Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright,
Taunter of the ultra right,
What blink of the Buddha’ s eye
Chose the day for you to die?
Queer pied piper, howling wild,
Mantra-minded flower child,
Queen of Maytime, misrule’ s lord
Bawling, Drop out! All aboard!
Finger-cymbaled, chanting Om,
Foe of fascist, bane of bomb,
Proper poets’ thorn-in-side,
Turner of a whole time’ s tide,
It appears that we’ re living (which isn’ t always the case), depending
on how one defines such things, in a “now you see it /
now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’ re working on our age,
as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can age
in whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’ t
get themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’ s right, and then we can all go
do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’ s either that,
or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s.
In my heart the old love
Struggled with the new,
It was ghostly waking
All night through.
Dear things, kind things
That my old love said,
Ranged themselves reproachfully
Round my bed.
In a culvert by the airport
under crumbling slag
wine colored water seeps
to this pool the two does
drink from: each sipping as
the other keeps look out.
The skyline is a blur
of barcode and microchip.
Even at home we hold
the narrowest purchase.
No arcs of tracer fire.
No caravans of fleeing
families. Only this
suspicion ripples
through our circles of lamp glow
(as you sweep the faint sweat
from your forehead and flip
another page in your novel)
Things are not
unmoving (or else what
is ing there for?)
The things once-living
fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye
that passes over them.
The wind wells up
to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,
take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —
every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Time paused, allowing time to be installed
Within that countless interim,
Coiled up, on hold,
A memory predicted and recalled.
Now, that weak muscle flexed,
All that contained him started to unfold
Because Yosemite’ s high altitude lake’ s
tadpoles wash up in
glow-in-the-dark condoms
and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because
there’ s bird shit
in the clouds. Things catch, get caught.
Things are consumed.
They told me there’ d be pain
so when I felt it,
sitting at my beat-up farm desk
that looks out glass doors
onto the browning garden — plain sparrows
bathing in the cube-shaped fountain
so violently they drain it,
the white-throats with their
wobbly two-note song
on the long way south still,
and our dogs
out like lights and almost
falling off their chairs
freed of the real-time for awhile
as time began for me
to swell, slow down, carry me out
of all this almost
to a where
After the cling of roots and then the “pock”
when they gave way
the recoil up the hand
was a small shock
of emptiness beginning to expand.
Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green
and spiked.
Like blissed-out childhood play
turned mean
they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.
Impossible to wield
The acreage of the fabric that unfolded,
Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field:
The distance from one Christmas to the next
When he was only seven
Was aching there; a foreign city flexed
Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven
About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded.
