MARIANNE MOORE

ooooooooooooo("it is a privilege to see so much confusion")


He popped one-million balloons in under a week

It's called--writing your autobiography

In an alley in New York the dumpsters clang at 1 a.m.

A light fixture, a fish gasping on a plate,

Spider webs so old they drift over plosives between mouthfuls . . .

She reminds one student of his grandmother, "The zookeeper . . ."

A real Menippean satire . . .

The bulldog snorts cocaine and farts up some Yeats

You don't need to cut a wedge in your heart--can't you just garden?

Queen is not Pink Floyd?

(What would we have done without you?)

The infant rabbits are there, under the soft fleece of tan grass,
like a bowlful of evolving peach pits, breathing . . .

Thank God the cat is indoors, asleep, dreaming of slitting
ooosome young bird's throat

THE BOATS COME BY


Pain, my idea

The Rape of the Sabine People

she lifted her guitar like a club as the shadows crossed
ooothe mother-face

Coyote Raccoon Fruit Bat Howler Monkey

I admire the dog--

Struck by an air-cooled BMW hog
he sought comfort under the tinkling
of pine needles

Sometimes waking the wind chimes form a pearly exit

But then I see my own hands

or face in the mirror and I forget that floating mausoleum

I know where we're going it's all lightweight--
like leaves, or feathers; like stars sprinkled on lake water

at night.

The grief I felt for that dog was of this earth.

PURPOSEFULNESS


for example: tastelessness

it heightens the tension

attend to the space around the cradle-board

(don’t feed the cradle)

we call these experiments peripheral attendance

the baby's not an anteater

(at least not yet)

you can open the stars and find a wall falling like hail into
ooothe Rocky Mountains

(from Indiana!)

Let the customer wait in a closet or deli case

the conditions are perfect for cruelty

don't get out your wallet at all

Today marks the end of all storytelling

IDEA OF ORDER


It's drizzling out, no bacon and eggs

The Mary Tyler Moore Show hums into an electronic dot

Perhaps landscape architecture should have been your metier

A rhododendron placed
Between
Two hollies, cross pollinating

Desire and its grandmother, waiting for the first snowflake

Or somewhere hot

Frank Stella earrings

I still go behind what used to be called Frank's (Nursery and Craft)
For garden stones

Capsized with outmoded grief, angst-ridden masonry

These sleeping members of the universe make tears

Hello! we say, although it's dark

And lonely

EARTH ART


No kids, the dark splashes another Pollock

That writhing, the pillar of maggots

The problem of it: the litter of shoplifting, sunlight, and awnings

*

You're confusing Barnett Newman with the Monopoly logo again

*

They reenact a rape scene--it's part of the script

Ana Mendieta is throwing darts in her grave

Carl Andre starts spitting on his index finger

A tiny prop plane cuts a corner of the sky off Manhattan

*

First there were crickets, dining on a pile of toenails

And the moth projects a face--it doesn't know

It's tied by its dick to the moon

The words start forming in my mouth but never leave

GANNET


What if the wheels sucked up the rubber

owls lining the runway with
their blue heads turning

Each bird stands on an overturned bottle of wine, or blood

Metaphysical ennui

As fast as the synapses burn down--

your mother goes rolling down the staircase in her chariot of glee

And all night long
the briefcase snaps open--

lemons floating on the sea at night

ice cubes melting in a bright blue furnace

roar of a jet engine suddenly stopping

IN ABSENTIA


Posoda, dramata . . .

The articulation of the need to explain

I pitched inside to Mike Damison--

It was a strategy:

The photograph showed some sky to ground lightning

Second base is an ascetic experience

Reflex and meditation

Right field is for zoologists

In the back, way back, behind the discarded bleechers

Somebody reading a newspaper--

His daughter shaving her legs at the artesian well

Fish rise in the forgotten pond

11:20'S BIG HEMISPHERE


Peptic, lachrymose, you make a right turn,
close bank accounts

follow clouds to end of everything

I mean, the philosophy of righteousness

Wayne Thiebaud's got a romance with luscious veneers

a landscape leading deeper, deeply
into the middle of the body

four hundred thousand four hundred and thirty three seconds
oooinside it

like when you're squeezed

by the thing you hold and observe--death orbs

a a tiny road map of blood in these sunny-side eggs

palpitation of Unicorn . . .

We looked up from our breakfast plates at the steel shingles
ooorippling

I AM ALL OUT OF TUNE


You awake in your sundry amplitudes, alive
to the sense you slept through another magnanimous opera

with all the bending floor lamps

and strangers passing on through

Your headlights come in through the window,
one insinuated feline growling like a compass that has lost all purpose

So how is it now that you are capsizing
through another new compress with mouthwash and Dial soap

(your passport stamped dissident)

Where is the steam upon the streets of London

It's replaced with hand sanitizer wall hangings

Enter: scribe with headache but proper travel documentation

I think I'd better live home

I STILL WANT THE CHEESCAKE


All over my back lawn, settlers

People kissing backpacks

In my bathroom, a new secretary

(I'll take over now, Melissa, thank you)

And this lovely childhood full of birds
Threading ripe intestines right on through each grant proposal

It's a rather flat harbor

Death with it's silencer, the way God used to be enough

What I hate most are the red cups
And the way they commiserate with the flocks of dandelions

The antlers broken and leaning in a pellucid paddywagon

Hamlet's running away with his brain-stem half gone

The rest of the habitat's not quite at piece in this country

TO LIVE IS ALSO TO READ


Power went out here in Gotham last night--I know
because I heard it--my fifty-four wind tunnel
fans--because I must shut out the outside world
if I am to sleep at all--just stopped roaring.
I awoke as if in the mind of a mummified live bird,
thinking in twenty directions, and still not flying
(and I, still not sleeping). It was a short term
emergency type thing. Although the circuit breakers
were tripped--Uh oh, what's wrong with the toaster
oven?--and leaves plastered the windows like
something trying to suck up light, a giant many-tentacled
beast of some kind. Dark, even in the daylight--especially
in the daylight. Gallaher is having a good week,
having discovered Ron Padgett, who I will here
thank again for giving me "The bean of understanding,"
which I stole and put in some poem.

Four Graham Foust poems.

I can't recommend enough Kenneth Fearing's
The Big Clock. It is a great read. A small novel.
While I'm here I'll plug Gabe Gudding's Rhode
Island Notebook--a book-length poem full of
shredded particulars and heartache, and Nancy
Reagan as a dive bombing, nickel-nippled
bird . . .

AMBIDEXTROUS


Oh, he's happy, working busily with his glue-stick

I put love on the snow out there yesterday

right inside her fur coat

the amplitude of bracketed, two balloons skidding

recycled fake grass
was like a buffer for the teeth in that ocean

the clutter
and come-ons

an old Oasis CD frothed and spun in the fading salt water

and the oranges were warmer than toast

Please take me with you

and with a hair dryer you seal those sockets until the
oootight plastic pops


***
aided here by Paul Foster Johnson's Refrains/Unworkings

THE CABIN


You say "Gee" to get the dogs to turn right, although the good doctor
seemed to favor one wheel dog . . .

It wasn't even cold--big flopping leaves dithered
over the hard-packed but rutted trail

Wood burners burned, a fiddler with long hair who wouldn't speak

Fall right off of that mountain, like Beck Weathers
With his nose separated and traveling in an ambulance for help

The dogs piled up in a ditch and then sat down

That wasn't on the schedule

It was fucking adorable

My Mamiya hummed, and then clicked like something no longer
ooothrobbed in my thighs, her toes painted pink

Rooms stood on top of rooms

Logs bursting in stable compression

The dogs started wailing at the Northern Lights

A MIDWEEK POEM


I really don't know how you feel . . .

slighted in the morning

your feet not anywhere near bottom . . .

Grandfather wasn't looking in the visitor window

Nor were your friends--

Closing in on twenty-three I'm afraid the equipment
hasn't even begun to descend

For ten minutes, while in the canal, the heart beating
in your chest is the heart of god, the one

in the video game. But then you're alone, dreaming nothing
ooowhile the snow falls and you rise along a trajectory . . .

a bell begins ringing in the plastic Colosseum

It's so peaceful--something slaps you back alive

AUTHORITY


Compensation is a prerogative of pencil and words

Rorschach tests in the Citadel

Or you languish in drugs
All your clothes streaming

They throw them down over floods in the outer rooms

Flatter under carpet
Thread punctuated by emotion

The two of them went riding right off the cliff in their glass pumpkins

Side by side in the dark passage of looking away

You can feel it with each swallow

The miles of rope like intestines

Slowly entering from the cave side of things the cable cars
ooowithout the comfort of dawn

TWO AND A HALF DAYS


There's alarm-clock ten p.m.

The latter is a sacrifice

The light years and the time in bed defeating deafening speeds

Then the other moon-set chambers breathe out shadows

Delegate your settlement and stay inside

The knife is trembling under the cold rafter,
Stars spilling from the broken arm

Remember the gate, how low it sank

Opening and closing

A word followed by a final word

It swept up behind you in its shifting current and was gone

You couldn't close your eyes hard enough

POSTER VOCABULARY (GREEN BAY)


It was one of those weekday mornings on the weekend

Looking right at the dreadlocks

33 angles of the human head

You should keep the dead bird--keep it for parts

Invasive species update: a Gila monster's loose in the basement

Instead of a sonnet he handed in a photoshopped portait
oooof Ricky Gervais

I remember Richard Hell in Door County buying double A batteries
And a package of cheap powdered doughnuts (small)

Now cut off from cities, airfields, isolated couplings

She wanted to make me dinner

Garlic salt and white pepper added to a can of Campbell's soup

Beef noodle

HUSHED


Light, you know, comes out of the ground

Listerine

In the glow of crushed weeds and broken belt buckles

We irritate the blossoms

It funnels over the skin in hot streams

Would-be highbrowism

I mean the shoulders

The front of the week starts caving in

And competence is expected of her

The tripod's breaking open

Sweating, like a prisoner

Valedictorian, but with none of the calories

BAYOU


There was absence in the sky

A week earlier I had chased the river down to its source

Two sets of venetian blinds

I brought my friends to the sheriff's ball and they grew more
ooocomfortable

Dilettantes

Continuity of Family

Possible gunmen

The river bubbled out of the rocks I was twenty as the ashes cooled

Each 200,000 yards another

Dickinson, Diamond, Diebenkorn

Chalk falling

The salt ticked like a bomb in his esophagus

PARADISE, MICHIGAN


In another house, not in the past ten years

Nor by the sea

Like an island village, introduced with a harbor

The stools shine, red leather and chrome, all in a line

A filterless cigarette

You can see through the reflections in glass her coffee and cake

It was then as I was driving away

She says At the bottom of the lake there is at least that much

And this tripped dusk into falling

Immanent snow

You know, your inner-most thoughts

Two upside-down lanterns burning like the wings of a moth

THE MIDWEST


Or, indicating in a northeasterly direction, Mount Pleasant

Many go to the window

Fall in love with some other and never return

"Gardener, did you kill your only flowering plant then?"

The desert cradles its relationship with the mountains


***
line 4, from Ange Mlinko's Starred Wire

I WILL WORK FOR POEM


It's news to no one--or not many others

Red-veined in your twenty-quart tub of vas-o-roll-o (it's new)

You know you're lucky when the office drunk announces
he's "Off to discover another path (you fuckers)"

How great for Big Rapids

I was just bending to put a spark plug in when he said
"Now put in the spark plugs" . . .

I got that one while they were packing things up

Two Hundred Poems On Tape

They put a collar around your neck and the Governor walks up
with one of those keys, the kind you might open a can of sardines
with . . .

That's when the screaming of poems began

Eyes popped a la Marty Feldman

Roofers wearing tights and listening to Dan Fogelberg

Hitting each other with hammers

NOTE

Poems are forthcoming in Interim, Columbia Poetry
Review, Field, Zone 3, Barn Owl Review, Shampoo,
others.

DECEMBER


The mother doesn't go. The alphabet doesn't dare.

The No-pest inactive.

The adult with all his affairs out of order
decides to hide his face under the clouds.

Dayglo hotseat toppled on the hutch in garage.

She digs in her purse, puts lipstick on, looks in the little mirror.

He can hardly believe it, his legs broken amidst the axle.

The balding with the long long fringe.

The artist who formerly parted his hair on the side.

How can things be so bad and you feel so warm.

8 a.m. weekend in the mall, empty, silent, doors opening.

Her neck--where were they going again?--smelling of pine cones.

Odalisque and Slave

Or maybe a pine wreath . . . It's not Christmas

Ice fishing for bluegills

A gently banked fire

The man stands with a hose, his breath steaming out,
watching the layers cover the ice rink. It's come to this.

MAXIMUM AGE


I see you're feeling delicious about the limousine casters

The train pouring out of the blackhead

A suicidal surfperch--

There is nothing to decide

The mound of shit denoting the porcupine's flat

A gate rolls up to the window

Depositing eggs on roots and nameplates

Unlike other sounds during courtship

Look at your empty clothes, falling back down to earth

Out of the afterlife

EVERYONE IS A STRANGER


The garbage can lid rolls down Flowerfield Road

Myth echoes off the blank faces

A head still attached, married to its own body-root

A head unattached

A hubcap rolls off a car and through a ditch and off into the woods

The mouth opens

The curtain slams shut in front of the voting booth

NUNICA


You're not lab material, the prospect of leaving isn't popular

Or you could gerrymander the shoes or the skirts

Casual dream for the working girl

Under the textbook

You can shatter the textbook

Remove the textbook from the bottom of the river

Fall's days are like an animal turned cold

In the spring when you feel like running through the daisies

Blood pours

You can remember to try always

First rule of thumb: don't be a cheerleader

Remember the biker dead in Nunica
the shotgun
His birthday cake

Deer walking across church parking lots

The failed promise of that tab of acid gleaming

What you needed was a warm blizzard

The phone poles look lonely walking away

THEY'RE BURNING THE ARCHITECTS AGAIN


Rain again, diary moment, no golf . . .

No java, sunrise

Of course it was new to me, the feeling of being disoriented

Closing my eyes

Placing my hands where there could be a knife, and fork

Like walking through a doorway and right into a door

Are Chinese food containers recyclable or not?

It hardly matters, she said her poem
as if round about my time on planet earth

But it's worth the investment--the colonies of floating hills

The taste of her blood on a Wednesday

(The car wash is open)

My only complaint is the Hurry-Up-And-Tee-Off feeling you get

First in the back of your kidneys

Your cupcake has negative 50 candles on it

Slowly, slowly the fish in the water-trap swims back to the ghetto
oooit came from

SEVENTEEN


I'd made a note on the partial virus

It could send back whatever signal the programmer favored

A cold circle of chairs

The poet's own family rising out of the ash

I pinned her to the sky

A glass of water and some strawberries

The version I would write in the eighties featured many angels

Some sporting broken noses

Breasts like on a breathing woman

Dogs pointing in the fields
To the pattering of garden spiders

Too cold to snow yet though

It was like Antarctica draining up through our thigh bones

They stood wearing headgear in the visitors' hall,
My sister repeating phrases from some old math problem . . .

And there was ice in the other one's hair

Water just beyond the ribs

Ice where the seeds came to a standstill in the center of the
ooofrozen apple

STABB'D ME IN MINE OWN HOUSE


Couldn't we just get scared

Goldfish swimming off the tip of the week

Cabrera, everyone will understand you stand in the shadow
oooof the previous year

Evolution is retrograde

The girl and her boy sit screaming an inch from the screen

I hit the flickering switch and see a ravening of fluttering jerseys

The glove has the grace of a pelican

Enter our causes, and opinions

The Archbishop to Falstaff: I live in fear of the extra-inning RBI


***
Shakespeare, yadda yadda (circa--one of the "Henry" plays)

THINGS AS THEY ARE


Jesus, thank you for Brandon Inge . . . we're going
into the 10th . . . and thank you again: Inge just hit
in the 10th inning go ahead run . . .

*

Then Granderson hits a single--man on first and third--
no outs, Polanco batting . . . (and he strikes out) . . .
and . . . out of the inning with a double play . . . don't
Freak Out . . .

*

9th inning bunt, one man on for the Tigers,
who are tied with the Twins at 8:13 pm. Geez.

IVAN ALBRIGHT


I live in a certain unburnished Aristotelian centrum of light

My copper brothers in prison

You might explain the barbed-wire cagesooooothe invisible birds

Here, right here, I am a smiling Hat

And with such finely trimmed nails

A basket of laundry for a head

And this buttonoooooif I push it hard enough the stars come on

It's the taproot of nightooooothe trees are throbbing

He divided a feather into a thousand such paintbrushes

Multiplication of faces into islands of age

Even the dust motes feel rage

You can purport to want devotion

The ribs of a whale are burning at the edge of the sea . . .

SPIRITUAL MOMENT


Please excuse me if this questionnaire feels like I want

Or, really, any number of people who think they
oooknow something

Come sit in the shade and enjoy an iced coffee

There was a sort of keening
Over the oceans
Throughout the slow fall of Rome

And a good person came up to the dais and said "Peoples"

We do not condone

The last two weeks in November were spent dragging the lake

Turned out there are tombs in the deep water

Montages of the Unconscious is what Peter called the Rothkos

You could hear the trains outside the gallery

Sunlight suddenly through the clerestory windows

Outside nothing but a fountain spilling like the tongue of a bell

THE PAST


My mom had enough elan, yea, enough sense after all

She was surrounded by dopes

When you used to come swimming up in the Ford Fairlane

I think it was Mrs. Dempsey needing badly
to do some weekend "Hoovering" . . .

We sat like logs in a retention pond, the sun on our noses

But wasn't that you we saw with your fourteen year old fist
oooin an ashtray

Could have been

Right after I carved the scowling face of Baudelaire into my
ooogirlfriend's bleeding stomach

I don't recall my mother prancing for anyone

And therein lies the problem

Or not

We'd laugh until we cried watching the neighbors go on with their
ooolives

"I'll phone you"

You do that

CHILDBIRTH


Nevermore, an arbitrary of loveless . . .

that's going back to the Conquistador

dust shimmering
on top of
other tall or deeper endless dusts

like a scar so ridged you might ponder her anger

the delicate legs

the ash-blue lashes dreaming of a counterless weather

it's a strange kind of falling

and then living to fail . . .

it's the down when she sleeps in her glass mountain range

Soft Chardonnay

--or where the buttons fly south--

from the red-painted toes

to the Valley of the Echoing Stars with its promise of milk--

you can't see her dreams standing in the rain anymore--

and blessed endings

RICHARD HUGO EATING EGGS IN PHILIPSBURG


The family tree waving like a maniac

you don't have to sit on the stone
bench listening to my narrative dream--

Spider Man versus Society

I was eating a New England boiled dinner

surprise! they tell you
and you get to pick a popular disease--

Grasshopper colon, for instance . . .

I looked at the kiddie pools and trumpeter swans amidst the fine
smoky red bricks and ventilator hoods

we're not half as righteous as we'd like to be

like bright laundry

sausage, and emotional blackmail