Bettina’s Sestina

Ease of the saint in bartering wisdom,
the truant forager sleeps till midnight.
I wire the Pope about Sunday in the trees
where time leaps furtively into the ocean
scraping scars of winter, as the blind turn to day
and frail snow earns each divinity’s displeasure.

We stacked the weak until around midnight
not wishing to clock our candidate’s displeasure.
Without further concentration we spit into the ocean
and the ocean spits back, sliding us into the trees
where we consider cocoanuts of wisdom
flooding lithesome frameworks once a day.

Bettina my love, give it a shove, share your displeasure
let it creak softly by night or by day.
You can’t get by with the wizard’s chronic wisdom
unless the curl is restored in the starved mote of midnight
and the ladder withdraws from its suit of the ocean.
You’ll be eating for weeks in the thumbs of trees.

There is no dancing here to illuminate the day.
The edges of protection fade into the ocean
masked by scattered canticles of displeasure.
Sorrow fails the clever wounded, suspicious of wisdom.
They laugh like darkness lost in trees.
They have not heard Bettina’s sob unfurl at midnight.

Salt flails, trying to attract the eager evidence of trees.
The fish wouldn’t miss the crease in its wisdom
though it’s fashionable now to spray doubts by day.
While we serve at the king’s last known displeasure
Bettina arrives in her carriage near midnight
tearing down the forbidden easement to the ocean.

Gravity’s onion is peeled back by the ocean
where Bettina leases the imaginary trees.
Caves of inconsequence fade into midnight
but the placating minions live to nod another day.
Bettina, marine dwellers urge their displeasure
upon the rocks of your woeful whim of wisdom.

We stand upon the waters of wobbling wisdom
only to screech the measure for measure of day.
Bettina clutches yearnings in the curl of the trees.

Selena Sestina

Her version leapt upon the region singing
while the students in the planetarium wept.
There is no legion crawling here at the last
to rescue my misgivings from my fate.
Her elbows grazed the fortunate heart
and solved the noose around my fantasy.

No one's window reaches first to last
or conjures long rows of sanctioned fantasy.
If all the average ruins in the city wept
they would twist the noose around my heart.
Regard this tangent whirling toward your fate
which I unleash with quiet singing.

Her wrist caught the light that her skin wept
upon the fleece of graduated fate.
Did the flaring diadem dim panicked fantasy
or does the stream of pleading last
beyond the grip of minor fishes singing
along the edge of her porous heart?

The loss of affable reason took to heart
the grievance of the random singing,
but she could not help but cough at fate
for blaring out the most envious fantasy
as morning planted streams that wept
to catch the sunlight free at last.

There is no cure for the grip of fantasy
that grabs and tears at my vagrant heart
with grinning fatal noose of singing
of her eyes closing upon the tone that wept
as I pound red-headed leather on the last
and throw myself back on the future of our fate.

What song has tied the noose around my fate
and kept this famished memory for last?
Not even mine, but stretched across the heart
of generations, foreign stanzas singing
beyond the reach of fables or learned fantasy.
Did you hear the antic pilot deny he wept?

Her version's shaking changing phases fate
as it phases me, lost in the breath after breath of singing,
not yet choked by the noose that time has wept.

This dream will not be televised

Monumental grass,
placecards of wonder--

retreat in the vacuum of snow
retreat in the flavor of night
retreat in the style of shining
retreat in the stillness
of sudden sound

I'm telling you she loves verbs!
She knows three adjectives!
She's so great the elevator
can't stop at her floor
only her ceiling

it's the leaking mist on the brick
glow, where the monumental grass
smiles, the circulation of living glass
hair of the mother, father,
lover, child, cat, enigma

we will flood the baskets of crust,
the murmurs of autumn
the whirling muscles of night

register now for the
pale undershirt of dawn
greet the new flame
with spangles of innocence

leave the ache behind in
your other throat

no promise too viral
no stone too placid
no finger too hidden
no better dampness anywhere

one more word
come on one
more word just
another

I am the last of my kind
who rode a trolley
who swore with real wool
and paint, who watched the lantern
swaw until the chant began.

No one can see what I
have seen as if they care
as if the light smacking the air
spinning your mirror
were made of rooftops

and a questioning stare
that never leaves
and never returns
and is never there
but is always present
above and behind

the heaped bows
of the performing ships
honking their way into history
of your heart, of your
earnest nouns

and the feathers drip
with inky blood
while feral adventurers
sand the hull, mumbling
in neon. Hammers
bathe the dazed lobby
with scarred nerves.
If no one sleeps, whose
dream can this be?

Victory

We have seen your visions of platonic sluts
gurgling in the backwash of victory.
Stables of ermine corrugated peaceniks
verging on plumes, nailed to freezing
clear rain. The evidence is
formulaic. Worship from urgency
sells books and flares blood
but reality frags its irritants, bulging
with flu-like symptoms.

I think the reason for this is
evident. It creeps through
the version of fatality you
urge on the unrequited.

Idiotic flame-throwers on sale
and belabored grills flopping
on the shore. There was
no prison so clocked
as your agenda for the banished fame
of our weary and sincere.

Now that you eat wet forms of
tribulation and spit out the former
fuming reliance on fortune,
yes, you can exact the pallor of your
resentments and call them deep
sparkles of destiny but

the clinging clanging dancing plate
inside the wobbly body
flips through the glare with its
own long yawn
regardless. Regard
is for us. This is
where you truly fail.

12/04

hastening, the obligations

hastening, the obligations
furl, furrow the pinky
of fair Minerva, bathed
in fright. Edge

of leers, pounding
smooth with repeating

the bones of her hand
fit in your hand

near now, the burping drip
and corona of fuzz,
as she returns in her abrupt
pale orbit, humbly
awaiting worship.

Slipping the mousetrap
of identity, reedy
wind, you remember
the ocean. The ocean!
Just in time.
She can't get you now.

near normal


oh let the candle
handle the last
details

your knees will lock
as you don doublet
and whistle---

each bleak step ferments
the reminder,
eggs
on the rivals to your

green flame,
bundled
like so many back aches
in tribute to fur,

we walked,
arched
by penniless softwoods
unable to buy their freedom.

Black waves cut
knotted fingerprints,
leaving
our normal amazement.

1/05

Until Leaves

I see the gripes coming like silver whistles
Battling the flickering mist
Gene pools of aggravations, placards
Of grand flame
Until leaves planet the floor of nothing.

We cry like gulls on tragic garbage piles
Irritants to the sky and wheels
Subservient to tears unshed
With raised fists of mourning
And grief in the shadowed step
Towards glass.

9-00

the journalist's lament

musing is amusing,
punctuated by regular
practices: meals, walks,
more rigorous exercise.
But writing is all momentum
flailing into the unforgiving
changing the destination
by the path I hack,
the streams I follow,
the peaks I glimpse.
All habit becomes a stutter
of impulse and the necessity
to sit in front of it and do it.
The rhythm now is measured backwards
from the infanticide of deadline.
So meals lose their borders,
exercise is only exorcism
and the desk feeds needs
into the motherless maw
of words and their prison:
sentences.

The story

I am worried about the tomatoes.
Crisis licks his master's face.
Greed stoned wind
hollows her smile.
No memory

ensues. It's one
pitch after another.
The frozen trance.

The long day groans
flares of stubbornness.

The night seeds.

10/03

Of No Consequence

Usually the night fastens
onto my nerves, ushers me
into the whispers of waking dreams.
But not tonight.
My heart sinks in the acid
of wide awake despair.

The silence clicks like a clock.
Numbers and letters swirl
then stare in sharp final salute,
etched in joy, laughing
at the murderous irony.
My legs won't bear my weight
yet I am light, a thistly seed
blown by the wind
into the sea.
I am embarrassed
to still be alive.

9-01-03

Pittsburgh 1988

Pittsburgh, where your ancient anchormen are proud
of believing that nothing is new
Pittsburgh is working out your erotic life
while your parents are in the next room debating
how much to put in the collection basket
this Sunday while watching transsexuals solemnly
talk on Sally Jessie Raphael

Pittsburgh is a computerized scalpel wreathed
in the smoke of a million cigarettes

Pittsburgh even your rush hours are inferior,
people walk farther to catch a bus in New York
than some of your buses run between stops

Pittsburgh, that never met a quarterback it didn't hate
Pittsburgh, younger than springtime and older
than Miami Beach
Pittsburgh is the accountant who spills his soul
to the knarled waitress at the Gateway lunch counter
and when his wife asks him what's new
he says nothing

Pittsburgh where your artists look forward
to your stunned silence as a sign of approval
Pittsburgh where the worst curse is, "That's differnt."

Pittsburgh with the loudest voices and the least to say
Pittsburgh the last city in the civilized world
where the biggest drug problem is your young addicted
to chewing tobacco

Pittsburgh so sure you're no good
that you can't let anyone criticize you
Pittsburgh your dumb people are proud of it
and your smart people are paralyzed with their
feelings of inferiority
Pittsburgh where intelligence
is the sin of pride
and self-pity
is the pride of the city

Pittsburgh is the beauty of the Iron and Glass
Bank building on Carson Street, still standing
because there was no reason to
tear it down
Pittsburgh is staggering out of a neighborhood bar
and seeing the downtown skyline above
the roof of the five and ten
Pittsburgh is the beauty of the hills, savage
and soft, that nobody knows how
to talk about

Pittsburgh too honest to lie to job interviewers
like you're supposed to
Pittsburgh you didn't want your children
to study art and now your mills
are going to be museums, detached
aesthetics of a lost civilization
and its unconscious beauty

Pittsburgh with not enough middle class blacks
to support an NBA franchise
Pittsburgh no longer worth being on the hit list
for Russian missiles, so even after the apocalypse
you will still be the most livable city

Pittsburgh do you have kids just so you can
scream at them,
recapitulating your own denied pain
and killing them loudly
with your ugly song

Pittsburgh, afraid of your feelings and
justifiably so
Pittsburgh, is there light
at the end of your tunnels?
Pittsburgh, what's that signpost up ahead?
Pittsburgh, hiding from time in your shopping malls
Pittsburgh is the deer hunter who shoots
a drunken driver when he mistakes a Subaru
for a five point buck
Pittsburgh your innocence is infuriating
and the reason we need you
Pittsburgh where masculinity means
you have to hate cats
Pittsbugh your women spend thousands of dollars
on clothes and cosmetics, hairstyling and jewelry,
then blow the whole effect
with a nickel piece of chewing gum

Pittsburgh we are all frightened and so
we are all you
Pittsburgh so confused now but that's all right
-you were not so wonderful as you thought you were

Pittsburgh, peaceful city, human city, let's build
on the basics
instead of just going back to them
Pittsburgh is a Lifeflite helicopter to a hospital
which will refuse to treat you because you have no insurance
Pittsburgh, world center for ugly white people, how long
has this convention been going on?
Pittsburgh is umbrellas with long fingernails,
and buffalo with wings
Pittsburgh, born under the sign of
If You're So Smart How Come
You Ain't Rich?
Pittsburgh slow to change,
but slow to turn on you.

devotions

The knot of attention is undone
by rampant sleeplessness
The curve of intent is fiddled
with, gone loopy, swooping
colors bounding and
bouncing off the sidewalk.
the chatter no longer crisp
as a self-evident smile
but dolloped in crustaceous wisps
knocking against my sidewalk table.

When does the beauty start, I wonder.
Can't waste this sunny afternoon
stolen from the IRS and other
landlords of my life. When does this day
get designed? can't we have
a deco border, a nouveau curlicue
edging through the high haze
and bus noise?

Just these radio station t-shirts,
old folks ambling in canary
and fuchsia sports coordinates,
junior high girls tanning
their winter white knees,
Doctors with their ties,
nurses with their grievances.

Shoe Inn, Foto Hut, Drawers,
Elegant Styles, Footers.
Babies dripping ice cream, cars
coughing poison, birds
on the captive trees.

At last a florescent green drink
bubbling on another table.
But it's not enough.
This day refuses to be defined
beyond the worn ordinariness,
the haze floating between the sun
and the leggy sidewalk,
the concrete amnesia.

1993

sovereigns

The wobble of time
as it speeds woefully
unaware of disappearing

into nightloads of dreams
the heavy lifting of sleep
and the squeaks of inconsequence
under the sun

I discover
a sovereign patience
saddle and bridle
on the flourishing porch

liquid invisible
as the pale colors flow
together, the sovereign fragrance
blankets
what I leave behind.

4/16/03

Notes

a good deal of comedy in the slide trombone's
transit through dense armpits of light
gradient stars, flashing like lemons
chortling down the steep cobblestone streets
of all seven volcanic hills

we left the church together.
you had no panic in your eyes-
I wondered why, but dismissed my doubts
and accompanied you for your year of shopping.

That was our first/last tour of Europe
strained as violin strings over pizza-like smiles,
we flew on boats, on beds, on planes
learning no new languages yet.
I bought a hat.

Now, seven years after
our last/first tour of Europe
I remember your grin
and your hungers.
what a greedy girl you were

and what a guilty boy was I
to have loved that moment
away from you and your amateur friends
bathed in the dream of my twilight
outside the restaurant, musical re-enactment
of a perfect cliché, brass echoing heroic light
of dusk, woman
with accordion,
not my heart,
a musical instrument.

12/1988

I dreamt that on the day I was to die
I was in South America,
passing a new subway kiosk,
where an agent of the government,
known to rule by fear and terror,
but trying to attract tourists
claimed patrons could get a trolley
all the way to New York City.

I strode by bravely, wearing a new white hat
but carrying its brim. I stopped
at an expensive and sinister café
and stood in line for chocolate
and Don Pedro brandy
but in the end did not buy.

On the sundrenched steps of the bookstore
next door, I read the house copy of Lorca.
The steps were crowded with men.
I was laughing as I read.
An old man, the owner, sat next to me.
Don't I know you? he asked.
I don't think so, I said. I was only here
a few times, many years ago when I was young
and thought I was a poet.
Were you? he asked.
No, I said. I was just a boy
undone by words.

6/25/03

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)

moral clarity

warm sun, an unseen woman hums
the green plaza enacts the arcane
word: mellow

streets in America are reduced to thoughts
ears are pinned back like samovars
reefed moments oblige us to cringe
we’ve eaten all the candy
dust is settling

every summer the explosions come back
alighting on the forked spasm of foam
the rhythm of the silence waits
for this purple storm to pass
will that be us, or just our worst invention:
the idea of kings.

6/10/03

Before the Tree

When talent breaks its last rewarded string
and grace released its furtive song
all the bells in tandem then will ring
and sandwiches revive us.
Onward, moth of ages!
ordinary plates
relinquish vertiginous portals
for the leaf is not to be
and the dream is on its knee
before the tree.

Here in the garden of undeclared saints
there are limits on the brooks you can withdraw.
As fast as reason eats the valley's sun,
our day is done.
The garden smells of paint.
No windows grow upon the thorny fruit
and shoots of lemon colored uniforms
drape over arbors of lost rumors.
There is no edge to it.
We hear voices when there's no one there.

Head crowned with solitude
seeing far, roots far below
entangled with the huddled distant others,
nourishing the accidental and unseen.
Who knows if your heart is joyous or bitter
or your gaze more intent than rambled
flooded inward or released to be born
of colored air?
We hear only a rhythmic converse
with the teeming wind.

When windows creep upon the failed fedora
and angels black the weary Diaspora
the fantasies collide us.
Inward, sudden thunder's beacon
cavity of mire
unleash the fluted planet
for the best is not to be
the irredentist forest flees
before the tree.

[irredentist: one who advocates the recovery of territory culturally or historically related to one's nation but now subject to a foreign govt. From Italian for "unredeemed".]

Oct/Nov 1998

tasked

your task eludes your grasp
and your return is uncalled for
your failures nip your heels
climb on your back, you think
no one can see them riding
but somehow they do.

easy as the imagination finds
you lose
and the grasp cannot connect
with the tempest in your shoes

this least of all is true
that the renewal is uncalled for
no, the grasp is meant to be
the first reason you try
to complete the evidence of the street

1998

Greetings
Instability is a crushing boor
except on certain Sundays
when the feet of nations walk blindly
in the mire of consequence, why
are we surprised when those supposed
entities, parties, forces, all the choirs
of power persist in doing what they know
we know is destroying them--it's the urchin
revolt writ large, bannered across the sky
o'er the squalling pit of composure.

I send you greetings, earthlings,
pitiable creatures who cannot even see
into the infrared or ultraviolet,
who no longer sense your own planet's
meridians of forces, who are blind at night
and cannot connect your inner worlds
with your perceptions of the outers.
You wonder that I speak English--we
have been monitoring your Star Trek--imagine
our surprise to find many alien languages
whispered in dark barrooms at the edges
of jungles and slums. We are still puzzled
by what you mumble about in churches
and the braying of your electronics hurts
our 33 1/3 ears. Nonetheless
the concubines of conscience inhibit
the pleadings of the grass.

We now return control of your set
game match, your conjunctions and
disturbances, your permutations and
inconveniences, to you,
who did not miss them.
This is what we wanted to know.
We will have no further contact
with your gray minds, your buzzing
fingers, dead skin.
Please arrange for our souvenir parkas,
Renoirs, partitas, late quartets
and ball point pens to be sent
to this address. Didn't you know
that you are a living time capsule
buried in this abandoned neighborhood?
Turn on your TV, and
think about it.

1/30/99