My Geographical Imagination

Melville took me to the water to show me.
He pointed to the horizon.
Do you see?
I told him I did not.

Another Machine To Praise

I might lie to you.
The way wood rots, growing darker
like a coastal edge receding
over the earth’s curve.
At this desk boredom is a fire.
I might light a wooden dog on fire to praise your
Beauty which is illegal in the country
Of my brain-pan where dictators
Follow easily each other
Soft and large and prone to sweats.
One pretended he was blind.
I might lie to you again, cleanly.
Or tongue the armor of a tank.
In either case, an incurious compass
That aligns the various fractures.
And if I lie to you what then, what tools
do we need to save the carousel, the hammered lion,
to feed him with our hands.
I might wish to hold you before the trumpets
And later the skyline.
I might lie to you about a childhood
When I drank from a creek
Because I was far from home.
It was hot and I liked it that way.

America's Favorite Hemorrhoid Cream

a

Swivel it my way
I mean coin
Or coins
Plural is genius my turnips
Gone to far away hills
Dirt on this here map you aren't
Saying it like they said it would be
I'm the disappoyted King of Malaria

b

No matter, cat
We dun brung groggy you home on a hand basket
You kin bite if you like
You kin bate in the lake
I don't care
We all friends here
Killers aint welcome

c

I warn't borne here but I learned
The language I learned the language
Of health and crime I learned
How to praise her pubic kite
You know the famous slogan
I wrote that one I wrote it:
America's Favorite Hemorrhoid Cream
That was me that done that
That totally owned it
Stone cold disowned it

another letter to M --

[circa 1959]


Dear M --

I saw Irving read in New York the other night, and I was disappointed there weren’t more people in the audience but Irving seemed relieved there were at least some in the audience. I went with Carolyn. He read from his new novel and he gave a good reading though I could tell at one point he wished he’d worn his sweat band as he was having trouble under the hot light. I believe his wife was with him. Before his reading Irving told me about the wonderful thrift shops in the Village, and that I didn’t know how good I had it – in terms of thrift shops. And then Harry showed up and he and Irving chatted. And then some woman who was very pleased with herself gave the introduction, I thought she was very enamored by the sound of her own voice. She seemed to go on a little too long, first talking about how she felt ‘betrayed’ or something like that when she learned Irving had written a memoir as she was such an admirer of his fiction. Then she proceeded to talk about Irving’s index card method,and how greatly she admired this method, and I thought but that is pure fiction, everyone knows it is, so what are you going on about. Irving looked as if he’d lost weight, he looked healthier certainly than the first time I saw him up close, which was on the plane back from Vermont as he headed to Minneapolis, we shared the flight to Detroit where we would then go our separate ways. Irving looked to be in considerable discomfort, flushed and his breathing slightly labored. But when I saw him last week he looked, as I said, so healthy. And in high spirits. People asked questions. He answered buoyantly. He laughed, was self-deprecating. He told how easy it was for him to give up characters once the book was over. During the writing of his book, however, he could think of nothing else but his characters. His immersion was that deep into their lives, their psyches. Another question was asked. He told how he hardly ever reads Nabokov anymore as he spent so much time on his work for many years, read all of it and at such a level of intense involvement, so that he now felt no need to return. He was pleased that Nabakov had gone on posthumously to have such a fine writing career. Everyone laughed at that. There were other questions. A tall man with a scraggly beard, long hair and floppy hat asked some stupid question that people ask when they simply want to hear their own voices: “What time of day do you prefer to compose sentences in?” Or something like that. I didn’t like him as I often see him around town, mostly in the Café House; he smells badly, and slurps his tea very loudly. He sprawls his long legs in a way that disgusts me. He isn’t good looking at all, though he has the arrogance of someone who is. I don’t remember exactly what he asked. I wish I did. No, no. I don’t. It wasn’t that bad a question because Irving gave a good answer and made it seem like the best kind of question someone might ask. You know the kind of wonderful grace that Irving can display, suddenly and unexpectedly; he is such a wonderful speaker. Then it was over and Carolyn bought a book for Irving to sign, I had my own copy of the book which he also signed. Irving said to Carolyn, “But you don’t have to buy a copy, James already bought one.” And Carolyn said to Irving, “I know. James doesn’t like to share his books”. Irving replied, “Really! So James doesn’t like to share books? I find that very interesting!” Carolyn: “No, no he doesn’t like to share his books.” Of course I am standing right there, “That isn't entirely fair." Carolyn says to Irving: “He has a lot of secrets like that.” Or something to that effect. Irving chuckled to himself as he wrote a very nice comment in Carolyn’s book. Then it was time to leave I asked where they might be going, and Irving invited us along but for some reason I thought he’d prefer to be alone with Harry and their guests. Now I wish I’d accepted the invitation. It was cold that night. Kind of gloomy. I hate leaving people behind. I hate not knowing what to do. The next day I was in the store and Alice came up to me and asked if Irving was disappointed with the poor turn-out. “No. I don’t think so. Maybe a little. Irving was happy for the chance to visit the city.” This seemed to confuse Alice, for some reason she thought Irving lived in the city and had a place in the country. Then Alice had to answer a telephone call. Conversation over.

I wish I had more to tell. But I live so quietly. Like a church mouse. Or a mole. However, this you might find of some interest, from a psychological perspective. I was in the backyard, doing yard work. There is always so much to do. I had been clearing brush, using a machete. I paused and saw something moving in the grass. I went up close. To inspect. Thinking it might be a snake or even a cat. It was only a mole. For no reason I kicked at it hard with the toe of my work boot. Just like that I killed it. Then I went back to chopping as if nothing had happened.

Someone should send me a big sack of money. I worry about money a lot these days. I worry about my teeth.

Best wishes,

J.

a remix e-book

http://www.featherproof.com/Mambo/downloads/ScrotalCashEbook.pdf

epigram

What changes singularly in the organization ... is the relationship between the voice and graphism: it is the despot who establishes the practice of writing (the most ancient authors saw this clearly); it is the imperial formation that makes graphism into a system of writing in the proper sense of the term. Legislation, bureaucracy, accounting, the collection of taxes, the State monopoly, imperial justice, the functionaries' activity, historiography: everything is written in the despot's procession.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ANTI-OEDPIPUS

(1972, tr. 1977)

for crows at daybreak

A new collection of my poetry titled

FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH TWO DOGS BLEEDING

is now available from:
Phrygian Press
58-09 205th Street
Bayside, NY 11364

The cost is $5.00 (U.S.)

Poem

‘The Shuttle of a Ripening Egg Combs the Warp of His Days’:
ON THE ENDNOTES GIVEN BY SAMUEL BECKETT
TO HIS POEM ‘WHOROSCOPE’ (1930)



I like these notes even though
they really do little to explain.
In fact, these notes read
as if they were lines
deleted from the poem itself.
'Saint Augustine has a revelation
in the shrubbery and reads St. Paul.'
Shrubbery being a word
the novelist Nicholson Baker
doesn’t like. And this one:
‘He proves God by exhaustion.’
Which is an interesting idea
and very interesting line.
And this final sadness
plainly stated and more sad
for being so plainly stated:
‘His daughter died of scarlet fever
at the age of six.’ Imagine that.
How terrible facts can be.

Festive

… jug, jug, jug …
John Skelton

What love is this drunk and misshapen and bullying, menace in
its loud visceral surge. I wish I’d enlisted as witness elsewhere.
So the hulking man tugs the co-ed by the waistband of her shorts,
and hangs her from his wrist like later meat. What love is this
in yellow and black uniform the bee-hive stirs. What love is this
that loiters on the hair-trigger and spits into the bull’s eye.
‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’ What love is this that forms
into three unsteady angels holding hands in jean-shorts
and halters, floating down the alley where dumpsters reek.
What love smoothes her skirt and skips and smoothes some
more her hands like sparrow wings upon her ass. What love is
this that needs the Black & White to ferry home at 3:36 on a
scalded afternoon in early fall. And where is home anyway
and why did you leave for this occasion taking with you
only the essential right to vomit in the square. What love is this
that seems to shade the lithe red-head as she is tentative in
passing and I am tentative on her behalf. I see her go alone.
Someone won one golden high-stakes game today. This great day.
Victorious were the good and glory their reward. So adjust
your figs, remove your shirt to put it on your nickel skull
and wobbly nab a smoke at curbside but know a detailed list
of casual harassments somewhere boils above the cost of every
glass you broke. What love is this, subterranean and thereby lost,
ugly shaved head looking in at all that loud aggressive joy,
that strains against its festive irons to be invited in.

letter to M --

August 27, 2009

Dear M--,

It has been raining these last two days, everywhere it is wet and there seems no place to go that is dry. Even what is dry in its bones is wet. I wanted to write you a letter for the longest time. Then I thought I’d save something special for you but that wasn’t working because nothing special seemed around. I went outside and picked up Biscuit and brought him in and said, “Such a handsome cat.” That was it. One day was like that and the next day, too. And then it was night so there. You can see I have my little boat in the pond but it is tied to the dock and anyone who rows it will stay in that place, close to shore, rocking uselessly against the rope. I told Nora I was going to write you a letter and she said she was jealous and I said you should write M--. Really, Nora asked. I said, yes, just don’t mention poetry. Nora said, that is good to know. After I felt badly because I thought, you don’t know that. You don’t know that M-- wouldn’t like to hear from Nora and moreover you don’t know she wouldn’t like to hear Nora talk about poetry, because after all Nora is a prose person and she is deeply intelligent and interesting and so might have fine things to say about poetry, plus she is Nora so M-- would like that right off the bat. I will write her and tell her she should write you and that anything I said about what should or should not be said should be discarded. I have a red history of saying things I shouldn’t have said. Oh well. Right this moment in the kitchen I am eating Swedish almond cookies that C-- made. They are very simple as the ingredients are simple: butter, one egg white, sugar, flour and almond extract. They are small round domes dusted with confectionery sugar. I made tea. It is quiet here. C-- is in the living room. J-- is up stairs. The cats are out for now. (They’ll be in soon.) The washing machine is churning quietly away. It would be nice if you were here. Drinking tea. Eating cookies. Well, it would be.


Next moment seemed
Remarkably like
The previous.


I was deeply touched you gave me erasures at the graduation, deeply. I think I love them, in my way, and after my own fashion, as much as any set of words I have ever seen. They are quiet and beautiful, and sad. Which is fitting. But wonderful for being all of those things. Notice I said, things. That is what I meant. For I feel qualities of life at times to be things, made, material. Anyway what question did I ask?

How deeply moved I was by the erased poem that in its entirety goes like this:

Our hearts were
Death-stones of the
Voice
Unborn.*

Those words found under what text I do not know, but those words suggest to me the voice of Paul Celan. I think about those death-stones when I read those words and I think I see them they are beautiful and sad and quiet. They might be stones on a beach or, more likely, in a creek.

I have saved everything you gave me. The cardboard, the envelope, the typewriter ribbon. All of it. I have saved it. It all seems special to me. All of it is the gift.

Some days I wake up and I want to say “Fuck poetry!” or “Poetry is bullshit! “ and think maybe we should just hand-write notes to one another and that would be all the ‘literature’ we need. ‘I saw a bird today.’ ‘Look behind you. Sunset.’ ‘Your shoelace is untied. Tie it, please. I don’t want you to trip.’ ‘Come to my house. We have almond cookies. They’re delicious.’ And so on. Maybe this would’t satisfy anyone but there are days when it would satisfy me. Maybe the notes could be in French. “Je suis … partout …’

Late at night I love to hear the sound of trains. In my boyhood I heard them all through the summer. My mother had a thing for open windows. There was a hand crank that opened the window in my room. I slept with my feet outside the covers. The breeze felt nice.

Here is a story I heard that instantly I thought you would love. Someone told me they saw all these dogs swimming in a pond together. One of the dogs was wearing a small life jacket. She didn’t understand. When the dogs came out of the water, she understood: the dog with the life jacket had only three legs.

True.

Three legs. The three legged dog is a marvel. She sprints in waltz time.

Poetry. Sometimes maybe it should be tossed in the river. Other times I think it would be best if we saved it and held it close and kept it in a quiet place.

I have hardly written anything though I find myself not at all concerned because while some people have told me about how they are rushing around trying to get their poems and manuscripts published I believe what will happen will happen in spite of our best intentions seldom because of. This might be delusion on my part, who knows. When it is fall there will come additional energies.

M-- I hope everything is going well for you. We – by that I mean C-- and I – might visit Vermont in the fall. We must wait, finances are terribly difficult these days. My job pays poorly and I have debts from dental work and automotive repairs that seem to cling forever to our poor factory of a household. Don’t worry though, somehow we’ll weather the storm.

Your friend,

J.

----------------------------------------------

* From an erasure sent to the author by Mary Ruefle.

NOTES ON

NORMANCE by LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
translated by Marlon Jones
(Dalkey Archive, 2009)

It is difficult to read Céline’s NORMANCE without feeling ill-effects from its catastrophic style. I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t admire the book, because I do and to a great extent; however, reading it was not always easy and I felt at certain points that I would not be able to finish it. The book is dedicated to both Gaston Gallimard – Celine’s long suffering publisher – and Pliny The Elder. It seemed a curious choice, including Pliny The Elder within the book’s dedicatory flourish, until one recalls that Pliny died near Mount Vesuvius and that he was there because he’d commanded ships to go to nearby towns to find survivors or, as another account would have it, to observe the spectacle of massive destruction the volcanic eruption wrought.

In NORMANCE, Celine describes his version of Vesuvius, of the man-made as opposed to the natural sort: namely, the bombing of Paris on the night and morning of April 21-22, 1944.

It is the saving grace of novels that a structure is erected in each case which is familiar, though not identical to what has gone before. These structures remind us that continuity in story telling is essential to the novel’s place in our imaginative landscapes. To read a book by Celine is to have all this familiar landscape razed, so that what confronts us is less the surrounding of what a novel might be but only its remnants, the parts that have been reduced to ash and skeletal debris. This is hyperbole, of course, and it is specific in that it is directed at Celine’s later works, the books he wrote after his appalling adventure writing the anti-Semitic books just prior to and during the Second World War. These books – the so-called ‘pamphlets’ -- represented Celine’s downfall into condemnation and misery. Which condemnation and misery he brought upon himself as a punishment deserved.

How does one read Celine’s later books? For they do seem unreadable at times, great vast lumbering weights that must be moved up mountains or deep down into cellars. Finding light sufficient by which to read them is always a problem. Breathing is difficult. I want to write about NORMANCE, published in 1954, a book that continues the story begun in the preceding novel FABLE FOR ANOTHER TIME (1954). (In French the two books are titled Féerie pour une autre fois I and Féerie pour une autre fois II: Normance). The two books come from the same epic cycle, as it were, though they do not need to be read in order for either to make sense to the reader, if making sense of what is read is what the reader of these books is finally after.

Celine is grotesque. His power in this novel is his inertia. The story goes nearly nowhere. Celine describes an attack on Paris, one night and into the following morning. He focuses on what he sees and hears, what happens in his immediate vicinity or the vicinity his visions travel in. We would do well to begin this discussion by wondering how he could write such a novel, a novel in which something seems to begin and then twenty pages, thirty pages, forty pages, fifty pages later the same thing seems still to be on the verge of beginning. Nothing has changed, though an exhaustion has entered the reader’s mind. For his part, Celine appears inexhaustible, able to continue pounding the same stake into the same spot of ground over and over. No writer in any language has Céline’s capacity for such relentless repetition. And while Celine has this power of inertia – some would deem it no power, merely a flaw -- nevertheless something is happening, he is a chronicler like Pliny The Elder was a chronicler, and so perhaps in spite of his own furious raging, a grotesque progress is made. Glacial progress, volcanic. The surging material that is a toxicity in progress, a slow strangulation.

Satire is literature at its meanest and Celine is frequently cruel in his writing; in being cruel he nevertheless is capable of making the reluctant reader laugh. Poison given the guise of an hilarious vernacular. Or the vicious face ready to explode suddenly seen as nothing more than an oval that is brightly ridiculous. The reader laughs against all determinations not to, at least this is my experience when reading Céline. For life is nearly always absurd in a Celine novel, and death is ever present, and both life and death meet in ways that dignifies no one: the great are just as prone to being humiliated by these polarities as are the poor and misbegotten. I have no idea how to convey the reason behind my laugher, because much of what one reads in a Céline novel is unreasonable. I simply assert this laughter happens and I can’t deny how his rage often leaves me feeling braced against the absurdities that seem our common lot. I’ve never survived a bombing, never walked streets strewn with dead, never stood my ground and expressed the most pernicious opinions … in my life I have been a hider, someone who flees, who fled. Perhaps that is the point at which Céline becomes familiar to me. Céline is fugitive, was a fugitive, both literally and figuratively.

We pick the story up, as Celine is picked up: “ Telling it all after the fact … easier said than done! … much easier! … After all, you can still hear the echo … baboom! … your head’s spinning … even seven years later … your neck … time’s nothing, memory’s what matters … that and watching the world burn …” [1]. An explosion has thrown Celine down the elevator shaft of the building where he lives with his wife, Lili, and cat, Bébert whose fame is legendary in 20th century literature. They gather him up like a bag of bones. We’re off. Céline is off: “ I’m telling you, they brought me back up! … I was telling you they carried me back like Marlborough … you know? When they put him in the ground? … me, I was in the air … with four … five knights and ladies in waiting … Lili told me … all seven flights! … I’d fallen down the elevator shaft, ‘cause the door was open … no! … further than that … I fell even further …” Our narrator is ruined right from the start. His novel begins in shambles because the narrator is in shambles and it continues through the violence that war is and it seems to go on interminably as the violence continues and after the violence there is only a momentary lull. We know it is momentary, because Céline – because the genus loci’s sputtering envoy -- is nearby.

***

[This is the introduction. I will post further versions until the essay is complete. Jon Cone.]

Found Poem

All

lack salt.
A small man take of half.
Bees in the warm sun.

Call Ward.

I dare not.
Pare a plum,
with care. Snare
hare. The flare
and glare scare.

Ask the lass for a glass.
Of milk? I guess so.
Graft the branch.

Chant for the grass
they dance on.

Did the ass pant
at his task.
I think it did.

***
Lines abstracted from the marvelous book WATSON'S COMPLETE SPELLER: ORAL AND WRITTEN/by J. Madison Watson, Author of the National and Independent Readers, Spellers and Primers; Hand-book of Gymnastics; Manual of Calisthenics; Tablets, etc. (New York: American Book Company, 1887).

Found Poem

Lead

the lean horse
to the sea.
He needs to eat.
Peat yields heat.

The dead cause deep grief.
Seek the thief.
My deaf friend and guest is
dead.

I had health
and wealth.
Death cut this thread of life.

Learn
to work. Earn
that rare urn.
Search the earth
and the world for her.

Burn burch wood.
A cur hurt a bird.
Worms turn and curl in the dirt.

Shy birds fly
high in the sky.
A dry sty.

At night a lynx
ran by our door.
Plow, toil.
Joy in soil.


***

See above note for information on WATSON'S COMPLETE SPELLER: ORAL AND WRITTEN/by J. Madison Watson (1887) for full bibliographical information.

Workshop Poems [Rejected]

1

I cross the river
because I
can't swim
dry-land
gravel.



2

What happy
ducks we
were, sitting
on a
plate.



3

Q: Why rain? Why
leaves? Why limestone?
Why wild
rose?

A: Fuck off.


4

Cataplux.
The name of a
cat
not yet arrived.

Enjoy.

Westgate

Yesterday I was like young.
It didn’t seem peculiar to anyone.
The ordinary is a blue cup leaking by a white plate.
It rains. I wander interstate
the inkless vein that fuels.
I think it would be nice to leave this room.

2

At night rain travels northward,
when I by darkness I do not own travel northward too.
Light ever magnifies
the list of days on which it snowed
and those on which it only rained.

3

Others huddle under covers in their beds,
because there is no hill to stand on.
Upturned palms staunch the rain
though seas flood toward the crowing cock:
a bastard I have known
who routinely killed the dreams I stroked
like the brutal farmer does his lovely horses in the field.

4

In darkness the eye is left to sense its limit.
Hands search walls to find a divot.
I pack my eyes
in chloroform beside my broken skis.
Laud bells announce the feast
to ring the skin off some immaculate beast.
It would have been nice to have wasted a life other than my own.

Barbarians

The clock I give you
with my blood inside. This clock

I leave at your door beneath
your pillow. In the forest
of hair in the castle of its
brush.

I guard that gate
they must always be absent from.

Or oar: from 'The Epics'

after Louis Zukofsky


OAR,
an equity --

and ore and orange
an inequity's also

Dear Critic,

I believe I could learn to love
this newest theory of yours --

if you could learn to tongue
these lines, your lips
smeared sloppily
with that gash-red lipstick I dream on --

a dirty open-mouthed kiss
that I would gently feed
myself into --

obdurating the irrelevant
meat of my art.

epigram

I always feel less anxious when I recognize that the collision is already well under way.

Joe Wenderoth, Letters To Wendy's (2000).

epigram

This is a poem about a horse that got tired.
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home.
I want you to go home.
This is a poem which tells the story,
which is the story.
I don't know.

from "Please" by Robert Creeley

epigram [from Susan Howe's THE BIRTH-MARK] followed by a comment of sorts

Ground and dont suffer your Cattle to tread upon it
and so poach and break the soil, and you will never
want any Dung.


Diary of John Adams, Tuesday, June 25, 1771


__________________________________



DUNG Hog Horses Oxen Cows
And Sheep


FOG


POACH



We knew their names once because we had spoke of
Them to our neighbor
And at market.

remnant memory

This remnant ark, this hollowed horse
where you hid to hear the owls and
squander blood in the begging bowl
of your hands, it is here you curse
with lightest breath, drift as eye-flicker
in tall grass by the creek with its moving shells,
it is here. Each torn day it is here,
you tick at it with fingers first dabbed
in stiff ink made by what you hold
in your palm, stain-wise. Ten thousand
light-years from now your mother scuttles
on her back to see what you saw:
a man in animal head, shaken, raw.

***

This is a revision of a poem that remains elusive. I doubt it is finished, or even barely begun. Something about an ancient rite is felt here. More than that I am unable to offer specifics. This will probably never appear in any collection, so I give it here a kind of burial.

the situation you find yourself in

Say you need something. Late at night you need something:
a box of band aids, a quart of milk, shaving cream, razor blades.
It doesn’t matter what. Just the fact of your need. So you drive
to the grocery store in a modest sized city. Anywhere.
You’re there at night getting whatever it is you need to get.
Life is settling in on you. Now you've got what it is you need,
now you're waiting in line. The cashier is doing her thing,
checking the items of the guy in front of you, she does it efficiently
enough. A little grimly you think to yourself. You hear a voice,
behind you, it takes a second for you to realize the voice
is pointed at you. “Excuse me, pal.” You turn around.
He stands looking directly at you. His face is narrow,
slightly worn. Well, he is slightly worn. Not too tall,
thin and used up. He stands there holding a large
pack of diapers. He says, “Do you mind if I cut in front?
I got a taxi waiting. I need to get out quick.” Before
you answer he's already moving in front of you.
You think, okay, the guy needs diapers, needs
to get them home quickly. You know what that is like,
how desperate it can get on the home front, maybe being
new to the job of raising a baby, how your life seems turned over,
how responsibility seems to pursue you, maybe how love
itself seems to have loosened its grip on you. And you step up
and find it in yourself to pay attention to what is needed,
what you need to do. If it means late-night runs to the grocery
store for diapers, then so be it. You do what is asked of you
by the situation you find yourself in. Well, this is what
you were thinking, standing in line, waiting to pay.
Then you snap out of it and focus on what is going on
directly before you. You see the guy arguing with the cashier.
You see her take the diapers and drop them behind her.
You see her turn to her register, you see her open the drawer,
reach in and pull out some bills and then some change.
She hands this to the guy, who licks his lips. He turns,
looks calmly at you with a smirk on his god damn face!
He leaves the store, nearly running to his waiting taxi.
And you realize no one in the history of the universe
has ever exchanged unused diapers for a cash refund
with a cab outside and meter running. Not ever. No one.
A different scene comes to mind. Somewhere a woman
paces the length of a shabby apartment. Cursing.
His name is Pitcairn. That gone, used-up guy. Pitcairn.

scrawled near base weeds behind the fast food joint

Her sacral saccade in
madding briefs and
aslant low hillocks of
her exfoliated shudder.

Oh her gesso
athwart
my looming
foci.

I admire her legs.

We flail
gladly, onto hunkered plains

fragments in search of a lecture: handout

The fear that a small wooden thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter where it hits the floor …

Rainer Marie Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

frg. 1: Fear
· Setting out

frg. 2: And then went down to the ship
· Ezra Pound. The Cantos. “I have tried to write Paradise …”

frg. 3: The Force Pump.
· I. A. Richards

frg. 4: The Window With Bars On It
· Childhood recollection
· Basement apartment, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

frg. 5: The Importance Of Learning How To Count
· One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Whereas prose is spatial, poetry is temporal. Ten. What the hell does that mean?

alt. frg. 5: Genetics And The Poetic Imagination
· Homer
· James Joyce

frg . 6: Speech Therapy
· My father’s stutter, stutter

frg. 7: Grocery Store Dictionary
· The process whereby a household dictionary is ‘convened’

frg. 8: Prodigious
· “Large in quantity or size”

frg. 9: The Knife Sharpener
· It was good to have sharp knives once again

frg. 10: X-Men
· Comics
· Superheroes in a beatnik café

frg.11: Tempus Fugit
· In which the audience is asked to imagine something, for a second or two

frg. 12: The History Of Canadian Blues
· An interlude musicale
· Richard Newell aka King Biscuit Boy

frg. 13: My Brother’s Transistor Radio
· Bob Dylan
· "Like a Rolling Stone"

frg. 14: High School Librarian
· Mr. N. R[..] C[......]

frg. 15: Hand-Written And Framed On The Wall
· Leonard Cohen
· "Go by brooks, love … "

frg. 16: Chagall
· Lawrence Ferlinghetti
· "Don’t let that horse/eat that violin … "

frg. 17: My Criminal Past
· Whereat the stolen property is displayed as proof of abject state

frg. 18: Mermaids
· ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot

frg. 19: Staring Out Windows
· University College reading lounge [University of Western Ontario]
· Winter is determined to be the better season

frg. 20: On Blind Poets
· John Milton, briefly

frg. 21: … That Lead To Other Thoughts That Lead To Their Unraveling …
· William Blake. "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright …"

frg. 22: How My Boots Got Dry
· W.B. Yeats
· ‘The Second Coming’

frg. 23: An Open Letter To The World
· My literary review. Mine, mine, mine!
· World Letter

frg. 24: My Flooded Basement
· My flooded basement

frg. 25: Not Enough ‘Poetry’ To Continue
· Wallace Stevens

frg. 26: What The Editor, Writer and ‘Infamous’ Workshop Leader G[........] L[...] Told Me
· In a letter
· G[........] to Jon
· Iowa
· Punishment

alt. frg.26 What Gertrude Stein Had To Say About Iowa
· You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and
you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa

frg. 27: The Transcendent Desk of Saint Thomas Aquinas
· My desk and one other

frg. 28: R[.............] J[..............]
· Iowa City, IA
· Drinking from plastic cups
· Montpelier, VT
· Riding bicycle home, neatly drunk and fearless


FIN

Was this a lecture? Was it useful? Like a hammer is useful? Like dental floss? You tell me.
I didn’t see Neruda in Paris, in 1957.
In 1957 I would have been two years old.
Well, okay then.
I was here, and so were you.

epigram

Each time we exert our will we are exhibiting hope inside emptiness.

Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress: meditations on word and life (2003).

allude to Shakespeare by 'using' a language

THAT IS ‘KIND OF LIKE’ ENGLISH BUT PLAINLY MORE STUPID



If a freaking yeti were to walk into the café where I brood
like a hammer in a sack I would be like all, ‘hey yeti, fuck off,
I hate you!’ and the yeti would be crying and shit and then
he would get up exit pursued by a bear and I would be like
laughing my ass off, then I would begin weeping myself etc.
but with serviette or some such paper product placed against
mine own ‘gorgeous’ face so as to kind of disguise my tears
as if such betrayed a weird tic or seizure or something.

fragment from a contest

[Translator’s note: My fear has stolen something from me. I am afraid of butcher’s aprons, cigarette lighters, dust, halos. I am afraid my mind went walking. I am afraid of hubcaps, burlap, pennies, dusty jawbones, metronomes. I am afraid of worms and pavement cracks. Anaphora is a form of fear and so: of moss and ivy, cornerstones, inscriptions, marginalia, graffiti, enclosures, broad sheets, variable spellings. I am afraid of yogurt, toy rocket ships, eye pencils, toothpicks, gusts, metallic, funnels. I am afraid of starts, coughs rolling down long dark hallways, the bells that always stop at seven, staplers, gods, hollow gods, stapled gods. I am afraid of tall men with one eye, ghostless dead, wooden dogs, the word ‘Peru’, men who do handstands for their children, microphones that smell of iodine, iron lungs, watercress, I am afraid of all that calls to me in this new world where language has been mugged, and kicked and punched, and skewered. I am afraid of chicken, turning on its spit. I am afraid, shivering, pullulating, obverting, reduced to pork, afraid. I am afraid of old keys, slippers, fruit flies, tennis balls, turnips, orange peel, lavender, forests, canoes, soprano saxophones, minnows, fishwives, wrist bands, bee hives, torture chambers, walnuts, chipmunks, bears, viral video, bare-knuckle fighting, assassins, marshmallows. I am afraid of tea stains, yellow teeth. I am afraid of the walrus if the walrus is Juan. I am afraid of mold, mildew, showers in basements, resumes. I am afraid of touching your wound, your monkey, your toothbrush, your ordnance, ordinals, ordination. Stairways that go nowhere and stairways that do. Rusted hulls, gulls, gall, gills, gaols, goals. The ribbed portion. The level reading. The heavy air. The humid light. The desk of the dead man, where he slumps at his desk, translating. The dialect of what matters most to those who live in now. The now. I am afraid of this moment, the next, the next. And binary code. And the plumber’s assistant of the strange milky left eye, wandering, appraising. I am afraid of diamonds, jewelers. I am afraid the arc of this hunched convulsive art, dream versus nightmare, locked, invertebrate. Your name, my name, her name, their names. I am afraid of poor typing, poor spelling. Ugly things. Beautiful things. Plastic spoons. Dental hygienists. I am afraid of argyle socks, pipes unattended, old studies, bookshelves, carbon dating, cross-eyed women doing the splits, shuffling psychos, absinthe, flying saucers, Bigfoot, bowling shoes, arcades, old unused diaries, panty lines, nuns, folding bicycles, wet towels thrown on the floors of change rooms, low tide, peanut brittle, middle-aged figure skaters, finger puppets, Punch and Judy, wires, dried turtles, physics equations, rinds, fingernail clippings. I am driven to a ‘kind of pseudo-afraid’ by bass clarinets, one armed drummers, death metal performance artists, videographers, sentence parsing, jelly fish, greens eggs and ham, the word ‘homoeroticism’, the word ‘plankton’, the word ‘watercress’, the word ‘plenitude’, the phrase ‘coming of age’, the word 'slack', the word ‘moist.’ I am made afraid, raised to a state of ‘fear fearing itself’, by barreling bison and erupting sausage. The Sieve of Eratosthenes. One or two or three or seventeen things. Of which I am afraid. I am even afraid of that of which I am not afraid. I am afraid of everything that is actual and everything that is not. Everything that might be but is not. Everything that will be but won’t. Everything and anything. Anything and nothing. Nothing and everything. All things that are, are light. And light makes me afraid. Omnia sunt, lux sunt.]

***

The above post was reposted by someone -- with minor alterations -- to a website with which I have no connection whatsoever. No permission was sought, nor was there any attribution. All my attempts to have my work removed from this website have thus far proved futile. Attempts to pursue this matter further have led to me to the point where a message reads: 'This user has decided to delete their account and the content is no longer available.'

fragment 27

HOW MY BOOTS GOT DRY

Winter. A sky brought low with cloud. I’m in the lounge, reading Yeats. Puzzling my way through the widening gyre and those falcons that cannot hear, wondering about ‘the center [that] cannot hold.’ I try to imagine his ‘rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem’ in monstrous terms: thick-limbed, carrying in one claw a hammer and bucket of blood in the other, and extending a killing horn back to the symmetrical tiger of Blake. It is the fearsome tiger in this comparison that seems truly loved.

My boots were often wet back then. By the time I was ready to leave they would be dry.

for it to make edge-wise in this living hatch

A DIFFERENCE THAT IS WORTHY


What skirrs beyond |an eye-globe pitched
To where is kept brim | from the ricked oak tree
And I am too much sold | for these loud brunts:
Any a gall-shod beast |and burst-lit seed extending

epigram

Yoursebl live on demigorgon offspring fearfnll love.

Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (1993).

***

The above is not a mistake, but surely one of the more surprising sentences in American literary criticism.

fragment 7

GROCERY STORE DICTIONARY

There were never many books in our house, when I was young. We weren’t that kind of family. The only dictionary I used through all the years I lived at home was one purchased in sections from a local grocery store. Every week a new section would be added to our shopping cart. As the weeks passed, the dictionary grew before me like some kind of weird alien sibling. It assumed its final form when my parents bought the red binder into which all sections were carefully placed. I have loved this dictionary for many years. It resides in my father’s house.

OLYMPIC TOOL & DIE CO. BY THE SEA

I didn’t fully understand what I’d been told,
but galloped ahead. The lash I understood
to be the first step, unleashing and re-threading
of a turbo-charged hand-scallop. Next I hauled
the lanyard about two feet. Gave an extra six
inches for safety’s sake. No sweat. I broke for
five the better to appreciate and review what I’d
accomplished so proceeding would be smooth.

Hephaestus gimped by. Bullshit, he spat.
You know it, I echoed. Away he humped as
I renewed my purchase of the task. The pintle
chain was tangled, so I untangled. Applied grease
to the sever horns. Used a winch to tighten the wing
leader up to about the head of the weighted grim.
Nicely done. Then Aphrodite sashayed by,
diaphanous Aphrodite from payroll. I paused
to admire her magnificence. Her liquid rolling hips.
I jerked myself back. Again to my blackened paws

I drifted, gripped the south yaw, wound it once twice
thrice about the stud pin, extracted its center gort,
which I half-noted was missing several punts and
heavily pitted. This is where things began to go south.

I don’t know why I figured a compass trout was plugged or
that I could re-route the trundle-set anyway. I pushed
at it hard, using my hips against its frontal globe.
Across the shop floor, reflected in the walk-in freezer door,
I could see it, the grind prop sheathing in then out,
far into the dock-niche. Suddenly in one long
loud unforgiving crack the whole thing shuddered
to a sickening end-stop. Silence like a flood. My heart
the single pump. Just then Hephaestus leered
around the corner. How he lived for
this kind of shit. Guys blowing it, fucking up.

All I could think to keep myself from losing it
was Aphrodite, transcendent Aphrodite,
acutely sweetly imperiled, while I balanced on a trireme’s
oar-lock tearing my coarse shirt, set to leap overboard
to save her from that vast tumult of wild dark water.

epigram

Truth is water. Attraction makes it open.

Fanny Howe, The Birth Mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (1993)

a poem to complete section 40 of W.S. Graham's 'Implements In Their Places'

YOU ball peen hammer ………………………
YOU toilet plunger ……………………………
YOU needle nose pliers…………………………
YOU hoe……………………………………

epigram

And then the storm of shit begins.

Roberto Bolano, By Night of Chile (2000, tr. 2003).

the cullings

From Reports of
The Princeton University
Expeditions
to Patagonia (1896-1899)



A creeping small,
glabrous with short
truncate
ligules.

Dorsally scabrous,
subapically awned,
the awn exceeding the flower.

Stems clustered from a running
rootstock.

Very closely imbricating,
distichous,
ovate,
more or less silky.

Obtuse, their margins, thin-purplish.

Cleft from the middle, moderately
bulbous-thickened at base.

Small, handsome.
Often curved,
leafless.

Floating, stemless, pubescent
with fibrous roots.

Dense tuft,
in simple and compound
umbels.

One third way leafy.

Having a straight cylindrical
calyx-tube.

Erect,
annual,
hairy,
FOOT LONG!

Flowers numerous, somewhat
salver-shaped and nutant,
and rather obscured.

The labellum, its rostrum
winged.
LABELLUM! ROSTRUM! WINGED!

Leaves and stems unknown,
yet common in mountains,
certain meadows.

Leaves all radical.
Nerves slightly
or not
projecting from the surface.

Fruit a drupe.

Dense bush,
with leafage of boxwood.

PENDULOUS & FIVE-TOOTHED!

At length distending
and rupturing
the calyx.

Placentae fleshy,
central.

Cosmopolitan,
8-12 ribbed,
yet abounding in the tropics of


Magellan, moist pastures of
Fuegia and Falklands,

Of North Patagonia, near the mouth
of Rio Negro,

At confluence of Rivers
Limay and Neuquen

– in the rainy zone as high as man –

By Hatcher at Coy Inlet,
Nov. 18th
year not noted.

nice going, august

I love the rain.
I hear someone speaking in Spanish.
Now they are laughing in Spanish.
Another woman is explaining
how to write a paragraph. This is crucial,
she says. This is crucial. Someone asks
How was your summer? Like those
clear moments when glass shatters.
We will never outlast them.

***

Tradational, Jon Cone. Arrangement, Mary Ruefle.

beauty? language? threshold?

This stuttering sky strung this day and hour
under which the world conducts itself, oblivion
to its what? Could you describe it? Would
that be meaning added to the world as is?
The iron gate at the park entrance sort of floats.
What color is it? What atomic weight? Where
the brave horses heroically still on hind legs?

Here the noisy avenue is muffled, a surf heard
in semi-swoon. What else? Maybe an idler
left behind catches a cyclist who seems a flash
of bloodied form hurtling through greenish cloud
set down beside the pond with its ordinary frogs.
So much is simple drift. The stone benches
for example are wonderful. But let’s be honest,
impossible to sleep on. Questions appall me.

staring out windows

My university years included many hours of sitting and reading poetry, and looking out windows. I was a tireless gazer out of windows. On campus there was a building called 'University College' -- ivy covered brick, long dim hallways down which a cough seemed to travel forever, and a student reading lounge that had a handful of very old, comfortable chairs placed haphazardly in front of floor to ceiling windows. What you saw out these windows was a slow stiff hill descending toward road and bridge. Dividing the hill in two neat sections was a paved walkway, maple and pine trees scattered on either side. In wintertime students could be seen struggling up the hill against cold winds, and falling snow. The view was cinematic, grainy, sad, the figures bundled in weak light nearly heroic. If the roads iced over, you'd see cars swerving and skidding in the distance like toys. Except for the clanging from ancient radiators and occasional whispered conversations between students, the room was perfectly silent. In summer windows were opened, and breezes would bring the aroma of cut grass. The winter was the better season in which to lose oneself for hours in this room.

epigram

The fear that a small wooden thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter where it hits the floor ...


Rainer Marie Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

notice

I have taken to posting my minima (poems & etc.)
at my other blog which I like to call:
'Cultural Criticism From The Grocery Department'. http://www.grocerydepartment.blogspot.com/

another house wherein stones are thrown

or on the verge of



Hid hard within the corn valve
we heard the heart surgeon huffing near,
we fanned low toward the pond then barn
and thru its door-yaw

into hay smell,
clambered up ladder to loft to look out
some small window.
The planks felt good to be on.

We can get im.
We each had rocks to throw at the heart surgeon.
Darcy had his sling shot, Arthur his bb gun.
Don't shoot him, Arthur. That's dumb.

But me and Darcy wanted Arthur to shoot
the heart surgeon with his gun.
We seen his shadow we seen his gait.
Loudly amid the noondday blaze

him treading our way. Whistling.
We hated that the most.
Sweat, straw and dust, beating in the blood.
Empires at stake and us just there.

epigram

... and I enjoyed myself and I took to gardening and it was a great pleasure I cut all the box hedges and we have a great many and I cleared the paths more or less well, the box hedges I did very well and then the weeds came up in the garden and we had corn the Kiddie who sends it to us says now we must not give it to any fascists but why not if the fascists like it, and we liked the fascists, so I said please send us unpolitical corn ...

Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937)

***

It saddened me considerably to encounter the above passage.

to eastern orchards go

S wift and sweet the

A pples

L ay

I n

E astern orchards

N ot

T his day some other yet to come

***

The word 'salient' being somewhat ungainly to my ears, yet hidden it seems not at all a bad word around which to bend a small verse in this obvious fashion. I profess my affection for orchards to be sincerely felt.

poem

Fuck the cowards with their flimsy guitars but
save the horses they ride on.

house arrest

Writ large your ravished inventories.
I don't even know your weight.
What took place, already forgotten.
You leave, close the door behind you.

In my tower all around the quaint debris
of my winter campaign, my summer,
under a fine hoary dust.

Anna Akhmatova, you and your death poems.
Everyone saying goodbye, even those who failed
to arrive.

Love is the integer, musk, heat.
I am learning Russian the better to take your pulse.
The better to record it in my blood.

andalusia

after Lorca

Don't bring oranges.

Bring feathers from

an iron palace.

Where bones of blood

stagger under a full moon,

forget your hunger.

Fetch straw from

the lung of your hollow purse,

where stones ring like bells.

Set out on your

broken horse

with its wings of cold fire,

and your mouth

seeking

cool green fruit.

Let there be no mention

of your orange

assassins.

letter to Artaud

Dear Artaud,

The sour battalion passed last night, scummed &

not a single rabid god in my throat, nowhere

in the Directionless I seesawed lights by the olde abandoned
truss factory.

Whereas one time I seen the Albino struggle
after the red steer at
Acme Demolition (established 1934),

while just the other side of chain-link the humpback
in retrofit
hawked root-beer and camel-skins.

Like wyrde.

And you, you lost your shark-teeth in and now huff
like a monumental lung-fish but torqued ajaw
way more than prolapsed, dude.

Corruption ratio is down.
Fever stock is up.
Ain't no way that be the Truth.

But it still is only $0.25 for lunch at Mike's:
tomato soup, egg salad sandwich,
one cold glass of fresh milk.

poem poems

no. 1


Your letter-bomb arrived.
The worm is a busy animal,
Heavily armed, like a Wal-Mart end-cap.


no. 2

Seven crows in a tree.
A dog nosing nearby.
Two cats on a porch.
I carry a pitchfork
For no apparent reason.

lines from a notebook written in a rented van at night during a thunderstorm in an Ontario provincial park

1

Whose bright idea was rain?
Who invented rain?

Please don't let me get sick.
Though I deserve it.
I won't get sick.

Thunder shakes the van.
My daughter asleep in her tent.
I can barely breathe.

Why won't the rain stop?
Why are you slamming the door?

Waiting for lightning to singe the page.
Lightning. Rain. Thunder.

A man can't sleep.

2

Mr. Nature slept all night in the van.
Now his neck hurts, he is slightly unhinged.
New Day! New Beginning!

3

"How did you sleep?"
"Not bad. And you?"

4

My hands tremble.

5

It is pleasure in the form of ordinary catastrophe.

6

One day you wake to find yourself
remade
into a new bent gull.

March meeting of the friends of E.D.

The strain -- the pain
Of pale souls who wear
Winding sheets of rain --
Bent under the turning year --

They have come so far
To hear her voice -- her Rose --
Balm upon her secret scar --
Warmed by all it knows --

Yet what comes forth --
Struggles! -- Grows! --
Till it -- is Final Strength
And we remain -- Echoes!


***

The above: an obvious homage.

hours

Eight hours of everything
in the world there is --

Four more hours ruined
by an additional bread.

Bread?
I meant to say dread.

this nothing bicycle

I got up. I said, hello. I said, What is this? I said, I'm hungry. Then it was time to go. I got on my blue bicycle. We're going now. And I was gone. Shooting down the long gravel drive by the silos by the creek by the barn on fire by the school that lay in ruins. I was happy to be riding in the new light. It was night. It was day. I hated to be going so soon on my blue bicycle which I hated and loved it was old and did not work. I grabbed the bicycle, throwing it onto my shoulder. It was nothing. I could have carried it all day. It was heavy. Where is my money? I had lots of money I was rich my father was rich though we were poor beyond my ability to admit how poor we were. I could not say anything to anyone how poor we were. The barns were on fire as I rode happily the gravel road. There was this place I would go to when I was lonely I would go there it didn't seem like much but it was special to me. Maybe it was the time of day that was it the time of day which was always late in the day early evening though there was no darkness on things yet there was light but it was going away. Everything seemed blessed by the light and the fact it was leaving everything. I thought I was a special person. I wasn't a special person. I had seizures. Pale skin. I had red hair and everyone thought I was wrong to have red hair but I had red hair. It was long and fell in waves. I thought I was someone else. I wanted to be someone else but I was only who I was and this made me sad. On my bicycle the world seemed endless to me though it wasn't endless it was only about four or five miles long. I would ride for an hour the time just when day truly ended and night truly began when I got home it would be still light but if I stood catching my breath at home once again it would be dark in minutes. I had everything this is what I would say to myself I have everything. But when you think this it is only the case that you have nothing or hardly anything. My return was perfectly timed. Every time I returned I returned at that moment when it wasn't light or dark it wasn't truly light or truly dark but was a moment of perfect balance between the two. I say it was close and sometimes closer than at other times but always it was perfect. Then I would put my bicycle away in the back yard and hitch it like a horse to a tree. I would hear doors slamming, a gun going off, a siren, a dog bark. Elements that leaned homeward.

epigram

Anyway one evening we were walking and a man came along and he said in a song as he was walking, Piss you dog piss against the side of a house in passing, if it was my house I would take a gun and shoot you, piss dog piss against the side of the house in passing, Piss he said piss against the lamp-post in passing, a poor street cleaner has to clean the lamp-post that you have pissed against in passing, Piss dog piss against the lamp-post in passing.

Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937).

poem

O hapless one! O storm tossed hiccup!

PALL MALL

I visit the gun shop
to look at death poems.

grocery list

1 take my knife 2 the sky seer 3 heaven forfending 4 i'll see you later 5 how old is this transmission 6 coconut water is awesome 7 dribble shot 8 her drear of rear ending 9 hallowed be thy name 10 an eleven second delaylay 11 i'm exhausted twoday 12 cut myself sheaving 13 this life of the gods isn't what people think it is 14 reading all those books why 15 veltflinger's syndrome is what you got 16 drive this car until summer then get another beaterupper 17 gardening tools all over 18 we're mowing to Portland 19 i saw a fox stolen morning 20 smoting here smoting there 21 Christ this smoting is everywhere 22 looking at animals in ice 23 what you got to understand see is understanding ain't what it cracked up to bee 24 crush-head his lungs 25 i never done went there before 26 i seen it once 27 i need more money to buy a moore 28 you think you got it bad talk to one who got it worse 29 for thine is the king-dome 30 this ain't so bad 31 kaput is a greet word 32 don't forget to go to the blank 33 what a weird occupence 34 he buys of lonely the finest raw materials 35 she is brilliantine 36 my dream of the northern flights 37 writing out thousands of tickets 38 i got caught bleeding 39 everything is fucked 40 a drunken rout 41 of words without porpoise 42 tall in her teal platforms 43 my hands slew 44 the wounds of his face 45 red ain't no color of hair for a man to have 46 pushing this tin dream around the junkyard all day 47 nope 48 i discover the body out back of the shed 49 could not touch my lips to the body at my feet 50 nothing but your garden variety miracle 51 officer i don't never seen this women before 52 tailored made 53 all of it made from blight on greening light 54 'concupiscent curds' 55 nice real mice 56 furthermore 57 i'll send it to you when i get back to the crematorium 58 what was the name of that movie 59 vamyres 60 how her backside peeled 61 gracefully uptight and sheer 62 stupid seizures why visit me 63 in the ditch in summertime 64 looking up her skort 65 sweeting nervous 66 through the walleye of the shadow of dearth 67 my novel on that syndrome of uncertain provenance 68 amazed by Artaud's toothless beauty 69 fragments arranged so as to tell the story of a life like a bag of tatters 70 his hatred of the 'thang' contemporaire 71 new snore and I look at it the world is like a rattle with nothing inside 72 my shores are all charred up 73 telling me i won't believe the heels you got 74 anthems for lost things 75 smashed in the face and hands 76 i never learned how to drive stick 77 the misterabilists 78 an obnubilated emblemtatic response 79 artichocke snatch 80 Belhaven ale 81 my list of things 82 my fear of never leaving the house 83 i feel like i could but who knows 84 trenchant bastard of the trench 85 fallen 86 Dante tours Las Vegas 87 green slowly opens 88 unto thy face 89 beauty razoring my stomach 90 my insides falling out 91 hysterical laughing of the dogs 92 i told you not to look 93 salt pillar 94 for now and 95 mineral is your calm 96 palms of cinder 97 call me 98 i've got a lot on my plate 99 knives for the cutter 100 deployed against but no further than

generous is the midwife of my days

Fetch in what falls.
Covet fat and sugared apple.
Strike the fair haired bag of wheat
paling beside the cloves.

Fetch it in the morn
to haul it hard till noon:
rut-eyed and hummock humped,
round bounty at the spine.

For those whose birth
is signaled by that sounding mark:
any a gall-shod beast
and burst-lit seed extending.

folk lore

Green the apple blaze
outside my remnant door.
I hold this and no more
in the eye like a kind of sea.

Green the going lung
that goes into the sea.
Green beyond the bell
that signals in the rain.

Three times it rings
in ears it brings
from across the bay
its green tonalities.

south of lower waking

It is a mystery to wake
transformed,
a grub
dividing an apple.

I'm beat. Daybreak
buoys the toxic.
Already this heat
opposes magnificence.

Why did we argue
our way all night
toward that cyst
of unwillingness

to let go, that
sac in a seed
of some lesser
climate, embracing.

excerpt from The Epics

Temming a winter mornin.
The collie coat upon my back.
Ice on pond. Mill still as stone.
The children teeming forth like froth.
Me and my gang. The steely sea. Forbidding
Spume skin on us all.
Boats moored and gently rocking by the dock.
Elsewhere were we.
On ice, on mill pond. The mill still as stone.
Saturday morn gathered near the ice.
Lacing skate and wrapping stick.
The preamble for the riot.
Sport and shoot, and sorry ankle.
For keeping on the goal.
Our shouts and thrusts.
Our hitting of the ice.
The light upon our heads.
The slip and fall, the crash and rise.
The puck like fish beneath our eye.
Go youngsters in delight.

They shoot, they score.
They sweat and swear like fathers on the shore.
Old drunken pukes appraising in the skein.
Sorry old fucks can never stand on ice again.
And maters come by with oranges and thermos.
Stop! Time!
We eat, we drink, we steam.

Once upon a time.
And hey did you lose a tooth?
Yeah. Fucking brother
punched it from my face when he played one
Saturday morn still pissed from night before.
I took him down, so he took me down,
in a rage him so much bigger and a fuck.

Ah, home, where family reigns your map.
Ice. On mill pond. A winter morn.
The sea in distance grey.
The ships all tied and true.
All go to watch the water rise, the water fall.

epigram

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronn
tonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohooho
ordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early
in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.

James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake (1939).

i'll be here for a while then i'll go away

Look at your cat
as he enters a room
with what punishing grace.
Give up your infected ambition.
The human is a mess.

sentence

He came to the realization, slowly earned, one gray morning, that he did not believe himself to be entitled to one instant of happiness; not that happiness could not or would not be experienced at some point in his life, but that it would be experienced illegitimately, would be stolen from some other worthier soul, and whatever this happiness might be it would also be the cause of a private agony because at its core it would be rotten.

admission of guilt

Unsure even of his own doubt.

a thunderhead of number

ooo54133335354335213187479915251635776571670000156002355553020008766990204200207880066254552408786268592005200502500006677562250222430505005250062022509908667673676533003506600653435200421100431442375256700733007034722055660806099566405600605060507000860066060444403053350144252255200052356000607470070470700808808080800546653530035005305303111022331401001050014110020041435145354004145050205205025060306356887540053432525505674770372307070500025020600705070400076060306040004444406060220034525345355646634663465778008050758580009699006000809005895756080508050040607764677668569654444776785858924523242544540606065470005507009065035060570700900440304065064300443455634345646007070080070700605345567570070000567515245454545154344341514553154992958577864295451975791225545248883939522454514148891414556561415678676794098757237666584821240967849302456454525276928676784892456265287562848658456824998667773298785628682659202989478566861286454638198378656652739119834664666475701088318641065147547164801836461408184616564164147776567561651017377374457337017327171223515647656611988876897136764156419686787548282920692767274020227685927206

epigram

Dear Sir -- I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who
you Are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate
or tell you of & why I am shut up I don't know I have nothing to
say so I conclude.

Yours respectfully

John Clare

***

Clare's letter above strikes me as one of the saddest declarations ever written by anyone anywhere.

a few last 'transductions'

1

VERSE

Your ectomplasmic
phonograph
ennobles us.

2

SLY

Tint of flange.
O seranade!

3

IDIOT ZEAL

The communist
enraged the bull-horn.
The psalmist
instigated the triathlon.
The smoker
maintained the round-house.
The seminarian
cleaned the small car.
The pharmacist
mortared the zap-cant.
The foot-soldier
made an idiot
out of thumb-smoke.

4

TRAINS

That vine mull in
the bowl. That mole
outside of granite.

Neither debt nor fort.

5

PEER

Blistering the main
without mother. No. Cheers
for my judo. O Canadian sue no
neural lake for clan
donned in fist leprosy.

6

BIFOCALS

Flexible pores that course.
No misery. Pain. From talons.
The miserabilists are a-comin.
Across the grass like
star football players.
Big names.
On Monday.

7

CORE

Fun dear. Smoke dear. Hung to dry,
man. Dented ray, Don. Air and
vents are real. If sugar fuses.
If tent irons and tubas
and trombone melodies.

8

SIERRA

Fusty against the form of
my calamity my blue saga.
Afternoons calcified like
membranes in my front.
Today. O annunciation!
For my floating birth
that teems gargantuan
and sends huzzahs
I study by [the light of]
poor sodas.

9

POOR END

I took what I slept what I
armor-plated what I lamed
what I bled what I tied
what I doubled what I saved
what I sickened what I stole
what I gave what I finished
what I gave where I

***
All nine above are 'transductions' of poems originally written in Spanish by John M. Bennett.

I like this version more

It is one day east of here for a fast lilac. Human is the the tempo.

sections numbered 30, 31, 32, 33

30
Water flows from the burnt stump. The red dog digs for the bone
in the jaw of the corn stalk. The carnival hauls its grotesque blaze.

The heavy monster lies down in the mud. In the graveyard
the stone angel waits with lidless eyes, believing in the invisible
tongues you ferry in your chest.

31
I believe in mid-western mysticism. Intention means nothing.
The turkey vulture doesn't try. Nor the horse in far field.

Mr. Pig wallowing doesn't try. Not one tries to eat magnificence.
But they do just the same.

32
Garrulous meat upon the salt table. Fried bread.
Our skates sharpened by madmen.

Bilious towels. Carnivorous mail. Obese pinwheels.
A sacred, ragged bus depot where our pilgrimage begins.

33
In Dodge City, Kansas I don't know anyone. I don't even
know who I am because I am waiting to be born.

I lost my birth certificate and can't travel
the full length of a bathtub. It is a small bird.

***
The above sections are from a long sequence titled 'The Practices'. Which itself belongs to a mansuscript of poems titled 'Family Portrait With Two Dogs Bleeding.'

4 more poems 'transduced'

1
HAVE BLANKS

Of near
lakes to go.
The bobcat
is white.



2
VOCALS

It is one day
east of here.
For a
fast lilac.

Human is
the tempo.


3
LOSE

Chap or chew.
Father nor
Mama. Claustrophobic
telephone of night.


4
RODENTS

I escape out the window, tumble
upon an 'ego' band of lamas, a
flowing egg invisible which makes
do [more or less] like an appearance
of rectal tin filled [to capacity]
with monster saints.

***

Once again these poems are based upon Spanish originals written by John M. Bennett.

3 poems 'transduced'

1
CAMEL

Mortal and
so pretty.
Poor talent
talk to her.
Is her camel
here?

2
O WHITE LIBEL

Too tart is
the tame world!
Murderess
of Minutes!

3
MAN

Of the world.
Neither mother
nor number.


***

The above poems are based upon Spanish originals written by John M. Bennett.

at skunk river

Because the stakes are so high,
this instant
is difficult.

Because my mouth.

It waits upon its own breath.
Across the sinew where night hides.

Whenever trespass begins.

Because the saying itself,
the saying.

At stake is at stake.

treatise on nickels

for Joel Lipman

How much money is that?

Add the prices to find out how much.

After leaving work quickly he permitted

himself to be soothed at

the Valentine Theater.

Toledo, Ohio.

Ticket no. 250377.

This was such a new and delicious existence.

On her first turn Ann jumped

the white light of the large reflectors.

***

The above was assembled from items I received in an envelope sent to me by Joel Lipman. Many years ago.

lyric from the grocery department

I'm sick of love
that is all fury and storm
and marrow
pushed
down aisle three
on a hand truck.

desk

This wooden plate upon which you hide to see
what needs seeing, where you get up early
to hear the owls, curse if you must but whisper
and shake vines with lightest breath,
go then to the creek with its moving shells,
drift as eye-flicker in tall grass. It is here.
Each day it is here, you will tick at it with
your fingers first, dab them in ink made by
what you have in your palm, stain-wise.
Ten thousand years from now your mother
scuttles above the mud to see what you saw:
a man in animal head-dress, shaken, raw.

***

This is a draft version of a poem about which I am completely unsure as to final form.

epigram

Sucking is dangerous.

Gertrude Stein, HOW TO WRITE (1931).

of his crown according

Hither the Moon, the Athenians
And their allies had suffered dreadful things
So that when they went out of an evening
The moonlight was beautiful
And the gods they were defrauded
Of their dinner and departed home
According to the number of tortures
For which reason Hyperbolus, having obtained
Hieromnemon, was afterward deprived
Of his crown according to the Moon

birth and other outmoded ideas

thinking of you thinking of you thinking of the color blue

***

small dog sprints big dog chases after
happy
alive

***

fly
hello

***

I walked seven miles yesterday saw turtle on trail
handled
gently

***
my hands look old now the rest of me I don't know
who am I kidding

***

that chipped cornerstone must have been a hammer

***
from the east wind brings coyote fur
horses breathe outside your
tent

***
burnt Sienna with its essential suggeston of folded me
in your pocket

***
next life I want to be an architect
whoosh!

***
I'll sell you my television for $200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. 000
my blood you can have
for free

***
if I could do it over again I would do it the same but with more fear

***

too easy too simple
yes

postcars (circa 1984)

But I want to trace myself

clear of the spots I have faced.

Clark Coolidge

a

Acquisition Junction, population 850

Black top and fresh lard

I point at them to know my disreputable standing

I don't know never did probably won't

That picture of God's electrifying finger

I'm too much here

At five feet eleven and one half

The spectacle from another style

You are soft as pillows

Down expecting my great distributed descent

O catch us at that fatal injection

For once they should have it fill

b

Trees glistening am up but not about

Am unstuck for breakfast time Warning

"Sorry I'm running late"

After temperature am breathing. Raining

The sound of raining its gentle hair

Your tresses. His water-form now net

I am estranged and forgetting

It is the murmuration of glove. Quiet

It is quiet. More quaint than silence

Raising cheers far stretched

c

Decide to reduce my mouth its wild running

Look and learn of process: look and --

Admired your upper cut, its confirming

Decide to misread a certain diary

Admire a surface tension

Your surface tension when you move, confusing

Substance that magnetizes my substance

Pulling and pulling me --

Damn the surcharge of things bought

At Acquisition Junction, pop. 850

d

Afternoon distilling funny tasting horizons

Everything slow and steady as she goes

Sailing off but cardboard scenery is shifted

We drink and eat and smoke

My stomach roils. My eyes give out

I am writing a letter to J.

He of the honorary degree

Your stereo in my brain

Lacks its needle in your absence

The beveled corners need some lick work

This is not it ... Come now

e

The seasons untied: "Groweth sed,

And bloweth med,

And springeth the wude nu ..."

And of the serene celebration

Sea-shells those scimitars of scintillation

Something for you something for me

Ich bin ycleped The-God-Of-Average-Nightmare

And you in the orange life jacket

Saving him on represented waking memory

For once you and I

Moving above the median rise

Never expecting a further falling down

***

The above is offered here as an example of arrested or 'late-onset' juvenalia; though it was indeed written in the mid-80s of the previous century.

fiction as an open letter

for Mohammed Mrabet and Paul Bowles

Amigo Mrabet,

You don't know me. That doesn't matter. Last night someone placed a dead dog on my door step. I do not know why they would do such a thing, why they would be so cruel. A man who would kill a dog for no reason but to answer to hatreds deep in his soul is a wasted man, a man gone wrong. The police came and banged on my door as I was getting ready to go to work. It was cold and black out. I had not even had a chance to drink my coffee. Come with us, the police said. All right, I'll come, let me get my shoes and coat. No shoes or coat, they said. All right, I said. The police are the same everywhere in the world. They took me to a gas station. Is this the man? No. Are you sure? I'm positive, he's not the man. Thank you, I said to the gas station attendant. I am an innocent man and whatever they say I've done you should know that I did not. I know, he said. You aren't the criminal. At the back of the gas station as I was being taken home, I saw the shape of a body beneath a white light. The body was covered in a white sheet, the edges of the sheet dark with blood. So, I thought to myself, they think I am a murderer now. What next? They left me at my door step. The dog was gone. It was nearly time for me to begin work. I would certainly be late. I started running. A man of forty-five running to work in the early hours. I am strong but my lungs are weak. When I got to work my boss called me into his office. Look, you're late, your getting old, I don't think you can do this work anymore. What, I said. Someone killed a dog and placed it on my doorstep. The police came and took me away and questioned me. There was a murder down at the gas station. I had nothing to do with any of these things and now that I am late you tell me I am too old. But I work hard and fast, as hard and fast as those other men who are much younger. They will tell you. They will say, he works hard don't fire him. My boss looked at me sadly, shaking his head. It isn't what you think. I'm going to have to fire you. All right, I said. I'm fired now. I'll just have to get another job. Good, he said. And take this with you. He reached under his desk and handed me a sack. In the sack was another dead dog. I took the dog with me into a field behind a dark building. It was nearly morning. I found a shovel and began to dig. I buried the dog. Then said a prayer for the poor dog and for all men. You say a man has no price, but there is a cost to being a man in this world. There are stones and there are the dead walking about with stones in their mouths. There are good men and women but one must spend one's life looking for them, in the unforgiving dark.

Adios.

epigram

It's a big ship and the water is on fire.

Tom Waits, David Letterman Show, 2002.

into what harbor

They shall sink.
Where they may.
Where they fall.
The ships.

a variant:

from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

They hit.

The flag pulls the wind.

Along the fence he moved.

In the grass they hid.

They hit some more.

Went to the flag.

It was red in the red wind.

By the fence they lost a penny.

Find the penny, someone said.

Find it or Ma get madder than heck.

You bein thirty-three year old,

Caint tie your own damn shoe.

They find the penny.

In the grass by the fence.

They hit. He hit. They hit.

Luster mean light.

field notes

1

High above the algae
that is clipped to stones
like glue,
I make the animal caw:
quick to the carried edge where water laps the egg.

2

Lizard why did you?
Why did you
snap your tail in two?
Be aware, silly slipper:
two boys stand ready to kill.

some few particulars

Of boy and rock and train and time
when you gripped a rock in hand as
you crouched for the train to pass.
Inert, held by the absent speech-
filled self on that tension drilling day.
Rock. Hand. Heat. Crow?
Ruins are made in revising.
And so being overfills its waiting
and whiteness of stone and whiteness
of flesh collide as that moment unfolds,
folds out toward you, rushing
the train toward you as you rise
into your tightly wound purpose:
one second of release into violence
to find a flooded emptiness
in an impress of rock.

epigram

It was as if we were the orgasm
of spiders fucking in dried human
blood.

Richard Brautigan, "The Red Chair"
from June 30th, June 30th (New York: Delta, 1978)

inland empire: being a review of a film by David Lynch wherein rabbits act on stage and a man appears with a light bulb in his mouth

You were something else and I wanted to crush my face. I could not stand the thought I would grow old. The old city was magical at night in snow. I walked to the bridge to look down in the dark water moving slowly beneath me. I could see the shapes of continents moving below.


South America.
Australia.
Europe.
Africa.


Certain pieces of ice had cracks like long meandering rivers. I went to a dark cafe. It was wonderful to hold a cup of warm coffee. In the corner a table of whores. I had seem them earlier under the street light.

A dog barked as I passed the Imperial Gardens. I was searching for spare change in my pockets, a few pennies to give the beggar.

"Do I know you?"

"My heart is an ailment once warmed."

"Of course. Why not? I'm sorry I'm broke tonight."

I recalled that earlier at work the papers on my desk were like alien transmissions in some complex, mathematical language.

Today's date. January 7th, 1904.

There was beauty in this language, but it was cold and lonely and moved toward you like a madman carrying a luminescent pine cone in his mouth.

Christ was a beggar in the darkness of some inland empire.

I only wanted to meet someone with whom I could share.

***

I hate winter. When will winter pass. These pages accumulating here are hideous. I have no interest in my novel anymore. I am coming to get you.

***

I hear sirens. I look out my window. On the street below, an ambulance. In the countryside there is quiet. I will go to the countryside in spring. You can come with me, if you want. I will bring blankets and a basket. We will eat by the river in the shade of the willow.

***

I saw a strange fish between the ice moving sluggishly beneath me as I stood on the bridge in the dark with my collar pulled high against the wind. Two anarchists walked behind me. I could hear their heavy breathing. They passed slowly.

***

The strange fish I mentioned. Perhaps I didn't see it. Perhaps it was only a shadow.

***

"When?"

"Maybe tomorrow. Who knows?"

"I cant' stand this waiting."

***

Nothing is moving. The cathedral doors are open and music pours onto the sidewalk. An organ recital. A drunk stops to piss, unsteady on his feet. His clothes are coarse and mud-spattered. The music is like some kind of divine apsiration. I pause to let it touch me. I would listen to this music forever, if I didn't feel so hungry.

Around the corner is a place I know. It's warm there, noisy. The food is good there and they ask nothing of you but your patronage.

I go.

monster picks up a tenor

Every true poet is a monster.

Tomaz Salamun

Monster out of work
nearly two years.
For twenty-five bucks
picks up a
battered Buescher
from a pawn shop
and begins to teach
himself how to play.
Scales and melodies
at daybreak,
screaming feedback
by nightfall.
He fixes
an old record
player so he can
jam with Coltrane.
For a change of
tempo gives up
drink. Says
to his cronies in
the busted
park Got my golden
horn to drink from, man.
And to any-
one who crosses
him Don't fuck
with me or my tenor!
Sweetest slice
in the world comes
from my horn. Goes
begging in bars
for the cost of a box
of reeds. Plays in an alley,
Believeth Me, If All Those
Endearing Young Charms.
Tone filled with spit
and righteous
vibrato. Later he
sleeps with his horn.
White genitals
cradled
in its bell.

epigram

So soon as the process of manufacture has been commenced by pulling off the wool, the pelt or skin when naked becomes a most perishable commodity.

[1790. Votes House of Commons of Irel. 26 Feb. 341. OED]

lions

Human breathing
and the moving of clouds.
Lions need feeding.
My mouth hurts.
I'll feed them.

bill of lading

You thrill to
certain civic codes
thumb-tacked
to motel doors.

Fire regulations.
Statements
of liability.

Ringing
cardboard
patents.

a metaphysical

Love interrogates
whatever annulments
you and I
over years of disagreement
have by appointment
come
to sign --

Love cancels
what nearly binds us,
and saves.

epigram

She hath chopped and changed it; yea she hath solde it.

[1549. Allen, Jude's Par. Rev. 29]

horse

The boys climbed the fence to watch her ride.
The wild-eyed stable hand beat the horse with chains.
We shook like husks in November fields.

site

Since I have come to hate Nature & its Poetry

Lynn Emanuel

A gill on

stone-ledge

fence and ivy converged

the limestone face

here drilled quiet

of a different order however I try

my language outside

these furious engines

I am outside what I know I want to say

and the Air is green

idea to improve morale and sales

I thought this a good idea so I got a pencil and paper and wrote it down on my break. Here is the idea: when it is summer and really hot why don't we set up a lemonade stand out front of the store and it would actually look like a real lemonade stand we used to set up when we were kids. The sign would be lettered by hand and maybe 'lemonade' would be spelled wrong or just with a backward 'E' or something. And the stand would be staffed by real kids. And we would train them so that when a customer asks for something, say, a lemonade, they'd respond by saying something like, Yo, Jack we're gonna fuck that shit up! And when the customer is surprised and says Excuse me, what did you just say? the kids would say You betcha as they carefully pour lemonade into a plastic cup. I think this is a good idea because it would get people thinking about lemonade and other things like that. They might even go home and think about how nice it was to buy lemonade in such a manner and maybe get an idea for starting up their own small business which might help the ailing economy and eventually lead to universal health care and an end to war and an end to our poisoning of the planet and all that shit.

epigram

The garden laid out in the old fashioned way of mince pies, arbours, and sugarloaf yews.

[1756, Mrs. Delany in Life & Corr. (1861) III. 435.] OED.

letter to a murderer

Drifting is difficult because

directly into the face of winds which feel polar,

coming at me from out of the north

where blood is a rare compass.

Driving country roads I pull

onto the gravel shoulders the better to admire barns,

but it is the fallen barns that present themselves
most powerfully to me.

Some quality they possess

in their disintegrating marrow.

Perhaps they conduct themselves out of love. Or lack of love.
Where seas go forth

we know intermittently. As light is in that plasma

of unborder where night ends

and day blah blah blahs.
Crossing these off my list

an actual list scrawled in
the last blank page of some cheap novel

or elsewhere

in the mind existing in the form of a sub-cellular map.
You mean almost nothing to me

in that way that nightmares
about my mouth filling suddenly with broken teeth do.
Here is your palm of cinder.

in praise of three-legged dogs

The three-legged dog is a marvel.
She sprints in waltz time.

thanksgiving

The bird is dead.

Children exchange
accusations like stones.

No one is a liar.
Everyone is a liar.

Dust stings
the war-torn country
of my family.

Its anthem a screech.

Flags clapping in the wind.

Cutlery desolate.

And my heart
is a dry well all the live long day.


***
Originally published in xtant 2, 2002.

throat clearance

Inside an inconvenient chair inside a mouth chewing a house
on this leaf-hewn strait I won't wake up outside without

astringent seeks a tongue

Land succumbed
neither pelt of Lambe nor case for Foxe
that all on Fish did feed like skinnes
of fattee sheepe
som do call hym
our Father or Carcase weighing sixteen stone

Out of inkt & downe narrow ale-wise
crawand cleir
mild the mid flowe where
argolbargoling we go obnubilated
by a fine rude
pig-hack

hinges

Once upon
a time

poetry told
us something.

It was a
map, an eyeglass.

2

The name
of the black cat

on the front
porch is Hydra.

Hydra is
the name of the

black cat on
the front porch.

***
This poem appeared originally in slightly different form in Scrivener Creative Review (no.29, 2005).

fragments in search of a lecture

Memory colludes. It poses mysteries in the wake of time passing. How do I remember what propelled me to this place, this hill, this place of starch and stagger, this College of Doubt? What encounters might lead anyone to pick up a pencil and decide to imagine a world bordered on all sides by the rib of language? I have no answers to offer, only discrete engagements with a list that includes shadow, a transistor radio, a little known Canadian writer, theft, a sump pump, windows at University Hall, a literary journal and similar nodes. I make no claims in this lecture, argue no position, reveal in the end nothing that is new or revelation, though some shimmering literary facts will be presented: 'In 1651 John Milton went blind.' If you know me, if you have read my poems, minimal and inclined to fragment and iteration, then this lecture will seem a simple and consistent exploration of what I have expressed in the past. I am trying to find my way to Vermont, all over again. I might play harmonica, I might not. Come, share my discomfort in public speaking.

***
In the summer of 2009 I will present a lecture that will, in its lineaments, engage what is hereby proposed.

to be read on the occassion of my coronation as king of all dogs

The cereal is gone from the box.
The box is seriously empty.
How is this possible?
In this day in this age?
For they would go to the ends of the earth to learn
no reason for an emptiness
as vast as the emptiness
in this box where cereal once settled.

golgotha

Know this: I've no love for mice, moles, voles, rats. Any of those. I mean more, in fact, by saying that: I mean, I hate them. I wish they would leave me alone. We have mice. Perfect. We have mice and three useless cats and I get up in the middle of the night to let the cats out, let the cats in, let the cats out again. We haven't had a good night's sleep in over three years. The plague arrived. It continues. I say 'we' meaning 'me.' It was a decision then, that one day I made, a declaration of sorts. To be rid of mice. To that end, I went to the hardware store. The store was supplied generously with various traps. I wasn't interested at all in the humanity of a gently dispersing intervention. I wanted them gone, with decisive permanence: a banishment into the white-ice of extinction. At least as far as my radius was concerned. I mean, my home. I bought twenty-five traps. The number excessive, I hoped, but still I thought better to err on the side of waste than meanness. It was thrilling in this way to determine the end of infestation. For I was made ill by scurrying at the edge of awareness. The sense that beings huddled behind my walls. I'd heard somewhere that mice carry diseases detrimental to the functioning of the lung, the human lung. You could say of me: I was a man afraid on certain levels of damnation. Back home I thought carefully over the proper arrangement: a constellation of wood and wire. There is an art to everything. Perfection is a form of terror. This was the first step in solving my dilemma. The setting. The setting of these. The setting of these traps.

***

This poem appeared originally in a slightly different form in Hayden's Ferry Review (42, 2008).

naming doesn't always work

जोनाथन पीटर कोने

in memoriam

Wrist of your wrist
Wrist of the blazing rain
Wrist of Neruda whom I saw in Paris in 1957
Wrist of the books boiled in snow
Wrist of the savage fence surrounding Madrid
Wrist of the raft and the stream and the elevated train in Chicago
Wrist of the whispered cue, the dark stage and naked actors
Wrist of the flake's unprintable agony
Wrist of the pretty ass, magnificent form, horse mane, lemonade stand
newspaper rack, long dark cafe
Wrist of tantra monta Tezcatlipoca
Wrist of the rain's pins
Wrist of the day's deep buckets
Wrist of cream and hump
Wrist of llamear
Wrist of tu pant, alone
Clank, clank
Clank, clank
Wrist of the gris-gris, crayon, republic, orange,

hogshead,

chopping block
sailor's burn
Wrist of the postal meter
Wrist of the virgin's neck, white thigh
Wrist of the fono frenetico
Wrist of the logo or real lago
Wrist of the leonino, tus listas
Wrist of the chain glazed, pintle chain,

knockabout chain, broken chain
Wrist of the cigarette
Wrist of the lamb's slit throat
Wrist of the loud sternum, hollow eye, human novel
Wrist of the big knockers
Wrist of the river and the stupid floaters
Wrist of earth, air, fire, water

***

The above appeared originally in the chapbook Elote King II by Leon Pinon (Luna Bisonte, 2003).

archilochos of johnson county

1
artillery 3,000 miles away
and nearby corn cribs,
busted

2
overgrown
lonely Bohemian graveyard

7
guy in feed cap on park bench
black angel at his feet
reads a paperback as if his life depends on it

11
thunderhead rolling in

12
turkey vultures

14
neither arrows nor bow
I only want to look anyway

15
a boy fiercely hits an apple tree
with a baseball bat
three years bearing
no fruit

19
silos

23
behind the walls
nothing moves, finally
the sour smell of rot

27
rain
sigin in a cornfield Repent thy time is nigh
winds

31
Held fast [.........]

33
harvest

34
I await
your letter like a joke
told in moonlight
and dew

37
cold as
war

42
[On the back
of a grocery receipt,
in shaky script]
dexiokratousa

44
a kiss
[.............] cult of
vinegar

45
sore,
thrillingly raw

49
at the dam
flashes of carp
in your dream
lines of trout

55
heavenly oatmeal

59
seed

60
mouth,
lips and teeth

67
on the playing field
a pathetic struggle
obvious losers, give it up!
your goose is cooked

67
crowded cafe
drinks, laughter
short skirts
white thighs

69
field kitchens
ax heads

72
here is our cistern

74
skillet on a nail

76
grit

77
earwig
silverfish
worm

79
knuckles
grease
canvas trap

80
outhouse fumes
clear the head

83
spring campaign

87
lies!

89
simple minded despot
bleating
about honor and courage
everywhere hues of shit

92
thistles
pumpkins [....................]
wild in the alley
behind the garage

94
once again I failed
to build
a writing shed

97
pestle and mortar
nerve tonic

98
whelps

104
waist-high grasses
bending

105
ditch weed

106
at last
quiet
asleep
in our
trench

114
bark peelings

123
under the shade of the weeping willow
in the river
a Frigidaire

127
the sinking porch
where everyone sat

129
savored dregs

132
sledge [..........................]
wrapped in burlap

133
one summer having nothing to do
you set a collapsing barn on fire
a rag and a whiskey bottle
your old man's dirty lighter

134
phlox

136
ausculated the track
by placing his ear down

137
gas station dinosaur

144
the attic
where you went

149
an inventory of
[............] days:
mannequin
chest of drawers
ewer
girdle
truss
horse glue
mason jars
[...............] and one apple crate
filled with
Classics Illustrated

151
over the far hill
you'll see it
you 'll know its name

153
my creel brims
blessed is the morn


***
The above appeared originally in 1913: a journal of forms, (issue 2, 2005).

crawls on paper screen to test the pen

Light at my desk
a hard excrescence, unduration or tumor
tending to ulceration.
I am a sit-fast.

2

With no place to warble it is a breach of warranty.
The hard incredulity that living is.
The first payment where
the heart is a great scab.

3

Restharrow and creeping crowfoot
of the krall where you
slaked your first thirst.

4

Ploughmen of like species of thistle
bound fast to
the sitfast held.

report to the nova express committee: current status of the artaud expedition

Dear Committee Members,

The number seven appeared to me last night in a dream. It was at first discrete, then transformed itself into the third and fourth beings, further clarified into the complex molecules of the second and first beings, as the third and fourth beings disintegrated finally into simple atoms surrounding the obscene mouth of the parasitic zero. The numbers were a premonition. A root struggled into my unconscious. A mechanical rabbit humped the root. The teeth of the rabbit contained funnels wherein eight aortal cavities lay. I could feel roaring blood beating in the aortal halls. I carried a stone in one hand, a bowl of tongues in the other. There were agonized filaments on the walls of the membranes that surrounded me. I knew without looking down at my feet that a soft calendar of flesh waited for me to fall into the slumber of an exhausted dog. I could feel fleas nearby, belting the ears of lilacs. Then I thought of my life, my family, my friends, my menial position as librarian at a provincial school, the small coffin of my apartment. My spine glowed with a bright infection. The bell of terrible metal rang from my throat, as I found myself standing upon a wasted summit. The river I had crossed to reach this summit now overflowed its banks and began teething upon the spur of a glacial jungle. In the sky, the sacrificial moon rose high and the forest writhed like a circle of rats in the ship's dank interior. I heard music, an angelic choir caught in the throes of slaughtering an innocent lamb. I wept as the lamb shifted its eyes under a cowl where blind hands crawled upward toward dominating violins and tyrannizing cellos. The map! I remembered that before my journey into the mountains I had been given a map by a local shaman. He had drawn the map out of his thin chest by making a single violent arm slash. I searched my pockets frantically for this map. Yes, yes! By the light of the river's edge, I held the map upward. It burst into flame. A virulent, cleansing flame. I saw then my path illuminated clearly, the route winding between amazing shapes and forms engaged in violent acrobatics. Men sprouted immense breasts. Women grew terrifying phalli, which they proceeded to suck hungrily deep into their throats. The night was thick and lay about like a funeral shroud. Then the music stopped, a silence rose like a cooling balm. The period of seven gave way to the era of eight and nine combined. Six stars fused to create a magnificent altar upon which the lamb lay in pieces. The fat ran in spitting streams down the altar toward the field where the corn waited the virgin's arrival. The blood steamed in a white cup. Exhausted I collapsed upon a wild grass. My eyes grew heavy. I slept. In the morning I walked ten miles to the nearest village. No one greeted me or looked me in the eye. I paid two pesos to a blind man, who told a young boy to take me to the city. Two days later I found myself in the Hotel Urania. I am writing this letter to you at a desk on a balcony overlooking a fountain. Last night, a whore was murdered in the hotel. This morning groups of men are gathered below, passionately discussing an important soccer match between the two great national teams. The tension is palpable. I fear riots are imminent. In five days I hope to return home. I feel an urgent need to discuss further, and in the greatest detail, what I saw and heard during my brief visit to the mountains.

I remain your humble servant.

***

The above appeared under the title 'Afterward' in the chapbook Elote King II by Leon Pinon (Luna Bisonte, 2003).