Poetry of Ken Schubert

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Shanny does what shinny sees

Poling thinly through a rush of trees

Didn't grasp until he reached so low

What all who had a pair of ears could know

And walked not upright or unduly bowed

A man whose aura could entice no cloud

Presuming wanton orange and a job of blow

If current pictures could receding go

Who wouldn't hesitate to flap his coat

In any desert wind, nor cereal bowl,

A light attraction for a longer mile

Where even fervent hate curled lips of smile

And brewed a gaping world to morning tea

Lisping sneezily to the crouching sea

 

The sudden circulation of a mind

Under car hoods or a splash of snow

Happens now and again, stops but once

Child weeping unheard, cloth-less

Time's breath is gray, not sad

Nourishing beyond body cares

Slipshod dancer on a marble sky

Boxed in by oldest human wires

Nativity shorn by bleating stars

Drooling straggler behind the barn

Saw little saviors scurry to their holes

Torched heaven's scarecrow gaspingly

Nitrogen devolved from maelstrom of March

Window washer who gave up too soon

 

 

When in the annals of regarded time

I cover your mouth and walk away

To stop now would be sadly wrong

Break up the dance but let the music flow

As in an older image of Malveux

Speeding backward train to Lockeby Row

Nowhere to run nor hole to hide

And only when the wiser or occult

Can cross live wire and retain its hat

Would sudden logic hold a sway

And sanity carry the whereworn day

All over you go finding what I would see

Shuffling our cards above the hectic night

In a city you no longer deny than me

 

Creamy dark you brought me,

Smiling winter sadness in a jar,

Pickles upward leaning noses out

Purple passion roses high and low

Lit the greening streets and sallow owls

Nowhere nodding empty wholes

Nymphoning all the days and ways

In and out blown wisps of straw

Where even you or I can be a part

Though often not alone on stranded hope

To joint-wise wish away the hour

Reeds whisper songs awash and far

And only when they cry you hear

I know we die it cannot stop

 

Furry as a mouse you crept into my life,

High-sounding laughter and soft like sheet,

Catching me off guard in my tower of shame

Inside a silken dream of ambivalence.

And when I awoke much later you were gone,

Your green perfume lasting as a waxy floor

Descending into its static parts,

Hopefully dusty blossoming sheaths

Over the rooftops spread your skirts

Who never opened a can when you were here,

Brightly timing an exit long acknowledged

But never concluding, slowly and ever colder

Until the night would clutch me like a cloak

Of blazing daggers in a ring of gold

 

On the other side of knives and brittle sheets

The relieved and once-angry man

No less weaseled or nattily weathered

A tongue-tied antelope or upward curtsy

Foaming high-sticked and always true

Could say precisely what he meant

Unctuously hard, if still a slice of cheese

Could win his heart before it slipped away

You on the prow where neither loss of face

Nor any tribunal could hope to save

Tightened the knot of words we never uttered

A package left behind but not forgotten

The white of winter a demented dog

Toothless and sleepy inside harmless eyes

 

A face that re-dissolves in very moment

I might have known but choose to skate below

A street that all too quickly becomes a square

Not far away, but averse to where I stand

Nor could the ragged strips of cashmere shawls

Deflect the tears that only wind could cry

Gleaning from the sunshine's glowering threat

The slide of death to now's eternities

And up a hackling monkey-laden tree

Scraped early users of the human form

Wrecking the backward glass to narrow sand

An ersatz star that lost a poker hand

We wrapped a yellow bone in smearless eons

Jump-starting atoms in a vehicle of shame

 

Pixels you were, or maybe stood for,

In your threadbare feelings and cosmic thoughts,

Whole in image and tattered from the side,

Where words dug in like homesick angels.

I seemed big, much too true,

And farther away could no one come

Without entrapping your fleeing heart

Beyond the limits of credulity or grace.

The furnace in the cellar scared us both,

Roasting us out of hearth and home

To heights neither of us could bear,

Electric shards of snow glazing our sight

And tearing us from what we held most dear,

The snake of language in a bed of straw

 

The fury of language in a platinum bowl

Zipped worlds apart to distance-defying gleams

Brighter than the eye could hope to know,

Older than a child would deign to count

When chalk rubbed damningly midst a muff of lies

The bear-tussed genius in his silver crown

Could wrench no teardrops from passivity herself

Poised on pinpoints of a fuddled start

Until the sputtering measuredness of dawn

Emptied dazzling nightpans into yellowing streams

For us whose grizzled crimes no longer sound

To sweep away the chariot's glassy shards

Confetti from an oozing earthly hell

Squeezing sunstrips from the mesh of time

 

Wish upon a nightly sound

As low as shafts receding down

Till stop say crickets with baseball bats

Topless knees and upward hats

You, who knew so much and swallowed more,

I could have answered with a lesser score

Were tunnels not a fatal curse

Nor wispiness a property of earth

Triangularity could not keep

What Sayde Adams saw asleep

The legionnaires of wandering snow

Longer than blow-horns sought to go

Though higher than Melisha's curl

Could no one see, if not a girl

 

In colder reaches a star is ever born

Burrowing oval egg, unstuck blackness

Your radio buzzes through relays of gold

Wire-cut meat and blood slab holes

Shin lining obscured by lumbering gait

Until we rip it out and fly away

You in the archbishop's corner, me a clown

The warring navies still refuse to claim

Nowhere knocking flat limbed door

Anthrax flight of once appealing wares

Trousers bunched round ankles up and down

Sunday light incapable of recess

Tumbling illness that could save a king

Dithered your fever in the slackest noose

 

On the basis of nothing a star is born;

And you, my dear, naughty down your life,

While fluorescently sizzling rugs

Anesthetize all-eye faceless flies.

The long train bleeps and dives away;

No horizon is big enough - or here enough -

No manner too pleasing for my taste

(Hyper-elliptic pizza regatta).

Any marriage reminds the snow to fall,

A door to open with no place to go;

Deer stumble but renounce no frown;

The woods step back and wide apart.

And no black can once eclipse the gray

Of naked brains in a defunct carnival

 

Handily rose the steam of God

Over treetops naive and fading

Where tricycles held no sway

Against the itch of first born pride

Your face but slightly visible

Hunkered in unvacuumed retreats

Nor could the primeval clock awake a world

That had barely survived a washed out beach

Food precedes life and death anybody's smile

Hawks dive earliest and women nurse

I watched you peek beneath your ancient brow

Rejecting the future brazen and ashamed

Exempt from the rules of orange velocity

Down stairs that screamed a new behemoth

 

In a mode wholly unanticipated

Heidegger writes letters to the church

Trips on his bathrobe and bruises his bum

Loosens his tie to caffeine presciences

Limited only by an angular face

A waiting room of oxygen re-civilized

Books emitted by dewdrop colonies

Parsed him from his jugular chair

But outrageous could no one call a man

Whose oatmeal barely withstood admiralties

Who nothing spread if not blindness

Nor hope possessed if not red death

And backward yellow beat his final drum

Domestic ecstasy from a dissolute balloon

 

Copernicus was right, of course,

It just took a few centuries to show

The ice-cream stars slid into place

Over the cone of an imploding rocket

Then the mind shut old Freud out

(An interloper at a midday feast)

Fired backward arrows from a plumed bush

Daggers in the omelet and pince-nez pies

No funneled hell could shake the bowels

Of sturdy citizens and fleeing thieves

The up jollying woods larked evenly

Nintendo ants crept closer to the ground

Nashville nighttime roared in from Calvary

Saving us first, then the whole family

 

A world without you is as white as air

Slices silver thinly but not old

Memories of orange-lisped acerbity

Crumbling houses beckoning in waves

No mortician stammered trellises

Or told high heaven of his fault

Heart-heavy craters bottom all too soon

Realms of lace that spiral gently down

Monster fountains straddling the night

I danced the high wire true and fair

Simmered the sterling fatuous

Bristle baby nosing down to speak

Noxious gender in a flounder stew

Derided phantoms and allowed all knots

 

Fruit trees come late and leave on time

Worlds dance swiftly with passing light

You taste forever neutrally wet

The edge of spring bites harder than ice

High in the hills a cottage squats

White but for the outline of fire

Ribbed mantelpiece, jutted kitchen,

Colonies of aviary ghosts

Pretence is holy but not a fall

Ten-toe winds plunge soundlessly

Recalling again an ancient tale

Mobbing the vessels of providence

You walked in with bags of food

Walked out with pinpoint hair

 

Form heavy dance among rubbish and gold

Oliver Twist in the rustling swamps

Diamond sized carbuncular horns

Posterior ponies unable to fall

Agile and maligned

Totemless or else

Nearing a divide of lemon and nails

Highwise balloon and pillow soft wiles

Gravel of long ago porcelain streets

Gray glitter dust and vaporized cheese

Noteworthy samarites loyal to none

Bearing their nobular front leaning canes

So many times and so few replies

Witch hunger screams asserted the lies

 

Slash the old slanderer retouched his sled

Wide streak and gashed as ever was said

Rivers steamed often or failed to run

Myopically resting near midnight's pale sun

Phrases too broad net a dearth of new fish

Shrinking humanity's overfed dish

Stopped in a rave of weather-stained breeze

Father screamed murder and hastily sneezed

Child slid bottomly below every game

Lifted high heaven in kitchen of shame

You became human when tires went flat

Life danced its one-step, lame at long last

Burn could do anyone who harbored a hope

Penniless pilsners on desperate rope

 

Absolute bread-line woes never revealed

Wreaths lain after the cold had passed

Disk-like panoply of cactus hope

Bore up a frosty window, star-pricked bubble,

A place of mind permanently visited

Jack knife clowns or messengers of trust

From friendly galaxies closer than skin

Dusty letters un-yellowing day by day

Ghost's profile nourished by the walls

Electric eras gone and back again

Wizened bureaucrat sloshing through the snow

Red Square resurrected from Atlantis green

Juice arrogated by rusty yards

Sales licensed in the first glimpse of dusk

 

Opium is neither substance nor agent

But a property of thought

That snakes its way through defiant space

Einstein in the bathroom and walls of ice

It is the siren that leaves no scar,

Exploring itself, coiled and free,

A trap door broad and nearly blocked,

A low eternal song

To find peace in a grain of sand

Demands intelligence, honesty,

Immobility that gives up at the start,

Sad eyes and a woeful heart,

Dream of wonder pale as fluff,

Sweet mildew that seldom was enough

 

Light in a doorway awakens anyone;

I step back, shake my head,

Laugh in the tea leaves, dance with shadows,

Say only what I can't help but know:

A volume slim but tributary rich,

Tree bark trite though wholly decipherable,

The clarity of a long formulation,

Stillness of reconstituted shapes.

Tannhäuser dips a foot in upper air,

Burrows through the eternal muck,

Prisoner of weapon and playground,

Forced entry, erratic, firm.

Tumble weasel notes a scribbled rite,

Adds us to his polymorphous compass

 

Each moment is a choice, oh Salazar,

Houses hide cellars and you your thoughts,

All things condense in the best of times

Parades arrive and dispel the contagion

The squirm of morning tangles the wind

Pink skies straddle oldest wisdom

You twirl your hat over passive prairies

I pick flies off the windshield

What we never mention is the fall

Banned from our parties, our primitive art

Future awaits the original cover-up

Now but a constant struggle to forget

The ceremony of ants is our invention

Staring back like white dwarfs, inside out

 

Rain-washed Stockholm streets

Blank faces the cheerfulest curse

White turns gray but child remains

Kings weep though never banished

The first windows show no cracks

Light no size though its speed be known

Time steps in for a final briefing

Embarrasses the drawing down of shades

From a low graveyard eternity shines

Rats hiss longer than the planet's hum

You swat words with a loaded gun

Nudging me upward in a splash of grace

Black angels bruise an awkward thumb

Swish their titles in a tub of gin

 

You, I'm not going anywhere,

It's fine, the whiteness is all,

Sleek dove impaled in snow,

Engraved birches, ashen sky

Close within the arching borders

A top ever spinning, ever still,

Niceness the cream of triumph,

Cruelty the powder of defeat

Paper was out before the trees,

Oxygen before air or anybody's cells,

Eggless antelope crouched in ruins,

Brittle music soared above

Disney dishes tracked the view,

Bombed low over Santa Fe

 

A weedy song you called for,

High but sober as friendship,

Rising on waves of thought,

Happy resort to opposites.

Duck epochs in an earthly palm,

Wide flower cradles the dawn,

Shimmering moonscape, plaited air,

Notes twist downward shingle-like.

Desertion is the recurrent theme,

Holy and doomed from the start;

Dynamite was aloe green,

The austere pirate (wild-eyed)

Dove from your elegies

Into an older and seemlier book

 

In the beginning was work, no filth,

Truth the venue of virtuosity,

Icing on a scalloped noose,

Traducement of poisoned wells.

The stench of jails is high, not far;

Boots go steadily scattering dust;

Time is lateral, lessons long,

Price always new and never paid.

Frost is relative to our sense of things,

White cap on a mole's head;

Thirteen tumbling clowns

Alight on roof top, purple noon,

Calibrated intent, convex lens,

Crib baby dance lighter than soap

 

Consider gravity as a two-way thing:

For the cosmologist, pre-pubescent Being

First feeling swollen nipples,

Imagining dependent litters;

For the recurrent scientist at dawn of a new age,

A label for the mystery which, once solved,

Rips off its own veil,

Revealing a gentleman helpless and soft;

For Einstein, the holy mechanic,

A description of the way the universe

Turns another direction each time one moves,

Without denying that nothing moves but God;

For one whose work is the traversal

Of the painted borders of the world,

The Earth's assistance in its own dissolution,

A woman who calls "Come here" and turns her head

 

Nostrademe's daughter lived in a brown tunnel room,

A place of notions and spider's songs,

Bright as the flesh of early space

Before fish thought of stars blinking on and off.

Her meals were watery like the juice of life,

Hippopotamus seconds in a fall of dust;

Sunshine broke windows and liquidly held

A tension of pulleys inside and space flowing out.

Having finished my business in the main hall,

I passed her room on the way to bed;

Her space blew wide like a billowing skirt

And my room sunk like Atlantis in the light.

She pirouetted tornado-like and loud,

The sea outside broke against hesitant rocks,

Mirrors surfed her walls like melting ice

And I coughed eagles into warring flight

 

Auras are necessary because pianos are skeletons,

And piano teachers are straight and cold,

And refrigerators make ice much too abruptly,

And the inside of your lips cracks with teeth.

Music is necessary because headaches screech

And time plumbs the depths of hopelessness,

And when we finally sit across a table,

Music walks in with the smoothest silkiest tie.

Love is necessary because words are dead,

And if I like you now, not later please,

And though love turn to hate it will always shine,

And though the Stone Age return, no stone hearts.

I see you round the corners of a maze,

And bless the walls that mask a frightened gaze

 

A present to you.

Four jellybeans and a cow.

On the last day a long long straw.

Let's talk.

What do you remember about

When you decided to come?

It's very important.

Say what?

I don't rightly know why Old Molly

Tried to jump over the moon

In her piss-wet (excuse me) backyard

And pissed, I mean missed.

I mean she lisped a broken lullaby.

Can you say "Pretty please mumblycheese"?

I don't know what's come over your father lately,

But I don't like it.

Can't you sing and walk backwards

Like in your silly dream?

 

The ice-cream jelly jazz man

Sings forks and spoons and frying pans,

And bigger numbers than you can,

Smaller books and fishing-hooks.

The wrinkled ninny in her lair

But winks and suddenly you're there,

And disappears except for hair,

Cold muffins and burning coffins.

The owner of the hospital

Has lollipops and worms that crawl,

And scarier voice than evil's call,

Deeper thoughts than apricots.

The man astride the ocean floor

Can't sing - but rubs his eyes for more

 

Mary in the morning spread like crisp newspaper,

Orange-bright as dark her fled tormenter,

Perched on telephone lines, singing to herself,

Answering yesterday's ads, clean switchboard lady.

Call from husband, chocolate doughnut and black coffee,

Hot bath, two pills, and swan-like sheets,

Guns her engine round the spiral streets,

Everywhere pacing cigarette hallways, long as breath.

She wakes to find gripping skillets, screaming walls,

Chain-talking detective, but no question comes,

Finds nourishment in vapors below cold floors,

Wraps chicken-bone family in hot swirling air,

And thinks of milkmen-princes, hard white paper,

Lays herself in green blankets and yellow arms

 

Sing, it's ending soon;

One day you're fat as a balloon,

And then you're hard as stone.

Walk, and face the sun,

Wherever yours shines best,

For that's the only rest.

Grow old as squirrels do,

Secure and smiling, desperate too

For one more winter's nest.

Shake the cobwebs from your mind;

Greet your saviors dumb and blind;

Run like grapevines do,

Up and down the gentle walls

That hold their sides while thunder falls

 

Only breath will stay,

Breathed from one who goes

Behind a crimson shade

New habits to assay.

Only time will tell,

Chronicled in dust,

The legend of a cloud

Releasing raindrop bells.

Only love will hold,

Fused in colliding storms,

Criminals and kings

In warm plasmatic mold.

Only action sings,

Only wings have wings

 

When the whodunit pizza man

Turned down wound corners

Nearing newly built membrane walls

Hoping to find the culprit before

Captain Buzz arrived with heavy flashlight club

He surprised himself upon a paradox

Whether the firefly fetus was the killer,

The victim, the hapless posthumous witness,

Or like old Oedipus backing his car over a cliff

 

It took a messenger on a cloudy day

To soften lumps of meanly tangled clay,

It was no accident that birds refused

To recognize the decorated muse.

For rules of flight on unregressive lines

Were broken once, but not another time,

The playful egglike nymphs in growing air

Established skies to shield their flowing hair.

And pre-organic prophets of extent

Created bubbles round what would be meant,

They spoke to audiences that yet denied

A role to willful exercise outside.

And yet the birds made one concession clear:

The food they now could eat made neighbors dear

 

When they moved Fat Eddie down to the street,

A little festival happened on the block;

Children ran in and out of skirts liked scared shrimp.

No 21-gun salute when they pulled away,

Just a dirty exhaust cracking the night,

But windows shone like proud candelabra.

No international news on Elm Street that night,

No drowsy sex after the weather report;

The purple air reported deep events -

Like Madeline brushing blood from perfect teeth,

Her mother writing notes to the loyal maid,

Her silk-pajamad father puffing fat cigars,

And breezes like a raven in the night,

Closing windows, laughing with the light

 

I'd love to write your story, me gone,

You in a big stone house,

Fireplace burning like the tartest orange

That ever God in jubilation made.

You'd lie on floors carpeted like forests,

Make love with hawk-diving words,

Eat fried chicken, crazy drugs and ice,

Write letters to your father sick in paradise.

At midnight you'd grow serious as snow,

Your eyelids would harden, your breath would go,

And your uneasy guests would rise to find

Stakes of emerald driven through their hearts.

You'd neither laugh nor cry, but swing your hips

As sailors do deserting sinking ships

 

The Clear Blue Sky (a fantasy about my anima)

Robert is the only one who still comes to visit me,

although it's him I was trying to escape from. He

says we'll be married as soon as I'm well. I don't

discourage him, just look at him with that sick

expression in my eyes I've learned to feign so

effectively.

It wasn't the fear of losing him that resolved me

to so desperate an act. It was a kind of weariness,

a culmination. Though at the time I had been

feeling extraordinarily happy. Robert had just

bought me a ring. It was a delightful spring. We

got caught in the rain a couple of times during our

afternoon walks. I loved the hot showers together

when we got home.

One afternoon we sat on the front steps staring

at the clear blue sky. Suddenly I realized it was

impossible.

I think I'd like to go off alone for a couple of

weeks, I said.

Okay, he said, where?

I stood up and walked into the house. He didn't

budge. By the time he had followed me inside, my

suitcase was packed.

I spent the next day looking for gifts. A

gorgeous coat for my mother, a book for my

brother. For Robert, the most expensive

microscope I could find - he'd been talking about

buying one forever. Afterward I sat down and

ordered a gigantic sundae.

That evening in the motel room I slashed my

wrists. After calling for an ambulance. It wouldn't

be fatal. I had figured out from the books how to

do it that way.

For several weeks they pleaded with me to

commit myself so I could be transferred to a better

institution. I screamed that there was nothing

wrong with me, knowing that was the only way

I'd be able to stay here. It's amazing how soon

they began to leave me alone. Even Robert's

happy, though he won't admit it. He's got a new

girlfriend. Her name is Sheila. He says they're

"just friends." I pretend to have a jealous fit, the

orderlies usher him out and give me my pills. I

learned long ago how to hide them under my

tongue until I'm alone and can flush them down

the toilet.

Then I crawl back into bed, prop myself up on

my elbows, and smile through the window at the

clear blue sky

 

a black man with a long silver beard tries desperately

to disengage from an ice floe in the purple twilight of

a very old century, hoping to embark upon a voyage

that will lead him to the windowsill of utopia. not

very successfully he swats away the flies of doubt

which hover about the interstices of his

disintegrating beard. in the distance one perceives

ever so faintly the drone of an armada of nuclear

galactic motorcades hoping to once and for all

establish the supremacy of the white minority. our

hero coughs swooningly and closes his eyes to imagine

a better world in which no whiskers would penetrate

the purity of the ever-expanding crystalline ambience

in which he finds himself. he mightily lifts an index

finger hoping to initiate a sea-change in the

consciousness which has not yet recognized his

existence. instead of causing movement his gesture

results in a resettling of the dust and a shriek of

banality from the motionless wind of his soul. he

starts to tear his hair out strand by strand while

realizing with minor ecstasy that the pain is no worse

than the boredom with which he seems to have been

eternally afflicted. around him skirt creatures of

interminably brief existence disappearing almost

before he can scoop them into the walnut-size briefs

which hang around the clothespin existence he is so

intent upon corrupting. in a larger sense he is no

longer able to marshal the forces required to oppose

an ongoing challenge to his subservience. the world

as-such impinges upon his perceptually-based logic.

mynah birds hum the death knell of freedom in the

porches of his ear. bees can no longer be said to deny

that the hunt is off and the feast has begun. can our

hero bear the burden of masterminding the process any

longer, or will the yellow sun of decay betray his

hopes once more? stay tuned for a further episode of

as the glowworm burns, reeking as we stand of an

everyday flame, the eternally limited garbage-chore

existence from which we each try to escape. the

question has been posed, the answer's existence

already denied. can we live with such a man as our

leader? obviously so and with a modicum of comfort to

boot. but will the soap operas tolerate such tedium?

our hero laughs and bellows for the first time with

conviction ciertamente que si!

 

What a marvelous day, I thought, waking,

I've come fully into my own,

There's nothing to do, my disciples have it covered.

I thought of climbing a tree,

Basking in the sun and writing a mystery.

Then I remembered, this is the day they kill me,

A shadow of anger fell over my heart,

Then I laughed loud, full of my father's seas,

My find floated off in waves of light

 

"What do they do in heaven?" my son asked.

Being a twentieth century woman, I thought of sex.

The only problem was I imagined my husband on his bike

Racing the pigeons to some old back door.

And then there were gleaming fridges,

Nights on diamond sleds,

Someone strangled over an opera balcony,

Or maybe walking from a fire hand in hand.

I laughed like chocolate milk, rich but a little dumb:

"What we do here, except there's no bellyaches,

And the moon sits on your window at night,

So you always go to bed on time."

Now a twenty-first century woman would have said -

But he gulped down his orange juice, nodded his empty head

 

A boy swatting baseballs on a sandy hill,

Its slopes folded like his mother's belly,

All soupy oatmeal, mutant peas, pink-gray meat,

Waves of flesh ruled in sepulchral beds.

A little girl baked as a golden raisin,

Queenlike tears clear on a flowering face,

Asking petrol dolls when beanstalk wars

Would swarm prophetic cities of her soul.

The fair-faced whistle-wearing wind,

All words of mumble-jumble Chinese priests,

Leaking its rain into childhood's only hole,

Jangling dinner bells, iron napkins, bathroom tile.

Husband running like a horse through swampy fields,

Wife screaming ecstatic wisdom at patient dogs

 

On a muddy Brooklyn street, trains like sick angels,

A huge black salesman stumbled to the door

Of purple Sylvia, clerk at Woolworth's store.

She had a thousand pairs of shoes at home,

Easter bonnets strapped around her soul,

Hymns that chased the starving mice from holes.

But in her raindrop heart she saw the world

Bereft of furniture that clangs like coins,

And prayed to floods where silent horses join.

And he, conspicuously empty-armed and free,

Saw in her wine-glass body crystal streams

That sparkled like a golden cloud of dreams.

She had to put the slipper on, of course,

But then who needs a stirrup? she'd a horse

 

I've been here two years now;

When they first dumped me like a dirty sheet,

I was furious and weak,

But just recently it's all worked out,

I'm being born daily and wonderfully.

I love now the clanging of metal,

Cages, spoons, it's all the same to me,

The howl of wind and electricity, men's games,

They come from my heart, they're my children.

I want you to know from this corner

That your cell also contains it all,

From where you look span the sweet stars,

From your dreams comes time's great orgy

 

Life's not friendly here in the colonies;

This morning an armadillo or something snapped at my toes;

These eternal meetings with the galactic reps

Leave me fizzing like seltzer water at midnight.

My secretary walks in each morning like an electric carrot;

She's never on time, which is no problem,

Except her stories grow as absurd as those meetings.

Yesterday I tried to take some time off,

Drove my autoship past a few craters,

Gazed into the dripping colors of the vacuum,

And I couldn't remember a goddam thing.

Then a face floated by that I'd known long ago,

When I really managed my own domain,

And there'd been flowers at midnight,

Secret messages and blind winter fires,

Seasons flying by like dying tissues,

And we so happy in the cradle of love's half-truths

 

Out of silence, dark,

Plump as girls by streams,

Timeless and mad for time

Balanced and stark

Out of darkness, motion,

As a fly buzzes and retreats,

Recapturing with thought

The waveless ocean

Out of motion, two,

Forward and back,

A moneyed universe

Mortal and true

Out of two, a prayer,

Despairing and wild,

Profligate intent

Of creature and sayer

Out of prayer, song,

Flower and grain,

Murmurs round a well

Rising and strong

 

Once, playing cowboy on a plastic hill,

I failed to hear the ritual dinner bell,

And glutted pigeons rose behind the dusk

To tell me that I'd heard a deeper knell.

I looked into the faces of my friends,

And saw that bright-washed ears were virgin yet

Of my short intercourse with winged books

That lived like vampires on men's fond regret.

I would have shot the stupid moon that night

Had not a caterpillar on my sill,

With index finger on his vaginal lips,

Foretold a revolution of my will.

And one fine morning, I awoke to say

That, skunk-like, rotten books had crept away

 

Hooded and dark, the old men

Who shadow the world with spears

Gaze at night into viscous bowls,

Searching for an image of themselves.

And we the victims dance in the rain,

Describing circles of death and hope;

We are the winners, if you count millennia,

The happy ones if you discount war.

Broken, splintered, the wise men,

Flapping in the breeze like soldiers' coats,

Terrorize mutilated backward centuries

And sail through mirrors of false light.

Now the enemy adjusts his tie;

Now the cough of night illumines an old sky

 

The more you do, the more the world stops

And watches. Unseeing eyes and forgiveness

For what you'll never know. And yet

You need it like the newly-fallen snow.

And when you are old, and when you are old,

The grayest clouds turn clear, and fall

One notch on the endlessly round horizon,

And only you can see the difference.

Mornings are all you will remember

On the way out of town, mornings cold

And clear as running water in a brook

You hear sometimes between wake and sleep,

You hear no more, you hear once again,

A child crying at the edge of town

 

The artist sees the world and runs away.

Does she long for something better?

Hardly so.

Or purer?

If anything, the dirtiest there is.

Then what do you seek, weary bird?

A place where you can be yourself

And live,

Not longer than three hearty days

With the yeasty sorrow of too much,

And too late

 

A brand new world of breadcrumbs and rust,

Spreads its lime over the political dust

Hate is all I can feel, all I can trust,

The last uncrossed barrier, last weapon I wield.

The highways we travel are the final battlefields,

A reprieve from judgment's inevitable yield,

We run from the burning prairies that shield

Our hearts from constriction in a furnace of lies.

The cement path to hell, we watch ourselves die,

Our heads wrapped in bandages and hands in our flies,

The sex of a lost generation that cries

Rocking baby dinner exploding in foam.

You in the kitchen and I on the phone,

Ninety miles per hour and no one at home

 

At desire's end I want you,

Who has never sparked desire before,

Only ice-chills and ivory disaster,

Who made people but want to die.

You who have always remained hidden

By the whistling of a bleary wind,

Who never knew me and never knew yourself,

Slept with eyes open and wandered blind.

At life's end I want your warm hand,

Dry as sandstorms on distant moons,

I want the light-shifts in your weary eyes,

The music in your ears of shame,

The body that ever was too small to be,

The golden mouth that shaped a crowd of worlds

 

Crashing bruised Sunday child,

Backyard lawn that eats up itchy skin,

Food that squirts vitamins in the eyes,

Wizened cousins and distant resemblances.

Oh Salazar, the world is no harem,

No cult of forgiven murderers and frustrated victims.

Oh wise one, the rules we make

Cannot under any circumstances be ignored.

What, if not that, is their saving grace?

When will someone finally take himself seriously?

It's been so long since a joke was anything but bloody,

And the only pleasure lies in our attempt to explain.

When we squirm on Eros' ruthless spikes,

Truth is what feels love when love feels death

 

In my dreams we do all kinds of things;

In the light of day it's either up or down.

It's clear everything must have a name;

You can't remember a world by how it's made.

Of the seventeen ways to make love

Only three remain - on the best of days.

When I chased you up a hill,

The mud splattered backwards

And your surrender created two new games;

Now only prayer has a chance.

Despair is a wind-borne song

And prayer the dying leaf,

Varicose as a bursting womb

Whose tatters point all seventeen ways

 

In my grandmother's livingroom:

Daggers floating in the air,

A sofa coarser than dragon skin

Carpet more pubic than anybody's hair.

Lamps high above Babel's fall,

Curtains flapping in a post-industrial wind.

Invisible walls like in King Lear's fields,

Electricity stalking like a desperate murderer.

A ceiling to muffle the stars.

The clock's ticking like a call to grace,

A single leaf in the soup of death.

Upon entering the room my body changed,

Shed the guiltiness of time,

Flattened out like an old and formless earth

 

Words and feelings are everywhere,

And all too many correspondences,

But patience went out with infancy's fall.

All things return, but not on call:

Knowing is an old seesaw.

You must dare to awake me,

If only to rub my eyes and sleep once more.

The wind's anarchy whispers my love.

The wind's motive is my love.

I dream of boundaries and fortifications,

And hope they are but partly real.

I see a hairy bison roaming the earth,

Resting now and again

In the wind's temporary shelter

 

Turning the final corner,

He forgot all the others

And saw the world shine

For the first time,

If not the last.

"Though," says Murphy,

Adjusting his glasses

And searching with his forefinger

Through an old and tattered album,

"In the summer of 1938

The same spiderwebs

Glistened on the leaves."

A poet is the oldest professional.

She quarreled with God - and won.

In consolation God got to create imperfection.

Now who supports whom is a tangled question.

But the poet has painted her every cell

And dressed her aura in blue chamois.

She walks the streets in search of tired angels.

For one stale beer they can be inspired

To forget their milk-cloudy homes.

They long for the banality of flesh,

And she for the blurring of its transparency

In the actuality of tree and stone.

The poet creates like God,

Erect and motionless on her saucer-like stool

 

I am against all that moves,

Be it out of principle or dullness,

But what I want is neither myself nor you,

But the will to want and to not have.

Why are we afraid to sit,

Preferring sleep and work

To the eternity of thought and failure,

The disappointment of just being?

In the beginning was boredom,

Followed by pure excitement,

But you and I were gone both times,

Sitting, sitting, being and regretting.

Though it's now too late to witness origins,

We have not yet finished sitting, nor begun

There's so much that you can't do

Watching the world hurtle on its way

That it's a shame we create our own prisons,

Make rules to catch flies and trap ourselves instead.

Nearly all my life spent in bright rooms,

Hard desk chairs and all-powerful clocks,

I remember only endings, the bell to leave,

I mourn what could have been in a softer time.

And I think only the whispering corridors were real,

Only the dust motes seeking any sun,

Only the smile disappearing as it grows,

A bubble that explodes in the birth of air

 

"A side effect of the air war was the psychological

effect on ordinary Iraqi citizens of having their

lights go out. The impact on civilians was

terrifying and certainly saddening. To say it's the

fault of the United States for fighting and winning

a war, that's ludicrous. War's the problem. It's not

how we fought it or didn't fight it. I think war's the

disaster."

- Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, commander of

the U.S. air war, 1991

It's certainly saddening, terrifying,

To see the impact of war upon a man

Who must have known once, at least as a child,

That bombs don't bomb, nor do airplanes fly,

Who must have once watched a bird glide

And seen volition, grace, responsibility;

For whom words were an affirmation

Of a duty freely and proudly performed,

Instead of shame masquerading as honor.

On the other hand, it would surely be ludicrous

To blame a man for pushing all the buttons he can

Like a kid loose in a big museum

(Especially when his job depends on it

And he's got a warm house and a soft bed

And storybooks to read all night long)

Each crime was like a flower,

Unexpected, free, beyond your strength

But opening, neither slow nor fast,

The petals of a mutual heart.

To close, at every divide, division,

To risk separation in learning trust,

You studied love in parallel rooms

While your pursuers ran in packs,

Learning nothing and forgetting nothing.

You were not strong like iron, nor even like muscle,

But strong like a river at its source

Bounding into the future's blackness,

Knowing annihilation as its fate,

But seeing also the annihilation whence it comes.

You learned because you set no limits,

Loved each other and your lives,

Followed the premise of joy to its conclusion,

Sustained by hope of a better world

 

Once gray covered the world like a satin sheet,

Green was a dream in a lizard's mind,

Oranges rolled backward on newspaper tracks,

Trees stood like pencils in a sea of black.

Oceans beat white knuckles on wallpaper rocks,

The lovers next door blew like feathers away,

Nymphs stayed at home on spaghetti phones

And satyrs stole train tracks for crutches and gold.

Color burst out like the Chicago fire,

A rusty teeter-totter creaked in the snow,

Mud spread oily over dewdrop suns,

Squirrels packed lunches and hurricanes grinned

 

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof comes in the end despondency and sadness."

- William Wordsworth

Sometimes when we're strong the lion hears us,

And it's all suddenly different;

You'll never see it in his eyes or twisted mouth,

It's something in the space between his breaths,

As a vulnerability to the suggestion of power

Content to masquerade as a foolish thing,

Prospero washing windows on a rainy day,

Birds burying stillborn youth as tanks approach

England was a lion, and so was Rome,

And every king in the flush of his new robe,

So mornings tumble monarchs out of bed,

And for one moment there's no mirror,

No facade of libraries with impossible shelves,

But nothing, romance of water and air,

Dewdrops on glass and brandy everywhere.

Then for a day that never moves beyond a field

Of poppies waving in a sizzling wind,

The monarchs mold new lions out of neutral clay,

And call them gifts of jungles far away

So madness is an option now,

Colonies have fallen and we're all wounded lions,

And if we prowl around dark corners,

We'll find ourselves at home, ailing and whole,

Or we can be as sane as iron rain,

Creating love out of recurrent storms,

Glad for the loyalty of insects, worms and things,

For the madness of man in his viscous womb,

And mad for truth safe in foreign tombs

Your soul, in which I see my own uncertainties,

Ascends through layers of flesh,

Ligaments of fortune and dissolving fat,

I can't say what I know, but wish-like thoughts

Fly from me to the cradles of your single body.

And for you also I'm a made-up thing,

Full of high dreams and a face like youth

Promising roses in the stench of doom,

Stumbling on the spikes of nature's conspirators

And waving bloody silk in mad despair.

Together, there's a chance in the anarchy of rain

To move the earth along its course,

To blot the lipstick of murder's arcane tale

With leaves of one spring's dying bloom,

The circus song that fades on rising waves

 

It's going to be different this time.

Somehow she'll know how beautiful she is,

And how much I know it too.

The flower that was once her womb

Will bloom in her speech, her wondrous mind,

And for me her injuries will be sweet,

The signs of a living soul,

Her covert role will be a child's game.

This time we'll meet in a neutral space

Away from the long mind of time,

The music will be of Christmas and of spring,

Between us nothing but the careless centuries

 

They say in the papers there's a war outside

Led by giants and larcenous men,

But here with you by a flame-filled hearth

I hear nothing, watch fables in the fire.

By your side I see the cloak of centuries

Parted to show man's glory and his shame,

I see little creatures, frantic beings,

Eyes longing for love, fighting with sleep.

In your skin I feel modernity,

Lives snapping like twigs, rushing trains

Burying years within a moment's roar,

Whispering love as an echo, an afterthought.

And in our room, encapsulated chaos,

Promises like young saplings,

I feel our ghosts smiling from the lights,

Rocking on the ceiling, holding wide the walls

 

You're as big as I get,

With your grizzled pumpkin head,

Black but in wide temple light,

Describing the universe in a lead of words.

I hear you in the canyons of my brain,

Oxen plodding over stony soil,

I see you through the fires of tired soldiers

In a heavy wind-beaten tent of canvas.

You've got pillars down which angels twist,

Impaled by laughter and sad as cows,

But when will I come to you as a neutral ground,

A space for landing in a wacky town?

When will the first murder be restored

Like gorilla movies on a circuit board?

 

What can you do with a kid who cries?

Bash him in his small pink eyes,

Feed him candy like the wages

Of lion tamers in rusty cages?

What can I do if there's nothing for me

On crayon lawns with chocolate trees,

If sizzling steaks betray a zoo

Where wives run naked and birds pursue?

What can you do when neighbors creep

To weave a dress for snow-white sleep,

When tables scream and toys roll,

And mirrors laugh though backed by coal.

You hug that child, and he hugs you,

And breath that's fled brings morning dew

 

The sun was a poisoned dagger that day;

The clouds sheathed it, they had to;

Rain carried me in its golden bowl

As a leaf fallen from a too-old tree

We need each element sometime,

Immersions becoming something else;

Earth falls to earth and water runs,

Air and fire play changing of the guard

So in the only bubble permitted me,

I was struck by lightning, astonished as an infant,

Atomic Abel and super-future king,

Praising all who moved or had been moved

And you, crouching behind dead trees,

Cardboard machete and rolling eyes,

Especially I thanked for times you couldn't stop,

Using earthquakes like recipes, shaking thought

The victim always wins, always,

Since God slapped darkness and light appeared;

Torture's now a purple light, and fear

Poses shamelessly, sends postcards everywhere

Avoid teachers, leaves are licensed to fall,

Rivers to run and earth to bear,

And we are licensed to make of our despair

Songs of love and roadmaps for ourselves

So, love, be crazy, fill the tub,

Drown memories or pick them like lilies,

Call me gently, out of time, or not at all,

Eat dark plums all life long and laugh

 

Sometimes the moon's so full

I don't know what to say;

Words fall down like April mist

And take the pounding light away.

Sometimes the sun's so deathly bright

I'd rather hide beneath a house

With headless worms and spacey friends,

Nobody squeaking like a mouse.

Sometimes I kick the tangled sheets

And pull my wet pajamas off;

I'd rather freeze in icy air

Than hear the voices whine and cough.

But in the morning all is new

Like birthday parties at the zoo

 

No need to cry, the trees still sway,

The evening's lovelier than the day,

The congresses of birds degree

The spell is broken, we are free.

It's no different now you know

That friends and fathers have to go;

You'll peel gold apples and you'll smile

When you walk that lonely mile.

We'll stroll through arbors, or we'll sit

Oppressed by nature's changeless writ,

But minds that lose relieve thought's dearth

As rain renews a withered earth

 

You couldn't sing, and yet the songbirds bowed

Before rough cakes you baked on business days;

You couldn't laugh, and still you thrilled the stars

Whose ivory touch relieved time's weary craze.

Your ruthless light led sparks from lesioned smiles

Through dark enraptured chambers of your brain,

Until the screams of falling lamps reneged

On promises deceitful men had feigned.

The iron in your bones reached empty towns

Whose gates stood open from your childhood wars,

But deepening ruddy mists revealed a crown

That spiraled clumsy jewels around your course.

You sat in studied reverie one day

While sterile waters washed your skin away

 

I'm the fat man in the circus of my life,

There's never any room where I go;

I've noticed though that no one runs away,

And in fact everyone regards me as rather small.

I asked the trapeze artist for his opinion;

He said he'd think it over, but you know their kind,

Bigness to them is a tumbling glance

At an everyday object mirroring a far-off thing.

Now the lion tamer was more direct:

"It's a like dis," he said, "we all got our troubles,

'Cept you ain't really got none, right?

'Cause you lives like a forest animal, ya see?"

I did see, and asked the clown for contravention,

Which he gladly provided;

I tell you those guys should have been kings,

The way they'll sell their souls for crazy flattery.

The lady who rides the elephant, now she was a case;

"The bigger the better," she said,

"You can't get nowhere with skinny legs and a suitcase,

Take it from me, I rode them trains."

One last attempt, I asked the midget,

Who clapped his hands, ran to pee behind the tent,

And brought me a book with skyscrapers and lakes,

Apparently illustrating some cabalistic science.

On the way to my room I met the manager,

Who stomped out his smelly cigar and said,

"Fat men aren't drawing the crowds these days,

What would you say to a lifetime pension?"

 

You didn't know much,

But you knew this isn't it,

This lie-strewn canvas we call life,

And you lived in the windblown suburbs,

Used your thoughts to muffle the lies.

For you death was the other side of the street,

And I'm sure you blushed when you got there,

You recognized the candy store from your dreams,

Probably bought a cigar for your man

And laughed the whole afternoon like an orphaned kid.

When you think of us now,

We seem like pale flowers

Living in slanted hazy rooms,

Talking through the cough of random gramophones

 

He's a boy, and he's caught

In webs that mantra-worms invent,

Carrying his satchel and flute in starry storms,

Robbed of virginity by Christmas pageants

That tell him, "You've picked the flower, now reckon the cost

In falling leaves that turn the other way;

On Judgment Day you'll watch the melting air,

Find gluey trysts despite your awkward gun."

And then he's finished as a king or thief,

His dreams descending into an apter realm

Of princes bound by helmets tourniquet-wide

In dark forest oblivion to save the dawn

In his pink-brained custodial role

He spreads economic cheer over bed and board,

The man with the answers and the toy pistol

Who moves interstellar conferences and children's lives

Finally in an essential ice age of hope,

Earth mother powerless and light like glass,

He turns to a religion of anonymity,

Warbling his mind's pollen to dying monarchs

In the old forests, Merlin among the weeds

 

In the cold Russian winter of my heart

Lives the joy of redness and pain,

The surprise of back doors swinging free,

Arrival of foreign travelers, intimacies.

In my bowels is an insatiable god,

Hater of substance, lover of spreading space,

Cousin to the mad galaxies of my cells,

Commentator on my foolish plans.

In my head there dwells a cat-like brain,

Certain of droll conclusions, a faithless book,

Content to be the steward of the heart,

So long a rebel that it needs no sword.

I lead, as far as thoughts reveal,

An exemplary life, filled with kingly hopes,

Yet there courses in my stolid veins

The blood of innocence, food of peace.

And in my larger body that no eye can see

Run nerves that sleep like gracious bats,

In a heart that hides within my enemy's house

Resides a jewel fleshier than my sex

 

You drive me out of hollows, out of brooks

Where jealous deer protect their tenuous broods,

And leave me wandering with a string of books

In marble labyrinths, securing woods.

I visit stores that aimless devils built

Vacationing from the world's oppressive hours,

When God's bright workmen dance beyond their guilt

And trees retracted retrospective flowers.

I dream a misalliance with the birds,

Hungry craftsmen with no sacred day,

But, victim of a gathering cloud of words,

I spill their dewy porridge when I pray.

As running children bow, I hold my rage,

Strong Casanova in a parrot's cage

 

I came to heaven with a jaundiced eye,

Expecting car salesmen and choking priests,

Clouds mansioned and gilt-edged like Spanish coins,

Olympic angels, low-cholesterol feasts.

I left my scrapbooks in the cold Midwest

Under my father's headstone in a battlefield,

Knowing God's sunny fingers would stop before

The Mississippi's gray and leaden shield.

I saw with blinding sight one April morn,

My husband's typing like swords of awakening ghosts,

I'd bought my sunshine with a vault of lies,

Traded my power and my ancestral hosts.

I stood, a frightened gull over the sea,

Waiting for the past to find a role for me

 

Your eyes like empty saucers' pleas

For cups of packed arrays of light

Revolved toward lemon fields of day

Where wispy winds hid burrowed night.

The lines that taught your body's sight

Stretched bones across a sea of hope,

And downward diving breaths of thought

Made waves of anxious bankers grope.

The wounded foxlings in your caves,

Where hunters' spears had feared to probe,

Had read the darkening alphabets

And wrapped their youth in time's new robe.

The violets dancing round your shell

Spelled paths to wisdom's selfless well

 

Tea and oranges, denial of real sex,

Babies born after the fact, lost in losing games,

Dreaded nights of misplaced love,

Mornings that come too soon like passing trains.

Death the same, missing forgotten births,

Funeral lines for unknown relatives,

Friends with other plans quaffing bitter wine,

Desserts that singe the meat from bloated tongues.

Ages gone by that live in dying brains,

Patient hungry birds flapping ignorant wings,

Bearded wise men, dry