I was playing in the street
no one paid attention to me
as I made forms out of sand
mumbling Rimbaud under my breath
once an elderly gentleman overheard it
— little boy you are a poet
just now we are organizing
a grass-roots literary movement
he stroked my dirty head
gave me a large lollypop
and even bought clothes
in the protective coloring of youth
I didn’ t have such a splendid suit
since first communion
short trousers and a wide
sailor’ s collar
When the moon’ s worn scutcheon
touches the flint-gray flood,
I will lave him in foxglove
and vetch until the blood
of his wretched heart heals.
Without a scar, he stood —
as the men make their way
into the quaking wood.
capable of feeling
while in contact with another?
I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles
facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini’ s angel’ s
silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’ s white one
that’ s practically transparent in his
Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!
Then the bells start, flood the void.
But that dashing, dauntless, delphic, diehard, diabolic cracker likes his fiction turned with a certain elegance and wit; and that anti-anti-anti-slum-congestion clublady prefers romance;
Search through the mothballs, comb the lavender and lace;
Were her desires and struggles futile or did an innate fineness bring him at last to a prouder, richer peace in a world gone somehow mad?
Where analgesia may be found to ease the infinite, minute scars of the day;
What final interlude will result, picked bit by bit from the morning's hurry, the lunch-hour boredom, the fevers of the night;
Why this one is cherished by the gods, and that one not;
How to win, and win again, and again, staking wit alone against a sea of time;
Which man to trust and, once found, how far —
I sing of simple people and the hardier virtues, by Associated Stuffed Shirts & Company, Incorporated, 358 West 42d Street, New York, brochure enclosed
of Christ on the Cross, by a visitor to Calvary, first class
art deals with eternal, not current verities, revised from last week's Sunday supplement
guess what we mean, in The Literary System, and a thousand noble answers to a thousand empty questions, by a patriot who needs the dough.
is an opening, is all
we can see
of the long
strands that make
the pathways for
rays, bisecting
annular rings,
the most
vulnerable door
of what makes
the holiest of
things.
The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir
licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint
of hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust
sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back
to where it was. The whole room swells
with the scent of cinnamon & desire.
How imprecise the smell of desire.
The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss
the grain can live behind without worry
of being forgotten. A single knot blinks
out of the small block and becomes
Tennessee: We are here, between trees,
with the tempo of a rosary being strung
in a queue of escalating beads —
Carolina: It’ s not quite the count in
the countinghouse of my chest
but the heart does make an awful attempt
t: and a circle wherever it may be
there was music coming on
c: which though machinery-like
moves not in cogs, and never
springs, but waves through
t: like wired applause for antic backstage
buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it
fades
c: but only after the chorus has pulsed
This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.
