Friday, April 27, 2007

ashbery

A Christmas Garland
Poems of Joe Green and the Lonliest Ranger and Others
The Kid
Who's that big eared kid with Santy Claus?
It's enough to give a reindeer pause.
Santy says "Oh, holy crap.
Who's this big eared kid here on my lap?
That big eared kid gets really pissed.
Crosses Santy off his list.
No longer hears the angel's choiring
Or Jesu joy of man's desiring.
Face all scrunched up. How very dour!
At ten he's reading Schopenhauer.
Sleeps with a pistol 'neath his pillow.
I think it must be Don DeLillo.


A Lone Ranger Christmas

My personal space is being renovated
And Christmas is coming.
That beige suede couch had to go
And it will be a week before
Miss Alexa Hampton Papageorgiou
Stepdaughter to Count Mario Loreta Frusci di Bertinoro
(that horrible man) and Nathalie Farman-Farma
Will along with other
Young Friends to Save Venice
Arrive with my 18th Century Venetian
Toiletry case so how will everything be
Ready for the Mr. Jimmie Stewarts who
Every Christmas bringing along Mr. Danny Kaye
Who is a bore but is after all
Mr Danny Kaye? They expect tea and my conversation
(I never mention “It’s A Wonderful Life”)
On Christmas Eve and how will I then
In all good conscience the Mr. Jimmie Stewarts
And Mr Danny Kaye being as it were homeless
On the eve of the birth of the Christ Child
Proceed as is my wont to Harlem
Where a bevy of jazz combos
Of the good old sort play
Alluringly shining in the candlelit mirrors
As I sip brandy and recover
All lostnessesess.

There is a certain slant of snow
I can see from my analysts office
That promises that someone very like
Theda Bara will soon come into my life.

But stepping as it were BACK into
Cinderella’s coach, past midnight and
5 o'clock in the afternoon
in Warrensville I find fuck it
I am as it were (I wish) back in Warrensville.
Flush then out into the PA slush a man
In uniform with a job to do leaving merrily
The St. Regis a very nice hotel bar of “The Shining”
Sort and at least I ain’t at the Bongo yet
Like my friend John sitting there all his
One dollar bills on the bar showing he has
A right to stay. No, I ain’t doing so well
But at least I have a job and going down 2nd Ave.
Past the coalyard Christ does any other town
Still have a coal yard past the Polack kids
Sitting on their Flexible Flyers smoking Pall Malls
Past Giancola’s Barbers where for thirty years
He has had up a 1963 calendar showing a kid
Getting run over by someone very like
Hugh Beumont who is horrified that his 59
Buick hit this kid and he is drunk Don’t
Drive Drunk past Trionfetti’s bar same neon Martini
Glass winking green in the window. I’ll bet my
Grandmother wished she were still alive so
She could walk by me wishing she could just
Walk on by me never looking at me at all
Her loser Grandson so I stop in Trionfetti’s
For a little drink. 41 and back in town.
I’ll be late for work. This must be the
Very last J.C. Pennys and here I am my
Man Just give me the motherfuckng bell.


Quote:


There is a certain slant of snow
I can see from my analysts office
That promises that someone very like
Theda Bara will soon come into my life.



The Ballade of Theda Bara

The next time you slouch
on your analyst's couch
and stare out at the snow,
Just recall, since its only fall,
the year's got a way yet to go.
And by the time that the Christmas chimes
ring merrily in the air....Ahhhhh..
you'll know that in the Spring, your phone will ring
and twill be Theda Bara!

Chorus:

Oh, and in the Spring, his phone will ring
and 'twill be Theda Bara


Then you'll cuddle and smile
as you drift down the Nile
on a barge thats built for two.
As the pyramids pass, you'll tickle her ass
while she's ogling the crew.
But you won't mind, for her behind
is as firm as a sedan chair....ahhhh..
And you'll softly sing, "I bless the Spring
for twas then I met Theda Bara."

Chorus:

And he'll softly sing, "I bless the Spring
for twas then I met Theda Bara."

When your ship at last lands
on the dry desert sands
and the Summer sun is burning,
your Egyptian tryst will take a strange twist
and for your home you'll be yearning.
And the desert wind from Samarkind
will blow the sand like snow...ahhhh
And you'll recall, it was in the fall,
when you first you saw Theda Bara.

Chorus:

And he'll recall, twas in the fall,
when first he saw Theda Bara.


Kwanzaa Christmas Tango
If you’re rich, then everything’s easy
You just take a jaunt to Belize
And sit on the beach and dare eat that peach
And you hardly ever feel queasy.
If you’re poor, you ain’t in no trouble
If there is a stock market bubble
You fell quite rested with nothin’ invested
And when it breaks you get nothin’ in double.
But what can you do if you is a Christmas tree Jew
And it’s the third night of Kwanzaa
And you’re black and Catholic and Argentinean too?
You just sing like Mario Lanza
“O Solo mio
I love Dolores Del Rio
But my sheikhy dashiki’s on fire
And Bacall was so hot
In “To Have and Have Not”
And if you say not you’re a liar.”
And you is alone as you is writin’ this poem
Alas for the Jeunesse Doree
You is alone. Alone in your home
And there’s only one thing you can say:
“O Solo mio
I love Dolores Del Rio
But my sheikhy dashiki’s on fire
And Bacall was so hot
In “To Have and Have Not”
And if you say not you’re a liar.”


Auden at Christmas
W.H. Auden
Perhaps the plummest
Said “Of all major poets
Tennyson’s dumbest.”
It was so cold outside
But cozy within.
A nice place to abide
With bitters and gin.
It was the season of hope
Hence reassuring them
That it was a dope
Who wrote “In Memorium.”
But Auden wasn’t a dummy.
And it was Christmas eve.
Right then he felt plummy.
Very soon he would leave.


Auden at Christmas II
W.H. Auden
Very bad
Made a list:
“Boys had:
Botley
Smythe
Thomson
Herbert...”
But at sixty
He only had one
After sherbert.
Then some cigarettes
Several vodka martinis.
It was Christmas eve
For a bit he felt greenly.
Wrote several cruel verses.
Meant none of them meanly.
Then listened to funeral music from “Tristan.”
If there was any meaning,
It appears to have missed him.


Night of the Hunter
Let’s go, please” my poem said.
“C,mon.”
“You sure you’re not too old
for the Merry Go Round?” I asked

But I loved it and she knew.
And so we went and I watched her.
I should have known then:
The solemn look on her face as she rode.
It was the last time.
I watched it whirl..there she was..and there.

And now and then the white elephant.


Gone for a year and Halloween.
I thought I would see her tonight.
Running in the dark TOWARDS me.
The porch light is on.
No-one came.


And then I read about her!
She had changed her name to Delia
Lived with Mingus Colorados
And she played a fair Ophelia
In a forlorn summer playhouse
In some godforsaken town.
“Dooley, I think I can do Neil Simon
Now that I’ve got Shakespeare down.”

Delia’s gone. Oh, Delia’s gone.

A postcard.

“Dooley, Sourdough mountain is sooo beautiful.
There are seven or nine stars in the Pleiades!
I’m learning to play the autoharp!
Gary Snyder says to say Hi!"

A phone call.

“Where?”
New York, Dooley! I’m having dinner
At Sardis!
I know where the ducks go – just like Holden
I’m in love!
Do you know Frank O’Hara?”

Alone then for years
I saw the pictures and she looked the same:
The photogs with their Speed Graphic cameras
The men beside her.

Alone and then a call.
“I’m sorry. I’m downstairs can I please come up?”
“Yes!”

And she was there!
Older. I liked her hair
It must have been raining
And she
Was sobbing “Oh, the others… I didn’t..
I mean…”

And I looked at her… all she put me through
..all the others and we still had a chance
One good line. One good line!

And I looked at her
Afraid to touch her.

“Baby, I said. You don’t have to
say anything.

Baby, I don’t care!”


That was years ago.
And I am alone.
Now I can only write on trains.
Like the guy who wrote
“Night of the Hunter”
One fist said “Love”
The other said “Hate.”
“It’s not dark yet…”

Yeah, I know.


Argentinian Black Catholic Jew

I.


Cante

He was an Argentinean Black Catholic Jew
It’s too bad but I am one too.
How sadly I think of my father!

After Mass he would play
Hernando’s Hideaway
Then the Blues, then yell at my mother.

After Mass he would play
Hernando’s Hideaway
And bitch of the Schwartzes and Yentels.

Then damn the Ofays
And, in his own special way,
Evict some of the Yids from his rentals.

II. Cante Cante

Take a Jew. Take my father.


Born in the beginning of the 20th century –
that century of universal disaster.

Born in the USA to a family of neurotic vaudevillians:

African American Jews who disguised their Jewishness
and pretended to be an Argentinian family of tango dancers.

An African American Jew dancing the tango:
the one dance that, above all, speaks of fatality,
of destinies engulfed in pain. It is the dance of sorrow.

Then take this Jew (my poor Papa)
and arrange it so that he falls in love in Berlin
months before Hitler takes over …

Falls in love with that fatal woman: Ilsa.

The rest of the family flees while my Papa -- the fake gaucho -- is drawn inexorably into the darkest of the dark underworlds that existed in Berlin:
the Nosferatau: the secret society of decadents with their Vampire balls and Grand Guigonal orgies

and my father and Ilsa dancing El tango de la muerte there while Europe descended into madness and my father danced –

danced to the dark music of the bandoneon and the violin:

A long stillness as the watchers waited in the dark and my father and Ilsa waited frozen on the stage and then

the quick motion that begins the tango!

stillness…

and then the sudden violence –

the dynamic of a frozen world suddenly shattered,

the apotheosis of the twentieth century!


III. Cante Cante Cante

I stepped out into the night from the funeral home remembering
how horrible it must have been for my father
to pretend he was a Catholic.

This explained his strange melancholy
during my first holy communion and,
as I remembered more of the story he told me,
I thought back to those times when,
my mother gone to Novena,
how he would lock himself into the bedroom
and all we could would hear was "Hernando's Hideaway"
on the old record player and

the sounds of my father shuffling about,

breathing …


IV. Cante Cante Cante Cante

Ilsa said "I am IRA.
And I think I can get us away.
But you must be baptized
And then in disguise
We’ll go to the U S of A!"

They fled cross the dark Irish sea.
My mother was Ilsa you see
And they remained in good health
And Pope Pius the Twelfth
Cried fie and fiddle dee dee!

Then they came to these shores at last
But the fad for the tango had passed
What could a Jew do
So he did a soft shoe
Grateful that he wasn’t gassed.

He starred in some old minstrel show
Papa said he wanted to go
Mama said “You Black Jew
You’re working for two.

Dance – it’s all that you know."



A Christmas Story

When I was real little
My Dad would tuck me into bed.
“You get to sleep. You know Mr. Jackson is watching.”
Mr Jackson was our chief of police
Scrawny and sixty.
And I imagined him leaning a ladder
Up against my window and shining
His flashlight in to check to see
If I was asleep. “Night,” my Dad would say
And, as I remember it, pausing in
The dark hall way to light a cigarette Bogie style
And then his footsteps going away.
And then no more.
Later I remember going upstairs to bed
By myself. I put the light on
And read “Famous Monsters” a fan
Magazine for those who loved them all:
Frankenstein, Werewolf, Dracula.
And I believed I was right.
Dracula would kick all their asses.
But when I got the book from the library
I didn’t even make it to the village inn.
Too damn scared and even scared
With the book under my bed.

Yes, it was strange in the fifties.
Mr Frank Stefanik who worked in the mill
And lived behind us with his dog Oscar
Saw a flying saucer and it was in the papers.
A week late he fell off a crane. Dead.

Mars is calling. We all were waiting.

At school I had a friend Steve
Who they called “Sputnik”
Since he was smart and as ugly as Bob Dylan at sixty
When he was seven. And you could listen
To the real sputnik beeping on his stepfather’s
Shortwave and we deserved Rod Serling

Yes, he was inevitable. We had all of that
Under Cheyenne Mountain. Waiting.

Steve would come to school
With a big black eye and tell everyone
How he got beat up by black shapes
But we knew it was his stepfather.

And twenty years later I met him
In a bar and he told me
How he was just driving across a bridge
After his divorce coming back
From visiting his kids and pulled over
And just jumped in the river but
Then changed his mind …
And he laughed and we talked
About “Famous Monsters”. He still held out
For the Werewolf but there was
Something else and he did kill himself
Before the year was out.
And I’ll always remember how we
Both leaned on the bar after he told his story.
Waiting for something worse to happen.



Bell Book and Candle

I always liked Kim Novak
In “Bell Book and Candle”
Curled up on that couch
Which you would describe as
Immensely red but you are wrong
For the colors that show best by candlelight
Are (she tells you) white, carnation and
And a kind of sea water green
And Pyewacket that lucky cat
Curled up next to you green eyes
And a sardonic glance
And you reach for the silver cigarette lighter
Man, you are as shaky as Jimmy Stewart
And it is Christmas! Christmas!
And you know she is a witch and
You want to ask her
Why she well.. has a tree…Let the room
Abound in light especially
Colored and varied
Or something like that. Witch? Christmas?
And she gets up and is on
Tiptoes placing the ornament just so
(“oes and spangs as they are of no great cost”)
On the tree and she knows what you are
Looking at. She knows.

Christmas? But if you ask she’ll say
Something like “The best art is general”
Which, really, you haven’t heard before
And she turns and the doors to the balcony
Open and snow swirls you out and you
Are both on the balcony. Manhattan!
And you know that Gene Kelly is
There somewhere feeling just a bit blue
But will anyway dance his way into
Someone’s heart tonight and snow is
Steepling on the Chrysler Building and
There is giant impossible yellow moon
And she is there and you

Know this poem ain’t going to end the way
You want it to.

The Diamond at the End of Time

A la carrera on the run again and the Federales
On my tail and I don’t mean the Federales but
True hounds of Hell but I WAS in Mexico.
“Much madness is divinest sense” and it was
Me that said that though Shakespeare would never admit it
Following me around all the fucking time with his little notebook
And the Parker pen I gave him I mean he deserved it
Even though he took what the Hellhounds were after yeah
He had mojo and so there I was outside a little cantina
In Night of the Iguana country Senor Carrera to the Mexicans
And waiting..for what… but when you are looking
For the Diamond at the End of Time it might not matter
That Hellhounds are on your trail you are drunk again.
Rock Drill. It does not cohere. On the third lunation.


They keep watch on the hilltops.
The moon was big and yellow and bleary so I was
Feeling fine and it was Midsummer and I was thinking
About Shakespeare take and take motherfucker
And the moon was big and you think I’m running again
The Black Zorro and then the moon winks at you
And you are someplace else and that’s how it happens
Back in time or somewhen or somewhere. Man, I was
Just back from London 1590 or so I never checked
Exactly and it is so strange everyone you see there
On London bridge as you smell the stench everyone is dead
And you can’t get that experience except by going
To a Republican convention but the stench is from the river.

I never thought Death had undone so many.
Another fine line of mine stolen but here I was
A black man in a white hat with a white feather and a silver suit
But they never gave me a glance onliest thing wrong
Was my bootheels were too low They knew how to dress then
And there it was The Globe Theatre. Show out. Around Five o’clock
In the Afternoon as it always is at time like these
When you are flung backward in time and you know
The little guy with the devil beard the ink stained
Wretch squatting outside the theatre trying to write something
With a goddamn quill as the Producer screams at him and he
Acts like he’s someplace else his lips moving writing writing
Is the Bard himself. Mr William Shakespeare blotting
The Hell out of his lines and there is a tide in the affairs of men.

You got to catch it at the sticking point. It’s like this
And I explained it to Shakespeare after I helped him out
With what to do when the bad guys got the the drop
On the hero. You gotta have a distraction I told him
Christ don’t you know that and the bad guys look away
And the hero grabs the sword and it’s best if you have
A chandelier to swing from as he cries “Sa-thump whoreson
Hound taste cold steel!” and it’s in his plays someplace
So I went right up to him and took his hat.
He jumped up. Shakespeare my man I said. Give me back
My hat and I am not your man he said and then when he looked
At me cried Amoor and I gave him back his hat and smiled
And said Yeah Love gets you into trouble I know
You got Dark Lady problems. But I ain’t here for that!

Then I took out my Parker pen and said This is for you
Yeah it’s a pen try it and he did. Who are you he said
A free black man from the seacoast of Bohemia I told
Him and he didn’t blink geography not being his strong suit
We gotta talk let’s go man and he just nodded We’ll go to the Mermaid
You interest me strangely and I could tell it had happened to him
Before the deer stealing son of a bitch because he had
A little smile as he picked up his quill. You won’t be needing
That anymore I said. You got a Parker pen there with endless ink
So don’t try that shit on me what do you know about the Diamond.
“What Diamond he said. That would be the Diamond at the end of Time.
Rock drill he said. Is Immortal Diamond he said.
Brother I said. He smiled. I said. Let’s be off to the Mermaid!
Fine Canary wine and and the lascivious pleasings of a lute!

Milton stole that line. Shakespeare would have but he was sweating it
Like you do when you meet a free black man from the 20th century
Giving you a fine Parker pen with endless ink and some
Of your best lines. We got drunk first of course. Ben Jonson
Came in. What a damn bore but we didn’t pay him no attention.
Ok I said you always callin people whoresons in your plays, Bill
Why don’t you just say motherfucker means the same thing
And he laughed and wrote it down and he admitted yes
He knew about the diamond and then the shadows seem to
Get more like real fucking scary shadows when he said
Alright I know Ezra Pound sent you he promised to come back
I tried not to act scared. When was this I asked and where.
Hsein he said Nova Vita. The Commonwealth.
That far shore at the Third Lunation. What the fuck does that mean

I asked as I melted into the air.

Fool-begged, foolish-compounded, folly-fallen footlings foison plenty
Of flickering Flibbertigibbets, fluxive flouting-stock flewed as
Flax-wenches, fleering and flap-mouthed flirt gills and flesh mongers
Full-gorged yet frustrate. Pajocks and pantaloons you scream but
No one hears as you melt. The crystal fretting (CF) is fracted.
A certain ontological void is created.The exterior envelope is palpated to
Effect a hiatus in the lattice-work. Dehiscence or fission de facto
Of course always implicated and a liminal porosity but anticipated invagination of light
delayed And the Da of Sa and the
Non-place of Vorstellung
Temporarily inhibited by glissement all glockenspiel causing
The CF to groin glutted by vacuum awaiting glissando. You get pretty fucking tense
So no wonder all you want is a Margarita and then another
And then another as you find yourself of all the Gin joints in the world in a Mexican

Cantina where you have to take your tequila straight and
You know what you have what all hell wants which includes
Mr Ezra Pound so you are outside of that cantina and it happens
Again. We go all darkling. You step out into darkness.
If I didn’t want to die I wouldn’t have lived and you know you are there
The Commonwealth. The far shore of the third lunation so, of course
There are black riders. There’s just about anything in the Commonwealth
All Stories All sweet days. This is where you grew up if you
Were a certain kind of Kid so I knew where I was Midsummer Nights Dream
Woods Near Athens. Musick. Alone of us Ben Jonson said
Shakespeare would put an ass’s head in Fairyland. And my black ass
Was there. Hell as they say could be Ilion Rome or any other town and
Even the woods behind Athens where right then two goblins got me
Ofays with SS insignia dragging me to a Castle a bleak wind rising.

Ah, bitter chill it was. Across the drawbridge. Stone and cold moon. Gargoyles.
And then into a room a lofty chamber triple arched the window
Candlelight, torchlight and they threw me down before the throne. Snarl
Of silver trumpet. They killed Keats! But no I see it is the Bard himself
Two goblin fuckers holding him and before me on the throne and stepping down
Mr Ezra Pound himself. Ezra, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?
I say since it’s important to confuse the motherfucker and maintain a high
And haughty style for that’s the way it’s written. You ready to be put in a cage?
Where is it he says? I want it and I will have it. It does not cohere
Which last I attribute to him being confused that a proud black man
Would have the Mojo. Which I did have which is why the hounds of Hell
Etcetera. Now you have to keep one step ahead of these evildoers so I
Took it out. You looking for this and I laughed to see him. Here’s the Mojo.
Here’s what you lookin for. Fix your poetry right up. Here it is.

Satchel pitching in Ponce de Leon Park against the Birmingham Black Barons
Threw the ball so motherfucking fast that it disappeared. And here it is Pound
But you don’t know nothing about it. Here’s the ball. Here’s the Mojo you want
But you don’t know nothin about it, do you? And Pound jumped back.
And the Nazi goblins jumped back. Whoa! Yes. Here it is and he couldn’t say nothing
But you know it is what it is when you see it. And Shakespeare was getting off of the floor as I told them all and threw the disappeared Satchel Paige ball up just a little
Smiling at them like the devil smiles looking Pound right in the eye thinking get
Up get up Shakespeare. Hsien. Rock Drill! You reading Frobenius, Benton, Del Mar
Aggassiz, Fenelolla knowing nothin about Ruth, Cool Papa Bell, The Splendid Splinter
Or the little guy sweating each pitch against class D minor league semi-pros, thinking
St. Louis Stars, Detroit Wolves, Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, Pittsburgh Crawfords

Memphis Red Sox, Chicago American Giants, Kansas City Stars, Detroit Senators
Get up Shakespeare . Grover Cleveland Alexander sick and dying at Beaubier's Hotel
Get up your deer stealing fuck . All over all over. You never even went to a Yankees Game and you want the mojo? Here take it and I wound up and threw the ball at Pound
Ran at the goblins, faked, got their swords flipped one to the Swan Of Avon sword glittering in the torchlight cried I was born to this motherfuckers and of course
The torches guttered up with a goblin flame a hot wind from Hell blew into the chamber
And who should leap out from behind the arras but more coldly grinning Nazi shitheels
Saw Shakespeare cut down two of them howling Angels and Ministers of Grace defend Us! Ha Ha I laughed We gotta do it ourselves and the disappeared ball of course back
In my pocket mojo working Shakespeare and I back to back grinning as darkness surrounds us and what should we do against it but leap on the chandelier swing to the
Tower winding stairs kicking Pound on the head rush like happy ghosts up the dark
Stairs making it to the great door and shutting it just in time. All Hell pounding.

Remember this when you write Macbeth I panted. Knock Knock Knock on the gate
A great effect no don’t try to write it down and we were on the ramparts Hell’s Agents
Pounding at the door. That fuckers gonna break I warned him. The clouds blowing Across the moon darkness surrounds us and then I saw it the star the greeny star
Winking in the west low there right over the trees. I pointed to it as the door began breaking We can’t hold em off Shakespeare screamed. I looked round the ramparts Hey a Great place for some Prince’s fathers ghost to walk o nights I told him just trying to calm Him down . Look at that star. That greeny star. We going there. He was too scared. Look up I shouted at him for the wind was blowing now and shadows comin down From the moon. We’re gonna go there and my mojo will get us there. What the fuck are you talking about you crazy black bastard he screamed. I grabbed him took him to the edge of the ramparts 300 feet up and they had broken through the door. Jump I screamed Jump like Butch and Sundance! Whooped grabbed the Bard and we jumped into the dark!

All the Federales say, they could of had him any day.
They only let him slip away, out of kindness I suppose. I’m Pancho
I shouted and you my man are Lefty cause we floated away into that
Dark me waving at the goblins floating towards that greeny star
And I got the ball and threw it right up whoosh felt a little sick and
We were there I looked down the green diamond and of course
Remembering how I first walked into Connie Mack stadium with my Daddy
Seeing the diamond green and eternal always remember my Daddy said
We were at The Diamond at the End of Time! I knew right away.
We stood there in the stands. The Diamond at the End of Time shone below us. It was The fifth inning of the 1932 World Series. Number 3, Babe Ruth, was at bat. Charlie Root was pitching. The Babe pointed to center field. I shouted
That's the Babe and that's the Called Shot. Watch! And we watched as Root
hurled the fastball that Ruth hit high high and out of here to forever!.

The Called Shot -- the immortal moment of baseball. The Diamond at the End of Time.
We were alone in the stands except for a hunched seated figure not far way in a tan Raincoat I recognized him at once. It was God. He was God That’s God I told the
Bard Oh, shit the Bard said Its true. God's a Yankee fan. How the hell did he
Know about baseball The Babe headed for home and there was Lou Gehrig ready to shake his hand. The Iron Horse! Man this is great. I said Cool Papa Bell did that kind Of shit all the time. You never hear about it though. And Gehrig is at bat and hits another Home run! The thunder after the lightning! Then it happened all over again. Again the Babe raised his hand indicating strike two and again he stood out of the batter's box and Pointed a finger at center field and hit a tremendous smash 436 feet over the fence and Into a ticket booth at Waveland and Sheffield Avenues and again he rounded the field Holding up four fingers now and the Iron Horse was up to bat and again smashed the ball into Eternity. And then it all happened again What's s the matter with God I asked
And I knew God is trapped watching beauty over and over and over. It was 1932.

Goddamn it I shouted He’s watching while the Nazis are taken over. Again
It happened. God stood up and looked over at us. He looked sad standing there Surrounded by empty Beer bottles. We went over. Me and Shakespeare.
He looked at me. Gimme the ball he said so I flipped it to him
He flipped it back to Shakespeare standing there grinning with his little devil beard.
God gave me a box of crackerjacks. Nice to have met you Dooley Shakespeare said
Tossed the ball up caught it and disappeared I really didn’t say everything I said
God said and later I remembered Yogi Berra had said that and the next thing
I knew I was outside of Wrigley Field It was 1932. Chicago.
God was not watching here. Hitler and all that and me just standing.
It, of course began to rain.
And I knew why I was the Black Lone Ranger.
Knew again why I was the Black Lone Ranger.
God gone. The Nazis closing in. And the white man had my mojo.

Finis.



When You Got a Friend
When you got a friend
Who can give you a ride
From the AA meeting
Where you fascinate
Both of you
The sadder drunks
To the Gamblers Anonymous Meeting
Where you both testify
With no little panache
Then you got a friend for life.
And if one day you both
Find yourself in a rather stylish tavern
John pulling out all his ones
Putting them on the bar
Explaining to the bartender
That he’s doing it because
He is an Irish Negro and wants to
Show he has money
And so has every right
Both of you agreed just a few
Drinks before you go to Delaware Park
Yippie! Promising only a few bets
At the two dollar window which you
Do once but then move on up
Both hitting the Trifecta
And end up giggling you two
Standing pissing in the urinals
There before you get your money
Then you know John is right
This must be as it is in Heaven.

Amen.

10 years later John dead
In a motel room in Downingtown, Pa.

Still.


Oh, My

September 30, 1968
The New Jersey was bombarding the DMZ
But what the hell did we know about that
And even grey eyed Pallas Athene
So far away from home?

We were in Quong Tre province
Right or someplace like that and
Had taken a lot of casualties.

Flying in and that was when
Wars were really fucked up.
And just 20 years ago and now?

And all that jive doesn’t have the
Same whatever.

You know
Used to be you would be sitting
In a bar someplace and you would
Hear them… all those names like poetry
Pleiku, An Khe, Ban Me Thuot
LZ Blackhawk LZ Hardtimes
Happy Valley, Phu Cat
And the guys they always look like the same
At least to you and the stories…

“We were in Quong Tre which
Is up north and we were in
The bush and nervous a ambush
Remember the claymores said
This side towards enemy
And thank fucking God for
That some of these guys were stoned
All the damn time so then we heard
This noise behind us and then nothing
And then this noise again so I got
Spooked we had these Remington
Full Auto shotguns which you could
Buy on the black market in Saigon
And I just turned around and fucking
Let it go and we heard screams like I never
Heard That was something big!
What the fuck was that we shouted this… deaf
Of course and this guy what was his name
The guy who died of sunstroke later
From Arkansas he went and saw
It’s a fucking tiger man he shouted.
And it was you know
I killed a lot of guys in Nam
But I never cried except then.”

And these guys go out and
You follow them and they kind of
Slob their way into the car
And you want to say Hey I heard
That fucking story twice already
How many goddamn tigers were there in Nam?
But you saw something…
Not then
But before… two guys who were
There together one to the other
Trying to remember the name of
Another guy who was killed and
Before that telling their stories
They made this kind of
Sign to each other which meant
“I’m there, man. I’m there.” But trying to
remember there was nothing, trying
To remember the name there was nothing
So this was true. This was true.

The poems that you read
All so typical... the dead soldier’s ghosts
Returning to their girlfriends and wives
Years later and looking on them the silent dead
Looking on “Ladies who were lovely once.”

And so in some Greek bar way BC
Two guys drink wine or whatever
And say there is a third guy there
You should have been with us
On the Anabasis those damn Persians
You do an Anabasis you know
When you shout the sea! the sea! it is right.
And who was that guy who got killed in Naxos
You know…?

And really they don’t remember
And they slob into their chariot or whatever

And we were in Quong Tre province
Or something like that.

Oh, my.
Black Lone Ranger


1960

In 1960
I was 12 years old
and in love with a stripper.
Her name was Sally Star.

She was an ex-stripper
or that was the rumor
who had a TV show
on WFIL called "Popeye Theatre"
which she hosted in a nice cowgirl outfit.

Where are the cowboys now?

The show consisted of Popeye Cartoons
and Three Stooges features
and

occasionally "Ramar of the Jungle" was shown.

Ramar had a native assistant called "Willie Willie"
just to give you an idea of what kind of show it was.
But what did I care?

I spent every weekday afternoon
laying in front of the TV -- safe,
for the moment, from the

Billy Laurento's and Bobby Stefanik's
And Sammy Sofchick's and Bobo McCarthy's

Who beat me up about every other day.

Though the Viet-Cong were waiting
For two of em.

"Love, Luck and Lollipops!" Sally would say.

I was a black boy
In a Catholic school.

I hung around with the Three Stooges
and, at the same time, watched
an insincere

big breasted woman

in a outlandish outfit

prattle about how I should be good.

It was great practice for my third marriage.

One afternoon I was thinking:
"I never liked Shemp.”
"Are they really that pointy?"
I suddenly understood that
Sally Star was saving my life.

She was jiving around about something
called a "Muscular Dystrophy" carnival.
Kids would send for a kit, organize a carnival
and then send the money they earned into Sally
where it was contributed to the MS fund
and then the kid got his name mentioned on the air.

I started at once making posters.
Of course, as soon as I went outside to put them up
I encountered

Billy Laurento and Bobby Stefanik
And Sammy Sofchick and Bobo McCarthy


They started to beat me up
as a matter of course.

Until I explained how they could help with the carnival.

It took three weeks to get everything ready.
The guys waiting to beat me up got starring roles:

Billy was "The Wild Man from Borneo,"

Bobo was Frankenstein

and Sammy and Bobby
got to run

the very lucrative
throw baseballs at stolen bowling pins concession.

The carnival went on for two nights and a day.

We pulled in the amazing amount of $126.43.

Of course Sally Star never saw a cent of this.

I had promised the receipts to
each of the guys who beat me up.

They each came for their money.

I had to tell them that I gave
the whole $50.11 to Poppo Riveria
the 24 year old ex con
who controlled our neighborhood

and that he had agreed, on principle,
to beat them up very soon.

I kept the rest
and used it to buy the affections of a
certain Karen Whiteman.

Who was better than Sally Star ever could have been.

That was the day my mojo began working.


In 1953

In 1953
I was in our living room
Reading the comics.
"Dondi," I think.
And the headline in the part of the paper I
put aside said:

"STALIN DEAD!"

And my father came home from work
And took off his hat
And I asked him
"Who was Stalin, Dad?"
And he said
"He was a bad man, son."
And reached in his pocket
And flipped me a silver dollar!

Now let's all watch
As that silver dollar

falls.




Black Poet Yellow Knife
Once Jung and Freud were arguing
And you can read about it
Like I did today
And Freud pissed his pants
And Jung offered to psychoanalyze him
Years later Freud was rolling into
Some town where Jung lived
And decided not to drop by
Can you blame him?
But this is called
In psychoanalytic circles the
“Kreutzenhollerin Blick”
Or something like that.
When Jung was a baby
He had two personalities
Number 1 and Number 2
But that’s ok…so did his mama
Years later he was asked to come back to Germany
Declare Hitler insane
He preferred not. He was busy.
“And who isn’t crazy these days?”
Crazy men is leading us, my friends
Even before my First Communion
I knew I had to get away.
School? Nuns?
A town with a West End and an East End?
Who signed me up for this?
You don’t get no points in
Those louche joosh joints.
Runnin’ from the Paterrollers.
Shortcut through Fairview cemetery
Goin’ to the library
With a note from my mama.
“Please let Dooley take out any book he wants”
Knew all about zombies
So when my grandmother got up from the grave
And followed me down
The weasel around her neck with its red eyes
Her sayin’ “The turkey is a little dry, Jean.”
I didn’t say “Feets don’t fail me now.”
Might have whistled a bit though.
The Patterrollers.
And when oh them cigarette girls got up
Dead after 30 years at Sun Ray Drugs
Following me down and when all them
Patterrollers started following me
Maybe I walked a little faster
Quick look behind but
They was circlin’ round.
“Who isn’t crazy these days?”
And then at the library.
“You can’t take out that book.”
That note from your mama
Doesn’t cut any ice.”
I stole the book.
Outside all my Zombies.
Bowing before me.
Crying “Ourance. Ourance!”
Which wasn’t my name.
And is the point.
Its ZERO degrees here in Yellow Knife
And we is grateful.
I am in my little room
And when death comes
We gonna have a “Kreutzenhollerin Blick”
Death on the street I lean out the window.
Like Scrooge on Christmas Day!
“We’re havin’ a “Kreutzenhollerin Blick” Mr. Death.
And I am not at home to you.”
Him goin away saying
“Who isn’t crazy these days?”
And I won’t answer the door either.
That’s how they got Mozart.
I’m waitin’ for the Groovemaster.


I Think Continually Of Those Who Are Truly Late.
I think continually of those who are truly late.
Like old John Howe in the snow leaning against my father’s store.
“Open Christmas eve! Open until eight!”
Which it was about an hour before.
John’s drunk. Pulls hard on the oarlocks.
Stagolees across the street to the Polacks.
“Just one drink,” Stan says. “Then you gotta go.”
John don’t say nothin’ Waves his hand. Means “I know.”
At our house the night is anything but holy and calm.
John’s there. “Jimmie, I need a present for my boy Tom.”
Just like last year. I sense disaster.
I’m right. “Here it is, John. Already wrapped. A Talkin’ Viewmaster “
John says “I gotta go.” My Dad says “Let’s go outside.
I’ll take you home. Looks like you could use a ride.”
My mother says “Dammit, all you kids need to get to bed.”
My uncle says “It’s been what? Fifteen years since his boy’s been dead?”
The Christmas star rages. With what ? With glory?
I don’t know. Anyway, this is a true Christmas story.
I think continually of those who are truly late.
And how they also serve who can barely stand… but wait.


I look out upon the fields of snow

I look out upon the fields of snow
And think of Christmas long ago
And sip my drink as memory yields
All those packs of Chesterfields
Stuffed inside my stocking toe
Upon that Christmas long ago.

Perhaps the elves those likely lads
Mistook my stocking for my Dad's
But it probably was my Uncle Joe
Passed out beneath the misteltoe.
Who now lies under fields of snow.
I really liked my Uncle Joe.


De God Hole Problem: Jamaican Song
Down de ribber in de land of Me
De poetry flow automatically.
De strophes be kickin’ where de Ganja’s free
To all de people so naturally.

You is sittin at home
Writin’ a poem.
You tinks you is playing God’s trombone.
Den de Lady says:
“Dat a terrible fabulum
What you got dere is A GOD HOLE PROBLEM!”

Way day I see my half brother John
Singing a sankey wid another mon.
What sweet nanny goat a go run him belly
De Lady say dat de song is smelly!

You is sittin at home
Writin a poem.
You tinks you is all alone
Den de Lady says:
“No matter how you cobble ‘em
You skanky poem got a GOD HOLE PROBLEM!

Thomas Mann say to Irene Dunne
“Tell me gal when we’s having fun
But de Lady says “You must do penance!
You gots a GOD HOLE Problem in “A Death in Venice!”

I know a land dat is far away
De land is called de EveryDay.
Kiss me neck ! Dey ain’t got no goblin
Always talking bout de GOD HOLE PROBLEM!

You is sittin at home
Writin a poem.
You tinks you is all alone
Den de Lady says:
“No matter how you cobble ‘em
You skanky poem got a GOD HOLE PROBLEM!


But de say dere is Babylon
Fayva like no kya weh im tun
So I stay here wid my half Brother John
What sweet nanny goat a go run him belly
De Lady say my poem be smelly!

You is sittin at home
Writin a poem.
You tinks you is all alone
Den de Lady says:
“It’s the same old pabulum.
You skanky poem got a GOD HOLE PROBLEM!


Ship Poem
We did Donne when Donne was done.
This was back in 71.
When we were done with Donne
Then we did Herbert
And Vaughn and Traherne before sherbert.
And those who were inclined to Pope.
Were very much inclined to dope.
And those who declined to Wallace Stevens
Were left alone. We had our reasons.
You is young and you think you’re wise.
Then your museum burns down and your elephant dies.
Many years have passed and it isn’t far
Through Villion, Nashe and then Dunbar.
You is gettin’ old and you think you’re wise.
Then your museum burns down and your elephant dies.
More years have passed and now I see
I’m very much inclined to me
In my little boat on the wine dark sea.
You is old and you think you’re wise.
Then your museum burns down and your elephant dies.


Jipijapa Hat
The moon coach and foured it with its horrible lashery.
Saul Roth had implored it from Roth's haberdashery.
"Forty years out for business" Fought Death to a draw, so
Into the store walked Ricky Ricardo.
"Ricky Ricardo walked in. “Bought a Jipijapa hat."
We didn't believe him. He was blind as a bat.
"Forty years out for business" You can bet that of course all
The Roths didn't make it from the ghetto at Warsaw.
Moon beetles black dreidel indifferent very
Lashes Saul Roth to the Jew's cemetery.
"Ricky Ricardo walked in. Brought a Jipijapa hat."
Say it. You're happy. We didn't know about that.


Go Tell the Achyans
Go tell the Achyans
That here obedient to their wish we lie.
Or something like that.
I remember
Drizzle in Warrensville
Meeting Kevin outside the Bongo.
Always smoking then.
“That rich bitch Lucy McIlvane
Jumped off the bridge at Exton.”
Looking around
For the police.
“She was high on acid.
Here it is."
“Something to do with her name,”
I said. And Kevin laughed.
Probably sold it to her.
We didn’t want to remember.
But I do now.
A PINK! VW.
“Slow down.” Her grinding the gears.
Talking about meeting the Panthers.
Her blue veined hand. Small girl.
Fluttering. “Read “Catcher in the Rye
At least 20 times,” she said.
Asking about Kevin, Gary, Steve.
“Kevin’s in California last I heard.
Gary joined the Marines.
How about that?”
Nervous girl.
Falling.

No one to catch her.
Thirty (More!) years later.

Go tell the Achyans.
Whatever that should mean.



Deportee
In 68 I was still old.
"Who's that Old Spade?" they'd say.
When I was digging the Velvet Underground.
But Nico never nibbled on their ear
and worried if she was a real good singer.
"Fuck, yes, I said. But why
do you have that dyke drummer?
2nd fret. Philly.
Arlo tried out "Alice's Restaurant" on me
in the backroom.
"Cut the mudfuk" I told him.
I told him.
"Do you know what the best word your
daddy ever wrote was?
Give me that guitar."
And I sang "Deportee."
This happened right before Bobby got killed.
Back when wars were really fucked up.
Who will remember me?


On the Road to the Iowa Poetry Reading
Goin’ to another poetry jivin’
With all its questionable glory
The big problem is who’s drivin’
The author of “Trip – an LSD Story”
“Dooley I had a heart attack
Must have been what ..one or two years back?
As I was saying I shot out that damn cop’s radiator
Remind me to show you my long poem about John the Revelator.
54 Ford, Flathead 6 Cylinder Three Speed Clutch.
Topped out at 90. John died. I don’t like to think about it much.
I love your Groovemaster poem. Love all soul and funk
Best way to do these poetry readings is flatout goddamn drunk
Grew up in Iowa. This is about where Buddy Holly died.
Didn’t know he was dead. But was awake all night. Cried and cried.
Taken many a blow in my time and delved out more
Anyway it was all pure Owsley acid. Like I said before.
That was when I discovered I was half Piute
I hope you don’t mind me telling you that you look cute.”

“I’m the Lonliest Ranger and I gots a gun””
“Man, put that down. I was just havin’ fun.
Anyway, you try anything you don’t get out alive.
I got me a Bowie knife and a Colt .45.”
Then, long silence… like two Pounds at Rapallo
Forgoing all violence. Then we passed Swede Hollow!
“Hey! What the hell? Ain’t we gonna read at the Grange?”
“Is that what you thought? You’re, a goofy fuck, Range
Tom McGrath is dead. There ain’t no more proletariat
We’re lucky. Instead we’re gonna read at the Marriot
Midwest MLA. It couldn’t get any worse.
Then he said, ”It’s all set up by the magazine “Verse”
The theme is “Dead Bards” that’s us and, oh, well
They tried but they couldn’t get Galway Kinnell.
We done paid our dues. So we gets a chance.
They’ll be plenty of booze and they got money for grants.
It won’t be like before. You won’t see Sandinistas.
Just assistant professors and blue haired Baristas
And MFA wannabes and MFA grads
And graduate students there with their pads
Wantin to know how it feels now you’re dead.”
“I feel perfectly fine” is all that I said.
But the truth was I didn’t. When we stopped for gas
I jumped out of that car to save my black ass.
And stood at the crossroads. But the devil don’t care.
He was buying up farms at the Iowa State Fair.


The Sense of the Sleight of Hand, Man
What I really liked was walking.
Did it a lot -- especially after I was married.
Then, maybe resting against a newstand in Brooklyn
Thinking "Hoon" "Hoon" and smoking a panatella.
Once I walked all the way to Connecticut
And there saw a cartload of happy Negroes.
The significance was unbearable. Maybe not.
Sundays... and then Monday back to work
And none of the sons of bitches
and you know who I mean
Knew what I did there.

I was a terrible explainer of my poems
Still am.
What's the point after all?
That poem? Well, at least, you know,
See where it is.."Harmonium" between this
one
and that one.
Which is where I am..or not.
I'm not you by the way.
Is it impolite to mention this?
How else could I be
Here in Yellow Knife
At "The Palm at the End of the Mind"
Waiting.


Asta That Magnificent Dog

Asta that magnificent dog
Was English
(But don't you dare ask her.)

"Cocktails at Sardis then?"
Bonny geste mastered.

"Drinks at the White Horse?
He's getting plastered!

Asta said "Of course!"
Cried "Faster and Faster

Do not go gentle then
You bloody Welsh bastard!"


The Eve After the Eve of St. Agnes
Up the long hill at last he carried her,
“A castle? I had so longed for a loft.”
Porphyro sighed but he had married her.
The ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft.
He led them to a little moonlight room,
Newly done in the olden knightly style
“Pale, lattic’d, chill, and silent as a tomb”
She cried, and moaned “I hate this awful pile!”
Porphyro sent the Beadsman down for drinks.
“That dreadful man he really has to go!”
She went to the can, then criticized the sinks
Took off her wig and turned to Porphyro.

Who wasn’t there for he had fled that morn
To perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn.


Feodora Doestoyevski
Feodora Doestoyevski
Bogarts it along the Nevskii
Following that last directive
He’s become a great detective
Looking for the Lost Lenore:
Out among the kitsch and noir
Only this and nothing more.
Feodora takes a breathski!
All those ghosts upon the Nevskii…
She’s not where you’ve been before.
Only this and nothing more.
His loneliness increases ever
Pulls down his hat says “Never, never.”
Looking for the Lost Lenore
Out among the kitsch and noir.
Feodora to the Neva
Where he thinks it’s very clever
Finding Gogol’s Overcoat
Knowing it won’t float that boat.
“I stood before a firing squad
Shut my eyes and there was God
Leaning from the heavenly bar
And he looked quite like the Czar.”
So, to the coat
“You know, of course, man
I was expecting the Bronze Horseman.
Old deceiver. Old Believer.
I require another star.
To take me from the kitsch and noir.”
Saying this – a midnight clear!
Then waiting at a station drear
Waiting for the Midnight Train.
Fog and rain and Polish plain.
Waiting for his Lost Lenore.
No-where he has been before.
Feodora Doestoyevski
Bogarts it along the Nevskii
Following that last directive
He’s become a great detective
Looking for the Lost Lenore:
Out among the kitsch and noir.


Third Murderer
I saw Warren Buffet on a truffet.
He kicked my ass.
I showed Donald Trump my Heffalump.
He turned on the gas.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Tom McGrath is dead.
And Adorno is too.
Many more have fled.
This overstocked zoo.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Poetry doesn’t change a thing.
You’re not sure that’s right.
You awake and sing
The World of Lite.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Everything’s ok.
You got your Sunday toot.
All’s a play.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Angels is coming.
Trumpets are flourishing.
He knows were dumb
And continually perishing.

It’s hard out here.You can hardly gets your breath.
All my pretty ones? All? Just like in Macbeth.


The Jean Paul Sestina
It is sensibly boring in Hell.
And it’s even more boring in French.
Ah, mon ami, the tales I could tell
If you’d only get rid of that wench.
I feel that would be very well.
You could then take a seat on the bench.
But you can’t have a seat on this bench
Although it’s a fine one for Hell.
And I think you deserve it but, well,
I think it’s reserved for the French.
Or, at least, reserved for that wench
Whose name I wish I could tell.
If she were just there I could tell
(I mean actually there on the bench).
If she actually were really a wench.
But, I guess, because this is Hell
She is quite decidedly French
And seems to be doing quite well
If her name were Simone, very well
I’m sure that I might make her tell.
I would gently ask her in French
To kindly exit that bench.
But there is No Exit in Hell.
So we can’t get rid of that wench.
But that wench perhaps isn’t a wench!
I can’t say that wouldn’t be well,
For, you know, all existence is Hell
And who knows if that is a bench?
But you know I would certainly tell
And I would love to do it in French.
For it’s awfully boring in French
And would be boring as hell for that wench.
And I’m sure she could certainly tell
And refuse to move from that bench.
Which I think would do really quite well
To prove the existence of Hell.

For a wench on a bench
In French can tell.
That she is in Hell and doing quite well.


Old Critic
I once met Denise Levertov.
I fear I am no better off.

One time I met Kenneth Koch.
He kept staring at my crotch.

In Harlem I met Countee Cullen.
I looked well so he was sullen.

James Dickey.
Was rather icky.

I never met Richard Eberhart.
I find I do not give a fart.

Siegfried Sassoon.
A vile buffon.

Langston Hughes.
I'm not amused.

Hart Crane.
Inane.

Adrienne Rich.
Back off, bitch.

Hope you're leavin'
Wallace Stevens.


Don Juan In Hell
When Don Juan the Great came down to the Styx
He was so fashionably late.
And sighed as he said "I'm so tired of you pricks."
He meant Charon... and he meant Fate.

"So, adieu and farewell all you fair Spanish ladies.
Farewell, you ladies of Spain.
I'm feeling unwell since I came to Hades.
I loved all of you -- in the main."

His baleful eyes fixed where the oozy weeds twist.
Fate said "It has been decreed."
He thought of the ladies he kissed and with a flick of the wrist
Said "I don't think that I have agreed.

But, adieu and farewell all you fair Spanish ladies.
Farewell, you ladies of Spain.
I'm feeling unwell since I came to Hades.
I loved all of you -- in the main.

Ladies who thought themselves unbeautiful
Sad eyes and shaky hands.
And those who thought me pitiful
As I awaited their commands.
And all those I've left forsaken
In a carriage in the rain.
Ah, it's a lonely road I've taken.
I won't see you again."

Charon looked grim as he said to him
"You're quite done my dear Don Juan."
And Don Juan replied. "Ah, then I'd rather swim
And did... and kept singing on.

"Adieu and farewell all you fair Spanish ladies.
Farewell, you ladies of Spain.
I'm feeling unwell since I came to Hades.
I loved all of you -- in the main."

And when he arrived on the far Other Side
He stood on Hell's burning black sand
And kept up his song. Some say quite long.
Subverting Hell's corporate brand.

"Adieu and farewell all you fair Spanish ladies.
Farewell, you ladies of Spain.
I'm feeling unwell since I came to Hades.
I loved all of you -- in the main."

I saw a dead sparrow oh, the other day
Outside the 7/11.
And I wish I could be able to say
"Pillowed on the sidewalk of heaven."

I thought of my first love the other day
And so wish that I could trust
That she is not gone forever away
And is only a boxful of dust.

So, adieu and farewell you fair Spanish ladies.
Farewell, you ladies of Spain.
I'm feeling unwell since I came to Hades.
I loved all of you -- in the main.

So farewell oh my Juan, farewell my Carmelita
It looks like we're all deportees
Sooner or later we ride the big airplane
I'll catch up with you all...if you please.


Mind of Winter etc.
You say Papagayo and I say Papageno.
I don't mean to defy you. We're both singing in the rain.
Or I don't want to deny you but I think that in the main

Oh, Whitetree!
It all goes down accordingly.

I say Leporella. You say Cinderella.
I sing "Willow Willow." You sing "Willa Willa."
Poor old Don Giovanni was one unlucky fellow
Singing down to Hell. He is singing "Follow, Follow"

Oh, Whitetree!
What ever will be, will be.

You say "Cleopatra and the burning barge she sat in."
I say "Jean Paul Sartre in a brothel in Manhattan."
You say Frank Sinatra. I say Lord Mountbatten.

Fiddle-dee.
On the marges of the wine-dark sea.

You drink Cosmopolitans. I need several shots of Dewars.
I demand that certain charlatans by scutted up to skewers
of Harlequin reviews quite like the Pleasantest Reviewer's

Oh, Whitetree!
It all goes down accordingly.

When you are a poem approval is quite tacit.
But then there's other poems that need a strong carbolic acid
For all them years with Britney Spears on a nude beach off Narragansett.

Oh, Whitetree!
What ever will be, will be.


If Found, Return to Frank O'Hara

Help! I am the pack of L&M filters
The Red and White Box that fell
From the left pocket of the stewardess who fell
Down and down – yes, she really took of her clothes!
Fell right after her pillbox hat came off falling into
1964 it was into a field outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I was stuck in a James Dickey poem but
12:20 in New York a Friday
Three days after Bastille day, yes
It is 1959 and Frank went to get a shoeshine
And he bought a pack of L&Ms. Me!
The Day Lady Died.
But I never got in the poem.
He too shocked to remember.
Take and take Frank.
Take and take.
But that is anyway where I belong.

But how did I get here in a poem making
Fun of a Steven Dunn poem where he comes
Home to his little dogs: Buster! (Actually)
And Sundown and never notices me
Because I am underneath his wife’s underwear
In a drawer upstairs next to the pine sachet
From Indiantown Gap that was her mother’s 1932...
Some kind of fair... and his wife’s a secret smoker!
And his children will grow up to get degrees in Communications
He doesn’t know any of this
But so what? What’s it to me?
And why am I here anyway for
So far from home?

I'm not joking here.
Try this: I'm as real as
Everything you love.


I Love Them Old Poets
I love them old poets the kind that we had
And I wish them sweet trysts with Puck or Queen Mab
In Midsummer mists -- and an endless bar tab
But I'm up here in Yellow Knife feeling so sad.

I'm up here in Yellow Knife with my little uke
And volumes of Tennyson and volumes of Buk
And an alarming e-mail from Peregrine Took
"Run for the hills boys! Fredonia's gone nuke!

Fredonia! Fredonia! The land of the Free
Has declared nuclear war on fair Honah Lee!.
And the elves are returning from over the sea
And they have arrested the Fiddler of Dee.

Harpo's been poisoned at a fun raising dinner.
Groucho has cancer. Gets thinner and thinner.
Fredonia! Fredonia! The land of the Free
Has declared nuclear war on fair Honah Lee!"

But I'm up here in Yellow Knife just playing my uke
And I won't reply to young Peregrine Took.
Sufferin' Succotash they killed the Archduke!
But I keep on playing. Don't ask me why.
"They'll be pie in the sky by and by -- when you die.
They'll be pie in the sky when you die."


I Love Them Old Hippies
I love them old hippies. The kind like before.
Like my poor old friend Kevin who slept on my floor.
Who told me he wouldn’t be sick anymore
But went back to the streets in the morning.
Saying “You know you’re in trouble and you got the blues.
When you forgot all you learned from Mother Earth News.
“I’m going to Mexico. Sleep under the stars.”
He went down to Mexico. Found many fine bars.
Where he could drink down the night and forget about wars
And wake up in the desert in the morning.
“I’ll tell you what Dooley. I’m not going to stay
I’m going to New York instead of L.A.
With my Carmelita. Our love will abide.”
But they lost it to junk on the Lower East Side.
The water is waly. The water is wide.
I got a call early one morning.
Now, my poor friend Kevin’s gone down to the dark.
His VW bus is in permanent “Park.”
He’d talk until morning then light up a Lark
And tell me he believed in transcendence.
“You know you’re in trouble and you got the blues.
When you forgot all you learned from Mother Earth News.”


Kevin Anent Jimi
December 31, 1969
I am on the train to NYC
To visit my friend Kevin
Who a few years too
Late for San Francisco
Moved there. Going
To the Jimi Hendrix New year’s Eve
Concert (With the “Sounds of East Harlem”)
And you can read about it as I did
Only yesterday in a very nice
Coffee table kind of book
On the Filmore East.
Finding his walk up flat
(He called it that) going in
Two of his friends there
Maybe Five in the afternoon
In any case and Kevin
Shooting up smack
I say “Kevin I am
Fucking appalled,” maintaining
A certain distance as I did
From all that looking at
His arm (now gone, nothing at all)
And he grinning then sighing.
Wake up let’s go and somehow
We do. I have the tickets
The Sounds of East Harlem first
Kevin nodding and then
Bill Graham introducing
Jimi and Kevin is awake
And then the man is there!
Looks out can’t see.
An instant before he starts Kevin
Leaning forward and I say
“You keep doing that shit
You’ll be dead in two years.”
“Man,” Kevin says, “Shutup
Can’t you ever be serious?”


Warrensville 1
He stood out, yes he did, like a big, black
bruise on a pink thumbnail, the only one
of his cowboy kind on this coal-town street,
dark against the new falling snow.
Hitchiking to school because he missed the bus.
Bootheels digging in snowbanks, backward he
walks looking north, up Rte. 36, hoping to see
a car slowing to give him a lift. Few pass
and none stop, until a 50 Chevy pickup,
custom cab at that, chrome grill gleaming
with all five windows fogged over
and only a small clear patch rubbed clean
before the driver's eyes, slid to
a halt 50 yds beyond. Its a wonder
he saw him at all, but then again,
he did stand out against that new falling snow.
Shamrocks and Coal
Black dust like mist from the Devil's ocean
settles everywhere in the March drizzle,
coating the brick façades and wrought-iron posts
leaving dismal stains on the slush-heaped
underpass out by the railyard with its lights
blinking red and green at dusk, directing trains
anyplace but here.

In the deep shadow of the coal-shed he is bent
double, peering into the godforsaken darkness
in wonder at a lone green shamrock
from the gravel grown.
Warrensville 2
Driving into Warrensville past Our Lady Queen of Peace
My old friend Tommy says “We still got that at least.”
Fifty six years old. Years of junk and speed and crack.
Tommy says, “Dooley, you know sometimes I think I’m not coming back.”
Pulled into Gaby’s. Drank and talked till way past dark.
Tommy says, “Jesus didn’t die alone. You can read it in Luke or Mark
But sometimes I can’t hardly breathe I feel so alone.”
I say. “Tommy, I got to leave.” Roll back stone.
Warrensville 3
“It’s a hard world,” my Dad says. "It's a hard world and you can't win."
You're always going out even when you think you're going in.
It's a hard world. It's a hard world, Dooley."
I know Dad. I know it truly.
91 years old. Can't see. Cant' hear. Can hardly talk.
My Dad says. "You got to leave. Pick up yourself and walk."


What is Poetry?

Here in Yellow Knife
At the Artificial Limb and Brace
We got a lot of “Nature.”
Never liked Nature much though.
“He died, Oh, well, it’s a natural thing.”
So what I don’t understand is
Why anyone would like it.
“If your grandmother ain’t in heaven
Why are you thinking about her?”
Well, we tried.

Here we got the Aurora Borealis
And people who say
“He looked like a moose in the headlights.”
Over and over.
Just like the old aurora.
But what do they want?
I don’t worry about it.

After all I ain’t natural
A Black man stuck all the way here
Playing his banjo singing “Sweet Lorraine”
Dreaming of a white snake with soft brown eyes
Like Nature never thought of
Polar snake, all white fur,
A sweet little guy you could talk to.
Named “Lorraine.”

“All Nature is a Heraclitean fire
Pray you, avoid it.”

We got a lot of one armed Inuit
Since the introduction of the snowblower by the White Man.

It’s why I’m here, baby.


Trout Fishin’ in Yellow Knife
Up here in Yellow Knife
We don't worry about the wars.
Against Aesthetic Idealism or whatever.
The war is there but we don't go to it anymore.

(Thank you Mr. Hemingway.)

We worry about our little dogs.

"Hoppy, I'll let you out but don't go down to the Borealis fields!"

But he does anyway and it’s so cold there.
Brings back what's froze.
Our Iniut calls them the "Breath of the Stars).
Always so romantic.
They want it all so strange and beautiful.

Old radio shows frozen.
"The Third Man" I loved that.
Could have done without "The Great Guildersleeve" though.
And those last words... all tangled up in Hoppy's fur.
They thaw and then you hear them.
"Help." "Mommy" Ah, fuck" No, no no."

Heard Goethe's the other night.
No, he didn't say "More light! More Light!"

Hoppy just standing there.
Wants to go out again.

"Ok, Hoppy, you tell me.
When did Poetry ever change a thing?"

Wants to go out.

"Arf," he says.

"Arf. Arf. Arf."


A Catholic Negro in Pittsburgh
The existence of that spiritual entity
AKA “The Groovemaster”
Is proven by St. Thomas Aquinas.
As you would know
If you stepped in like me
Into a pawnshop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Which is right near “The Poor People Banque”
Past the old guy telling another old guy
“I tell you what There ain’t no hustlers like us anymore”
Just like what I bet Jesus said really
Goin to take a look at the tambourine
And you see that 45 record
Shining there from the Groovemaster
And you remember you is safe
Like when in “The Exorcist” they listen
To the devil talking and say
“It’s English – but backwards. What an asshole.”
Which starts everything right up
The calling of the exorcist, the young priest
Saying “Take me” and going to heaven
The little girl not remembering anything then
Not remembering -- what you hope for the poor whores
Shivering there as you leave you thinking of that Groovemaster song
Safe. We are safe. We just don’t know it.
The Groovemaster coming at the end of days.


Incident on Fifty-second Street

"I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid."


It was Christmas Eve 1939
W.H. Auden was waiting for a sign.
"Been to China, been to Spain.
Lord, lord don't want to do it again.
The Christmas star rages with its usual vengeance.
Lord, lord give me a little transcendence."

Lord, lord that's what he prayed
At the end of a low, dishonest decade.
Drinking alone. Then who comes in?
My Uncle Joe. Auden buys him a gin.
They fall in love. There is a back room!
Boom a lay Boom a lay Boom a lay Boom!
They went back to the bar and unless I miss my dates.
Auden wrote "In Memory of W.B. Yeats."
Showed it to Joe who kept on drinking.
"I like this place" is what he was thinking.
A New England Christmas
Whose woods those were I think he knew
His house was in the village too.
He'd come to see young Robert Frost
Who sneered and said "You must be lost."
And closed the door, "We do not mingle,"
Is what he told the old Kris Kringle.

Frost was a cad and creep at home.
Saved all his feelings for The Poem.

Choosing between the Fire and Ice
Is difficult and not so nice.
And, at the end, does not suffice.
And, at the end, does not suffice.


Unforgiven

Sometime after Verdun my
Mother at about five years old
Hurried down some road in West Grove, Pa
Wanting to see the soldiers go off to war
And stepped on a nail and
Got tetanus but thank God recovered
But walked with a limp the rest of her life
A little limp but still I remember
When I was five seeing her
Stockings down around her knee
Pounding “This goddamn leg”
Later she lied and said
She had polio when she was younger
And hinted of, perhaps, a year
In an Iron Lung during which
She never could imagine how
Her simple faith would be betrayed
And she would end up in Warrensville
With a son who was asked to leave
The altar boys. But when my father
Went to war I am certain that
He didn’t hold my mother’s wound
Against the Germans. He forgave them.
Or maybe never thought about it much
Him being the kind of guy who
Present at the Liberation of Paris in 44
Sent a postcard of the Eiffel Tower home
That said “This is as nice as it looks”
Which makes no sense at all.

And I forgive the Germans too and
My mother and father and my friend
Kevin who on a cross country drive
Probably around 1980 we arriving
In Davenport, Iowa about 3 of the clock
And I noticing that for some d**n reason
The local cinema was showing that
Great Silent film Abel Gance’s “Napoleon”
Suggested we abide there a while and see the
Movie and so we checked into some d**n motel
And by the time the movie started Kevin
Was drunk babbling next to me and
Then rushing into the restroom to retch
Came back sitting next to me stinking of
Vomit and thought it funny to follow me
As I changed seats until I had to leave
Just when Napoleon is giving the fisheye
To Robespierre and had to before
That drunk fool could do anything about it
Get in my Gremlin Hatchback and
Leave the f*****r there him with maybe
10 bucks providing him ample opportunity
To notice that Davenport is a very nice River Town.

And I forgive the Vietcong and even
That Jamaican ba****d who sidled up
To me as I slim and fit and fifty lounged
On a bench on the boardwalk in Atlantic City
Wondering which way the Mr. Planters Peanut
Store was and thinking I looked pretty damn good
And said “ You want to buy a watch, Granddad?”

I forgive all.
Even everyone who wears a baseball cap backward.

All but you Lemony Snicket.
Who had the idea to write a series
Of Gothic Adams Family kind of
Children’s books and actually wrote
Them me having the same idea
Years ago and counting on that.
I know too much and so wait
Wanting them just so and you
You ba****d have written them.

You, Lemony Snicket are

Unforgiven.


Once There Was Childermas Gazelles
Once there was Childermas Gazelles asleep in the green chapel
and food! food! food! and great clipper ships
and President Taft leaning out smiling and smiling into symbolic quantities of small arms fire!

There was median and modulus. The promise of parrallel universes! of a color called panelume!

And we were all magic paradisoadoration jukebox perfection Crhistmas Titian cortex flung out in the wild blue yonder with a shoeshine and a smile.

The young Goethe plays with his toy theatre!
The Tsar accepts all these restraints with extraordinary serenity and moral grandeur!
Jack Ruby gets some good coke!
Henry James writes a letter to his friend!

But now we are void alphabet eggs at best waiting for the spasm war
when there will be gulftown galactic lamentation hometowns with
bones bones bones and there will be no modulus
except deep under Cheyenne mountain where the joint chiefs dream the long dream
Unsyllabled Poontang!"


For Robinson Jeffers
What of It?
I
The broken handle of the teacup jags
from its shattered body
And the world sickens.
I have no right to breed sons.
Yesterday I was strange at dawn,
the sky smudged crimson, all Asia burning and
I held this little teacup edged with void, a little
splendor
indifferent to man and squid, puma and hawk.
The dawn wind was quite cool. I wore my coat.
All night I was at my desk writing for
nothing.
Nebulae sleeping in the next room.
Boys perished overhead.
Or, the other way around. Why should it matter?
The moon opened her
bruised breast at me.
At dawn: the fog. I am an
old man
in fog.
Only the teacup is decent.
I must attend to business. Gulls cry overhead.
They should keep quiet.
II
I'd rather, if I wasn't so tired, kill a man than break a teacup;
especially this teacup who was never
petulant
who never begged or wept, who never
Howled envy at the flagon or ever spoke to the mugs -- the com-
mu-
nal
Vessels, or even spoke to the milk pitcher -- of all vessels most
hu-man --
And the most to be despised.
Certainly, I would never break this teacup --
who never held tea
but only an occasional paper clip and once a family of
ticks, and my fat yellow pencil -- ticondaroga'd down to the ultimate
O.
Surely, I would never break a
teacup whose hollows mouthed indifference to star and stone,
indifference to boy's breathing.
III.
I broke this teacup with my human hand.
Boys, better go to the heron or hawk and make them love you.
Dead things increase.
Watch out for splinters.


Point Lobos: 1944
In the "heavens" a sword of galaxies burns
Against the hunter's thigh: Orion, that "most tall and
beautiful of men," strides out, a lion's skin on
His shoulders, the star that tips his spear
brilliant lilac and ashy.
His dog is at his heel. He has left a woman.
He is going to find a treasure and
Steps off into space -- and falls forever --
Westward across the Pacific; the sword burning,
The speartip brilliant lilac and
ashy.
Standing at the edge of the sea,
standing here you would look up and say "Oh, what poetry this
is! What sky-blessed
story:"
For this is the poem, the story; the hunter -- never mind his
name -- Orion, Ulysses, Hercules, his eye on the treasure,
the journey always beginning.
"A journey to find treasure?"
"Oh, the treasure is the journey."
"Orion wanted what?"
"I disremember. But…"
"What?"
"Ulysses only wanted to get home."
"A good story."
I think this story the best our civilization has.
Think of the 600 million dead required to create it.
Let's say Homer started it, though
surely it was another peeled Ape of infinite faculties, clubbed
to death somewhere in the steppes of Russia. Let's begin
with Homer. Four million years to make large animals, perhaps
one million years of various modulations of torment to make a Homer.
After the war
They say, his inward eye contracted, he made a poem to draw
The starlight from the thighs of the water. A poem about a rest-
less man. A poem about a liquidation.
Is this a story to
Tell a woman;
A story of killed and killing things, of the gods who
kill yet live forever? Is this even like nobility?
And… this is the best we have.
I mean this: we will not look at the unhuman heaven.
We live in slave camps and therefore must have our Homer
to sing that the restless man will live forever
As a god.
Perhaps only Jenghiz could tell the truth.
But even he would have his Homer to draw
The starlight from the water
so that
Something human will live forever in the clear dark.
O vile enskyement!
And Homer was the best of the liars
Who made a compact with Death.
What if we saw the actual stars? What
if, for one instant, we could leave behind the vulgarity of our
consciousness and see the unhuman beauty of reality?
But we sicken on what is not even half-real.
Greek civilization goes under.
Another death in the family.
Rome degrades itself. A tortured lip twitches. "Give
me the hammer." Fire dives from the high
air.
A tortured god is not the prettiest of stories. Leave it to the
poets.
"Look at the stars. Orion wants it,
Perseus wants it, even the star-eyed
dog wants it.
But they can't have it --
having been born before Christ flipped a nickel."
Only love can open the sky. There is a
flower in the heart
of the star.
The treasure is the
flower.
We have seen it.
It loves you."
Dante's rose.
What extravagant kindness!
I think that you will find more kindness
in the claws of a lion.
Another thousand years of self-
Importance. The crystal in the granite is a fire wheel.
The Calla Lily is a fire wheel.
Another war and,
in complete candor and acutely aware of the writer's freedom
the public poets thrust Goebbels and Roosevelt
into the sky.
Other poets
(Secure in the goat pasture and looking at the stars)
Speak of art, of religion, of the never-ending story
Of the pure world. Where?
Above
the torture camp?
"You need this," they say. "After the bombings, after
the battle squalor you will need this also." They say, "This is
beauty.
This is love."
It passeth understanding.
They say -- the best of them say --
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare say, men at the
extremest limit say,
That this, this hungered emptiness, is beauty.
Therefore:
Civilizations are built on the bones of sleepy children
and this winter, under the Pleiades, there die large numbers.
It is only a trick of deep gravity
that makes the hunter fall westward and graveward to Asia.
All day I listen to the radio.
At night I turn to the nameless stars.
Orion is falling into Asia.
Nothing is falling into Asia.
When will we ever be clean?
Fire.


Just Spring with Chaucer and Some Shriners
Whan in Aprille with its shoures soote,
The Dow declines, the staring Owl sings "Hoota Hoota,"
And I am bathed all in swich liquor:
Johnny Walker Red or sometimes Dewars
Then me lova lova to go um on pilgrimages
And ask a drunken Shriner where his lodge is
And wenden there to myken my complain
Singing nonney nonney hey the wind and rain!
And wanton, dally, smile and jest:
A summer-seeming sprag wit methought the best
That can be doone more than kith and oh! so much less than kind.
Here at the end of an awful century
In the Hungry Mind.
A knycht I am, a parfait gentle wight.
Bodeless my birkin and my pants are tight.
Fell is my feigning and I am rather tired.
My brainpan leaketh and my arms are wired.
Twa corbies natter over my ancient bones.
My leman is lumpish and lubbers low moans.
Ye scenes of childhood! When I ramped
Reckless of the objective world.
My little dust box delicate scamped
My fingers fashed my hair dew curled
My little earth! That one sweet look:
Crying “Abbadabba die welt zuruck.!”
Erkennt Ihr die Lieder?
My tiny Gluck my und so weider?
Oh, I have lost the important connexion to the land.
In a field I am not the absence of the field
And what can I do about it oh Mark Strand?
And Berryman descants: “A most melancholy Boya
When all that’s left is Dana Goia.”
Ich glaube a clock there was with a sleepy baby face:
A dark veined darling all bedight in lace.
Langsamer war dee day. Komme nicht zuruck.
I saw the movie. I read the book.
The Shriners with their little Harleys,
The thereness, the isness, the beardy bar barley,
The sloppy slop! The happy hop!
Of Aprille when the birdes are braw:
The who shebangadey green green carnival.
And where is Christ with his little pony
And Mary makeless and the winter cherry
The albatross with his abalone
The ant king and the malt fairy?
Therey?
Not very.


Old Father
Baby Belly Butter Little Face
I had a terrible childhood.
I had a problem with Pope Pius XII.
His picture hung in my fourth grade classroom,
St. Sebastian's Catholic School, Warrensville, Pa, 1958.
I beat him drag racing.
He drove his 600 ft. long gold and white Popemobile
Synchromesh transmission, etc.
I had my bicycle.
And a little luck.
I still remember his face in racing goggles,
the sneer, the Redman tobacco drool at the corner of his mouth.
He called me Kid.
However, there was no doubt who won.
You can't read about it.
The church bought all the newspapers.
The next day nuns descended on sports desks all over the world.
What you can read is: Pope Beats Smart-Ass Kid."
Don't believe what you read.
They had World Youth day and I wasn't invited.
My father chased me with a belt.
"Why weren't you invited to World Youth Day?"
My mother wept.
Those were terrible days.
The nuns made me write religious poetry.
"The collies/at the funeral home/barked at my grandmother."
Kids fainted nightly from airplane glue.
We lined up to see the movie, "The Man With The Atomic Brain."
My father talked to a cough for twenty years.
We bought Remco telegraph kits
Strung wires from house to house.
Sent secret messages:
"You will be killed in a war."
We all wanted Ted Williams to be our father.
We all wanted our father to take us out and show us the stars,
Hand on shoulder, pipe in hand pointing to a
constellation.
In a field. On a hill.
But our fathers worked for guys who looked like Eisenhower.
They worked the night shift.
They were too tired.
They cried in basements.
They fell one by one into rolling mills.
They left $2500 in insurance.
They were driven to Fairview cemetery by big-knuckled drivers
wearing Masonic rings.
Our mothers were also tired.
Hands caught in mangles at the laundry
They had problems stirring the Kool Aid
They had problems hauling us to church on sleds when it snowed.
You will waste your life.
Someday you will open a book
that will not be the color of the sky.
You will blame the book.
We won't be there.
We will be wailing in coffins.
Wailing for the world to end.
Wailing with all the poor poor dead
For this shitstorm, this storm of shit, to end.
Baby. Belly. Butter. Little Face.
("Whoa," said Little Face. "Hand me down my walking cane!")


Ulysses Found on the Internet
Stupid theme dining expands and thrives
while topless doughnut shops have all but
disappeared.

Fat lady butt art spread like kudzu
across the lawns of the south
— from where?

Night after night, it's the
hottest
spot in Las Vegas: Troy Mortuary.

Four cremation ovens, burning at 1,600 degrees,
work around the clock, turning cash-strapped dead people
into more sand for the desert.

But there's only one way to get in
if you're not employed there, so
I'm planning to go
to a place with a
slightly less severe door policy,
an after-hours club
known as

Home.


Two Poems: Josef Rilke
Manches umher Bergtier
Ihr in einander Genugten
Tag zu Tag
In Himmel wuchsen.
Hore, mein Herz
Erstaunte euch nicht?
Wo ist der Ort?
Die Sterne der Erde!
Josef
Many a humpety mountain animal/
Smug as hell/
Day after day/
Blooms in the sky/
Listen, my heart/
Are you not astounded?/
Where is the place?/
The stars of Earth.
Das war die Zeit...
Sie wissen nicht
wie es kam.
Ah, las uns klagen.
Die rote wheelbarrow
es schwer ward.
That was the time/
Damn if they knew how it exactly went down/
Oh, let us weep and make sad noises/
The red wheelbarrow/
Became heavy.


A Short History
O my ancient father.
My little toy.
My waly water
My little boy.
Wild were my ways
and weird.
Sun blest.
Uber alle Gipfeln
Junior.
No rest.
No jaguar
anymore
no mercedes benz
ruh ist die
waly water.
Amen.
Twitch me a new one
baby
let me go down.
Christ's in the old one
honey
lay down.


Jigging
A farcical afterpiece
after a worthy tragedy
is what it s'posed to be
like Bojangles dog up and died in jail shack burnt up
jigging
cornpone
blood
alcohol
urine
jigging for the police and they pass the hat around
or even better
a Jewish doctor who survived the Holocaust
jigging
when E-man is hanged
but
then
E-Man
jigging
at
the
end
of
the
rope
and
Hitler
jiggity jiggering
when he steps OUT of the railway car.
With all this indeterminate jigging that goes
on and on it's awfully hard to concentrate
Nicht wahr?


Francis of the City of St. Francis

knows that there is
whatever the water wants.

Paddling on the river with Mole.
All these books foolish and beautiful.

One day the Earth says, "Let me guess.
You want it all strange and lovable.

Plateaus
lichen


the Bierstadt moraine



blue herons

Anglo-Saxon farms
the traditions of lovers


John Clare resting his cheek against a stone

a chamberlain of the moon


doves in secret books


rivers
rivers

Finn always Finn again



Dylan Thomas opening the French doors singing

"O Ewigkeit"


guinessess genitive forever




maple

leaves

blown by

a

wind

chasing geese



clouds

seas



and a fire of love from all this



from all this to

her."

"Yes," says Francis.

"No problemo," said the Earth.
And sent this.

"I shall keep in mind my looking in at whatever
it is that is to me you."


Dinosaur Love
My friend, who is dying,
was reading Jurassic Park
I wanted to shout:
"Why are you reading that?"
You're dying!
You should be reading ...
You should be calling..."
"I always liked dinosaurs," he said
and then fell asleep,
one finger between the pages.


Old Devil Moon
They are here.
The children of no love.
They are still alive.
There is no other world.
They dream they are only dying animals.
When the moon ticks they stand before doorways
the graves of their fathers and mothers
crying to get in.
Tick.


Some Last Words
Someone called "Der Alte Professor."
The little man behind the curtain.
"I am OZ the great."
Toto knows but is nice to him.
He is so nice to him.
He loves the little guy.
Later, they all step inside a tangerine
and ride pretty ponies up the golden steps
to the sun.
The sun says: "Go home and go to bed."
So they do: lion, scarecrow, tin man,
Dorothy, Toto, Old Professor.
They dream of a carousel in a park in winter.
They dream of the snow that seems so shy.
The delicate mouth of the giraffe.
The white elephant.
This mirror shows them sleeping.
Why do they seem so forsaken?


At the Hospital
Beside her bed
there is a vase with one flower.
Just before sleep
the flower seems a red-glowing cloud.
When she closes her eyes
the flower inside the cloud awakens.
Conjured by solitude and beauty it opens
as she sleeps.
This flower is a world.
Temples and palaces and
distant villages all in this one flower!
She dreams of a city.
Peach and plum trees shade the roads.
A white jade palace.
Inside the palace
gowns with women bright as green hummingbirds
sing "Celeste Aida."
Their wings hurt.
A slash of ruby at their throats.
They hope that radio will be discovered soon.
They dream that the emperor will love them
nevertheless
The flower beside your bed.
Not impossible.


The Red Light Is The Blue Light Is
At 16 I hopped a freight
Me dressed as Johnny Yuma
Or maybe Donovan, the little cap
Ok maybe I looked like Dylan
But imagine it. It’s dark in Missouri
Down in the railyard and you are
Alone and 16. The freight car is
Yellow in the moonlight and like
A dream. Secrets. No one knows me.
I made it! Where are you going?
Anywhere.
Wish I had done it.
So at 51 I am really on a train,
The Empire Builder!
Coming back from Portland, The Dales,
Spokane, slept through Glacier Park.
No time for ice ages.
Coming back from
Watching my Uncle Joe die.
Drawers and drawers
Of handkerchiefs: A man of
A certain age.
“If you want to
Come,” he said. A letter a few weeks
Before “Cancer…oh, well it sure
Was fun smoking all those Chesterfields.
Oh, well. I’m saving all the newspapers
To wrap the china.”
And the train stops.
As trains do in the dark.
No reason that you know.
Now look at the schedule:
Wolf Point MT. Yes.
Look out. Hourless Prairie.
The moon’s moon is in the sky!
Maybe someone’s Uncle has died.
Maybe the engineer needs a smoke.
Maybe ghosts loading buffalo skins.
Moving again and past the town.
All these towns built on the
Bones of sleepy children.
Stops again. Same moon. More ghosts.
Moving towards Minot:
Spooky for sure.
No place for Joe, of course
Then coming up to Williston.
Jorgensen's Roughrider Liquor!
Train stops for ten minutes.
Think I can make it?
No.
Next train 23 hours and
About 45 minutes from now.
15 dollars in my pocket.
Took the wrong credit card.
Standing on the platform
Suitcase on the train.
The red light is.
The blue light is.
Wish I could tell Joe.
Oh, well.


In Faerie Tales Which
In Faerie tales which
Are much more terrible
Than Fairy tales
Let’s say you are riding
On the horse you got from
Your Dad the Baron who
Dressed in his Baronial robes
Christmas sweater from 1963
And ratty J. C. Penny corduroys
From about the same era
Too tight but baggy in the ass
Cause he has no ass
Just like you and you
Are riding uphill and can
See the castle Sleeping Beauty
Or anyway the castle that has something
You very much want you say
And the Ant King meets you
And tells you “Kill that horse”
Then you damn well better do it
Or you’ll end up
Back with your Dad the Baron.
Something has gone
Terribly wrong although
In the University Library
Checking out for the third time
Gustav Fechner’s
“The Soul Life of Plants”
You, you notice, being the only
Guy to check it out in 25 years
And thinking once again about
How Fechner depressed for years
Went into a garden and fell asleep
And awoke changed forever
Knowing that everything has
A Soul even plants or especially
Plants and then wrote a book
About it you are not sure
Just what went wrong.
You have a dissertation
To finish, Ok you have
A dissertation to start but
Are spending your time on the nice
Collection of Books on Legerdemain
The library has and then
One of the long Saturdays there in
The library notice that guy
Who is always there like you
Though a bit heavier and
Withal much more sallow
Actually belly crawl under a shelf
To retrieve a book from the
120 Epistemology, causation, humankind
Section (I was going to only give
The number but, perhaps, this is
A bit much for the reader) and
Then sigh as he sits there
Near the copiers opening it slowly
His hands a bit shaky.
Something has gone
Terribly wrong you should be
In the 820’s but mess around
Almost anywhere else
An afternoon in September
In the 090’s and then
By God the New York Times
Crossword puzzle.
ASTA that magnificent dog!
That works. And, oh yes,
The muse of Lyric Poetry
ERAT—or something
Both stuck in the Crossword
Puzzle and there is damn
Little chance you and your
Little horse will ever even make it there.
Tomorrow you will be
52 or maybe 53.
Plenty of time you think
Something has gone terribly
Wrong but there is a certain Swan.
(Maybe)
Last Night
Last night I was watching 'Panic in Needle Park"
1971 with Al Pacino playing a junkie
and what’s her name Kitty Winn playing his girlfriend
A sweet girl but then, inevitably, a junkie and then a whore.
He betrays her and then she turns him in when she gets in trouble.
Nothing personal really and when he gets out of jail
And sees her... a perfect ending. He says "You comin?"
Junkies in New York. I knew this one and that one.
All dead now and I remember John calling me
"I have bad news we lost Kevin." "Lost?"
This one and that one and I would remember if I could.
But instead I feel desperate for 1971 to see what's left
What will be left which is a certain slur of colors
There out on the streets and this is what will be left:
The movie. Need a dime to make a call. Yes.
The VW the narcs drive now looking so strange.
But at the end a slur of color. And I am grateful even for this.

Today my father is dying. Went in won't come out.
"Failure to thrive" Which means he won't eat. Doesn't want to eat.
Just two weeks ago not all there then he still
Asked me if I could go home and get his razor.
The good one. And pointed at the tree outside his window.
And said something. But now my brother says even
That whatever is gone him gone except for the part
That worries about how he's going to pay for all this.
Which I am grateful for. I remember the old lady
in the Williams' poem on her last ride seeing trees
A blur asking "What are those?" "Trees"
"I'm tired of them too." So much is left behind.

Which is the easy thing to say but not right.
Or at least you know that this one and that one
Is gone and there was a certain look.
Tired then I remember of the bullshit of, for example, war
And then tired of the bullshit about the bullshit of war
And then not even tired or now so what but
I would remember if I could. I'd remember my father if I could.
2AM stomach pains. He called my brother to take him.
Chinese doctor in the emergency room and my father asks
"Are you Jewish?" The doctor laughs. And my father says.
"Why are you laughing? It's not funny. I need a professional here."

Absolute lucidity and purest, most marvelous bullshit.


In the Blue Note
In the Blue Note
you are so sad
your monkey raincoat on.
Your lunchbox with the circus train
gone quite gone again again
you on wrong side so long.

The snow she no know
Stalin is dead.
Neon throws three roses to the frost.
A mauve cat jumps
is lost
jumps again.
O Maundy Tuesday! O chalice of rain.
Snowghosts mother the windowpane
Sighing hey down a down.

February! February in the Old Town.
How nice and sad and sad and nice
it is here safe from all harms.
The bargirl's little tits
and when the whisky hits
the nothing you love falling,
falling asleep in your arms.



Chiasmus in Chicago
When the pals of rain come
I know just what to do.
Grab a bottle. Get Old Blue.
Belly crawl across the linoleum
Get under the bunker bed.
Drink till Old Blue is dead.

Then the pals of the pals of rain
and Lamentation Junction
Me want to be sleepy head againe
Another Extreme Unction.
You're a good dog Blue.
And I am too.

Spilling the universe againe
Wild about Harry
The Cubs behind 1 to 10
I will never marry.
Pals, my pals of the pals of rain
I will never marry againe.

Especially not some slushlaced witch
Blabbing upon a peak in Darry
in Californio!
Not unless she's goddamn rich
and I'm drunk againe
and horney O!
and Thelonius is monkerin
and we are sweetly hunkerin
and the rain falls like stones
on our marrowbones.

The Lovely Dead/The Evil Dead
Who are the lovely dead?
At 55 and alive.
Speed limit.
Reading the obits. Look away, damn you.
All those who at 94
Die in their sleep.
Wife still alive.
Children in flats in Paris or New York.
In love still.
And their little cats alive alive O!.
Or even at 89
24 more years! Ok.
Yes, I could do that.
Yesterday at Barnes and Noble.
You would think they would
Be more specific about chest pains.
Look around quick scurry from
Medicine to Poetry and meet your daughter
There
Who are the Evil dead?
Oh, don’t even think about
Those poor young:.
Certainly car crashes, or gaspings
Before Everest.
But here’s a guy at 55!
Perhaps bitten by a poisonous toad in Brazil!
That would be ok.
No. Damn. Just dead.
They don’t say why.
Just because we really want to know.
These are the Evil Dead.
Around your age.
Art Garfunkel why do you look so old?
He’s still alive though.
The evil dead crouch.
One day you think the telephone is ringing.


Call Me Ishmael
“Call me Ishamael” he says
With the arrogance of the young.
“I only am alive left to tell you.”

You were still floating, right?
What were you 35? 30? Go back to New Bedford.
Open up a bait shop…”with no little irony” you think.
Sit there all melancholy …but safe… and anytime
You can go into town.
“Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear,
ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow!”
“Yep, that’s exactly what he said,”
You say in a fine bar.
“I was there. Don’t like to talk about it too much.”
Write write all night.
Miss Queequeg a bit.
What was that about?
“There were such fervent rays…”
Yes, exactly.
Describing the night it all began
Before the “Swordfish Inn.” Your boots
Worn out. Too expensive there.
Down to “The Spouter.”
All that over and over.
And, every instant you are alive
But don’t really know it.
Melancholy yet alive.
That’s the way to go.
And you’re not even real.
Like a guy.
Gets bad news. Was counting on more time.
Thinking: “Call me Fishmeal…Oh,
That was from Mad Magazine…”
La la. Silly…and then over.
Or maybe.
For an instant.
“That’s pretty funny.
La la .”
Goes to a fine bar.
“Call, me Fishmeal, guys.
I’m buying”.
Call me Fishmeal.
But call me.


The Grasshopper and the Ant
My sad friend Ira comes into my office.
“I’m busy Ira.”
“I’ll just sit here for a while ok?”
Type Type Pretend work.
“Soybean futures are down.”
“What?”
I just lost 4,000 gogooglies.
“So what? You have plenty of gogooglies.”
Ira not listening.
Man, I didn’t need a sad friend.
Gotta pretend to work and he’s there.
Only a sad man
Sad sun setting and in the year 2000
Tells you sitting in the bar after work
Where he has trapped you:
“Never been married.
I am a confirmed bachelor.”
Then talks about his 401K
His stocks, the tragedy of loss
And the fact that he still has
467,000 gogooglies invested
In bonds and stocks and
Is movin on up
In the futures market
And is buying a condo
In the old Northern Pacific offices
The J. J Hill House and Lofts
Robber Baron Bastard
“I don’t have a 401K, Ira
No IRA either Ira.
Too confusing and anyway
I hate all that stuff.”
Think he’ll go away?
No I interest him strangely.
Slump to my office
“Natural Gas is up.”
I didn’t buy.
Could have had those gogooglies”
Weekends he is at the library
Reading up on companies.
I’m at the library
Another one
Checking out the “Soul Life of Plants”
Do they have one?
I would like to know.
Two more winters.
IRA sad but up over 678,000 gogooglies.
Only when, 20 winters from now,
When, shivering in the snow
Old and broke, dragging my old broke ass up
The steps to the J.J. Hill Lofts
Banging on his door.
“Let me in you goddamn ant!”
Will my sad friend be happy.
Which is why.
After all.
I’m here.


The Young Tsar
The young Tsar descants in Barnes and Noble
Attended by his own babyshka.
But he knows he hasn’t got a snowball’s
Chance in hell with this Matryoshka.
He wants to buy a graphic novel.
For after all it is his Name day.
She’s thinking Tolstoy, Isaac Babel
And little tea shops on the Nevsky.
They both are from our Russian sector
He’s American as me… you bet.
But she arrived on another vector
Escaping on a Jew’s bilyet.
He succumbs and smiles. Ah, how she kissed him!
The young Tsar flees east. Behold Prince Myshkin.


Embedded Sonnet
If plants have life and soul they must have grown Some analyses use triangular
Some sort of nervous system web of night subsections to allow representation of
Not linked to body. Forces yet unknown smooth curves. If improperly implemented, As the great God Baldur the God of Light undesired error can result. To detect
Saw when the Flower Princess bathed in the stream this error, repeat the above
Neither plant, nor stone, nor crystal nor wave Standard Stripline, only now
An All Knowing God. He saw this was not a dream. subsectioned with triangles, see No thing left out, no thing that he need save. Figure 6 in Chapter 2. Perform the
Eternal life to all the living things. analysis for the line subsectioned only one
Nothing is dead. He saw her naked there. (triangle) subsection wide. Determine the Alone and not alone… of course she sings! amount of error due to triangles by
Old Euclid never looked on beauty bare comparing the result with the Stripline
In hidden forms. She looked in Baldur’s eyes. Standard subsectioned one (rectangular) And laughed. And turned. Remembered the surprise subsection wide as performed above. As explained in the chapter, this test is not appropriate for Sonnet.


Halloween
She’s thirteen.
It’s Halloween.
“Dad, I’m not going trick or treating this year.”
Stunned. Not quite as bad
As when she caught me years ago
Putting the money that the fairy
Left back under her pillow.
“I’m just checking to see if
He left you enough.
That was an important tooth.
Could have been a mixup”

She didn’t believe me.

But pretty bad.
“I have a party to go to.
And anyway, I’m too old.”
“You’re dressing up though?
“Yeah, I’m going to be an angel.”
Thank God.

I offer to make a tin foil halo.
I have a lot of experience at that.
“No thanks, Dad.”

But on Halloween
“Hey, the party’s at seven.
Want to go – just down the street?”
She does. At six it’s dark.
A tiny skeleton down the street.
A perfect moon
A too cold wind.

I wait as she walks up steps.
Then down the street to a few houses.
White gown, one wing a bit crooked
And anyway too small. Never fly on those wings.

And then the Witch Tree
An old, a twisted oak, bare and bent
Just as is required!

“Remember the Witch Tree?”

“Yeah, we better go.”

“Didn’t you write a story about it?
A witch who lives under it…?”

“Yeah, we better go.”

And she hurries up the street.
Get to the party.

I stay for a second. I have something to say.

Not talking to the monsters everywhere else.

Looking round. Watching her go away.

Getting ready to catch up.

“I’m still here you goddamn witch.

I’m still here.”


The Town
It is Christmas and a Midnight drear.
The cock dreams of the slaughtered hen.

Oh, the forlorn Chanticleer!

The spinster turns in her narrow bed.
She dreams of the beloved insane...

The undertaker -- that dear old Chevalier of the dead
Dreams of his electric trains.

The gate is open to the asylum on the hill.
"Ghosts of the Insane dead" plays there.
It always will.

"Oh but the little church, the little church
...surely there...?"
The church is shuttered up. Its choirs are bare.

"Then the King, the Good King
Must send a message to the town!"

He'd better come himself.
All the lines are down.


The Tale of the Tinker Transported
I was born beneath the thistle bush.
I leapt up from the clay!
My heart sang like a dying thrush
His young love far away.

I was born in the wildwood drear
But there I could not stay.
Though Jesus be a grenadier
And I a clock of clay.

I went to be a soldier man.
But there I could not stay.
Dying by some stranger’s hand
In lands so far away.

Then I would a sailor be.
But there I could not stay.
There were many famous victories
But I was far away.

I stayed then with a Gypsy girl
All winter in a valley.
She had black eyes and raven curls
And I called her Dirty Sally.

When summer came I left her there
In the gypsy caravan, oh!
And stepped out smart to take the air
Of the wide and wakening land.

I was learning the tinker’s art
And walked on through the Fall
And mended many a maiden’s heart
With my long peggin’ awl.

Oh, stamen stiff and pistil sweet
All on the livelong day!
He that would temptation meet
Is but a clock of clay.

And then I met a demure lass.
It was in Dublin city.
She would sit and watch the fine folks pass
All evening by the Liffy.

I am but a country lad
But many a maiden have I seen, oh..
But none with eyes so bright and mad
And none with eyes so green.

“I am a merry tinker lad
My young love,” I did call.
“I’ve got a thing to mend,” she said.
“If you have brought your awl.”

Oh stamen stiff and pistil sweet
All on a winter’s day.
He that would temptation meet
Is but a clock of clay.

So she sang like the cuckoo.
I sang like the thrush.
There were two birds in the garden
And one bird in the bush.

“Now then,” said the fair maid
“Will you marry me?
And carry me far far away
Across the wine dark sea?

My father is a Captain grim
Many stories I could tell, oh
He likes his whores and he like his gin
And my life’s a living hell.”

“Oh, hush now lass and do not cry
Of this you’ll have no doubt
I’ll take you to Australia
If you’ll blow the candle out.”

And we beguiled the wild wild night
And the wild wild wind did blow.
I left her in the cold daylight
Before the cock did crow.

So it’s farewell bonny lassie
I’ll never married be
Though I become a vicar
And have Jesus Christ to tea.

Then I put on my tinker’s pants
And my tinker’s coat
And kissed her oh so softly
And took a half pound note.

So, it’s farewell bonnie lassie
I’ll never married be.
Though Jesus be a sailor
And love the pure whiskey.

So out I slipped into the hall
But who do you think I see?
The Captain grim with a quart of gin
And a pistol on his knee.

Oh, stamen stiff and pistil sweet
All on a winter’s day.
He that would temptation meet
Is but a clock of clay.

I woke up in six iron bands
The captain said “I’ll tell ya
You’re going to Van Dieman’s land
Near far away Australia.”

Now I make do with lizard stew
And heed the wombat’s call
And mend the hearts of kangaroos
With my long peggin’ awl.


Whitman’s Sampler
Getting old
Can’t find the kind of candy
You want anymore.

The Whitman’s Sampler.
Fine for all occasions!
Worked for your Dad.

Stopping in the rain at Sun Ray Drugs.
“Dooley, buy two boxes.
One for your Mom and one for me and you.”
Christmas. Valentine’s day.
We ate most of the candy.
Maybe she had Cashew Cluster.
If she was real fast.

So here you are
Years later at Walgreens.

“Look a Whitman’s Sampler!”

Taking it home
Looking for the one kind you remember.
Checking the little map on the lid.
What the hell?
Your wife watching amazed
As you savagely bite

Vanilla Butter Creams,
Chocolate Nut Fudges,
Cashew Clusters,
Vermont Fudges,
Chocolate Whips,
Molasses Chews,
Coconut Creams,
Solid Chocolate Messenger Boys,
Butter Cream Caramels,
Toffee Chips.

“They used to have an Almond Nougat.
Where the hell are the Almond Nougats?”

None.

“Goddamit!”

Nothing.

Call up your Dad to tell him.

“Dooley, get off the phone.
Dooley, I’m 91 years old and I don’t give a shit.”

You’re happy again.
Knowing you still
Got some hard traveling to do.


Telephone
Sometimes when I call my Dad
He says “Get off the phone, Dooley.”
I figured it out.
He thinks I’m on the upstairs phone
Messing around
Keeping him from talking to

Someone important.

Sometimes he says: “How’s that car?”
Meaning the 75 Toyota Corolla he gave me
In 78. Transmission totally trashed
From his habit of driving everywhere
In second gear.

Still, I’m afraid of that call.
Middle of the night.
My brother: “Dad…”
“I’ll be right there,” I tell him.
I’ll be right there
Anyway.


Billy and the Poet Morons
Where are the poets
For the Poet Morons in cubes?
Give us a break:
Pretending to work
Listening to “Werewolves of London”
Twenty times a day.
At least.

Do you think that, say,
Mr. Billy Collins
Will write for us?

Hell, no.

Anytime he wants
Sliding outside from his home
To walk his dog.

“This might be a poem,” he thinks.

Tying up little Roger
His sweet little two year old Westie
As he slides into Starbucks for a Chai.
Sipping it later. “Look at the funny cloud, Roger my man!”
Yep, it’s a poem.

Never thinking about the poet morons
Knowing nothing about the bosses of Poet Morons!

A man from Oz walking around a sweet home Transylvania!

Safe.

Safe.

I want to be Billy.
I’d take care of it.
Write a little poem.

“Dear Poet Morons.
You can all kiss my ass..

Billy”

As I puffed out of Transylvania
On my moon powered Guggenheimer.
Which is more.
When you really think about it.
Then we deserve.


Pumpkin Teeth
I finish carving my pumpkin.
Took a little longer than most. True.
What do you think of this guy?”
“That’s good, Dad,” my daughter says.
“Nice teeth,” my wife says.

“When he was just starting out
I had to show your Daddy
How to do pumpkin teeth.”

My daughter laughs.

“No way,” I say.
“Don’t start with that.
You want to start a legend.
All anybody will remember about me?

Damn.”

My pumpkin does look fine though.
Glad I stopped that.

“Your great granddad couldn’t even
make pumpkin teeth until your great
grandmom showed him how.”

Don’t want that rumor started.

(Even if it’s true)


Going West
Looking for what we
Found the moon
That night on the highway
From North Dakota.

We were talking about Indians.
At the highway rest stop
You saw a stellar jay
Flying into the dark.

All these towns built on the bones
Of sleepy children!
Families hauling European clocks
Over the hourless prairie.

Into the dark again and the moon.
We stop even though it is below zero.
Something blows through our bodies.
Ghosts fleeing us. They can do this easily.

Tonight we finally see our bodies.
The moon's moon floats in the sky.
All night this happens!


Don’t bury me in my Walmart shoes
Don’t bury me in my Walmart shoes
I might have been poor but I paid my dues.
In my time o' dying please let me choose.
So don’t bury me in my Walmart shoes.

Don’t bury me in my Levi Jeans.
I’m the Lonliest Ranger. I’m not James Dean.
And by the time I die they’ll still be too tight.
When I get up before the Kindly Light.

Don’t bury me in my jipijapa hat.
Put it beside me so it won’t be squashed flat.
I’m dead… don’t make me worry 'bout that.
Pleaae don’t bury me in my jipijapa hat.

Naked came I. Naked I go out.
Bury me naked so there won’t be no doubt
When they look at the Ranger from that poor lonely crowd
That the Lonliest Ranger was super well endowed.


The Snow
Because you loved the old man you tell stories about him.
Sometimes the stories are true.

He spit tobacco in tin cans and lived
In your aunt's house in an upstairs room
Where she was not allowed.

He pissed out the window when
He was drunk and sang
“Arthur McBride.”

Your aunt screamed,
"Sweet Jesus, What's this?"
And he looked down on her.

"Its your goddamned father
Pissing out the goddamned window!"

The winter night when
He died you were home looking
Out at the snow.

At the loneliness of the footprints
Your parents had made
Where they had gone.

At yours where you had gone out
And then come in again.

Small flakes floated past the streetlamps
And melted when they touched
The car. The wavering lights

Shivered, standing in pools of themselves.

When you parents came home
The snow had already whitened
Their shoulders and he was dead.

The next morning when you awoke,
The new snow had come.

And your father's footprints
And your mother's and
Yours and everyone's were all gone.

But the new world was still
So lovely all in the
new snow.


The 32 Pockets of Bertrand O’Toole
Pocket #1: A purse, of the "small change" type formerly carried
by misers and presidents of Standard Oil, black, distressed leather,
used for holding mechanical moths which when released cry "Help me.
Help me, Neighbor!" Used when impersonating Old Scratch and
for moments of merriment when attending Board Meetings.

Pocket #2: "The Jest Book of the Dead" -- a compendium of jokes
guaranteed to crack up the Dead. "Why did the chicken cross the
road? To get to the Other Side." &c.

Pocket#3: A set of knuckledusters and a scimitar.

Pocket#4: A set of cock's wattles.

Pocket#5: Devil's Glen Scotch -- for private consumption.

Pocket#6: Quizzing glasses

Pocket#7: A folding tent for privacy while changing one's bad breeches

Pocket#8: My shadow, the Count Chiasimo

Pocket#9 A complete "artificial glen" with rocks, and artificial
moon , and forester's station. Excellent for achieving the effect
of the sublime without going out-of-doors.

Pocket#10: A sad Rilkean mirror.

Pocket#11: A list off all elements as they should be arranged in
benevolent natural order.

Pocket#12 My special scents (in silver flasks) -- "Water Frozen by
Boredom" -- "Theological Scruples"

Pocket#13 Swiss Army Knife with Unix workstation.

Pocket #14: An ingenious self-defending peacock

Pocket#15: Instructions for completing my tomb.

Pocket#16: A Ventroloquist's "Helper" -- Recordings for Divers
Occasions, especially cries to put in the mouths of enemies --
"God Bless Captain Vere!" "Les jeux sont faits!" &c

Pocket#17: A Little Devil

Pocket#18: A tuningfork for snoring

Pocket#19: A silk ladder for descending from boudoirs

Pocket#20: A bellygun stolen from a crusty old toper.

Pocket#21: A set of gingerbread noses.

Pocket#22: The star called Childsbottom.

Pocket#23: A faded 1860 print of Goethe ascending the Brocken

Pocket#24: A shrivelled potato

Pocket#25: Instructions for broiling steaks on one's tongue

Pocket#26: Begob the Bobwob -- chalk drawing

Pocket#27: A basilisk awaiting further orders

Pocket#28: A Pocket Guide to the Vilest Bonzes (1879 edition)

Pocket#29: Game Ball for the Current Universe

Pocket#30: A collection of sock holes -- includes holes from the hose
of the Bride of Lammermoor and the Mother of the Maccabees.

Pocket#31: Ravishing thoughts and sentimental correspondance

Pocket#32: The Royal Academy of Berlin, countless butterflies swarming
over a shreiking entablature, Shelley's children, a peanut butter
sandwich.


The Ballad of Little Noddy
Up the magic mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.

Little Kants and Hegels
Socrates' and Platos
Pissing in our garden
Eating our tomatoes.

Preaching their philosophy
To prove their very piss is
The cockle shell theosophy
Of Hermes Trismigistus.

Once there was a little boy
Little Noddy was he name
Who held on to his little joy
Beneath his counterpane.

What a pretty wanton boy
Slaughtering the flies
And spattering the bourgeoisie
In their dogmatic stys!

What a brave young Nimrod!
Who with lists prefers to hunt
For Consciousness and Cabbages
Coelacanths and Cunt.

Vile rumor states our lad avers
All three the same dish
But Rumor's wrong: "I much prefer
The last sans consciousness.

I am a carefree deliquant!

Will take a cabbage everyday
Though Coelacanths are elegant
When in a family way.
I prefer the simple vegetable

Much before another.
Its inner silk suggestable
Of my late lamented mother.
Picture a silken draped boudoir

And Daddy behind the arras
The cabbage in a pink peignoir
And certain scents from Paris
Daddy chained and gagged. O! Rare!

And a slit for him to see
And another in the cabbage dear
Just big enough for me.
Then I caress the vegetable

And read her Havelock Ellis
And poetry pansexual
Of the dying on the trellis
Of many a time-blown rose

Wailing for her demon lover
And many a well-blown nose
Ever waiting for another
Finger than the one it loves!

A nose whose passion lingers
Stars above -- though penetrated nightly
By the finger it abhors.
Until the turf lies lightly, lightly

And the doors, the golden doors
Of Eternity open!
And the dear digit it adores
d
e
s
c
e
n
d
All Beatrice to its bosogger.
And then I take my daddy's Luger
This is how my Daddy wooed her
And then, and then! I leap! I leap!
Ravaging that cabbage
With a passion so steep
It o'ertops Dante's!

And then I calm her
With a murmured verse von
Jeffery Dahlmer.

Daddy thinks the cabbage mother
Daddy's always getting thinner
Though every night he has another
Piece of mother for his dinner."

You can see that little Noddy
Had quite eccentric passions
Perhaps banal to anybody
Who keeps up with the fashions:

Vile poetry and matricide
A bit of old Jocasta
A weariness of time and tide
And, to make the moment last

A burning in a gemlike flame
Of all of his relation.
But he is like the gentle rain
The leaders of a nation

Direct ten million tons of bombs
Upon the place beneath
Bunkers, bridges, dads, and moms!
Roll me over Lethe!

Our little Noddy after all
Is rather ineffectual
His sins are white and do appall
But, at least, not intellectual.

All passion spent he rests his cheek
And recites a soothing psalm
And, perhaps, he dreams of leeks
But the vision of napalm

Is sugar plums and marzipan
To those across the sea
Who calculate the body count
Sing "Nearer my God to thee.

Nearer to thee Lord!" Then they
Adjust their calculations
And (100,000 say)
Are gone
gone
gone
Quite away.

And then, they face the tribulations
Of dog shit in Harvard Yard.
(Professor Booby's Lhaso Apso again)

Many miles away
The General says:
"Men, here is you mission. We want numbers!
Arise ye nations from your dogmatic slumbers!!

In a geste most incandescent
The jungle algebras luminescent.
The mother, child, and sturdy peasant
All become quite deliquescent.

Flowing in a fiery stream!
Flowing in a golden dream!
Till they arrive at Harvard Yard
Where Booby thinks it a canard
"That's not my dog's shit in Harvard Yard.
Not my dog's shit in Harvard Yard.

The priest, the King, the simple clown.
Intellectual vileness trickles down.

As does this verse. O comic Muse
Make my bowels and bladder swell!
Jesus Christ, I've paid my dues.
Deliver me to Infidel.
Who is not a little Noddy.
Little Noddy's anybody.

Souls of poets dead and gone
Be sure to keep your condoms on.
Be advised your lissome muse
Won't be as prankish as she used.
And though, perhaps, your stiffened chillness
Will seem to some a formal stillness
And the worm your daily wage is:
You'll still be better than John Cage is.

Ah, she's back. My verse becomes more regular.
Except for that last line. A rhyme! A rhyme!
Hey, Tim the keg-u-la
You bought is all drunk up.

That's a lie.
He isn't even here.
Hasn't been for a year.
I loved him best.
We were the "Owl Oak Press"
He had three wives and a silver star.
And killed himself in Carmel Ca.
1/1/91
Car
Car

Car
the cars said.

Did it the American way. In his car with a .45.
The word I want to rhyme is "alive."
Alive! Alive O!
Silver stars, and wars and wars,
And pretty maids all in a row.

O Tim! You lost your town the race.
But at least you found a parking space.

Alas, poor Tim is not no body
Let's go back to Little Noddy.

One night little Noddy
Maddened by the crowds
Who danced the limbic limbo
Neath the Magellanic clouds

Went up the magic mountain
And down the rushy glen
And by St. Tommy's fountain
He met the little men!

O see their vile symposium
Underneath the trees
A cacophile colloquium
Of venal venomy.

Buboes like bijous!
Transcendent logorrheas
Blood or beetlejuice
On their paideas.

Socrates accouchant
Plato on his knees
Hegel only kegeled
While Kant begged, "please."

Poor panting pooh bahs
And moon-botched mullatos
Hear the ontic ohh ahs
In their secret grottos

The very meagre spewing
The sudden going slack
The strangled senseless mooing.
I want my money back.

Poor Noddy thought them pixies
A typical cathexis
With many a cunning lick he
Sought logosrhythmic nexus.

"O fondle all my fabula
Make my bowels go whoosh
Bite my incunabula
Gerbil my cartouche!"

They crowned him then with laurel
And pulled his undies down
And had a little quarrel
About quintessence brown

And who would have the precedent
And who would wait behind
But in concord incrudescedent
They chose symbol over sign.

First the gave him No-Doz
And then they bound his arms
Then spoke to him of Logos
And of his manly charms

Then they put him in a toga
And in the best Platonic forms
Whispered he was deathless
And buggered him in swarms

Drizzled him with powdered gold
And decked his dick with lapis
Diddled with his tiny fold
And called him "Dear Priapus."

Filled his behind with sea dark wine
And then they crammed the ice in
"How do you feel?" "Why I feel fine,
Rather Dionysian."

Then they took a silver spoon
And scraped him out all hollow.
He laughed and bayed right at the moon
"I feel just like Apollo."

Then they stroked his little bum
(It really was quite flexible)
And gashed a hole between his legs
Until he wasn't very sexable.

See the timeless golden dial!
Hear the crystal spheres!
See the unmoved crocodile
Cry his pearly tears!

The good, the true, the beautiful
A frenzy fine and flighty
And Noddy shouts, "O! take me! Do!
I feel like Aphrodite."

Plato did and him y-thrid.
"Dear master, are you peeing?"
"It's just the God you silly sod.
You're just becoming being."

Let's leave him there. O my dear Muse
I must say that I detest
The words that I am forced to use
Like "bugger" and the rest

And pee and fuck and dick and cunt
(Poor Noddy's vade mecum)
But I only sing as he was wont
Which is, it seems, "fair dinkum"

Or whatever they say near Botany Bay
In the land of Noddy's fellows,
Australia the Fair! And, anyway
Even old Catullus

And a murder thick of other bards
Were forced to this vile usage.
Don't ask me who. It's rather hard
Living in a loose age

Where buggery is thought a crime
(I mean the kind consensual)
While helping thousands out of time
Is reaching your potential.

Sing mea culpa everyone
Pick up the muse and lug her
Guts to the top of Helicon
And bugger, gently, bugger.

Sweet Christ! Not yet! Unhand her, Mark
It's a swerving so to swive
We're still on Wilson River Drive
And Noddy's still alive.

He guards the sacred oxen
The oxen of the Sun.
But a glamour seems to mock him.
He only sees the one.

And this one looks just like a cow.
So what does Noddy dare?
"Flossie my own fleur du mal!"
Then he goes all Baudelaire.

And takes her in unnatural ways
Ways so vile and low
They were unmatched until the days
Of Verlaine and Rimbaud.

The cow just mooed and chewed and mooed.
Noddy did what should be banned.
O depths of Moral Turpitude!
He mentioned old Ayn Rand!

He only muttered out the word
To try to keep from coming
He was dreaming of the pliant herds
And of his different drumming.

The cow cried out! The levin flashed!
Noddy screamed in pain.
The cow dissolved! The levin flashed!
Little Noddy came.

What against he couldn't tell
But it was the Goddess Io
Who had simply been through hell.
You can read it in her bio.

Noddy struggled to get off
And gave a little cry-a
The goddess gave a little cough
"They call the wind Mariah.

The fire is Tess, the rain is Joe
I hope I get this straight.
Apollo has a golden bow.
Aphrodite's always late.

Zeus has the juice and just hangs loose
Hera's such a hassle.
And I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce
That Plato is an asshole."

The goddess felt a tiny pinch
And touched her sacred portal
Little Noddy dared not flinch
"I think I smell a mortal."

And then she felt a nasty itch
In the derriere direction.
"Oh dear", she sighed "This is a bitch
I've got a yeast infection.

A douche might work. A douche divine.
Of amaranth and rue
And equal parts of turpentine
And a little Mountain Dew."

She sighed and wished. Behold the douche!
A boiling viscous fluid
That chuckled like a Scaramouche
In a cunning little cruet.

"Douche to the Gods, my lady fair,"
The douche cried with panache
Made little Fairbanks in the air
And fondled his moustache.

But what of Noddy? Damn my eyes.
I seem to have forgotten.
He hung there by a mild surmise
And smelled like fish most rotten

Behold! The douche leaps from the cup
And quivers on the quim.
Noddy weeps and covers up
And sings an English hymn

A quavering tune: "I thee implore
To save a wretch like me."
That Little Noddies like to sing
When far away at sea

And their mothers are so far away
And it's really dark at night
And it's a long way to Bristol bay
With that nasty bosun tight.

But the douche just laughed and tried to peer
Through the deific tangle
He was a jolly musketeer
Who held his sword a dangle

That sword had killed a thousand yeasts
From Moscow to Peoria
And drank the blood of judas priests
All for the greater glory...

"Ah", he cried when he saw the lad
This is to damn too damn too damn bad
And the douche just wept: "Sad sad sad
This is just too damn too damn too damn bad."

And little Noddy wept. He knew the truth.
His only friend was a goddamn douche.
The douche heaved a heavy sigh.
"All of this will pass."

And picked up a crab just passing by
Who bit Noddy in his ass.
"Free at last", the poor boy squeaked
Unstuck from his own jism

And saw where his becoming leaked
All sparkling like a prism.
He reached his hand around behind
And plucked out the owl feather

Preferring matter over mind
Started running for the heather.
The Goddess laughed and saw him run
(It really wasn't fair)

"A mortal. Oh, what jolly fun."
Then seemed to catch the air.
Little Noddy shrieked and fell
And cried out (rather quizzical)

"Jesus Christ this hurts like hell
My dick is metaphysical!"
And so it was! It dandled there
At least ten or twenty versts
What once was meat was passing rare.

God knows how that hurts.
That mini-length of Oscar Mayer
Now thinner than the thistle
Upon the head of Richard Pryor

Or Nancy Reagan's pistle
Stretched out in far flung molecules
Like a St. Tommy's angel band
One end near his follicles

The other in her hand!
She reeled him back and played with him
Like a fish upon a string.
He'd make a pretty pendant

She could even make him sing.
Poor Noddy begged and sobbed and moaned
As he dandled twixt her breasts
He bitched and kvetched and groaned and groaned

Till the goddess got depressed.
She took the little minnikin
And held him up to see
"I once knew a Mick named Finnigan

That sounded just like thee.
What do you want you little shit?"
Then Noddy did reply
"I want this terrible dream to quit

If not, I want to die."
The goddess sighed and twitched her nose
The little guy was free!

He ended up upon the ranch
With Hoss and Pa and me.
He's happy now cause all he does
He does it all for Lorne.

And what a wiz he was he was
Shucking all the corn.
He talks philosophy with Hoss
Does his oriental thing
Bitches and bemoans his loss

And buggers poor Hop Sing!
The little men? Why she found them.
In their tiny elfin grot.
And listened to their boring talk

Screwed up her nose, said "NOT!"
And they were changed, changed udderly
To ugly leprechauns
And, though they are more cudderly,

They'll still fuck up your lawns
And bugger moths and butcher flies
As they were wont to do
And fashion little priestly stys

All in the morning dew
They'll "crucify the butterflies"
"Break gnats upon the wheel."
Then tell you with a wild surmise,

"I guess it's how we feel."
Four and twenty blackbirds
Eat the ever-dying swan
Tiresius eats Jesus
All bloody flows the Don
Aristotle in his bottle
Keeps looking for a ship
But tiny sailors sail away
And let the big seas slip.

Straight for the heart of Lyra.

"I'm so pleased we're not dining at the ranch tonight.
Hop Sing's such a filthy cook."
Peter O'Toole
"Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?
Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in
the delerium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of
rejection invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity
of the satellite of the planet."


In 1959

We didn’t make it to Midnight Mass.
My father always wore a hat.
And that’s what I remember.
I mean this was a cool hat.
Like Sinatra used to wear.
And he came in and took off his hat
And there was snow on it.
And Bishop Fulton J Sheen was on the TV.
Meaning it was pretty late on Christmas eve.
And my brother and me were in our pajamas.
Hopalong Cassidy for him. Or maybe Roy Rogers.
Who remembers them any more?
I inclined towards a sportier look.
White with red stripes.
Philadelphia Philles curlicued on the pocket.
And my mother said, “Where the Hell have you been.?”
And my father took off his overcoat and said.
“At the store.”
“It’s Christmas if you haven’t noticed,” my mother said
“I’m tired of doing everything myself.”
And the electric reindeer in our window blinked on and off.
And my father said “Oh, fuck all this.”
And he put on his coat and then his hat.
And my mother said “What the hell are you doing?”
And he took our Christmas tree.
Picked it up decorations and all
And carried it out the door to the trash.
I was hoping for a bike.
My brother already had a ray gun and a Fort Apache set
That our aunt had given him.
And my father stepped on the fort I remember
And broke a few soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry.
But we didn’t move and my mother screamed
And my father calmly took off his hat and coat
And went to the basement where we had a bar
And my mother screamed at him and went upstairs
And then came down
And then she put on HER coat
And we screamed but she took off out the door
And my father came up out of the basement screaming.
But it was too late and he stood in the doorway
Screaming as he saw our car slide down the street.
My uncle, my father’s brother lived up the street
And my father called him.
And Dad told us to put on our coats.
And Bishop Fulton J Sheen was talking about the Christ Child.
And we left the TV on as we got in my Uncles Pontiac.
And my Dad said “I know where the fuck she’s going.”
And my Dad said “Let’s go.”

Snow, snow everywhere.

My mother roared down US30 in a 59 Buick at 80mph

putting on her lipstick.


­
Ronald Reagan Blues
Ronald Reagan got shot in Washington.
Got shot in Washington D.C.
Ronald Reagan got shot in Washington.
Got shot in Washington D.C.
They put him in the black car.
He didn't say "Oh, my. Oh, me."

Shot up in the black car
Old Ron made some jokes.
Fucked up in the black car
Old Ron made some jokes.
We'll never know. He'll never know.
We is all just folks.

Tired of the bullshit about him.
Tired of his bullshit too.
Tired of the bullshit about him.
Tired of his bullshit too.
The only thing I really know
Death comin' for me and you.

"Silly motherfuckers," I sd to my friend John.
"Silly motherfuckers. See how they babble on."
John sd "Why, you talking to me for anyways?
I got killed in Vietnam."


Music for a Masonic Funeral
Jupiter, eyes turned inward,
Rests his cheek on the cold moon.
O! Do not ask him why he weeps.
Great gods weep for themselves alone.
And he is as stone
And tumbles through the interplanetary night
In a cold that chills even immortal flesh and bone.

A god adrift in a universe of Seem!

Of what then does he dream?
Why, he dreams of home.
Of windwrecked, swanswept heights
Flame rush skies, Foam rush seas!
Striding through the rainsweet day
And many a maid of Thessalay
Lay ripe and eager beneath the olive trees
And dreamt the possible -- the feathered deity!

Then, this god who came as a swan
As beautiful as a poem,
Who shook, like us, with oceanic longings
Beneath a spring moon,
Alone came before your triune King,
Who, somber and wan,
Dressed in a seamless robe,
In the place of Law,
Denied him his ancient rights,
And cast him out beyond geography!

And are you now beyond him …
Utterly touched by your sexless God,
Your Spiritus Mundi, his fingers cold as ferns,
His breath stinking of his resurrection?

Answer!
When you wake at night
To find your slow thighs parted,
And no sign of the Kindly Light,
Do you listen for the sound of wings?


1970 something
Drivin’ down the road near Winslow, Arizona
I heard that song – right then!
1970 something. This is true.
No girl though.
And I was happy for a minute
Forgetting why I was driving down the road:
To join the army – again.
I was confused.

Yesterday I heard it again
And imagined I was there with me
Shouting “Pay attention you dumb fuck.”
And me just drivin’

Imagining this – ah, God so much lost.
Makes it all more interesting
And I am happy again.

What do you think about that?

Goin’down I’m goin’ down
I’m goin’ down to Goin’ Down.
Third Murderer
I saw Warren Buffet on a truffet.
He kicked my ass.
I showed Donald Trump my Heffalump.
He turned on the gas.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Tom McGrath is dead.
And Adorno is too.
Many more have fled.
This overstocked zoo.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Poetry doesn’t change a thing.
You’re not sure that’s right.
You awake and sing
The World of Lite.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Everything’s ok.
You got your Sunday toot.
All’s a play.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

It’s hard out here. You can’t hardly gets your breath.
With all these Third Murderers. Like in Macbeth.

Angels is coming.
Trumpets are flourishing.
He knows were dumb
And continually perishing.

It’s hard out here.You can hardly gets your breath.
All my pretty ones? All? Just like in Macbeth.


The Market
When the Irish came to Ameriky to work
Some came on the boats to Louisiana
To work in the salt mines.
When they got there they had to take them off in wheelbarrows.
Someone forgot the food.
They just threw the dead in the sea.
50 cents a week and three of ten died.
Good work for the Irish. Too risky for slaves.
I mean you have some money invested in them.

When it rains it pours.

My Uncle Mike was a runty little Irishman
In 1942 went to join the Navy.
No money so he walked 17 miles to the recruiter.
“Come back in two weeks O’Brien.”
So he walked back.
January 1942.
Two weeks later walked 17 miles again.
“Nope, we’re not ready yet. Come back tomorrow.
Walked 17 miles home and next morning
Walked 17 miles back.
“We ain’t…”
“I’m joining the Army,” Mike says
And they took him that day.
“O’Brien we’re making you a tank spotter!
Your job is to run ahead of our tanks
And point to where the German tanks are.
Welcome to the Army!”

50 percent of Mike made it home.

We all know things have changed.
People have changed. And

“They’ll be pie in the sky by and by—when you die.”


Weep, Ozymandius, Weep
Outside her window snow falls slow and soft,
She wiggles at her new computer chair,
And sighs and moves the mouse, googles Laura Croft,
A chair, a desk built almost out of air!
OK, from a kit, that same afternoon,
By me, her Dad, and, I beg your pardon,
By me, cursing that long day in her room,
A geste, a feat like the Hanging Gardens
Pharaoh’s Light House, the Panama Canal!
I labored alone for glory, for fame,
And old man in winter. It seems banal
But… Eternal Glory! Immortal Name!
“All right it wobbles.” But remember what I did
In this golden age.
Here’s looking at you, kid.


Stone Soul Picnic
“It’s here at last: the Stone Soul Picnic.”
You looked about and took another breath.
It was “Ok” we were merely at the clinic
No worries yet. It was only a test.
“Ah, it’s here at last: the distinguished thing.
Our Henry must have loved that wicked pun.
And maybe thought… Oh, ring a ding a ding…
Then the screw turned… He liked to have his fun.”
Wit lapsed, of course, when you got the glossy:
The Fatal Interview, the Last Directives.
A rally: “I’ll go just like Bob Fosse,
A dance and a wave my last electives”
And then it came. Oh, reader turn your face.
No words. It’s here. The usual commonplace.


A Sonnet Without Allusions
Here is a sonnet without allusions,
Bare naked poesy sans feather boa,
No seven veils. Don’t jump to conclusions!
That might mean something but I dunno.
There’s cocktails enough. Bring your Minolta!
Quite safe. A drink? Want to see her Iamb?
A glance! A dance! It’s time for the Volta!
What’s next? Oh, dear. It’s damn Omar Khayem.
He’s gone, thank God, but one wanted a rhyme.
Alas, too late, the rhyme scheme’s quite bollixed
Yes, out with the dancer! Bring on the Mime!
No damn allusions. See how he frolics.
No Y____ts, no K____ts, no P_____d, and no B__d.
Just as you like it. It’s really quite hard!


The Insect Clerks of Neiman Marcus
Lo! The Gods and Goddesses of the new mythology.
The Godesses are crocodiles in communion dresses!
They wear Adolf of Dachau designer jeans!
They wear necklaces of bird skeletons!
The Gods wear shrouds of petroleum jelly!
They brilliantine their hair.
They turn their mild, Belsen eyes on you
"May I help you sir?" O do not stare!
At secret luncheons they devour lark's hearts.
They devour the intestines of mummys.
They prefer larks three to one.
Three to one.
They have never murdered a baby
Who didn't deserve it.
Listen O listen!
Hear the twitching of their delicate attennae!
Haie! They come! They come!
Dragging their long
and swelling abdomens!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
The insect clerks have come.
There are trapdoors in Cosmetics!
There are trapdoors in Lingerie!
There are trapdoors in Men's Accessories!
There is a secret button in the elevator.
Nightly they descend into vast catacombs.
Buffy! Meagan! Tom! Wesley!
They hang upside down!
They copulate like bats!
They whisper to each others in the languages
Of prehistoric fungi!
And, like Gods everywhere,
They are always hungry.
O Holy Mother!
The store is closing!
They know who you are!
Run! O RUN!
There is a trapdoor in Customer Service.
Down you go
down
down
down
They carry you effortlessly through the tunnels.
They carry you past rooms.
Rooms where small blue clouds weep!
Rooms full of angel guts!
Rooms full of bearded foetuses in bronze caskets.
Rooms where your wife makes love to eels!
(Your wife has a certain eel sex appeal)
Rooms where sores run naked on chandeliers!
Rooms where sewage rats read poetry
In pink peignoirs!
O what is this big room?
It is the Mad Queen's chamber.
It is the throneroom of hearts.
It looks. It looks.
The inside of your brain.
The indifferent mandibles let you drop
To the marble floor.
They quietly suck out your eyes.
And then
Ah! Then!
The Mad Queen comes.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
The dread ovipositer.
You lay paralyzed.
You look out into the "Crevices of Night."
After 80,000 years
your tears
turn to pearls.
Oh, those were pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him but doth suffer…


Luftmensch
The out-of-work painter sketches the ghetto
emptied of its inhabitants,
The painting is filled with objects,
The absence of the living is only temporary
and hints at the most delicious mysteries.
The "somewhat overstocked zoos" of pre WWII Europe.
Zeppelins are required. Liftships leave every day.
We all took pretty ponies up the golden stairs to the sun.
Extraordinary visions all last night
Along the lake of Silvaplana,
not too far from a certain powerful pyramidal rock near Suler
I was given the envelope.
Into the teacup, quickly, my friends!
The cup (as the mirror shows)
is indeed the cracked yellow one
Otto Frank is now holding in his trembling hands
as the Nazis march down the little street.
But little teacup does make it through!
And the silence and dust are so dear to us.
Later the teacup is filled with the eyelashes of owls.
A wind comes and we waft through the night.


Literary Baseball
Who’s at bat? Why it looks like Old Bill Yeats.
Pope’s on the Mound. The pitch is wide and low.
Yeat’s spits. The pitch. A hit. Get it Johnny Keats!
A long legged fly. Keats is too damn slow.
He coughs. He falls! Look it’s Wallace Stevens!
Way back! He’ll have to catch it off the wall.
Shelley scores! By God the score is even!
Yeats stops at third. A fact which doth appall
Bobby Frost. Who strides quickly to the mound.
Pope’s out. Pound’s in. No it’s Christy Marlowe!
(The Bard’s retired.) But then there is a sound
As the crowd cries out in rage and sorrow,
Makes for their cars. The Greeks would call it Fate.
What can be done when Homer’s at the plate?


My Brooklyn
15th Ave "hangin out on da corner,"
Buck-buck, Man-hunt, stoop ball, skully, two-hand touch, 7 Mississippi.
13th Ave.,
15th Ave.,
17th Ave.,
18th Ave.,
20th Ave.
Loew's Oriental,
The Benson,
Walker Theater,
Marboro.
86th Street: the "L,"
"Dadillac",
Need a slice: L&B, Lenny's,
DaVinci's, Krispy's.
Regina Pacis, St.Rosalia, St. Bernadette.
Stickball and roller hockey at the P.S. 279 schoolyard
Double hotdog heros at Coney Island Joe's.
Walking to Ave. L to buy baseball cards
Caesar's Bay, Chess King , S&J, The Garage, Frank and Sal—
"D A, no spray, and don't get scissor happy"
Rispoli—home-made Italian ice.
New Utrecht H.S.—Monte Midler, Basta, Ms. Stern, Ali, Leibowitz
Neighborhood photographer : Frankie Foto
Saturday morning was peaceful. My father gone to the store
And my mother rarely rose until about 1.
I just pushed the bottles of Jim Beam and the overflowing ashtrays
Out of the way and settled down. “Ha, ha, Cisco," "Oh, ho, Pancho"
Be careful crossing the streets.
Look both ways and make sure there isn't a car coming.
And then proceed across the street very carefully.
Study real hard in school and learn all about our country.
The United States of America.
Mind Mom and Dad Don't forget kids, they love you just as much as you love them.
and the police officers of your city
I remember growing up at 3420 Clerendon Road in the Flatbush section.
It was the best of both worlds—the Irish, Italians and Jewish people.
Everyone got along and everyone had pride—not that anyone had all that much.
That did not matter.
Can anyone remember the name?
We were all in it together.
The spring and summer were just wonderful.
I used to play stickball on the street and the old people used to sit on their lawn chairs.
I remember their conversations so well . . .
Nixon vs. McGovern, the War in Vietnam,
The Mets, how John Lennon should be deported for being a "radical."
How all the old ladies thought Mayor Lindsey was so handsome.
That was some summer.
Can anyone remember the name?
Do a button hook and I'll hit you at the Chevy.
Joe's pizza on Ave. L.
Mario's barber shop.
Bataway on Pennsylvania Ave.
The roller coaster (Penn Ave.) to the Carvel.
Chow Chow Cup, Milty the Good Humor Man,
Uncle Lee (Bungalow Bar) Punch ball.
Anyone remember hopping the school fence on President Street?
Anyone rememember the BMT train and jumping onto the track to retrieve
a high flying ball from the across the school yard fence?
rememememberrememememberrememememberrememememberremememember?
Around 1 I would hear my mother stirring
Just in time for me to escape to a matinee. Usually a double feature.
"The Man with the Atomic Brain"
and "Revenge of the Creature."
That's all for now.
I now live in Oklahoma City and am 74 years old. Sure would like to hear from other Brooklynites.
Can anyone remember the name?
Back in the 1950s there was a big fire that destroyed the apartment house at Brevoort and Bedford Ave.
My Dad whistling as he came home from work and climbed the 5 flights of stairs.
The days were wonderful and filled with excitement in our courtyard, concrete backyards.
The nights were warm and safe.
Almost everyone had a mom and dad who lived with them, usually a grama or grampa too.
Walks down Pitkin Avenue, with my Dad and my uncle.
So, so safe. So, so safe So, so safe So, so safe So, so safe So, so safe
Stop off at the Chocolate Shop for an egg cream. Look in the Stadium Toy shop, and hope.
One day my dad took me to John's Bargain Store and told me to pick out any 5 toys I wanted. I never felt so happy in my life!
My dad passed away 24 years ago
Candy stores, lime-rickeys, egg-creams, Dukes of Earl Tuna salad sandwiches, 2 cent plain, 3-part Musketeers for 5 cents, cherry lime rickeys.
Brooklyn had it all!
The streets were tough with tough kids,
But were filled with a European charm from
Mature people who were precious.
I will never (and don't ever want to) forget it! There will never be anything like it again.
I remember Saturday matinees at the theater for 14 or 21 cents; then it went up to a quarter.
Boredom was impossible.
Eating potato & onion or kasha knishes at Shatzkin's.
I can still taste the franks and french fries at Nathans.
Hot sweet potatoes or chestnuts from corner vendors in Manhatten
It was fun watching the old men playing Bocci under the El.
It was fun watching the old men playing pinochle or chess.
Boy did those little Italian cigars stink,
And I remember them shushing us not to make a sound while they were "concentrating.."
Some of my friends were:
Lenny Vario, Richie Frisch, Harvey Feintuch,
Franklin Monteforte, Honey & Leroy Elfenbein,,
Gail, & Karen Cecere, Freida & her brother Steven,
Sammy Leff, Tommy Uss, Richie Harlukowicz,
Michael, Wallerstein, Howie Rodgers, Gerry Goodman,
Larry & Bevely Bernstein, Danny & Linda Barrett,
Freddie Rosenberg & Stevie Katz, Walter Fenimore, Billy Montana
A velt mit kleyne veltelekh
A good hitter could drive one the length of a city block and half again. Power hitters regularly hit home runs from the manhole cover that served as home plate on Tenth Avenue and 16th Street into Brooklyn's Prospect Park on the other side of the next street…
Hello Hello


Being Bly
Damn you Robert Bly
Writing about “small boned bodies.”
So fine… and then about 50
Doing all that Men Beating on Tom Toms Stuff!
But I understand
Having lived in Minnesota now all these years
Why you wear the same old reindeer sweater
Say every line three times.

At 55 driving along
One of those perfectly straight roads
Going nowhere
Trying to find Highway 61
You (me) realize
I have become Bly!

Same ratty old man sweater.
Same flash to small boned bodies.
Wanting to say the same thing
Again and again.
Knowing you’re not explaining
Nothing.


Eisenbahnwagenlebenvirsicherunggeschellschaft.

Eisenbahnwagenlebenvirsicherunggeschellschaft.
Is German for "The Railroad Life Insurance Business"
I don't even want to laugh. And they are telling US about isness?.

"Arbeit Mach Frei." Makes me want to lay down and die.

In fact, none of them exterminatin' languages
Has any reason for Being.
Which eliminates most all. Startin' with the Indo European.

We gotta pick, we gotta, one language to die in.
Maybe Navajo? I choose Hawaiian.

Komoniwannalayyou. Ilakalittlenookie.
I might even pay you. I think we could speak Wookie.

Oh, what is that sound I hear of Being and Becoming?

It's only the soldiers dear, the soldiers coming.
The Poet Goethe
The poet Goethe was well hung
He didn't need no Weltanschaung.
Didn't need it since er war ein Kind
Dreaming the far Tamarind.
Or dreaming on the skull of Schiller
Seeming to compose a thriller.
"More light," he cried on his death bed.
"More light is what I need," he said.


Uncle Joe Ignores Hegel
Onto said to Theo
"You just have to believe, oh."
Theo said to Onto
"Get out of here pronto."
And my Uncle Joe took a sailor to his room!
Boom a lay Boom a lay Boom a lay Boom!

Onto said "Heidegger."
Theo said "Quite meager."
And my Uncle Joe took a sailor to his room!
Boom a lay Boom a lay Boom a lay Boom!

Selbstkunst
I love making up them fake German words
Though Eisenbahnwagenlebenvirsicherunggeschellschaft.is real.
Still the word "Selbstkunst" has a certain Teuton appeal.
Like what you would apply to a guy like Eminem
Denied access to the Eternal Feminine
And stuck with the usual ranting
Like Hegeling or Kanting.
Selbstkunst Selbstkunst everywhere
Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Scottish Philosophy
There was a young man from Carlyle
Who was magnificently ept at denial
When leaking his Being
He said I'm just peeing
And offered to all a sad smile.
Introduction to the Rin Tin Tin Poems
These few poems are from the original 1,673 page manuscript “The Dark Bark” found buried in “The Yard” (as the poor animals who are to be euthanized call it) at the pound in Brighton Beach. They are the work of Rin Tin Tin. I write elsewhere of the strange and tragic events that led me to this manuscript – my depression, initial contacts with the spirit world, inadvertent destruction of the complete posthumous poems of Shakespeare as communicated to me by the spirit Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the establishment of communication with the dead animal world (Thank you, Ted Hughes) and, finally communication with Rinty’s spirit with the assistance of the KA of W.H Auden.
Here I can only give the briefest sketch of Rinty’s life.

We know about Rinty and the movies. I’ll skip that. What is not so well known is that he was an excellent jazz guitarist. He met Billie Holiday in the Fifties. They fell in love. No one knew.
Intellectual love, of course.
He goes mad with grief after her death and -- because all dogs know the essential existentialist insight -- decides to create himself anew by joining the Cuban revolution.

It doesn't work -- he tries to establish serious theatre in Cuba and overcome the typecasting he has suffered from all of his life.

Oh, during the first flush of revolutionary joy audiences accept him (he thinks) as Puck in his Marxist version of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" but soon he is reduced to playing bit parts in proletarian dramas and then its not long before there is no place for him in the State Theatre.

He works as a street performer for a bit -- usually as Lenin -- for the Soviet visitors Castro welcomes to the island. But then is arrested for anti-revolutionary activity when he tires of doing Lenin and tries a stint as Trotsky. After his release he makes his living --such as it is -- teaching the mambo to canine candidates for the Cuban National Circus and peddling marijuana to vacationers from Bulgaria.

In 66 he makes his move and escapes to NYC disguised as Chiquita Banana (he never says what happened to the young girl on the cruise ship who had been playing the part) and almost at once falls in with a crowd of drunken stand up comic wannabes and, while stoned and driving a dune buggy along the beach, runs down and kills poet Frank O'Hara.

(O'Hara died of injuries he received when he was hit by a vehicle on the beach at Fire Island, on Long Island, New York).

He flees to Cuba.

He is caught and sentenced to prison again where he is released by Castro -- one of the hardened criminals Castro sends to the US -- where, after many adventures, he attains his dream and is acclaimed as the "Hamlet of his Generation" by NY theatre critics.
He gives it all up again and travels in Texas and Mexico playing country guitar and getting in fights arguing over whether Fredric Remington or De Kooning is the best artist.
Gives that up and moves back to NYC. His poetry begins to be known.
The reader will note that in one sequence of poems Rinty claims to have assassinated JFK. True – he did testify before the Warren Commission but I believe we can dismiss these claims as sheer fantasy caused by Rinty’s failure to get Leslie Howard’s role in “The Manchurian Candidate.” I believe we should choose to remember the famous “Life” cover of Rinty saluting the eternal flame at JFK’s tomb rather than those photos taken later that night on the Mall -- drunken, under arrest and wearing only a significant leer and a leopard-skin pillbox hat.
Rinty spent his last years in New York City.

And then, of course, destroyed by his own loathing of his being in time as a dog all he has left -- loveless and writing this memoir in the pound in Brighton Beach where he will be euthanized -- are memories of his betrayals and regrets that overwhelm everything else.
The first poem “Late for a Poetry Reading” starts somewhat towards the end.




Late for a Poetry Reading

Late for a poetry reading
and trusting the Sufi
livery cab driver
because he pretended
he knew me
(How old are you
anyway? What is that
in dog years?)
and half drunk
in any case
having known
intellectual love
with Billy
She dead these
thirty years
and fame and
an excess of revolutionary
ardor those years
in Cuba
and don't even
ask me about the sixties
having ridden the
Union Pacific
to the Cheyenne cutoff
loveless
in America
in winter
dreaming a
heavenly chasm
but no and
then hating
death and all
those who love it
returning through
West Texas from
Pancake to
Goodnight
in the railroad yard
there I heard
the OJays and
so returning to New York
and ending that night
somewhere in
I think
Long Island
poetry reading
in the Bronx
and at dusk
trying to find
my way back
seeing at the
window of
a perfectly bourgeois
house her a
young German Shepherd
the cream gold
glittering of her
eyes she looking
at this old dog
in perfect indifference
and knowing never
again I turn
the corner
always forever
going no-where
at the end of this
life

and bark
at the difficult dark.






This second poem is a beginning and an ending of sorts (a typical denouement) after Rinty returns to the USA after exile in Cuba.




Los Marielitos

You know Elmore Leonard
got a lot of his Florida schtick from me
when I was sobering up down in Miami.

I guess it was inevitable that I would
get involved with the mob after I fled Cuba
but it didn't start out that way.

May, 1980. They called us Los Marielitos.

I was one of 123,000 new Cuban refugees
that came to the USA in a short five months,
including about 5,000 of us who
were said to be hard-core criminals.

They crossed the ocean on a prayer.

On crowded, unsafe fishing boats.

On rafts held together by tires.

In search of a myth. Carrying only the
clothes on their backs, a passport, and a
crumbled piece of paper with a relative's phone number in the US.

I knew better.
The myth was over for me long ago.

I had Lassie's phone number but of course I would never call it.
She was probably dead and it was a whole new generation and
here I was, the icon of a previous generation, puking half
digested red beans over the side of a raft.

Back in the USA. Back in the USA
done in by the hype back then and by,
yes, my own yen to do serious theatre.

"The Defiant Ones"
The studio really wasn't happy with Tony Curtis
His real name?
Bernie Schwartz.

They came to me. As always.

But I didn't really think it would be a good move
to play a role in which I would have
to be manacled to another actor for the whole movie.

I didn’t tell this to Billy.
But she would have understood.
We had that kind of relationship.

"Don't threaten me with love, baby.
Let's just go walking in the rain."

I was already leery of typecasting
and ready to break out.

This was in 58, of course.
Billy died next year.
I remember what she told me:

“You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane
for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”

Yeah, so my TV show was a hit.
So what?

West Side Story had been a possibility
It's based on Romeo and Juliet
but I turned that down too.

They didn't know about me and Billy.
Lady Day.

No-one did.

If they only knew.

Sidney Poitier was a gentleman to me when
I met him but I felt that… well…
that he simply wasn't up to the role

and I was tired of having to carry my part
and everyone elses.

I suggested Richard Burton -- a little make up
… but they wouldn't go for it.

Sir Lawrence Olivier would have been good
But tell you the truth I didn't want to be chained to a lisping Limey for hours on end.

And I'll tell you what.

It was Shakespeare or nothing.
That’s the way I felt.
I told Billy I loved her.
She said:.

"Don't threaten me with love, baby.
Let's just go walking in the rain."




No, I Am Not Prince Hamlet Nor Was Meant To Be

You humans are so predictable.

In fact for years most dogs
were convinced that you were utterly
without self consciousness -- without Mind.

After all, we present a stimulus to you
and we ALWAYS get a predictable response.

The fact is we have such a horror

of the fact

that we can NOT be sincere
that we do whatever we can
to make it stop.

Yeah, a dog will pant
and bark and bring the
damn ball back again and again and again

-- we do it to keep from going mad,
to hope to experience
just for an instant unmediated
unironic consciousness, to --for just one instant
-- be THERE, be in the moment.

It never works.

Never.

That's why we die so young
and it is also why I was,
on a foggy evening OFF OFF Broadway
in a little theatre in the year 1959,

I was, simply put,


the best Hamlet of my generation.
New York City -- Towards Night

When I reflect how that
My little light went out
Ere I had a chance to
Be Poet Laureate being
Perfectly capable of
Writing fey little poems
A la Billy Collins
And why do we have
A poet laureate
Named Billy anyway
And what is this – Ireland
Then I find my mind returning ever
To the Golden Retrievers
Of Manhattan
Forced into the indignity
Of limping beside
The jogging wife
Of the Day Trader
With her highlighted tresses
And DKNY shirt
And her pierced low carb belly
Exposed and that bitter breed
Chained next to her
Desiring only, perhaps,
To die
Then only then
Am I at peace with Death.




1953
1953 was a hard year for me.
Sad. I don’t know why.
I had work. Me and Bob Mitchum
Were friends at last. After all
Those misunderstandings. “You want to
Break out?” I asked him. “Then forget
All this crap about being a natural actor.”
I took his drink away. Got his attention.
“Acting is a craft. Don’t scowl at me.
You know I’m right. You’ll never
Do Shakespeare unless…” He eyed me warily.
“Yo, Rinty,” he said. “You have Billy”
( I had told him) “What do I have?”
He fired up another Chesterfield.
Squinted through the smoke.
“Nothing happens anyway.”
Nothing happens?
I knew what he meant.
I was getting there.
He grinned. “How the Hell did you
Do that to McCarthy?”
I gave him back his drink.
“Told him I was a commie, that’s how.
“I’m an American Icon, Bob. It was too much for him.
Goodbye Tailgunner Joe.”
Bob laughed but he didn’t believe me.
He was really quite a charming man
Guys who don’t believe in anything often are.
So he could be a gentleman to Rita Hayworth
Down in Mexico, her mind gone. But…
A bastard to everyone else.
Nothing in his eyes.
And I was sad there.
It was New York. September 13, 1953.
Another dive, Another gig.
Bob left with a blonde before I began to play.
I started to play but just walked out.
It was the night Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey had
Finally gotten together again.
They kept playing while I put down my guitar.
They never forgave me.
“A” train to Harlem.
Got in Billy’s DeSota and drove.
In a few hours
Lost in Pennsylvania.
Stopped. Don’t know why.
Got out. Looked up. Falling star.
Not me. Something from forever.
Finally found a town.
Asked a little guy outside a hospital for directions.
“We just had a baby girl,” he said.
I drove back to my life.


In Lonliest Country
In Lonliest Country
I remember that
The philosopher Berdyayev wrote
About how when he
Was little and it was night
And he was with his mother
Wanting to get to Moscow
In a bolshoy hurry whizzing under
The stars in a sleigh the kind
Dear to the memory of Nabokov
That is a sort of unreal sleigh
As he was whizzing past all
Those wretched villages maybe
Seeing only a dog shivering
Before some wretched hut that
He thought All over
All over No More All lost
He would never see that dog again.

But I was worried there
In Lonliest Country
Warrensville, Pa turning
The corner of Second Avenue
Noticing a three legged dog
Following me and seeing it all
Someone's dead grandmother
Passed me and I was looking
For the Lonliest Ranger wondering who is
That lonely and restless man
Behind that swinging facade?
The dog following me the American Icon
And no Mister though
You never asked you smoking
A Pall Mall in front of the
Furniture store across from
Lipkins I don't need a 21 Inch
Magnavox Color TV or a bedroom soot.
And where was Lonliest I'll bet
In Cuernavaca or Taxco
Up the street I am wearing my
Sheep shirt the one with all
The sheep on it. Damn dog.
Turning up the Knowledge of Death
Is the Source of our Praise Avenue.

Unreal city and there he is
But I don't even have to ask
He says Behind that swinging facade
Is another swinging facade and
Then Do you remember the little cake
Shop on the Neva the one Pound mentions
Where he never was where I never was
Where you never was and I say
Damn right I do mofo
And he is gone and I turn to
The little three legged dog
Running TOWARDS me and
I am happy and call
"Here, Hoppy! Come here, boy!"


L.A. Song
It's all pre-need as they say.
I knew it when I went to L.A.
To lend my peculiar grace
To that particular place.
I'm sorry that I had to stay.

It's the wanting it all that kills.
Still, I wish I had one of them stills
Of me "In the Yukon"
With that little toucan.
I'll never see it and no-one else will.

I had a few drinks with my pals.
We wished we knew more of those gals.
Those gals who are sad
And wasted and bad.
The gals who were just like my pals.

So I stay in the Hollywood Hills.
And dream of the ghosts of those pills.
The kind you would take
At the Sir Francis Drake
And wait while the emptiness fills.


What a Little Moonlight Can Do
Three days after Bastille day
Behind the shut up café
In a broke down car
(Hard to gas yourself
If the car won’t start)
In Cross Plains, Texas
Thinking I saw nothing
More than myself
Reflected in my Les Paul
Black Beauty that night
I step out of my 1971
Ford Maverick the
Door operated courtesy
Light snicking on and
Look up at the sky
At all the tired animals
Stars bluewhitelonely
Thinking of that night
At the Three Deuces so
Long Ago and playing at
The Famous Door
The night Billy died
Errol Garner, Me, Oscar
Pettiford, Errol saying
You better than Django
But nobody will ever say it.
Not knowing Billy was dead
I was happy. Looking up
I say at the skyey animals
The old dog in the moon
Ending like this
Saying to the drunks
In the cowboy bar
This riff is based on Les Negres
By Jean Genet laughing
At myself really and now
Wanting it to end but
The car won’t start. Looking
Up I remember I told Billy
Radiance is the dealbreaker
And heard, radio definably off
Her singing “What a Little
Moonlight Can Do” and
That was the last time
I was truly happy and
I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again

Tired.

Pancake

Levelland

Mule Shoe

Sonora

Meadow

What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!





After the First Death, Well….
The collies yapped outside the funeral home
The whole world it seemed was sinking, sinking
I illumed the lamp, read a curious tome
Minnie Cheevied it and kept on drinking.
Damned hard to do with the goblins chuckling.
Ah, yes they won’t get no satisfaction.
No swoons, or faints, and no knees buckling:
I read, and drink and choose inaction.
“More Ovaltine?” Lassie draws near.
“And tell me, Rinty, what are you reading?”
“It’s only Captain Midnight, dear
Poor guy, he’s taking quite a beating.”
I kissed her, then said, “I won’t forget
Though really screwed, he’s not dead yet.


Road Kill
I ignore them.
The possum squashed on the macadam.
The unprophetic groundhog, in Texas
A holocaust of Armadillos, the skunk
“Skunk. God!” you say.
Driving on, a snake absolutely flat on the road.

There is no heaven of animals
A rabbit. A black and white cat.
A small dog stinking in the sun.

You see them and you make up a story.
The dog setting out to warn us all:
Fire, fire in the forest! The turtle there
100 years old!... what thoughts there, Rinty?
And what innocence for all of them.

I’m glad one of us knows the signs
To find our home.


The Thing
The Thing that
Is really
Quite unrepresentable
I represent anyway
It’s really
Quite tenable
Just like a lawyer
Whose client
Unkennable
Testified awfully
Horribly unmendable
Admitting something
Really unpennable
An unkennable, unfencible
Horrible thing.
Really quite venerable
Completely unlexible
Sadly unhexible.
You say that I represent nothing at all?
Please, make yourself comfortable.
I’ll go make a call.


RinTinTology
I never met Django
Never really wanted too, I guess
We would have “eyed each other warily”
Like the time I met Senator Jack Kennedy
Was it 57?
In the Cozy Cole me playing there
Jack with Sammy
Sammy told me he was nervous.
Jack working on his charisma thing
And me.. height of my fame
Billy there Jack wanting her to come to his table
Her not noticing and me looking at her
Playing “Vous et Moi”
Sammy said “Man, come on down see who’s here.”
So afterwards I sit down next to the Senator
He in black glasses smoking a Kool
Undercover or something
Billie came over. She said she liked the man
Afterwards, knew his Daddy… called him
Mr. Death. “That boy has troubles”
She said. “He was just nervous meeting me”
I told her. She could see that.
Anybody could. “He eyed you warily
Behind those shades” We laughed.
Forgot about it. I had something he wanted.
And he had something…something…
Held back… connection to.. as if he knew
About us, about me and Billy,
Something he said. Joking about Howard Hughes.
Sammy told me Jack laughed afterwards.
“Said he was nervous. Something strange. Didn’t
Know why.”
In 63 in August Castro “eyed me warily.”
A little moonlight, bourbon on his breath,
Backstage, the little moon a paper one
For “Midsummers Night Dream” A wood near
Athens and I had transformed it, a bit of Brecht,
All of Shakespeare, Theseus nervous knowing
That Quince knew, Flute knew, Bottom breaking
the frame, declaring the revolution and me as Puck
Leaping, flying off that stage, like Peter Pan
TO FIDEL he standing up, smiling,
Me kneeling with the flowers but he
Afterwards backstage distant and cold wondering I thought
If the applause was for him or me.
Che was very nice, however.
Speaking one word… one word.
And I was in Dallas next was in Dallas then.
If I could play great jazz guitar
No hand…only paws.
Why couldn’t I
Slowly, hold breath, there he is
Pull the trigger
Of a Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle?


The Platinum Goddess
Stepping into
Her room
I see
What should
Not be seen.
Beauty is sleeping.
Beauty is sleeping.
Nice work, my friends.
In Texas
Driving through
West Texas there
Ahead a silver trailer.
“Good Sam Club.”
A dolt with a halo.
Passing on
The shoulder going
Nowhere I look up.
American dolt behind
the wheel.
Going nowhere.
Like me.
I can do nothing for him.
Arlington
Me standing before
The eternal flame.
Photogs.
Speed graphic cameras.
One tear.
Saluting Jack.
“American Icon”
Cover of Life
Yes, one wants life.
Nou goeth sonne under wod.
Boulez, Bloch, Maurice Ravel

Boulez, Bloch, Maurice Ravel
Tell me.
Are you doing well?
I seem to hear a faint demurral.
Is that you?
Or just this squirrel
Shivering in my winter garden
While I stand here like Sydney Carlton?

Mercy for all in fall of sparrow?
Do I hear a faint Bolero?


Letter from a Dog Before Troy
Dear Penelope,
It's windy here. Nine years in a tent on the beach.
Ulysses says they know what they're doing.

Right.
Nine years and for what?
What’s nine years to them?
Most of my life.
I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
There’s a limit to loyalty.
But you already know that.
I know about the puppies.
You should have told me.
She told me, of course.
I don’t care.
Just get them out of Ithaca.
By the time you read this
I’ll be gone. I have..what..four more years?
Going to someplace where there are no men.
No gods.
Maybe a few rabbits.
All the Starry Animals
Looking up
I love them too --
All the starry animals.
Looking down
Or not.
Not saying anything.
Not saying nothing either.


Old Dog: A Villanelle
I am an old dog and am gently trying,
To meekly go to the difficult dark..
Alone, alone I am slowly dying.
The slow snow drifts down and no wind sighing.
Take out a Zippo and light up a Lark.
No regrets none. No who and no whying.
Sad ghosts outside I hear them all crying.
Mort Sahl’s on TV. Makes a funny remark.
No, thanks Time/Life I guess I’m not buying.
Death’s at the door. The bastard is lying.
“Hey, Rinty! It’s Lassie!” One small sad bark.
Wilder wind now. The snowflakes are flying.
Good Night has come. There is no denying.
Unknown is that country. Stark is the bark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
And you, who haunt me forever sighing,
Crying my name in the difficult dark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am alone and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying
Alone, alone I am slowly dying
I am alone and am dying, dying.


I Died In New York

I died in New York
At the shelter in Brighton beach.
My last silence.
I thought of Pound at Rapallo in the last years.
Silence. He didn't speak to anyone.
He too had been in a cage.
Like him I wrote and wrote
It was all I had left.
1,673 pages of my life.
And this is how it ends.
The guy gave me part of his pastrami sandwich.
I had Lou Reed's number.
I had Woody's.
But I didn't ask the guy to call.

"Come, kindly death," I wrote.
Not without irony..it's a line I never got to say.
The kind of line that went to others.

I acted with my body one arf one twitch of the tail
and you knew what it meant to be with the 7th at Little Big Horn your little boy dead beside you with a hole in his neck and the bright blood and the blue sky above and

the

red

Indian

yowling and you running to tell someone, tell Custer
tear his throat out for he brought you to this
and then they'd say "CUT" and I would have a smoke and mess around with my stand-in and tell Jew jokes and then

I

WAS

ON

but I never even began to be what I was

Never

Never

Never

and yes I could have been Lear.

Oh you are men of stone!


But I said not a word.

It's cold with the breeze from the beach.
I was in Brighton Beach
I was dying.

At Sardi's in 57 I think with Capote I told him
everything Hollygolightly and he took it and
changed the name to Tiffanys just because no-one
would believe a dog could be so tender and gay...

But I loved the movie.

It was cold in Brighton Beach
The guy also gave me some knishes.
All of it lost. I should have been kinder.

At night I howled.


My Epitaph
How oft has the Banshee cried
O’er a poor dead dog’s grave?
Snow. Silence. Don’t ask why.
Nothing to save.
Yet, I loved you sweet passers by.
Dear Catchers in the Rye.
As you are so once was I.


Jazz Life/Afterlife
I went to Hell.
Never looked back.
Already been to Texas.

Talk about "Le Jazz Hot."
They were all there.
Of course.
The Hot Club.

Like before...they were ghosts.

I remember that time in the Four Aces
Errol saying. "You on tonight, my man"
Without irony.
I knew what he meant.
Laying down a line like Judassilver.
Wanting it all never getting it.
Missing that one chord.

He meant I wasn't perfect.
So perfect. So trying..like we all did.
Him what...in a few years?
Dead.
Love in vain.
All in vain.
And not

There... not getting it all
Just missing.
Notes dying.
Only rain outside.

Talk about "Le Jazz Hot."
They were all there.
Of course.
The Hot Club.

Before Another Poetry Reading
1.
Just like Robert Lowell
Before he went definably mad
My “author” (let’s call him Joe) steps off the plane
Where he is met
With greasy servility
By a nervous graduate student
Who notes
Shaky hands
Red eyes
Too many whiskeys.
Into the car
“Reception at five, sir!”
Five o’clock in the afternoon?”
Where are the great finned cars of yore?
Passels of Passats….only…
Joe eyes him warily.
“Take me to the Old Aquarium!”
“But…where?”
“I need to see the Colonel.”
Vonnegut on the car radio. Still alive then?
South Boston. I wait
For the blessèd break.”
“Where…?”
“Drive,” he says and somehow
There.
2.
“I have been living at the Garden of Allah.
Yours, Scott Fitzgerald”
Then
in the Wordsworth Room
Of the Pierce Brothers mortuary
1941 720 West Washington Boulevard
Ghost Dog
Returning to where I never was
Where was I?
Scott there. No.
“His hands were horribly wrinkled and thin.”
At 44: “He actually had suffered and died an old man.”
Returning then. Dorothy Parker remembers Gatsby.
Says “Poor son of a bitch.” to Scott Not Scott.
No there there as they say.
Seeing what? Mystery. Seeing what she wanted.
Ghost Dog.
“Scott, I will always remember looking in on
whatever it is that is to me, you.
Yours, Rin Tin Tin”
3.
At the monument.
Remembering that line about Shaw’s father.
Looking for Lonliest there, perhaps.
Joe then back in the car.
“I’m ready,” he says.
Shaky hands, red eyes..
“It’s almost five. I don’t know if we’ll make it.”
“Skunk hour,” Joe thinks.
“Drive like the wind,” he says.
Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.
Epigraph
I bark at at the dark until the darkness yields.
As you go stark. Babbling of green fields.
Yours,
Rinty
Encounter
Amishmen ambled / Nude beach near Nurmberg
Grim was their visage / Gormless their Grinning
Grimly grinning / mocking our manners
Feignlings from Lancaster / in far Pennsylvania.
At midnight I seized them / Made of them scrapple
Fed to the swine and / sweet did they find them.
Kann ich dei Pikder nemme / asked I that night
Ambling Amishman / and I asked in Amish
Cunning was I / Canny and cruel
Cunningly creeping / with Speedgraphics camera
Now it is known / Oh Hard was my heart
But hot was the jazz / and jumping the joint
Rare was the reefer / where laughing I lured them
Good jazz, bologna / and big butted women
Promised I them / and primping they perked up
“Great are the Germans / and Awesome the Amish
We will go watching / the big butted women
We will waste not / the blessed bologna
The comradely kindred / Amish and German.”
Now sorely my sadness / speciously sighing
Lament I the murder / malicious and mad
Young men of sinew! / useless the eulogy
Somewhere near Lancaster / laments an old mother
Asking for surcease / anguish awakened
Mirthless in Millersville / on a miserable morning
An old Amish man / phones his brother the news.

Lament
A whippoorwill trills
On a Millersville hill.
Trilling so sadly
As whippoorwills will.
And the breeze it blows madly
Past a forlorn windmill
I can't say just why
But there is a Big Chill.
In a barn there's
a sad horse named Stoltzfus
There's a creek
Full of ignorant crawfish.
A sad bird, a wild wind
And a lonesome clodhopper.
Oh yes, I should've listened
To Dietrich Bonhoeffer!
Meow, meow, meow
I'm sorry but don't ask me right now.
I was mad I was sad... so what else could I do?
I read too damn much. Damn you, Albert Camus!


Alienation Effect

As that dreadful
East German, Brecht
Has written one must
Make it strange.
Ostraneniye!
Viewing It all from a new angle
Like this a poem about
A cat writing a poem
By me, Tippy, a little
Meadow Mouse. So
Here goes! What if I?
No, that won't work
Or I could, ah, that's
So done and done.
I know! As soon as
You finish reading
This poem, me, Tippy,
A little meadow mouse
Right now clinging to
The ledge of the Reichstag
As the Red Army advances
Under me will throw myself
Off this horrible building
Down under the treads
Of a Soviet T-34 tank there
To be squished.

This is the cat
Speaking.



Fur Elsie
You were once the Queen of Saigon
Whore of Tyre and Bitch of Sidon,
But ohhh how I wanted you.

I was once the Prince of Cats and
And I played the tenor sax and ohhh
How my love came through!

But I don't care about your Kings and Queens.
I see how the moonlight leans
And I do too oh honey I do too.


You once made love to Argentina
Paws so slow and eyes so green, ah.
How they wanted you.

But I don't care about your tango dancers
All night stands one night romancers
Ooooh, I just want you.

You once made love to Mahatma Gandhi
Oh, Shiva, you sweet as candy.
What could he do? He wanted you.

But I don't care about your little Gurus
No more wars goody two shoes
Oooh, I just want you.

I called him "Dolph" you called her "Little Eva"
I don't know I can't believe we'll make it through.
What can we do?

But I don't care about the Goddman Fuehrer
And to hell with Eva let's just ignore her.

Oooh we could make two.
That's what we'll do.


Nine Ways of Looking at an Ocelot
I.
If Hitler had an Ocelot
It really would have meant a lot
He would have been a goshdarn snot
Walking with his Ocelot.
Perhaps would not have gone to pot
For admiring his damn ocelot
Sleeping on his simple cot
The Jew who did
Would not be a Yid
and Hitler would have liked that kid.
For admiring his darn ocelot
Really would have meant a lot.

But he only had a poor old cat.
Did God have a thing to do with that?
II.
If Keats had had an ocelot
He probably would have coughed a lot
But also would have loffed a lot
Calling him “a toff” a lot
Which in Cockney is quite a bon mot
And pleasant for an ocelot.
III.
If Wilde had had an ocelot
He would have stroked its ass a lot.
And uttered more than one bon mot
Embarrassing that ocelot.
IV.
If Shakespeare had an ocelot
He’d have writ those plays.
But he did not.
V.
If Orson Welles had had a catamount
He would have gone to Paramount
But he had an ocelot
Which he liked to toss a lot
And which he liked to boss a lot
Which saddened that poor ocelot..
VI.
Cleopatra had an ocelot
Which kissed her little asp a lot
Which made Cleopatra gasp a lot
Yearning for that ocelot.
VII.
An ocelot had Charlie Mingus
He used to diddle with his dingus.
An Ocelot had Daniel Boone
Which made him sing “Kentucky Moon.”
An ocelot had Steven Foster
Just another for his roster.
VIII.
Hamlet had an ocelot
Which made the little fellow rot
But he quite liked that little sot.
Alas, I knew that Ocelot.
IX.
If Jesus had an ocelot
He would have felt the loss a lot
And descended from the cross and not
Left that little ocelot.


Wittgenstein Bereft of Is
Wittgenstein bereft of is
Watched all that isness whiz.
Forlorn, bereft, you know, because
He knew what a wiz that isness was.
He stayed up night after night
And thought about that.
No light! No light!
Meowed Schroedinger's cat.


A Cat Speaks Out
Just in case you haven't heard
A cat pronounce it I say "Merde!"
Perhaps you should just hear it twice.
Well, very well, this cat says "Scheiss."
Which isn't twice. Well, sing Goddamn
A forlorn Kitty's what I am.
Alluding to both Pound and Keats
And offering you these kitty treats.
Friend, you have not larks nor linnets
When all it takes is just five minutes
To write a poem just as fine
Omitting that quite awful line
Which makes it, really, somewhat better
And makes this cat say "Donnerwetter!
Is this the promised end or what?
Q.V. Pope on Arbuthnot.


Birdland
"There is no god. The thought's absurd."
I overheard a little bird.
Tell a worm upon the sod.
The worm replied "There is a God."
Poor little worm! How he would cage her!
"And have you heard of Pascal's wager?
Please choose God. It's the better bet."
The bird agreed "But yet and yet.
I can't conceive his vasty isness
Would have anything to do with business."
Then ate the worm. And then took flight.
God bless us everyone. Good night.

Once by the Pacific
Once by the Pacific Jeffers stood
The Hurt Hawk thought, “Man, this ain’t good.
Who you looking at you old fool? I just hurt my wing.
That don’t mean I still can’t shake my thing.
A hurt hawk can make a damn fine pet.
Put down that gun. I ain’t a goner yet.”
Things looked bad for the hawk. Then turned worse.
Jeffers shot the bird. Then put him in a verse.
Why I Went to Texas


Mirthless was moi / Alone at the Alamo
My legend looming/ Dire was my death….
Many the Mexican/ Blazing the battlements!
Yet I yahooed/ All life was lusterless
For fled is the fire/ So pointless the poontang
Tintinabulant titties / Tender to touch
Touched them in Tennessee / Where many the maiden
Demure in damp deerskin/ Were wenching for wampum!
Bells they had on them/ Light was their laughter
In fern or in forest/ Implored me to touch them
Once I had paid/ Fetch me firewater
Then did I call to them./ Oh merry maidens
Unburden thy bodice/ Home is the hunter!

Now fled is the fire/ And pointless the poontang
Kicked out of Congress/ Unmanned by many.
Ax of Age on me/ No more the maidens.!
Grudge against God/ Goddamn mother fucker
What’s happened to me/ Pointless the poontang
Turned then to Texas/ Desiring my doom.
Hell or Texas they said. I chose Texas.
Route 66
I drove Route 66
I had but one hope.
To get my kicks
With a fine jackalope.

In a broke down cafe
One was drinking a beer
And the jukebox was playing
"Ruby, My Dear."

I went right up to her
She said "Shutup, you punk."
So I sipped on My Dewars
And listened to Monk.

And forgot all about her
And had a fine sad old time.
Drinks were a quarter.
And music a dime.


Route 66 Jesus
I thought I saw Jesus on Route 66.
I said, “I knew you didn’t leave us.”
He said, “I do this just for kicks

But ain’t you got no be-bop?
I can’t stand that hip hop.
I want a strange and plain song,
A “Ruby, It’s Gonna Rain Song.”
And the rain falls like stones
On our marrowbones.”

I thought I saw Jesus
Out on the macadam
But it was the red outline
Of beginning Adam


Oh, how he pursued her
Oh, how he pursued her
all those hours on the phone
the furtive calls from cowboy bars
somewhere between Dallas and
Wichita Falls. Before there were
cell phones, and cheap rates and
hands free dialing, he clutched at
dirty handsets, all across America
heedless of the greasy film left by
others' dirty ears and unwashed hair
pressed to hear the unanswered
ringing endlessly—he sought her voice.
Motel bills swelled with extra charges,
credit cards ran dry, and his ears
now infected with god knows what,
cauliflowered, roseate, aching to
hear her voice, could not be satisfied.
One night, from Omaha, he called
the KGB Bar in NYC looking for her.
Needless to say, they wouldn't put her on.
And when the final bill came, it was
1000 dollars or more. He said "C,
we've gotta get married, I can't afford
this anymore, and since you're there and
I'm here, I'm coming. And he did.
Invocation

Wake, hanging man
I will sing them to sleep.
The Great Stag lies wounded.
The snow is so deep.

The Wild Hunt descends!
Its banners unfurl.
Thou -- woe unto man.
Thou -- love of the world.

Rock them, rock them lullabye
The Lords of Love, the soon to die
Ah, their burning eyes!
The flaming swords!

Haieeee! They come.
The hounds of war!


In Caithness
The wind from the North Sea bites the empty moors and cliffs. Tumbled mounds of stone were once great keeps of the Northmen, standing high above rocky beaches where the Raven banners flew from the waiting longboats.

I was there once, four years ago, in the land where my ancestors were the Jarls of Orkney and Caithness. It is a silent place, and cold. Few reminders are there of the fierce warriors, the desperate skirmishes, the fires in the night, the passionate clash of Northman and Pict.

Few remember now, but I do. I felt it in my bones and blood.

I will be forgotten too, I expect.


The Ballad of Miss Victoria Minh
I was merry and sad and then sad and merry
When I got off the bus: Downtown Tucumcari.
My friend Hunter had called just two weeks before.
“Come visit me Dooley I'm home from the war!”

He picked me up there and I said "What luck!"
Threw my old army duffle in his Ford Flatbed truck.
I asked "How'd you do it?" He said with a grin
"I guess you remember Miss Victoria Minh."

Miss Victoria Minh she had Saigon eyes:
Thousand yard stare and it was no surprise
That Thomas E. Hunter had Saigon eyes too
Like Victoria Minh's -- but his eyes were blue.

"Tell you what, Dooley do you remember that bar?
One of those places you don't want to know where you are."
"Yeah, it was there that you said "Let the Viet Cong win."
Then went into the back with Miss Victoria Minh."

"I thought just the usual whore and we went to the back
But I seemed to have lost my plan of attack.
You think you are dead then something else dies.
I couldn't stop looking at her Saigon eyes."

"You already know, Dooley, it was my second tour"
"Yeah, I already know what are you tellin' me for?"
"I didn't want to go back. But I thought there's something you owe
To all of those guys got killed at Pleih Troeh.

She told me she had a family got killed at Pleiku
Are you listening Dooley? I'm talkin' to you.
You think you are dead then something else dies.
She said she couldn't stop looking at my Saigon eyes."

She said, "You go right now and you have to pay."
She said, "You come see me tomorrow day. "
"The next day she gave me a phony passport
And I left Vietnam a hundred days short."

We were merry and sad and then sad and merry
We drove out to the desert outside Tucumcari.
Forgot all about all those usual dooms
Under the stars with those magic mushrooms.

I had my usual visions which consist in the main
Of a convertible Thunderbird in the desert rain.
American roadrunner chasing Wil. E. Coyote
I turned to Hunter said "That's good peyote.

"What are you seeing? I turned to him.
He said "Peace falling like rain on Victoria Minh."
Then he seemed to have found his plan of attack.
Walked out to the desert and never came back.

You better believe that this is an American song.
I won't admit we did anything wrong.
So put down your glasses once full to the brim
For Thomas E. Hunter and Miss Victoria Minh.

And then have a last drink to Victoria Minh
Who would help a guy out who wouldn’t go in.
Have a last drink to Miss Victoria Minh
Who would help a guy out who wouldn’t go in.

The Soldier’s Whore
I have always loved a soldier's whore.
When I was with Achilles’ men
I told him
"Leave off Patroclus that pretty boy!
Have a go at Thetis here! She'll give you joy!"

The bastard slew me then.

I loved her because she stank.
I loved her because there was nothing in her eyes.
Oh, how I loved those old tired thighs.

Then there was another.
That time in Galilee when I was a soldier there.
The one who wept.
The one who dried that Jews feet with her hair.

A little silver will put you right.
And it did that night.
And I struck her when she cried out "Jesus!"

Yes, lads, for us a soldier's whore is best.
She is used to lying down with Death.


As I walked out one evening

As I walked out one evening
To take the air around Loch Lain
I spied poor Peggy's new laid tomb
In the lowland fog and rain.

"How are you doing, my Lady?"
I expected no reply. But I heard.
"The night that you took my plaidy awa
You swore that our love would not die, my jo.
You swore that our love would not die.

As kirkward they carried me Sunday
Oh, the black bell tolled so slowly
You lounged in the hall
With damn Maggie McGraw.
And spoke to her softly and lowly.
Spoke so sweet and so low.

As in the kirkyard they laid me
Oh, the brave birdies twittered so sweetly.
Then you all went away.
Why did you not stay
To see that the turf was turned neatly
To see that my house was made clean?"

With a flick of the wrist the top I did twist.
Off my bottle of whisky so pure.
And said to the mist "Is this the lady I kissed?
Oh, it's more than a man (a young man)
Should endure."

And though I felt queer
I said, "Oh, my dear... a man must do what he must.
For Maggie McGraw's a live lady and all
You are is a boxful of dust, me Peg."
All you are is a boxful of dust"

Then I looked around and there wasn't a sound
Save the knocking of my knees.
And I spit on the ground and said "I'll be bound.
It was only that last bit of cheese."

Then this tale I did take to old Parson McFake
Who bell book and candled me duly.
So the dead won't awake as our pleasure we take

Oh, kiss me sweet Maggie, say truly.

Will you love me?
Will you love me forever?


You Are a Star

The Buddha is a baby
in the baby Buddha palace.
You are a star.
You never heard of him.

The baby Buddha
smiles at the peacocks.
You are a wisp of cloud.
Just then you are snoozing.

Little Buddha points at the moon
pale crescent shining.
You are a coin
buried in deep grass.

Spring rain.
Buddha iris in the golden chapel.
You are born.
You love your little life.

The Buddha is a baby
in the baby Buddha palace.
You are a star.
You never heard of him.


As I Went Out Walking
As I went out walking one evening for pleasure
Oh, the girls are so pretty on the Champs d'Elysee
I spied a lithe lady all dressed as a sailor
Selling fresh fruit as she sang “Toujours gai!”

“Toujours gai” she sang “Tourjours gai! Toujours gai!
Who will taste of this fruit shall be toujours gai!”

“Always happy?” I said as she turned her sweet head
Ah, Christ what a lissome lady was she!
“Would you like for to see just what we could be
Tonight on the boulevard Champs d’Elysee?”

“Toujours gai” she danced ” toujours gai toujours gai
Won’t you take a chance..toujours gai?”

Ah, she was a wild thing with kisses like bee stings
All on the boulevard oh!
And she danced to her tune in the dark clair de lune
And she danced with a sweet disregard oh!

“Toujours gai” she danced ” toujours gai toujours gai
Won’t you take a chance..toujours gai?”

It was white wine and absinthe and snails and champagne
We clutched in the kiosks, we kissed by the Seine.
We began to make love in the ripe Paris air…
I asked her her name and she whispered... “Pierre.”

“Toujours gai” she danced” toujours gai toujours gai
Who will taste of this fruit shall stay toujours gai!”

So all ye fine fellows who would follow to France
To pluck the pink poppies where the pink poppets dance
Know that your strange fruit even stranger will turn
When you bite through the skin to the wriggling worm!

Tourjours gai we sang the Marseille!
The bells of Paris rang.

Toujours gai!


Streets of Laredo
As I walked out on the streets of Laredo.
As I walked out on Laredo one day,
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped in white linen,
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.

"I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy."
These words he did say as I boldly walked by.
"Come an' sit down beside me an' hear my sad story.
"I'm shot in the breast an' I know I must die."

"It was once in the saddle, I used to go dashing.
"Once in the saddle, I used to go gay.
"First to the card-house and then down to Rose's.
"But I'm shot in the breast and I'm dying today."

"Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin.
"Six dance-hall maidens to bear up my pall.
"Throw bunches of roses all over my coffin.
"Roses to deaden the clods as they fall."

"Then beat the drum slowly, play the Fife lowly.
"Play the dead march as you carry me along.
"Take me to the green valley, lay the sod o'er me,
"I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong."

"Then go write a letter to my grey-haired mother,
"An' tell her the cowboy that she loved has gone.
"But please not one word of the man who had killed me.
"Don't mention his name and his name will pass on."

When thus he had spoken, the hot sun was setting.
The streets of Laredo grew cold as the clay.
We took the young cowboy down to the green valley,
And there stands his marker we made to this day.

We beat the drum slowly and played the Fife lowly,
Played the dead march as we carried him along.
Down in the green valley, laid the sod o'er him.
He was a young cowboy and he said he'd done wrong.


MONDAY, MAY 18, TUESDAY 19, WEDNESDAY 20THESE THREE DAYS ONLY!!!!!!M. JOSEF O'TOOLE


We have the honor of repeating the third annual entertainment
of "A NIGHT WITH AN O'TOOLE" under the title of:


ODD SAYINGS and QUEER DOINGS

Introductory of his novel and

ASTONISHING ILLUSIONS

METAMORPHOSES

PRESTIGES, &c,&c.

{"Queer doings, my merry masters," OLD PLAY (for want of a better title)}

M. O'Toole will "Begin at the Beginning" and that will be a short Exordium
illustrative of the Elysian Comforts of a Lodging House -- Chit Chat
at Breakfast -- "Is your Tea to your liking?" -- "Another lump of sugar."
-- Candlestick O'Toole -- a Widow, and Loving it. -- Captain Douglas
O'Toole -- Moustachios and Manuscripts -- How to write a Play --
Eyebrows and Literature -- Virtues of Hardin's Domestic Medicine --
Magnesia and an Eight O'Clock -- Hour Glasses and Pill Boxes --
Egotism and Boiled Eggs -- A Gentleman who never Lies -- Haberdashery
-- An Aubade -- A Gentlewoman with an Interesting Burr &c

ILLUSION THE FIRST

A barefoot Naturalist -- A Gentleman who walked round the world --
Played at Marbles with a Kangaroo, and Bo-Peep with a Porpoise --
All True! -- Tiger Hunting Extraordinary -- "Never do it again." --
Signora Lily will command Light to Fly at the Rate of 186,000 Miles
per Second!

ILLUSION THE SECOND

The Conflagration of Moscow -- With Divers cunning and interesting
effects -- Laughable Animal Products -- A Senator changed into A Diving Bell
-- Why eat an Infant? -- Horrible Depravity but very true -- A vegetable
Man -- A Family of Flowers -- Pushing and Squeezing -- What are their
eyes made of?

ILLUSION THE THIRD

Feminine Anger -- Intrusion of an Umbrella through a Pane of Glass --
The Request of Cornelius Kilarny -- Camelions -- A death Blow to
Tornadoes -- Various Schemes -- Plans for Persons of Small Capital --
Profitable Investment -- The O'Toole Anti-Hurricane Society --
How to Resuscitate a Departed Friend or affectionate Wife --
Testimony of Posthumous O'Toole!

ILLUSION THE FOURTH

A new Visitor -- My Irish Relations -- How to detect a Mad Dog --
Evidence of a Knife Grinder -- Pleasures of a Tavern -- How
to fill the belly of a person by suprize -- Reenversement of
a mustard jar -- Many tricks to evade the fulfillment of
a common duty.

ILLUSION THE FIFTH

A Canine Philosopher -- Tricks for the Amusement of Juvenile Visitors
-- Tricks for Frenchies -- Le Vase ou le Genie des Roses --
Le Petit Tom Ensorcelle, Le Merveilleux Bowl de Punch --The Egg of
Belzeebub, All Illuminated with GAS!

ILLUSION THE SIXTH

The shower of sweets -- Goblets of the Great -- Pray take care of that
Nasty Cold -- A Set of Child Bed Linen given to all Ladies -- Infants
who remain in one immense Body of Flame forming, for the moment,
one of the most brilliant spectacles ever witnessed!

A medical gentleman will come on stage on the third night and administer
poisons to M. O'Toole to the wonder and satisfaction of the audience.

Positively the Last Night!!!!!!!!!!!!


Dreamland
It is a nice nursing home.
And it has a fine smoking lounge
Where you can be completely alone
And listen to Sweet Georgia Brown.

Invisible hand. Invisible band.
You is old and think of your mother.
But the band plays as it's going away
In smoke. So why should you bother?

There was this and then there was that.
You should have got out of that town.
But you is just where you is at.
They go up and then they go down.


From the Hypothetical Intelligent Reader Who Does Not Exist
I'm here. It's ok.
Yeah, I knew what you were thinking then.
Outside the poetry reading.
Certain horrors.
Belly crawling through libraries for this?
And "A Catholic Negro in Pittsburgh?"
It's just you and me, baby
Your best. Where from?
Turning it all around, no Hootie Bill Plotinis but there
Which you, by the way, owe me for.
We is safe. We is safe.
We just don't know it.
Groovemaster coming at the end of days.


I Think Ofttimes of Doctor Seuss
I think ofttimes of Doctor Seuss
Ah, to read a fine verse as he used
To write: sans "Higher Meaning."
Sans epiphany. Sans poxy preening.
Sans anything like the usual geste.
Which, dear God, won't you put to rest?
He could write of Castles in the Sand
Near Whoville or some other land.
And, though, it's a dead metaphor
Done 10 million times before
From Terra to Tramfalmadore
He could stand upon that Fatal Shore
And not think of the Lost Lenore
And all the rest -- the usual bore
And be, so fine, without pretension
Which is damn hard I thought I'd mention.
No mermaids singing each to each.
No little girl upon that beach
Doing what's been done before
Undone by a dead metaphor.
He'd have a Castle in the Sand
And trampling it at his command
Perhaps a sullen Who or two
Quite indifferent to you.
Of "Higher Meaning" -- not a pinch.
And so, Good Day to You.
The Grinch


Standin' on the High Bridge
Standin' on the High bridge
Yellow Volvo broken down.
Standin' on the High bridge.
Yellow Volvo broken down.
It's been 15 years. Man, gotta get out of this town.
Standin' on the High Bridge
In the goddam mizzling rain.
Standin' on the High Bridge
In the goddam pizzle drizzle mizzling rain.
Mississippi down there. Broke down Great Northern train.
Standin' on the High Bridge.
Singing the same old song.
Standin' on the High Bridge.
Singing the same old song.
Pizzle drizzle poets pass me by
'Fraid I'll tell 'em where they done wrong.
Goin' down to Yellow Knife
Gonna get that broke down train.
Goin' down to Yellow Knife
Gonna get that broke down train.
Lay down in those Borealis fields.
Lonliest Ranger feel the same.
Goin' down to Yellow Knife
Meet the Lonliest Ranger there.
Goin' down to Yellow Knife
Meet the Lonliest Ranger there.
Going down to those Borealis fields.
Nothing. No where.


 
At Sixty
 
At sixty his poems seemed
Too ashamed to be devotional.
At fifty he was, perhaps, too
Guardedly emotional.
At forty: too lonelyall
At thirty: hesitant and ceremonial.
Twenty?  His “Back to Nature” phase.
Teens?  In the usual daze.
But at ten?
Ah, he was good.
Then.


There
At the Buddha Christmas Poet's Bookstore
Here in Yellow Knife
We got what you need.
Two bookstore cats each curled up
in the sweet corners. Ray dreaming
"For I Will Consider My Cat Geoffrey."
A volume of Lovelace next to him.
Snoozing away but Jerry the Christmas cat gets up and stretches.
That Christmas cat you might remember but also hip
So you can say "Galactic Lamentation Hometowns" and he
Knows what you mean. "I like Larry Ferlinghetti.
Fact is, he was always there."
And two literary gentlemen… the young guy outside
Snow, snow everywhere and him shoveling away as you go in.
"Insouciant enough at last to grow a ponytail."
The older fellow says. And then "Say, could you use a glass of cocoa?
What can I do for you? "
And you say "I remember."
And everything listens.
And you say "I remember a book"
And you are safe the snow outside, the general snow.
And you say I remember a book of poems, Christmas poems, pictures
Of a little mouse in the snow looking inside at a Christmas tree inside they were they were
Singing "The Holly and the Ivy Oh!"
“Be right back,” the older literary gentleman says and opens yes
The trap door down behind the counter and goes
Down.
You think he is not coming up. But behind you
Ah! there is the word "eclat" sipping
Champagne cocktails with the words "manquee" and "eperon.”
"Supple" has his arm charmingly about the waist of "farthingale," and who is
That doing the samba but "Vorstellung" and his dark eyed beauty
"Phantasie!"
"Here it is," the old fellow says.
And it is.
But it ain't the same.
Which is what you hoped.
It's better.
How about that?


Canarios or The Escape of D.B. Cooper
As when, oh, as when
Any small shining clock arrives.
A beautiful odd shaped boat prepares for love.
Our children's bluish car his little caw thinking
Sees her golden round fancy clock laugh.
A silver sport shoe is on fire.
Yet the bluish gun abides.
Mine silver well-crafted book fidgeting thinks.
As when any little cat smiles and an expensive mouse walks.
Our shining picture runs as soon as his round soft house walks.
The stupid soft gods get an idea as soon as her daughter's
expensive mouse looks around while the fancy magazine fails
and her daughter's white camera got an idea too.
The red car sleeps or a given little tall picture is.
Any given silver camera fidgeting.
Our children round guns walk.
Our children whose white white silver
moon smiles as soon as his tall odd sha!
As when the purple exam book falls.
A given red adheres or maybe their tall expensive purple golden green tall clock falls.
Mine smart glove walks at the place where our children's beautiful balloon snores
Whose sloppy love shows its value and perhaps our children's red sloppy caw of a crowcar snores.
The smart expensive bicycle snores.
Any green magazine looks around while a well-crafted spoon of the color panelume snoozes
His brother's smart white mobile phone calms-down however,
the silver tall door stares or any beautiful forge lies.
As when a round white angel sings
And any silver omprella is angry.
Any round small stupid camera stares the time that mine green eraser fidgeting so nervous rests.
A sloppy exam book stands-still while a round-shaped door stands-still
or maybe her daughter's white phone calculates and still any
golden golden golden lostlove calms down and her daughter's green wine calms down
while
her
daughter's
golden
ram
arrives as when if only the cat comes home and he does!
D. B. Cooper jumps from that plane
To oh! what strange stars and skies
Where the clock never ticks or tocks
Under the sign of the constellation
Vulpecula!
The blue fox.


My Left Foot

Doesn’t work anymore
One day I got out of bed
And it hurt like hell.
It still hurts.
Even with no weight on it
And when I stand up
I almost begin to limp
But not so you can tell.
Things fall apart.
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.

I’m not ready for this.
But I can almost remember
When “Chookie McCall”
Was not quite an absurd name
For a heroine in a detective novel.
So it’s probably polio
Like we used to have
And soon I’ll be in an Iron Lung
Yes, soon it will be 1958 again
And all my dead will visit me.
Me in my iron lung.
And eat candy and smoke.
While I look at them
Upside down in the mirror
As they get up and walk away.


The Rain

The rain in 1959 say is
Not the same as the rain in 2005
Which is something a lot of bad novelists forget.
In 1959 it’s raining and some kid has
To stay inside or go outside wearing one of those
Yellow raincoats and funny hats
That Dick of Dick and Jane had to wear
And this kid won’t do that.
No, he’ll watch “Superman”
And George Reeves is still alive
There on the black and white TV
And that 1959 rain is falling
On lilac bushes under which
He once buried a silver dollar
For a whole night and once saw a dead mouse
And the moon that comes out
After the rain when his mother is
In the basement actually ironing clothes
With a mangle and smoking a Lucky Strike
Is a 1959 moon but to get back to
The rain just then a rain was falling on Pusan
And Normandy beach quite different from
The rain for example falling
Today in a suburb here on the coffin
Of some poor kid killed in Iraq
And that kid knew in 1995 at ten
The 1995 rain and now he’s dead
And tomorrow it might rain.


Ok, then… so we’re in Fredonia…

The corpse on Page 1
Just got up and left
Ok, then… so we’re in Fredonia
Right before the coup.
Down on Moonlight Drive
Near the Palace
And you and me
Are playing chess
It’s snowing outside
But we have a nice fire
And there are even sleighs
Whizzing by in the lamplight outside
And we are listening to Ruby Braff.
And suddenly the radio goes off!
They’ve attacked the radio station!
I said “suddenly the radio goes off!
They’ve attacked the radio station!’
But the radio keeps on playing.
La la la la la la.
And you take my bishop and yawn.
Damn it, when will this poem get started?
And there’s a knock on the door!
And it’s the corpse on Page 1!
All right!
But he just comes in
And removes the first line.
And the second.
Ok, then… so we’re in Fredonia…


A Very Fine Fiddle Had She
When my mother was four
She got out of her bed
To see off the soldiers
At least that’s what she said.
She walked five miles from the farm
And stepped on a nail
But it did little harm
She was swept up in a gale
That carried her straight to
A green field in France
Where she wasn’t too late
To see the white poppies dance
“I thought it was pretty”
She said to me.
“Now, let me tell you
Of the “Fiddler of Dee


Trio
At the Starbucks next to
The Barnes and Noble where
Somali cabdrivers huddle in winter
And where last night
I sipped a tall hot chocolate
And read some poetry
The guy with the black overcoat
And the shiny shoes and
The look of what
The look of money looks like
If you are that kind of guy
Asks the poor women across from him
“If you don’t mind me asking
How old are you?”
“59,” she says the poor woman
“I have six grandchildren.”
“Your time is now,” he tells her
“All the rates go up at sixty”
And she must have told the guy
How much money she had
Because he says “You are in
An excellent position” and tells her
That it might seem ok to have your
Money in the bank with their
So called guarantee but do we
Really know if the worst happens
Is it really guaranteed and
Six grandchildren that’s wonderful
And there are some funds where
She could put her money.
And I am reading that Frank O’Hara poem
“Autobiographia Literari”
That great poem: O’Hara the lonely child
The orphan even birds flew away
From him and then those great last lines
“And here I am, the / center of all beauty!
/ writing these poems! / Imagine!"
And I laugh out loud.
And they both look at me
Like I’m crazy.


The Green Light Is
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lived in a yellow and white Victorian house
(What color was it then?)
With Zelda and their daughter
Right here in Yellow Knife
On Goodrich near Dale
And he wrote about
Standing in the cupola
Trying to see the Mississippi
So he would understand me
Trying to remember
My daughter riding on the Merry-Go-Round
At Como Park for the last time.
Was she 11?
I think she waved.


Where Are You Now Charlie Solomon?
Dear Charlie,
Lat night I dreamed that you were dead
Which you won’t mind since I haven’t heard of you in more than thirty years
And there’s no way you’ll read this if you are living
And if you’re dead I’m sure you have other things to do
If my dream was right. I had to dream I had woken up to be sure it was
You…Charlie Solomon looking yeah I’m sorry like Ratso Rizzo
Which I assured you you didn’t look like you were so broken hearted about it.
That was when …in the seventies sometime which is just about as precise
As we get up here in Yellow Knife. 72 maybe or at least since
I remember you aspired to a 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle
Just something you said when you showed me the radio telescope you
Had built out behind your trailer in Bisbee Arizona about a month
Before you disappeared – for me – forever.
So in my dream I saw you in the crowd of ghosts in the night air
The Christmas night air I saw through the window. Dreaming that
Scene from “A Christmas Carol” (the book) Marley backing away
as the window opens “I wear the chains I forged in life!” and then gone
And me in my Scrooge nightgown and cap rushing to the window
And seeing the spirits trying to trying to save someone (a little girl!
A sad man!) but helpless and you gave me a little wave you had
A top hat and cane and looked damn dapper and were watching it all
And somehow I was Bill Murray and made a goofy wry remark (the movie)
Which I forget maybe something about how they didn’t get you.
Back at Fort Huachuca 1970 something and I was new and had
To stay in the barracks for a month or two and you were on the upper bunk
When I dropped my duffel bag and man knowing what I know now
I should have been happy that I had a guy who looked like Ratso Rizzo
And was taking a correspondence course in witchcraft.
“Who isn’t crazy these days?” I would have said to all those stories.
I can appreciate it now. Up here in Yellow Knife you’re what we need.
“Yeah? Let me tell you about Charlie Solomon. That guy was crazy.
He got drafted in 65 or something right out of high school.
They were taking anybody – even Charlie -- and they were keeping them.
Charlie must have been busted twice in his first two years and
They let him re-enlist and the he was busted twice more.
You know what for? Ok, this is true. Charlie was working in supply
And he found out – he read everything – from some old papers that
Our MI Company in WW2 was entitled to a railroad car.
So he ordered one. Months later the Company Commander got a call…
But Charlie was sincere and everybody knew it.
So all they did was bust him to Private again.
Sincerity counted for a lot in the old army.
There was always a place for a sincere fuckup.
Which is the way things should be.
And let me tell you he was sincere. Huachuca was the headquarters of
The Army Electronic warfare center so while Charlie was ordering
That railroad car he was also borrowing everything he needed
To build a radio telescope to detect aliens which Charlie sincerely
Thought were a menace or had to be watched in any case and
This also required him to build a headquarters out in the desert
Where he spent weekends. A broken down trailer near Bisbee
With orange shag carpeting and electronic manuals and soldering irons
And the damn telescope thing beeped which was good enough for me.
By then following the rule that the army did then
That there was always a place for a sincere fuckup
Charlie had been removed from supply and given a job
As the clerk in the Classified Document depository where
As he told us he read all about the secret experiments the Russians
Were conducting with child psychics at an undisclosed place
Below the Siberian tundra who were sending out their astral bodies
Or what we in our ignorance called astral bodies to peek into
Kissinger’s secret meetings or so we suspected.”
You were happy then, Charlie.
But I’ll bet you were even happier when
After getting orders to Vietnam you vanished from
The face of the earth but were sincere enough
To send back the secret documents you had taken
To Colonel Whateverhisnamewas with that little note.
“Enjoyed reading these”
Exactly as you wrote that.
You must have been happy.
Where are you now Charlie Solomon?


Jim Moore
Major Moore isn't any more
As he said
Sitting in the Buddha Garden.
Our C.O. 529th MI Company
Fort Hood, Texas
Just off Tank Destroyer Boulevard
And he was our King.
One time, years later, when I went to Thailand
Leaving the airport and flowers everywhere
My cab driver said "It;s the King's Birthday!"
And I felt fine like I was in Fredonia
A comic opera country but with Emerald Buddha
And Jade Buddha and Golden Buddha
And thought of old Major Moore and how
Something had happened to him
When he was in Thailand back then.
Liason to the Air Force
Helping them discover just what 50 miles
Of the Ho Chi Minh trail that they would obliterate that day
Major Moore was a West Point man
And a "I don't wear the ring, anymore." man
Who came back from Thailand with "Pat"
Whose real name was something like Pattypat Pattypat
And who knows what happened it was
Anna and the King of Siam only backward
And she shimmered there in Texas
As he addressed us.
"Men," he said. "Men, I feel that I am
As good as any of you." And paused.
"And that you are as good as me."
And waved his hand at Sergeant Gonzalez
Who said "Company! Dismissed!"
In a wry baritone. One year to retirement.
"Wait," Major Moore said.
"Men, I bought ten copies of this book
"Stranger in a Strange Land" and they'll
Be in the orderly room and I'd like each of you
to read it. And think about it. Dismissed!"
What happened is this.
Our XO was Lieutenant Hanson
A ROTC man from Texas
And a snake.
June in the Buddha Garden.
"Major Moore is no more," Jim Moore said.
Disgraced. Dismissed. Branded.
"Have you ever read Vonnegut?"
And he was gone to -- really -- Fawn Grove Pa.
Where he and Pat had a few kids
And he pondered "The Strawberry Alarm Clock"
And never killed himself.
Lieutenant Hanson was also gone.
Within three months.
During a field exercise someone set up his tent
Right over a nest of copperheads
And he blew off his foot trying to shoot them.
Don't look at me. I didn't do it.


Ara Killijian
Ara Killijian read William Saroyan
But nobody ever caught him.
"Just a book I have."
We all need our secrets -- or needed anyway
Stuck there between the First Cav
(Napalm in the morning!)
And the 2nd Armored Division --
Actually commanded by George Patton Jr.
So we understood when Ara went crazy.
And walked around everywhere
Arms outstretched like the crucified Christ
Asking everybody "What is the number one?"
It was, at least, original but
He would get in your way
When you were, for example, smoking
In the Buddha garden thoughtfully provided
by Major Moore. Buddhas looted from who cares.
"What is the number one?"
"Shut the hell up, Killijian. Take it someplace else.”
So we were somewhat startled when
He jumped off the top of the barracks
And got killed.
"He really was crazy," we said.
And I remember Jim Linden said
"I wonder what the number one really is?"
Flicked his cigarette to the ground
And went to the movies.


Christopher Smart
Christopher Smart
Was lucky that
He wrote a fine poem
About a fine cat
If you read the poem
I think you will agree
That the poem's damn fine
And so is Jeoffrey
Good old Kit Smart
Wasn't particularly sad
That just about everyone
Thought he was mad
When he would fall on his knees
To pray in the street
They would all creep away
On their little feet.
But poor old Kit Smart
He had one big fan
"I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart
As with any man."
Said Doctor Johnson
And then he went out
To drink lots of coffee
And complain of his gout
Yes, Doctor Johnson
Had much common sense
Though he knew not the wherefore,
the why or the whence
"Thus I refute, I refute
Bishop Berkeley."
He pounded the table
And did it right smartly
Things seemed to him
Just how they appear
A miniature sleigh
And eight tiny reindeer
Hardly, if ever,
Appeared to his vision
And if they once did
He'd made a decision.
"Thus I refute, I refute
Bishop Berkeley."
He pounded the table
And felt rather sparkly.
While Christopher Smart
Who had cats in his belfry
Wrote "Jubilate"
With his fine cat, Jeoffrey.


My Demented Mother
Took my mother to see my father.
It was my brother’s plan.
“Tell me, Jim oh tell me
Who was that old man?”
His death it wasn’t easy.
We followed him through the town.
“This place looks pretty sleazy
Can’t we drive around?”
Drove on past the movies.
Or at least where they had been.
“We snuck into the movies
Walking backwards going in.”
West Grove cemetery.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Damn it, Joe, of course I know
And I’m staying in the car.”
I don’t want to see. I don’t want to see.
The breaking of the bough.
When her mother died my wife turned to me.
“I am an orphan now.”


Road Trip--Robert Creely--What Really Happened
A hippopotamus had a little tail
Which he would sit upon
While practicing the diatonic scale
The crocodiles among.
I sd to my friend John.

A hippopotamus had a lovely lute
Which he would sadly strum
He claimed there was no substitute
When the moon was wan.
I sd to my friend John.

A hippopotamus wriggled in the Nile
I think there was but one
And said the Nile was very vile
While the rest cried our "Tres bon!"
I sd to my friend John.

We hadn't gotten very far
When John cried out "Just stop the car!"
And struck me once upon the head.
"I think I better drive," he sd.


Black Irish
My friend John Rollins was both Irish and black.
"Black Irish," as he explained one day
You don't hear about us much though
But we got us a little bar back home
Called "The Blues Harp."
Looked at his black hands on the bar
Spreading out all those dollar bills.
"Shows I have a right to stay."
Looked at his hand. "Need to get me one of them harp rings."
Stayed. Sang "Danny Boy" with the rest of them.
Knew when to leave though. Knew not to come back.
Knew what he really was -- was black.


Uncle Joe
My Uncle Joe O'Brien had a different kind of war.
Didn't go the Basic. Went to the Jersey shore.
How strange life is! But you have to bear and grin it.
When you're a fighting stenotypist who can type 130 words a minute!

When the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor Joe was working in DC.
And here's just how it happened as he told it all to me.
The Japs had bombed Pearly Harbor soon all the world would be on fire.
Joe thought he'd have a word with old General Strattemeyer.

Who was a major general but in certain quarters passed
As a mellow guy named "Poppy" or, more often, "Straddleass..."
Who put his arm around him. "I just can't help you, Joe
It looks like it's a World war and everybody's gotta go."
Then paused and beamed at Uncle Joe and gave a little laugh.
"Just kidding, Joe I need you. I need you on my staff! "
They gave my Uncle Joe a uniform and all that fiddle dee
Then he and General Strattemeyer went down to Wildwood by the Sea
With some other VIPs whose name you’d like to know
But that’s a secret history and they’re all dead and so
Joe was a stenotypist and a master of the keys
And he went with General Strattemeyer to plan our victories
He was at the Cairo conference and at the Yalta conference too
Yalta was rather awful but in Cairo – what a view!”
He sat across from FDR. “He was often quite a wreck.
Stalin loved a samovar and so did Chang Kai Shek
I remember all the words to the song that we once sang
About Stalin and Churchill in a tent with Madame Chang.”
Let’s go to 67. And how nothing could really beat a
Drunken happy Uncle Joe singing his version of Aida
With Stalin as the tenor and the soprano Madame Chang
And the Stone Guest from Don Giovanni requiring them to hang.
“Celeste Aida” is the song that I put on.
When my Uncle Joe was dying back in 2001.
Il tuo bel cielo vorrei ridarti, Le dolci breeze del patrio suol;
Un regal serto sul crin posarti, Ergerti un trono vicino al sol, ah!



The Ballade of Susie Lamont
Some talk of Hegel. Some of Kant.
But permit me to speak of Susie Lamont
Who jumped for the Frisbee and there in the air
Was eternally present with no underwear.
This was in the Sixties. I was at Marquette.
By the bones of St. Thomas I see her yet.
She taught me so much of becoming and being
"Help me Aristotle I can't believe what I'm seeing!"
And she was much sweeter than Hegel and Kant
So much more demure was Susie Lamont.
It happened so fast. The moment soon passed
Of Becoming and Being revealed.
Then she went away with her boyfriend Ray
And left me alone in the field.
Oh that very day I took the philosopher's way
Went home alone as per plan
And for the rest of the day wrote a boring essay
That ended with three words: "What is Man?"
About "Oh what the loss is that the world is in process!"
And I cited Teilhard de Chardin.


Poem Written at Twenty Below
Up here in Yellow Knife we got a weekly paper.
Comes out once a month.
"First baby of 2005 born to the Olsens!"
Of course.
You can't go by Pat's Czech American Grill without wanting to go in."
So true.
Got a guy who writes a column: "From My Fiery Heart."
Really. One of those "did you ever?" things.
"Did you ever notice the sound the snow makes
When it's falling and it's 20 below?"
Can't say what it is. But it's a serious sound.
That's serious snow.
Got another guy...the one who wrote the poem
About the snow plow driver in Chicago in 71
Who went crazy -- plowed fifty four cars into the river.
The poem was "oddly sympathetic to the driver" they said.
Icicles on Bicycles.
Our town is "Our Town"
Rescuing Polacks from snowdrifts happens most days.
On the hill the cemetery
And the dead talking.
Married six years and she's on the hill and...
Someplace in my house I have a letter
From my Great Aunt.
Her boy, Noel, missing in North Africa, 1942.
Missing not dead she said
Missing not dead she said and ten years later
I have the letter she wrote
"Oh, who will help me find my baby boy?"
There's the Little Indian Sioux River off the Echo trail.
Really.
You say everything twice when it's twenty below.
Except:
When the planet was young sailing ships conducted
commerce upon the five mighty oceans of Barsoom,
traveling from one fabulous port to another.
Which is what works for me
At twenty below.


KGB Bar
Oh, how he pursued her
all those hours on the phone
the furtive calls from cowboy bars
somewhere between Dallas and
Wichita Falls. Before there were
cell phones, and cheap rates and
hands free dialing, he clutched at
dirty handsets, all across America
heedless of the greasy film left by
others' dirty ears and unwashed hair
pressed to hear the unanswered
ringing endlessly—he sought her voice.
Motel bills swelled with extra charges,
credit cards ran dry, and his ears
now infected with god knows what,
cauliflowered, roseate, aching to
hear her voice, could not be satisfied.
One night, from Omaha, he called
the KGB Bar in NYC looking for her.
Needless to say, they wouldn't put her on.
And when the final bill came, it was
1000 dollars or more. He said "C,
we've gotta get married, I can't afford
this anymore, and since you're there and
I'm here, I'm coming. And he did.


Drive, He once Said
Up here in Yellow Knife
We seem to forget
Most of out life
But yes and yes yet
Sometimes at night
You get a call
That seems so right
About nothing at all
Have a nice little natter
With an old friend
That doesn’t much matter
Goodbye. The end.
It’s 11 o’clock
And time for your bed.
What a nice little talk.
Drive, he once said.


The Tall Hair Blues
They say I'm ugly and they're right I guess.
They say I'm ugly and they're right I guess.
Some say I look like a plugged up Porgy.
Some say I look like a drunked up Bess.

Went down to the Mojo Man asked him what I can do.
Went down to the Mojo asked him what I can do.
Told him I want some of that sweet sweet loving too.

He said "Drink this potion. Then get outta my place.
Drink up this motion potion and get outta my place.
Give me fifty dollars. I don't want to see your face.

You'll look like a Beatle. That potion make your hair grow long.
Maybe you'll look like Ringo. But your hair gonna be long.
Maybe you got an ugly hairstyle. Maybe that’s all that's wrong."

But I ain't like the others. Hair roll and flow so beautifully.
But I ain't like all the others. Hair roll and flow so beautifully.
I'm the Lonliest Ranger. My poor hair grow vertically!

Went down to South Philly. Gals give me such looks!
Went walking down South street. All the gals give me those looks.
One said "Hey mister, you in those record books?"

Walked away from those mean women. Hair got caught up on a electric wire.
Walked away from those mean women. Wire was twenty feet or higher.
Listen to em all. "That funny man's on fire."

When you got tall hair you're gonna ride the Midnight train.
When you got tall hair you're gonna ride the Midnight train.
Have to sit on top of the coal car. Smokestack lightning in your brain.

The Tall Hair Blues.


The Ballad of Miss Victoria Minh

I was merry and sad and then sad and merry
When I got off the bus: Downtown Tucumcari.
My friend Hunter had called just two weeks before.
“Come visit me Dooley I'm home from the war!”

He picked me up there and I said "What luck!"
Threw my old army duffle in his Ford Flatbed truck.
I asked "How'd you do it?" He said with a grin
"I guess you remember Miss Victoria Minh."

Miss Victoria Minh she had Saigon eyes:
Thousand yard stare and it was no surprise
That Thomas E. Hunter had Saigon eyes too
Like Victoria Minh's -- but his eyes were blue.

"Tell you what, Dooley do you remember that bar?
One of those places you don't want to know where you are."
"Yeah, it was there that you said "Let the Viet Cong win."
Then went into the back with Miss Victoria Minh."

"I thought just the usual whore and we went to the back
But I seemed to have lost my plan of attack.
You think you are dead then something else dies.
I couldn't stop looking at her Saigon eyes."

"You already know, Dooley, it was my second tour"
"Yeah, I already know what are you tellin' me for?"
"I didn't want to go back. But I thought there's something you owe
To all of those guys got killed at Pleih Troeh.

She told me she had a family got killed at Pleiku
Are you listening Dooley? I'm talkin' to you.
You think you are dead then something else dies.
She said she couldn't stop looking at my Saigon eyes."

She said, "You go right now and you have to pay."
She said, "You come see me tomorrow day. "
"The next day she gave me a phony passport
And I left Vietnam a hundred days short."

We were merry and sad and then sad and merry
We drove out to the desert outside Tucumcari.
Forgot all about all those usual dooms
Under the stars with those magic mushrooms.

I had my usual visions which consist in the main
Of a convertible Thunderbird in the desert rain.
American roadrunner chasing Wil. E. Coyote
I turned to Hunter said "That's good peyote.

"What are you seeing? I turned to him.
He said "Peace falling like rain on Victoria Minh."
Then he seemed to have found his plan of attack.
Walked out to the desert and never came back.

You better believe that this is an American song.
I won't admit we did anything wrong.
So put down your glasses once full to the brim
For Thomas E. Hunter and Miss Victoria Minh.

And then have a last drink to Victoria Minh
Who would help a guy out who wouldn’t go in.
Have a last drink to Miss Victoria Minh
Who would help a guy out who wouldn’t go in.


Groundhog Day
Up here in Yellow Knife
Groundhog day is not widely observed by the citizens.
Not by the groundhogs either.
The moon high in the sky!
A huge ring around it.
Jackpine Bob says:
“The Ojibwe said that if you count the stars
between the ring and the moon you’ll know
how many days until it gets warmer”
Back in the war. That song “We walk alone.”
We changed it name to “We’ll bomb Cologne.”
“How many stars do you see, Bob?”
“What the hell are we standing out here anyway for?
And what the hell did they know?”


I Saw a Lass in Monparnasse
I saw a lass in Monparnasse
But I had forgot my glasses
So I sat and smoked and laughed and joked
With all the other asses.
Heigh ho for the wine dark sea
I was quite in a panic.
The band played "Nearer my God to Thee"
Aboard the HMS Titanic.
"Women and children only, sir"
Cried the officious bosun.
And I wept and wept as I thought of her
As I sank beneath the ocean.
So, if you see a lass on Monparnasse
Hail her as she passes
For she may be your only love
And don't forget your glasses.


How My Mother Gave Up Drinking Gin
Christmas eve of Fifty-Seven my mother gave up drinking gin.
She kicked me out into the snow and wouldn't let me in.
"Freeze your pagan keister Mister Joseph Green
You can stay outside till Easter making fun of Bishop Sheen!"

She was drinking Christmas cocktails with my Uncle Joe
Who had drunk up all the whiskey. He denied it but I know.
They had run flat out of vermouth and you know just what that yields:
The telling of the Awful Truth while smoking Chesterfields.

Uncle Joe confessed to Mama and told her he was gay.
My Mama said "Oh, no you're not and what an Awful Thing to say."
I was watching TV and said "Look there Uncle Joe!
He acts just like you do sometimes!" Joe just said "I know."

I pounded on the door and wept "Oh, mama I will freeze!"
Then slipped and fell on the front porch steps and fell down to my knees.
I raved and begged and then I prayed. Then gave a little shout.
When a gentle voice behind me said "Now, what's this all about?"

And I heard celestial music and peered into the night.
Oh, it was the Virgin Mary all dressed in blue and white!
Yes, it was the Virgin Mary! Ask me how I know.
She looked like a Maid of Derry but had a snake beneath her toe!

And there inside a pink cloud was a merry angel choir
And kind of to the left were all the martyrs in a fire
And then there were the patriarchs and little Johnny Doan
Who was baptized by my Mama when they left him all alone.

Whose parents thought he died last year a Baptist to the last
But was re-baptized by my Mama and so went to heaven fast
With all the other Catholics. She saved him from the Hell
Of the awful Baptist heaven. He was happy I could tell!

For there was St. John Boscoe and St. Sebastian too!
But Johnny didn't answer when I shouted "How are you?
I'm freezing here. Help me out!" But I couldn't see him through the swarm
Of Catholic saints all wanting to... just keep him safe and warm.

"Oh help me Blessed Mother. There's no room at the Inn
For my mother and my Uncle Joe are inside drinking gin!"
But... yes it was St Patrick! And he said "No, lad she ain't
I know your Uncle Joe's a homo but your mother is a saint!"

Saint Pat raised up his crozier and cried "Erin go Bragh!"
And Mama was so embarrassed as instantly she saw
All the saints and angels and the Blessed Mother too
Float into our living room. What else could she do?

"O, Lord I am not worthy! Oh, help me in my sin!
For it's the eve of Christmas and I sit here drinking gin
For Joe drank up the whiskey and I fear there's none around
And I have no drink to give you." There was hardly any sound

Till the Blessed Virgin Mary said with her charming Irish lilt:
"Ah, there's no need to worry. I absolve you of your guilt.
For we have good Irish whiskey-- the finest you have seen.
Ego te absolvo! Where's the glasses Mrs. Green?

And turn off that damn homo. We'll have no more of sin.
Turn on Perry Como and let the Sacred in!

Just turn on Perry Como and let the Sacred in!"

Uncle Joe was quite offended at that awful "homo" slur
But, of course, he just pretended for he knew just who they were.
And he joined the Host of Heaven as they danced a jig aerobic.
They were Irish and were Catholic and so, of course, quite homophobic!

Then suddenly all rested and beamed with angel joy
As good old Perry Como sang "The Little Drummer Boy."
"Thank God for the Irish," the Blessed Mother said
And I crept up into my room to read James Joyce: "The Dead."

And put my special music on and watched the general snow
And wondered what was going on and danced a slow tango.


Dead Poet Blues
Should I go for the long ball or just go for the bunt?
They flee from me who sometimes list to hunt.
Should I write that haiku about the inequities of income taxin’?
Or that great epic poem about the left tit of Janet Jackson?
I’m up here in Yellow Knife and I gots to choose
Up in old Yellow Knife with the Dead Poet Blues.
Should I read Doestoyevski? Or go to Khartoum
Do some gun runnin’ then write a Pantoum?
Should I write a fine sonnet bout the poor and the frail?
Why won’t Robert Penn Warren return my e-mail?
I’m up here in Yellow Knife and I gots to choose
Up in old Yellow Knife with the Dead Poet Blues.


A Ballade of Uncle Joe
Don't go to Naco I told Uncle Joe O'Brien
Stay here with Paco your tortillas is frying.
But he said "I have not forsook all joys.
I'm goin to Naco for those brown eyed boys!"
My Uncle Joe O'Brien was Irish and was gay.
Twenty years he had been sighing down in Long Beach near L/A.
Loved Bonanza and loved Sugarfoot. Loved all Louis L'Amour
He knew Cheyenne was a lonely man. Knew he wanted more.
I was living in Huachuca. This was back in 71.
I was a sad Palooka. My wife said "Goodbye, hon."
Took off across Sonora. Left me busted flat.
You can call me schnoorer. Paco was my cat.
One night I heard the telephone. It was my Uncle Joe.
Asked him to come see me. He said "Well, I don't know."
Told him "There's a simple reason you might want to come around.
It's the tourist season and Clint Walker is in town!
"I'm on the first damn airplane!" cried Uncle Joe O'Brien
Took a little cocaine so he'd feel alright flying.
Drove down from Tucson in a yellow renter car.
Dressed himself as Zorro. Then we went over to a bar.
The eyes of Arizona were upon as as we sashayed inside
My uncle dressed as Zorro his shilleagh by his side.
"A Sloe Gin Fizz" cried Uncle Joe "and a whiskey for my man."
And turned to me said "Tell me, son. when will we see Cheyenne?”
I looked up at my Uncle Joe all six foot eight of him
And said "Cheyenne's not coming, Joe." Ah, my Uncle looked so grim!
"My Rosalita's left me and I need your advice.
I lied about Cheyenne, I fear." His eyes turned cold as ice.
"You've always been a fuckup, son, and I think it's getting worse.
You could be so happy if you were polymorphously perverse.
But I'll be frank with you, my man, and tell you how I feel:
You couldn't pour piss from a cowboy boot with the instructions on the heel.
You've always been an asshole yet I think you need another
And that's what I would give you but for your dear old sainted mother."
Joe had fought at Iwo. Fought the Japs like a machine.
Like something out of a Devo. A fighting gay Marine.
Three drunken soldiers came up. One said, "Man, I hate your hat.
My Uncle Joe he laid 'em low in thirty seconds flat.
The crowd fell back before us as Joe walked out to the car.
Uncle Joe made just one remark: "I wish I had my B.A.R.
Pulled down his Zorro hat and twitched his Zorro cape.
Put in Giuseppe Verdi. Played that Eight-Track tape.
Sang "Celeste Aida" as we went down the Bisbee road.
Joe felt just like Zorro. I felt just like Tom Joad.
Don't go to Naco I told Uncle Joe O'Brien
Stay here with Paco your tortillas is frying.
But he said "I have not forsook all joys.
I'm goin to Naco for those brown eyed boys!"



Arrayed for the Bridal
Arrayed for the bridal she looks so nervous
Her mother beside her she didn't want to go in.
She cried all last night imploring the service
Of all of the angels on the head of the pin.
“Oh, take me away to a small town out west
Where I'd work as a waitress in a broke down cafe
And live right above it. That would be best.
And work some nights and only part if the day.
And maybe I'll write him a letter sometime
And have a cowboy send it for me.
"I got a small room and I'm feeling quite fine
In fact I'm feeling quite free.
I have a small bed, one table and chair
"The Gypsy Girl" hangs on the wall
And as for the rest why you know it's not there
I have a few things and that's all.
But I have that old book you once gave me, Joe
"The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart"
And read it sometimes just so I will know
To be true we must be apart."
But none of the angels heard a damn word.
They laughed and laughed in their dancing.
For she was a Methodist and the thought is absurd
That they would stop, for an instant, their dancing.
And so she was married on an old winter's day
Perhaps it was all for the best.
But sometimes she dreams as the old records play
Of that broke down cafe way out west.


The Deaths of Cruel Joe Green

Some are pleasant. Some are nice.
And some are simply mean.
But all agreed that fire and ice
Should rub out old Joe Green
And chief among them all was God
Which Joe Green thought so very odd.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green

After the first death there is no other.
“Except for Joe,” sneered God’s great mother
“He shall die nineteen”.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green .

First he died in Arizona.
He did not stop singing “My Shirona.”
Squashed quite flat on the macadam.
He thought “I guess that’s that.”
Then a cat pissed at him.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

Then God put him on a log
And ordered him to do the frog.
Joe smiled and said “I guess I’m willin’
This all reminds me of Bob Dylan.”
And before he sank into the bog
He was pissed on by a yellow dog.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

Then God made Joe read Silliman, Ron.
Then insisted that he cry “Tres bon”
Mean Joe died in a little while.
Done to death by Ron’s prose style.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

And on mean Joe Ron micturated.
And declared him somewhat dated.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

Then God took Joe by the behind.
And filled his ass with turpentine.
“I’m waiting for the rainbow sign!”
Cried cruel, cruel Joe Green.

The God threw Joe down to Guantanamo.
But all Joe did was cry “Geronimo!”
As he was waterboarded by a hippopotamo.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

The God chased Joe throughout the universe.
“Fuck off,” cried Joe feeling somewhat terse.
Joe ended up on the planet Jupiter.
Which is bigger than Earth but somewhat stupider.
“Shows God,” Joe said, “just how crass he is
This place is cold and too goddamn gaseous.”
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

Then God caught Joe Green reading Shelley
And put a weasel in his belly.
Joe died but he could hardly tell he
Was having fun just reading Shelley.
Cruel, cruel Joe Green.

The God sent down a plague of nitwits
Liars, tyrants and religious hypocrites.
Joe told them “I’m with the “I don’t give a shits.”
About your bullshit you damn hypocrites.”
Which made them all just keep on killing.
Thing is, they were always willing.
They see themselves. There are no others.
There are no fathers and no mothers.
Their’s is a universe of one.
Which was sad and no damn fun.
For cruel, cruel Joe Green.

How many times now has God killed Joe?
Eleven more deaths Joe has to go.
And so he died. There were 19
Horrible deaths for cruel Joe Green.

“Dear God, said Joe, “19 seems plenty.
But I’ll’ bet you can’t go for twenty.”
“Oh, yeah,” said God “Here try some cancer.”
But Joe kept singing “Tiny dancer.”

Then how the universe admired him!
The real God said it quite inspired him!

The Real God? Yes, you see the old one.
Was nothing but the same old told one
Created by the usual haters,
Liars and exterminators
Perverting the world’s great religions
Justifying their decisions
And praising death so they might be
The me in every thou and thee.

“Well, then, said Joe, let’s see some action.
We can’t get no satisfaction.
Surrounded by all these usual versions
Cruel and mean and vile perversions…”

But then the real God fell asleep.

“I pray the Lord your soul to keep.”
Cried cruel, cruel Joe Green.


He was only 19 and his name was Joe Green
He thought he'd drop out of school.
He was ugly as a rat and he wore a funny hat
Plus he was a goddman fool.

It was 1967 or maybe 68
Anyway it was a melancholy year.
19 years old and Joe had never had a date
But he still sang "Ruby, My Dear."

He was 19. What did he know about girls?
But he knew about the "fog, amphetamine and the pearls."
!9 years old but he knew he'd feel so fine.
All he wanted was just one good line.

"Give me one good line," he said foolishly.
"And, just incidentally, let everybody be free.
Everything would be ok. Everything would be just fine.
If you just would give me just one good line."

So he dropped out of school and walked into the rain.
And he played the fool and caught the midnight train.
He still rides that train and is forever 19.
Lord, take mercy on poor poor Joe Green.


It's hard on the sternum
Makes me want to weep.
Cruel Joe Green says
God has fallen asleep.

And all that is left
Is that thousandfold fake.
We are so bereft
That it makes me heart ache.

Joe says the real God
Is sleeping somewhere
While nothing but darkness
Falls
from the air..

Nothing but darkness falls from the air.

Oh, what can we do
To awaken the Lord?
Cast pearls before swine.
More than you can afford!
And look up to the sky
To the stars up above.
And join cruel Joe Green
In a sweet song of Love.

Loving hand, loving hearts
In the Jeunesse Doree
And we'll be sad but merry
At the end of the day
Though scorned and demeaned
For our simple belief
Know that Love is eternal
And Time is a thief.

Or is it the other
Way back around?
Try to wake God!
With many glad sounds!
Let us join hands
As we insouciantly pray.
RudyDangTol De Yodel De Yodel De Day!



When we were young
Back in sixty three
We’d play model railroad
My cousin and me.

Down in the basement
Back in 63.

“All aboard,” he would sing
Across time and space.
We were there
We were no-where
You remember that place.

In the middle of winter
We’d lay on the beach
Reading “Life” magazine
Laughing at each
Story of
The sad world outside.

All aboard. All aboard.
Do you want a ride?

There’s trouble at the castle
Hop on the freight!
Trouble at the castle!
The Sheriff won’t wait.
Yes, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s
Is at it again.
And I was Robin Hood
And his merry men.

In fact I was Robin
And sometime Little John
My cousin was Friar Tuck
And so we went on.
Riding that freight
Until the people were free.
Down in the basement.
Back in 63.

Now my cousin is gone.
Died in a war.
And I just go on
I don’t know what for.

But once we were young
Back in sixty three!
And we’d play model railroad
My cousin and me.

Down in the basement
Back in 63.

It was 63 and I was alone.
Just my dog and me.
Watching the Twilight Zone.
Watching Rod Serling
With his knowing grin.
He looked at me
Said "Joe, come in."

I turned the TV off
And the room was dark.
And my little dog
Began to bark.
Out in the hall
My shadow I saw.
I knew it was me
And that that would be all.

I saw my shadow
Come down the stairs.
I knew at once
I wasn't there.
I knew at once
I was no-where.

So I turned the TV on
Stayed up alone till the dawn.
Knew I would always be alone.
Somewhere no-where
In the Twilight Zone.


I'm just a poor poet in an old steel mill town.
Eleven straight whiskeys and I knock them all down.
I remember old Rinty and Johnny Tremain
And I wish that those old days would come again.

I'm just a poor poet. It's just what I do.
They say "Shutup old man. Death's coming for you."
I jack those men up and then take them aside.
Say " A dog bit a poet but it was the poor dog that died."

Rudydangtoldeyodeldeydeldeday.

Yes, I'm a poet but I ain't a hard man.
These poor folks down here they do what they can.
Cranes knock off their heads. They get run down by a truck.
But they got a poet to sing it. It's just their good luck.

Old Frank went one day down to the Steel Mill.
His wife had a lover but he shot old Bill.
Poor old Bill told him "I ain't got your wife.
It's Joe, you dumb Polack." I say "That's life."

And I write it all up and wait for the hearse.
And sing about Bill in some damn fine verse.
His wife takes to crying. "Oh, I'm so alone."
Then we bury old Bill and we both go home.

Rudydangtoldeyodeldeydeldeday.

A dog bit a poet but it was the poor dog that died.



I told my Dad I wasn't doing too well
He asked me "What's wrong?" I said "Lionel.
I'm doing ok, Dad. I'm alright in the main
But I really could use a Lionel train."

When Christmas came I saw it under the tree.
A gaily wrapped present intended for me.
"I got it for you. Do you want to know where?
I got it on sale at Devitt's hardware."

"Open it, son." So open I did.
My Dad said "Will you look at that kid?"
I stared at my father and my tears let loose.
Instead of the whole train I just got the caboose.

I turned to my Dad and said "Here Dad, take this."
A bottle of Old Spice. And I gave him a kiss.
"I'm doing ok, Dad. I'm alright in the main.
Thanks for the present. The Lionel train."


The Iliad of Joe Green

I beat up the Gamashay twins
It was back in 61.
My friend Johnny said to me
Do you know what you’ve done?
Do you know what you’ve done, Joe?
Do you know what you’ve done?

I looked up to my friend John.
Looked up from my book.
My book was the Iliad.
I gave a John a dirty look.
There’s no balm in Giliad.
For those moronic twins.
I caught the bastards going out.
And caught them going in.

It was my left hook, John.
It was my left hook.

Did you forget their cousin Frank?
Johnny said to me.
He’s built just like an M1 tank.
And he’s back in town you see
He’s 16 and he’s damn insane
He already has a beard.
He’ll take you like a freight train.
Plus he’s really weird.

I looked at John. Put down my book.
I’m sure my eyes did narrow.
Then I gave John a frightened look
Thought of the falling of the sparrow.
Tell me John, say it ain’t true.
Their cousin from Wilkes Barre?.
Their cousin from Wilkes Barre?.

Yes, that’s who I mean, Joe.
Yes, that’s who I mean.

I ran back into my room.
Stayed there for a week.
I read and read the Iliad
But I was somewhat meek.
I tried to think just what to do.
And concluded I would run.
Living in Honolu -lu -lu.
Might be rather fun.

But the best and well laid lams
Often go astray.
My mother she did come to me
At the dawning of the day.
It’s a perfectly nice day outside.
I want you to go out.
I'm taking your library card.
Go ahead and pout.

Go ahead and pout Joe, go ahead and pout.

I knew then my doom had come.
So I snuck out outside.
Look here the bastard is
The Gamashay twins cried!

And there like some damn dinosaur.
Stood their cousin Frank.
He was taller that he was before.
Still built like an M1 tank. Lord!
Still built like an M1 tank.

Come here, you little shithouse rat.
Cousin Frank did cry.
And I saw just where my doom was at
And knew that I would die.
But than I thought ‘If all is lost.”
To Hell with all these willies.
I would pay a terrible cost.
But I’d take it like Achilles.

And so I sneered at Cousin Frank
And started spouting Greek.
The first lines of the Iliad.
I prayed my soul to keep.
I almost got up to that part
The great part in Line Nine.
When I heard Line 10 In Homeric Greek
And the voice it wasn’t mine.

The voice it wasn’t mine.

I stopped and stood in wonder.
Seeing what I saw.
There was a clap of thunder.
Oh, the Gods exclaimed in awe.
It was Cousin Frank reciting.
Homer’s immortal verse.
He was weak on the pluperfect.
But, by God, I had heard worse.

Weak on the pluperfect.
But, by God, I had heard worse.

And Frank and I smiled one to one.
And left the rest behind.
Two youths in a steel mill town
Loving the life of the mind.
We fell into discussion
Of Homer’s metaphors
And just what Herodotus
Said of all those damn Greek wars.

Frank and I strode out right then.
From that steel mill town.
I mean this metaphorically.
You better write it down.
I went on to a wild, wild youth.
Frank stayed on the straight and narrow.
And in three years led the Classics Club.
At the University of Wilkes Barre.

Some come all of ye strange young lads
Who love the classics well.
But despair of ever leaving
The awful Steel mill hell.
Pay heed to this fine story.
And know you might be free.
Leaving the steel mills behind
For the wine-dark sea!



I remember moping in my room
Listening to the radio.
First the weather, then the news
Then some stupid show.
Get up. Change the station.
The crackle and the hiss.
WCOJ in Coatesville.
Who signed me up for this?

Down the hill in South Coatesville.
Where all the "Negroes" lived.
Was a bar called the Bongo Club.
I was inquisitive.

I asked my Dad. "Do you know that place?
We drove by there every day.
He said "That's for the colored race.
Whites better stay away."

So we drove on past the Bongo.
Oblivious and aloof.
The sign outside said "This nite only!"
Mr. Howlin Wolf.


Remington was a rifle
And the street that I lived on.
Among all the guys I grew up with
I was the only one
Who didn't die inside a jail cell
Or got shot dead on the street
Or drown drunk in a wishing well
Or have a dog named Pete
Who killed poor Debbie Jacksons's cat
And got killed by Ernie White
Who ran off with Debbie afterwards
And vanished in the night
Though then they found his body
In the river Brandywine
He had jumped off the Lincoln bridge
After sniffing turpentine.
My Dad never had to go down
To get me out of jail
And you won't find my picture
Where you get the mail.
But you could see Michael Koppel's there
Before they put him down in death
For shooting two other guys I knew
While high on crystal meth.

You want to know what saved me?
It was poetry.
That "Little Orphant Annie"
That my mother read to me.
I avoided jail and a whole lot worse.
You don't have any problems.
You ain't gonna ride in a government hearse
If you is afraid of goblins.



It was Christmas Eve,
1975.
Hardly a man
Is now alive
Who remembers the blizzard,
The terrible snow
And the midnight ride
Of Dale Credico!

Dale was a drummer
Aa fine sturdy lad,
But Lord, Lord
The trouble he had
Because all the club owners
Could not understand
That he wasn’t the only
Guy in his band.

A guy booked his trio.
The “Dale Credico Kool”
Then asked “Where’s the rest?
Dale said “You fool!.
Now watch as the poor guy
Gets paler and paler
As Dale says “On my left
You see Albert Ayler.
And here on my right…
Are you insane?
Who you got here is
Mr. Big John Coltrane!”

And the poor guy did scream.
“Man, you gotta go!”
And kicked Dale’s young ass
Out into the snow.

And the word was sent out.
From booking to booking:
“Credico’s crazy!”
But Dale just kept looking.
And driving and driving
Throughout the North Land
Looking for someplace
To play with his band.

He drove and he drove
And would have ended his life
But that Christmas night
Came to old Yellow Knife.
He drove through, despairing
But what did he find
On a dark dangerous street
“The Palm at the End of the Mind!”

Cried out in amazement
As he saw a sign.
“Playing Tonight
At the End of the Mind
Dale Credico with
the Dale Credico Kool
Be here tonight
For a very fine Yule!”

Dale didn’t say nothing.
Just went right in.
And said to the bartender.
“Hey, give me a gin
I’m with the band...
Where do I go?”
And the bartender said
“You’re just in time
For the show!”

Dale hurried up
And set up his drums.
If you know that juke joint
Then you know who comes!
Sitting up front,
In their insouciant way
Were Ornette and Brubeck
And Billy Holiday
Smoking and drinking
And waving their hands
They were all there I’m thinking
From the great jazz bands

Dale didn't say nothin'
And set up his drums.
Then he said somethin'
And you know who comes!

John Coltrane on the left!
Albert Ayler to the right!
And they played
And they played
To just round Midnight.

Then it all ended!
The great set was finished.
Dale said “That was a brilliant
A-Minor Diminished...”
And Ayler just smiled.
And Coltrane said that
Dale had a way
With that damn old High-hat.
“Dale, pleased to jam with you
And I hope you will find
A lot more fine jazz at
“The End of the Mind.”

But you better be leaving.
You gotta go.”
And Dale knew he was right
Went out into the snow.
Packed up his drums
Drove off in his truck.
Said Ayler and Coltrane
"Goodbye! Good Luck!”


Night, Fog, War
You, sir, are no gentleman,"
My poem said.
I lit two cigarettes
One for me, one for him.
Two on a match.

"Just like the movies,"
he said.

"Well, she's gone," I said.

Night. Fog. War.

"Of all the gin joints
in all the towns in all the world,
you had ..."

"Shut up," my poem requested.

"Let's just go."



A Christmas Tale
The story that changed my life happened where they still bury people above ground. Part of it, anyway. New Orleans, you'll guess, and you'll be almost right.
But, I heard the story on a Christmas eve right after one of the wars. It was in one of those dirty, dimly-lit places on Third Avenue -- Reilly's, Kelly's, Teague's, O'Rourke's -- I'm not exactly sure -- but they had one of those electric reindeer in the window blinking on and off and an old barfly named Mary drinking bad gin and feeling mel an cho ly (as she puts it). "Where are your gloves, you goddamn idjit? You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you?" Give a penny to the old girl and sit down. You're in the right place.
My name's Marlow/e. You know me. Who I am is why I live here. What I want to tell you o pall of the pals of Labovtown and patron of the Peacock theatre is how I was changed, changed utterly that night. How a terrible beauty was born.
It was a terrible day as I remember it. Rain over Rahoon and a dull drizzle over Long Island. I spent the day drinking with Eddie Poe at the Tomb of Ligea -- a gin mill over on Bleeker street. Eddie got sick as usual and I ended up taking him home. I had nothing else to do so I called up Daisy B. She wanted me to come out but I can't stand Tom. I ended up in some be-bop joint listening to some melusines who called themselves "The Rainy Pleiads." They sang to me but I guess I wasn't in the mood. "I did not think that breath had undone so many," I told them. They liked that. I couldn't believe it.
By the time I got to Reilly's, Kelly's, Teague's, or O'Rourke's I was feeling pretty down. Reilly, Kelly, Teague, or O'Rourke has a face like a thermometer and then there is Mary: "Where are your gloves, you goddamn idjit? You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you?" Ah, my sweet Christ. But it _was_ Christmas eve and a few of the lonelier members of the Narrator's Club always get together to have a few drinks, tell a few stories, and complain about their authors and characters. Sometimes an author or character will even show up.
But the really good authors are all over at the Mermaid and the characters are a sad lot indeed.
I won't even talk about the critics.
It used to be that they stayed home drinking eggnog with the gentlemen in dustcoats. Those guys are mostly dead. These new sons of bitches roam the meaner streets with their AK47s and Twa Corbies and woe woe woe unto any poor author unlucky enough to encounter them. Before they know it they're one with the wind and the west moon. Even on Christmas eve. So, we were all there waiting the coming of the infant God. In order serviceable.
There was a guy named Joe, a neuresthenic sort with a 10ft long scarf chainsmoking Pall Malls and staring at his liver spots. Joe -- not the scarf. There was a guy called "The Beadsman" from "The Eve of St. Agnes." A shot of rye. "Ah, bitter chill it is." There was T. Crofton Croker: "By my word a drop of good liquor would be no bad thing to keep a man's soul from freezing in him." There was the citizen who toasts the memory of the dead and shouts "Sinn fein amhain!" "Ay. Ay," says Joe.
A dapper little fellow in ratskin gloves who said his name was Mother. Two of the ducks that Holden wondered about in _Catcher in the Rye_ were there along with the pig the man comes in with in the joke. The Lamia, Mary, Barbara Allen, Walter J. Ong, and me, Marlow/e, made up the rest of that not- too-visionary company.
A few drinks. The ducks sang "Oft in the Stilly Night." A few more drinks and I was just beginning my tale: "This too was once..." when the door blew open, the gaslight flickered, and Fate came in the door.
Fate was this pooka who called himself Mr. Harvy. Claimed he was from a Kate Chopin story and looked the part -- bad teeth, sidewhiskers, horseleather perfume, a pearl-handled derringer sticking out of the sidepocket of his waistcoat, a copy of Byron under his arm. But, the rabbit ears gave him away. You could tell the poor son of a bitch had been bell booked and candled by some reader or critic. Without a word to the company he sat down next to the pig and lit up a foul smelling cheroot.
The pig muttered but kept his peace. He was used to worse. "Well, go on, Marlow/e," growled Walter J. Ong. I just shook my head. There was a dampness in my soul and I felt like Deor's Lament. "No. no -- maybe later, you curse of priest-ridden Ireland," I said. "Give us a poem."
The little guy's eyes lit up. "I'll do that you wordy son of a bitch. I'll give you one of my special Christmas poems." "Nah," I said. Do the one about the moon a ghostly galleon." But he just glared at me and began:
"Once there was Childermas Gazelles asleep in the green chapel
and food! food! food! and great clipper ships
and President Taft leaning out smiling and smiling into symbolic quantities of small arms fire!
There was median and modulus. The promise of parrallel universes! of a color called panelume!
And we were all magic paradisoadoration jukebox perfection Crhistmas Titian cortex flung out in the wild blue yonder with a shoeshine and a smile.
The young Goethe plays with his toy theatre!
The Tsar accepts all these restraints with extraordinary serenity and moral grandeur!
Jack Ruby gets some good coke!
Henry James writes a letter to his friend!
But now we are void alphabet eggs at best waiting for the spasm war
when there will be gulftown galactic lamentation hometowns with
bones bones bones and there will be no modulus
except deep under Cheyenne mountain where the joint chiefs dream the long dream
Unsyllabled Poontang!"
All of us gave a little cheer and had a few more drinks. Everybody, that is, except for Mr. Harvy. He just sat there sucking on that cheroot and curling his sidewhiskers with his fingers. Every once in a while his tongue shot out like a lithe proboscis and captured a bit of tobacco from his upper lip. I couldn't keep my eyes off him.
I overheard the Lamia asking Walter what unsyllabled poontang meant and him replying that it was his phrase for the ontological longing of the West. "It's why all you girl characters are what you are," he was saying when my attention was caught by one of the ducks claiming that Ted Williams was the best American poet. "Gregory Corso said that, you phony," quacked the other duck. It sounded like the beginning of a long argument, but, just then Joe grabbed their beaks. "Shut up and I'll tell you guys about my great writer fantasy baseball league." "My great heart is beating still," said one of the ducks, but we all settled down to listen to his story.
"I started my great writer fantasy baseball league back in 57 when the poet X was living with my mother in our place in Cape May, N.J. he was just one of my mother's poetic lovers. In fact, you can pick up an old Oscar William's anthology and see most of these guys. The ones that were my mother's lovers all died fairly young, but more about that later. Anyway, the poet X and I started playing "Authors" during my mother's more than occasional absences (with, as it turned out, Poet Y). I can still see the poor guy in a ratty old sweater of my father's sipping Scotch and holding the cards in his shaky hands: "Do you have any Louisa May Alcott?" Poor jerk.
After about the third day of a drizzly November (he wrote a little verse about that waiting beginning "In the Impossible November," so you can find out who he was if you want) he came downstairs early before I could escape with little pictures of all these authors pasted on index cards. He cut them out from my mother's books. He had about 100 cards. All the big guys were there complete with their stats. The poet X was big on the 18th century so he had Jane Austen leading the league in R.B.I.s. Alexander Pope (whom I eventually acquired in a trade and called "Sparky") was a great little shortstop, and so on. I can still remember my team and how the poet X cheated me. He talked me into picking Johnnie Keats for right field. "Look at this guy, Joe. He's young -- just 24 -- and has more promise than anybody in the league." He said almost the same thing about Chekhov ("Has a lot of heart.") so I had him at third base.
We'd go through a season in about a week. One season, one year in fantasy time. I was really pissed when both Keats and Chekhov died in the middle of next season. "Tuberculosis, Joe. You can look it up." It was a lot of fun anyway. Poet X had Old Possum Eliot on the mound and every time he would strike someone out the poet X would cackle: "I do not think that they will sing to thee." My mother would call in the middle of one of these games and the poet X would take the call in the library. Muffled cries, whispers. My mother would ask to talk to me: "The poet X isn't doing too well, dear. Perhaps you two should go looking for Cape May diamonds."
I didn't ask how the poet Y (who later threw himself off a bridge) was doing. I could hear the Vibra-Bed humming. My mother was quite fond of them. All of this comes back to me because my mother recently died and I am sorting through her effects. I came across book after book by young poet after young poet with inscriptions to my mother: "Snowflakes on stained glass." Peter "To the latest flake of Eternity" Trevor Not their real names, of course.
God, how this boy's life comes back to me. I remember hating the poet Z. I was only about seven when he "boarded" with us. He's the guy who wrote the poem about the starfishes copulating. I remember that he read it to us and then went walking with mother on the beach. I followed with a sharpened stick and impaled every starfish I saw. (I know. "Who knows but that every starfish who mucks the moisty way is not an immense world of delight closed by your senses five?") But those starfish had to pay the price and I liked to imagine that they "screamed" "Haie, it is a good day to die!" as I pinned them wriggling each to each all on that misty moisty morning.
One after another they ended up falling in love with my mother and I ended up with them as my mother went "To Rienzi's to meet a friend." The poets -- not the starfish.
Poet Z had a face like a thermometer. I remember sitting across from him at dinner, lamb dripping from his chin (these guys loved lamb) as he called my mother "the pure product of America I am crazy about." All these guys would have to tell me why everything meant something when it happened to them when I would rather have been resting by some tidal pool reading _Bomba the Jungle Boy_. Is still liked the poet X though.
He kept coming around every few years and mostly started hanging around with me. The scotch got to him and he would make up stories about the wonderful time he and my mother hadd in the "Pension Beaurepas," and greet my mother with "Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas" on the mornings when she would come down to breakfast. (Though the power is lacking, the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy). He also gave me a snowglobe (those little worlds so popular in Nabokov stories) inscribed with "All nature is a Heraclitean fire. Pray you, avoid it." He was a funny guy. My mother came back from the hairdresser with her hair a fiery red. The poet X: "See, see how Christ's blood streams in the permanent!"
Ah, hell. She was quite fond of Marlowe. His happiest times were years ago in my mother's bedroom, the "Damnation of Faust" playing on her old hi-fi. I think she tied him up. It all comes back in nightly visions unimplored. "Bases loaded. Bottom of the ninth. And here comes Leo Tolstoy from the batter's box." My mother read all their long and marvelous letters and kept them all. I'm told that the Poet X's graffito can still be found next to a urinal in the City Lights bookstore. But, this is strange.
A few nights ago I was going through my mother's books and found her old Oscar William's anthology with pictures of poets X and Y and Z (and Q and W and R). There is a big black X across each of their faces and, at the bottom of the page, in my mother's neatest Palmer penmanship: EXTERMINATE THEM ALL!
There was silence. Mother tittered. The pig looked around nervously. All of us were shocked. "Wassail." said the Beadsman as he took another shot of rye. Joe fell back in his chair, his hand trembling, spittle on his lugworm lips.
I felt momentarily lost -- as if the sedge had withered from the lake and no bird sang. I looked at Mr. Harvy and thought I could see his whole form trembling but it was as if his features were hidden behind a black veil like one of those Hawthorne characters one encounters of an October night. "Let's have a song," piped T. Crofton Croaker and he began to sing in a quavering voice: "When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom."
The citizen began to join him in that ancient carol when Mr. Harvy suddenly lurched up and cried out in a voice like the River Scamandrous: EXTERMINATE THEM ALL! NUKE THE BASTARDS! He fell in a dead faint at my feet. Everyone except Mother jumped out of their chairs. Old Mary ran for some smelling salts. I thrust them under his hairy nostrils and we soon had him with us once more.
The ducks began fighting over the cheroot. The Beadsman and I helped Harvy into his chair. "Rum," he muttered. "Bring me rum." "Yo ho," said Joe, and brought the bottle. The poor fellow drank and drank again and then, fixing us with his glittering eyes, began this tale. "I was born in a bad novel. Never mind what novel -- that's my business. All you need to know is that I woke up one day on the slaving vessel the _Bestial Villany_ bawling `Let's have a song, mates!' as I marlin-spiked the true Duke of Erl and the jolly topmen scrambled into the futtock shrouds. `Drunk as a dogge againe, you Greenwich scupper,' I howled and ordered the duke gyved to the topmast and his fine clothes flung into the foul, reeking orlop. `Yer aboard a slaver now, me fine gentleman and there will be no need for yer foppery in the Bight of Benin. Belay and Bedad!' `You, sir, are not British,' the Duke croaks. `I am the Duke of Erl whatever you do!' `The Duke of Erl?' I sneer. `YOU are not the Duke of Erl. Why, you little smart ass, it was your cousin Clarence, the Duke of Erl, who signed ye aboard this pretty vessel! Har! Har!'" He grinned rakishly and took a deep draught of rum. "God, it was great. The whole voyage I got to torture that pompous ass. When we dropped anchor in Benin I sold him to a half-caste Portugee who sold him upriver to Chief Mwalimu who took a fancy to his shapely calves. Har! Har! Har! The little Lord was fending off the attentions of the Chief while I was doing the Limbo with my mistress the fair Madonna of the Tortugas. There is no gainsaying that I was hanged at the end and the little upstart lived to become the true Duke and count his receipts from his Welsh coal mines wile he hummed "Ladies of Spain."
I didn't mind. Hanging only lasts a few seconds but every time some empty-headed swain would rent my book from a circulating library I got to put it too that lubberly jerk againe. And the Madonna was such a toothsome lass ...and then, ah! then..." He hefted the bottle in his great paws and guzzled greedily. "Then it happened. That bitch Kate Chopin read my book while loafing about the live oaks. The next thing I knew it was adieu and adieu you fine Spanish ladies, goodbye Bight of Benin, and I was stuck in a short story called "The Kiss." Faugh!!"!
He took another drink from the bottle. "Oh, she made me what she wanted me to be, damn her eyes. Someday I'll have the cat on her! No longer did I rip the bodice of a likely wench. Instead I pressed "an ardent, lingering kiss" upon the lips of a southern belle never rung while she flirts with some milksop of a millionaire. She spurns me, the little cat, and then lies to and marries the millionaire. The fool tells me at the wedding that he doesn't want to interrupt the "pleasant intimacy" between us.
Sends me over to kiss her." Drinks again. "The other fool, her name is Nettie, thinks she can have it all. Me and the millionaire. There are some hints that we are more than friends, but old Kate had a powerful female sexuality trapped within an elaborate code of manners and hang me if I remember us doing anything." Drinks and spits. "You know what Happens Next. Like the prissy Anglo Mandingo I am, I spurn her." "I don't kiss anymore," I lisp. "It's dangerous. Then I walk into oblivion. Kate adds a stupid pompous coda to the story and that's it." Drinks. "The vile baggage of midnight! To think what life used to be like! Squeezing tangerines over the bosoms of trollops named Vanity! The ecstatic yip I uttered as I plunged my cutlass into the bowels of this or that naval lieutenant with a well-modulated baritone voice. Sneering and spitting as I stood at Tyburn tree.
And now I am reduced to this! At any moment someone could pick up the story and it will all begin again." He looked imploringly at the company and spread his hands. The bottle of rum, now completely drained, fell to the floor. "And this, the final insult. That diabolical wench had to name me Harvey and that senile old bastard, Jimmy Stewart, read her story and got me confused with the rabbit! Look at me! Look at me!"
We all looked. What can you do? Here was a strapping fellow who looked like a Sabatini villain gentrified by the imagination of a repressed Maid of Orleans and there were two rabbit ears sticking out of his head. We all laughed. Mother began it with a titter. "Lay your sleeping head my love human on my faithless arms and quit your blubbering."
Suddenly, we were all laughing. Even the ducks. Mr. Harvy stopped blubbering. He jerked a derringer from his vest pocket. We stopped laughing. The pig squealed. Croaker began a protest but Mr. Harvy cut him off. "Shut up, youm loose baggy monsters. Shut up all of you or I'll kill the pig!" None of us moved. He gestured with his gun to the pig. "Front and center, you marvelous sow," he spat. The pig squeaked and tried to hide behind Mother, but he scurried out of the way. Mr. Harvy strode the dew feet to her and pulled her by the ear.
The pig gave an ontic oink as he dragged her up against him and leveled the derringer at her head. "Yes, you heard me. The marvelous sow. I know who she is and I'll kill her if any of you kittylitterateurs moves." The pig squealed. Universal moans.
Mr. Harvy looked straight at me. "You see, I know who she is, don't I, me smarmy fellow?" I tried to bluff. "Whatever can you..?" He cut me off savagely. "Shut yer trap, Marlow/e, you wordy son of a bitch. I KNOW who she is. The marvelous sow. The origin of all literature. If she dies, literature dies and you, all of you, return to the faint flat emanations of things as they are. Har. Har." "But, she's only the pig in the joke," I squeaked. You know, an Irishman comes into a bar carrying a pig and so on. How can she possibly be the origin of all literature? Let her go and have a drink." He laughed wildly. "I know who she is, Marlow/e. That joke begins everything. You want to hear old Kate's story? A boy asks a girl to dance. She says no. He says, "That's ok. I just wanted to see if pigs could talk." Same story. Same pig. And, look here, Marlow/e. I know the Irishman's name." He paused. I waited. Oh, the horror. The horror! "Shem!, he screamed. "Shem! Shem! Shem!" He began to press the trigger. I screamed and hurled myself on him to protect the long loveliness of sow. I took the bullet through my heart. The pig screamed "Not this pig" and made for the door. I died. I was changed. Changed utterly, Benjy. I am now a bit of Spanish moss hanging from the old oak near the golf course. But, you don't understand, do you? Put on your gloves you idjit. Ah, Benjy, I am the earl of epiphytes, released from the great chain gang of being. I may look like Spanish moss but I feel just like Jesse James.
Joe Green’s poetry has a savage wit and a plaintive, enchanting innocence, like some of Joe Brainard’s drawings. He has one poem about Kim Novak and James Stewart in Bell, Book and Candle that perfectly expressed the Technicolor genius of Richard Quine, that film’s unsung genius director. And he has other poems about Rin Tin Tin, the hero Shepherd of early US serial film, and about “The Lonliest Ranger,” that makes me think he is lighting out, fast, for Henry Darger territory. Look out for them little girls!
I lack the qualifications to review Fulcrum 3 properly, but the more I think about its density and mass, the more I realize, oh give up trying to be Solomon, evaluating Fulcrum 3 is like — trying to hold a moonbeam with your hand. A big heavy 500 page behemoth of a moonbeam. In Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich edit this stylish literary journal, assisted by a gaggle of contributing editors so diverse that looking at the list on the masthead reduces me to a blank deadpan a la Buster Keaton. I just couldn’t help myself, the names were not registering as all belonging to the same species, it was like the caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland.

In general what I read of the poetry in Fulcrum 3 I enjoyed. There’s a whole section, edited by Gregory O’Brien, of 21 New Zealand poets that will appeal to all who have wanted to find out more about writing Down Under. I suppose since Jacket is based in Australia that it would be like me trying to find out what writing is like in, I don’t know, Fresno, but still I was shocked and appalled at myself, to see that of the 21 poets, I only recognized the names of maybe 14 or 15. What’s wrong with us in America that we are so little interested in people from South of the Equator? Is it just cultural snobbery or heavy, empirical inertia? Maybe a cobbling of both. And as I looked closer into the 14 or 15 I thought I knew, I realized to myself that maybe their plain Anglo names were fooling me into a false familiarity. When a poet is called James Brown, does any American say, no, I’ve never heard of James Brown? I don’t think so, my friends.

Of the non New Zealand poets, well, I’ll leave out the people I know personally, for you would not believe me if I told you how great Bill Berkson, Michael Farrell, Peter Gizzi are, for you know that I love them (or you could find it out on Google, then I’d really look a fraud). Joe Green’s poetry has a savage wit and a plaintive, enchanting innocence, like some of Joe Brainard’s drawings. He has one poem about Kim Novak and James Stewart in Bell, Book and Candle that perfectly expressed the Technicolor genius of Richard Quine, that film’s unsung genius director. And he has other poems about Rin Tin Tin, the hero Shepherd of early US serial film, and about “The Lonliest Ranger,” that makes me think he is lighting out, fast, for Henry Darger territory. Look out for them little girls! But much of the poetry is the same old sestinas and villanelles you see everywhere else under the reign of new formalism. Somehow or other Ange Mlinko squeaked through the Cambridge controls and her poems here are something true, savage, and accurate, an array of sensibilities that put paid to the notion of the lyric voice by opening it to multiple notes and graces. I might also mention the poetry of Mark Lamoureux, a name new to me, a exciting writer who knows how to keep his secrets. One feels that all concerned are putting their best foot forward because it’s, you know, Fulcrum 3 and it’s aiming for something different.

Lackluster, however, is the word for the cough “Fulcrum Feature” cough of “Poetry and the Psyche.” A band of Spinozas might be able to make something out of this perdurable topic, but our panelists in general aren’t up to the challenge. As for the artworks of Konstantin Simon, they are of the sort which makes you realize how great the art in Sulfur really was, no matter how blind you were to it before. I might like it in person, but photographs do not do this bronze or stone work justice.

There’s also a debate between Chris Stroffolino and Joan Houlihan that runs out of steam before it really begins, in a converse ratio to the energy the two of them bring to the table.

The section that excites me is the final one, Ben Mazer’s 108 page anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance poets. Mazer must have worked his ass off, knocking on doors, digging up sources, ringing up strangers, and the pay off, turning up some wicked documents. His research is of the kind you’d have thought disappeared with Jay (The Melville Log) Leyda. I thought I knew where all the Jack Spicer material had been published, but Mazer scooped me not once but twice. What he did first was to assemble a complete collection of Berkeley, Bay Area and student periodicals for the period in question (roughly from 1945–52) and he read right through each one. In the back of a 1948 issue of Occident, unlisted in the Table of Contents, Mazer found a substantial article Spicer wrote on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. Then he trolled through the internet, through the ranks of the alumni of Fairfax High School (LA), to procure a copy of the school literary journal, the bizarrely named Colonial Voices 1941, which boasts 4 of Spicer’s earliest poems.

In this way he adds to our understanding of Spicer’s sources and influences, by placing his poetry within a broader context of postwar thought and fashion. Similarly he has printed unpublished or forgotten material by Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and the underrated Mary Fabilli. Mazer widens the picture by reconfiguring the Berkeley Renaissance to include Charles Olson among the writers of that place and time. Olson, yes the Black Mountain guy, spent several months in Berkeley in the wake of Call Me Ishmael (1947), his pioneering study of Melville and what we now call the Pacific Rim. While consulting the vast Western Americana resources at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, he met up with Kenneth Rexroth, Tom Parkinson, Muriel Rukeyser, and Duncan (though not Blaser or Spicer). This was one of the most important meetings of Duncan’s life, and I have sometimes thought that RD afterwards used his early acquaintance of Olson to swank it over Blaser and Spicer, his superior knowledge of Olson’s poetics a piece of cultural capital so high, you couldn’t get over it, so low, you couldn’t get around it. Maybe I’m projecting. I’d feel the same way if, oh I don’t know, if Jeremy Prynne decided to come to San Francisco for six months and would only see August Kleinzahler and Amy Tan, wasting no time on Kevin.

Besides shoehorning Olson into the Berkeley scene, Mazer also argues that a nearly unknown poet, Landis Everson, is the real champ of the group. When people think of Landis Everson, they are usually conflating him with William Everson (born Sacramento, CA. 1912– died Santa Cruz, CA, 1994), no relation, who “became Brother Antoninus” whatever that means, and managed to land in the New American Poetry. William Everson had a Kevin-Federline-style marriage to Mary Fabilli and was thus in the Berkeley Renaissance whether anyone really wanted him there or not. Landis Everson is a different kettle of fish entirely. He was young, handsome, a WWII veteran, and strangely gifted, from Coronado, down by San Diego, with the famous spun-sugar hotel where Some Like It Hot was filmed. For Blaser, Spicer and Duncan, Landis was nearly the “Maximin” in their tightly wound circle, the idol, the golden boy they all wanted. He appears as the “bronze boy” in Duncan’s early masterpiece The Venice Poem. A spiteful Spicer punctured holes in his god in his poem, “Orpheus’ Song to Apollo,” written to Landis and delivered to him at a poetry reading.

. . . Perhaps,
If the moon were made of cold green cheese,
I could call you Diana.
Perhaps,
If a knife could peel that rosy rind,
It would find you virgin as a star.
Too hot to move.
Nevertheless,
This is almost goodbye.
You,
Fool Apollo,
Stick
Your extra roses somewhere where they’ll keep.
I like your aspiration
But the sky’s too deep
For fornication.
Stung, Landis fled the reading in tears. After Berkeley there was Korea, grad work at Columbia, and a publication history that brought him close to the mainstream magazines that Spicer despised. The poetry stayed with Everson through the 1950s, and in 1960 he joined Blaser and Spicer for an intensive San Francisco study group, devoted to the serial poem and to dictation, during the course of which they “received” Homage to Creeley (Spicer), The Park and Cups (Blaser), and for Everson, two remarkable sequences which Mazer prints in full in his anthology, Postcard From Eden (printed as a small chapbook ) and “The Little Ghosts I Played With”.

But after Spicer’s death and the departure of Blaser for Vancouver, Everson wrote no more. Essentially he has been silent for forty years, a poet who never published a book and whose appearances in some pretty Grade A periodicals, from Poetry Chicago to Locus Solus, have been pretty much forgotten. And now to have him back in full relief is pretty exciting. And, due to Ben Mazer’s encouragement, Everson has started writing poetry again, thus breaking a silence longer than George Oppen’s.

If I have spent a lot of time writing about Everson here in this review, I mirror the attention Mazer brings to Everson in his introduction. He has refurbished the Berkeley Renaissance so that its chief significance becomes other, it was the “site” that allowed Landis Everson to flourish.

Such jiggling of the canon is not entirely unprecedented. 150 years ago people thought they understood the American Renaissance pretty well, even before Melville or Dickinson were known to have lived in it. We don’t know yet whether Mazer’s critical placement will “take,” but it is one of the interesting poetry events of 2004, and if nothing else, he is to be congratulated for the “awful daring” of his good education.

http://www.saraayers.com/darger.htm
Union station dawn train track 19
I'm back one day after Christmas
Washed in the waters of Victory
My brother said come see us in Oregon!
We wrapped them each in the slaughtered sheets
Turn me they call o turn me Brother.
Railyard and wasteland
Oxnard Ventura Vandenburg
San Luis Obisbo Salinas
Oakland
Dark is with them nearly
Their clothes bubble on them
And firefleshed the children form a thought of spring.
Of trees in Wildfire
Refinery flame marshes and ricefields power station the sign says Dunsmuir Shasta white winter high light indian salmon ridge spine snow bridge and over the cascades blizzard silence blown out then down the hill and o many rivers coast cascade Williamette fern and fir I'm told and there Salem station there is my brother his dog and new wife pickup truck geese and goats rain on a tin roof.
Fuck this I'm going back to New York
The moon was walking his cat under a mulberry tree. >> Chuck Berry came up. >> "What you doing with that funky cat, Mr. Moon?" >> "That ain't no cat," said the moon. >> "I know that," said Chuck, but it was too late. >> Before he knew it he was playing at the Bongo club. > > >> Just then a poet named Wally found the moon. >> "Fuck this," said the moon and turned him into >> a neon palm tree in the window of the Bongo. >> >> Chuck played "Maybelline." Helplessly. >> The poetpalm drizzled color helplessly into the rainslick street. >> >> You drove by. In your black limousine. >> >> The moon drove his silver buckboard across the sky. >> Whistled "Lilliburo." >> The cat said: "Just once I wish that nobody would fuck up." >> The mulberry tree dreamed that the moon was out walking his cat. >
You were once the queen of Saigon. Whore of Tyre and Bitch of Sidon. But ooooooh, what could they do? How they wanted you. I was once the Prince of Cats And I played a tenor sax And oooooooh my love came through. It was all for you. But I don't care about your Kings and Queens I see the moonlight leans On your breasts. (Sweet breasts) And I do too. Honey, I do too. You once made love to Argentina Hands so slow and eyes so green What could they do? They all wanted you. But I don't care about your tango dancers. Gypsy girls, all-night romancers Ooooooh, I just want you. And I don't care about your Kings and Queens I see that the moonlight leans On your breasts. (Big breasts) And I do too. Honey, I do too. You once made love to Mahatma Gandhi Oooh, ooh, Shiva you sweet as candy. Ooooh, what could he do? How he wanted you. But I don't care about your little gurus Barefoot boys and saints with no shoes. Oooooooh, I just want you. And I don't care about your Kings and Queens I see the moonlight leans On your breasts. (Nice breasts) And I do too. Honey, I do too.
Epitaph For My First Wife Traveller, tread lightly over this sod. Here lies a lady with a pretty good bod And a face not half-bad, except for a mole, And a look like a lapdog's. God rest her soul.
Epitaph for Joe's Second Marriage Here's to my wife with the dynamite bod, Who eloped, alas, with a real Irish bawd. Exciting her (barely) with tonic and gin, Then coupling quickly (she'd ask. "Is it in?"). I'd shake my head yes, she'd sigh and then say, "At least your friend Timothy knows the right way!" And it wasn't too long before she left with him. And left me alone with my tonic and gin. And left me alone with my tonic and gin.
All day we walked out into the green
out of the lake the emerald world
dying in slow light.
The billion drops of water
of a sky where fishes swim
little puffs of cloud
all beneath us.
Gazing upward the fleecy peaks
then glittering ice
then a lake of vision.
You cried "Look there!"
Or something like that.
A space between quotation marks.
But I looked down.
Red flames eating television sets.
If we return I will make no promises.
___________________________________________________________________
II.
Looking for what we
found the moon
that night on the highway
from North Dakota.
We were talking about Indians.
At the highway rest stop
you saw a stellar jay
flying into the dark.
Towns built on the blood
of sleepy children.
Families hauling European clocks
over the hourless prairie.
Into the dark again and the moon.
We stop even though it is below zero.
Something blows through our bodies.
Ghosts fleeing us. They can do this easily.
Tonight we finally see our bodies.
The moon's moon floats in the sky.
All night this happens!
_________________________________________________________________
III.
Beside her bed
there is a vase with one flower.
Just before sleep
the flower seems a red-glowing cloud.
When she closes her eyes
the flower inside the cloud awakens.
Conjured by solitude and beauty it opens
as she sleeps.
This flower is a world.
Temples and palaces and
distant villages all in this one flower!
She dreams of a city.
Peach and plum trees shade the roads.
A white jade palace.
Inside the palace
gowns with women bright as green hummingbirds
sing "Celeste Aida."
Their wings hurt.
A slash of ruby at their throats.
They hope that radio will be discovered soon.
They dream that the emperor will love them
nevertheless
The flower beside your bed.
Not impossible.
_______________________________________________________________
IV.
Francis of the City of St. Francis
knows that there is
whatever the water wants.
Paddling on the river with Mole.
All these books foolish and beautiful.
The laughter of children.
Whatever the water wants.
One day the Earth says, "Let me guess.
You want it all strange and lovable.
Plateaus
lichen
the Bierstadt moraine
blue herons
Anglo-Saxon farms
the traditions of lovers
John Clare resting his cheek against a stone
a chamberlain of the moon
doves in secret books
rivers
rivers
Finn always Finn again
Dylan Thomas opening the French doors singing
"O Ewigkeit"
guinessess genitive forever
maple
leaves
blown by
a
wind
chasing geese
clouds
seas
and a fire of love from all this
from all this to
her."
"Yes," says Francis.
"No problemo," said the Earth.
And sent this.
"I shall keep in mind my looking in at whatever
it is that is to me you."
_______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 92 13:15:02 CST
From: n2412@willow.cray.com (Joe Green)
To: francis@sep.stanford.edu
Subject: Re: wots with the words?
The Song of Cowboy Hank Vogelfrei From the Heights
of the Cosmic System to the Effect That...
Waiting for Waylon and waiting for Willie
The wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.
Waiting for Jesus to squeeze us and leave us.
Leave us alone. Oh, what can we do?
The wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit you can be one too.
Old Pontius Pilate he just had to smile,
"It's a bitch," he said, "but its gotta be done."
Atilla the killer-- a really big chiller--
Says, "Oh, I'm so sorry, but aint we got fun?"
And the wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit you can be one too.
Napolean Bonaparte, after things fell apart,
Sat down on his island and howled at the moon.
Cleopatra the clever, dressed all in leather,
Chastises poor Caesar and promises "Soon.."
And the wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit you can be one too.
Vlad the Impaler, the best of the Wailers,
(The wind howls like a husband and sobs like a wife)
Says "It's no trouble. I guess I'll date double."
And remarks to his victims: "Ah, the blood is the life."
And the wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit you can be one too.
They told old Samson, "Oh, just be a man, son
Pull the pillars on down and let it all go."
But he said, "No lie, ah, I remember Delilah
She made love so sweetly, she made love so slow.
So I'll dance, I'll dance with William Fake
For love, for love, for sweet love's sake.
Let the wild, wild wind go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit, you can be one too."
I told my bonnie, "Hey, you know it aint funny."
But she said, "Oh, honey, they already know."
I didn't believe her and I had to leave her.
But I saw them last night at the last picture show.
And they danced, they danced with William Fake
For love, for love, for sweet love's sake.
Let the wild, wild wind go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit, you can be one too.
Infinite spaces (they say) in sweet infant faces.
Infinite love (they say) in the grief of a leaf.
So they all bump their bellies with Percy B. Shelley
Jelly Roll Morton and little John Keats.
And they dance, they dance with William Fake
For love, for love, for sweet love's sake.
Let the wild, wild wind go willie woo woo.
If you get an outfit, you can be one too.
And sing:
Nietzsche is peachy!
Kant aint so keen!
As on heaven's gate
We insouciantly lean.
All you attempters
You know what we mean!
He's on tonight!
He's come tonight!
And, by God, he is burning
With hyperboreal light!
And says just two words.
The words are: "Not quite."
Amd lends a little sang froid
To the numinous void.
And a little sang-froid
To the glutinous schwa.
I see by my outfit that I am a cowboy.
I see by your outfit that you are one too.
We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys.
If you get an outfit, you can be one too.
Fade to black to strains of "Sweet Home Alabama." Somewhere a figure
leans against a coppice gate and looks at Orion.
Two things fill me with awe: the starry sky above, the tea cozy in my hand.
What have you done, what have you done,
to aggravate the Ranger?
You'd better pack before you run
You are no friend of danger.
You'd better take what's left of pride
yes, even if it's tattered,
and steal the money for the ride,
forget promotion mattered.
Into Red Riding Hood mutate
and hope you pass unnoticed,
the Wolf is at your starting gate,
he'll eat you on a protest.
He's eaten other men before
who showed a bit of promise,
because they hated Yeats or Joyce or
vaunted Dylan Thomas.
And one poor cove I saw him maul
who loved St.V.-Millay
was not a pretty sight at all
when the Ranger had had his way.
Oh, take my word it isn't worth
the fight, if he feels mocking.
You'll rue the day you caused his mirth,
and after you'll feel shocking.
And if he's not yet rhymed your faults
then thank your lucky star,
just check for lightning, thunderbolts,
and head for Zanzibar.
The sound of laughter, aah it flies
as fast as you can scamper,
so be prepared, act smart, get wise,
become a happy camper.
Or give up the unequal match
sit on the side, demure,
throw him some bait and watch him catch
some worse poseur than you are.
In fact, some people he's attacked
have come to like him, quite,
when from the argument they've backed
and realised he's right.
And I have known him now for years
yet never caught him out,
though sometimes coming close to tears
his wherefore to work out.
So there you are, I hope you've learned
He's wicked as they come,
and I can take the rest I've earned
and get back to my rum.

2 comments:

Joe Green/Tim Smith said...

How long has this been here?

& said...

Since 2007!