The code of things, icy mornings, pine’s multiplicity of needles under flaps minds raise to widening skies
whose cloud casements gather and disperse as young thoughts one day press the balustrade, next, polish the dance floor,
wring a false confusion—there is order, this fabric of scuffmarks, well-heeled leavings even our true mothers can’t excise
and time goes by and science flips the bird at consciousness, that default permafrost in which our packed lives, as slumbering spores
repose—failsafe but fresh enough in soil’s shuffle though bland in spades and bare, rat-trapped, wired as hell in its tough season—
for the funneling down, tiny messagecoats slit with a twinkling as fogbound sloops rip void. More travel than force,
numbers tell all: as a lioness rises up, lifts herself, does not lie down till she devours in the freezing
zone her prey we come, relay our love, gifts, lies, platitudes—what have you—Point A to Point B. The crowd
clumps, stomps in socks, blows hard, toggles earflaps, turns on thoughts, longs from the brassy switchplate of its awakening
for news of the foreign self—smokestack, deck, rail, gunwale—the living on board, each paltry party, fetid fête deep sounding
as hands gang weigh and the knotted rope slips from stay tight water, swollen and remorseless as the pinprick undertow
of predation. Night scoper worms his view, takes a bite, low end of ham and cheese still plastic-wrapped. Loud
reasons for all this draw a bead for the fun of it—not time yet—and dangle from the tip of his tongue not knowing
from that inlaid shelf of hacked superiority, they’ve been dead for years. Ah, here she comes—the long-stalked
—not rose, not tough as gaillardia—iris? Daylily perhaps? This will be her past—so transient—no for sure she won’t
last long cut. The window of the bar flashes a beer-blue light. He can see inside (tapeplierstinsnipscaulking
subatomic under his feet) inside his head, this, his kind of woman: redblack hair, opaque hose—so kind
by midnight, third rum and coke chortling in her mind, she will scrape cold keys from regions of her upper purse and walk
out alone. There are instances, molecular events, manned collisions for which charging particles align
like planets in a house; boudoir doors to a half-lit upstairs hall snap open briefly with a valve sound, unfurl
candy-heart gists of our vilest dreams, depart. For all its randomness, rest assured, some god may come of this. A sign
(not the same as a symptom) to keep an eye out for: one glass marble coming in. Symptom of same: pain. A pious wad,
fell voltage, slow basting with hot oil. Nerves’ frayed endings twitch limbs as automatic cats o’ nine,
fondue forks, electroshock into that jammed sea of our timed imaginings, emphatic current, vine-ripe pond
of the unknown solution, that quandary in which we lay our steps: no faith too brittle, no stone too blind if from the right mine,
that tunnel of power, that great teat our progenitors, strapped to the clothesline between famine and war, had occasion to strip dry
but could not, or so we believe. Thus, the lordly otter and we and the pink-fleshed fish steady our upstream climb to find
precise sources for ourselves or, more plainly put: go home. Is it an angled noose we coax our bodies into, a rusty
cigar-store cutter? What will we know? Cables of heredity stretch the bluing haze, merge like ends splitting somewhere
near infinity. Against judgment the helical hairs untwist, unzip dwindling proteins to quell and pleasure earth’s dusky
second skin, that cool bed, starlit, cloud-mirrored, from which we transmit like lice the family darts, those last peculiar
image-bytes salvaged from our cell-souls. Missions of love will have to wait. But our time brims with palpability, place,
trick static, that sense of unexplained passage, slave scrabbling, freeze-fractured noise—claws on doors. The trained liar
hawks brilliance, poised far as flight from the usual fairway. Stockcars shift confidences, trade security for space.
Plastic surgery: molding outsides to innards. But if one’s true interior’s still unknown? And afterwards, too ornate
to change? So often knowledge lags—ears, eyes mislead—case of elephant as tree, dust as grain, Maker as callous
conjuror. Scripture: to everyone under this godlike, no more godly sun, there is a season. Winter is here. Hate
wipes its sly lips on one sleeve, kicks the mewling, garners its lamest young to hand around, like some rogue grail,
the poked apple. We take in its icy sheen, point to waxy skin scarce-dinted by fangs and deny, in our late
hunger, venom inside. Evidence betrays. Courts plan on it. Shabby spate of lives like bullets lost to the legal Braille
whose thick, awled boots raise wall upon wall, ramparts, an archaeology of limits aging students as blind dates
with dry toothbrushes and picks must exhume from blocked canonical turf. Our oldest gifts may be our trial.
Ah, to wrest tradition from its vises! The corporate thumbscrew thickens, corpses bear, an epic wrenching ensues, baroque tercets
gigue on. Torch Song, or How O’Hara Finds So Much Time to Party makes me jealous: lack of children, convenient tragedy
of the gaiety. But the Fifty Second dive, unconsciousness, New York’s millennium marked—how to shake off slaughter’s
little s? Phrenetics in the forward pew chase Word to Web, that boyish, pettable feast whose peeves, small storms, rages
flame out, as painless papules, to a clear peace. Who knows—the acid bath, cathode slowly blowing its gold, may have been
to blame. Every raw solution merits a backup plan—an eyewash, a pull-cord shower, tree-friendly towelettes. Ajax.
Figure: shedding. No dispose-all. In the stuck sink of world woe, one false swig of lye performs wonders, gnaws open
pipes. A fiction: “She was a good girl, she fought me now and then I guess, but she was happy…” Words caustic, prophetic, in three
sleezy acts. What finds its way into his coffee negotiates a foreign body possessed of such strange constitutions
the green creased pathologist touching his bald spot can’t rightly say. My mother, Plathlike, copied for her husband. A fifties
thing—men couldn’t type. When they were positing, yes, but long before the twenty-seventh carbon revision for quick editorial
perusal, their fingers gave out. As the bird guide says: American Coot, VOICE—grating kuk notes. Like a duck—but not a real
duck. The Blackstone River trickles in dark beneath this city of lead where Mother makes stays and Father, ever the menial,
crimps barbs on wire. Deceit runs like this: how not to answer. How to get away with the unsporting yen to cut off a past
immemorial. That lurking dry-eyed ditch. Oblivion’s haha. Meanwhile jug band, hooch-fed, bonfires up a hobnail reel
and the brine slides by except this time Mother rides the anchor. That is to say, she is the blessed figurehead before the mast
breasting waves, and she is heavy, heavy—carved red tail, gilt-rubbed—peaked, furrowed, this ship dips low in the prow
and I mean low. Semaphore flaps an SOS. Jetsam water lilies all around, shirring toward us like an elastic
waist. Botanically speaking, Nymphaea. Cultivars, ‘General Pershing,’ ‘Afterglow.’ Lotus (pink-white-yellow) is Nelumbo
like a dictator or dance, the sound makes sense given these seeds’ repute: “The Land Of The Lotus Eaters.” Don’t miss out—
Hannibal’s vision: trunks, side to side; the pass at Mont Genèvre. Hammurabi’s vision: thou shalt put to death. Even the sots,
anklets jangling into the flesh-toned night, could appreciate that. Not a matter of some antics—all passages by rote,
not a question of interpretation. As with ants and jam, flight south or the plush worm’s inching, instinct is
the fiddle nature plays: its twisted food-chain, that obvious inbred coil of precedence, the soaked but hearty prix-fixe riot
of who sits where, down to the vinyl boot buttons. Cages fashion slow. We exit Gare du Nord, Paris wind and drizzle
sapping this, our last umbrella. Young men beckon. What to do? Music rises as a blossoming, floods our shoes.
By all standard indication, some time has come—yea, but which? Hindsight ripens now, coincident wisdom
the breakthrough cryptographer’s knack. A fingering—sleek key to the Enigma, forced satin, so dark a cheek, lush clue’s
night skin. If we could peel it, plumlike, trace the bloodless vein in that gold flesh—conviction, gratitude, healing might come
easier. How little space a breath takes up. How large a space, an ideal—which, as blanket-slapped smoke, cuts and bruises
sky’s plain vision, carves ellipses—loose, one-sided arguments for God. No pounding catalog native to numbness
—gray vellum, matte bite—can encompass all shade loves but seeks to hide, the flatness of solidity;
dimension, shaken from its shell; that dim space facing every wall. Strange, how a dappled corridor makes shift to crumb
like decadent fretwork, or like Will, in the aftermath of Inhibition. Barbarians trade the warp of battened enmity
for its slack weft—remuneration. Money, hospitality’s successor, ferries those split weights, glut and want
on its well-thumbed back. Empiric costs to the system—tagged finds, fishkill, crime patrol ponies, duplicity,
graphic emulsions—hinge on light spectra, derangements overhead: if infrared’s in the clear, does ultraviolet
fire as we thought, in short—where colors go at night upon annihilation. I do best at equinoxes, allow
for day and dark the same seesaw less treacherous if neither rider fakes the premature vault, the hashed plummet—
the whingeing board’s bad habit, self-deprecation. Our suitors beg forgiveness. Without additional protection they can’t follow.
Somewhere a reticent bridegroom buds: pride’s cutaway, gray silk cravat. Tall brides’ satin and flats. Joined at the hip. Oppos-
ition is balance, fibers pulling an arm or leg: some to fold the origami, some to unfold. Each hollow
action’s critical, the skill to build and destroy, a human obligation. How, minus ebb and flow, gross
perennial crushing/raising up, as Wake-robin stabs winter’s debris, might we not live? Fly strips post the only message:
don’t drop, dead. Or as it is said in the time of Idi Amin, don’t disappear. We forge coins for every purpose.
Four score and so on, after a rash of pasty witch hunts but before Dallas theaters rang out, our forefathers, hardly of age,
cast some sort of oat, clotting once and for all this nation’s waterways. Loosestrife. Pert catkins flinging seed. Murder
is like that—ferrets out the evil, back to watch the longhouse burn. Schloss Immendorf, 1945: much
of Gustav Klimt’s best work—the allegories “Philosophy” “Medicine” “Jurisprudence”— ascend. In a healthier
topography of leaving, there is galloping. And there is trusting the spavined horse to finesse carcass-grass and holes—
terrain, rain a liability after the smothering peat, midday cockcrow. Windrush—always the blazing hook to a severe
freedom, acreage past points of no return no perimeter keeps: to not go back. An axe hatches a bevy of poles.
Land slides. Sun sets again but different this time for the body’s umbering swathe unboning. Whisper that it is, the trail whips
shapes from the last exhale, afternoon blue—a bottle, inside out. Pale box, lowing. The Tuesday the ground bent the shovel,
there turned not to be any bread. I prayed for spongy fields, pulmonic wet-ripe sounds. Forgive me friend, for I have slept
here all my life. I have eaten at the table with the others. But now, dear soul, some strange change curls my hand. I have
mixed too many miles to keep. And so again, to the boats, as if the next chill fabric won’t soak through. Weep
these shallow fordings, hallowed by sameness. You of all people must know how little a nation feels its eyelids clam
shut, as fields, drought-listing, struggle to lie flat. When it comes to that—cruel wonder why we do this to ourselves:
saga of the circling sphere, rounds the cup two times, won’t drop in; last false start: goal, spare gutter fly, slap
easy shot; popped triple, knocked fence, Magic 8 in the can despite all that practice, wheels lodge against the night, half way up,
save us from the top, or it from us. These are the hills of the slit meat eaters but who’d be out in this? Days, sniveling, streak
the obvious. Is shelter ever more than an opportune leaf? This ribbed moment, inertia, a fallow space, dampens
foreign things—sounds, animal heavings narrow on fins of flight as the blood-warm panga’s honing, the bushbuck’s trail. Hygeia,
stoops, burns. Lethe boils over—splits her cup. The bilious snake cracks, slackens, peels. There is thunder, release:
all the bodies—young, old, Klimt ever painted curl into black, slake Salzburg, schmeck Berlin. This chic
sky one hundred ions thick fungates over Asia, America, Africa. And yet, just as one mercenary century
fails, Bushido kicks in—that Samurai sense, harmony, justice, contempt for one’s own death—such courage as may save
or damn. Summoning drums punch cobwebs of humility, broadcast order over sicky-sweet air. Honey,
the blood of ideas, oozes, looted. Nectar’s choice array, the six-edged Ikebana of bees, what you can and can’t say
in the end, satellites’ extrasensory buildup, a cursory art, relays coordinates—latitude, longitude—what best attracts
sharks: the acronymous manual, the little black box, Roberts’ rules of engagement, home index to the brave—
strong shocks a must—oh see where this goes, Sunday in the park, roundabout feet like a bird’s clutching the hyaline tracks
fortune slides on: willing boxcar, sleek and well-connected, seeks commodious shunt. Believe in any old thing you light on:
mechanisms, multicolored leaves that fail to shut, for these are longevity’s cauldrons, hipslung fires no axe
can whistle away. Einstein’s time rings serenity, comme-ci, comme-ça as our Samuel’s flat punctual gridiron—
dash dotdot dashdash dot—obliterates it. Wire news always signals the next court crunch— fresh backs challenge
unsaved arenas for a break. All this for rocket fuel. Fame lifts off like intergalactic war, all craters and spliced neon
shorting its dayglo path to immortality’s wing. Others sputter—buzzards, off key—dive bomb the snuffed Catherine
Wheel of infamy. We cry that sun after burning—moiré washes memory from the dying vat, strings out fast,
clear, the striped pillars of returning. Is it fate whose vision swells the drawstring pouch of mourning? Dim circles draw in
dust, I-beams fall. For sense of beauty, there is earth, doubt in vertical glide time. How gravity adores the crass
ballet. Bell-knell the world stage pulps; flung field mice tear away at dark. No one finds all those delicate slippers hidden like lies
in the permanent drift of the asphalt moor, chemeval stench nice for guttering letterhead. One nation braves the crazed glass
of sentiment, that blush river half-dressed as heaven and might. Slipped candles can but witness as the underbelly’s newsprung eyes
scoop limelight, spatter faceted fortunes’ cloying sting, reflection. How should we not have known our own yolk would split,
even in its seamlessness? Matched architecture, whose naked books strike air open as an ocean’s spine, divides—
a sere calligraphy too late for any seal not to cake like snow deadening the fresh-hatched beetle’s tread, the slight
spring gasp of forked tendrils combing, prying forth unbidden texts, obeying and portending the delicate knife
that sculpts our globe to exact tectonics, which, like jointed floors in subway cars, slow-smash together or apart and spirit
off islands—Madagascar, India—lift white knuckles—Urals, Himalayas. Confusion is what you make it, a trifle—
dry cake, booze, cream—a berry or two—slabbed in a bowl. On a larger scale al fresco, casualties included, this dense
concoction’s a Great Wall. And if it weren’t for planes... so many if’s in this world, our crude understanding cumbered by rife
disrespect for clarity, wordiness, dense spots. Where leopards lurk, dominoes’ chief effect, falling, makes some sense.
Did no one tell us misdivided wealth, faulty placement of all those dots, would hurl Humpty onto London Bridge,
roll poor Pussy, Ding Dong, down that well Orpheus played so tenderly, even the rocks responded with delight, quartz—
all rosy at the plinkety, genuine bauxite hickeys over its neck. But I digress. Exclusively. Get religion
—its priests, mullahs, beatitudes, copious books, hirsutisms, excess virgin trimmings and trappings—to implode
or try to. Dust prevails. Misinformation bars the door. Stove clock ticks the day or doesn’t—sullen, silent, digital
times like these, planets seem best. Spins, orbits, bulks so great, humans couldn’t stop them—well maybe, given the right payload.
Let me say this: bombs are so fine. There’s certain poetry in clearing it all up quick, one fast drop. Our sea is similar,
cheaper for basic scouring—beach rinse. Footprints, feathers, scales, crisp-dry jellyfish, sawteeth, stacked removable stones erode
under tide’s cold reach. And once home, what of the gangling larch, maiden gull too low into the blue flame of winter?
Sunscorched needles, rapid molt. Or, alone, the last caught apple—dull sway—frozen in—hoarse, shy stranger tolling
the tree’s terse web? Even the kamikaze oak—leaves trapezed miles from the mast, brazen in gales—after
slacker rigs, does lose it sail. Sometimes you have to try hard to stay offended. Packed, explanatory barges trawl
down, ripple gloom, poison all you know you know with wonder. “What’s that?” you say, another parcel wincing up at your lies.
Knowledge oils its joints with fat lardooned from history’s bones. No telling what freakish thing might elevator up from that howling
to rip all prior judgment from our minds. But I assume too much. More scenarios stretch and blink before the wise
east window, flick slivered egg from the checkered cloth, drag out drawing boards, paper, ink and careful of the morning’s
tea stain, write. Consider these, the simplest geniuses starting. Penning the first few lines. Crossing and dotting t’s and i’s. |
