DEW POINTS


I'm busy pouring the last years' work through a funnel
and fashioning several books out of it all, followed by the
massive send out. It's time. All of this takes too long
and it's rather frustrating, and the heat, the heat, the heat
(the humidity). I become one crabby camper. A couple of
cool, rainy days would do my soul good.

image by anselm kiefer

UNAVOIDABLY, WINTER


I don't think the dead see it all

Wood. Clouds.

I think even boys dream of more,
their dice and velvet. But that doesn’t last . . .

God knows no one loves you

God knows
we'll all die one day while the sprinklers keep running

Death and mothers

the bedrooms of girls who kneel on the floor while outside it snows

It takes practice . . .

I believe the old are our least cowardly thinkers

Sometimes the very act
of speaking seems a lie

THE WHITE HORSES


Periscope up, she liked to say, before sinking all the way down

Mist of blue light leaking through the clots of snow
000stuffed tight between screens
High winds buffeting the windows

Drifts that would eventually block the driveway
(who cares, she drawled, let it snow forever . . .)
Her skin swarming into goose flesh whenever she came

00000000000000000000The snow made me harder,
Or hungrier--both, I guess
Days stretched into a couple of weeks

Some evenings we'd get drunk, maybe fry up some catfish
000steaks
If there's ever been a lake outside
It was hard to remember it now, unless you made your way

Past the snow-covered woodpile
With a small sled and auger to drill a hole for ice fishing

the water bubbling up through the ice, dark and lonely

TONGUE AND GROOVE


We'd very much like to
cut you a check

meanwhile

sit down so we can X-ray
your credit report

There's that, and then there's the post-industrial fluid exchange

phlox in your root system

a cicada with a heroin problem

the simple elements of life in the country

Stranded, by Roxy Music

the way her grandmother really is nicknamed Nana . . .

And there is plenty of
love wrapped in the isolate

underground sculpture the pond makes just shining there

silently being all night

And none of it requires a guidebook

Cold fusion iconoclasts . . .

("a once in a lifetime head rush")

the shell of the snail is simply a by-product of time

I weltered ably
on her, sweat and anaphora

God yes, God yes, God yes

I mean, born out of seed prematurely

adipose growl . . .

she looked up at him dreaming

various colored syrups in a rack

the girl still bleeding while the man just breathed

I woke up feeling on edge this morning . . .

NO TELL


Week of August 25, a poem a day will appear here,
just FYI.

TAMPA


Too many days,
segmented,

lost work time in August

the bad things sneak in
from around the rim

of the skull . . .

or in through the hole of the knocked out teeth

a little mold on the page

a memory etched in kerosene . . .

it's a Gothic insomnia, less
American than jogging

a ticket to Florida

down there pressurized
deep-sea and back-lit

and the train crawls south on its legs

you can see through your binoculars

I do get it--the ice of the moon
has a dirty sex tarnish

four million years sleeping on top of a stone mattress

drinking rain water

an anchor spears the soft muck . . .

this music has veins

it grows bones . . .

you pick up a pencil

start rowing

A Katydid . . .

AMERICAN POEM


or it never really
stops00000000000merging traffic

not a fork in the creek

some kind of music, a glass book

no daughters, nor wolves

ideas

rushing over rocks

Tomorrow I've already done something I regret, he said

God, and nerves

baseball at midnight . . .

time is a possessive grammar

***
ripped off line 5 from Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MILK SNAKE


Lidless, milk or rat

. . . the future of love sleeping like a coiled garden hose

black vinyl pulse in the straw . . .

There was a Dodge and it had
patches of raw bondo

someone's Alberto Burri special on bald tires

The antique cabinet came
flying out of the
eye of that dust ship . . .

It was a poor pretty rich man's
attempt to be fine--

a father and his raging muse . . .

Fine art from Frank's in the basement and a single pot plant . . .

The almost dead feeling living brings after
almost dying

salt collecting on the lips of white statues . . .

daguerreotypes of the wild wild west

vernaculars of the Nitro G

a polygamous baby even

moves out of the churlish city

moves north to the country

You wouldn't know the snake's been in the shade of the barn

It has not been waiting to speak

DEMITASSE



You don't ask for the universe

executed as punishment

coffee indistinguishable and Latinate

like a mobius strip
(s)he approaches . . .

choose "LIVING"oooooooooochoose "DEAD"

one long broken exhalation

crosses the
yellow line

there isn't a boat down here

the thunder of the dream grips down

wind scribbling on wagon doors

it's constructed inside you . . .

Good boy

Good kneeler

a soundless pre-calculate table . . .

not wine but a lantern

to fly by . . .

I would like a clean cup

TRAGEDY OF SPECIES


Stars fal-

ling

and then Catch yourself

that man has a pulmonary

way with his other

copacetic arrangement of plovers reading Wittgenstein

the murderer
used a sentence

she longed to own a minde of such durable compleasance

make love, not poetry

such methodical hunger

eat him up to his mountain

They all died

0000000000000mourning

watch this reality filmstrip

IT'S SOMETIMES THE FORM OF THE WANTING


Sincerity is at half-mast

An hour after falling asleep
the piano begins to hum

Green turrets of wind, small religious squalls

the deeper I sink

Trees blowing in her eyes

I know because I know your body

Thought is not a corporeal motion

"description"

Even the baby turned Catholic

It's not enough

The apple tree splits and dies

PSALM OF THE FORTUNE TELLER


There must be light inside the room, a long list
of dreams
one wick at a time, softly, There now . . .

Pure as ungreased longing, I've been looking for You,
moon crossing
in a chariot the dome of the unhouseled bed, sailing away from the
000clouds

These things have slipped from my fingers

On the wall the boots of soldiers crush paper
chess pieces,
shadows swinging over the sill like a Cat Stevens song . . .

The little bag of rooms sits shrinking in its evergreen basket,
the drive-in theater,
ants the size of dinosaurs. The father comes awake in his own late
000second act

and with a needle sucks up a few threads of blood, sparks
the body wants, like whistling knives,
and injects them into his own thigh. I could feel the lust

run down the walls despite the committee arguing in my dark
closet, stars
squeaking and drying on the floor behind the half-closed door . . .

(stars waking, stars moving in the dresser drawer)

Perhaps it was then I invented the rain,
the cave,
shirts scraped clean with a bone

God looms over my bed from a height of 48 years,
concentrating,
blood leaking out of the human heart He grips and extends in His
000hand

The moon lost a letter last night and now he's gone (just thunder)
and looking for love
in the rain and mountains of North Carolina . . .

A lizard glows in the window instead of the moon, stained by a yellow
ooonight light
He grips the screen
He whispers to the starless night.

FAUST


Not since Tideland have I seen such a riveting film,
and I have to say those who were bored to death with
the slow overwhelm of self indulgence in Tideland
(Terrence Malick on Quaaludes) having nothing to fear here.
Svankmajer is a filmmaker I've been searching for, somehow,
for a long, long time. I refuse to explain,
as Larry Levis says in a poem, because (he) I can't. The comedy
is dark and the archetypal is made personal. The stage
within a stage within a stage and the close mildew wafting
out of the detritus of all our burgeoning by-product!
Never has human junk been so radiantly magical . . .
And the human-sized puppets? I go on too long . . . Check
this out . . .

PLANET DISTURBED

0000000000(after Jan Svankmajer’s Faust)

Enough!

Alert the plasterer—

my struggling seeds
winter over

for the non-breathing, scary side . . .

Some people just throw
the head out on the street!

they make noise and shoot

here comes death’s sunset

2 mirrors

forever advancing (retreating)

we get up off all fours

(GET BACK DOWN)

that wooden cross

the statue’s immediate sky

they put all the demons man’s invented up on the wall

WORSHIP HER man

that torched kind of bean

sibilant cry in the wind over these fields

LIVING IN A WALNUT BOX UNDER THE GROUND man

the intrusive accident we once called Meditation

her perfect ass

***

I've lost track. Either way, collaborative poems I wrote
with Louise Mathias will appear in Parthenon West
shortly. I also have new poems due to appear in Barn Owl
Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, minnesota review . . .

They'll appear . . . when they appear . . .

STILL NO CLUE


No one knows what the happened in my office. Tools
were required. An odd desire to appropriate two objects
that are everywhere/anywhere and of little value existed,
or a desire to send a message, or a desire to simply make
me uncomfortable. This is pretty weird, and so far no one
has come up with a solution for how I might
regain my privacy at IUSB. Frankly, I thought by now
some reasonable explanation would have surfaced. Nada.

***

The locks will be changed. All you can do. Until next time . . .

enough with the i-phone! good grief, it's a "phone"!

this reminds me as well of the bottled water scam,

how we drank water from the tap, how we had plastic

containers we'd attach to our bikes, containers we'd

reuse, filled with good old, nearly free, tap water.

similarly, as late as the early nineties (and this reminds

me of the more recent impending forced switch to digital

TV) I owned one of those black rotary phones. It was so

big and wonderful, I often thought if a thief were to

enter my home I'd clock him with the phone and

he'd gurgle and die in seconds. Not anymore!

Try hitting someone with an i-phone. Then stand

there, shrinking and grinning. at least you can take a picture

of the person slapping you across the face if you're quick

enough.

To a Hiking Spot (don't really feel as serious as I look).

This is an amazingly haunting film. It's bled into the day today.

TWILIT


A sort of a scary dusk, because someone, somehow, let themselves
into my office at IUSB and stole my computer keyboard as well as
the ergonomically correct tray that comes with my desk the
keyboard sits on top of. The door was all locked up, no record
exists with IT or Custodial Services. No record exists, anywhere.
All the stuff of real value is fine, untouched. Nothing else was
disturbed. Is this somehow part of the Patriot Act? Or are we talking
someone's idea of cute? Ho. Ho ho. Ho ho ho ho.

***

Can't stop thinking what a bad movie Last King of Scotland was,
--Allegory for Colonialism--and, really, Forest Whitaker wasn't so
friggin' great. Act like a crazy dictator!!! Big deal. You want
nuanced acting, watch Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand.

***

Check out Graywolf's new re-issue of Thomas James's Notes
To a Stranger. Some of what he does has filtered down to other
poets since 1974, but the book still has an intensity and
imaginative depth all its own. Nothing really out there like it.

BEFORE THE FIRST ERRAND

Jane Mead


(--which was her life on earth)
there were the practice moments:
the stars from no perspective,

the stockyards in winter. Thud
of mallet on skull--from no
perspective. In this way

she came to sense a manner of
being she wasn't there for:
the wide burst of pigeons--

at dawn was not enough to keep her
from being carried in whatever
direction the changing wind suggested.

But eventually--she sensed the boy
had passed under the leviathan's
jawbone into a graveyard overlooking

the sea. She knew there was no way
to change him: she knew he would
lie on his mother's grave forever--

stunned beyond all reason, unconsoled,
that gray-as-the-answer would enter.

And the hills are messy with golden stalks.
The gray of the ocean is always with him.
The reddish fall vines and the grave of the sky.

***
from The Usable Field, Alice James Books

***

Under the Sand (with Charlotte Rampling)--4 1/2 stars
The Sweet Hereafter--5 stars
The Talented Mr. Ripley--3 stars
The Nines--1 1/2 stars (I quit 2/3 of the way through)

Washington Crossing the Delaware, Larry Rivers

FUSED WITH APATHY


Congratulations!

they tell you, always

what a GOOD thing

sitting alone at the airport smiling

you've come to the end of that rainbow

(with interest) . . .

geometry of melons

cubed

or balled

depending on color

the wind blows through your hair

a million tiny wheels are spinning

Master

Tiny pomegranate

I see a labyrinth of opening doors

Tell me something we all don't know!

it means nothing

the digger wasp

fails to inoculate the spider

cut to it lip syncing

blindfolded

NONE BUT THE BRAVE DESERVE THE FAIR



Alienated, in the displaced
quarter

Baron, seamstress

windless damage and a feathery osmosis

a common understanding (a lingerie salad)

There's a thousand such
sentient but petrified hearts

rehydrated by Communion:

The Western tradition:

picture she took through the window,
The duke, and his garden hose

a feudal oblique

Yon lord with his cape and cutlery

aboriginal bird
sighing inside his hood

she knows . . . his place is on the gallows

elegant in the purity of her serfdom

white doves where his hands should be

stress points
where matter is forced
under pressure . . .

: so what if the peasantry were to engage in such gang love

Primal Colonial

saturnine preparation for his fifteen-foot flight

ants all over the buckets of fuel

with enough leftover for her afternoon bath

SLEEVES ACROSS THE ARMS, CROSSED


Let's go

penitentiary drug-store historian . . .

the patient knows
reality is only this office

released into "life"

the heart fails again and again

a veritable seizure

of misjudged dimensions

and counterfeit jewelry diseases

post-traumatic-stress-dilemma . . .

so go ahead

comb your little pasture of electrical hairs

the pygmies aren't leaving

they're reading the DSM-IV

(I gave them the folding chairs) . . .

O turned over sod at the zoo at day's end

already the tree exists

a coffin waiting in the woods like an end table . . .

Milk of stars non-existent!

The river of now makes a new human being . . .

arguably the next
friend you'll ever have

***
line fifteen and the title, from Fanny Howe's Selected Poems

500

Don't look now, the Tigers are at 500

THE LOWLIEST SAINTS


That kind of water
has no dirt in it

chemically denatured . . .

a shadowless experience

like a single heel of bread

prairie dogs lined up at the soup kitchen

they're the ones you see wearing masks

(blacks suns shifting
behind eye holes)

brilliantly conversant
between leaves

after all it is almost Halloween

this one missing his head

a mechanism in the joints
allows the legs to bend forward

and that's why God takes vacations . . .

colors not intended by Nature

(no varicose veins)

feathers falling out of the darkest clouds

(its primary form of defense is vomiting)

Dear crack in the plaster wall

We pray to You

That spirit is no longer in service

SAD HORSES


"They pop out
like Roman candles"

one little squiggle of blood in each egg

a cantilevering amalgam
of successful
late night harvestings . . .

then he can put on her dog collar

the way a wand sucks up the cotton candy

because, go crazy, it's the sixties

a real un-diving, back up
00000000000000000000to the diving board

some 'shrooms on your Rice Chex?

her white shirt
tied in a precious belly knot

(the mother keeps turning into a Ellie May Clampitt)

she puts on her headband

in the nineties he'll get chills when a freighter moans through a wall of fog

flashlight bumping around in the dark

the execution of the search

It's nice to imagine she found paradise inside there

trees blowing with Spanish moss

the smell of the beach

but no

nothing but eggs

like eating your way to the other shore

"spiders erupting from a blister"

then the creaking of the harness, the taste of steel

the lapping of waves

that dream

so far away from Missouri

FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS

I did post three "exercise" poems
at The Spider Pine, for anyone interested
in such a thing about now . . .