Free Verse

Tightened jaw, I did not love.
Flashback of myself  jerked about,
legs high above my head, men
laughing, I came to sea drifts,
movement and crashing. I found I am
not so far from God exploding.
Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live.
Seven storks still and white on a gold lake.
My lazy eye glances back to that original
split, myself  high above myself.
Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’ t know
hours from minutes. I was hypervigilant for
catastrophes. My head raging then numb.

The woman is daft.
Invented her own sect.
Has upside-down sex.
With alternate species.

You see her on the street.
Corner of   Sansome and Pine:
Morning rev up of sf financial types.
Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat.

Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle-
Snake. Smiles like she’ s got the shakes.
Every cell in her seems to vibrate.
Psst! Could you turn that to low?

Despite that you
wrote your name
and number
on its fuselage
in magic marker

neither your quiet
hours at the kitchen
table assembling
it with glue

nor your choice of
paint and lacquer

nor your seemingly
equally perfect
choice of a seemingly
breezeless day
for the launch of
your ambition

nor the thrill
of its swift ignition

nor the heights
it streaks

nor the dancing
way you chase
beneath its

dot

Lucretius grabbed my arm and led me
to the spot where he went nuts. I watered little
drums right away and entangled the Sava River
with knitting needles. I putrefied a small soup,
dismembered seven towels. There, He — The
Terrible — burnt on the stake, squatted, too.
My god, I beat him up his ass. Puff, puff, but
no one had heard a thing. Now here, I’ m flooded
with flowers by cumin. Even Tarkovsky appears.
Now I will suck you with my thumbs, mold
you like clay with my horns, till he’ d vaporize and

O little-know facts — how Robinson attracts them!

Pilgrims rocked ashore here, before Plymouth Rock.

The word scrimshaw is of unknown origin.

The stock name of the archaic two-lane main road? Route 6A. Really
it’ s Old King’ s Highway.

Some facts are useless: the paper bag was invented in Dennis.

Some facts are not: Wellfleet’ s town clock sings out ship’ s time.

19th century Americans observed only three holidays. The Fourth of
July was one.

O witty aperçus — how Robinson accrues them!

The mountain skies were clear
except for the umlaut of a cloud
over the village.
The little girl wore yellow gloves.
She looked in the peephole and saw
a stack of unused marionettes.
Yet, she wondered.

I

The teacher said inner truth
and the chalk said like a fresco inside the earth
that no one has ever seen
and one day decides to be discovered
and begins to breathe —
do you know what that means?

II

The child broke the chalk.
The mother said be strong.
The child said when I die I want to be a dwarf.

III

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach
Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all
And the air is emptied to an uplifting gassiness
That turns lungs to winter waterwings, buoying, and the bright white night
Freezes in sight a lapse of waves, balsamic, salty, unexpected:
Hours after swimming, sitting thinking biting at a hangnail
And the taste of the — to your eyes — invisible crystals irradiates the world

Silent, about-to-be-parted-from house.
Wood creaking, trying to sigh, impatient.
Clicking of squirrel-teeth in the attic.
Denuded beds, couches stripped of serapes.

Deep snow shall block all entrances
and oppress the roof and darken
the windows. O Lares,
don’ t leave.
The house yawns like a bear.
Guard its profound dreams for us,
that it return to us when we return.

November 1969