From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
Contemporaries
By Gregg Glory
Made available in USA by Blast Press
© 1992 by Blast Press
Contents
I. Contemporaries
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Nixon, Election Eve 1960
Dukakis
Farmer at the Embargo, 1980
MacArthur on the Yalu River
Nixon During WaterGate
Boris Yeltsen
Writing
Artist in His Studio
Dai Ichi
MacArthur Reads to his Boy
Schwartzkopf, Duke of Iraq
Nixon Now
Casey in the Hospital
Ancillary Victim at Reagan’s Shooting
Philippic Against Darwin
Andy Warhol
Trotsky in Mexico
Contemporaries
Saddam Huissain
II. The Old World
Marilyn Monroe (Death Speech)
Cleopatra
Thucydidies
Valhalla, Vonnegut, Etc.
III. The Central Plateau
M. Blanc
IV. Masks
Etchings of the Caribbean Cross
Questions Concerning History
Don Juan Among the Maidens
Bacchus at the Pianola
IV. And Anarchies
A Birthday Suit
Moon Garden
Paraplegic
The Night Absences
Marcia Funebre
William F. Buckley, Jr.
It is this common, dirty love of all Man
that does us in. When I was a puling boy,
unloved and underpublished, I put my levelled scope
to the crew-cut skulls of my class and wrote
Man and God at Yale, what a joke!
Man's a bastard, and God is not his dad.
All my soaring arrows jut suction tips... see?
Jefferson's sky-high forehead's still red
from where he plucked my one-sided life
of concourse off. I'm the best Catholic in my diocese,
and when Mary was assumed by Pius X,X,X,
I smiled at my blushing girlfriend in her dorm,
posing for family photos of the Nativity. So what
if God made me? I am what I engendered.
Nixon, Election Eve 1960
The only political genius to ascend the stage, I
jammed into a jockeyed-for corner of this glassed-in booth
straining to read Johnson's lips over the broken phone,
his Southern slurr.... Paris is stalled.
Expect nothing; I'm calling all three candidates,
wronged by rumor in the waiting room.
Hush-hush tiptoe is of the ultimate... you understand...
I instructed Haldeman to pass the word.
It was one of those paper nights, my name in stardust
at the annual Al Smith affair, Johnson stooped to load
my rickety back with the new-mown low-down
on the Vietcong; nix on fusillades; no violation
of the effervescent Zone drawn between participants
of the talks, etc., etc. The issue was soft-pedaled to a pulp.
Each night the bearded bombs come ringing on my sleep,
my dreams are fire; someone's making political capital
by my solicitude. But, of course, that was inevitable.
When asked, 'There seems to be some movement,' I said,
'but I won't disclose those briefings.' It was a weak answer.
I was campaigning in Missouri on October 16."
Dukakis
"The placid green tank rambles against my cause,
trembles my squelched skull in its combat hardhat
squinting out the cool black fish-eyes in the crowd
of press-men. I won't smile for applause.
How many times has the future groaned and ceased
beneath my feet? That ice lightning stalled me blind
but unlike Oedipus I remained unchanged, chained
to my loving Kitty and her scrambled passel of cubs.
Bush and Willie Horton register like stars, crooked
like unforgiving hooks into the milky heart
of my campaign-cosmos. When Willie went killing
on his blood-spritzed spree, funded by the Furlough's goals
of rehabilitation for the apolitical psychopath,
Mr. Ailes had me sighted in his hateful geiger
fat on his media-consultancy and pool shark style
of cynically 'manipulating the Mass...'
I feel the edges zero-in and narrow at my throat....
I was like a tree when I was green, like Alexander
at his dashing bastard best, played by Steve McQueen.
Now hot on the overheated tank churning at my hips,
the minotaur of my class with an eagle's face, I feel
the cold motion rifle through me. What is left to say?
I love my wife even when she's high."
Farmer at the Embargo, 1980
"Our docks go rotten with the unsold grain.
Let Russians eat cakes! My fields have weight
of wealth enough to feed thin ideologs.
Until the commies come round to Adam Smith
and every Black Sea dacha lilts to 'upon the fruited
plains', our Uber Alles, let rubles flit
to Little Rock, Ark. Fresh wheat feeds Free Enterprise!
Fresh wheat on the sea-drift skims.... All night
I phoned my phoney congressman at The Mall;
his hands are tied. My head is in the sack!
No stomach swears allegiance to a godless cause,
all money loves a capitalists' warm palm.
Beached here by our timid wish to feed
and democratize the Slav, we hop, foot
and foot in hand while the White House consents
to Bowdlerize the press, and so sacrifice
events' true shape to rumor's inflating word
that blows dragons from water-wings, and spills
fertile fallacy from an honest palm of grain."
MacArthur on the Yalu River
"The land lies rough beneath the oriental's tread.
Such a winter makes retreat impossible. The yellow tide
has crested the Yalu early; there's a commie in every weed!
If I had beat the snappy Jap back on the Chinee mainland
a billion of the world's maundering masses
would be bickering and free; if I were given half a chance!
Manuel, bring this disaster's map, my royal purple pen...
...Jack... Once, aching for my little filipino princess
in her blue turtleneck dress at the officer's cotillion
I felt almost boyishly innocent of murder and smiled.
Her limp body passed through my hands like black wine....
But immutable Kant's quintessential Duty called:
you only know you're alive when you're doing what you hate.
At Okinawa on the killer's field, lean and ready
for the silent bullet to repeal my god-granted marshal's fiat,
nothing pierced the scarlet of my commander's sunglasses
mirroring the quixotic haste of dead men's actions in impassive plates.
Take this down, Jack. Manual, thanks. Take this down:
when the engraver comes round with his axe and chisel
say these words be cut atop my body, say
'I was a born winner whose nerve didn't fail or turn blue.'
You know, don't you Jack, that this is my last action?
I played five card stud with my heart and groin."
Nixon During WaterGate
"Vishnu-handed at the last, I watch perched
the world unravel from my needle-pile
of discarded trophies; stretched reel to reel,
my soul cannot fold.
Swept by sweet victory into the electric chair,
I listen to my own slick stammer and applaud.
Whose hammer beat in time to my wincing tongs?
I held my grammar steady, and I stared
TV-asphyxiated like The War into every voter's lair.
Now alone in my high estate with the jury's minions closing in,
I listen to the mystery play my sub-subconscious penned;
my Quaker's conscience holds me flinchless and appalled,
I ached after my own interest and called that aching 'World.'
What has the salutary commission convened to stage-whisper
into the nude mikes that flood their mouths like flies?
I cannot wait! I click on the humming set....
You know, when I was young, with the one hand inched
out to nab the ribbon at the high-school track meet
panting like a wildebeast chased to death, what
was Vishnu to me but a ten-handed castanet player?"
Boris Yeltsen
"I sway drunk and liberated from the tin green tank-top
spouting my bright brand of Nevesky's Napoleanic 'Liberte!'
Yesterday, I ran away from poverty to fame,
a circle clipped... by lies, by bliss...
Brezhnev signing in my subway bill after a solid round
of boilermakers toasting his longevity! Such dull, glum rounds.
Am I the hero of my nation-state? Giving parliament a kiss
and a whistle for their censure of my too solemn unsolemness.
Soldiers fawn and come to humble silence
when I spill the beans about the independence we've won
from ourselves. Who needs psychoanalysis now? They smile
and cheer in black, ironic, loving, loved street-jeers;
good ethnic-russian boys to the riven core!
I weep with bilged courage into hot salt hands
when I declare The Coup a Coup Decapitat... those guys
couldn't hang a cat! The bear dances mincing on its paws.
The gilded, false shuffle of our flighty republic's shifted
once again. At my slipping, bootblacked foot
some Mother Russia holds her infant up to the AKs ricochet.
What will Yevetshenko think up to rhyme with this?
A cab-man in his busted cab crammed with madcaps
putters by and sings: 'Puling Pavlov, Pugo and Yazov--- manhood's appalled...
70 bleak years of the Commies' trawling haul...!' "
Writing
Packed into my typewriter day by day, I thumb
my prose squares on the rich and famous til I choke,
dazed by the haze as my consciousness thins,
getting high as I sniff the lighterfluid of my language
smoking over history's thick white skin.
Allusion made them popular, but the verse must drag....
Each day in my ribald trickster's mask, I soak
the bilked body, and pray to the blaze's bray;
I make my bee's circuit from kitchen to bandstand,
command Genghis Khan in his boudoir, Hitler to harmonize...
Saints to outkill soldiers, flash their spiritual brands to ash,
hug me in a Covenant, lash myself to the mast!
When I'm buried like Poe's heroes will Parnassus kneel
and scoop me to heaven, mailed alive in the velvets?
The Artist Surprised in His Studio
In this drawing of an apostle's nirvana
I gave a charming native girl christ's
fivefold power hand, a santa rea item.
The bone dice of fate are chiselled on her skin,
her breasts are docile rounds to those twinned squares,
her pubic matt preadolescently slim. Note
the use of black, another power totem,
which oil slicks in India ink the right or damned
hand side of the visual field; out of its night soils
burst pumpkins, and watermelons halved
for the easy licks of the naked girl who lies
with crossed arms at their side. Calabeza bianco
says the stylized head joined to the anointed
torso which hovers clubfooted in this dream
which I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have painted."
Dai Ichi
“When I came to my laurelled rest at Dai Ichi,
overlooking the grey, plain, immutable quadrangle
a crooning Tokyo Rose had sworn I'd be hanged at,
giving the timid botanist-emperor an American-made smoke
in his claw-hammered tux, he mumbled gags
about his own execution through his stuttering translation-man!
My marrow went white with fire; I was abashed
to see such an elegant little fish as himself
fluttering against the grainy, post-post-war land.
My nobler soul followed his rollercoaster's flash
from artificial heights to the Lay-Z-Boy my officers unfurled
beneath him; how had we skidded together to these digs?
When he told his people he'd forgotten how to be God,
scratching a nimbus of lichen from some sea-rock, we won the war.
He waved goodbye like the xmas pine we buried in the sand."
MacArthur Reads to his Boy
"I was too cool to rule with fisted vengeance
beneath the swaddling velvets of my elegant green glove---
tell the vets who took it on the chin at Iwo Jima to read The Book;
God himself puts hubris to the sword. I start my day with prayer.
War makes one love what God hasn't wrecked.
When I worm from my humdrum office to the ambassador's shack
and back, I let the limo-boy drive in a slow lull,
open to the assassin's asking; when Gawd calls me home
I want to feel the tug. Let lesser men denounce
what means nothing to them, stuck with their existential hype
and hysteria for reality. I've had my blistering fill.
Glory, duty, honor, lilt me into longing still.
Jean in her scarlet kimono comes ghosting in. Honey, please, my pipe.
Ever see a wasted derringer fizz? Thanks. Smoke goes up
just like that. Curls like the starved howl of Arizona wolves
I played pinch-pat with as a darling kid, on assignment
in the desiccated wild west with my cavalry dad. My boy, goodbye.
Kiss Daddy on the cheek, and he'll tell you a Pecos Bill lullaby."
Schwartzkopf, Duke of Iraq
"I will go wash; and drown these desert honors
that stick in my throat. Three weeks before the grand
defeat of our enemies, I dreamt my tent squalerous,
ruined lieutenants killed by infiltrating mustard gas
that couldn't sniff out the winning colors
of our almighty flag. My aide snored on
under his moony brow, refusing to wake
for anything less than the Judgement Day; I'll pass.
In the wheezing trenches we squeezed off rounds
like mad
in an unending philippic against the damned.
Dust-erased faces blink skyward from their rust lakes
of blood, off, on, off, on.
Now downed in a North Carolina airplane hanger
and tired of the itching laurels that itch my scalp
I stare bemused at what our wanting has brought us here:
Disinterred love scrambles up my lap."
Nixon Now
Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our
wicked spires;
I came trumping in, Ike's prat-boy VP,
flipped the sinister death-ace on its head in Laos
to a vermillioned flush, a cornucopia of flowers
scissored off by dear Pat for my tweed lapel.
Coronated by my foreign policy's jewelled accretions,
old man
of the treasons, whispers stitched to whispers,
I age in New Jersey; grown familiarly bland
I confer my Ovaltine-sweet opinions on the mass,
saddled with a politician's over-zealous
over-friendliness still.
Whatever has happened has happened.
Smooth-trunked Atwater by a humorous tumor felled;
How many more must wither and lessen? Stopped
at the bullet-proof pane all day, I watch
the dogwood whiten and the rich magnolia finish...
What love cannot conquer I leave to my will.
The winning children still swing back
to their crooked papa at Xmas... a few bright, colored lights.
I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!"
Casey in the Hospital
"Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim,
repentant, towing cowed Eva like a swallowed soul...
a hang of flapping hair shut one demon-eye in, dimmed,
wrestling with itself, whirlwind angels laughing in his skull.
We killed him eventually; a few, true things
penetrating to the innermost. I feel the arrow still
my brother lumbered from my leg; atop a joyous swing
I rubbed where its rubber cutting nose had thrilled.
Our afternoons were resplendent, unhurried, vague,
as we tumbled as cowboys and indians in an
unholstered rush
killing the shuffling vegetation and lizards that plagued
our simmering summer patio. They would blink and push
their low bellies in and out, alien, slow,
themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill
my tumor now."
Ancillary Victim at Reagan’s Shooting
We are all in the hospital together... all of us.
The IVs rattle above us, see-through gods
with their jingling rattles, bodiless, pure...
Why must we sink and sink? The lead allays
the hurt of its thrust; rubber hands pull bullets from my side.
When did the first enigma enter? Its pulsing yeowl
spurred through a lurid kidney, blood ripe blood
aching to black against the crystallized innards.
Near me towered and grimaced the great man,
his heart-pouch slaughtered while the cameras whirred.
The anesthetist's mask crouches at my throat
hissing its green dreams of health. What cure
will come slurring from my ribbons, white
and clean as a slug? I remember a young man's
fanatic face and tanless untrembling hand....
Its purely pathological, I'm sure of it."
Philippic Against Darwin
"The world looks level under my steel rims,
crushed to bliss by God's giant green thumb
which teems and redeems everything under
its whirlwind whorl.
We must ax out this cancer of Chance; the world
was built, I believe, and my book proves its true.
A downtown D.A., I'll burn the palace down
for the convicting clue. Professors are such soft,
openended things, and besides, science is unproved.
I saunter up with my bilged briefs from
the ribosome links of these stranger docks
and penetrate the doilywork of the statistical city.
Fly-eyed in the pulpit, I meditate
on my haranguing lectures to the mass. The mass
remains unmoved, pawing the ground. I don't know
what simmers inside myself! I don't know
about that master fake-maker Darwin, revealing a world
a blinded god had hidden, even from himself!
His sideburns evolved from bad to worse.
Maybe God made each mistake independently...
Our green genes shift and change like germs,
our bodies diminish and age, shrink back to
apes in smocks
crooning in ape-ooohs around a glittering testtube.
The people are finished with me, TVs off
they return to the burning circle of their lives,
chanting gossip, politics, and news; but will they
buy my book?
I walk back to the docks. I love my life,
my wife, my little ones I made in the image of God."
Andy Warhol
"Coke bottles float in a grid of blue joy,
the spray paint hisses and skids, pseudo-gestureful,
pseudo-pseudo, in fact, for I wept when it was built.
Graceless audacity in the kittened crush
of the New York art scene ruffles my feathers still,
one must have the economy of the surgeon, and double
the price! A feted stack of Reverse Marilyns makes
one corner dark as a swallowed pill. Staring through
the repetitious window Jim angled and killed himself through,
my wild faces punctuates its gasping stab of hair,
a cigarette stubbed in its hoarfrost of ash....
What can I see? Disasters, foghorns, flares, the wash...
I wallow and skin-dive in the elucidating trash.
Soupcans stutter to the shelf-edge still, canned elves...
The Hudson boils in its gum of sludge. In my last, stitched
effort, two washed feet patter off the continental shelf,
patter off, patter off.... America loves
my handcarved off-the-rack! Beneath my retching heart,
my lapsing gall bladder's turning in me, neon green."
Trotsky in Mexico
"Pure squares of Mexican sky ease my exile;
reviewing my post-dated Pravda like a parishioner
fallen from St. Peter's gilded grace, the dome of Rome
and NVD network that kept my clockwork ideologies
alert and au courant, I watch my clear marguerita
evaporate
in its harsh dawn of salt. My eyes feel blooded
in their stark haloes of grey hair. I grow old, I grow old,
the Party moults me in the general slough.... I'm sent
here among the cacti for my pasturage,
a missionary without a church or holy relic beneath
my skirt!
Lenin's parboiled skull would make a nice knick-knack;
thumbing my wry digits between his teeth for a tongue,
I'd make him say: suffering is salvation, for the mass...
I stagger from my white beachchair sober and appalled,
Stalin with his ice-cream suit and dictatorial lunge
scattering the pieces...! I read in bad prose
of how he'll mechanize the Worker's Paradise,
assembly-lining cool cubes of sweatless swimming pools,
rototilling sweet compassion under, the hard clasped
hand,---
Communism's true gen. The horizon's sere
with unswallowed bile, baked brown. I falter;
at my turned back a brother communist, Juan Love,
undoes my brain with a pick or shovel."
I
Contemporaries
Saddam Huissain
"The petty strut of a peacock without a tail,
or old men salaaming for drachma in the city's dust,
so much scratching and disturbance of dust...
so much strafeing and raping of the holy villages....
Here, year adds on to year, the camel chews as slow.
Lifted from the dung fire by a ladder of assasinations,
I climbed to kindle the deserted palace steps, and turned
my unerring hand to the populace, coaxing to vex
my nomad volk towards foam. Oily dollars,
skin thin, flutter as bats to the waste horizon
returning at motor dawn in the hunched shapes of tanks;
sea-anxious to return to the yaw and abyss of the sea,
Kuwait halts our monumental, crawling foot
and whines for a beach-badge from their simmered
verge of sand.
I pet a captive's infant before the camera, swill
the thick wine of Peace Through Annexation and stoop
in my ill-fitting soldier's fatigues to plead or command:
Surrender to God, whose white hand works through my hand."
King Faad (of Saudi Arabia)
"Dew sweetens the orchids on the abstract balustrade;
my rich eye spouts to the sky's rafters, seeking Allah.
Seeking Allah, black tanks bristle on our border;
water-fat Americans sweat in the shade of a water tower,
Hussain putters about in his bathrobe with a globe
dreaming on the spinning quilt of colors, rich as spilt oil...
his stale mustache and chemical stench
more like Il Duce or Saladin than Hitler,
less like Saladin and Il Duce than a wayward boy
dawdling in the new mosque with his new top;
the entire desert piled like Picasso's charnalhouse.
When the one unwelcome moslem sweeps in with dawn,
high on his probation from sanity, will enough
F16s lower from heaven and provide oblivion?"
Marlin Brando
"Histrionic, with a swine's loving heart
larding my innards, I crash on San Francisco's docks.
Unpacked from my Polynesian heaven I eye
the bruised head of the press; once, Shakespeare
without a throat, I had made the sexual
mystery limp the boards, and grunt, grunt
by glorious grunt in Paris Tango's sordid atomic dawn.
Now old and sexless before the gawping crowd
at the courthouse, my largesse mauled
by rumor, my sinning son unsentenced, I sweat
my sty of causes dry before the cool blind stone.
Leather-jacketed in my rebel heyday, I knew
my hated audience like a hated father,
all my patricidal punches sweetened by affection."
Trump
"All this deluded elegance's against me. My ripe
man of youth, a plaster-of-Paris David, hangs
in a gaudy corner of the Taj Mahal like a ghost,
and reckons up the poker-faces my goliath ambition birthed.
Golden quarters tinkle from a showgirl's palm
in the moon-blue changing booth; she frowns;
all that titanic lust for money unveiled in glitters!
I count the shadowed furrows in her brow;
the hot lights make her mascara leak. I pause and smile.
Coughed smoke smears the wards of patrons. Alone
at the automatic door of the underground lot, swept
by light, I hear the new cars creak and breathe. Who's so sure
he can't find some solace in his death? I turn;
she leans against me like a candystriper."
Wolfgang Puck, Cook
"Rich in shrimp, and fed fat by feeding,
my nouveau cuisine and halapino peppers stuff
the moneyed throats of stockbrokers like a tickertape,
quoting every appetite to the last eighth of desire.
On my empire the sun sets flaming like a peach's pit;
inverted pigs stare naked and wrinkled from their hooks,
flayed Bartholomews, while I boil the mother sow
to a tasty vinegrette my salt palm spices.
Others boil, teeming with a prosperous guilt
my low-cal meals can baptize and cure; slimmed
by the communion wafer-sized servings at the steel counter,
they smile. I smile from my orange hell of steam.
My father was a butcher like the bard's, often said:
'Let each man's conscience, sick, and thin with pining
like a scythe,
razor his wet brains apart, in bloody pieces like spaghetti.'"
Open Lake
Spider infants float above the noon waters
filament by filament by filament...
Strange, to reach that age, to have the timid pulses
waver in a fatted neck, not the hangman's, not
the erect victim's, but your own blue tangle
under the skin; wet winds comb the rushes.
Uneasy on our haunches in the dingy we watch
blue spines of fire leak into the lake
from the fumbling alternator; our lax bodies rise.
We are almost ready to dive and dive....
How long has the swamped horizon been
so thin a line of red? Our fishing lines lie
reversed to a clear spool in the bottom of the boat;
we maneuver our middle-aged spider's bodies
to the wavering lip and kneel to leap,
our hands have found the gunwales and strange strength.
The Old World
Marilyn Monroe (Death Speech)
"My heart the size of an apple all my girlhood grew
then festered in Hollywood's tinselled wastes;
hardened and enlarged, a red peppermint flooding
its candied blood to flares in the leftover
gin drinks at Arthur's theatrical parties.
Mondays we drain the scarlet tumblers til sunset
to kill the hair on our tongues, flames
of light dividing and writhing over the stuffed couches
and oriental carpeting... but that was years ago.
A distant, powdered hand paddles a rattle from the bedstand;
the fallen pill bottle clatters and cackles....
My heart knots on a watery bed, black rubbery inches
of overused innertubing, patches cauterized on patches;
the pink pills make my loaded pulses shiver;
the slithery nighty in jazz aftershocks shimmers,
thin as a reversed eyelid in silk, a clear
red blood loss open from throat to groin---
this soft lusterless blushing ends in a simple frill."
Cleopatra
"Black candles throw smoke to the throne room's corners,
hissing and spitting, mad as wives
yattering their lecherous husbands back to bed.
Quiet this light that curls blue above the Nile;
ghostly tapers flicker in the marsh, moon-misted, watched
by slippery moons rising in my crocs' slow royal eyes.
And I, bare-breasted, caught, without my golden wristwatch
in time's rich tri-cornered delta, stand to gasp,
paired snakes black as mud spilling from my Medusa dugs,
my hair on fire; Antony, the kingdom---
Everything burning that had made the city or river glitter,
everything burning that had given love a face and taste!
Flamed barges twinkle doubled in the water,
my wet slice of heaven. Stars, men, all conquered
by a crust of lust as fine as any sweat."
Benedict Arnold to Peggy Shipton
"Let these soulful travellers quit travail
On your cold lips' firmament; restful earth,
Let me stretch out my full measure on the ground
As final mortal toil all lies down to do
Even to this last particle of desire.
Taste this measure of my life's content
Which tasting stirs contentment to a rage of love,
Beneath which, vanquished, I'll calmly settle
Among blushes, encamped as a pilgrim in the wilderness
Studying out the flowers how they bloom
Or how dull whippoorwills take punishment of rain
Beneath the starry barbs fixed in your glance.
On this grass field that tombs up men
And builds no further monument of dust
But wild everlasting weeds, I'll lie down
And become myself some substance of the grass."
Thucydidies
"The perpetual distortion and stabwork of the historian;
stray pieces seem to fit or falter like Escher's birds,
flying forwards, then backwards, on a neutral field:
bright diamonds of effort, fletched like our Athenian arrows
sighing flaming to the Cartheginian flesh.
Exiled to objectivity and the bad frost edging
the temples whiter, failed strength having failed,
my scoured gilt of generalship tops the dustheap,
flashes and falls as I mope on words, the periscope---
a ladder of mirrors to spy the flamed dross
of Pericles' ogling funeral oration as I polish it.
All night my mind runs on the track towards the tunnel-mouth....
Dark grapes cool on the vine as the new dew stiffens,
one wakes to light as if from the cradle still---
the mind rises on fire, running downhill still
till all the heart's an unceasing mill
battering and yattering for the doomsday pill....
Killing flies and time with the same rubbed thumb,
how like this world's the world to come."
Valhalla, Vonnegut, Etc.
The ritual errata and recovery of existence
shocks us still. Wars horrors concentrate
the false scent in the cloth daisy mailed here,
pie-eyed and plangent by my breakfast plate;
the wrong NJ air smells cool-soulled. Things smash:
Vonnegut in a cooler when Dresden's shelled---
cold sweat flashed on his back, soaked.
The uneaten egg must stare and water. Dry ash,
dry ash, and the city flat as a pancake. Flagged,
alive and dragged back, he was glad enough to laugh....
The eye rolls and fixes its sights, a white
and blue prayerbead thumbed by a blue God. I'm glad
enough for that diaphanous freedom to just die & glide....
This chord of being's too dumbly thrubbed.
Saturated in cold sweat, and rife with rarity,
I sing bird and beast, animal or man, trapped.
III
The Central Plateau
M. Blanc
O the damned inroads of this my conscience
On my infinite flesh! what substance in the body
Does daily death to these stellar essences,---
Performs abortions, drags the brain by its one
Long blue hair to the electrifying brink
And puts it to pieces with a rockinghorse's
Fluttering motions as though an unsteady child
Had giggled in its saddle with too rich love?
This is how our haloed lord appeared
Fallen from his rocking sphere
Of light too intemperate for dull day
Where criminal and saint decay
But crimsoned round him with a power
To dissuade death of his rude takings,
As when he bends his executing breath
Of frost on flowers, and gives life back.
Like a mountain every day my body breaks
From the sleeping smoke of rhymless night
Creeping its umber calumnies round the globe
Useless as rumor, to have all my dawning skin
Gilded in a flash.
Dropped mercury lolls to its leaden level.
My human heart out of this constricting vial
Must fly, and find some profounder habitation;
When the mirror shatters in an ache of glitter,
And the moon in shards comes hacking back at earth,
What sultry lotion from the lagging air
Will be my heart's balm and my soul's repair?
Panic with her hair outspread
Strode among the shocking dead
All wounds and whispers as she choired
Them like mice to a humid quilted mire
That pillowed every festered skull
Among anxious reeds in one soft hush;
In their dead eyes blazes a watery fire.
A rotting hand undoes my buttons at the throat,
My trembling ribs fold open to disclose
Red wings of an infernal bellows beating
Around my closed soul, the one gold
Globe charred black; a charnalhouse alive
With scolding fires rasps the black corpse blacker
Until my bolting Soul and Will, all one,
In the burning majesty of their abrupt destiny
A charcoal homunculus remain, rudely carved.
If the envenomed world would fade,
Diminished and pulled back every shade
As if skin were the harborer of some pure light
Waiting ecstatic cues from the vibrant hum
Of this compelling air, perhaps she---
Perhaps her translucent limbs
Falling fantastic from fantastic air
In paused cometing oblations
To a sincerer self left unimagined
Until realized, would then unwind and climb
Out of every morning's desolation
To its true atmosphere and ice sublime.
As when a cloud a dream of joy imprints
On eyes' retaining paper, all one gild
Of silver, she steps, love, to me, in sacred vision
Of a field, all wild in a fever of wildflowers;
She steps, and with her beauty all one bower
Recalls the sweetest seconds of drawn breath
As in deep spring fields after short showers
One feels love's fondest hour grown longer.
Love, thou breathless sphere, thy
One white wound in eternity's side
Bleeding light into every eye,
Perennial form and substance of all grace
That refuses to decay, falter, or lay
Waste to the imagination's projecting
Powers, infuse this wrack again as once
You made midsummer's day from my breast's dust.
What you look on once regains regal
Solitude of love, by your connecting glance---
For essential form perceived once aright
Can never fade, or suffer loss,
Or lessening as if moving into shade
Where differing whitenesses are all
Congealed to one grey shade. Never
Suffers this breath such cold effects
Speaking like a stream that cannot know
How to say other than its self's soul
But fathomless rushes in a sunlit glen
From source to intermingling reeds
As alike as water to itself.
And in a hushed and holy whisper
Formed air creates and men decipher
This shape undoes its native bonds
And as the sighted sun itself does fray
Into water-freighted mists as bows of rain,
Both disappears and pleases at one stroke.
Or so the melancholy monster curled
Between my eyes had, as if by imagination
Forecasted into the unfinished future's shape,
Made me think my sun-like fortune failed,
Dwindled to one grey drop of pearled dew.
So deeply retreated to a shadowed cape
The chill ligaments of my cold temper
Throws round my shoulders, furled as sails,
Have I run back as casts my white face
Into a single dark. And still I hear
Those ghosts my former selves cannot shake
Burn and purge in a distant gap or gape
The unmended mind crowds full of guilts
Bearing the tumultuous heft of exultant faces.
These scream, and blast the natural grasses black;
Spiteful curses or blessings only
Exit spirits with such exceeding force.
This troublous diurnal duty of breath and life
Plunges with the itchy reiterations of a heart
Or a glossy vinyl album of compressed time
Restricted through material fault to this
One cool mouthful of notes.
Masks
Etchings of the Caribbean Cross
Archaeologists after lunch
Are picking through the litter
Beside tin shacks
Flashing under dark palms.
A white shard emerges
From the lifted dust.
Reversing its Greek intent,
The thick lines
Show fluttering women
Melodious beneath
A darkened moon, lemur-eyed.
A white shard emerges
From the lifted dust.
Questions Concerning History
One has lifted the white boat
From the yellowish sands
To skate out over the reef,
Azure opacities and pinched purple reefs.
The corridors of barracuda in the sound
The sharp, silver rows,
Are like elegant fish
In an immense bowl.
The revolutions in nature
Are like revolutions in history.
How many times
Can the same Chinese man be freed?
The question falls heavily with each slap of the boat.
The question lifts and penetrates the air.
The mild clouds
Revolve in bright corridors of air.
Don Juan Among the Maidens
Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride
Glitters under maidens in the countryside.
Sleepy roosters in their streaked sheds
Stride by musky hens lolling in their beds.
The moon observed him from her dusty height,
His colorless shadow, his advancing hand.
The maiden fainting is not less herself
Because of her pale feigning and fluttering eye.
Piebald roosters and their mates grow cold
Under a moon emptied of light,
Emptied of fond looks, and emptied of ashes
Aunts ferry from the fireplace every morning;
Her looks coarsen,
And the wind grows rough.
Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride
Strides by maidens exhaling their finicky sighs.
Bacchus at the Pianola
Dionysus in confinement at the leper's ward
In Louisiana, on an island hospital
Plongs his purple fingers plucking grapes.
Bacchus at the pianola moves his mind.
Swelled music from his swelling digits poured
Wine to the chill willows hanging crepe.
And although the music, wine-induced, is less
Than the musky forest through which it moves
And less than the vatic profusions out of which it soars,
Irretrievable, large, and of the hugest heart hung high,
Is less than that, a mincing of its human portion,
Shrunken from a Greek intent, a skeleton on the keys,
The leprous ladies in their spotted gowns still sway.
And Anarchies
A Birthday Suit
I do it at least once a year.
Try it.
Have you ever tried it?
Try it.
Simply unzip the skin
And emerge
Like a girl removing her zebra bikini
A new, improved you,
A bald gold bone;
New flesh unfolds like a suit of clothes.
It carries faces and hands and Lord knows what.
It carries the past like last year's packages.
The titanium skeleton is full
Of buoyant, swirled
Alloys tough as an ant.
It smiles and smiles, a thing of grins.
It smiles just like ice,
A mouth of acidy statics pure as a cloud.
A shellacked heart or shellacked limb
Won't hinder it---
An embalmed tongue
Means nothing to such indestructible metals.
Moon Garden
The stilled rose
And moon pallors
Well the loaded pool
Edges like a cut---
The one stone-
Solid among darknesses.
A bush of silverdust
Throws tremendous capes, shadows;
And now the moon
Cradles a candle
Behind your face as behind a palm.
Such luminescences
Crave a cave
To hide in, a filled well
To extinguish
Such unbidden brightnesses;
Some damp small spot will do.
Any liquid
Deep enough
To fall through a breathe like air.
Paraplegic
O love
O paralyzed love---
Somebody is entering our house!
The heavy shutters heave open lovingly.
The carpets smooth themselves instantly.
Glued smiles appear like stars.
Somebody is coming into our house!
Coming thunderingly up the steps,
Rattling the moony spoons in their drawers.
And now your face appears,
Huge and luminous
Above the sheet's edges as out of a box.
Your susurrations are aware and perilous---
There is nothing that has not been said between us.
Frosts stiffen the window panes,
Each chilled web a bullet's nest of fears.
One counts the radiant moon-spokes
Delicately, delicately.
Our hesitations fill the flowerboxes,
Each flower a little yellow scream.
One fear, one fear
Radiating into the next softly as flowers;
This flower paralyzed and set blinking in mid-air.
Out of what pool has it sucked its white dose of kirari?
The cross petals jar strikingly.
The steps make the sound of an advancing crescent,
Assured as Islam. The flowers shiver,
Unloading their feathery pollens;
At dawn they unfold
Eager as hypochondriacs
For the new sweet pill that crests the hill,
The red medicine,
The sure cure.
The Night Absences
The stars drop
Thin and sinister as pins
Into the silver skin, the skin
The skin of lions
Skins of seals
Peeled back bleedingly,
A washed eyeball, after the thumb
And water have come
With their pressure of good wishes;
The wet skins
Shed silk bloods, I-dots
That spatter the dry concrete
So appealingly!
Such pure dark washes of dropped blood---
Pure as the clean
Simple things you say to me.
Night's absences
Recede
And dawn breathes
Blue and new as a bruise
In the vacant east.
Strange, isn't it,
How you and I
Were each
Born with a mouth to pronounce death with?
Marcia Funebre
The heavy cannon are shouldering their men
High, high and tinnily,
Over the hill.
Doused in the sun's reds
Their submerged torsos elongate to little screams;
Compliant sheep stare stonily.
Some of them are wounded,
Some of them are dying.
Some of them are shot in the heart.
Ravens leap out of the sky like icicles,
Like little knives
Bearing their shattering voices before them.
Thundering cannon prognosticate
No end to this winter.
The knives
Arrive blindingly.
