adding something

add something to something
and you get the price
of tomorrow's pears.

the best thing that happened today
didn't.

happy happy
inscrutable as a chinese
gong:

it's function is limitless
in new brunswick,
new jersey.

ii
anthony winchester is a
spy.

yesterday he ate his last
scrambled egg
dreaming
of setting womens underwear
on fire.

just before lunch
he caught a moneychanger
BLAM
through the temple.

iii
jesus christ
is a wholly
indistinguisable
metaphor.

says his wife never pays
the bills.

iv
twentyfour years on the same machine,
brianowsky knows everybody in the plant
including all the secretaries
and who they married
and the cars they got it in.

lived seventeen years with the same woman
but never married her.
never can tell when another
depression
'll sneak up on you.

v
there are fiftysix ways to broil hamster,
sixteen of these are illegal.
all of them are unnecessary.

vi
marshall newberm gets a relief
check twice a day.
his wife buys rachmananoff
and they eat dinner wednesday nights
on the fire escape.

marshall is fascinated
with odd numbers.  they have a daughter
who thinks she is a sieve.
oleg cassini talks about the fall
line on television, allen
ginsberg says "folks..." the
landlord demands rent
every six minutes.

vii
circe
pushes the coffee at you    you
smile at her.   she says
'you wan anything else--
huh?'           which
is her way of saying
wach it          i'm
expensive.

viii
standing on the highway
six hours, want only to say
no lady, i'm not a growth
coming out of the cement
of your imagi-
nation.

george, look at that funny hitch
hiker
in the rain rides are easy
college boys with sexual frustrations
will tell you all about it.

i rode with a guy in iowa
who thought pennsylvania was
in the deep south.  he showed
me a picture of his girl. i
worried about corky, wondered
if she made it back home ok.
prettiest dog i ever saw
in iowa.

---1967

Ears

The ears of hair roots in 1964.
The exhumed left ear of Van Gogh interviewed by the right.
he ears of the Bachinale, of Love Me Tender
at the drive-in at two a.m.
The ears of oil, listening in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The ears of Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Kim Agnew.
The ears of Mt. Tamalpais
cocked towards the Himalayas.
The various ears of God, if any.

The ears of slander and deceit.
The ears of elastic, bending time into the tentative image of sound.
The ears of "Scoop," the official magazine of Brighams Ice Cream,
a subsidiary of the Jewel Tea Company.
The ears of a boiled pitchpipe. The ears of solipsism and
the ears of repetition.
The ear of the sky blown by the nose of the wind.

The ear of Picasso's fingers.
The ears of John the Baptist, Percival Goodman, Edmund Carpenter.
The ears of Mary Magdalen and Jacqueline Kennedy.
The catastrophic ears of A.T. & T.
The sighing ears of the president's commission on anything.
The ears of clocks.

The ears of Tanganyika.
The ear of the first anti-pollution valve planned for obsolescence.
The circumspect ears of beer cans filled with kool aid for a
movie made for television.
My lost third ear.

The burning ears of Mamie Eisenhower and General Westmoreland.
The ears of the caves that Paul Klee remembered.
The ears of oars, ores and ors, or either ear of each.
The ears of games. I imagine one of them is always bored.
The bored ears of Shakespeare's ghost.
The coy ear of the lame waterboy. The left ear's unqualified
opinion of the right.
The taxidermist's favorite teddybear's ear.
The light bulb's sneaky ear.
The first ear to demand an earlid.

A brick's ear in Galesburg, Illinois.
The ear for tragedy which must be returned
before it's too late.
The opaque ear of dawn. The insidious ear of draft boards.
The Cornish cartoonist's inky ear.

The round yellow ears of the meadow.
The thin black ear of the desert night.
The ears of a unicorn.
A photograph of Gregor Samsa's ears the night before.
Arthur Godfrey's freeze-dried ears.

The sad ears of the Appalachians. A fragment of Lake Erie's
ear is among her relics.
The protruding ears of archangels (This is how they are
identified in their earthly forms.)
The ear of the pig we refuse to do anything in.

The ear of the sea listening to the moon.
The astronaut's ear listening to himself on the radio.
The impregnable ear of money.
The ears of Viet Cong, a million dollar bounty for each set.

The temptations of warm ears on summer nights.
The sophomore's overstated ears.
The deaf ears of law and order.
The progressively insane ears of adaptation.
The ears of the exorcist.
My father's ears, deaf to mine.
My dream's ear, carefully watching my grandparents'
abandoned house.
The ears of energy. Look at them.
The ears of breasts listening for DDT. The ear of the Pill.
The ears of forests and closets and locations of other
sounds disputed by empiricists.

Midnight's trembling ear.
The ear once painted by Salvador Dali, still dripping and
still listening.
Going deaf are the ears of kids who listen to loud rock but
are mercifully unaffected by the decibels of city traffic, diesel trucks, bulldozers, teachers and jet planes.
The moronic ears of the sane.
The ears of onions clutching the earth.
My camera's ear when it has no film.
The candle's ear when the lights are on.
The parrot's ear when its learned all the words it wants to.
The ears of fossil bubblegum as it is unearthed by the first farmer
of the sixty-first century.
The ears of secretaries knees at noon, near the fountain
in Mellon Square, Pittsburgh.
The ears of red shifted quasars.
The ears of holographs.
The compulsive ears of earthquakes.
The dark ears of managers. The split ears of bishops.
The ears Beethoven would not trade for his eyes.
The positive ear of the south pole. The negative ear of the north.

The inundated ears of stomachs subjected to our incredible
American crud.
The dumb old ear. The happy new ear.
The watchful ears of porpoises.
The inscrutable ears of cockroaches.
The taxed ears.
The ears in the boardroom of American Motors when George
Romney first said, "Chevrolet."
The penultimate ear of James Joyce.
The ears of science fiction writers.
The ears of talk shows as they go to sleep.
The ears of beaches twisted with the sun's broken sidecar.
The bleeding ears of the moon.
The aching ears of subway pornographers.
The ears of trees.
The wise ears of urinals.

The ears of repossessed cars.
The ear of the national debt.
The city's inarticulate ear.
The Indian's ear, next to the earth's ear.
My lover's ear, who also speaks to me.

(1969-70)

where to be/impressions of protest

When I talk about the war
I look for the answers
in the faces of young women.

I recount my memories of demonstrations
in blades of grass.

I stared at the yellow bricks
listened to the sounds of the woman showering
and voices in the smoky distance
talking war and antiwar.

I awakened in a field
of clock radios--
Mother of Exiles,
blood must make you kind.

I will hide.

1968