A CHANDELIER CANTOS

00000000000(into the afterlife . . .)

You can only take so much democracy

shades of tan and blue

socialism and muzak

The two Bolsheviks at table four

are back from the salad bar

I tell the woman with a smoothie

something ugly, vague, tiny as a vagrant gas

But she can't aver

The path can be anything

a moth flies out of my napkin dispenser

asphalt, laid bricks, the bodies of carp

enlightenment or amnesia

dangling light fixtures of the Bourgeoisie

"springfed" is a kind of danse macabre

That was a surprise

strangers moving to and then multiplying
amidst the stark duplicities of such commerce

then it starts raining outside the twenty-storey tall, plate glass-but-
ooocasual, in-store Delicatessen's front windows . . .

Diagnosis: mid-life cesarean

a man wearing sunglasses in the dark endorsing:

I'll die before I get a job

And the moon rises out of the trees

***
language here (line 7) from Francis Webb, "Ward Two"

MASSACHUSETTS

00000000000(1961)

Can't forget the tall trees

masts sticking every which way
out of the mud

the births came
like unwanted spam

oyster shrieking in the corner of it's box

fish swallowing a too-big fish

(2 for 1 deal at Sherman Taxidermy)

We were married coming out of her

mushroom acceleration in our amphibian-brains

(10, 9, 8, 7, 6 . . . . hit send)

The common house fly has a face full of knowing . . .

our first outfit: her filth

the honor of a laundered towel

This was followed by a "children's book"

little window of innocuous clouds

sailboats racing around Cape May

nothing but legs, and beaks

She bored headfirst out of the living corpse

A toast to Nantucket

then they sewed that extraneous mouth

SPENT SHELLS IN A DITCH

(Bloomingdale, April 12, 2000)

There are snails in the love. Narcotic Be-
Nign Altruism. Blunt as the day. It's
Chopped. Pettish, manic, while the sun bleeds all over
The tree-tops. Cicada crawling out of the body of a swollen
000carp, she owns
Him. The grass is too wet the tires keep spinning.
Mosquito water, smell of spring rain on gravel. Here--
goat sucks the offered finger, sideways moons
in its eyes. Maybe we're safe. A pile of tires trembles
inside a small grove of birches. The woods grow still under
000the wings of the glider.
It's an enactment, in silence, a suicide for show.

THE AIR WE NOW BREATHE

Herbert Scott


This air was part of the blood
of those who are now dead.
It rises from the grass
like sunlight.
Now it enters the lungs
of those who survive,
of the children,
of the haltered soldiers
where particles of death
are filtered to fall
helplessly to the earth,
strangely like bodies, like seeds
that will take root.

CITY OF GOD

What a supreme disappointment, The Last King of Scotland.
First of all, I know, Whitaker is golden. But it's a no-lose
role, and F. even looks the part. Another movie filled with what
feels like, by now, Third World Stock Imagery, and what's
with the bongo drums every time things get tense? I suppose
McAvoy did a fair job--supremely unlikable, as self absorbed
as the kid from Into the Wild. He gets what he deserves
and yet you do feel for him. A little. City of God was such a
perfect film, it's too bad I followed that experience with this one.
In COG all the actors/characters pull you into the movie--Li'l
Zee, Benny, Carrot, Rocket. It is brutal and shot in such a
way you sometimes feel as if you're drowning. Sometimes style
transcends the material and your heart surges with an odd
romance at the possibility of such anarchy. Both films offer
scenes during which one wants to look away--violent, unthinkable--
but in one film the scenes feel essential and in the other,
gratuitous.

***

THE VELVET TOUCH


take another for instance, Palo Alto

a bastion of sarongs
and medievalist look alikes in sandals

toucans splitting limes

a pilfering of ski masks on the set

mahogany and Harry Belafonte

that's where they spin their rockets

anklet to anklet

flirtation is a disease much like phonics . . .

Down walked the minister
like a foghorn of devilish portent

he sat in the bell tower, thinking

an uncertain variety of piety-through-ozone-exposure

hormone of the olive

though that wasn't the plan

controlled chaos haunting the azaleas

Perhaps the problem is Velcro

or it isn't anyone's fault

an unfortunate product placement

fake rhododendrons

(made in China)

the abacus of love is a fine jangling of properly placed bling

My friend, Ronald the dog, surveying my street for scoundrels.
A few minutes later, Ronald, loyal friend to man, pooped
in my yard, secure in the knowledge no unseemly characters
lurked about . . .

AMERICAN GREED


First, I can't think of a better time to listen to George
Harrison's "Piggies."

*

A quote: "Corzine said the volatility in the price of oil
'is absolutely indicative of speculation in the markets'."
I'm sorry, but, duh! (picture of someone knocking
on Corzine's wooden head). It's Enron all over again, only
at a much larger scale. Remember? The rolling blackouts,
the creation of illusions about "supply and demand,"
all at the expense of common sense? Instead, everyone
sits screaming SUPPLY AND DEMAND, SUPPLY AND
DEMAND, when all you have to do is look back at the Enron
story to see evidence of out of control prices due to
speculation. Why has this not been clear from the beginning?
Hey, how about looking back at the recent
SUB-PRIME MORTGAGE mess. Tell me about the perfection
of the free and unregulated market. Well, it will all
come out in the wash, but is there absolutely no shame?
So, now that revealing this can be used politically it
will come out in the open? How totally and wonderfully
f***ed up. JUST DO IT (because you can get away with it) . . .

*

And it's not as though I haven't been watching a sinkhole
form in the neighborhoods of the poor as house after house
is abandoned, boarded up. Not as if I haven't been
watching and, indeed, photographing these "movements" . . .
the poor falling down the rabbit hole, the rich, well,
we all know what the rich have been doing . . .

*

I acknowledge I can't seem to make the leap to uploading
through Google (or whatever) YouTube video's and posting
the blurry, awful photos with that tacky arrow pointing to the
right stamped on the face of it. I did it once, and I couldn't stand
looking at it so I just went back to the subtle little links of old.
I suppose I lose clicks but, oh well . . .

THE HISTORIC DISTRICT


A dilapidation of channeling

things standing where you let them

pines in the wind shake out more pollen

(they're all sluts)

world I can trust because it isn't mine

the snow in the alley makes a little room—

this way you're no longer lonely

Fully involved behind the shower curtain

(where there used to be a garden)

O gravity
O hot water

O delirious Sudafed buzz . . .

He kisses her hot, naked lips

O red rose between her tits!

Just think of the Midwest
as a giant Nativity Scene

(voice-echo in the porcelain cave)

Patient to psychiatrist: I wouldn't say my thoughts race exactly

Here's a live mole--this one would make a good sidekick for the grim reaper

MOLE

L. let out a gasp that tore leaves off the trees. This is on a path
along the river, and my mind was part way up in the thunderheads
drifting by. Anyway, I leapt out of my brain and somehow
skidded ten feet past where we'd been, and when thinking
caught up with my body I could have been on Saturn. There was a
dead mole in the path, the oars of his feet pulled in, upside
down, small as a small box of raisons. We got over it, although
I kicked the mole off the path to save it any other similar
indignities. Also, on the same walk: A less animate part of the
landscape, or, to be more precise, a form without history as
breathing being, was this enormous brown statue, a hulking and
mournful figure (on Riverside) that simply inspired a kind of
mutual amazement. Appropriate, I think, for something (intense
grieving?), although the sheer mass of the thing throws the entire
neighborhood out of balance.

*

Movies (further film update)

Broken English/ 4 stars
Atonement/ 4 stars
The Last King of Scotland/ 3 stars
Starting Out in the Evening/ 2 1/2 stars

ANTI-DERACINATED


With quiet aplomb, the mirror
spills

a spell

raining in such small towns

one by one
the principles
are blindfolded

*

The young man was shot, lavender shadows filled
with maples dreaming past, the car "sensing" a problem

as predictable as geography. It chose a route. A piece of bone
lodged in the channel of thickening blood, and the car swooshed

east, while a father and a mother pedaled west,
toward the lake, their baby riding in a big red basket.

*

The streets grow damp with menace

secular as all get-out

the volatility of this weather

another Monday
in small claims court

200 pound oak desk shipped straight from Canada

It's called reflex-eating

the elderly blind in a field for an eternity of chewing

*

Or maybe you're just a downer

XM sports

beef barbecues

backyard trampolines . . .

even the night's are translatable--

Cocaineless, with Crickets

armies of sandhill cranes dropping their voices onto the houses all night

It is that quiet

suddenly a wing passes between your heart and the moon

THE TASTE OF SUNSET

000000000And Adam knew Eve
000000000000000Genesis 4: 1


The air--

I located the air, a hydroplaning
panic attack

27 boxtops

in a box with spit

I'm sorry, silk

a box with silk

a lyric in the swelling space

*

All cats--I'm traveling back now--are like the cat slit open,
the clockworks gleaming at a standstill, a tide of guts, in 1963.

Ignominiously dark of face, her paws made a hole on the
clean cement, a passage perhaps, or just what's left.

Dry, finite.

*

Get out of the rain, you'll
catch your death.

Don't let the insides get out.

Don't even pretend.

*

I hate that Hopper painting, Nighthawks

All those hours stuck inland acting hip

We're talking about shame

The burden of the body

Is the beginning of the burden of style

*

Idle time on the sand just watching the ocean, grand lack
of need for the mess of another person.

Not anatomy.

Silence.

The silence of another person in hiding.

*

A flood deep in the ocean of every season

snow, and sand

"You become naked"

The matador twists the bull's
neck with the red of its own blood

Negative-two degrees of separation

It's humid, and thundering

The first "sunrise" begins without rhetoric, or clothes

***
"You become naked"--"Revolution # 9," The Beatles

THE GREEN CHATEAU

000000000000deserves a quiet night . . .
00000000000000000000000000REM

Every single lit window

Is wired for detonation

An implosion of feathers
As leaves are blown away from
The glass case

You, him, that girl with the mohawk

These recalcitrant wax husks
We live in
We'll no longer be needing

Honestly, my skull feels like an arrowhead

No room for nostalgia . . .

The impression we existed once before

Clouds sinking deep into the mirror

The world gets clotted with eyelashes up in this dry dry air

A little airplane glue
And some toothpicks . . .

It's been fall every day this week for over a year . . .

People just don't respond
To the sheer size of the box anymore

In fact we stood around a hole
In upstate New York

The death had been long and painful

A boat skidding
With no driver

But now look, said a woman I'd seen maybe twice in my life,
Over there, and pointed

And she was right

It'd begun raining across the river, in Canada

***
for J.M., after the Hodgkin painting of the same title

Viral

Another Update (film)


The Unforeseen/ 3 1/2 stars
The Visitor/ 4 stars
Clockwatchers/ 3 stars
I'm Not There/ 4 1/2 stars
Fast Food Nation/ 3 1/2 stars
A Scanner Darkly/ 3 stars
Cloverfield/ 4 stars
Safety of Objects/ 3 1/2 stars
Michael Clayton/ 4 stars
The Savages/ 4 stars
City of God/ 5 stars
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room/ 4 stars
Closer/ 2 1/2 stars
Dazed and Confused/ 5 stars
There Will Be Blood/ 5 stars
Margot at the Wedding/ 1 star
Funny Ha Ha/ 2 stars
Modern Times/ 3 stars
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story/ 4 1/2 stars
Before the Devil Knows you're Dead/ 4 1/2 stars
Lars and the Real Girl/ 4 1/2 stars
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing/ 3 1/2 stars
Lone Star/ 4 1/2 stars
Plagues and Pleasures on The Salton Sea/ 4 stars

Just walk until you hit cows . . .

Poems for Laurel Review scattered about in background.
I'm not worried. I've got a system. (Selectric provided
by IBM Corporation).

LAUREL REVIEW


Look for an upcoming issue of The Laurel Review, in which
I'm presenting a "portfolio of poetry," in the spring of 2009.

Some of the poets whose work is included: Christine Garren,
Franz Wright, Norman Dubie, Robert Vandermolen, Dorothea
Laskey, Gail Wronsky, Angela Ball, Arthur Vogelsang, Lisa
Fishman, Cynthia Cruz, Gretchen Mattox, Jordan Davis, Laura
Kasischke, Louise Mathias, Chase Twitchell, Graham Foust,
Dzvinia Orlowsky, Stella Radulescu, and others to come . . .

Two corners

other greenery

***

JUST CALM DOWN

Detroit Tigers: an effort to stop the bleeding.

THE KINKS

Apeman.

Kinks songs popping up in so many movies, here is
an all time favorite of mine, Strangers, (those drums at the end!)
and Ray Davies wasn't the only great songwriter
in the group. Dave Davies wrote (and sings) this.

Used in Darjeeling Limited . . .

The Paper

Roses

Tables

a survey of doors, etc.

in Three Oaks

TRILOBITE

oooooo(Mount Garfield Road)

The used car laziness of Muskegon

of scattered stones in the sunlight between small
cinder block buildings

the machine will no longer
catapult into motion

the velveteen wind and the heat

Simonized right
out of existence . . .

even the pines can't find a direction

tortured into staircases
of unnecessary foreplay

mostly the tank tops kept turning into wedding gowns

Premature ejaculation
followed by a new fish tank

(life's more manageable with particle board)

until Victorian society
lumbers onto the scene at about half-past four

Feathers, and too much free time

It was a kind of dictation living in that tent

brace of woodcock at dusk

I took notes and thought about the country

thought about the not-country

the good cholesterol, the bad cholesterol

Washington Crossing the Delaware,
by Larry Rivers

the mattress, and the bedside lamps

MENAND ON POUND/Current New Yorker

Here's the article.

"Language becomes transparent; we experience the
world itself. 'When words cease to cling close to things,
kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish,' Pound wrote
in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language
with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by
that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict,
embellish, and digress continually in order to
make our meaning more precise. No one likes
to be required to answer a question yes or no,
because things are never that simple. This is not because
individual words are too weak; it's because they
are so powerful."

Also, James Wood on Theodicy, fiction by Annie
Proulx and Mary Gaitskill, and a review of
Sex and the City, the film (fans be careful),
by Anthony Lane.

CHAPBOOK

A list of contests.

Green Tower, has extended its deadline, so send now.

***

Saw The Unforeseen in Three Oaks. It was a fundraiser
for conservation (the showing). I got caught in a storm
ten miles from the theater. Found a great church . . . (a
photo or two coming.)

Also watched The Savages . . .

Natural Bridge


Sure, sure, my work is featured in this issue, and that's
great, but I don't always find the work in lit mags as
gripping as I do the work in this issue. Edgy, passionate,
inventive. Tilted toward the narrative, but moon-rich in
voice, piece to piece. Eight bucks. Not bad. Some very good
poems, a few very good stories.

Guest edited by Mary Troy.

***

I don't want to get into the math, but by this point
every human being who has written a poem in crayon
has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. It is time
to stop listing that--merely being nominated--
as an "accomplishment" in all of our bios. Right? We keep
stating the obvious. It does pretty much goes without saying
that if you've written enough to publish in five
or six magazines there's a good chance--between
nominations from magazines themselves and nominations
from your writer friends--you've been nominated
for a Pushcart once or twice. Can't we agree
it's no longer special, just, kind of, you know, part of Nature--
being alive, and writing, etc.

GHOST HILL

0000000("reared upon the base of outward things," Wordsworth)

Elementally, a tribe
moves out of the kitchens

little insect insurgency in leather

haunted stances
behind various trees

The moon shines down on the beast's shoulders

Subjective nothing

I was feeling my way with my hands

my brother the oak
spiralling up out of the dunes

"Our Father who art in heaven"

something is deveined

a better form of church worship

the trajectory of one smooth stone

stars freezing, stars dripping
into other stars . . .

"on earth as it is in heaven"

or is that the soft breast
of a quail, the crucified arms called Your Wingspan . . .

the man thought time was a trip to the store
until his windshield suffered an aneurysm

There was a howling through the woods

a squall between trees

Angels swept over me once I could hear the lake

she sank down

hovered over him

everything else was the world

Drink this glass full of rain

His voice was the blood in my ears

FLAMINGO

000000000(Upside Down)

Her Chinese spoke first

lie down

My female possibilities
weren't my eggs--

two Vikings gored to death
become suddenly conscious

(good-bye bone structure!)

time is a macrobiotic love pig

a working class itch creme

Epilectic in winter

stone heads crying in the basement again

raise you a pile of peas . . .

there's no Electricity like Kosher Electricity

It's #5 on the list

with Ginsberg's other

late failures

THE LYRIC APPROACH

Small letter openers
running like rats

all over the actress

Maybe you should take a couple more

Samantha Morton
crushed by disinterestedness

(she keeps living with the boyfriend's body)

"I keep reliving The Wasteland"

the wings of certain flies
vie with the memory of the Ash Can school
of mud wrestling

the purloined waitress

coming over the Starnbergersee . . .

"I can't believe she's dead"

Neither can we

(pass the Alprazolam)

And so the question arises:
ever thought about fasting?

I thought about breathing

and forensics

lilies all over the mosh pit

empty coffee cups
in the Hofgarten . . .

You may notice an excess
of free-floating happiness
on Zymbalta

But I'm no longer actively Catholic

***
a couple obvious thefts from Eliot's The Wasteland

BLISSFULLY (BLUE VELVET)

I'm feeling nostalgic for 10cc, most notably,
Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, and that includes--
especially--the post 10cc solo projects (as a duo).

***

I think I broke my hand. It's this election crap.

If I hear one more citizen (or pundit--what a
word: pundit!) deliver his or her sincere and "well-
meaning" sermon--composed, angry; patronizingly cool-headed,
or with eyeballs spinning--I may break the other one.

Let's just put a cardboard cutout of the Orkin
Man in there or something (he can represent
the "Free Market") and get back to writing
things down and going to the beach on bicycles
until all the "speculators" (remember Enron?)
fall into manholes and we can place our little
paper oxygen masks back onto our faces and dream
about those "seasons in the sun" Bobby Vinton
couldn't shut up about thirty-five or forty years
ago.

***

I had this dream last night in which I get this corporate
job and I'm all like, Well, it's suicide for you, old friend, and
yet I hold on, of course, brush my teeth
and all that crap, get on some dumb bus--Hello
Mrs. Peabody!!--and then I'm there, at work, only the
building looks like my old elementary school (it's now
a police station on Henry Street, in Norton Shores).
Anyway, I climb some stairs looking for my floor--let's call it
the department of no accountability--as well as my miserable
little cubicle (I'm thinking influenced perhaps
by my just having watched Clockwatchers--
another knockout performance from Parker Posey).

Anyway.

There I am, and I'm looking--smell of lead-based
paint in the stairwell--and looking, until I walk in through
some wide-open double doors to discover My Fellow Employees
Are All Crows And Mockingbirds, several of whom are perched
on a good-sized swing that descends out of the
indistinguishably high and confusingly cathedral-like
ceiling. I can't tell you how relieved I was I'd be working
with birds. And they weren't those evil, demented
Hieronymus Bosch type birds one might
expect (aka, party animals) . . .

But they weren't exactly behaving professionally either.

After all was said and done, it was a pretty cool dream.