They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.
They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned
to call this a nature show.
Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for
the face.
Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed
meditation.
But the song was never familiar.
Because this was the only room this was the only room where we
Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,
These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,
Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,
Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’ s foot,
Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert
It’ s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind
Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel,
Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep
At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing
My fugues have no apparent relation to past trauma of any kind.
When it came time to rehearse we decided to get glamorous.
We get all done-up for rehearsal. Gradually, imperceptibly, things begin
slipping back into their normal place. My body is slowly rotating
into its proper north-south orientation. My playing is flawless
as it turns out. The audience goes nuts
but what was it all about?
Had I longer to see the aspects and facets of the family,
which as we know are not always tickety-boo but I have drifted away
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You must never go down to the end of the town,
Side by side through the streets at midnight,
Roaming together,
Through the tumultuous night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.
Roaming together under the gaslight,
Day’ s work over,
How the Spring calls to us, here in the city,
Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!
Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces,
Cleansing, entrancing,
After the heat and the fumes and the footlights,
Where you dance and I watch your dancing.
This is your foreign correspondent,
Aristotle, for The Poetics,
reporting live from the Mediterranean
where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians
crown the tradeships of His Majesty,
wave back and forth:
starfish — moons — Februaries.
To my right, our military advisor,
Hernando Cortez,
oversees operations at the Aztec/
Mexican border
where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water
a dove collects
its nest egg
upon the skeleton of a hummingbird.
my house’ s stairway is seized
with vertigo.
Matter having forsaken its laws,
we land in hell,
ascending to heaven.
*
Shadows move along ladders
under the silence of ordinary things
there is another silence:
it belongs neither to the leaves not to the
dead
In the dark irritation of the eyes there is a snake hiding
In the exhalations of Americans there is a crumbling empire
In the foul waters of the rivers there are Palestinians
OUT OUT of its borders pain has a leash on its neck
In the wheat stalks there are insects vaccinated against bread
In the Arabian boats there are sharks shaken with laughter
In the camel’ s belly there are blind highways
OUT OUT of TIME there is spring’ s shattered hope
In the deluge on our plains there are no rains but stones
We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
It was coming.
We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their
long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen.
Her head bangs against the window
and dash when I stop and turn,
my legs too short to work
the brakes.
Mama’ s crooked
brow, her makeup smearing away,
slurs something about good
ol’ boy music, a pint of Kentucky
Deluxe in her hand. Two hours,
she said, and three days later,
Tuesday, she is finally wanting
to stop. I am getting better
at the turns, guiding her
Cutlass through these hills,
ten miles an hour, gravel roads,
the Cutlass
