After death, my father
practices meticulously
until the Bach is seamless,
spun glass in a dream,
you can no longer tell
where the modulations are,
or the pedal shifts
or the split fingerings...
if he rests
it’ s to wind the metronome
or sip his cup of ice...
We want to give ourselves away utterly
but afterwards we resent it, it is the same
with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly
under the dusty pines, their small chests swell
as they dispute a crumb, or the empty place
where a seed was once: this is our law too,
to peck and peck at the Self, to take turns
being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance,
then to hold the entire forest in one tilt
of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly
and fuck in midair, tumbling upward.
It ends badly, this glass of wine,
before you drink it
you have to drink a prior glass,
before you sip you gulp,
before you chug the bottle
you pour it down your throat,
before we lie together
naked, we divorce, before we rest
we grow old, it ends in chaos,
but it is delicious,
when we wake it is the past,
we are the faces staring
from the high lit window,
the unmet lovers, the rivals
who do not exist,
united in a radiance
that will not fade at dawn.
The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton’ s victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
everybody bad dreams. So we do need to solve
the problem of students reading difficult things
that will lead them astray: why did Rimbaud
turn from socialism to capitalism? As if
To be free of situations,
To live from day to day without events
You’ re gonna strike the match —
You’ re gonna strike it —
Flame the bank up into pods
of fire, be
a masterhand —
—
And someone said, Gasoline.
Someone said, We have to change the images
inside their heads, said
Gasoline?
And motor oil, he bought at a mini-mart.
—
You have installed a voice that can soothe you: agents
of the eaten flesh, every body
a cocoon of change —
Puparium. The garden
a birthing house, sarcophagidae —
And green was so dark in the night-garden, in the garden's
gourd of air —
green's epitome
of green's peace, the beautiful inhuman
leg-music, crickets'
thrum —
a pulse
A blast off the Atlantic
snaps a flag in the Firth
of Clyde, while thirty leagues
away, the same synoptic wind
surges across this hillside
honeycombed with mineshafts,
sounding the unstopped slots
of a "G" harmonica left
to dry on the kitchen sill.
Snow charges a sky
in which the sun swims
and glimmers like a groat,
a turbulent space where owls
On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I
propel a raft with plastic spoons
through the hissing fur of surf,
stirring as we go
an Alka-Seltzer sun.
We pass Bolinas-Stinson School,
the fire house, and Smiley's dive;
extinguished geodesic domes
along the mesa road
where Cream Saroyan lives.
Looking at Mapplethorpe’ s Polaroids, I learn that he
liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women,
both shaved and un’ — all giving a good whiff to the camera.
But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phones
which convey a palpable sense of expectancy as if
at any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude men
strewn about might call. One could pick up the receiver
and hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Roman
voices reveling in the background. But even when silent,
