“Painting a wave requires no system,”
The painter said, painting a wave.
“Systems may get you flotsam and jetsam,
Seaweed and so forth. But never a wave.”
There was a scroll or fine-lined curve
On the canvas first, and then what looked
Like hair flying or grayish nerves,
Which began to move as the painter worked.
“Painting the sea is a lot of trouble;
It never stops still for a moment, so
I try to make it internal, mental,
As though I stopped it, then let it go.”
Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
Before I was born, I saw a tissue of ingenious detours, an inextricable tangle
wreathed with mistake.
Perhaps the ghost does not limp away, but rather forests flee me, frightened.
Look, they are setting a place for loss, clearing the table for the first glow of
antiquity.
Here we see William T. Walters in his little library illuminated, carefully
smoothing the lip of the continent.
What form bounds forward from behind but The Atlantic Railroad Coastline Co.?
The whole Roman Empire was sold by ascending auction in 193 A. D.
Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carnage of battle, this is a "carrion creature," but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is "instructed," she is enchanted, rather.
There are fewer introductions
In plague years,
Hands held back, jocularity
No longer bellicose,
Even among men.
Breathing’ s generally wary,
Labored, as they say, when
The end is at hand.
But this is the everyday intake
Of the imperceptible life force,
Willed now, slow —
Well, just cautious
In inhabited air.
As for ongoing dialogue,
No longer an exuberant plosive
To make a point,
But a new squirreling of air space,
A new sense of boundary.
Genghis Khan said the hand
Perhaps the universe is an extinguished building
with blue banners strung along
and the forest, more like a commodity
bordering bushes and asphalt,
something else to string our blue banners on.
Never was restoration swifter:
the leafless trees, the asphalt
less splintered and more splendid.
Never was restoration swifter
with its mightier solutions,
less splintered and more splendid
snipers, dynamiters, colorful bombs.
If there is a word in the lexicon of love,
it will not declare itself.
The nature of words is to fail
men who fall in love with men.
It will not declare itself,
the perfect word. Boyfriend seems ridiculous:
men who fall in love with men
deserve something a bit more formal.
The perfect word? Boyfriend? Ridiculous.
But partner is... businesslike —
we deserve something a bit less formal,
much more in love with love.
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples
draw the young men's rooster eyes
where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,
breathing fire, holding for dear life.
Green almonds in their shells:
she knifes them open one at a time and
hands him a slick teardrop, cool white
tasting cool white. Nothing
Thanks for the violence. Thanks for Walt’ s rude muscle
pushing through the grass, for tiny Gulliver crushed
between the giant’ s breasts. Thanks for Moby’ s triangular hump
and Ahab’ s castrated leg. Thanks for the harpoons.
Thanks for this PBS history of the automatic pistol.
They love me so muchthey have imagined me dead because they fear the loss of my genius above all elseHow literarylike Huck FinnEveryone will be weeping
The Desultory Slut
Do you have one of my books to sign?
Oh nocan you please sign here?
Isn’ t it greatThe old bastard finally kicked
Ta daaa!
Wait, I’ m not dead at all. Here I am. It was all a mistake
Do you realize what this means? This means we’ re free
He’ s dead, he’ s dead. Our enemy is finally dead
