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.
Once upon a time
I caught a little rhyme
I set it on the floor
but it ran right out the door
I chased it on my bicycle
but it melted to an icicle
I scooped it up in my hat
but it turned into a cat
I caught it by the tail
but it stretched into a whale
I followed it in a boat
but it changed into a goat
When I fed it tin and paper
it became a tall skyscraper
Then it grew into a kite
and flew far out of sight...
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)
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?
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.
for my love, Charles (1938-2000)
Say: 言
In different cities, on different
forms of transportation, a woman read Daniel Deronda
until the year became the arbitrary pink
the calendar chose for the middle of winter.
And finally she sat in the reference section
of the public library finishing Daniel Deronda
for days at a slowing pace between pieces
of newspapers and foreign language newspapers
whose syntax she enjoyed, not understanding.
And when she didn't anymore she wrote in the margins
of Daniel Deronda for someone
who might never see. Thought of that person
November wind. The feeling of knowing
something before you said it, all over everything.
As in, shadow take me into the side of the mountain.
As in, open up the earth and get inside.
Leaving doesn't mean much. Arriving
means everything, how you came to be where you were,
even if later it will hurt to think of it.
And the forgotten, aren't they always
the most remembered elsewhere, before they perish,
when someone has their eye on them,
and later when the shrines are made
with local flowers and icons of heroes, roses
The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug
say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.
The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.
The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.
Here is the door he will paint on the rock.
Here is the glass floor of the cliff.
Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life.
There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.
She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.
She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.
The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to
become a kind of grammar.
She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as
they drowned.
