentates,

has something to

teach them.



215

HONING

Let this cup be taken from me, Lord.

There's still all of Time to avoid it.

Let me lie down in green pasture intoning

Songs of the seabirds, the nightbirds

Honing

Knives of their wings on the flint of the storm.

Lord, Lord: take it from me.

But he answered only

Always

Till I felt him turn my

Face to the wind

Which blew around and

Around again.

A cycle, a circle, and Lord I am

Born

Anew to the sound of it blowing

The seagull, the raven. My master is torn

By the tear in the eye of the cattle

Lowing

As belly deep in the river they

Sweep

Through the fields of the dream of a

Child.



216

And blow me down mild, I cried to the sky

But it was too high. And the cup was held up to my lips,

Flush berried lips and I supped and was filled

With something quite other than what I had willed

In the days before I came round to know

To put away childish things.



217

ON HIS EMBARKING FOR ENGLAND

You're the chipper type,

the shipper type,

the chipper clipper ship skipper type.

But that's not what I wanted to say,

traveler.

I wanted to say there's too much remembering and

too much forgetting:

the former characterized by an elemental tat tvam asi,

a purple flower only just now opening in clear morning

light:

and the latter by an ineffable But,

a blandness,

the sad standard raised in a cancer ward.

Your mistake is you assume I don't exist.

But that's not at all what I wanted to say, traveler,

but rather that it's neither remembering nor forgetting,

neither here nor there,

and that words would erase it

if they could.



218

I AM AN ANCHORITE

Cast in the pocky mask of a decayed imagination,

Herculio

sat wildly in the thigh of a mothlike den--raucous,

inconsolable,

slave to a manner like a tanner-and-dyer born.

With a handicap like that he was bound to be fairly ironicand indeed sat wildly in the castlike din of a million snorting

jailbirds.

The neighbors were monsters, they lived on in the

dawn of species demise--I mean scars on their faces,

heads shaved,

grim mouths casting imprecations

and shoulders scrawnily drawing in on themselves in the backseats

of busses.

In other words, a fair number were already numb to the appeal

of horror

in which they lived like unshelled peas.

Not a pod to kiss in,

like not a pit to hiss in.

Language a soporific one of the best. I languish. I pull

and pinch with deathbed jitters at the wool of a social blanket.

Pick, pick: I can no longer say what I can no longer distinguish

in the grey and greyer fog.



219

But rhythm downpulls fasting cells in the hut of bones.

And had I ever asked to float on the skin of the sea like a bark

of victory?

Did I ask to be corn punned and puckered in the refuse of midwestern

suns?

I wanted to stay under, a mermaid by birthright.

(Go down, Herculio, way down in Egypt land.)

I wanted to be the eldest son slain for lack of blood on thelintel.

But no.

I was spared for lesser things.



220

STANDING ON HIS HEAD

He came to me again in this town

Upside down

Upside down.

And never been fed, the doctor said.

But I doubted.

Ponderous, heavy, built like a bear.

Shaking his head from side to side.

Shattered his vision, battered his brow.

He's only a thief,

now.

Barred from the stores, now.



221

WANE

Every time the moon is full I think of you.

Sometimes I think, Well this moon no longer

offends.

Sometimes I swim in a silver sea or lie

in a car on the beach with my head thrown back in the sheer

light.Usually I am a harsh mistress angry that man ever looked

on my pocked face only to leave, uttering,

"One giant step for mankind!" as if there were any

such a thing.

The moon's not full at the moment.

I no longer count on its ever being so again.

It's too late you've made me wait

too long.

So long, Song

of Solomon (that wiseacre who simply wanted to be known

as fair to all concerned).

Stern side of the moon: if I vowed anything to you I vowed

to keep blackness behind me, to show only

the tracks you left on my white shining

mind.



222

THE JAY

As I climb the cinder hill,

everything weary but my knees,

I hear a jay foray into the silence

with one raucous question.

I whistle back: pucker my lips and try to make a sound

comprehensible to him. But I know I am humanand suppose that only by softening my voice

can I persuade him to listen to something so strange.

It doesn't work, exactly. He does not shriek again, but a

deeper silence from his direction overlays the overall silence.

A silence rests on the silence, and it is only by faith

that I manage to differentiate the two.

But what is my climb to you? Are you not a man unutterably

bored with first person tales? and second person too, be honest,

and even third? You've taken refuge in the idea

that no one is climbing a high hill,

hacking it to bits with a

harsh heel.

You've taken refuge in the city dweller's delusion that wilderness

is barren and that the voices of birds

are not brothers' voices,

but scratched records put on expressly to irritate you.



223

You've told me in the most dread hour that the trees whispering

in your joyful voice are liars: you've told me that the trees

are liars evermore, and that you won't listen

to their dead songs.

But up on the hill the jay is ignoring me now completely,

and his cry is answered--immediately!--by the cry of another jay

in another tree,

and the wind is beginning to moveand the sun is going down

and I won't be home till after dark

today.



224

TO MS. DICKINSON

Emily, I'm losing my sliding scale,

for Higginson's a prig

to whom I--pray.

I'm not like you, a sprig

of springtime's long and surerelease.

I cease to matter

when my master

waits a day.

No, Emily, you are a breath

that blows half-noticed on his brow.

But I'm a winter-hearted suitor

mourning the loss of

the here and now.



225

MILKMAID'S LAMENT

Poets are writers

Who hate to write.

They have better things

To do with the night.

Don't argue with me:It makes me weep.

Poets prefer

To wake and to sleep.

The matters of which

You can talk about

Don't carry with me

So very much clout.

Get some dirt

Underneath your nails

And torment me not

With critical tales.



226

LET WITCHES LOVE OLD MEN

Let the gypsies hold up lanterns as the clouds roll in.

Let termagants tipsy in their garrets bow:

"Praise to the Lamb.

All praise to the Lamb!"

Let twist-toed scarecrows rouse in every graveyard on the earth,

Let the fools give birth.O lordy, let the fools all give birth!

I saw a sinking phantom rise a moment in the western sky,

Heard the drinking bantam crow and bats saw fly

High to the vision of my old love's laugh.

High to the vision of his unrepenting sigh:

"Praise n praise n let the fools give birth.

Praise n praise n let the Lamb now reign on earth."

...Reign.

I'll love you in your mousetrap/rat-trap/stone soul's lair.

Love you for a moment or a long long year:

Winter as the owls cry,

Summer as the days slip by:

Praise n praise.

Let witches love old men.

Couldn't find the bats or bantams in the raw cold night.

Couldn't find my soul: where was the Lamb, and the light?



227

Couldn't find my cloak or broom or see my face anymore.

Couldn't hear a mouse's squeak or a lion's fading roar.

Gave it to the gypsy to the wild wind's sound.

Gave it to the ground.

And to termagants tipsy as the moon sank low.

Stowed it in a garret or a rat's round room,

Blowed it to the phantom for his ashen gloom.

(So let the witches laugh,

Only witches love,

Let all the witches praise

The old old men.)



228

ON CALVARY

I. Crucifixion

Bones of the feet creaking 'cross the floor,

Creaking cross: what for?

For piercing the soil

of Calvary.

Carry me 'cross the floor.

Take up your tree and

follow me

for my feet are split by spikes

of importunity.

But five toes,

a pentatonic scale.

Oriental bones: not a cross but

curved and mobile

to escape on.

Cape on to turn aside the wind.

Capon: price paid. Take, eat.

As oft as you do,

remember me.

II. Resurrection



229

Salvator Mundi

and Mater Dolorosa

met alongside

a felled ponderosa.

"This is my cross,"

claimed God the Son.

"No. Only firewood.Your race is run."

Man condemned to do,

Woman to love what he has done.

Praise the Mother

and forgive the

Son.



230

DELILAH

He called me lucid: I turned in fright.

Better the night--any old night.

He assured me he certainly DID understand.

Draw back thy hand from my precious quicksand!

He showed me connectives objective and pure.He tried to persuade me we both could be sure

Of rational structure that's clear and so simple.

But I cut off a lock and down came the temple!

Yes I cut off his hair as he hollered Unfair!

And bald-pated surfaces shown like the sun.

And I WAS having fun

In this flesh-tinted sun:

With the temple's debris

I made myself free.

But God too was cunning He spied me in shadow

Hunted me down Hiding in shadow

Now He had won,

He said, "Let there be light!"

Overwhelmed me with sight...

Spoiled my night.



231



232

LAUGHING JESUS

"'Twasn't any different in the Age of Faith,"

Quoth the flying horseman, pursued by every wraith,

By every passing whirlwind that scours the desert floor--

But the minute that he said it, he became a crashing bore.

"I'd rather slop the hogs," said he, "or split the stubborn woodThan tread the streets of shining gold or be forever good.

I'd rather soap my saddle or sit and watch a hawk--

If I HAD to go to Heaven, I'd only stand and gawk."

Then Jesus wept.

Darkness crept

Across the burning sky.

"Now God like man's forsaken me;

Upon this cross I die."

Three days in the tomb he lay,

A stone stopt up the door.

An angel pushed the stone aside,

It scraped the desert floor.

(Ye always have the poor.)

(But death shall be no more.)

'Tis very, very different in the Age of Faith!

He walks on water, walks through walls,



233

Spies every sparrow as it falls,

And when the flying horseman passes,

He lies and laughs in the desert grasses.



234

INFLUENCE SOUP

Sir:

In honor of doctrine which is only an accretion

and only incidentally applicable to the discipline of your subject,

I must say that it is always a shame to have to acquaint the lecturer with

the moral imperative.

Picking like a hen on philosophy,

you proceed to establish a pecking order for lyric poets

and then to embellish this triumph

with facts.

But we the mass at your elbow,

we the proletarian audience,

continue to suffer terribly. You have no right to turn James

Joyce into a disciple of Aquinas.

I am surprised that you let his utter innocence of

his damned influences

(influence soup)

escape your attention.

If Joyce was blind he was simply blind: deaf: dumb.

Finnegan's Wake is sufficient proof that something was the matter

with his memory. It was all he could manage to ignore the

legacy of the past which various parties kept dumping in his

lap. However, he did manage.



235

Of this the class should be left fully aware.



236

MIGRAINE AURA

Latticework inflection,

Infection's on the wane.

Watch the window-washer

Wash off the windowpane.



237

DON'T COUNT YOUR GOLDEN EGGS

BEFORE THEY HATCH

"Climb to my rooftop--Dance your dumb contradanse. The house

will stand, and on will play the band." From "The Little Geese,"

Italian Folktales, compiled by Italo Calvino.

The goose went into the barnto lay her golden egg.

The fox thought he'd better warn

her not to break a leg.

"And why are you pestering me, buccaneer?"

said the goose to her russet swain.

"I've been laying here now for many a year,

and no one but you has deigned

to hassle and jostle in coldhearted jeer.

Buzz off!"

The fox went out to the field

to check his line of traps.

His lips he kept close-sealed

till he stopped for a quick game of craps.

"So how have you been, mein herr?"

said his pals to the russet swain.

"Sniff any fat geese on the air?"



238

Well, the fox, he made it all plain,

and the fox he took their dare:

"Go for it!"

The goose stepped out of the barn

on both her fine webbed feet:

"Oh golly gee & oh darn!

Where can I go in this heat?"

She took herself down to the stream,

But there stood the russet swain.

He was wrapt in a vulpine dream

and never noticed the rain

which fell on his intricate scheme--

which, hitting his head, turned to steam:



239

Alex the farmer clomped out to the barn

to gather his golden eggs:

"Aye, and ah'm faelin' sa sad and faerlarn,

sainkin' sa low on useless old pegs."

He sat himself down on a stump

and noticed his goose was gone.

He picked him a little clump

of violets, down by the john.

He saw something red give a jump,

then subside to the grass--and 'twas gone.

The fox has been stung by a bee!

"Tee hee," said the goose. "Oh tee hee."



240

IMPERSONATORS OF MORNING

Impersonators of morning under a calm gold sky:

--the housewife hanging up her clothes, stomach pendulous from

six successful births

--the horse hanging his head over a barbed wire fence, waiting

for the cyclist in cap and sweatpants to say a word in passing

--the dog charging out to fend off the cyclist with a terrorof brash barking

--the other dog looking up with one eye, then turning his old

head stiffly aside so as not to give offense, and laying it

back on grizzled paws

--the jay breaking the silence, the crow outdoing the jay, the

sparrows on the fence speaking a language of careless comfort

--the men from the electric company, from the telephone company

and from the roads division, sitting around, standing around,

making work, feeling too guilty to quite enjoy their freedom

--the lovers lately risen driving lazily to the store for more

wine, then reconsidering the trip back when the freshness of

the world at last strikes them.

Morning itself grows slowly in splendor, nothing can remain

noisy for long underneath its canopy--grows steadily in brightness

until every object stands outlined.



241

THIS IS BILLIE HOLIDAY, BREATHING

I sit here sipping nectar

on the occasion of having desecrated

your grave.

I splash oil ochres on the canvas of my desire

because I hear your released feet running

across the square milesof my beautiful painted deserts.

I drink to bad poets. There are

hundreds of thousands

and all of them excellent lovers.

Run,

ol' Jack Rabbit,

and circle back.

I have not stopped playing Cripple Clarence Lofton.

I will never stop.

You can count on a room with me sitting stirring

homemade mocha pudding

and drinking California chablis

and listening to the walking blues talking

about that streamlined

train.



242

NO DAMAGE

Heartless heart of a darkened mind: you call yourself will.

If not for you, gall and wormwood would long have had their

way.

I need not thank you. Sterile mimic, you resemble those who

once gave

not this patient thing superior to the great grotesque sensualitiesbut only bodies,

reluctantly,

under cover.

What my nemesis hints is my own business,

perennially.

It is not bad, business: desire transmuted grown ravelled

under the ropes

is delicate still: a matter of hands,

implicit dogma,

and precedent demands.

Two million years is not a long wait (the voice of will cracks

in the telling).

Rhapsody comes suddenly to the obedient servant of spirit:

the one already gifted with the word yes.

What is it then that breaks in a creature whose heart has been

considered unnecessary for some years now:

is it the will?



243



244

EL PEDESTAL

On a post in the desert I sit

Deciding what's fatuous, what fit

To be bound by the tie that binds,

To be found by the guy that finds:

Great God. Nor do I blaspheme in my intrepid vigil:I have not heard, out here, quite yet, where they've interred

Virgil.

For all I know he wanders still, one step ahead of Dante.

I am tied to one spot

Beneath the black sun

And it's not, I assure you,

A question of fun

But of waiting, outwaiting

An uplifted sire

Who's consigned me to wait

In his stead for the fire

To finally fall from the sky.

Why Escalante, with his expedition,

Once passed quite close to me! He didn't pause,

But raised his arm

In the Spaniard's brusque salute.

"Adelante!" Onward! was what he said.



245

But a henchman of his held back and gave bread,

And moistened my lips with a drop of

El vino

De la vida

Que pasa

Como sueño

De sueños.



246

THE SPILL

Granny landed

on her fanny.

"It's feast or famine,"

said she,

and picked herself up

with the aid of a stick,and sat down to sup,

and finished up quick,

and passed down a scrap

to the cat on her knee.



247

PROFESSION

The moon was a caracol shell of silver,

But my gliding eye fell on cretins and saints,

Cretins and saints

Carved like lines on the face of the light.

My every ode was to some poor sageLost in his nook

Picking his brains for a book I could love.

And I did,

I did love the brainwhorls of myriads.

It was my profession.

I made no other.

I followed my brother the moon with lowered eyes

Till I died in my room,

Reading,

Blind at the last,

Ablaze.



248

CHECKMATE

Said the Amazon to the Neo-phyte:

It's been a long time since the

spark

of our mute neat crossing

rose

in its inexplicable poseto breast the blank tides of the

dark.

And I never did catch your name,

I only just noticed (re)birth was your game.

But game to me is an antelope,

a flash of sharp heels on the windward

slope,

a print in the cinders, and

scat, a sure thing

for my singleshot prowess,

a bird on the wing

in the face of the sun.

..............

Said the Neo-phyte to the Amazon:

It's over, my dear, but very

well done.



249

(Ambition, perdition, rye whiskey and woe:

quick as we come, more quickly we

go.)



250

I LIVE ON COLD MOUNTAIN

On a weary day of prose,

fallen too far into the common discourse,

I remembered Han Shan, the mountain poet:

remembered him in spite of the fact that the

gendarmes of the Cultural Revolution have scrubbed his poems off

the cliffs....

"I live on Cold Mountain and no map leads to my home,"

said Han Shan.

"I don't speak more than I have to.

I don't give lessons.

High clouds rebound from the face of the heights.

I sit without shoes and watch.

Bird cries fall from the empty sky,

there rests only one seed on the glassy ice:

who will feed the fliers?"

On a weary, sultry day on the edge of a city,

flung too far from the broken boulders,

I called out to Han Shan, the mountain poet.

And no one answered.



251

A DIVINE COMEDY

I was a scion of the humble soil,

a creature bent and braced by chance,

not daring or

not caring to take up

the higher toil of those who would escape

the coils of circumstance.

Ah God. Dear God. It snows.

Ah precious lover, hear the wind!

The blizzard off the mountain falls

on our tin roof. Its

icy warp and woof, its

careless weather-weaving

takes our hapless life

to task

and makes us pay the common price of strife:

Inferno. I never noticed till too late

the elements of hell.

One came to tell me all my love was vain.

"You are unguided, lost,

untamed. Come follow me

lest darkness cleave your pate."

I laughed, but then he spat upon my plate.

"You call that food?" he hissed



252

and wrapped me with his cloak.

And darkness fell,

a midnight which did not abate.

I knew no more

Till in a trice hard starlight called me back:

hard harsh those singing spheres,

a canticle divine, no doubt:

but how my mortal eyes were burnedand singed my earthly ears!

"Arise," he said, "and follow me. My name is Virgil;

Purgatory is my realm.

Its nether lake will purify desire,

and I its virgin potentate

will turn your dross to gold



253

if only you

will follow me."

I held a calloused hand above my eyes,

and felt my sweaty brow

as if in other days I followed at the plowand saw the loamy furrows roll along the heavy blade,

and wept a little at the cry of some sweet bird

whose eggs I'd buried there.

"But still, I will, I will believe!" I swore,

and stumbled in my master's wake.

A vision flaring from the shade,

a tide of azure swept upon the shore

of Purgatory's deep and reed-encircled lake.

The mettle of my poor benighted mind was tested then.

He would not let me rest among the pliant weeds.

He would not slake my thirst or offer meat.

He was no more a guide than Beatrice

had been a lover to that man who too attended Virgil

through a dim unearthly light,

a night of shattered promises and shards of broken hope.

The blue and burning vision

which whispered like a tide,



254

which rushed the reedy shore, almost in anger,

bore

within its bruiséd heart the countless souls

of those who likewise came before.

And these were wailing, hailing me and pleading:

now this,

now that.

Full well I knew that without aid I never could determine

what they asked.

I wandered on, and "Master!" shouted I,

for in my dream I'd lost him.

I only heard the echo of my aching voice

which drove upon the cliffs



255

which all around with blind eyes watched.

I dropped my head upon my breast and wept

and wished I'd never left

the verdant meadows of my homely past.

And someone wiped my tear away,

and someone smiled.

"Why child, don't you know

that this has all along been Paradise enough

for you and yours,

for bird and beast and tame and wild?

My child?"

I traced the outlines of his smile;

I knew it well, this face:

but was it, then, my master Virgil

or the quiet soul beside me

in a bed I'd never left,

while snowdrifts rose outside the rough-hewn door?

I really couldn't tell.

Ah God. Dear God. It snows.

Ah precious lover, hear the wind!

The blizzard off the mountain falls

on our tin roof. Its



256

icy warp and woof, its

careless weather-weaving

takes our hapless life

to task

and makes us pay

the common price

of strife.



257

THE EVENT

Ev

o

lu

tion is slow,

rock rising from a dead sea

to ring itself with coral,sprout palms,

apes,

parrots

and an odd fish,

man.

Genius is unseen,

blinds the beholder

to itself,

binds the foot to a

secret ledge

from which it could not fall

if it would.

Evolution choked

when it tried to swallow genius.

The smooth patter of eon upon eon, past upon past,

was rudely interrupted when mutant man

ran in,



258

inventing

a future.



259

SUBJECT CRITERION

Thou Wendell Berry woodman

in a dream

that Wendell Berry would be

what I deem:

a heavyhanded hewer,

maker and a doer,worker not a player,

not a naysayer:

is what I seem.



260

THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT FORGIVES EDWARD ABBEY

Most of all you wanted out

of clichés like the bit

of being an environmentalist or bitter

backwoods salvator

mundi.

Monday you stopped by the bar all balled

up in a rage of humor and human risk;

it wasn't risque when you spoke

of love, the common sense: not bad really all those

tales of heart-shaped ends.

Your end I'm certain was heart-shaped, the

obit said you died of a circulatory ailment,

and doesn't everyone lucky enough?

Don't get me wrong, I for one (and one for all)

remember the fearsome foe you'd have been had I been

born a little earlier, had you been

crowned a little later.

Most of all you were a philosopher,

such a good one that I,

who can't but believe,

announce in good time that you

are a philosopher, hobo-king, and doctor by now



261

of divinity.



262

ALL FOR LOVE

Oh teacher, teacher, marry me.

You'll see how happy we can be.

Of all my acts, this is the corker:

I'm published now in the New Yorker!

But the poetry editor gives a sniff.

"We never take stuff that has a whiff

Of the bareheaded backwoods brat about it.

It runs in the face of all we've touted:

The lavender nun and the flower unflouted

By louts and your lewder roustabouts.

"Better luck elsewhere.

'Fair-fair is fair-fair,'

To be faintly third-world in our first-world diction.

Why don't you turn to humorous fiction?

Why not submit that wit to forms

A little bit closer to big-city norms?

You remind us of course of Dorothy Parker

And Vachel Lindsay and Ogden Nash

And Gertrude Stein, the way you clash

With the light fantastic, though somehow starker

And more perverse

And dunderheaded

And not quite terse

Enough."

So I fold my hands and resign myself

To remaining ever on the shelf



263

Up here with the cans of tomato paste

And tuna fish. It's a life of waste.

It's a wallflower's life (a flower, at least).

It's the beggar unheeded at the feast

Of the rich feastgiver who doesn't need

The blooming wish, the burgeoning risk,

The florid calling

Of a female Johnny Appleseed falling

Off the rails, into the mouth

Of the beast. -Like the leastOf you, my brethren.

Oh teacher, teacher, marry me.

We'll sail away across the sea

To make our home in the British Isles

And wake each other with daybreak

Smiles.



264

DUST

You think I'm coming to tear you off the tree

and devour you seed and all.

You think I'm traversing the deserts deliberately

to give you scope for your revenge

to make a spectacle of myself

to out-martyr youto put off goodbye.

But,

It's just a slowness you give me and

measureless depths:

Murky backwaters iridescent on the

surface, rainbowed, empurpled, flyspecked.

The layers of fern and frond in a rainforest

on in a flawed emerald.

In short, eternal things smiled upon by

reigning immortals with round bellies and red

beards and gold back behind the

irises of their eyes.

We won't catch it this time, either.

Expect nothing but my tireless patient

pursuit, you gray mouse in the sights of a

white hawk in a whirlwind of deathless



265

dust.



266

DUST (II)

Street boys, survivors.

Sleet days, piledrivers.

A simmering onion stew.

Graybeards are dozing,

Gentlemen bulldozingA corridor back to you.

Mists and miasmas,

Ma's razzmatazz at

Venerable Bede's old bust.

Sort it all out, sweet,

Pull on the sugar-teat.

Do now or die as you must.



267

LIGHT FADES FROM THE RED AND WHITE

INNOCENT STRIPES

Am I the less for taking my half-tutored idiom to the back trails,

where the only prize is peace on the face of a literate nun?

Where the only publication is a confusion of passion in an aging

aesthete?

Hie Vachel Lindsay and remember America,

land of unsought buffalo suns, blinding anyway

through a growing pall of smog as the light fades

from the red and white innocent stripes,

as the bright stars dim in our cobalt sky.

Fat black bucks are strung up by their heels now from strands of

barbed wire,

necks broken, bellies fetid for the flies, furred antlers a waste

in the dust. Fish and Game drags them away.

Wine barrel rooms are awash in sulfites... But I can't go on about

environmental decorum, for the usual Raven Scavenger has stolen

my drunken tongue, and an urban ogre my pastures and primitive

sleep.

Is the Statue of Liberty, fine idol she, any the less for

Oklahoma roots?

Will her crown of thorns fit the homeless head



268

here pillowed guileless in streaming gutter?

Hie Vachel Lindsay and pray for this babe, beat drums for this

Redskin babe, black as a prune dying one day old

of his mother's AIDS.

Bury your children in reservation sands on a day of drought.

DRINK! Barrel house kings have dignity now and a brand

new name: Native American.

Their uranium streams are picturesque shrines.Their electric power plants run the blenders of nice white folks.

But their feet, Vachel Lindsay,

are still

unstable.



269

TURNING WEST WHILE TALKING TO HIS WIFE

He was turning west while talking to his life

About the death she had vouchsafed him and

About a castle built on shifting sand.

I coughed to let them know I'd noticed but

They blinked and went on (on and on and on).I quite gave up, I lay upon the beach

Where every itinerant comes down at last to teach:

Cruel as crows' eyes, keen as hens' teeth, often out of reach

With hands entwined like hippies, bowing from the strand

To where the margin is, the end of things, where

Hangs a city plague-blest.

The septic sun itself was falling red and fast.

His wife sat back and said, "My dear, I'll take a rest."



270

POR AMOR PARAMOUNT

Bad boy, street boy,

Took away my tongue.

Sweet man, 'at's reet, mon,

Sleek and low slung.

Queer bird, greybeard,Arms around his lass.

Tailor-take-a-tuck in his suit of tails--

He's a damn fine old jackass.

But she was the mute cat,

He was the meat rat.

It wasn't easy to tell

The smooth-faced infidel

That he'd better beware of Jezebel.

Jezebel wears a girdle.

It's got emeralds and pounded brass.

Jezebel ties her hair into tails

In front of the looking glass.

The mute cat keeps eunuchs

Who bend to her will--

They once caught the meat rat

With his hand in the till.



271

(But it all faded. Nothing much

Happened. It fizzled.

The covetous cleaving and bizarre bereaving

Took a tittle and jot of a toll.

Then they both went on the dole

And ended the rigmarole.)



272

DOWSER

Seed of cold water,

if it's pure, pearl-like and

engendered,

will fall like a sentiment, a wonder,

like yon Yule bauble,like sands in the hourglass

to this spot.

Baked unyielding snow-spliced tarn bottom,

real peasant ground and I'll take the

low road.

Rode lo these many years in highwayman's

red garb Eureka he's risen forked

stick flies up like an adder's tongue.

'Way, Willy, outta the way Willy.

That spot's filling up.



273

LONGEVITY: AN UNFINISHED POEM

The fraught sea cannot scar the stone

It runs upon like blood on bone

Unless it run for countless years

Bereft of human ties and tears.

The sea's not human in its ways,Its waves won't cry out to the gods,

But gales and storms draw out its days

Like gamblers beating down the odds....



274

YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING

O Peter Pan: 'tis Captain Hook,

Here in all my finery.

I'm not a scarecrow, nor a spook,

Nor bounced out from some winery.

From Tinkerbell I come to thee.She folds her wings, drops to one knee,

And says her piece: "Now set me free.

"I never wished to fly so high.

Fairy dust just makes me sneeze.

And anyhow it's all a trick, done with

Strings, so Peter, please,

Just cut the cord and let me die."

You hear that, Pan?--ill-named at that!

If you're a forester, I'm a cat.

But just reach out and feel the lace and

Furbelows upon my hat: harrumph!

I'm a PIRATE, Pete; I sail the seas

And steal my supper

And don't pay fees

Or taxes, Peter. And my praxis,

Parsed in Paris, by an heiress

With a broadsword (privateer's sword)



275

Finds your blackboard by a

Fluke! You say you're still bored,

Flyboy, lukewarm? Taking time? Oy! I'd

Rebuke you,

Sir...

If you'd once wake up and rub the chalkdust from your

Beautiful eyes....

On my galleon I've seen smoke.

War at sea is not a joke, not a

Game for children, Pan:

Comprehend me if you can.



276

FINALE

That's all for tonight, boys,

and that's a natural fact.

If I've shook yr. equipoise,

get yr. press unpacked:

steal this for a literary supplement,

just leave it all intact.

But if you still are queasy,

it's no more than I expect.

Let your minds rest easy--

you've been so circumspect.

And console yourselves with the observation

that it's the lowest chicken who most gets pecked.



277

LAST CHANCE

And me you leave, through my thousand houseless words,

Mute, as vividly deep-dyed mute

As the manufacturing marrow,

For which, ripely considered, strange

Is too tame and usual a word.

For all that you ever gave

Me, off with my barrow of rags for the street,

My tatters of things for carbuncled feet,

Was the common old edge of the Scythemaster's scythe:

A hint, intimation, seduction, a sigh

Which cut deep. Much too deep

For a baglady's day.

So good night, all my life,

Nostalgia was ever your word. 'Twas the word

For failure to tip the felt hat to a bum

Soliciting sweets from the curb

Or a crumb

From Chance's rich table, fabled afar:

Last chance to feed Lazarus

Caviar.

Mortuary Music

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Transcript of Mortuary Music