English Poems

Once, in the city of Kalamazoo,
The gods went walking, two and two,
With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion,
The speaking pony and singing lion.
For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart
Lived the girl with the innocent heart.

"There's machinery in the butterfly;
There's a mainspring to the bee;
There's hydraulics to a daisy,
And contraptions to a tree." If we could see the birdie
That makes the chirping sound
With x-ray, scientific eyes,
We could see the wheels go round."

And I hope all men
Who think like this
Will soon lie
Underground.

Quick passage into
memory and behind
only blank spaces,

blue stain on pink
litmus or merely
known so closely

something falls away
receding from touch,
caught in the air

your fingers move,
agile water-fly
padding the surface

Chile, 1834

1

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal
was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard,
he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave
unseen with Phil’ s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it
into the mounded deeps of the city dump.
Simply, there were things that Phil didn’ t want
to hurt his family with. Do you have yours?

Not knowing in what season this again
Not knowing when again the arms outyearning
Nor the flung smile in eyes not knowing when

Not sure beyond all doubt of full return
Not sure of time now nor the film’ s reversal
This all done opposite, the waif regathered

Like our lost parents in the blinded song
We bag in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through suburbs take our solitary way

So in Pieria, from the wedded bliss
Of Time and Memory, the Muses came
To be the means of rich oblivion,
And rest from cares. And when the Thunderer
Took heaven, then the Titans warred on him
For pity of mankind. But the great law,
Which is the law of music, not of bread,
Set Atlas for a pillar, manacled
His brother to the rocks of the Scythia,
And under Aetna fixed the furious Typhon.
So should thought rule, not force. And Amphion,
Pursuing justice, entered Thebes and slew

The soil I’ m walking over comes

from deeper: a fire had done it in,
a stewpot had suddenly popped
and its contents streamed
out wave over wave until
it reached the water, until the sea
called it a day and struck back

Two guys sucking each other in the steam room
didn’ t want anything
to do with me, evidently —
I left them to their comedy.

*

Legato longings:
wish for walnuts, wish for water,
wish to exorcise this morning’ s debauch —
two Fauré nocturnes.

*

In slow motion
Steve tussled with a motorcycle
trying to run me over
on the boulevard of moon smut