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3 1293 00896 61

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

VANTAGES

presented by

Robert J. Clark

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. degree in English

 

 

 

Date May 13, 1991

 

0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

 

 

 

LIBRARY
Michlgan State
University

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

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MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution
empire-9.1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vantages

BY

Robert J. Clark

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requiremants
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English
1991

ABSTRACT

VANTAGES

BY

Robert Clark

This work is a porfolio of poetry divided into six
sections entitled: 1) Love and Other Things We Do Alone
Together; 2) Etudes Ordinary and Fantastic; 3) Music for
Solo Dragon and Continuo; 4) Off the Top of My Head; 5)
Draining the Swamp; and, 6) Listening for the Big Bang,
which is submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree
requirements of the Master of Arts program in creative

writing.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a last, desperate effort to spread the blame,
I should like to point out that without collusion of
the following un—indited co—conspirators this opus
would never have been foisted upon academia. First,
there’s my wife Noelle, who not only encouraged my
shaky ego at critical times when I might have given
up before it was too late, but also provided tons of
what at the time seemed like friendly criticism. Then
there’s Doug Lawder, who more or less made me write
this stuff. And, finally, there's my mother, Rhea,
whose knowledge of computers, word processing and
laser printers, etc., has made the final product so
attractive, polished the poison apple, as it were. If

I can’t blame these guys, who can I blame?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LOVE AND OTHER THINGS

WE DO ALONE TOGETHER .
Clouds of the Spirit . . . .
Invitation . . . . . . . . .
The Origin of the Quest . .
Four Little Flowers

of Noelle's
The Wages of Naughtiness
One That Ovid Passed Over . .
Water Lights . . . . . . . . . .
Hilary's Surprises . . . . .
Mallards on a forest . . . . . .
The Fortunate Fall . . . . . . .
Pamela Harris, Her Pavanne . . .
Little Absences . . . . .
Giuoco Piano . . . . . . . . . .
Elf Call . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sundown on the Road .

If, as they say, the final cause of love

ETUDES, ORDINARY AND FANTASTIC . .

Winter Trains . . . . . . . . .
The Sheets Were... . . . . . . .
Spring. Persephone . . . .

...And Hector, wrenching out the bronze-point

spear . . . . . . . .
Those the Gods Remember
In Old Calypso' s Cave

MUSIC FOR SOLO DRAGON AND CONTINUO

Droppings From the Bird of Time
The Dragon and the Canon . . .
Statuary . . . . . . . .
Vantages . . . . . . . . .
Gargoyles . . . . . . . . .
The Dragon and the Chinese Rose
0n the eating habits of
old Chinese philosophers and

ancient dragons . . .
Under the Tree of Heaven . .
Cape Cod Piece . . .
The Fate of the Cliff Dancer .

iv

61
63
65
69

OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
A Compromise on the Inclination
Toward Immortality Arrived at
in October, 1986, at Higgins Lake . . . 73

Looks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Sweeping the Stairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Breaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Duelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Ozimandian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Those Lion Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
The MOWING OF THE LAWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Like Persians in the Snow . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
The cardinal cocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Bahram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

A Niche in Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
The Dildo of Fate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Astronomy:
Variations on themes
by J. P. Sartre and the Holy Ghost . . . 90

Manhattan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Germantown Trees, circa 1950 . . . . . . 92
Modern Argosy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
A puddle enchanted . . . 94
Paradox Stew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Gesture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

DRAINING THE SWAMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Squawking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
The Monkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Heartache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
On the Crest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Trivia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
She Holds the Dawn Away . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
The Keep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

___°__
m= / _v_2

\/ c2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Digging in Our Own Ruins . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Marked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Overdue Requiem . . . . . . . . . . . 112

The Myths of the Beautiful Weapons . . . . . . . . 114
In the Huron Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

LISTENING FOR THE BIG BANG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Two Saints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Dust Bowl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Skirting the Absolute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Sanctus Sanctorum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Notre- Dame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

A Bright Mist Hoards the Sea . . . . . . . . . . . 123
If into the Midst of Armaggeddon . . . . . . . . . 124

V

A Raven Lumbers

Dark Camp . . . .

Don't You Wish . . . . .
Shores of the Mind's Eye

The Arches of the Sun and Moon .

Kyrie O O O O O O O O O I 0

vi

125
126
128
129
132
134

LOVE AND OTHER THINGS

WE DO ALONE TOGETHER

Clouds of the Spirit

Perched on a Smokey's bald
in an October afternoon's unsettled air,
gazing down a forest cove
to where a column of smoke rises, tall
yet fading into haze
far below the granite dome,
squinting against the sunlight
that blazes off the valley
under the walled darkness
of an approaching storm,
waits the hawk of my imagining.
Deft wender of the clear spaces

between the clouds of the spirit,

keeper of the voices

whispered to raptors

in the hiss of breeze-sleeked feathers,

with wing ends
spread like a lover's wheeling

on the rapture of the gift,
spread to trace the sheer satin
rippling across the ribs
of the wind,

spread to tease the mysteries

from the body of the wind
and the will of the storm
and the mind of the sky.
Hunter of shapes that pass below
as rumors through the pines,
Hunter of shapes that pass above

like clouds in a watchful eye.

Invitation

Dine with me tonight, love,
in the stateroom
where the sexed angel
dances on the
moon tormented waves,
dine with me on
unicorns and sea yarns
as we reef our sails
in every slack interval

of our heart's weather.

Do the dark duty
of all salty sailors
with me here
on the wharfside watch,
lit with hurricanes.
You can be
my cradle of storms
as we navigate
by your starry eyes,
like little sailors

seasick on each other.

The Origin of the Quest

The windows rattle, ending my pretense of sleep
so I lift the curtain on a muggy dawn that's
racing through a storm to break; flashes

of lightning etch out a branch of huddled
wrens, wind shaken in an eerie orange haze.

I turn my eyes to you, nude on flowered sheets.
Your body shimmers in this strange light

like a thing apart from you, a form

before thought, will or understanding.

It lays as it wants, beautiful, calm,

feet draperied in tangled sheets, hips
innocently tilted, a wanton stillness

like a carving in a paleolithic cave

or a daughter remembered in a pharoah's tomb.
It stays real while its meanings shape

in your dreams. The wind changes and the rain
splats against the screen.

I watch you waken,
watch you begin to form your body to your will,
to make yourself into that frail unity
of flesh and spirit that is our mystery,
our chief joy, and our catastrophe. Your eyes,
hazy with sleep, come to focus past me at

the ruffled wrens and the sky tumbling by.

Four Little Flowers

of Noelle's

1
Blind in thin yellows
of young sunlight; tulips nod

also top-heavy.

2
Pricked thumbs in a
clouded thicket of blossoms. I'm

your roses' virgin.

3
Sitting in a far corner
of our garden, away
from your averted eyes,
thinking how well over years

this ivy has learned its wall.

4
the rude sun prickles
the scalp of the gardener

as he plays plant god.

The Wages of Naughtiness

When our breathing had settled down

it was full dark under the golf

course oaks. As our senses rejoined us
where we sprawled naked on the grass,

we were surprised by the honeyesuckle

in the air, by how the fairway glowed

with a faint tangerine light, by

the stars rimmed with folded roses.

I asked her if she thought we were
being applauded, she replied that

she thought we were being upstaged.

One That Ovid Passed Over

A Roman count was used to search far from his palace
for rustic maids, through wood and field and boggy fen,
to rape and glory over; to shame their men

with the puissant virtu of his privileged phallus.

But on a day he caught sight of cunty Venus

at her bath, all naked, veiled by the ferns of a glen--
Thinking her his quarry, he creeps up behind, but then
she turns and his flinty soul surges into his penis--
How hugely it swells! Arm's length, hard as rock!

The weapon of an elephant, a stage prop

on a centaur in the plays! He grabs it as it sways
heavy at his groin-- and finds it numb! in shock

he pulls back his hand, and with a dull "plop!"

it drops off, sprouts little wings, and flies away!

Water Lights

A last lavender light washes

among the hissing reeds.

Moths swirl about the dock light
that hangs for them

in a gibbous crescent

above the water.

My thoughts around your bright face

swirl. Are you the moon?

10

Hilary's Surprises

1
My daughter's red-gold
hair in the sun, sparkling as

she squashes the ants.

2
The lilacs shiver
on the edge of a storm wind,

the sky grows grumpy.

11

Mallards on a forest
pond; still water mirrors mists.

Dark tears in your eyes.

12

The Fortunate Fall

1
The clouds twist among
the ridges of the hunters' hills.

Blue smoke on the rain.

The pond reeds hiss
in the chill mists of night breezes.

Yellow windows scold.

3
The silky fine grey fur
of the cat who sleeps between us

sneezes me awake.

4
Ghastly shrieking owls--
pines in panic-- nothing frets

this wife in my arms.

5
Southing birds gossip
in a woods half envy green

half jealous yellow.

13

Pamela Harris, Her Pavanne

Medieval dances, slow dances,

not touching-- not quite touching--
formal steps, symbols of desire

or memories of imagined consummations;
tease and demur, eyes lock,

lower; curtsey and bow;

other dances, other partners.

14

Little Absences

1
The bowl of plums glistens,
still wet. Meows complain of

your having just left.

2
If I see you're face reflected
in the stairway mirror
even when you're gone
could it be that a sound
has fallen in the forest
when no one was there

and the tree still stood?

3
Upstairs at my desk, staring
out into the suppertime sunlight
that's hanging limply through
the branches of our big sycamore.
Just waiting (aren't we, old Tree?)
for her sparkles and shadows

to move through us again.

15

4
You, sauntering up the walk,
twirling your denim skirt
about your ankles
with a dancer's wrist,
too intent to feel
my eyes' caress from so high

a husband's window.

l6

Giuoco Piano

I phone to tell her of my untimely death
and she asks me over, but her voice is empty

and there's a hint of liquor on her breath.

She seats me on the couch and serves me tea,
the de-clawed wilderness of Sierra books adorn

the coffee table, her saucer wobbles on one knee.

I find she lives exquisitely, genteely borne
through Persian memories on the english horn,

and I had thought to teach her how to mourn!

 

17

Elf Call

Great conifers brood,
dim light slants through speckled haze,

even the birds whisper.

She floats translucent
through this half light of ferns,

spinning slowly, nude;

eyes closed, dreaming;
always away over the ancient falls

of moss mottled trees.

18

Four Phases of a Winter Moon

1
Geese settle on snow
in stubble fields, the moon rises

into cobwebs.

2
A sharp wind braids the snow
across the ice of the lake,
from the blue shadows
beneath the cedars and out

into the moonlight.

3
The moon nudges aside
the curtains to shine on
the nightstand
where our eyeglasses

embrace.

4
Snow ghosts howl and twirl
beneath the warlock oaks, the

harlequin moon sets.

l9

Sundown on the Road

Rusts and umbers fade
from windbreaks and stubble fields,
blacktop glasses with rain;
it's time for lights and wipers

and pain behind my eyes.

Aching for my head
to be nestled in your lap,
your fingers to ruffle
my hair. On the radio

local stations fade.

20

If, as they say, the final cause of love
shines from the ardor of divinity,

the changeless light of crystal flame above
the splendid agitation of our affinity,

we must also know, no pleasure being pure,
that wounds that take, not merely catch, the breath,
must have a primal cause, abstract and sure,

in the wanton will, the call and suck, of death.

The frailness her sleeping, moonlit face,
this woman who is all I need of cause,

all of my myths and only bond with grace,
stings me with tenderness, a need that gnaws
at foolish reasons, causes all cause to blur

and aches as helpless, hopeless fear for her.

ETUDES, ORDINARY AND FANTASTIC

21

22

Winter Trains
..And so there is not one kind of strife only,
but everywhere throughout the world there are
two...and they are completely different, for one
causes fighting and war, ...while the other makes

even the lazy work.
--Hesiod, Works and Days

{(St. Louis, January 31, 1990,
3:45 AM)}
All night they heard it,
the night people,
without listening,

the rev of the diesels,

the squeal of the rusty brakes,

the satisfying, prolonged

crunch of the coupling,

the building of the Chicago freight:

112 cars from Seattle, Frisco, LA,
Vancouver, Phoenix, Mexico City;

Santa Fe piggybacks of Toyota parts,
Canadian National boxcars of lettuce,
empty DT&I RoRo's headed back to Detroit,
flats, orehoppers, tankers with

their various warnings concerning sudden death,
and the night people heard it

without listening, it registered

only on the strangers to these strange hours,

new parents listening

for their baby's breathing,

23

first time felons,
the new widow just moved in
with her city daughter,
not the cops coming out
of the alley in their boredom,
in their suspiciousness, checking
the doors for trouble,
not the janitor swinging
his mop and arguing out loud
with the call-ins
on the radio talk show,
not the waitress at Denny's
just getting the smell of the bar crowd
out of her nose and fighting with
the pretty new thing to get her to do
her share of the cleaning up.
Of all the night people
only the yard workers heard it
because it was the rhythm

of their work.

{(65 miles west of Billings, Montana
January 31, 1943, 3:45 PM)}
The big steam locomotive
punches as fast as it dares

through the heavy snow

24

adding its confusion of smoke,
steam and noise
to the steel cold

of the dangerous afternoon.

Behind stretches the forty-three coaches
of the troop train
headed for Seattle with its
variegated load of male H. sapiens sapiens--
the crap game of the ”old" sergeants
(25 or 26 at least),
the cocky corporal from South Philly
thinking about the three girls
he talked into bed since he got
his orders, smiling, looking out
into the insanity-- the orderless swirl
of the snow-- wondering if
they were the last women

he would ever touch.

The drafted miner from Bluefield, WV,
who, by some quirk
will be pulled out of a formation

at Ft. Lewis and spend the war

25

behind a desk and on the beaches
of Honolulu, beside the son
of a Senator (whose presence there

was less accidental).

The 19 year old ex-cop enlistee
whose wife doesn't know
she's pregnant yet, who will
get through the malaria, the jungle rot,
the two purple hearts
by a fantasy: he and his angel
afterward, peacefully enfolded,
only to return to a snotty toddler
who wants all of his mother's time.
So in a roar, he swallows the kid whole
and spits out a ghost
that saps the colors from

both their lives.

And, outside, at a county road crossing
resting her head on the wheel
of her daddy's pickup,
the sister of a new KIA
with parents too gnawed by grief
to care, with no real sleep

in three days, and with, out there

26

somewhere, still, 125 head of Herefords
starving in the snow,

takes the time
given her by the passing train,
but no more,

to let herself cry.

{(St. Louis, January 31, 1990
5:30 AM)}

The Chicago freight
Moves out of the yard lights--
the diesels straining--
the first crossing whistle sign--
out into the decaying factories
past the make-shift hovels
of the hobos and the homeless
with their 55 gallon drums of fire--
out into the old tenements, dark,
into the better neighborhoods
with the street lights changing
from blue neon to bronze argon--
and here and there a light
in an apartment as early workers
crouch over their coffees,
dry their hair, listen to

their radios-- the pinstriper

27

with a staff meeting to chair

listening to his top forty,

the single-mother—realtor

with a tricky 9 AM closing

trying to get her kids out

to paid-for schools, jiving

to the rap she's picked up from them,
the short order breakfast cook from
Bangor with his country,

the boiler operator with his Puccini,
and the freight, even when it blots out
the music, isn't noticed because

it happens every morning, every morning.
And as the train moves out of the city
the engineer, as he always does

as soon as it's really dark,

looks up to see

if he can see

the winter stars.

{(New York, December, 1916
sundown)}
In a sullen swirl of sleet
the Sixth Avenue El rumbles past
shaking clumps of dirty snow

down onto the street below.

28

The light is fading, the sun sets
somewhere behind the drab brownstones.
Here and there gas lights come on
behind the windows
that line the canyons
of olive-drab-grey-brown shadows.
Tired horses plod, heads down
at the same angles
as those of their drivers,
their course held straight
by the slushy ruts,
the snow between
steaming with fresh excrement.
A young woman, picking her way
through the slop
catches the attention
of a shriveled bookbinder
in the El's window seat,
her warm brown face
curved in a secret little smile

and the brilliant crimson

29

of her flapping scarf
are the only colors alive
in this ashlight where

the snow's not even white.

At the next stop the windows
of the second car look down a street
where wiry children were disgorging
from the doors of a garment factory
at the end of their shift, which,
in winter, of course, started
before the sun and ended after it.
With the indomitable, or rather
not yet dominated, spirits
of children,
they laugh and shout
in the snow, pushing
each other down in it, throwing
snowballs, first at each other
and then at the unreachable train,

up at the tired face in the window,

30

the tired face with its cigar
in the window of the

unreachable train.

{(Central Illinois, January 31, 1990
10:30 AM)}
The Chicago freight makes its way
through the stubble fields and farm towns,
and from the helicopter above
everything seems sharpened
in the pale shadows off the snow
in the low winter sun,
seems crisp and clean, modeled
in miniature, like a Christmas train set.
But it's just a working
freight as it pulls through the town,
past the idle grain elevator
and the backs of the stores--
the closed John Deere dealer,
and the seed store, the laundromat,
the Victorian gingerbread
of the antique dealer,
the hobo look of the
hardware store and the plastic respectability
of the supermarket.

It rattles the cups in the diner

31

where a local farmer

is flirting with the waitress
who he has known since

he knew anything-- but he's just
filling the time

of the winter waiting
until the land again

softens to his hands.
At the corner table

two old-timers with weathered eyes
sit jawing over coffee,

their forearms propped
on the table edge,

their hands, awkward when at ease,
looking like

burls of mahogany.

Next door the train shakes

the dust from the rafters
of the Dew Drop Inn,

where the tired owner wearing
a Cubs cap tries to clean up

the hopelessly shabby

32

bar from the ravages
of the night before.

Three streets over, the third grade
teacher with recess duty

stamps her feet in the cold
as the kids find their place

in the pecking order

like chickens in a barnyard.

And at the crossing gate on the main street
the alternating shadows and brilliances

as the sun flashes between the cars

splashes across the face of the town carpenter
as he waits in his pickup. He's

impatient because he has just seen

his lover's husband flirting in the diner,

and tingly in the hope that she

is, then, alone and waiting.

A mile past where she is

alone and waiting

a farmer sitting in his workshop
feels the vibration

of the train and
pauses a minute

to watch it out the

33

ice~encrusted window,
and then goes back to sharpening
his chainsaw, whistling
"Islands in the Stream"

with Dolly on the radio.

A flock of wrens that had been started
by the train, wheels behind its leader
and settles in the only evergreen

in the farmer's woodlot,

as if to wait for him.

{(West of Dresden, Germany, February 14, 1945
7:00 PM)}
They stopped the troop train
a few miles out of the city
because of the bombing.
It was dark and the boys

and old men in their Volksgrenadier

uniforms didn't look or feel
much like soldiers.
This last vestige of what
might be called Germany's manhood

filed out of the cars

34

and stood watching the flashes
and the increasing red glow
from over the hill and

behind the trees.

The commander, an erstwhile teacher
of classical languages, walked

with the engineer up the tracks

to the top of the hill and watched.
For hours the fires whirled through
the old city, becoming fire storms
that flirted with each other,

and then, as if copulating,

becoming one firestorm. The buildings
disappeared except where here and there
a shape tottered, like a mockery,
like a demon building, rocking

in the heat and the smoke and

the flames.

The commander felt himself

growing hysterical--

35

The grotesque lines of a medieval song
squirmed through his brain:

’VWBagfifixm
Modo niger,
et ustus f0rtiter"--

"Misery, Misery,

I am roasted completely black.

He barely suppressed a will to laugh
and turned toward the engineer,

who was gaping absurdly,

and then back along the train

to where the dark shapes

of his foolish command

flickered in the obscene glare.

An hour after dawn

a handcar with an SS lieutenant

and a railroad worker came

over the rise from the city

like a bizarre Virgil and Dante
returning from a modernized

circle of hell.

When the officer told them to move on
toward the city, they looked at him

as if he were mad, he looked mad--

36

with a little smirk on his face,
and he said, "Yes. They fried
all the women and children,
the old men and the hospitals
but the only military target
in the whole city,
the switching yards,
they missed completely, didn't
even burn the station,
not a track out of place,
they couldn't do it again
if they tried, not
in a thousand years,"
and he showed his bright
teeth and grinned.
The commander reeled,

"Dentes frendemes video" - -

"Gnashing teeth I see"
and his soul froze
and he started to laugh,

a laugh beyond self-forgiveness.

The train passed on
past the hardware bound with them
for the Russian front,

past a cattle train on a siding

37

filled with Romany gypsies

headed for another sort of oblivion;
and still the city burned,

and would burn until

there was nothing leftto burn

not so much as

a baby's fingernail.

(Chicago, January 30, 1990
5:10 PM)
All the diesels' rumble, all the clamor
of their steel sinews, all the screech
and clatter of the metal wheels

are lost in the great city's rush hour.

Even as it streams in plain sight
across the expressway overpasses,
few of the commuters
(headed for the western suburbs
wearing their twice-daily squint
against the rising or the setting sun,
half listening to the radio reports
of multiple fatalities and, more
important, long delays, on the Dan Ryan)
would remember seeing the Chicago freight.

Even for those in buildings close enough

38

to shudder to its passing
it's just another rumble
filtered from awareness
in the white noise of the city's scramble

to change the guard.

From an architect's office high above the streets
the trivial motion of the train
is lost as he stares out over the city,
no part of which he owns, yet so much
of which is his, and he watches
Chicago turn violet and golden

in thousands of reflected sunsets.

Equally unnoticed, the vibrations jiggle
the reflections in the mirror over a bar,
blending the reds and leathers and brasses

with the faces of those for whom
getting home is no big deal--

empty apartments, or homes where tension
rubs the spirit raw, or homes where
boredom has settled with the dust
into the carpets. And they sit

and drink over talk of work and sports

and sex and lies, they all shimmer for

39

a minute like a mirage. The same mirror
a few hours later will shimmer
to a different train and craze
the images of the singles, dressed
like exotic flowers, as they

search out heroes for the night.

Certainly the train adds nothing to the jostle
of the triple-decker mall,
just filling up, unless it slightly
stirs the aromas in the 'Cafe'
of the burgers and tacos and hotdogs
and steak kow and gossip

and lasagna and pastrami.

But a woman in a fawn-colored Mercedes

does see it briefly, as she drives toward O'Hare
to mix her destination (Phoenix)

with the thousands of destinations,

and her purpose (a convention)

with the untellable thousands of purposes.

And it seems to the 10th grade English teacher,
still sitting at his cluttered desk,
that the world has begun to shake

in sympathy to his shaking.

40

He still sees the look in the eyes
of the two last-period dealers
as they told him why they were
in his class and exactly
what they would do to him
and his family if he got
in their way. And, Oh, yes,

from now on he was to call them "Sir".

And in a maternity ward, a new mother

feels it as a vibration of her breast

as her son takes the nipple for the first time,
but she doesn't know what it is

and looks up, past her smiling husband

toward the girl in the next bed

who can do nothing but cry.

And a plasterer-- still in his own juices,
splattered hat-to-boot with white-coat,
shoulders aching from the ceilings
he's been stretching toward all day,
elbows on knees; grungy, callused hands
held up as if they were those
of a newly scrubbed surgeon--

hears, but easily ignores, the distant whistle

as he laughs at Bugs on TV

41

along with his twins
who are sprawled on the carpet
at his feet, until his wife

shoos him into the shower.

And so it goes until the train
pulls into the huge Chicago yards, and
in the dim lights of the tower
the work of sorting
the cars of what was
the Chicago freight, begins.
And the work continues,
the building of other trains
in the patterns the computer
calls for. Here and
everywhere the work continues,
work passed hand to hand,
across space and through time.
The endless drudgery of those efforts
required to keep things
from falling quite all apart.
For it takes none of our wickedness
to reduce things to rubble.
Left alone, things fall
apart by themselves. Endlessly

we must rebuild, shoring up

42

the weak support, tediously replacing
the rusted and the rotting,

so that, once in a while,
for a few, the chance comes

to build, to make something new
that isn't just a replacement

of the decrepit.

And in the park on the lake shore
the pigeons, with the ease
that only long practice brings,
fly just far enough to avoid
the mittened hands
of the snow-suited girl
and resume pecking the bread
that her mother has
scattered for them.
The child wavers for a second,
runs back to touch
her mother's knee for reassurance,
looks up with bright cheeks
and says, "Mommy! Birds!"
and runs out again toward where

the low sun is shadowing

43

the ice of the lake.
Her mother watches the pigeons
swirl about her twirling daughter
and smiles the ancient, quiet smile
that is the only known wage

for the valid work of the heart.

44

The Sheets Were...

chilly, like thunderstorms over water,
the heat of the day

sapping the colors from the light.

The birds scatter and wheel,

the summer silences rumbled,

shatter, and I imagine my distant wife
standing at a window

slapping the fly that bites her arm.

The dishes clatter, echoing "Skgfikflm

to the thunder, sapping my daughter's

breath, the lightning's demon clapping.

The voices of the sirens (nurses)
joking quietly at their station.
The lack of pain feels odd.
Afraid a deep breath

will start it up again. Afraid.

Half awake again, the serene face
of she who, poking my limp white flesh,

serves as adhoc god,

calling me back through
the silent storm, chilly

and afraid.

45

Spring: Persephone

Her husband's lusts would take a while to quell
but rain will wash his pungence from her hair,

the maiden had, at last, returned from hell.

She smiles in memory (the crackled air

beneath his shadow, glory and despair!)

and steps uphill from death, where none belong,
transfigured winter glisters in her glare,

her eyes the green in a grey world, her song

and smile, the only song and smile, but not for long!

46

...And Hector, wrenching out the bronze-point spear
from the bubbling throat of the soon to be dead,
rights his glorious body

and, turning his head, locks eyes with you.

Your spine creeps, the fear gulps your will,

your bowels go loose and queer, as when a woman,
late at night, in a dim, red corridor,

fumbling for her keys, purse spread wide,

sees the approaching swagger and sick leer.

You suck the air almost voluptuously,

tottering at a famous death,

your knees sway—- your soldier's training ready,
your soul aghast.

But then he sweeps his disdainful gaze away

as if the leering eyes

had just walked passed

merely glancing at her, contemptuously...

47

Those the Gods Remember

"Thus he spoke, and Calypso shuddered"--

faith broken-- and in her tall groves

the trees squeezed the dirt between their roots
hard as the knot that thudded in her chest.

Her hand at her throat, she clamped her eyes

tight, til the day, the boat, and he, were gone.

When she opened them, she didn't know the place.
Teutonic clouds scudded through the thrust

of gothic vaults, roofless to the clotted sky.

She watched til virgin Spica shone in the center
of a glassless window, then she slowly climbed
the cold stone to a place she could lick

the moonlight from where it had pooled

in the empty socket

of a gargoyle's eye.

48

In Old Calypso's Cave

She bows her head above the steaming coffee
and lifts the rosebud cup, so very softly,
with ten most careful, wrinkled, fingertips

and brings the china to her parchment lips.

She drifts into an idyll from her childhood
about a unicorn captured in a mystic wood,
trapped for royal hunters by her virginity

in a ruined abbey above a slate-grey sea.

The morning's restless, she can't elude
the aimless lusts that senselessly intrude.
The mildewed photo albums on their shelf

taint the air, the soul frustrates itself.

Her scent is lavender, the room's, cedar,

the FM stirs them round with Mahler flaky.

She slowly puts the cup and saucer down,

and stirs the coffee with a angry frown.

MUSIC FOR SOLO DRAGON AND CONTINUO

49

50

Droppings From the Bird of Time

The avian menagerie of this splendid morning

sings in the speckled leaves above, scorning

the fancy footwork of this earthly frolicker,

wife in hand, who pause to listen as they bicker,
fight for their bit of branch, their right

to love whom they please, even in plain sight.

Along comes an old gnome (full-bearded, half-smiled)
with Eliot under one arm, Williams the other, riled
and writhing for each other's literary throat.

But this well versed gnome knows by rote

how time comes to obscure such living differences--
reducing animosities to footnotes and references.

"The Moderns" they will say, as we say "Romantics" now,
as if they formed an infield for the Mets, how

we fought or who we diddled will be just so much

bird noise. Why is it, love, while we're still in such
sunlight, that of all the love we've made, only

that once (with the red hair) will survive our memory,
while, all the while, the anthologies are filling up
with mere immortal words and such-like sop?

What snuffs the truest of loves and realist of birds
so much before any half-decent poet's, half-decent words?
After the eggs of the eggs above are dead and gone

how long will these trees ring with the same old song?

 

51

The Dragon and the Canon

1
When a mind's been whetted on Ockham's strop
it's bound to be the canon of the coffee shop
So when I relate how I cut my incisors,
as just a lad, on reason's revisers,
and my insight sizzles and sparks
as I show by the charm of quarks
how demons hatch in the strangeness of pions;
and as I reason away our every fear,
the whole pride of refuted lions

comes to lick my face and whisper in my ear.

2
But there's a dragon of the night
haughty in the glory of her might,
her black scales flowing red
with the faces of the dead.
She stands, one gryphon's claw

about my heart, her dripping maw

 

52

exhales her rancor in my face;

lucent wings fling me into space.

In the morning I may pin her heart

with the logic of an apriori dart

but for now her atavistic need

is my religion, sect and creed.

 

53

Statuary

1
In the burnt beginnings lurks the myth
multi-headed, yellow-toothed and lean,
and from its heads the epic hybris springs
for gods are flesh and blood and we are not.
A fire insinuates its pale down stony halls
where pewter people gather in deeps and shadows;
so I chant to them of demons and twisted things
gone wild and sane. For I'm the northern singer
and I'll sing you sagas that sparkle in the air
between us. Huddled together in the pentacle
of witches' bones, I'll chant you a blizzard

of lies, and you'll believe them, and so will I.

2
The maples shade the rhododendrens
and fleck the garden with a flirting fire
in jigsaw bits of quaint desire.

The hedge is specked with pigeon coos and wrens.

A Venus shining in a goldfish pond
becomes a wish allowed to harden
in the formal corner of a city garden,

allowed to be familiar, easy, fond.

54

Some ancient knew this jaunty goddess posing here,
how once she laced her coil-perfect hair
with musks distilled from sacred air,

ice blue in amber, spiced with fear.

His callused fingers on her breasts could trace
the pure flesh of the image in his loins

that for us is just a niggling in the groins
obscured by the altruistic lusts that grace

the bashful reality we allow ourselves to face.

55

Vantages

1
She sizes up the party through her bubbly
and lets herself be baffled by its chatter.
It's such a pretty folk her liquor flatters
into demigods, so nicely mannered, doubly
dangerous, being mysteries. A Roman sort,
cocktail cocky, begins his polished stalk
of her, exciting some atavistic part
with his hips and leers and specious talk.
Sex sparkles through the smoke and laughter
but images of his smug indulgence after
rankle the goddess in her and she balks,
spins on a tall heel, and on a whim, and walks
past shark mobiles, Ming lions, abstract dangers
lining the halls of her hosting strangers.
At last she stumbles on a covered atrium
lit only by the light from an aquarium.
She rests her eyes on exotic labyrinths

of neon tetras and water hyacinths.

2
Among the honeyed cloud-tops, with a dignity
derived from the blushless nature of divinity,
the gods make lazy love to the counterpoint of hymns

hummed by choruses of the gendered but unsexed Seraphim;

56

and, far below, blue and scarlet birds swim
through the olive shade beneath a forest canopy,
weaving in iridescent flashes among the ivory
shafts that mottle the gnarl of roots and ferns.
Here in a grotto sacred to a nymph,

he leans against a lichened boulder and turns
stones in the pool with a dainty hoof.

He grins deliciously—- smug eyes a trifle mad—-
hands folded at the juncture of goat and god,

of myth and maker, where choices clash and blur--

thumbs spread like a banker's, fingers curling fur.

And she comes, keeping to shadows, too timid

to touch a heel to the leaves, or her daunted

eyes to his. Beguiled by this specter reflected

in her pool, she feels it becoming host

to an illusion: an image that's never haunted

by the stoop of raptors' wings, a ghost

of the grace that gods think other gods must surely

have, the very symbol of the desire to desire.

She stands, ankles crossed, arms folded on her belly,

transfixed by phantom paradigms and shadow fire

until the distant demigods with muffled laughter
shame her from him

and she finds herself staring down into the water

of an aquarium in a stranger's atrium.

57

Gargoyles

1
Consider the musty grace,
polyphony from Cloisters

twining up the gothic vaults,

Kyrie elcison

the disturbing of old dust
speckling shafts of glass stained

sunlight, altered and subdued,

Christe eleison

the rituals that through time
foment an incense
for the buttressed galleries

and their essences,

Kyrie eleison

pungently holy

sacredly profane.

2
Were a crossed knight to hie himself
to church in quest of purity,

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi ,

58

the spiced robed priests might
pause from their liturgy
to bless him, absolve him,

Miserere nobis, and perhaps,

dissolve from him
those grosser passions which
give nuance to their ethereal distillations.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi ,

This gentleman might then leave
through the gargoyled doors,
charged with the sacred liquor,

the intoxication of expiation.

Dona nobis pacem

 

59

The Dragon and the Chinese Rose

1
The sledges strike the anvil
waking the esoteric dragon,
that mad professor, who chimes

his scales, and cracks the dawn.

His breath freezes like a hungry
memory of the antique air
as he spins a bard's song of heroes

that only serves to singe his beard.

He casts his eyes on a Maoist poster--
dumbfounded by an image of a million
bowls of ideological rice;

he shrugs and jogs off,

stage sinister.

2
The scene is lifted from a scroll
with pointy pastoral hills

and scents of a Mandarin's woman

6O

tiny-footed in the bamboo,

gathering orchids.

The dragon slakes his thirst on her
and tosses up his head, testing
the air. He scans the castle's crenellations

and sniffs the morning smoke.

On the hill he thinks he sees
the ghosts of Chinese philosophy
fall like an ashen snow

that softly deepens around

the blue and white funeral urns
of those ancestors who have lost,

posthumously, the right to think.

The tenured heart knows the truth

but habitually rebuts itself.

61

On the eating habits of
old Chinese philosophers and

ancient dragons

1 (for the wise man)
One day beneath a juniper tree
sat old and gnarled Lao-tze

sharing out his meager alms

with ants that chanced across his palms.

2 (and the dragon)
"Dragon, my friend," said Lao

there's blood on your chin."

"I've bitten off the head
of an evil hero," said the dragon,

licking her lips.

Lao shook his head, ”So much effort,
so much risk. You are a foolish
monster; I've warned you against

commitment."

62

"But," the dragon said, laying
her head in the old man's lap
"When only those who like
violence are willing to do it

they will rule us all."
"And that," said Lao,
stroking the beastie's head,

"will be their punishment."

"Bah," said the dragon.

63

Under the Tree of Heaven

Lao and the ancient dragon Ming
shared the water from a spring

high on a tall summer hill

in the shade of a tree of heaven

and paused a patient while

to watch the village anthill

bustle far below them in the heat.
They imagined the squish of the mud
between the toes of the peasants
bending in the fields of rice

and how the whining of the children
was slowly wearing their parents out,
and how the anger of the fat mandarin
at the dull resistance to his tyrannies

was choking his heart.

"See," said Lao, "if you make yourself
useful, people will use you.
The bane of women is that

they are useful by anatomy."

"Ah, Lao, the trouble with you people
is that you think too much,
instead of doing what

you know is right."

64

"No, my friend, there you're wrong.
What gets us into trouble isn't
the apparatus between our ears,

but that between our legs."

Ming snorted out a small cloud
of lilac peonies that

circled in a graceful arc
around Lao's head and said,

"You've got that straight."

65

Cape Cod Piece

('I‘imor mom's {et amorz's}

C unturbat Me)

1

(Old Nestor in His Cups)
The night's grown late and rather drunk
and the land breeze chilly on a naked trunk.
The young bodies, water logged, puffy eyed, circle
the fire, letting the beer work its juicy miracle.
Only the driftwood flames show any spunk
spinning up sparks in dizzy constellations
to buzz among the stars. Its hot aspirations
flush the faces of every clammy-assed hunk
and wench with sparkled perspiration.

The Summum Bonum sips his beer with moderation,

sneaks a hand between two thighs and cops a feel.
A strangled sound that tries to be a squeal
begins a protest her intoxication squelches,

he falls supine on the sand and belches

and I begin to wonder what I'm doing here.

Old man among the heroes, drug along as seer

to read the sacrificial livers, glean an omen
from the circling birds, tell which women

are sacrosanct or divinely favored. I lurch

66

up and wander from the pale, go in search

of dark places for my loneliness to be alone.

I stagger up and down the shifty dunes

until I tumble-sprawl on a crest, a twisty rune
drawn by a drunken Druid, denoting "groan".

Below, a naked couple sways in the breeze,

hips arched for the probes of curled and stroking
fingers. Me? I watch, despite the poking

of an angel nagging in my breathing's wheeze.

My intoxication wins the tug between disgust

and the titillations of a voyeuristic lust.

She kisses his chest and slips to her knees.

Corn silk hair, silvered by the moon, bobs gently,
smoothly, like calm and starlit waves that tease
the shore, little ripples lapping the rocks, softly

nibbling, curling up the beach, buckling his knees.

2

(Cum mortuis in lingua mortua)

I ghost out along the moonlit beach like a dead lover
trying to remember who it was he loved and why. Clever
old heart to resurrect itself through the prick of pain
the high sadness that it used to feel, but it all drains

away into the paley moonshine of this silver never—never.

67

I stand on a sandy spit for the ceremony of the setting
of the gibbous moon, for the ritual of great regretting.
I pour libations into the pit, semen, honey, wine--

down into darkness to placate the darkness, the purified.
Above the black ground I lift the spotless ewe, beatified
in virginity, and draw the sharp bronze across its benign
throat; the smoking blood squirts hot on my wrist,
dripping into the bubbling sand. The ghosts twist

around my head, seeking to sip the blood, to gain
remembrance, the feeling of anything, even gross pain.
Hold them off! wait for the blind one, the promised!

Wait the seer with the secret homecoming, the omened mist
through which everything is clear. And here he stands

chanting in a language so dead that nobody understands.

3

(The prophet by daylight)

Knee deep in the surf, swayed by the surf, the sunrise
sizzling on the waves, I stare like a puzzled

infant into its mother's face, utterly dazzled.

Sea nymphs, like white cats, nuzzle my thighs

and lick my face, whispering that the old, the fizzled
gods, between the sanctification and the sacrifice,

offered a brief divinity. But this old, this grizzled

68

heart, prodded by hairy legs as cold as ice,
reminds itself that it's mortal, still painfully alive
and bizarre behavior in the surf won't shorten the drive

back to Plymouth. I shiver and shut my gritty eyes.

The snow is softly piling up around

the pitted granite headstones on the hill

above Plymouth. Night is coming; the sounds

of Christmas carolers and steeple bells

are muffled by snow and a pang of doubt,

So I sway, held from both the dead bound

beneath my feet and the living songs in the bells

by the simple faith I am without.

69

The Fate of the Cliff Dancer

On a lawn high above a sea turned bronze
in the haze of a quiet sun, she dances.

The curves of her body stretch the fabric
of her dress, her white skirts swirling

with little twists of a wrist that smells
of hyacinths. She sings and the sun stays
to listen and hummingbirds, iridescent in

reds and blues, come to feed from her ears.

In the brassy sun, with corona and halo,
she has waltzed to the prince of hummingbirds
until they broke their spells of brilliance
and, laughing, fell like mating eagles,
swirling down an immensity of empty air
toward waves that sparkle in sunlight like
hyacinth petals.

And high in a jungle canopy
an orchid falls, swirling through the leaves,
and the hummingbirds come and fly around it,
mourning its long fall. It comes to rest
on a jaguar being stroked by a woman
who wishes that her wrists still smelled
of hyacinths.

And as she floats along

the slow, deep river, a green-gold shining

70

through the tarnished mists

of the tropical morning,

she trails a wrist in the dark water
and tells the jaguar lying at her feet
that she will remember how it was
before the hummingbirds sucked

all the nectars from her spirit.

But surely we know this,
my poor soul,
for what it is:
the oldest of your dreams,
the oldest of your pangs,
the most beautiful
of all the lies
we cliff dancers
tell ourselves

during the long fall.

OFF'I'HETOPOFHYHEAD

72

73

A Compromise on the Inclination
Toward Immortality Arrived at

in October, 1986, at Higgins Lake

The sunlight skitters across the water,
and through the gaudy leaves swirling
above my head as I lie on the

kiddy merry-go-round that my daughter
is pushing for me. My wife

and mother flash past, swinging

on the swings.

{Socrates was accustomed to walk

in the blazing midday of Athens

when the sun off the stucco and marble

was an exquisite pain to the eyes,

but with everyone else curled up in the shade
he was forced to talk to himself.

He and the cicadas chirping away,

they of things sexual, he dialectical.

The clouds of twenty-five centuries

have topped the Akropolis

74

but the cicadas still sing
in the olives of Athens
and Socrates' ghost still

walks in the limelight;}

but me, I'm content to lie in this shade
and with indolent eyes

talk to myself.

75

Looks

On campus the young women--

girls a blink ago-- are

everywhere, and I find myself
watching them, not with

the guilty lusts I used to feel
but just because they're beautiful.
Sometimes, though, they meet

my eyes, with interest or defiance,
with half a smile

or a grimace of disdain.

Flustered, I count my feet.

Art should have the grace

not to look back.

76

Sweeping the Stairs

The job I assigned myself

first this glorious spring day
is to sweep down four flights

of institutional stairs, a task
I usually give to someone else.
But this evening I want

to at least see this sky

if only through dirty windows.
But then I get down to

the entrance and there, floating
on the high gloss

of the white terrazzo floor

are thousands of cherry petals.
I wander off to find

someone else to sweep them away.
It's got to be done,

But I'm not about to do it

or to watch.

77

Breaks

In the deep snow the pines

on the ridge are silhouettes

against the last green light.

Where I'm standing in the deep cut
it's already as dark as snow ever gets

and Jupiter is sparking in Taurus.

A shadow in a crook

of twisted pine suddenly

becomes a great grey owl

that rises on its arched wings

and stoops behind the crest

of the ridge. We all disappear, he

to his sounds of rodent-under-snow, I
to the mopping of this endless hallway,
and you, with any luck,

to the labors that

make you mysterious.

78

Duelist

Oh, I know what my body wants.
It wants to be the eagle,

the shower of gold, the swan,
the bull that breathes

crocuses from its mouth.

Ah, poor body, to be saddled
with the rest of me,

and poor me to have to know
what my body wants

and still be me.

79

Ozimandian

At night the city has

that cocktail taste,
Scarlet plumage

perches on the linoleum
shooting

by the bar light.
Electric music

churns the umber air,
exotic flesh

spins and burns

on the foot-polished floors.

Out subway exits
purple schooners sail
fishing for elephants
below the neon waves,
all the easy people pop
their paper bags
defying hazy dictums
with their zigs

and zags.

80

Those Lion Eyes
{Ten dicta for dealing with

the big cats}

1
The lions of this world
can be bearded, must be refuted,
or they'll begin to think
they're right as well as strong;
but leave their spouses alone,
even if they lick your face

and whispurr in your ear.

2
You can't beard a lion
with your head in his mouth
or all of you in his gut.
It's hard enough to do if

it only hands you your paycheck.

3
It's better to have bearded a lion

than to have brought it bad news.

81

4
When choosing up sides
pick the lions first,
when choosing a mate

think twice!

5
Stay sleek around the hunters,

slowpokes end up as lion shit.

6
For the most part it's easier
to beard a lion in its den

than to pull a thorn from its paw.

7
Remember the proprieties:

lions are "tawny" not "yellow".

82

8
If you love a lion:
a) be prepared to feed it well
and live on scraps.
b) remember that lions,
even when refuted, sated
and face-licking,
don't build nests.
c) N.B.:
lions screw who they want
and consume the rest,
and who's on what list
is subject to change

without notice.

If there's a wall
between you and a lion,
check it often for chinks

and misplaced loved ones.

10
Lions are more beautiful
and infinitely more graceful

than half-eaten gazelles.

83

The MOWING OF THE LAWN

This is not a neighborhood for taking risks.
Each house has its hedge clippers, edger,
lawn mower, weed sprayer. My 4" grass,

my shabby bushes, my lovely dandelions

send tremors of vague uneasiness

across the brows of my neighbors,

an anger peeks from their eyes.

For three whole weeks I have ignored

the ritual Cutting of the Grass

and the tribe views the pollution of my yard
with growing restlessness; the God of
Immaculate Neatness may do something,

who knows what? Their eyes grow atavistic.
They want to drive me from the village
wearing the garland of this year's sins,
they want to pour honeyed wine on my driveway,
to sacrifice a goat on my doorsill and smear
the smoking blood on my lintel. Since they

can't, they just grow madder, vaguely.

"n

 

84

Like Persians in the Snow

In the backyard I unclip my beagle's leash
and she runs out across the starlit snow,
then I look back toward the house--

two lights-- the kitchen's tropical
fluorescence, and up on the third floor

a dim yellow glow from the desk lamp

left on a week ago when I rummaged

for my Poetics. From a Michigan January

the house seems to hold an oriental warmth.
I turn but she's run off someplace, so

I just stand and let myself feel the sharp
air, easing into a world where the bottom's
white and the top's black between

the bitter stars.

The old girl's back, whining

and limping from the cold.

5;

 

85

The cardinal cocks
his sleek head on the snow crest.

No camouflage here.

86

Protocol
Prone in maple shade.
Daddylonglegs bobbing on
moss between sparse grass.
Tigers of tiny jungles,
kings of naught, aren't we?

(Who bows first?)

87

Bahram

("And Bahram, that great hunter..."
--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

Remember, love, how your grey

cat was when he was fey,

staring quite through the common world

to where, in the dust motes, swirled

the realer one of Plato's paradigm?

And there a mouse, of "Mouse" sublime,

ran the final course of absolute escape

chased by your great grey hunter (up the drapes,
across a lap, into a half-open drawer,

which when opened, found him curled in a C shape
among the underwear, feigning to ignore

you.) Nothing had happened, he petulantly swore

and besides it had all been (YAAWWN) a bore.

88

A Niche in Time

One of those gifts given for mischief--
up all night writing through the storm
leaves me awake at first light

of a season that's become confused--
everywhere the snow and ice

shine in the white winter sun

but, it being only October,

the sugar maples are olive becoming orange,
the willows half yellow, still half green,
the sumac blaze scarlet over the drifts,
and the temporarily unemployed robin
who's perched in the summery leaves

of the honey locust above me

gives out with a heart-rending chorus of

"Un bel di vedremo" .

89

The Dildo of Fate

Once as a prank Bros and Dionysos
taught somber Atropos, the silly calf,
a use for her scissors less surely pernicious

and nobody died for a year and a half.

 

 

90

Astronomy:
Variations on themes

by J. P. Sartre and the Holy Ghost

From this fourth floor window
the urban space below spirals
with people, each a black hole
into which flows these massy
blocks of glass and concrete
along with the curves and bumps
of each other's bodies

to be crushed and reinvented

by the laws that each negation
stumbles on. And the Other, namely
me, watches their faces, those
event horizons, and wonders what
their singularities are doing to
my universe, while all the while
waiting for my number

to be called.

 

91

Manhattan

The scariest thing
about this place is
that even on the clearest night

there are no stars.

92

Germantown Trees, circa 1950

On our block were maples

with big red keys in clusters
whirling down in the haze

of the leaf smoke,

one block up were the big oaks

with their plump, sharp-tipped
acorns that clattered against

the trash can lid shields

and stung bare arms,

and a block down were the sycamores
with their hard balls that split
into the surprise of delicate cotton
and tiny seeds.

Not the kinds of trees the planners
plant today, too big,

too dirty, too shady.

These trees were planted when
people thought of cities as

good, permanent, civilized,

and worthy of patience.

'1

 

93

Modern Argosy

And Neptune gazes dully up

at the all-too-familiar passing
of the leviathan-dwarfing hull
and runs his fingers through

his oil-matted hair.

 

94

A puddle enchanted
with rainbows
of oil, ugly only

by inuendo.

 

95

Paradox Stew

Nam overwhelmed me with its life,

from the algae that choked its puddles

and the niggling insects with their gaudy
wings to the lizards that crept out

from the tops of the walls at night.

All this living smelled corrupt, cancerous,
to this nordic nose. How I longed for snow,

sun-dazzled, blue-veined, sterile, snow.

96

Gesture

Sitting on the sandbags

of a bunker at Bien Hoa

just after sunrise, grease

and sweat sticky in every fold

of my body, trying to get sloshed
enough on warm bourbon

to sleep another day

of tropic heat away,

I looked up and saw an F-104
coming in low from the south

like the Hollywood version

of a Trojan spear point.

The tower must have given him hell
for violating its air space

for all of a sudden he sat it back
on its tail, kicked in

its afterburner and disappeared

straight up into a clear sky.

 

DRAINING THE SWAMP

97

 

98

Squawking

The raucous squawking of some damn bird
tells me that I've done it again.
Somewhere out that window, beyond

the city's big fake stars, the sun

is changing the color of the sky.

So I'll sleep half the day away and

my wife will try just a bit too hard

to be understanding and

my guilt will make me mad.

Through fatigued gritty eyes

the words my night has left

on this page, seen now against
the ages-honed glamour of a bird,
begins to seem a perfect paradigm

of purest doggerel.

Look at these books on their

sagging, dusty shelves. The lives

compressed there (saint cuddled up to Casanova,
kings and cooks shoved belly to belly,

lamb and lion laid down {with gilded spines})
serve only to remind me that they are,

as we will be, gone, completely dead, forever.

 

99
So why have I wasted a night
trying to flesh out this ordinary life
with words? For a gilded spine and dust?
I'm not the keeper of any axe of sacrifice
or sword of retribution,
No dawn demands that I sing.
Sixteen poets on a dead god's nest,

drink and the devil have done for the rest.

Now even I can see the new light.
Sibelius on the radio has me
half in tears. That's it, then,
really, isn't it? The beauty
thing. Having been churned up

by Yeats and Shakespeare, Brahms
and Monet, I want to make
someone else feel as they have
made me feel. No, that's not true,
I want to do it for myself.

I want to make, with words,

my wife's smile more beautiful to me

 

 

 

100

than it already is. A phantasm.

It's because I want to recreate

reality so that I can/ad it better

that I wrench language in the dark,
and why I'll never write anything like this

ever again.

5.-

 

 

101

The Monkey

A simple thing, a little cowardice,
while still groggy from too little sleep,
puffy from the tropic heat, unsure

in my underwear and towel,

walking to the shower,

grease, grit and sweat everywhere,

even between my teeth,

excuses, excuses.

He was a big Spec 5, a crew chief

on one of the hogs, I didn't know him
well. He stood in front of his tent
with his monkey, paying his mama-san.
All of a sudden the monkey

runs at the woman and bites her

on the leg. She cried out and

half turning, kicked it.

He bellows out

"Leave my monkey alone

you fucking gook cunt,"

and hits her, backhanded, hard
across the temple, sprawling

her onto the path.

 

102

How tiny she looked there,

hardly big enough a bundle

to really be a human being.

After a second she pulled herself
onto her knees and, with averted eyes,
said something nasty in Vietnamese.
But I ask you, who was worse,

him for defending his monkey

or me for walking away.

I?-

 

 

103

Heartache

Caught up short between a plowed snow bank

and a department store window creche,

jostled by shoppers. How gross and rank

to be frozen here in everybody's way,

stunned by the pain in my arm and chest.

The nitro I pop makes the Christmas lights sway.
How ashamed I'd be to die here at these strangers'
feet. Afraid to even be afraid because the strain
might lay me out before this store front manger
in a shameful desecration of the nativity.

The Nitro pounds my temples, easing the pain.
Suddenly I'm shaken by a queer fit of anger

that the baby shames me from. Infant Divinity,

why leave me here shivering, scared, shitty?

104

On the Crest

Snow bright night trees;

You in his comfort

I in my cap

had just settled down

for a long winter's nap,

Our windows show different branches

hung with the same snow.

105

Trivia

When I think of how few lives have mattered
even to the race that bred them,

of how for every Brahms there are a million
"thee"'s and "me”‘s; in short, of my humanity;
I wish that I

could forge a sword of ecstasy, rising

from the lake of terror in the last darkness;
that I could call it forth

as a scream of lust and light,

castrating the Antichrist

in the last moment of crisis.

But then I realize that even this

could not console me for the five minutes
I last watched my wife prepare her body
for the endazzlement of her lover's eyes,

which is why, I guess, so few lives ever matter.

106

She Holds the Dawn Away

She holds the dawn away with shoaling fog,
the twisty heart she twirls to solemn stillness,
but after yearning comes the empty epilogue

of intimates who fail their need for nearness.

This siren on the shrouded rocks, her rings
flashing as she rolls a nipple in a palm
slides her fingers through her sex and sings

a calling song that oils seas to deadly calm.

As the swimmer finds no horizon reachable
and comes to murky drowning with a full surprise
to find his wizened heart so gullible;

he gulps a lung burst, turns belly up, and dies;

Last night she twirled his sea with shoaling fog

and twirled his heart around her shadowed eyes,

but in the morning, over coffee and a roll,

the sunlight shows a human face. Each politely tries--

but there isn't much to say-- the reality's a bore--
he invests his soul

in real estate, she sells sea shells by the sea shore.

 

 

107

The Keep

1
Lost in his office, weightless with pain,
can he move the morning through its platitudes?
The secretary's eyes and words probing,
alien, through flashes of his wife lewd
in her lover's grasping, burning.
Years of images of her suddenly intrude--
the shape of her hips, a smile through a window,
her fingers tossing through her hair. A rude
sting of fear. He twists in his chair and rises,
gripped with nausea, and paces in crude
pain. He chokes on his civilized disguises,

chokes on the fear her images exude.

2
The hero squints his cunning eyes
across the glare of a clouded sea.

The surf pollutes his feet with foam

108

like the semen of a thousand enemies.

His memory reenacts a vision in the haze

of Agamemnon standing on another shore,

his daughter's smoke twisting through his beard;

a sacrifice to the thrill of enterprise.

At the last the heart's long journeys
all are for the heart's home.
Where is it now, my Agamemnon?

Why is there seaweed clinging to your knees?

 

 

109

Secure in bed, an arm around a nubile knee
I've given up all hope of being free.

All quests are over, I will not find

the harpy clinging to the Western mind.
I'll just compose my melodies in major keys
that depict my Hero's quest on baffled oars
Through the darkling realms of rhythmic snores.
For I must accept what I can't reverse,
Equations rule the universe,

But no philosopher should be too mad

if I chance to find this rather sad.
For they tell me, and I believe it,

though you can take or leave it,

that we are only things, mechanical devices--
A clockwork in pants, an engine in a skirt,

though we find, surprisingly, we still hurt.

110

Digging in Our Own Ruins

We twist and churn through dreams of mythy sex

with textbook adeptness; legs up arms under-—

new escapees from sin but running scared, torn asunder
by doubts, chased by Guiltasaurus Rex.

Dashing through the trees, knock-souled, bow-hearted,
like candidate saints seeking to be rose-farted.

We should have been preachers and on Mondays, angled,
leaving our spouses' lives and arms untangled

while mumbling sermons or rearranging mangers,

or better yet, been bears and slept our winters

breeding every other year with growling strangers.

Will the diggers who recreated us from our splinters

be able to tell our gonads from our livers?

111

Marked

The chalk is on the door
across the street and down the way;
furtive women smear blood on the lintels
next door and across the road,
the hexes on the peeling barns
have been given a careful coat
of fresh paint;
an announcement

it is obvious, has been made.

The storm riding in on the sunset
like bile over a bleeding ulcer

has more in it than rain and thunder,
that's clear.

The eyes in the street
look at me oddly, and I begin to feel
that I wasn't told on purpose,
that everything is, somehow,

my fault.

112

Overdue Requiem

When I was just back from Nam I attended

a small, exclusive college in Illinois,
feeling as out of place as a hedgehog
hobnobbing with eagles. Me, soldier's brat,
three-striper's whelp, whose father was proud
of the pain he's had the honor to have suffered,
proud that each morning he becomes Death.

I was torn between what I thought I ought

to feel about these sons and daughters

of the men who paid his wages and bought

his sense of duty, and my easy affection

for the people they were, how they wore

their confidence that they had the right

to be alive like an angel wears its smile.

But the one I remember late at night

was as blond and blue-eyed as a spring sky.
He was dying of leukemia

but never told us, any of us.

In his place I'd have been a prick,

but he was as placid as a star.

I called him Mr. Gullible, and

113

he'd just smile and call me Mr. Absolute.
I guess he felt no more need to cultivate

a skepticism than to burn and rage.

He was not a saint, nor I a demon

and the sky is the same color.

114

The Myths of the Beautiful Weapons

The older boy with his confused longings,
diffuse, objectless, wanting to hold onto
something,

aching to defend

something,

someone, desperate to be of use,

stands with his fingers laced in the chain fence
watching imaginary F-14s flirt in the sunset,

top-gun in the winter twilight.

He joins all the heroes who ever knelt

in the cold moonlight of the winter lake
when the woman's hand, emerging

from the ice that encircles her wrist,
holds up the sword of kings (golden,

rubies for sacrifice, emeralds for revenge,
diamonds for glory}, and takes it from her,
warming her hand with his,

heedless of consequence.

But as they take their weapons up
she can not tell them they've become

merely the newest toys of Mars.

115

In the Huron Mountains

If there are still divinities that care a jot
for this wet world, it must be for

places like this-- for the hushed light

of the deep forests,

and when they are gone,

cut down and paved over,

there will be nothing holy,

nothing of true power, left;

or not, at least, anything

that wishes us well.

 

LISTENING FOR THE BIG BANG

116

117

Two Saints

St. Francis

Oh, triple blessed!

Though bruised and sore

you chirped to talking birds
and slept among their turds
but we love you all the more
and not a whit the less.

You shine out brightly blessed

to your most silly, holy, core!

St. Dominic

dead men's cunning
written on almond leaves,
is that sun rising?

where is Christ's lion?

trimming a tree

with black balls.

118

Dust Bowl

The old accounts tells us

how drought added injury

to the insult of their poverty;
how the dust rose up

in the sulphurous sky

and buried the wind naked stalks,
how it wormed its way into everything
till their faces were dust grey
even when clean;

how when the sky crusted over
and thunder boomed down the wind
the lightning brought only smoke
to mix with the dust;

how they saw their children grow
too thin, and too old too fast,
and realized that they couldn't
pass to them what their parents
had graced their own childhoods with:
the laughter of the games

played in the innocence

before knowing that,

in the long run, all games

are played in the dust.

119

Skirting the Absolute

A skirted angel of my close acquaintance
pirouettes, masked, posed in a Greek trance,

across the carpet; enthused in seething
metaphysical delights, "I am teething

"on the devil's pitchfork," she explains,

"gnawing it to a trinity of pink pains

and splinters in my milk white throat.

I've sailed the black waves in a swan shaped boat
and need not die the death expected

but can spread my free grace, sacredly respected,
around God's heart and die to him on my own terms."
All this delivered with elegantly prurient squirms,
so we watch, candlelit faces like stone gnomes,

our socratic phalluses imagining idyllic homes;

but as she vaporizes into the ashen night

we can't but hope that she might be right.

120

Sanctus Sanctorum

The old bishop, back from a meeting

of the finance committee, sinks,

half asleep, into his leather recliner
and commences to recline. Music

from the CD player (Vaughan Williams's
"Mass", by chance) aches in his ears:

"Ky-y-ri-e e-lei-ei-son. "

In the darkness beyond the pale
of the Tiffany lamp, the smoky forms
that prop the tenets of belief begin

to dance to the "Credoinunum deum"—-

half seen, half imagined-- like
topiary in a dense fog. Forms which

in morning sunlight once brought delight.

121

Notre-Dame

The late sunlight gilds its gargoyles,

crowns its kings and glorifies its saints.

The stone in its profusion of perplexities,

its intertwining of the sacred and profane,

creates an awe for its mysteries of faith.
In the echoed loftiness of

its sanctification, the round

and facing windows portray what

the holy eye should see--

such colors as God might show

a spirit as great and yearning

and as pure as these crossed

and arching vaults, a soul stained

absolute in piety, burning

solely with the candles

of pleading and devotion.

These eyes of roses that see

only the most sacred of the Light

gaze unconcernedly above the world

of couples and cafes that spreads out

beneath the trees and across the Seine.

Lofted above the sparkling river as a
space apart, liminal; the outer

and the inner universe of the Gothic heart,

122

she was lifted by a faith we may

have come to miss.

But the towers, guarded with grace

and grotesqueness, still await

the consummation of their intended spires,
still await the coming of a day

when they may point our way to heaven,
still await the return of the Gothic

confidences of will and faith.

And so the towers stand to earth

as squarely solid as our flesh,
still too human for its aspirations,
and in so being, Our Lady stands

as a perfection in the way that's

least intended of them all.

123

A Bright Mist Hoards the Sea

A bright mist hoards the sea that climbs
in a slow roll up the sand; a gull

out of nowhere suddenly testifies in tongues.

And if it were that one who taught us all
that any perfect man could understand

it could not be, to me, more unintelligible.

So should an understanding one ever come
like a ghost gull above a fog sea, teaching
the supermen who sacrifice him everything

they could possibly understand

he would be, like this gull in a blind
mist, merely crying to the pipers as they
peck the beach, skirting the bright misted sea

that climbs in a slow roll up the sand.

124

If into the Midst of Armaggeddon

If into the midst of Armaggeddon

the Fire Faerie came in her forbidden nakedness,
her garnet eyes flashing with the blood's very
fury, her aegis of sheerest light

deviced with copulating dragons

blazing out with the blindness of prophecy,

her emerald sword arcing in runes

of sacred mystery culling thane and thrall,

Would the final warriors listen then? Would God?

125

A Raven Lumbers

A raven lumbers from

birches clumped on soggy ground

to scrub spruce near rocks

and tucks his wings; waiting death,

others or his own.

 

126

Dark Camp

(In memory of Noelle's parents)

We sit touching shoulders as

the wind and moonlight

do their ancient dance

through the trees around us.

The old fire, once again

prodded, smolders, flickering

in your grieving eyes.

Hollow in their absence

we had been wondering in whispers
why their princesses and ever-afters
had to be fairy tales indeed
while all the monsters

proved quite real.

In the tent our daughter

stirs and mutters in her sleep
and I feel for her a terrible
helplessness, knowing

that no care is ever enough.
Will the tales we tell her--
that victories are for always,

that slain dragons stay dead,

127

that the passing of the powerful
is more real than

the deaths of decent people,

will these lullabies of innocence
make her defeats more poignant?
Make the dying harder, hers

or ours?

The things that haunt our race
circle us through the trees.
We sit, tense and dazzled,
like the last witnesses

to an ancient, sacred, murder.

128

Don't You Wish

Listen,

The silent voice is singing while
the clear flame spins the crystal rose!
The war horns themselves
are proclaiming the

Par!

The spirit has come to cuddle.

We find that after all we are

the answers to the sacred Mysteries'
queerest questions,
The absolute proofs of
the brightest of

worlds.

129

Shores of the Mind's Eye

I
Where the tundra ends
at a groan of wind and ice,
where no scarlet birds ever sang
for a spiced dawn and no Greek

ever asked any barefooted questions.

II
From beneath a stand of copper beeches
on the last tall hill in the rain,
the eye can follow the tangled hedgerows
that trace the bones of the land
until they run beneath
the grey mumbling of the bay,
knowing that nothing vivid or sudden
ever happened here except the clamor
of Tudor church bells and the flutter

of swallow, swift and lark.

III
From a lime green lagoon
the run of a tropic curl
up the coral beach, up from

the break of the white reef

130

and beyond to an ocean
that's the color of the sky

just before full dark brings stars.

IV
Slack tide on a dark beach, a night
of moonlight chanting on black waters,
flickering like votive candles might
to the slow medieval litany
of cloistered nuns at winter vespers,
a calm that seeks eternity.
But their heartbeats, like glass bells
twinkling above my head, form an augury

of what, in darkness, has begun to swell.

V
The roar of the wind and the trees
on this headland in the gale
could drive you mad--
tear your mind out through your ears
and drive it in thin strands
to catch on snags in the pines
or sweep them up through
the crevices in the contorted clouds.
This gale without rain whose

grey fury has already driven

131

the waves crazy, drowns out

your heart, snuffs the sparks

of your brain, smashes

the meaning of every word

uttered since Gilgamesh gave Enkidu

the whore of civilization.

132

The Arches of the Sun and Moon

1
Wind driven snow hisses
around the slippered feet
of the Moonlight as she dances
across the ice of the lake;
her swirling silver gown
sweeps out in the rhythms
of her last hero
when he was in her;
he, whispering "flame-flower,
witch-lover, mother of my
monsters," until his lips

froze to her breast.

2
The maiden has returned from Hell,
from the long winter of her husband's lust
and she lets the rain wash the pungence of
last year's death from her hair.
Her eyes are the only green in a grey world
her lips the only red and her smile

the only smile, but not for long.

133

3
The cries have all but died away.
The fires crackle through the houses
burning clear and nearly smokeless.
The dust from the fields coats
the open eyes of the neglected dead.
In the woods an ancient dragon watches.
The homecoming hero, his shield
slapping the flank of his lathered horse,
his cock sticky from the girls
he has polluted with his semen
and the blood of their own fathers, rides
through the mottled arches of the trees

and the dragon crouches in the shadows.

4
But there comes a time
when dragons hide from beardless boys
and the spiders cast their webs around
the eyes of the old men as they watch
the infants suckle by the hearth,
when the small beasts scatter before
the flashing legs of the older girls
as they rustle through the red hills,
run the leaf strewn ridges

of the red, wild, hills.

134

Kyrie

There is a prayer that haunts me
and I say it now for my daughter
asleep miles away

tying me to my humanity,

and I say it now for my wife

as she lies in her lover's arms,
and I say it now for my duty drowned
father in his soldier's grave,

and I say it now for my mother
whose life I have helped to use up,
and I say it now, and over again;
for our obscenity of power

boils all religion down

to this one old prayer:

Miserere nobis, Dona nobis
pacem; Grant us, 0 God, if

You be good and God,

Peace .

--Ann Arbor, 8/8/82, 1:18 AM.