S'taff

I wait for the song to finally reach your heart,
for the sun of my true fathers to shake you.
I am not patient, I eat knives at my gentle
table, I wake up several times a day
always alone.
I wait for the thunder to crack over your city
of damp shock, the lightning to surprise
your mirror, so you can see the face
that I see.
I wait for the blister of a world to go away
and leave us to our own rain,
our wind, our snow, our sea,
our faces drowning in the same glass
our teeth beating in the same
madness, our dreams
at rest with each other.
I can't reverse the clasp of my mind
or the sinking of my heart
or the skin's discouragement without you.
Call it an unearthly instrument
too clear to bear a name
among the prodigal namers. All we have learned
is to turn away.

1/14/1976

Goodbye

I want to scream pictures into your mind.
Many of them are burnt with a sun I have never seen
but in them.
A leaf purple with other leaves,
a woman pink with strength.
I want to put us both on a healthy diet
and to strangle every cigarette in the world.
I want to not worry.
I want strings pulling ordinary language
past the quiet where my mind zooms.
I want the ether to be noticeable, but easily walked through.

I want your eyes where I can see them
and your hands where they will move when I move mine
and our lives to make silent dances despite our
weakness. I want you to have our baby
but only if you quit smoking first.
I want this to be the last time
I am afraid I am only kidding myself.
I want the world to tease us
to the limits of a love.

1/15/1976

What is the measure
of this dislocation
that I know myself
best in anger.

But note another
sign:
of dry mouth,
sounds collapsing in throat,
mind dismayed
at the weakness of anger
to make myself
understood.

No eloquence comes,
only wholeness
in that instant.
It is the measure
of what I know
I know.

early 1970s

The Chain

By gripping my eyes
in helpless insistence,
I see what is needed

instead of what be-
fore them is behind them,
forever and for
now.

For friends who will not
touch,
insolence
is my only clothing.

Forever forced, I am
lost in the needle
of these
eyes' demands,

squeezing mud
and scurrying to perceive.

early 1970s

Balloon Sandwich

I went over our conversation
with a fine-toothed gland.
It was a game of immovable stomachs.
I choose to remember the coffee
because a painting is the lie
that tells the truth.

Where are you now, my sweet
misunderstanding?
Standing in a vacuum cleaner
that moves from vacuum
to vacuum?

Why did we not grip that sandwich tighter
to give a little flavor
to the memory?
Why didn't we do it
again?

The quiet fills my head
like warm whispers ballooning.
Too bad I'm so
thin-skinned.

early 70s

Chiarscuro: The Days

The days succeed
as pulleys

carrying this
and that
across the fine
synaptic edge.

My skin is the fulcrum
of the sun and moon.
All day, in weariness,
I dodge the delicate missiles
not meant but meaning
to kill.

At night
my dreams
are massive retaliation.
They grow like mushrooms
on the bark of daylight.

I am sustained
by this ecology of dreams.
This other, this
daylight noise
is what I do

to launch my dreams like obsessive arrows
aimed at my destroyers:
those I hate
and those I love
alike.

1970s

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)

endless

Endless young women in tee shirts with cigarettes
tiny breast and bright face
EYES of quick challenge-YOU:
the world of forms
to her, a representation---
a body, maybe;
endless young challenges in young eyes with tee shirts

thin arms, thin hair
leafed on sunned skin
challenge the BEAST
with a billion tendrils, a
million arms and eyes
and faces
to settle her challenge
in one poor weak man
who functions...

Endless young functions in bright cigarettes
with leafy wives
clinging to the sides of
the world of illusion---
to her, a representation,
a body, maybe
endless young beasts in tiny breasts with
a thousand hairy tendrils
and eyes
and faces.

and if not with
this precision
the form is
as probable---the
many of the endless young girls
will slide from
insolence to certainty
settle perhaps forever holding
fashions of tee shirts
before eyes
and representations
of faces, maybe.

1971