George Starbuck The Works, Poems Selected from Five Decades

poems selected fr

om ﬁve decades

GEORGE STARBUCK

HE WO

T H E W O R K S

foreword by ANTHONY HECHT

edited by KATHRYN STARBUCK AND ELIZABETH MEESE

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS • TUSCALOOSA

poems selected from ﬁve decades

GEORGE STARBUCK

E WO

Copyright © 2003
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn
Typeface: Courier and Syntax

∞
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Starbuck, George, 1931–1996

[Selections. 2003]
The works : poems selected from ﬁve decades / George Starbuck ; foreword

by Anthony Hecht ; edited by Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8173-1378-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8173-5053-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Starbuck, Kathryn, 1939– II. Meese, Elizabeth A., 1943– III. Title.

PS3569.T3356A6 2003
811'.54—dc21

2003008342

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful for permission to reprint from Yale University Press and
Pym-Randall Press.

In the course of our work, we received generous assistance from many people.
We especially wish to thank the staff of The University of Alabama Press for
their patience and perseverance, Braden Phillips-Welborn for her untiring indus-
try, and Sandy Huss for her graphic ingenuity that made it possible for the pro-
ject to go forward.

K.S. and E.M.

ALSO BY GEORGE STARBUCK

Bone Thoughts

1960

White Paper

1966

Elegy in a Country Church Yard

1975

Desperate Measures

1978

Talkin’ B. A. Blues

1980

The Argot Merchant Disaster

1982

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second

1986

Space Saver Sonnets

1986

Visible Ink

2002

C O N T E N T S

Foreword
Anthony Hecht

xiii

PA R T O N E
Poems from the 1950s to the 1970s

selections from Bone Thoughts, White Paper, and Desperate Measures

Bone Thoughts on a Dry Day

New Strain

Fable for Blackboard

Technologies

Communication to the City Fathers of Boston

A Tapestry for Bayeux

1958: Poems from a First Year in Boston

Named Individual

On First Looking in on Blodgett’s Keats’s “Chapman’s

Homer”

(Summer.

credit. Monday 9–11)

Ghosts of the Missionaries

Cold-War Bulletin from the Cultural Front

War Story

Of Late

For an American Burial

From Baudelaire: Le Rebelle

Making It

Translations from the English

Late Late

Elegy for an Industrial Domestic Object

Out in the Cold

The Well-Trained English Critic Surveys the

American Scene

Sonnet on the Recognition of China

Dear Fellow Teacher

Poem Issued by Me to Congressmen . . .

Tuolomne

High Renaissance

Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line

The Passion of G. Gordon Giddy

Said (“Agatha Christie”)

Said (“J. Alfred Prufrock”)

Working Habits

On the Antiquity of Warfare

Said (“Dame Edith Evans”)

Said (“J. Edgar Hoover”)

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle.

Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there
are no rhymes)”

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle.

Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which
there are no rhymes)” Part Two

Verses to Exhaust My Stock of Four-Letter Words

Falling Asleep Over Scott

Desperate Measures

The Visit

PA R T T W O
Shapes from the 1970s to the 1990s

Three Crosses on Three Pages

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second

Space-Saver Sonnets

The Game of Giza

102

SLABS for George Herbert

103

Eliot Runs On

104

Up to Here with the Pied Pipers of Gotham

105

Poem to be Typed on a Donor Card

106

Spin Control

107

Nineteenﬁfties Vogue Rorshach

108

Magniﬁcat. Brave Cat at Snifter Fishbowl.

109

Quatrain for Kathy

110

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

112

Films Trip Comicstrip Column Vs. Krazy Kael

113

Cargo Cult of the Solstice at Hadrian’s Wall

(December 1988)

116

Elegy in a Country Church Yard

118

PA R T T H R E E
Poems from the 1980s to the 1990s

selections from Talkin’ B. A. Blues, The Argot Merchant Disaster and

Visible Ink

Three Chapters From Talkin’ B. A. Blues

1 This is the Place All Right

141

2 Grand March

142

7 Honorary Doctorate of Laws

144

Commencement Address

148

Magniﬁcat in Transit from the Toledo Airport

149

Sign

154

Incident of the Blizzard of ’81

155

On Gozzoli’s Painted Room in the Medici Palace

157

The Spell Against Spelling

159

The Great Dam Disaster a Ballad

162

The Universe is Closed and Has REMs

165

The Staunch Maid and the Extraterrestrial Trekkie

172

Sunday Brunch in the Boston Restoration

176

On an Urban Battleﬁeld

179

S.D.I.

180

To a Real Standup Piece of Painted Crockery

181

The Enchanted Glade

182

Amazing Gracious Living on I-93

187

Errand at the Lone Tree Mall

189

Reading the Facts About Frost in The Norton Anthology

195

Gastarbeiter

196

Like Dotted Swiss (From a Book of Unretouched

Photographs of the Patternedness of Things)

197

Catalogue Raisonné of My Refrigerator Door

198

Washington International

200

Pleasures of the Voyageurs

201

About the Author

203

F O R E W O R D

Anthony Hecht

As I have with each successive publication of a book of

poems by George Starbuck throughout his long career, I come
to this posthumous collection with serene and justiﬁed con-
ﬁdence in ﬁnding enormous pleasure, astonishment, admira-
tion, and genuine satisfaction. The Works: Poems Selected from
Five Decades,

is a generous sampling of a profound poetic lega-

cy, one for which readers ought to be deeply grateful. Starbuck,
unquestionably one of the most brilliant poets of his day, is
unmatched in technical bravura, powerful in his expression of
indignation at the daily atrocities of our time, immensely witty,
and often simply dazzling.

Together, these poems highlight and enrich Starbuck’s life’s

work, stunning this reader with the technical agility that always
has been his, but that here rises to something more than
ﬁreworks. This collection is the work of a man who has no equal
for his own brand of virtuosity; a Starbuck poem has about it a
quality as identiﬁable, as unique, as singular, as any of the major
modern poets.

Starbuck once said of his path in making poems: “For me,

the long way round, through formalisms, word-games, outra-
geous conceits (the worst of what we mean by ‘wit’) is the only
road to truth. No other road takes me. Put another way: I have

a conscious slavery to the language. The only alternatives are
unconscious slavery, or the sainthood of the wholly silent.”

And his is not a display of wit or intelligence for its own sake,

though the intelligence is always there. The poems exhibit a
style of mind

that is supremely alert to all the inﬂections of ver-

nacular parlance, regional speech, and idiomatic and demotic
melting-pot American. They are richly embellished with learned
allusions to literary sources, popular culture, topical events, and
the shopping-mall-collage of impressions, details, and ideas that
assail our consciousness at every point of our existence. His
effortless technique in such forms as the ballade, the clerihew,
and the double-dactyl, and in the form he called Standard
Length and Breadth Sonnets, or SLABS for short, astounds. His
general cheerfulness and lively intelligence give us a poet to be
read and remembered.

Moreover, Starbuck has always been a poet engaged: as

riotous and as witty as many of his poems are, they are equally
devastating in the frank and frightening highlights they throw
on contemporary cultural, personal, and political life. At their
most powerful, his poems do both at once—entertain and
appall with their honesty. His poem “Of Late,” is not merely the
best “protest poem” about the Vietnam War that I know—it is
the only one of any merit whatever.

In this collection, the editors have assembled a rich display of

Starbuck’s versatility including “A Tapestry for Bayeux,” a poem
about intricate naval operations during World War II. Com-
posed, dauntingly, in dactylic monometer (three syllables to a
line, with the accent always on the ﬁrst), the poem consists of a
dozen 13-line stanzas. It has a needlework complexity even at
ﬁrst or second reading. The poem slyly reveals an acrostic, with
the initial letters of the ﬁrst 78 of its 156 lines spelling out a
playfully scatological sentence about the anthologist Oscar
Williams—the editor who had included the poem in one of his
anthologies. The Works also features a remarkable double-
dactylic poem 124 lines long. Starbuck’s slim volume, Essential
Shakespeare,

is here represented in “Richard the Third in a

xiv

Fourth of a Second” and “Space Saver Sonnets.” The editors
also include three chapters from his comedy-in-verse Talkin’ B.
A. Blues,

as well as the entirety of his 65-inch wide landscape

poem, (presented here in single-page form) Elegy in a Country
Church Yard

which, when originally published, surely made the

French Ouliepian masters, who like Starbuck were trained in
mathematics, quiver.

Almost everywhere today, courses in verse writing are

offered at the leading universities and colleges. Sometimes even
at high schools. Many teachers ﬁnd it useful to set before their
students the challenge of a superior example to imitate. Such
formal exercises are not concerned with the expression of deep
feeling, but the journeyman mastery of Czerny ﬁngerwork. Not
only is this good discipline in its own right, but it richly develops
student respect for the abilities of their betters, and thereby
encourages emulation. George Starbuck’s work is of this peda-
gogically useful sort, and there are not as many in the world as
one might hope.

Here is the kind of poet from whom virtually anyone can

learn a lot, while having a lot of fun and acquiring great respect
for verbal wizardry and richness of mental life.

The gifted young English poet Glyn Maxwell wrote a

thoughtful assessment of Starbuck’s career as a poet that
appears in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry
(edited by Ian Hamilton). Maxwell writes, “He is equipped . . .
with a veritable arsenal of strategies against the darkness, and
the very qualities that make his work seem at ﬁrst willfully
odd—ceaseless formal exploration, Byronic ingenuity of rhyme,
and playful linguistic whimsy—proclaim his strength and sanity,
while at the same time dramatizing the idiocy of what he
opposes. . . . That he has continued . . . to experiment at the
edges of formal possibility, while delighting in America’s absurd,
demonstrates his intelligence about what truly constitutes poet-
ic ‘seriousness’: knowledge of the powers and limits of words
themselves, and awareness that to don a joker’s mask is merely
one of the oldest and swiftest ways into the palace.”

T H E W O R K S

poems from the 1950s to the 1970s

PA R T O N E

BONE THOUGHTS ON A DRY DAY

Walking to the museum
over the Outer Drive,
I think, before I see them
dead, of the bones alive.

I think of how the snake smoothed over the fact,
but hung sharp beads around its charmer’s neck.

The jawbone of my cat.
So easily held shut.
Breakable as ice.

Mice.

The mouse of course is a berry, his bones mere seeds.
Step on him once and see.

You mustn’t think that the ﬁsh
choke on those bones, or that chickens wish.

Chickens
pedaling like the dickens,
getting away on a ﬁve-man tandem bike,
unlike
that legless headstrong showoff on crutches, the ostrich.

Only the skull of a man makes much of an ashtray.

Whereas the wise old bat
dumps his bones in a bag

and hangs it on a hook,

the elephant says look
how I can put
this on top of that.

Here’s a conundrum.
Tug of a toe, blunt-bowed barge of a thighbone,
gondola-squadron of ribs, and the jaw scow.

Carried along somehow,
keeping our eyes peeled
for what we were just yesterday,
we surge into the Field
Museum of Natural History
with busloads full of kids.

Whole-hog hominids.

NEW STRAIN

You should see these musical mice.

When we start the device

they rise on their haunches and sniff

the air as if

they remembered all about dancing.

Soon they are chancing

a step or two, and a turn.

How quickly they learn

the rest, and with leaps and spins

master the ins

and outs of it, round and round

and round. We found

the loudest music best

and now we test

with a kind of electric bell

which works as well.

In two to two-and-a-quarter

minutes, a shorter

rhythm captures the front

legs, and they stunt

in somersaults until

they become still

and seem to have lost their breath.

But the sign of death

is later: the ears, which have been

ﬂat, like a skin

skullcap, relax and ﬂare

as if the air

might hold some further thing

for the listening.

FABLE FOR BLACKBOARD

Here is the grackle, people.
Here is the fox, folks.
The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox

hopes.

Here are the fronds, friends,
that cover the fox.
The fronds get in a frenzy. The grackle

looks.

Here are the ticks, tykes,
that live in the leaves, loves.
The fox is confounded,
and God is above.

TECHNOLOGIES

On Commonwealth, on Marlborough,
the gull beaks of magnolia
were straining upward like the ﬂocks
harnessed by kings in storybooks
who lusted for the moon. Six days
we mooned into each other’s eyes
mythologies of dune and dawn.

They do the trick with rockets now.
With methodologies of steel.
With industry or not at all.
What does it come to? Ask the trees
carrying out their lunacies
for all they are, for all they know
on Commonwealth, on Marlborough.

COMMUNICATION TO THE CITY FATHERS
OF BOSTON

Dear Sirs: Is it not time we formed a Boston
Committee to Enact a Dirge for Boston?

When the twelve-minute countdown comes, when Boston’s
people convened in unaccustomed basements
feel on their necks the spiderwebs of bombsights,
when subway stations clot and ﬁll like beesnests
making a honey-heavy moan, whose business
will it be then to mourn, to take a busman’s
holiday from his death, to weep for Boston’s?

Though dust is scattered to her bones, though grieving
thunderheads add hot tears, though copper grapevines
clickety-clack their telegraphic ragtime
tongues at the pity of it, how in God’s name
will Boston in the thick of Armageddon
summon composure to compose a grave-song
grand and austere enough for such a grieving?

Move we commit some song, now, to the

HOLD

ﬁles

of papers in exotic places. Helpful
of course to cram some young ones with hogs’ headfuls
of Lowells, khaki-cap them, ship them wholesale
out. There’s a chance, in one of them the hairsbreadth
imminence of the thing may speak. But Hell’s ﬁre,
what’ll they have on us in all those

HOLD

ﬁles?

You want some rewrite man to wrap up Boston
like garbage in old newsprint for the dustbin?
The Statehouse men convivial at Blinstrub’s,
the textile men, the men of subtler substance

squiring Ledaean daughters to the swan-boats,
the dockers, truckers, teenage hotrod-bandits—
what could he make of them, to make them Boston?

Or even make of me, perched in these Park Street
ofﬁces playing Jonah like an upstart
pipsqueak in raven’s clothing—First Mate Starbuck
who thinks too much? Thinking of kids in bookstores
digging for dirty footnotes to their Shakespeares,
while by my window the Archbishop’s upstairs
loudspeaker booms redemption over Park Street.

Thinking of up the hill the gilded Statehouse
where just last night the plaster-of-paris faces
of Sacco and Vanzetti craned on ﬂannel
arms at the conscientiously empaneled
pain of a state’s relentlessly belated
questioning of itself. (Last year the Salem
Witches; next year, if next year ﬁnds a Statehouse . . . ?)

Thinking of Thor, Zeus, Atlas. Thinking Boston.
Thinking there must be words her weathered brownstone
could still re-whisper—words to blast the brassbound
brandishers on their pads—words John Jay Chapman
scored on her singlehanded—words Sam Adams,
Garrison, Mott, Thoreau blazed in this has-been
Braintree-Jamaica-Concord-Cambridge-Boston.

There were such men. Or why remember Boston?
All of them dead of course. Or else old Boston
wouldn’t be acting like a perfect Boston,
counting its thumbs and counting up the Boston
dividend-factors in this made-in-Boston
guidance-umbrella heisted over Boston
leaking the gods’ own laughter in on Boston

while the apprentice ironists of Boston
target the obvious. But then that’s Boston.

A TAPESTRY FOR BAYEUX

I Recto

Over the

seaworthy

cavalry

arches a

rocketry

wickerwork:

involute

laceries

lacerate

indigo

altitudes,

making a

skywritten

ﬁligree

into which,

lazily,

LCTs

sinuate,

adjutants

next to them

eversharp-

eyed, among

delicate

battleship

umbrages

twinkling an

anger as

measured as

organdy.

Normandy

knitted the

eyelets and

yarn of these

warriors’

armoring—

ringbolt and

dungaree,

cable and

axletree,

tanktrack and

ammobelt

linking and

opening

garlands and

islands of

seafoam and

sergeantry.

Opulent

fretwork: on

turquoise and

emerald,

red instants

accenting

neatly a

dearth of red.

Gunstations

issue it;

vaportrails

ease into

smoke from it—

yellow and

ochre and

umber and

sable and

out. Or that

man at the

edge of the

tapestry

holding his

inches of

niggardly

ground and his

trumpery

order of

red and his

equipage

angled and

dated. He.

II Verso

Wasting no

energy,

Time, the old

registrar,

evenly

adds to his

scrolls, rolling

up in them

rampage and

echo and

hush—in each

inﬂux of

surf, in each

tumble of

raincloud at

evening,

action of

seaswell and

undertow

rounding an

introvert

edge to the

surge until,

manhandled

over, all

surfaces,

tapestries,

entities

veer from the

eye like those

rings of lost

yesteryears

pooled in the

oak of your

memory.

Item: one

Normandy

Exercise.

Muscle it

over, an

underside

rises: a

raggedy

elegant

mess of an

abstract: a

rip-out of

kidstuff and

switchboards, where

amputee

radio

elements,

unattached

nerveﬁbre

conduits,

openmouthed

ureters,

tag ends of

hamstring and

outrigging

ripped from their

unions and

nexuses

jumble with

undeterred

speakingtubes

twittering

orders as

random and

angry as

ddt’d

hornets. Step

over a

moment: peer

in through this

nutshell of

eyeball and

man your gun.

1958: POEMS FROM A FIRST YEAR IN BOSTON

1 Hospital Visits. Visits to Beacon Hill.

Boston. Lord God the ocean never to windward,
never the sweet snootful of death a West Coast
wind on its seven-league sea-legs winds its wing-ding
landfalling up by upheaving over you.

Winedark

hunger for some washboard music to this one-way
maze.

Hunger for the stink of kelp winrowed

on beaches. Hunger for the hills, hills somewhere
anchoring the dizzy sky. No wonder
it groans, groans. It’s the wind’s own girl I waylaid
through deserts who sours here, a sick wife.

With land-wind.

Nothing but land-wind hot with steel, but lint-white
bundles of daily breath hung out over textile
towns, but the sweat sucked from mines, white smokestacks
soaring from hospital workyards over grassplots
of pottering dotards. Take it, the dead wind whispers,
crouch to its weight: three thousand miles, three hundreds-
of-years of life rolled up in a wind, rolled backwards
onto this city’s back, Jonathan Edwards.

Funny old crank of social history lectures,
ﬁrm believer in hell and witches, who knows whether
you of all witnesses wouldn’t watch this wayward
city with most love?

And the busy winter

bustle of steam and batting. And the white-wound
handiwork of the nurses, the spattered internes
sober as bloody judges, culling the downtown
haul of the mercy ﬂeet, while rearing and sounding

through panicked trafﬁc the sacred scows come horns-down
heaping the hecatomb. The pretty hundreds
of bells nod off to sleep like practiced husbands
propped in high corners of their lady Boston’s
white-laid and darkened room.

And yachtsmen, footloose

legatees ﬁtting reefers into faultless
features with febrile wrists, protest: some leftist
restlessness threatens them in brittle leaﬂets;
some angry boy, some undiscovered artist
has put soot whiskers on their public statues.
They wring their strange left hands that every-whichways
scatter the khakied corpses onto elsewhere’s
turbulent waters to save oil. Peer westward
plotting the last-ditch sally of The West.
Peer from the Free World’s keep.

Old pioneer,

Jonathan Edwards, did you stop off here
where marsh-birds skittered, and a longboat put
its weed-grown bones to pasture at the foot
of Beacon, close on Charles Street? And see then,
already sick with glut, this hill of men?
And even there, see God? And in this marsh,
and in the wood beyond, grace of a harsh
God? And in these crabbed streets, unto the mid-
mire of them, God? Old Soul, you said you did.

2 Jack Spicer Says There Is No Witchcraft in Boston

What’s with the shrub rubbish? I’d say it’s witchcraft.
Brats in the belfries, catboats in the outskirts,
junk maples at the dump sites waving kerchiefs,
something there is, it sure ain’t Spring yet, itches
to kick this customary blacktop dragster
into a new gear. In a quick-march mischief

her prim white picture-postcard patchwork
slithers on down the Charles. The crisscrossed Mystic
twitches in snazzy sequins though the calls
of her small tugs entice no geese. All’s
up; all’s on us; a life raft wakens the waters
of Walden like a butt-slap.

And yet she loiters.

Where’s for-keeps while the lark in winter quarters
lolls? What’s to solace Scollay’s hashhouse ﬂoaters
and sing them to their dolls? and yet—

strange musics,

migrant melodies of exotic ozarks,
twitter and throb where the bubble-throated jukebox
lurks iridescent by these lurid newsracks.
Browser leaﬁng here, withhold your wisecracks:
tonight, in public, straight from overseas,
her garish chiaroscuro turned to please
you and her other newsstand devotees,
the quarter-lit Diana takes her ease.

So watch your pockets, cats, hang on to your hearts,
for when you’ve drunk her glitter till it hurts—
Curtain.

Winds frisk you to the bone.

Full-feasted

Spring, like an ill bird, settles to the masthead
of here and there an elm. The streets are misted.
A Boston rain, archaic and monastic,
cobbles the blacktop waters, brings mosaic
to dusty windshields; to the waking, music.

3 Surfeit and Hot Sleep

Heavy on branch, on tight green knuckles heaves
the Spring. Cumulus, thick as broodhens, thieves

green from the earthy bark like worms, like leaves,
like dollars from up sleeves.

Outbreak of billfolds,

bellbottoms, burleycue babes. Musical billboards

join the parade. And deep in bars the railbirds

listen: “They selling something?” “Can’t tell, trafﬁc.”
On corners cats bounce once or twice: “Hey frantic.”
“Yeah.” and they stop. Flared forward like an intake
the lips lurch on. DISASTER OUTLET, NATICK
BEHEMOTH BARGAINS MONSTER DEALS TITANIC
the soundtruck reads; but what it says is “Mine.
You’re my obsession. No I can’t resign
possession. I’m confessin’ that you’re mine
mine mine mine mine click.” Da Capo. Move on.

Slowly the moon, that shifty chaperone,
performs her preconcerted wink. Green, green
upon green, hips the store windows—I mean
it’s summer now, that lolloping large mother,
comes puttering about some spell or other
among her brats the beasts.

And milky mutter

of pigeons, splash of children, scissoring shadows
weave us asleep as if there were no goddess
other than this of love, as if old Venus,
sprawled on the Common grass, her honeyed wonder’s
hernia’d ruiner snoozing against her shoulder,
had found a better nature with an older.

There’s something still goes on on Beacon’s backstairs,
there’s something gets discovered in the drugstores,
but it’s not hers, not Cupid’s, not the Dog Star’s.
The prank still plays, but it’s a colder jokester’s.

If spring and fall and all, the hapless hustler
does her impersonation of the picture-

palace posture on an Elvis poster,
if spring and fall and all, her helter-skelter
sisters go squealing to the marriage-smelter,
the tin-pan Moon, the Moon’s to blame!

Throngs

follow the bouncing ball and sing along,
singing about the Moon in every song,
singing about the Moonbeam scoobie-doo,
Using the Moon to slouch allegiance to—

A pox!

Powder with stardust. While the bride’s

the broad’s the broodmare’s Moon at a cloud’s side
poses and slowly the light is hers. She glides,
golden, an apple of eyes, and so cold, only
heart at its heaviest can join the lonely
circle in emptiness that is her dance.
Yet she is Love, our Love, that frantic cadence.

Gasp at the ﬂash fadeaway into the dot
that swallows the bright stridency of the sign-off shot.
Shuddering just to think it, think with what
aplomb the proud haunch of the Moon hangs through,
while far back in the dark she truckles to,
stoppling her champagne giggles, what rough crew

NAMED INDIVIDUAL

They hold the committee today.
Today they get to me.
I wasn’t invited. They say
the public gets in free.

The man I have this from
wouldn’t divulge his face.
I heard, in the dead hum
that took his voice’s place,

something I almost hear
in you. (You purse your eyes,
look from ear to ear
and back again.) Surmise

a room, the table set
with ﬁsts, the ﬁsts with sheaves
of evidence as yet
safe in manila sleeves.

Suppose commercials done,
cameras, papers, ﬁsts
set moving, everyone
plunged in light to the wrists.

Say, when those hands aghast,
those thumbs awag with woe,
jig like the naked cast
of a Punch and Judy show,

that pretty comedy
draws millions. Say they gawk

too openmouthed for glee,
too tranquilized for shock.

Say every well-fed gut
unshaken at that jape
eases or freezes shut
one stronghold of escape

and every head that smiles
in torpor or assent
nods me the empty miles
of its imprisonment . . .

But say I came to you,
waiting for you to speak?
Would I be such a jew?
Am I so damned unique?

Surely there are a few—
well—
friends

that I could seek?

ON FIRST LOOKING IN ON BLODGETT’S
KEATS’S “CHAPMAN’S HOMER”

(Summer.

credit. Monday 9–11)

Melliﬂuous as bees, these brittle men
droning of Honeyed Homer give me hives.
I scratch, yawn like a bear, my arm arrives
at yours—oh, Honey, and we’re back again,
me the Balboa, you the Darien,
lording the loud Paciﬁc sands, our lives
as hazarded as when a petrel dives
to yank the dull sea’s coverlet, or when,

breaking from me across the sand that’s rink
and record of our weekend boning up
on The Romantic Agony, you sink
John Keats a good surf-ﬁsher’s cast out—plump
in the sun’s wake—and the parched pages drink
that great whales’ blanket party hump and hump.

GHOSTS OF THE MISSIONARIES

This is a quiet country. Chinamen
caress the ﬁelds with cultivators, groom
the streams with weirs. Mulberry bushes bloom
ultraconservatively. Now and then
the gang of blacks building a bridge say when,
and the weight falls ker-pockk. You can assume
the straw-thatch cottages, the paths. There’s room
to do things in this land, there’s room for men.

And as we walk, the barley ﬁelds comb to
behind us. Caucuses of crows take up
our cries. Gusts from a pasture pond renew
the early-morning vapors we drift through,
while cherry trees annunciate, chirrup,
the unsubstantiating dawn whereto.

COLD-WAR BULLETIN FROM THE
CULTURAL FRONT

The proposed new U.S. Consulate at Algiers will

be an ultra-modern structure . . . described by the

architects as “a feast of great low glass domes.”

We’re building a building
in functional glass
at Algiers in Algeria:
no gargoyles, no gilding,
none of your crass
classic criteria:
one functional mass
of glass—

glass ﬁbre, glass block,
glass fenestration,
with cut-glass tears
on the chandeliers
and pier-glass piers
clear to bedrock
(not far at Algiers)
for foundation.

But if domes of glass
of critical area
tend to let pass
units of mass,
heat, or hysteria,
we can gild with gilding
our functional building
in Algeria:
sun will not pierce

a glare so ﬁerce,
and we’ll station stations
of heads-of-legation
all round the block
with anti-rock rocks
(and anti-jeer jeers)
at Algiers.

WAR STORY

The 4th of July he stormed a nest.
He won a ribbon but lost his chest.
We threw his arms across the rest

And kneed him in the chin.
(You knee them in the chin
To drive the dog-tag in.)

The 5th of July the Chaplain wrote.
It wasn’t much; I needn’t quote.
The widow lay on her davenport

Letting the news sink in.
(Since April she had been
Letting the news sink in.)

The 6th of July the Captain stank.
They had us pinned from either ﬂank.
With all respect to the dead and rank

We wished he was dug in.
(I mean to save your skin
It says to get dug in.)

The word when it came was nine days old.
Lieutenant Jones brought marigolds.
The widow got out the Captain’s Olds

And took him for a spin.
(A faster-than-ever spin:
Down to the Lake, and in.)

OF LATE

“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what

he said was his draft card”

and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned

what he said was himself.

You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was

a concentration

of the Enemy Aggressor.
No news medium troubled to put it in quotes.

And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned

what he said was himself.

He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your

kitchen.

In your ofﬁce you were informed.
Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance

angle.

So far nothing turns up.

Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned,

and while burning, screamed.

No tip-off. No release.
Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes.
Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists.
Pity the press photographers, not called.

Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned

and was burned and said

all that there is to say in that language.
Twice what is said in yours.
It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try
the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.

FOR AN AMERICAN BURIAL

for Doris, for John

Slowly out of the dust-bedeviled air,
and off the passing blades of the gang plow,
and suddenly in state, as here and now,
the earth gathers the earth. The earth is fair;
all that the earth demands is the earth’s share;
all we embrace and revel in and vow
never to lose, always to hold somehow,
we hold of earth, in temporary care.

Baby the sun goes up the sun goes down,
the roads turn into rivers under your wheels,
houses go spinning by, the lights of town
scatter and close, a galaxy unreels,
this endlessness, this readiness to drown,
this is the death he stood off, how it feels.

FROM BAUDELAIRE: LE REBELLE

An angel swoops from his into the fool’s
Paradise, snatches up the sinner and
Shakes him, saying, “You’re gonna know the rules
Or else. I’m your Good Angel, understand?

Get this: you gotta love (no faces, mind you)
The featherbrained, the half-assed, the off-key,
So Jesus when he comes in state will ﬁnd you
Spread like a carpet of sweet charity.

That’s Love, if you want Love: no pat orgasm
Letting you off the hook: it’s pure, it’s hot,
It’s God’s own ﬁre: you burn for all you got!”

Exemplifying his enthusiasm,
He loves the sinner more the more he ﬂays him—
The more, the more he answers, “I cannot!”

MAKING IT

There is nothing at all pretty about death.
One does what one can to make a pretty poem.
One writes, in fact, of death—the grace of the poem
does one the greater credit. Why waste breath
in neoaeolian yodelings for love
of the lark’s rising? Give us the dead bird.
Or if death gets too easy, take my word,
there is nothing all that pretty about love.

(Not that you less than levitate me, Love,
or that your saltiness has lost its savor:
you are the killings I could carol of
if I were someone more than merely clever
who dared own up to his good luck and leave
the Love-and-Death boys to their heavy labor.)

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ENGLISH

for Arthur Freeman

Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes

The heat’s on the hooker.
Drop’s on the lam.
Cops got Booker.
Who give a damn?

The Kid’s been had
But not me yet.
Dad’s in his pad.
No sweat.

Margaret Are You Drug

Cool it Mag.
Sure it’s a drag
With all that green ﬂaked out.
Next thing you know they’ll be changing the color of bread.

But look, Chick,
Why panic?
Sevennyeighty years, we’ll all be dead.

Roll with it, Kid.
I did.
Give it the old beneﬁt of the doubt.

I mean leaves
Schmeaves.
You sure you aint just feeling sorry for yourself?

Lamb

Lamb, what makes you tick?
You got a wind-up, a Battery-Powered,
A ﬂywheel, a plug-in, or what?
You made out of real Reelfur?
You fall out the window you bust?
You shrink? Turn into a No-No?
Zip open and have pups?

I bet you better than that.
I bet you put out by some other outﬁt.
I bet you don’t do nothin.
I bet you somethin to eat.

Daddy Gander’s New Found Runes

Rain, rain, grow the hay.
Grow the weeds another day.
If I die before I wake,
Skip it.

Little Boy Blue come blow.

Can’t Man; learning a new instrument.

What’s with the old one? Where’d you get the new one?

Found it in a haystack Man.

Old Mother Hubbard,
Decently covered,
Went to her ﬁnal reward.

She had to laugh.
Manger was half
Empty and half kennel.

Ol’ Shep. At it
Again. Livin’ on
Principal.

I ﬁred a missile up.
It came down maybe.
Maybe it stayed up.
Things aint much like they used to be.

LATE LATE

Where tomahawks ﬂash in the powwow
and tommyguns deepen the hubbub
and panzers patrol, is the horror
I live without sleep for the love of,

whose A-bombs respond to the tom-tom,
whose halberds react to the ack-ack,
while I, as if slugged with a dumdum,
sit back and sit back and sit back

until the last gunman is drawn on,
last murderous rustler druv loco,
last prisoncamp commandant spat at,
and somehow, and poco a poco,

the bottles are gone from the sixpack,
sensation is gone from the buttocks,
Old Glory dissolves into static,
the box is a box is a box.

ELEGY FOR AN INDUSTRIAL DOMESTIC OBJECT

I
Cradling herself asleep, it is a lady
hugging her knees beneath her, heavy-headed
and heavy-hipped; it is a licorice hassock
she couches on, and she a licorice lady

whose maker, as if to footnote his abstraction
of drowsing womanhead, has carved a clockface
into the hassock side, the counterclockwise
eyes of its ten hours widened to abstraction,

the odd pair closed. The silver hand or paring
at half-past-Z-for-zero cannot orbit
on that gapped zodiac, nor the alarmbell
stop stopping, blaring, stopping, blaring, blaring,

nor she herself, for all the sultriness
and heavy hand-to-hand and thick sweet nothing
of the mad waltz she waltzes dreaming, summon
the Prince’s nor the enamored sculptor’s kiss.

II
Hunchback, head in your chest,
all mouth, all circle of gap teeth,
and those stub arms, like ﬂeshy epaulets,
and no hands and no feet,
can it; you are too many freaks:
you are as crass as forty parakeets
whose only trick is to screech, screech.
Black ganglion, absurd
exaction, half-abortion, turd,
last night I dreamt I dreamed
I yanked you aloft and cut your cord
and slapped you until you screamed.

III
They were afraid I would not like you black.
They were afraid I wanted princesses instead.
Still they connive; they want to take you back
and send me something pastel with pink buttons.
Oh Love, it is not Princesses Instead,
nor Tuesday Welds, nor glittering Barbara Huttons,
on which the soul’s deep appetites are fed.
It is the voice that comforts though it crack,
the known dark shape at night beside my bed.

OUT IN THE COLD

All day today the seagulls cried.
All day they cried, if not because of you,
then not at least because I asked them to.
I’ve got enough poor bastards on my side;
I’m not a Greek, I can be satisﬁed
to share a chorus with the shrill sea mew
without pretending it’s an interview
with souls plucked from the shipwrecked as they died.

I’ve got enough cold company: the guys
you used to tell me how you used to see
before I came along and you got wise.
Where are they now, in what capacity—
those dear, well-meant, unsatisfactory
approximations of the eventual me?

THE WELL-TRAINED ENGLISH CRITIC
SURVEYS THE AMERICAN SCENE

“Poetic theory in America is at present in an extremely

curious state, resembling that of England during the

Barons’ Wars rather than that of a healthy democracy

or well-run autocracy. It is not even a decent civil war . . .”

—T

HOM

UNN

in Yale Review

Sometimes I feel like a fodderless cannon
On one of those midwestern courthouse lawns
Fiercely contested for by boys of ten and
Topped by a brevet general in bronze.

Hallucination, naturally: no
Era without its war, and this has its,
Roundabout somewhere, some imbroglio,
Even if only run by starts and ﬁts.

Limber me up again, somebody.
In with the charges! To the touch-hole! Wham!
Elevate me, ignite me, let one ruddy
Side or the other taste the thing I am!

This pale palaver, this mish-mash of factions:
How can you ﬁnd employment in a war
Of private sorties and guerrilla actions?
Maddening! Maddening! It chokes the bore!

Great God why was I tempered of pure shefﬁeld
Unless to belch and fulminate and reek?
Never in England would I be so stiﬂed.
Name me the nearest caitiff: let me speak!

SONNET ON THE RECOGNITION OF CHINA

for Clark Foreman

Columbus sailed the ocean (misdirected
by a self-styled geographer’s conjecture
of the Earth’s girth) blue, with a crew selected
from the cons, creeps and crums of Palos Prefecture.

Behind him lay the graying recollection
of Isabel. Oh well. If she could hector
Ferdinand into giving him protection,
he guessed the jewel business hadn’t wrecked her.

Before him, as it said in his prospectus,
lay nothing new—at most a more direct
way to the old. And though you can’t expect us
to swallow that about the egg, he checked

a mutiny, found China (a correctable
error), and almost made himself respectable.

DEAR FELLOW TEACHER

I must confess I’m tired of these demonstrations.
Surely there must be better demonstrations
against brute force than brute force demonstrations.
Come now and let us reason together like
the Old Man says. What kind of a demonstration
is

this from academically trained minds?

Is a stalled freight our cogent demonstration?
Is a blocked highway where some unwashed mob
panics at a mere word like “napalm” our
idea of perspicacious demonstration?
Would Aristotle, master of demonstration,
have digniﬁed with the proud name “demonstration”
this massing of dumb bodies under ﬂags?
Would Euclid have admired such demonstration?

What are we after with these demonstrations?
Accommodation? Compromise? Then let
that spirit permeate our demonstrations.
Was it not Secretary Rusk who said
We have already made our demonstration
of readiness to negotiate unquote?
What could be more amenable than that?
And had we not in fact for ﬁve whole days
called off, forsworn, and utterly regrouped
(for that is how we made said demonstration)
our prior and like-minded demonstration
of readiness to negotiate unquote?
Were we discouraged? Did we not resume
what McNamara calls our demonstration

that we shall not be bluffed or made to yield
until, in Bundy’s words, some demonstration
of comparable etcetera unquote?

Lyndon, I’m sick and tired of demonstrations.
There is a demon in these demonstrations.
I’m fed up with the mere word “demonstration.”
Furthermore, I accept your demonstration
that this or that or any demonstration’s
about as much use as a plugged piastre.
Like alibis, like sides of beef on spits,
like children in thatch villages of huts,
if you don’t watch them they get overdone.
That’s the damn thing about these demonstrations.
Let’s everybody go out and stop one.

POEM ISSUED BY ME TO CONGRESSMEN ABBITT
ABERNETHY ADAIR ADDABBO ALBERT ANDERSON
ANDERSON ANDREWS ANDREWS ANDREWS
ANNUNZIO ARENDS ASHBROOK ASHLEY
ASHMORE ASPINALL AYRES BALDWIN BANDSTRA
BARING BARRETT BATES BATTIN BECKWORTH
BELCHER BELL BENNETT BERRY BETTS BINGHAM
BLATNIK BOGGS BOLAND BOLLING BOLTON
BOW BRAY BROCK BROOKS BROOMFIELD
BROWN BROYHILL BROYHILL BUCHANAN BURKE
BURLESON BURTON BURTON BYRNE BYRNES
CABELL CALLAN CALLAWAY CAREY CASEY
CEDERBERG CELLER CHAMBERLAIN CHELF CLANCY
CLARK CLAUSEN CLAWSON CLEVELAND
CLEVENGER COHELAN COLLIER CONTE COOLEY
CORBETT CORMAN CRALEY CRAMER CULVER
CURTIN CURTIS DADDARIO DAGUE DANIELS
DAVIS DAVIS DAWSON DE LA GARZA DELANEY
DENT DENTON DERWINSKI DEVINE DICKINSON
DINGELL DOLE DONOHUE DORN DOW DOWDY
DOWNING DULSKI DUNCAN DUNCAN DWYER
DYAL EDMONDSON EDWARDS EDWARDS
ELLSWORTH ERLENBORN EVANS EVERETT FALLON
FARBSTEIN FARNSLEY FARNUM FASCELL FEIGHAN
FINDLEY FINO FISHER FLOOD FLYNT FOGARTY
FOLEY FORD FORD FOUNTAIN FRASER
FRELINGHUYSEN FRIEDEL FULTON FULTON
FUQUA GALLAGHER GARMATZ GATHINGS GETTYS
GIAIMO GIBBONS GILBERT GILLIGAN GONZALEZ
GOODELL GRABOWSKI GRAY GREEN GREIGG
GRIDER GRIFFIN GRIFFITHS GROSS GROVER

GUBSER GURNEY HAGAN HAGEN HALEY HALL
HALLECK HALPERN HAMILTON HANLEY HANNA
HANSEN HANSEN HANSEN HARDY HARRIS HARSHA
HARVEY HARVEY HATHAWAY HEBERT HECHLER
HELSTOSKI HENDERSON HERLONG HICKS
HOLIFIELD HOLLAND HORTON HOWARD HULL
HUNGATE HUOT HUTCHINSON ICHORD JACOBS
JARMAN JENNINGS JOELSON JOHNSON JOHNSON
JOHNSON JONAS JONES JONES KARSTEN KARTH
KASTENMETER KEE KEITH KELLY KING KIRWAN
KLUCZYNSKI KORNEGAY KREBS KUNKEL LAIRD
LANDRUM LANCEN LATTA LEGGETT LENNON
LIPSCOMB LONG LONG LOVE MACDONALD
MACGREGOR MACHEN MACKAY MACKIE MADDEN
MAHON MAILLIARD MARSH MARTIN MARTIN
MARTIN MATHIAS MATSUNAGA MATTHEWS MAY
MCCLORY MCCULLOCH MCDADE MCDOWELL
MCEWEN MCFALL MCGRATH MCMILLAN
MCVICKER MEEDS MICHEL MILLER MILLS MINISH
MINK MINSHALL MIZE MOELLER MONAGAN
MOORE MOORHEAD MORGAN MORRIS MORSE
MORTON MOSHER MOSS MULTER MURPHY
MURPHY MURRAY NATCHER NEDZI NELSEN NIX
O’BRIEN O’HARA O’HARA O’KONSKI OLSEN
OLSON O’NEAL O’NEILL OTTINGER PASSMAN
PATMAN PATTEN PEPPER PERKINS PHILBIN PICKLE
PIKE POAGE POFF POWELL PRICE PUCINSKI
PURCELL QUIE QUILLEN RACE RANDALL REDLIN
REID REID REIFEL REINECKE RESNICK REUSS
RHODES RHODES RIVERS RIVERS ROBERTS
ROBISON RODINO ROGERS ROGERS ROGERS

RONAN ROONEY ROONEY ROOSEVELT ROSENTHAL
ROSTENKOWSKI ROUDEBUSH ROUSH RUMSFELD
ST. GERMAIN ST. ONGE SATTERFIELD SAYLOR
SCHEUER SCHISLER SCHMIDHAUSER SCHNEEBELI
SCHWEIKER SECREST SELDEN SENNER SHIPLEY
SHRIVER SICKLES SIKES SISK SKUBITZ SLACK
SMITH SMITH SPRINGER STAFFORD STAGGERS
STALBAUM STANTON STEED STEPHENS STRATTON
STUBBLEFIELD SWEENEY TALCOTT TAYLOR
TEAGUE TEAGUE TENZER THOMPSON THOMPSON
THOMSON TODD TRIMBLE TUNNEY TUTEN
UDALL ULLMAN UTT VAN DEERLIN VANIK
VIGORITO VIVIAN WAGGONNER WALKER
WALKER WATKINS WATSON WATTS WELTNER
WHALLEY WHITE WHITE WHITENER WHITTEN
WIDNALL WILLIAMS WILSON WILSON WOLFF
WRIGHT WYATT WYDLER YATES YOUNG
YOUNGER AND ZABLOCKI (Y) IN HONOR OF
SMITH OF NEW YORK (N)

Your poem is issued to you so
you may burn it and so
it may cost you burning and so
it is issued to you. Burn it.

Perhaps no more than a draft
will have as yet been issued.
There have been critical shortages.
Honor the draft and burn it.

Perhaps in your case only
a symbol is issued pending

the draft, pending completion
of the true poem. Burn it.

The issue is not in the poem but in the burning.
The poem is not in the symbol but in the burning issue.
The poem is not in the ﬂesh, even, but in what issues burning
after the ﬂesh and after
action, the sonnet of tension, the absolute sonnet
of quiet guard.

Your hands are full with the plain hardware of it.
Interval. Dress. Alignment. This is it.
What’s it to you what some junk sculptor later
makes of its wasted workbreath? This is it.
Uses are what you drill from this hard center.
Meanings are what you burn off into slag.
Cause is the bright and accidental spiral
you plane from it to leave it what it is.
Whatever sudden emptiness may send you
whining like shrapnel through the bars back home,
whatever you drag home to disremember
bloodily and obscenely and at length,
this will be something else. Head down, knees high,
weapon at high port, MOVE. Your hands are full.

Quiet. A calyx closes. Heavy leaves
foreign to you in their simplicity
of outline and arrangement slowly lose
outline and then arrangement. Their red green
and the transparent oranges and blues
of a fragmented distance gone to black,
a darkness is composed. Its black-on-black
reciprocating engine of gun barrels
cranks over once, ﬁres once, and lashes back.
Nothing is here the night so much imperils
as loneliness. Nothing the breathing dark

so much dispels. Your ﬁx upon the known
is on point ﬂashes answering to your own
the way no pulse or persuasion has or shall.

Poem? You want a poem we got poems, Baby.

Bow Bray Brock Brooks
We’re the gunners got the gooks.
Pickle Pike Poage Poff
Charlie seen us an took off.
Rhodes Rhodes Rivers Rivers
Give us the job an we delivers.
White White Whitener Whitten
Nobody sets back the hard-bitten
Special Detachment Ran-gers!

Peace, Wanderer. Patience at your hard labor.
Later, almost in silence, and by surprise
must come to you if at all the at night now wept for,
the halfway-around-the-world-awaited rising
as out of a grayed horizon

Objective.

This.

Slow outcrop of bone faces. Baring of teeth
In the brief space of a doorway in ashes. This.

Cathay? Santo Domingo? Some such name.

The whole West waits to award you, you need only
(But a ﬁgure out of your own squad bumps past you,
rigorous, heavyladen and unimpeachable
upon the work of conﬁscation. Others
fan into the near distance, smoke-obscured.
Smoke falls

back on itself around you,

leaves you

somewhere

a light truck motor labors,

lone

sound of a dark

March morning in some St.

Paul

the exhaustclouds lifting

neighbor and stranger

lifting

as out of its own breath rising)

Objective.

This.

Blackface.

Implacable.

Death his be-all and end-all.

Death his intense

meditation.

Death his design.

Your poem when issued to you will be Enemy and Response.

It will be crabbed, wrought, strained and in fact
poetical.

It will be your Ballad of Roger Young, explaining
how at impossible odds and with what grace.

It will be your Song of Songs Which Is Solomon’s, saying
other than what it says because what it says
it cannot be saying, just as when

the deathshead in the doorway
who is, Yes, a Conspirator
(he has spilled his guts) and who would,

Yes, have maintained his insidious
cover until the leaves were taken off,
says to you I
am dead. I do
not move. Not happy not
unhappy I
am dead. I do
not move. Not feeling not
unfeeling I

And you, because you will have your Moment,
you with your ﬂag and book,
you, because there can be no such Elsewhere
indolent in the laps of unfurrowed seas,
hammer the words like gold and unfold them I
am soulless relentless remorseless insatiable I
shall not be moved.

Trophies. In the displaycase of Post Ten
Thousand and Something, Algeciras Georgia,
your own eyes, half-hungover but all there,
in a disturbed reﬂection over brass
nameplates on walnut: Trudo, Rountree, Green,
and with the names the years, and with the years
half of a banner head: VOICES ALARM,
an arm upraised and pumping and cut off
at the white edge of a bowling roster, eight
wide-open-mouthed men straining their neck tendons
in a curled brownstained photograph with whores
(captioned SAIGON, containing someone’s brave
tablecloth manifesto GET EM REBS
and one small face worthy of Lippo Lippi)

deserve, sweet Hell deserve, what your sick blood
vibrates as these things vibrate to hear told:
Didn’t

we get em? Didn’t we take arms

an slog halfway around the world to get
them before they got us? (white shirtbacks rising)
An won’t we get em? Let em show up now
callin themselves Americans, oh yes,
sellin us up the creek with their half-measures—
(Dead men around a table: their dead friends.
Pin-ups of yellowed championship clippings.
Their National Commander with the same
vigilant, just, and just about fed up
glare, as the glare behind you, as the glare
of your awaited turn, your ﬁrm stride forward.)

Your poem when issued to you, bearing symbols, bearing

a date,

will be neat, sweet, proper and terminal. Need it be said this

late

that these which you read are verses—verses to celebrate
me and my righteous posture, my facts and brains?
Light them, they will at once incinerate.
Burn as you will your poem, the burning remains.

(Here ends the document as issued and read into the record.
But the gentlemen from Arizona, California, Indiana and
Louisiana among others having remarked upon the lack,
strange in a document of this nature, of due acknowledgment
to the Supreme Authority Above Us All; and, the gentleman
from Iowa having at hand a suitable Hymn and Recessional;
we here insert in the record the following Expansion of

Remarks.)

Mine eyes have seen the glory of hard work at least.
I have kept the bore unpitted and the action greased.
Even when it aint a ﬁt night out for man or beast.
What’s your story, Mister?

Brandenburg Louisiana!

New Vienna Minnesota!
Venezuela West Virginia!
Get outa my back yard.

I have seen at least the star shell and the muzzle ﬂash.
I have sabotaged for glory and a little cash.
I have fought my jammed controls right up until the crash.
What’s your story, Mister?

Macedonia Nevada!
Himalaya Oklahoma!
Okinawa Indiana!
Get outa my back yard.

I have walked my twenty-thousand-mile perimeter.
I have cruised at eighty fathoms and a thousand per.
If I didn’t they would get my wife and ravish her.
What’s your story, Mister?

South Kamchatka North Dakota!
Lebanon South Carolina!
Dutch Guiana Arizona!
Get outa my back yard.

In the beauty of a moment of camaraderie
With a godforsaken bunch of gooks across the sea,
I shall die to make men safe in my society.
What’s your story, Mister?

Guatemala California!
Anatolia Nebraska!
Hispaniola Pennsylvania!
Get outa my back yard.

(You take off your insignia. You seek
cover. Maybe they still come sniping at you.

Maybe the outline of a bloused fatigue
uniform is a recognition pattern.

You take off your insignia. Through white
wildernesses of rock to where white water
spins from the snows, still climbing in a white
silence they cut to ribbons with their chatter,

You take off your insignia. The crest
holds you a moment, meeting, of no color
other than that of sunset, their distressed
and automatic redface compulsive stutter.

You take off your insignia. Escape
is a simple melting into the landscape.)

November-December 1965

TUOLOMNE

(Tu • ol´ • omn • e. 1. a river in California, north of

the Yosemite. 2. a meadowland on the river,

above Hetch-Hetchy. 3. a tribe, now vanished.)

for Meg Nye

Lord, look at the grass.
Globs, glebes, gallopings, a whole ocean
and blade after blade after blade
of promiscuous
grass.
It could make a man feel called.
Called on the carpet.
Yes, Lord, yes,
I let my seed fall on the rocky ground.
I never laid my talents out to found
The many-mansioned condominium.
I stop off to camp on the way home
From a trip west to see my married daughter
And look at me.

Big woodsman.

I’m so dumb.

I build my nylon dreamhouse on the sand.

You read me well enough.
Mornings, chilled to the marrow, when I stand
And squint out over the pebble-brightening water,
Something there is that shakes me by the scruff.

I forage off. I climb a little bluff
And kick my morning cat-hole in the dirt.
My knees are cold. They hurt.

I get down close to what my heel turned over.
All made of leaves! Oh look:
So many proﬂigacies brought to book.
Look at the way the crumbs and fragments glisten.
Tell me again thy teachings, Lord, I’ll listen.

Happy the man who hunkers down and mulls
A second reading of the parables.
It hungers up the blood and whets the air.
The things that are entrusted to my care!

Where there is soil, plant seed. Where there is boulder,
Cover the same with buildings. Neither build
Nor scatter seed along the highway shoulder,
But if you are an ethnic, scavenge there
For someone newly robbed, or damn near killed,
Or both, whom it behooves you to befriend.
If you are merely indigent, perpend:
The hedges and the ditches are the place
To stand forth and be feculent in case
Some parvenu who planned a banquet gets
A mailboxful of monogrammed regrets
And throws himself a little social tantrum.
If someone slips you money, don’t succumb
To modesty or misplaced moral scruple.
Throw it around! Invest! It might quadruple.
Weeds, you weed out. Collect the weed seed, though.
Your enemy may sink his pot of gold
In millet-ﬁelds and leave them unpatrolled.
Salt, you are meant to savor, not to sow,
Unless there is a grievance to avenge.
On sand, thou shalt not build nor plant nor scavenge,
But meditate. The sand shall be a standard
Of competition and comparison
In counting up the offspring of the dutiful.
The lily too shall function. It is beautiful.

Lastly, at unpredicted interval,
A sparrow shall conveniently fall
To test the quickness of the Cosmic Eyeball.

I have committed whimsy. There. So be it.
I have not followed wisdom as I see it.
You avalanche me sermons and I make
Jokes.
Break
Me of it. It’s a trial to my folks.
Show me the grass. The kingdom brought to birth.
Convulsion in the ferns. The very earth
Rising above itself in ecstasies.
Haven’t I gone glass-eyed onto my knees
To pry into the busyness of these
Green legions, every microscopic blob
A roller-palace with a milling mob
Of chloroplasts careening around in it
A dozen or two dozen times a minute?
How furious they are as they compete
At drawing water up a hundred feet
To let a picturebook blue spruce complete
Its simulacrum of a waterfall.
A man’d have to think exceeding small
To get no hustle from that plasmic jazz.
Quadrillions! Every cell as frenzied as
A Circus Maximus beside a Tiber.
Whole generations toughen into ﬁber
And turn into the body of the mother
While I scratch out one verbal razzmatazz
And heavy up my notebook with another.
They have their conquests to consolidate.
And I?
I guess I’m here to celebrate
Myself, your works, man’s passions, or the State,
Depending on which school I emulate.

And do I mock?
I mock.
And grieve?
I grieve.
There’s nothing I would gladlier achieve
Than Poetry. I mean the serious thing.
Not this Pop-Popean ring-a-ding-dinging.

The Pure Organic Form,

Where not one word malingers from the norm
Of grateful dedication to a purpose
Higher than its own accidental likings.
As self-effacing as a bunch of Sherpas,
As drab as doughboys and as dour as Vikings,
Ready to take the universe by storm
And die in the attempt, my Words would swarm
Over the dazzled reader like a . . . swarm.
Of bees perhaps. Or how are wasps at swarming?
O hell, the whole conception was just forming.
I know that poem. I can almost hear it,
So sure am I of it, and of the spirit
In which I have heard (so often) it described.

I’d swear I struck the rock once and imbibed
Something that wasn’t used-up and hock-and-soda.
Move like the wind upon these waters, Lord;
Make me a spectacle of devastations;
Break, blow, batter me, leave me ﬂoored
And at the mercy of the Great Inﬂation
That launched Jack Keats. Or was it Carol Doda?

Hopeless, abysmal, my transgression is.
You are, by your own double-barreled Testament,
An agribusiness tipster and a whiz
At principles of capital investment,

And here, instead of pyramiding shares,
I’m scattering my corn among the tares,
As bad as any of those silly gooses
Who put the right thing to the wrong thing’s uses
And made an utter hash of their affairs.

I’d better just sit down.
I’d better get my coffee boiled, and brown
An egg or two around the spitting edges,
And sop them with that canned brown bread I love.
I’d better take a walk into the scenery
And on the willows in the midst thereof
Philosophize without so much machinery.

Great big lumberless weeds,
What are you good for? Holding sand together?
Huddling in bunches under heavy weather
Like immigrants on shipboard? That would ﬁt.
The cabin-class contingent lathers it
Off to the high horizon hell-for-leather
And there you stay, all sombre on the decks
Of something big and frightening and just
About to give in to an underthrust
And go down in the folklore of great wrecks.

I’ve seen you walk the waters, willow trees.
Somewhere in all their dappled botanies
I think the English Bards ran out of gas.
They left you lorn, and pretty much unheeded,
Except when one of their fair damsels needed
A semiotic shorthand for Alas.

No skin off you. Who needs us and our tricks,
Our amateur hysterics and theatrics?

I’ve seen you skating with an easy stroke

On waters that would petrify an oak.
I’ve seen you lean, and brake, and send a slash
Of icy whiteness up against a trash
Of aspen-bones and ponderosa rubble
The snow-melt-water ﬂood had swept aside
Like scaffolding. I’ve seen your streamers ride
The wind as if to whip it on the double
And laugh at it for getting out of breath.
I’ve seen you scare a camper half to death
You stood so calm, so silent and serene.
He thought he almost knew what it would mean
To cease upon the midnight without cavil.
He tossed his beans aside, and panned some gravel,
And whistled “Oh My Darling Clementine”
To put his thoughts back into proper channels.
And when he’d pulled up stakes, and itched his ﬂannels,
He still felt shivers up and down his spine.

Some master of the high Miltonic line
Owes you a Great Ode, willows, sure as hell.
I think I’ll speak about it to Kinnell.
I hate to see so versatile a tree gypped
Out of a rightful place in the Anthology.

But this is not some Ode, it’s an Apology.
And if it needs a moral, there’s the grass.

Look at it. Grass grass grass.
Who sent these indolent armies out of Egypt?
They pillow the plains and valleys wall-to-wall.
I do, Lord, oh I do wait for a call.
But also, I enjoy my avocations.
I scribble side-notes to the fall of nations.
I play with spacings, and with indentations.
And generally, I sit here like a dope,
As obviated as the spheres of Ptolemy,

And keep my crafts and hobbies up, and hope
That when the big wind comes, it speaks Tuolomne.

I mean why not? I know the wind I seek
To ﬂee from seven days an average week.
If everything it says to me is Greek,
And everything it means to me is All,
And all I care about is the unknown,
Who is to say I’m loco if I fall
Into a little singsong of my own,
And while the twigs ﬂy, and the tent-ropes moan,
I make a joyful noise: “You speak Tuol-
Omne. You speak Tuolomne. You speak
Tuolomne.”

HIGH RENAISSANCE

“Nomine Domini
Theotocopoulos,
None of these prelates can
Manage your name.

Change it. Appeal to their
Hellenophilia.
Sign it ‘El Greco.’ I’ll
Slap on a frame.”

SONNET WITH A DIFFERENT LETTER
AT THE END OF EVERY LINE

for Helen Vendler

O for a muse of ﬁre, a sack of dough,
Or both! O promissory notes of woe!
One time in Santa Fe N.M.
Ol’ Winﬁeld Townley Scott and I . . . But whoa.

One can exert oneself, ff,
Or architect a heaven like Rimbaud,
Or if that seems, how shall I say, de trop,
One can at least write sonnets, a propos
Of nothing save the do-re-mi-fa-sol
Of poetry itself. Is not the row
Of perfect rhymes, the terminal bon mot,
Obeisance enough to the Great O?

“Observe,” said Chairman Mao to Premier Chou,
“On voyage à Parnasse pour prendre les eaux.
On voyage comme poisson, incog.”

THE PASSION OF G. GORDON GIDDY

ten arias in search of an operetta

(HH ANNOUNCES THE ARRIVAL OF GG)

A pipsqueak. Pitiful. Thinks he’s a Dan Duryea.
Acts tough. Talks rough. And if it was his idea,
We’d blow the whole mission over some Bogside Boadicea.
This is an ops specialist? It’s a grade-A
Twit if you ask me. Tell them up at Area
I know him, I know his price-tag. 5¢ ea.
What am I supposed to do? Stamp him per via aerea?
Ticket him to Belfast on BEA
With a box lunch wired for the Irish Sea?
He looks all right. A neck trim, some Nivea,
He wouldn’t frighten the regulars out at Shea.
But when he comes at me in that chintzy suit from Chelsea
With his giveadamn button ﬂashing like an azalea,
Baby, a damn is just what I don’t givea.

(GG SETS CC STRAIGHT ABOUT HH)

Where do you hire these creeps? In the Tonga Is.?
I mean for the Bond fans in the Cinema Is
He’ll do just great. Whole townhouse full of bonsais.
Him and his bon-ton Siamese Thaïs
Prattling about the Paris caravanserais.
Babbling about the boat train down from Calais-
To-rhyme-with-phallus en façon Anglais
The way they taught him in the AIS.
Flashing a little Négritude (Marais-
And-Miranda records, a couple of assegais).

Trotting out the grass mats from Minas Gerais
And one of your more exorbitant beaujolais
And there they sit, happy as Adonais
(A little patois-de-foie to go with it? Mais
Wee) and hold hands. I’d sooner Gilles de Rais.
I’d sooner the Boy Scouts on Mt. Tamalpais.
He’s a case, Cece. Terminal. Thais or no Thais.

(MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE AMERICAS)

Don’t touch that shade. Christ Jesus. Los Saguaches
Again. You been there. Giant plastic spinaches
Coming out of the woodwork? Machetes, gouaches
Of gauchos, devil-dancer papier-mâchés?
You been there.

Pimps in Pancho Villa mustaches.

Tinsel-titted Folies-Bergeres apaches
Ki-yi-yipping like a bunch of Andromaches
While some caped crusader plays chercher-les-vaches
In a bullring dickey slathered all over with caches
Of tin doubloons, and the old crock bellyaches
How there ain’t no action in this spic dive. Teaches
The multitude a sing-along about cockroaches,
Stomps all over his hat with his huaraches,
And har-hars with all of us cultural attaches
About the ass we used to get on the Hauptwaches
In Forty-Five. No wonder Helms has headaches.
Six billion in funding-arrangements attaches
To this putz getting planked at Mama-Ché’s.

(GG COMES IN FROM THE HEAT)

This outﬁt. If it isn’t prop up Haile

Selassie, it’s go count poppies in Zile.
Guess what they did while you guys pulled off Chile?
Ran me for Rep. Yep, cranked up the old Langley crapmobile,
And to listen to them tell it Honey-Chile
I was the Flag I was God’s own guided missile
The Liberty Bell or a reasonable cracked facsimile
Mario Lanza doing La Donna é Mobile
And the ﬁrst shot at the Battle of Mobile.
I mean I been run up the old campanile
And I been tolled I been X-tolled I been mobile-
Podiumed around from San Pedro to Presque Ile
Hey Baby I bled for that seat: moi: mutilé
De la guerre. Fun you say? Fun?? Baby, if Gigi-le-
Moko does that again, he’s ten-tenths senile.
Of all the idiot, tedious, infantile . . .

(THE GIDDY TAPES WILL CONTINUE AFTER THIS WORD)

Some day—there’ll be a playback system so sensitive, with
an on-line signal-retrieval computer so advanced, that no
conspiratorial skullduggery will escape detection. No mat-
ter if malefactors have erased the tape-recordings of their
malefactions. Mixing the erased tape with an electronic
negative of itself, scanning the resultant “white noise” for
vocal traces, audiotechnicians will assemble and decode
the exact actual voiceprint of the perpetration. That
“some day” is—today!—at Honeywell.

(GG WITH A SUREFIRE PLAN TO SWEEP ALL FIFTY)

Gigi, you son-of-an-Andy-Warhol-heroine,
They’ve bought it. The whole schlemozzle. Project Jasmine.
The Wienerschnitzel himself. Pfft. Terminé.

Look at him down there browsing along the Seine
Pipedreaming about Metternich and the Ciné
Bleu, well Gigi he’s up the old Assiniboine
Without a paddle and he don’t know it. In nomine
Bob Hope and Pat Boone and Spiro T. Agnew thine
Is the contract, Buddyboy, and the place in the sunshine
And the seventy-six-trombone Concerto-in-E-
As-in-EOB you bastard: Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik for gelignite and ﬂying machine.
So. Sunday. Him and his Amazon wahine.
We do him a Dag or a Hale Boggs or an Antoine
De St. X. and by Dag by Dhiem by Jacqueline
In the pink original if there’s Palestine
Written all over it all the more goldmine.
Tragedy! villainy! martyrdom! heartbreak! Procaine
For the masses, to ease that great big needle of morphine
In. Oh Gigi you weasel you minx you ermine
You Painless Parker you Bonaparte you Tom Paine!

(COUNTERMAND FROM CC)

Scenarios? Hang scenarios. Gimme the mises-
En-scene.

You got an Oswald on the premises?

well whaddaya use for meat, some gang of Cochises?
Yeah? . . . Yeah? . . . Well OK: say he demises.
That make us Hertz? ’Cause there ain’t gonna be no Avises.
Just Wyatt Earp and a streetful of rigor mortises.
You take your soundings in the Chicagos and the St. Louises,
Run em through your computerized hoozy-whatsises,
And listen to all the pretty little noises.
Know what it is? He plays. He plays in the Boises,
The Baton Collapsible Rouges, the Lake Louises—
How do you spell Peoria? He cruises.
Slicker than twenty Special Forces porpoises.

He carries us.

Stay limber. Sing his praises.

Say after me: I kiss the dust of his daises.
I kiss the way the mother hisses his ises.
I kiss the exquisite remedies he advises
For the seven deadly societal malaises.
I blow the Rockefellers and the Onassises
Kisses to each of their island paradises.
I kiss the little ka-votes from My Six Crises.
That’s

a good boy. Now tell your asshole Aramises

To take the shirts back out of their valises
And get back down to their USISes
And use their breath to cool their vichyssoises.
Read a good book. You’re ﬂuent. Mes Six Crises.

(GG’S AFRICAN INITIATIVE)

Howie, we got the wrong damn clientele.
They shunt me to some quiz-kid name of Schaufele.
Stupidest open pit this side of Tooele.
But precise? Prettier footwork than Pele.
I told him. “Give em some instant Passchendaele.
Lay a little downbeat on them jungle tele-
Graph artists courtesy of Curtis E. Le
May. Voice of a new E-pock is it, Bubbele?
Well it ain’t strumming its goddam ukulele
On a batik under an Egon Schiele
And it ain’t singing ‘D’ye ken John Peele’
For the assembled friends of Goeran Gentele.
It’s marching down the banks of the Matabele
Under the ﬂag Ché made for Pierre Mulele:
¡Patria o muerte! ¡Venceremos! ¡Andele!”
You’d think the junks had landed at Eleele.
He froze. Right there in the Gents on Level E.

(GG FINALLY PUTS IT ALL TOGETHER)

Hit him? Not on your life, Mon. Let him rotate.
You think I’d work up something this elaborate
just to get in one jump ahead of Atë?
Let the poor bastard moulder in the Senate.
We’ve got those cables. We’ve got that girl Renate.
Tony’s developing something up in Scituate.
Relax, Baby. Jiu-jitsu, not karate.
If you need meat for your M-Five and his concate-
Nation of spaced-out bren-gun bunnies, by Hecate
Meat they shall have. A nice fat Nixon surrogate.
Admired. Adored. Expendable. The Late
Great Reverend G. Cracker. Jubilate
Agnew you bet, and from what I hear in private,
High time. The good Rev’s revved up. He doth remonstrate.

No efﬁng ﬁnesse. Plastique. We make a paté
Out of him. Whip up a nice big chocolate
Mousse for dessert. And the Chief? Vengeance incarnate.
Götterdämmerung at the old Gaststäte.
Something juicy on everybody’s plate.

Tomorrow then. Chores tonight. Naa, nothing delicate.
That bug. You know, Larry’s other penate,
The boys put in last month over at Watergate?
Well I don’t know what’s up at Ye Olde Sweate
Shoppe. They keep hiring kids straight out of Choate
And they don’t know circuitry. Talk about third-rate . . .

(EPILOGUE: SPANDAU)

Are you guys lawyers, or a bunch of titmice?
You got it made. I’d have those goons from Justice

Chasing their schnozzles up their twots and vice
Versa. You’re golden. So what’s this with the Cice-
Ronian smokescreens and the tinhorn artiﬁce?
They got some questions? Let em take their choice.
Tell em if it’s irrelevant, no dice,
And if it ain’t, tough luck: sub judice.
Catch-22. Their case goes down the sluice.
You’d have that wop from Jersey chasing scalplice
Out of his wig and saying “Cosa dice?”
And looking like the guy that lost Eurydice.
What is all this? My Lai? Or maybe Lidice?
It’s ﬁve kids stealing ten cents worth of licorice.
Grist for the goddam juvenile Police.

(EPILOGUE: CHATEAU D’IF)

Loth? You bet. And I’m getting a damn sight lother.
The Beard sang like a bird. So what’s it got her?
I don’t think I could play it that much smoother
And I don’t ﬁnd confession psychother-
Apeutic and I don’t want Bozo-the-R
CMP signing me any pardons. Other
Than that, I’ll gab. I’ll be the glibbest frother-
At-the-mouth since Mary Stuart came to Fother-
Ingale. Listen, you Rotarian Rehobother,
This game plays. Can I say it any soother?
For kicks, clout. Both, or I wouldn’t bother.
The rich get rich. The mammoth’re getting mammother
Name of the game. Behemother and behemother.
Last man into the pool’s an American-10

-er.

Maybe we go the way of the archaeother-
Ium and the sabre-tooth, but we’re Big Brother
And hog-butcher and feeder and houser and clother
And general all-around scout-camp housemother

To the World, Pal, and it’s headed out to sea.
S.S. Leviathan. Someone’s gonna pilot her.
Put it all together it spells moi.

(CHORUS OF EXPERTS)

Heraclitus

: All is ﬂux.

Holmes

: History is particulars.

Horatio

: You might have rhym’d.

SAID

Agatha Christie to
E. Phillips Oppenheim,
“Who is this Hemingway,
Who is this Proust?

Who is this Vladimir
Whatchamacallum, this
Neopostrealist
Rabble?” she groused.

SAID

J. Alfred Prufrock to
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,
“What ever happened to
Senlin, ought-nine?”

“One with the passion for
Orientalia?”
“Rather.” “Lost track of him.”
“Pity.” “Design.”

WORKING HABITS

Federico García Lorca
used to uncork a
bottle or two of wine
whenever the duende dwindled for a line.

James Joyce
would have preferred a choice
of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany’s,
but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies.

The Later Henry James
bet shots of rum against himself in games
of how much can we pyramid upon a
given donné.

Little Dylan Thomas
didn’t keep his promise
to stay out of Milk Wood.
He tried to drown the fact as best he could.

Anna Akhmatova
Eyed the last shot of a
Pre-war cognac de champagne.
“So much for you, little brandy. Do svidanya.”

T. S. Eliot
used to belly it
up to the nearest bar,
then make for a correlative objective in his car.

Proust
used
to
too.

ON THE ANTIQUITY OF WARFARE

(For my son John, while he is thinking about the ROTC)

The celebrated Missing Link
made mincemeat of a few of us
I think. Therefore I am, I think
congenitally, cagey. Sink
or swim! Troy gate or Tartarus!
The Celebrated Missing link
arms. Are you with us, boys? And wink.
Is not the night sky glorious?

I think therefore I am. I think
I like it that way. Rinky-dink
escadrilles, shine on. Make a fuss.
The celebrated missing Link
Trainer patrol that hit the drink
south of El Paso lives. And thus
cogito ergo sum

I think

lives, where they lined up in the clink
to forge the bright, the clangorous,
the celebrated missing link
“I Think Therefore I Am I Think”

one more time:

I think therefore I am I think
The celebrated Missing Link.
My socks don’t match, my shit don’t stink,
My landing brakes are on the blink,
But I could ﬂy to Hell through ink
In a coal-ﬁred kitchen sink.
So buck up, Tooey you dumb gink.
When the great game-plan hits a kink

And I am needed at the brink
I’ll be there, feisty as a mink
With Memphis Rose and Lil the Chink
At Mama Juana’s Roller Rink

one more time.

I will stand tall. I will not shrink.
I’ll sing until my scalp turns pink:
Rink a dink dink, rink a dink dink,
Last man in is a raaaaat ﬁnk.

And then if you don’t mind I’ll slink
Out a back door and hop a bus.
I’ll hump and brawl and steal and cuss
And by the year two-thousand-plus
I’ll be the most obstreperous
Old AWOL since Odysseus.

SAID

Dame Edith Evans to
Margaret Rutherford,
“Seance? Oh really, my
Dear, if there be

Nonhypothetical
Extraterrestrial
Parapsychologists,
They

can call me.”

SAID

J. Edgar Hoover to
Constable Dogberry,
“We are the Law. When they
Call us a pig,

We must impugn them for
Creditability.
After them! After them!
Jiggety-jig!”

ON READING JOHN HOLLANDER’S POEM
“BREADTH. CIRCLE. DESERT. MONARCH. MONTH.
WISDOM. (for which there are no rhymes)”

“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which

there are

No rhymes

)” was just the title, and I only read that far.

That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar
When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions,
And I was scared this hothead would start hedging his asser-

tions

Before I had him dead-to-rights. (A Chekan’s or a SMERSHian’s
Lot, you know, is not an happy one.) He might retract.

A liar is a liar is a liar. That’s his act.
But six distinct demonstrable deﬁances-of-fact
Before he hits line one? That’s taking aim at the World’s

Record.

I wanted this quark-colored tangerine-ﬂake double-deckered
Omnibus of absurdities to make it to the checkered
Flag. He had started fast, but could he forge on? Was he serious?

He had the Grand Prix style all right. Intense. Composed. Impe-

rious.

And lies to burn. Poor lies, in no wise deep or deleterious.
He drove them home like thumb (or rather tooth nail ﬁst and

chin) tacks.

He planted Cosmic Glints to make you whimper for a glint-axe.
“Unconstellated words rain down . . . inexorable syntax”
Etcetera etcetera.

It’s not that I’d set up,

Like Carrie Nation beating back the drunkard from his cup,
To scourge the world of liars. I’d as soon be Ofﬁssa Pup.

I’d sooner hassle fetishists and call myself a bra-narc.

If I were Lord of All (or even constitutional monarch)
I’d send a Deluge down, with one-way tickets on the Non-ark
For lying priests and pedagogues. They make a feller’s fez hurt.
But whom does Keats’s whopper about corpulent Cortez hurt?
Or any poet’s whopper? If he wants to say the Desert
Is made of pea-green Camembert, hell, welcome to the circle.

We listen to a Bard the way a certain kind of jerk’ll
Listen to leaves or listen to a percolator perkle.
As long as he can grind em out, a dozen-or-so a month,
We’ll praise him to the nth degree, and to the n-plus-

He could have called the thing “Fifth. Sixth. Eighth. Ninth.

Twelfth. Baker’s dozenth”

For all we care. We’ll cheer him to the w-x-y-zedth
As long as his ﬂimﬂammeries have brio and have breadth
And don’t come on like nursery-nannies pushing early-to-

bedth

To three-year-olds with jingles about Health and Wealth and

Wisdom.

He should look out, though. He might take himself in, and that

is dumb.

Do that, and sure as malheur is the better part of Msdom,
Sententiousness will sidle in with snapshots in his wallet
To lay a little something on us camels: some small strawlet
Of Wisdom, say, or Beauty. Take this poem now. I call it
“Width. Rhombus. (see Lozenge.) Glacier. Despot. Fortnight.

Bilge.”

I told myself: “No overkill. Go easy on the bilge.”
But then. Tueur is human. And what rhymes with bilge is bilge.

ON READING JOHN HOLLANDER’S POEM
“BREADTH. CIRCLE. DESERT. MONARCH. MONTH.
WISDOM. (for which there are no rhymes)”

Part Two

I liked that when I wrote it. By the time it got to bilge,
It even had a moral. All of that! And out of bilge!
It made me so blamed proud I bought some i-beams from the

store

And welded me a Sculpture to bestride my study door:
A ﬁve-piece ten-foot Sculpture spelling out forevermore
B-I-L-G-E BILGE, to match the Late-Pop-Art decor.

I stood back to admire the thing. I beamed, but not before
I started to detect a tapping at my study door—
A featheriest tapping, tapping, at my study door.

Imagine my surprise. It was John Hollander. He wore
The quizzical expression of the vanquished, but he bore
No malice. Quite the contrary. He said, “What perfect bilge!
Something of yours?”

“You know,” he said, “it’s curious, but bilge

Once struck me as unrhymable. A lead-pipe cinch like bilge.”

“You killjoy!” I exploded. I snatched up* the B in BILGE
And went for him. He countered with a well-aimed I from ILGE,
But his next words were his last words: “No don’t! I’m not a

killj—”

*Literalists may question this. Not even a Mad Turk could “snatch”

four hundred pounds of monumental ironwork. Snatch is poetic

license. It was more a clean-and-jerk.

VERSES TO EXHAUST MY STOCK
OF FOUR-LETTER WORDS

From the ocean ﬂoors, where the necrovores

Of the zoöoögenous mud

Fight for their share, to the Andes where

Bullllamas thunder and thud,

And even thence to the heavens, whence

Archchurchmen appear to receive

The shortwave stations of rival nations

Of angels: “Believe! Believe!”

They battle, they battle—poor put-upon cattle,

Each waging, reluctantly,

That punitive war on the disagreeor

Which falls to the disagreeee.

FALLING ASLEEP OVER SCOTT

for Anthony Hecht

Drowsing one day in The
Heart of Midlothian,
Finding no pillow to
Cushion my head,

Reaching for Kenilworth,
Happening onto an
Earlier Waverly
Novel instead,

Why was I suddenly
Bound, on the battlements,
Helpless to rescue my
Self from the dread

Castle of Torquilstone’s
Phantasmagoria,
While a bull voice from the
Parapet said

“Runagate rufﬁan,
Wilfred of Ivanhoe,
Whom dost thou sally at?
Whom dost thou seek?

Brian de Bois-Guilbert?
Reginald Front-de-Boeuf?
Lucas de Beaumanoir?
Rabbi Ben Samuel?

Stephen de Martival?
William de Mareschal?
Oldhelm of Malmsbury?
Jacob Ben Tudela?
Richard Plantagenet,

Alias Lion-Heart,
Latterly Knight of the
Fetterlock? Eke

Herman of Goodalricke?
Cedric of Rotherwood?
Dennis the Cellarer?
Giles de Mauleverer?
Richard de Malvoisin?
Philip de Malvoisin?
Albert de Malvoisin,
Master of Templestowe?
Locksley of Nottingham,
Formerly Huntingdon,
Alias Robin Hood?
Gaultier of Middleton?
Ulfgar of Middleham?
Hilda of Middleham?
Athelstane Adelingson,
Franklin of Coningsburgh?
Whom

wouldst thou duel or

Diplodactylify?
Scarify? Vilify?
Pole-axe or pique?

Call the man out! Be he
Anglonormanophobe
Churl from our charnel or
Cock of our clique,

Spit him you shall! give his
Skippety-hoppity
Madrigal-monicker
Back in his cheek!

Skewer them, scatter them,
Hyperpersnickety
Gaggle of gluttonous
Gabblemouth geeks!

‘Top o’ the morning, Miss
Ulrica Wolfganger.’
‘Thankee, good Nathan
Ben Israel.’ –Breeks’

Bones! The bare minimum
Breakfast amenities
Drive a man mad in a
Matter of weeks!

Who in the name of the
Quasihistorical
Sent

me this houseful of

Metrical freaks?”

Long rang the echoes from
Breastworks to bulwark to
Outwork to catwalk through
Dungeon and hall.

Longer still, silence, till
TrumanCapotean
Vocables rose from the
Base of the wall:

“Crotchety-crotchety,
Fictional Spokesperson:
Dactylophobiac
Tantrums like these

Scarcely bespeak the com-
Posure demanded of
One who would wrestle a
Folk to its knees.

As for my challenge, you
Blankety-blankety
Bounder, convey my re-
Spects to that Non-

U, that non-ullulant
Monosyllabical
Name

of a name, the u-

Surper King John!”

Noises of battle rolled
In and rolled over me.
Cauldrons of pitch were up-
Ended in ﬂame.

Stones were hurled earthward, then
Garbage, then carcasses,
Timbers, bound prisoners,
Me!

Was my name

Saved from the wreck of that
Keep in some chronicle?
Saved for some reader years
Hence? As for me,

I like to think it a
Nonprobability
Epiphenomeno-
Logically.

I like to think that the
Waverly Novelist
Nodded and wavered and
Vanished in smoke

Like a closed book, like a
Saudi Arabian
Djinn, like a higgledy
Pig in a poke.

DESPERATE MEASURES

Oh Momma, Momma, I haven’t slept for weeks.
This secretary and I are being blackmailed by a bunch of sheiks.
I thank my stars it’s Henry they’ve been to see.
I don’t know how I could stand it if they came straight to me
With their oily insinuations and their bedroom millinery

Henry

, Momma. What do you mean “What Henry?”

Henry the Secretary I’ve been talking about
That the Sheiks are after because of the way that we’ve all

made out

And now we gotta get money so we can pay them and keep

them quiet

And he’s a lovely warm human person and a real laff riot
But what if silence is like happiness and you can buy it
And buy it and buy it and it just won’t stay bought?
Bad enough with the pot ﬁends rioting in the streets.
But blackmail! Trading on another person’s dirty secrets.
It’s worse than being a classiﬁed-documents-leaker, it’s
Diabolicaller it’s slimier it’s sneakier it’s

Blackmail! Oh Momma I just don’t care anymore.
They can drag our impetuous ardor in all its sordor
Into the glare of the lawcourts and the even horrider
Glint in the eye of the would-be boudoir toreador
The Suck-of-the-Month subscriber the PlayboyPortfolioreader
The plain-brown-wrapper Scenes-from-the-Life-of-Ann-

Corio

orderer—

Blackmail!

Plastered in tabloid all over the porno shops.

I shall stand there shattered, defenseless, hopeless, topless
And throw myself on the generosity of the American populace.
It worked all right for the Pinochets and the PapaDocs

and the Papadopouloses.

It works for the nattering-kneejerk internationalist applepolishers
And their eastern establishment limousine lib-lab scuttle-

buttpublishers,

And if I can just get a little groundswell started among the

Winnetkans and the Tuhungans, Gee:

I can hear me now: Gentlepersons of the Petit jury,
What’s the big rap here? Mayhem? Kickbacks? Jobbery?
Some scheme of evil rivaling in its obduracy
The Crédit Mobilier and the Teapot Dome?
Why hang it all, we just puttin’ a little down-home
Jalapeno chilipepper into the implementation of
Nation-to-nation nonstop marathon stratamatic love-sweet-

love.

World I could love you to death.
The Kid from Nazareth
Said that. And the World best listen. Hell to pay.
Love you to death, said Dennis and Doris Day.
And Martha and Johnny and Sanjit and James Earl Ray.

World I could love you to death
The great Hernan Cortez
Sang as he jangled down to Tenochtitlan,
And Sammy and ldris and Herman and Genghis Khan
And the Madames Lafarge, Chiang, Bovary, Cho-Cho-San
Jostle along. And Alvin Dark. And Jeanne.
It’s the universal background music, Mon.

World I could love you to death.
Give in to it. So saith
Good old Elizabeth
I, II, Berrigan, Bagaya, Borden-and-I-don’t-mean-cow.

You better believe it, Wayne Babe. Dr. Lao

Said it, Mao
Said it, the entire cast of the festival at Oberammergau
Said it and durned if there isn’t this kind of a massed ancestral

row

That builds up into my bloodstream like a thunderhead over

the Jungfrau

Or a tidal wave or a Ghost with a notion to say it and say it now:

Evvvvvrybody go kidnap Henry Kissinger.
Evvvvvrybody go kid—

Aw come on. Oh wow,

You must have had goofy-juice with your evening chow.
That went out with Spock. With the Rome Plow.
Might as well tell me huelga. Tell me Dow.
Might as well tell me giftshop Handy Wrappinger. How?

Just everybody go kidnap Henry Kissinger.
Fill skin of head with sand.
Place out in sun.

Just everybody go kidnap Henry Kissinger.
Fill skin of head with ashdust.
Place by stream.

Just everybody go kissify Henry Kidnap.

Fill skin of head with cool.
Place in high place.

Whaddaya trine? Whaddaya make me? Play the fool?
I got no time. Gotta nab me a bullshit heiress.
Nab me a Yanqui plantboss.
Nab some yids.
Kidnap the didn’ts. Kidnap the diddly dids.

Whoa there, Cha-Cha, line up and place your bids.

Them penny-ante contracts is for kids.
Goddamit, this is crime.
Have I been getting through to you? This time
It’s everybody kidnap everybody.
Hold for extravagant ransom.
Keep secure.

It’s everybody in bad hands. Everybody
Off to fantabulous hideouts.
Gone to earth.

That’s everybody. You got that? Everybody.
No bystanders. No stragglers.
No ﬁfth wheels.

Now everybody glare at everybody.
Listen, you’re my investment.
You get sick,

Then everybody loses. Everybody
Finish his goddam oatmeal.
Nice and thick.

Now everybody snarl. Give everybody
Beautiful hardboiled reasons.
Companions. Eggs.

Now everybody count off. Everybody?
Single exception, Captain.
Heavens! Who?

Henry? Out there alone with Man-with-
Suitcase? Ooh.

Nobody out there now but Man-with-Suitcase.

Black Samsonite suitcase.
All that loot.

Practicing to himself: “Put down that suitcase!”
Practicing to himself: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

THE VISIT

The gingerbread house in the gingerbread forest,

That’s where it took place.

The gin, the St. Vitus, the gingivitis,

Whatever it was, her face

Was radiant. The kids were zonked.

Even the mice were de-

Molished on an overdose

Of stone patisserie.

Grandmama in her thermal formal,

Grandpapa in his cape,

Had just settled down for a paranormal

Nightcap at the nape.

When out in the clutter of Forest Lawn

Stone furniture there landed

A wee little ship, from whose wee little hatch

There strode forth, openhanded,

A wee little man with his little ol’ eyes

So shifty and lightning-quick

That we knew right away—oh what a surprise—

That it must be TrickyDick.

He was chuckling all over and licking and grinning and

Ooh, this was getting fun!

He was checking the house for chimneys. Nope.

And for doors. There was just the one . . . .

Oh goodie he found it. Around he bounded,

Casing the joint for green.

Casing the joint for red. Confounded

Snooper he was, and mean.

He knew what a stocking was used for: to hang!

And goodies for kiddies: to hide!

To hide from the sniveling beggars! We sprang

For the door. In the nick! Outside!

We twisted the key in the gingerbread lock

In the patented blast-proof door,

And that’s why no one’s terriﬁed

At Christmas anymore.

But Christmas Eve, or Halloween,

Or any susceptible season,

I wouldn’t go down to the gingerbread wood

If I didn’t have terrible reason.

I think I would rather sit down on a thistle

Than listen to that. And to hear him excite

A yet clammier gaggle of slimier creatures

To wail and to wallow? Good night.

shapes from the 1970s to the 1990s

PA R T T W O

THREE CROSSES ON THREE PAGES

This work, printed in purple ink, originally appeared as a three-page

foldout in The Ohio Review, Spring/Summer 1979.

The Essential Shakespeare, Volume I
Rapid-retrieval editions in rhymed hemimeter

RICHARD THE THIRD IN A FOURTH OF A SECOND

G. Starbuck, general textual editor

Act I

Clop.

Clop-
clop.

But
look
what
Hop-
toad
did.

Wid-
ow’d,

Act II

woo’d,

took

this
lewd
and
stin-
king
thing
this
En-
gland.

Act III

Clop-
pit-
y
clop
he
swap
it
fer
some
horse.

Act IV

Flum-
mer-
y
of
course.

Cov-
er
stor-
y
for
the
hoi
po-
lloi.

Act V

Good;

we
would-
n’t
want
the
slu-
bbered
herd

Act VI

thin-
king
which
nerd
murd-
ered
Rich-
ard
Third.

Poor Soul

Fly,
thief;
thy
ﬁef-
dom
’s torched.

Come,
Cur.
Fetch!

Get
your
scorched
earth
worth.

Not Marble

This
word,
whis-
pered,
shall
stand,
and

the
Car-
rar-
a
mar-
ble
fall.

The Essential Shakespeare, Volume XII

SPACE-SAVER SONNETS

purged of accretions & newly published in the corrected hemimeter

version prepared under the general folgership of G. Starbuck

My Mistress’ Eyes Are
Nothing

Yes,
Per-
fes-
ser,

snow
no
doubt
out-
does

her
et-
cet-
er-
as.

100

Like the Sun

She’s

not
some
ﬂot-
sam
si-
mi-
les
from
Ly-
ly’s
Eu-
phu-
es.

Th’ Expense

Lust
is
just
mis-

er-
y,
wor-
ry

and
blame.
Brand-
name

dreck.
Ecch.

101

‘Notes on the Life, By the
Late B. D. Browse.’

“Bill?
Lil?
’sme!
’s Will!

Key?
Natch.

Latch-
rope?
Nope.

Ope
nup!

Yup.

You
too.”

THE GAME OF GIZA

102

a m

t h e

l a t e

g r e a t

C h e o p s

p h a r a o h

e m e r i t u s

c e l e s t i a l

r i v e r p i l o t

p r o b a t i o n e r

g o d i m p i o u s

a r c h e o l o g i c a l

i n v e s t i g a t i o n s

n o t w i t h s t a n d i n g

for

bull

pucky

efendi

neither

god nor

geodesist

inheriteth

downtrodden

ankhstridden

straightfaced

indecipherable

WelfareMountain

you

aint

youre

Archys

fulcrum

buddyboy

leastwise

Archimedes

Enterprises

Incorporated

patented the

organizational

infrastructures

p o l y p r o c r e a t i v e

p r o t o p a t r i a r c h

w h i t h e r s o e v e r

t h o u s i f t s t

t h i t h e r w a r d

g a l u m p h e t h

g a l l a n t r y

w a t c h i n g

K a n s a n s

n a r r o w

t h e i r

e y e s

a n d

g o

DIRECTIONS FOR HOME ASSEMBLY:
Cut out along outside margin.
Place on table other side up.
Fold each face over carefully
so that its apex meets center
of base of the face opposite.
Lift faces until apices meet.
HOW TO PLAY THE GAME OF GIZA:
Scale face I to entry tunnel.
Pose for last known snapshot.
Scale face o to entry tunnel.
Calibrate torsion gravimeter.
Scale face b to entry tunnel.
Proceed upon official signal.

SLABS FOR GEORGE HERBERT

AtLeastItsNotA

Synchrostrobic

GizmoWithDials

OnItIKnowIKnow

IvePutYouInIt&

SomeFolksFindA

StandardLength

&BreadthSonnet

Claustrophobic

SoTryAnAerobic

ExerciseOrTwoI

MeanBreatheAah

BreatheSeeIsnt

ThatSomeRelief

103

104

ELIOT RUNS ON

DiscoingLately

Disconsolately

InAnAbandonedA

FrameByTheSeaI

DidNotThinkThe

GoGosSpokeToMe

Discouragingly

CrassAndJingly

&TheHyannisMTV

Inconstant&The

WindsPhilately

Discomfitingly

TinglyLikeAWan

Discountoutlet

Counterpersons

DiscontinuousT

GroupTalkathon

UP TO HERE WITH THE
PIED PIPERS OF GOTHAM

IDontLikeMimeI

DontLikeSleaze

IDontLikeSteel

BandSymphonies

Psalterypawing

SlobsLikeThese

Discountenance

Philanthropies

NorAmIAvidToBe

EyeballedOddly

ByAnIdleRibald

OboistWhoFlaps

APiebaldMotley

WhilstHeTweets

105

POEM TO BE TYPED ON A DONOR CARD

106

GentlesWhereas

TheDoublebreas

tedItemICameAs

HasNoSandf

leas

LesionsOrIdeas

ForEvasiveMeas

uresDoYourBeas

tly&SeemlyBest

ItemMyPancreas

ItemTwoCorneas

Demounted&Reas

sortedCool&Eas

yAsDinos&Rheas

IntoTheLaBreas

MiniSanAndreas

&TheVastUnrest

107

SPIN CONTROL

OhHeDidDidHeOK

UseItLetHimSay

CrossMyHeartHe

DontKnowDiddly

InHisOwnYouMay

FireWhenYouAre

ReadyGridleyDo

ItOrScrewItWay

ThenWeCanPlead

TheIneptnessOf

HisIntrepidity

TaintTheNathan

HalenessItsThe

GGordonLiddity

NINETEENFIFTIES
VOGUE RORSCHACH

BecauseAWriter

ChancedToOffer

APhotographerA

HintNamelyHand

MarianneMooreA

TrulyHumongous

HatICanConnect

JohnJacobAstor

DiegoVelazquez

TheBeaverTrade

DeNirosBravura

DietrichFedora

&APoetPictured

InMyDictionary

108

MAGNIFICAT. BRAVE CAT AT SNIFTER FISHBOWL.

for May Swenson

109

Mmm, just might. Minnow a

moment

now here

now

nowhere

tower a moment enlarged, like a heretic

cataract plunging unchanging, like a cat’s-eye

scatter, like a deco herence, a

re fracting ﬂaw. There’s half

the attraction: eye,

the ethereal, shot

unscathed into

lithosphere, swims!

has a Kitt Peak

vision, is a dis-

location, like the

starﬁsh maw

catapultable out. Palomar! the proffered paw

widens and the sum of

hun-

gers

beg-

gars

Gar-

gantua’s and you arrive

up to your ears in a handstand on one claw.

QUATRAIN FOR KATHY

Triune Transport

(Shakespeare sonnet 105)

Rare
ﬁnd.

Fair,
kind,
and
true.

Und-
u-
lant,
buoy-
ant,
poi-
gnant.

You.

110

Subscribe

(Shakespeare sonnet 107)

Shock,
A-
poc-
a-
lypse,
Con-
script-
ion,
Doom,

Shake-
speare
’s here;
make
room.

Necessary Wrinkles

(Shakespeare sonnet 108)

Spring
plow-
ing.
Thou
mine,
I
thine.

Thy
ston-
y
lone-
ly
face

my
place.

111

Time Exposure
Sonnet 116

Scar
light.

Scar
bright.

One
star
un-
smeared

all
night
long.

Weird.
Tall.
Strong.

112

SONNET IN THE SHAPE OF
A POTTED CHRISTMAS TREE

fury-

bedecked!

O glitter-torn!

Let the wild wind erect

bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect

frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn

all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn!

It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect

tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect;

bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born

now
now

while ox and ass and infant lie
together as poor creatures will

and tears of her exertion still

cling in the spent girl’s eye

and a great ﬁrework in the sky

drifts to the western hill.

113

FILMS TRIP
COMICSTRIP
COLUMN VS.
KRAZY KAEL

SheTellsMeCome-

dyHasMadeACome-

backSheSezCome

Look

ImASitcomE-

clecticSoICome

LopingLikeSome

Shnook&Yup

Come-

dianPlanksCome-

dienneBopsCome-

diansGetsACome-

uppanceAndCome-

downOh

ZOK

MMM

ItsaRockmSockm

ItsTitCity

Come-

dyByScriptComm-

itteeWhereCome

sTheMotto&Come

TheOutcomeCome

RainOrComeCome-

ts&Bombs

114

Come,

Powell&Loy

Come-

dyGotBroke

Come

DoItAgain

OCome-

hitheriestCome-

stible&SlyCome-

dienne

ONarcome-

thodicalIncomp-

oopHerSot

ACome-

onToGetWelcome

In&Not

ANewcome-

nEngineOrEcome-

chanicalVacuum

PistonPump

Come

Gleam

&LocoMe

NoLocosIfISeem

Aleak&Overcome

115

Yes

Comma

Cccome

SdHeIsAnEECumm-

ingsClassicOMe

OMyEvenTheComm-

édiaAndTheComé-

dieHumaineCome

OnAllRosy&Come-

ly&Sexmad&Come-

dicLikeTheCome-

dalistsInACome-

fest&Maybe

Come-

dyKnowsHowCome

GismIsOakum

Cum

Ça

ItsAComicOme-

let

VivaQueCome

Note: Rhyme is, of course, an impurity—one of the grossest. Hell, all

“prosodic form” is an impurity. We’re lucky to have the whole history

of Western literatures to remind us of that, while reveling in our fringe

lit and fringe lingo and taking our guilty incurable delight in rap, sonnet,

Clerihew, all that impedimenta. So, what I’ve tossed in your hopper is

the most egregiously overrhymed (and overnonrhymed) thing I had.

It’s bedizened toad. But heartfelt.

116

CARGO CULT OF THE SOLSTICE AT
HADRIAN’S WALL (DECEMBER 1988)

OTinyBombOTiny

BombWhatGangOf

MadmenMadeThee

OMiddleeastern

MasterpieceNoT

NTBetrayedThee

OEensieWeensie

IndyCarOCreamy

HalvahCandyBar

SeeEvenMrMovie

StarMakesFaces

ToDissuadeThee

IfEldAcquaints

TheElderlyWith

Frailty&Terror

ThePresidentOf

MegabucksFinds

Payable2Bearer

LiningsInLifes

Overcoats&Anti

DagoAnecdotes&

SummersBunchOf

HadjiiotesJust

HaddaBeAnError

117

OCheerfulnessO

WholesomenessO

AmityONiceness

OInfoInHisGrip

AttainingRegal

Impreciseness*

HeTakesTheCake

ForKindnessYet

290PersiansGet

NotOneSpasmNot

OneWetTremorOf

Thinktwiceness

*This form is recommended for beginners. It is as simple as it looks.
Fourteen characters to a line. Difﬁculty arises only when a footnote is
required. Then the poet must contrive a thirteen-character line in place
of the canonical fourteener, so as to leave room for the asterisk. Most
poems in the form evade the difﬁculty by doing without footnotes,
save for poems like this which are designed to be put in textbooks.

118

ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCH YARD

119

“Elegy in a Country Church Yard” was composed for display as one
continuous panorama. Originally published by Pyn-Randall Press, it was
printed on 3 separate sheets of creamy Mohawk Superﬁne, each 7.725
inches high by 22 inches long, with slim margins for overlapping and
dexterous gluing. It came packaged in a thin cardboard box, 11.5 inch-
es wide by 8.725 inches tall and .5 inches deep. In addition to the three
sheets that comprise the visual poem, a sheeet of the same size, with
the “Elegy Written” was contained therein.

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

ELEGY WRITTEN

Rubbings

Directory

Restroom

Crafts

Souvenirs

South Slope

Soft! her

e lies Bill Bunn,

His labor at last undone:
He sought and nearly won
Decent poetic oblivion
By writing no poems. None.
I’ve foxed the son of a gun
And ﬁxed his name to one.
Drag him out into the sun.
Eternity, meet Bill Bunn.

The Pylon

Nellie Belamy

, 1923–1970

No no no no no no NO, Nell,

Don’t pass that snowplow,
I’ve told you and told you and

told

you.

(But Nell—Well, Hell,
You know Nell when she’s told.)

The T

empietto

A. Jar

Git ici.
Par

Ubu Roi

Il n’nie pas

133

Ces “Pssst” que dit
La Tante Pispis
A ses commeres les doigts.

East Slope

ams grubs nuts materia medica bulbs bulbs BULBS O Bulbul

Bull Williams I am

still tilling gingerly your ﬁeld of focus your ﬁeld of force! Psy-

chic chinchbug!

ou work in the earth so fast it’s a gas of a pas seul the two of

you do Dr. W.

ﬁnch chicks skitter in clusters to jump or perch in churchyard

urchin chorus!

The T

win Mausoleums

I dig for the I I was, but the I I dig up’

s not I.

I get mad. “Hey I,” I cry—but the I I cry to’s
one I I may not dub “I,” I may not, not I. “I
get you.” sez I, “I dig. You old I,” I sez,
“old Ego-I, I can eye any I I can eye, can I?”
“Epiphenomenologically no but you’ll never know,”
goes echo an ego ago, “though aye-for-an-aye is no
mean motto.”

I ask Are the I I dig and the I I dig out
any I I can say was I? I say Yes: any I I dug
was the I I did, and the I I did was the I I was,
and the I I was was all I!
“I see,” sez the I I ax’d, “but was I I? he heh heh”
I stand back. This here’s one excavation slated for
industrioenvironmentalistical uplift and eco-
logical dozing
in.

134

The Mysterious Monument

Oh me oh my

, I’m an Is no extravagantheartedness raises,

Oh me oh my, I’m an Is no Plutonic dreamhoard sequesters,

Ye Gods!

Here lies

lies done,

Duns Scot,

Scot free:

free-load

me,

monomaniacal miniaturized philossifers:

transsubstantiationalist disseminarians.

Dog-eat-dog has had its day.

Now the cur few has his say.

“Shhh,” says poet Thos. Gray

extemporaneously.

Headstones of the Nor

theast Addition

Stranger in God’

s name who gave you

Carte blanche or passing fancy to
Weep for the late Leota Pettigrew?

Away, you parvenu
A drier eye is due.
This Leota, who

135

Sought strength, joy, & decent few
Disciplinarian thrills through

The

Wye, Iowa
W. C. T. U.

Earth, receive and honored Guest,

To be exact an Edgar.

Take his old hat & hang it up;

Do him a laurel headgear

To loll among the revelers

At your Polonian supper

By Mr. W. B. Yeats

And Dr. Martin Tupper,

And by and by by me & Bly,

When he & I decide to get fed up here.

Hold your
water a minute hold your
cover & hold your
ﬁre! I said, Next p-head starts in on the old ger-
onimo bit’s bucking for Unkonwn Soldier!
So the next thing I know the stupid motherfucker is up

waltzing into the old AK47 like he was Ray Bolger.

Starched uppercrust
Straforders mill
About nonplused
And acting chill.
They’ve taken ill
Your ﬁnal trust,

136

Madbabblingest
Rebellious Will.
You stand robust
And bitchy still,
Trumpeting just
You watch my dust;
And watch we will,
Since dig we must.

You’ve scrounged up your last snooze, Charles Grolmes.

You’ve breezed in twelve twelfths schnappsed once too

damned often.

Stretched ther ﬁlth-splotched like some sludge-wreathed

slough,

Look at yourself: ploughed ﬁelds got an edge on you.

Mute inglorious Milton Schwartz
Blushed red when the news reports
Spoke of quashed or mooted probes.
Words were volts! and at the

Globe’

Scr

umptious and refractory

Word

impeachability

Something in him had to give.

He was hypersensitive.

O there’s no truth like an old truth:
Sincerest words I ever heard wordsmith say
Was the last words of old George Starbuck,
Ninety-one years old if he was a day:
“Ed,” he says, “I got it now,
Gonna do that dad-blamed novel,
All I gotta do’s to get squared away.”

137

Notice:

Rubbings of the Angel out of stock.

Inquire about our layaway plan.
Military Annex not uner Parish maintenance.
Ring for Sexton.

138

poems from the 1980s to the 1990s

PA R T T H R E E

141

Three Chapters from TALKIN’ B. A. BLUES; THE LIFE
AND A COUPLE OF DEATHS OF ED TEASHACK;
OR, HOW I DISCOVERED B.U., MET GOD, AND
BECAME AN INTERNATIONAL FIGURE; A
RHYMING FICTION IN SEVEN CHAPTERS

1 This is the Place All Right

More one-arm chairs. More pi-r-squares to

stare at. Ain’t it awful.

The same old chalk-eraser rack.

It oughta be unlawful.

Playin’ pretend in some upended

glass-and-concrete wafﬂe.

A whole new triumph-of-the-mind.

Another ediﬁce designed

To look like someone’s scoresheet full of

boxes-for-the-answer.

A few lights broke. A few NO SMOKING

signs in case of cancer.

I been on this widebody ﬂight from

Reveille to Recess

Since good king Og was knockin’ the

Neanderthals to pieces.

Same brass-protected non-connected

wallplugs from forgotten

Technological breakthroughs in the

art of stufﬁn’ cotton

Into the minds of nine-year-olds.

Same chalkdust. Ain’t it rich?

142

Same nameless passkey-activated

demolition switch.

These academic ambiences

really do get to me.

They’re always done in some new unfam-

iliar shade of gloomy.

An’ someone’s always found a way of

jazzin’ up the blackboards.

Like green! Or shufﬂe ’em up between

the pull-down maps and tackboards.

It always puts me into synch,

kinda simmers down my mixture,

To sight my toe on the little glow

from the lectern lighting ﬁxture

An’ nod off, to the distant soft

erosion of the Velamints.

I shoulda been a Periodic

Table of the Elements.

I shoulda been a paratactic

clause, or some o’that.

I shoulda been a junior high school

lunch room vend-o-mat.

I shoulda been a tome. A text.

A t-square. Ain’t it awful.

I shoulda been a folding chair

chained in a four-man cofﬂe

At Carver High. . . But maybe I

should introduce myself.

2 Grand March

I’m the Universal Educational

Veteran and Victim.

143

You can name your budgetary dodge

or pedagogical dictum,

Some schoolboard’s tried it out on me an’

got themself a buzz.

If they made a raid on the second grade

(escorted by the Fuzz)

With a new technique for remedial Greek,

there by gum I was

An’ I waved my hands like a brass band’s

trafﬁc ofﬁcer, because

I’m the irreversible ideational

overload conniption.

If a stone-cold ding-a-ling taught the course,

I signed up for conscription.

I’m all your fault, I’m the thang that crawlt

out of the nucular gestalt

With its teeth absurdly manicured

and half o’ that twelve-letter word

Sufﬁcin’ it for sustenance and

backtalk baby I am the Nerd

Outa Nursery School I’m the First Grade Fool

I’m the Kindergargoyle Gallopin’ Ghoul

Gone gaga over the ink-remover

an’ Magic Marker an’ Herbert Hoover

Memorial twelve-foot window-hooks

an’ squiggledy-diddled attendance books

With individual lines and rows

for Went Weewee an’ Picked Nose

An’ Demonstrated Propensities

an’ Stood Up Screaming Attention Please

I’m the Universal Educational

Veteran an’ Victim.

If a dog showed up to teach, they pointed

144

my way an’ they sic’d him.

I’m a textbook case, I’m the zero-base

communicational interface

Between Yestermaybe an’ Hey-Sweet-Baby-

you-trekkin’-inna-my-soulspace,

I’m the promised land for the whole damn

pandemonium of ﬁxers

With their polygraph-combo feedback module

videotapedeck mixers

I’ve done more rolls at the ﬂight controls

of more damn learning-lab con-souls

Than IBM has memorychips

an’ Kellogg-brand has cornﬂakes,

I’m the living death, I’m the shibboleth

to your ethnographical conﬂicts

I’m the thanks you get for the en-tire wetback

transAtlantical inﬂux . . .

But there I go: showboatin’. Jus’like

all of us was kinfolks.

I start to run, I plumb jump the gun,

vrumvrum, vrumvrum, vrumvrumvrum.

So let’s jus’ take it easy here,

while I tell you where I come from.

7 Honorary Doctorate of Laws

Now that was frightening: no white tile.
No geezer-gallery. No ﬁve-mile
2001

space-corridors

With jetstream stratocumulus for ﬂoors.
The Lord stood shinin’, plain as day.
But the campus hadn’t gone away.

145

The dozers hadn’t budged an inch.
The Chapel hung where a power winch
Had left it twistin’ slowly slowly.
Same cityscape. But Holy Moley,
The look on everybody’s mugs.
Students, professors, teamsters, thugs—
Whole legions of the conscience-stricken
Saggin’ backwards an’ lookin’ chicken,
Half the landscape a-sayin’ prayers
But the only sound is the Man Upstairs:

“Now get this straight, ’cause I’ll say it once.
I been receivin’ evidence
You’ve took my work an’ got it foozled
An’ let yourselves get all bamboozled
By scalawags that claim to be
(If you’ll pardon the expression) Me.
Well if life has one prerequisite
It sure ain’t bosses bossin’ it
Down to the last least ﬁve-cent-retail
Who-puts-what-on-his-Grapenuts details
Au contrairy. You’d be surprised
The wonders an unsupervised
Gene-bank think-tank and ﬂoatin’ zoo
Cast loose in outer space can do
When the man upstairs just takes off elsewhere.
You get these bosses talkin’, they’ll swear
Everything depends on breathless
Experts following the deathless
Principles of pyramidal
Bureaucratic taradiddle
And ideational oversight
But they don’t speak for me. Good night,
If half they thought was halfway true
There’d never been a Boston U
For them to futz with in the ﬁrst place.

146

But let that go. It ain’t the worst place
I coulda picked to place my trust
In the gumption of the scrufﬁest
To scratch their way to grace an’ glory.
So take down this here cover-story:

Way way back in the nineteen-eighties
God saw everything gone to Hades.
He nose-dived into the degradation
And spent a moment on re-creation.
The darkness parted, the shit ﬂew,
God stood back an’ said: Boston U!
He said Rise an’ shine! He said Multiply!
He said Work out e to the i pi
As a tripole moment in n dimensions
An’ climb aboard! ’cause my intention’s
To save Creation (except New York)
By incarnatin’ an antiquark
An’ dressin’ him up in cast-off jeans
As God’s own ever-lovin’ means
To shake this place. But for now by thunder
You get his ass up out from under
That piece o’ GMC equipment
An’ stop hog-tyin’ his classrooms up for shipment.
You make a space for this here boy.
He’s the cosmological counterploy
To all that jive an’ all that jargon
You jokers throw into the bargain
When some poor yokel who don’t know better
Comes wavin’ his admission letter.
He’s Grunge City, he’s God’s love
An’ he’s this week’s incarnation of

The universal educational

Veteran an’ Victim.

147

You’ve talked him black an’ blue but you

might notice you ain’t licked him.

He’s the inaccessible irrepressible

classroom volunteer.

He’s fake he’s lazy he drives you crazy

he shows up every year

With a dead guitar an’ a bridge too far

bit into by the strings

An’ some stuff he wrote himself, unquote,

somewhere, among his things,

An’ a kind o’ Cisco Houston look,

at least until he sings.

He’s the nonstop ﬂip-top liaison

with the Land That Nivver Was;

An’ this is your Creator speakin’,

signin’ off . . .” because

Talkin’ B.A.’s about talked out I guess.
Next to come is an eight-hour fancy-dress
World premiere of my Talkin’ B.S.
Oh yes.
Meanwhile Lord deliver us,
There must be more commodious
Places of refreshment than this here.

148

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

You are the retribution we invoke.
You are the sudden daybreak we proclaim.
We ﬂock to the unburdening: our shame
Is History: pale alibi: bad joke.

A mud of Nothing labored and awoke.
A spawn of cities crumbled into ﬂame.
A galloping of paladins became
Nightmare and died screaming when it foaled you.

The nebulae come running to behold you.
If it were not so I would have told you.
Surely goodness and mercy are the name
The darkness and the starry legions spoke
When they took up the anthem and enscrolled you
In the sparse tangled banners of the dawn.

149

MAGNIFICAT IN TRANSIT
FROM THE TOLEDO AIRPORT

The world has a glass center.
I saw the sign for it.

TOLEDO

GLASS CENTER OF THE WORLD

That’s what surprised me.
I mean that it was Toledo.
I knew the center was glass.
That’s why we’ve got this cleaning-and-polishing operation

going.

There were bulldozers outside of Toledo, working away.

It’s a beginning.
Move this junk, we’ll be able to see in.
When the Chinamen at the other end gear up, we’ll be able to

see through.

It’s like the completion of the ﬁrst transcontinental railroad.

It’s like what the Egyptians had in mind when they invented

the pyramids.

It’s like what God would have opted for if he had been

an optician.

There it’ll be.
This really tremendous lens.

Think of the excitement when they put the ceremonial white

handkerchief

into the outstretched hand of the Final Polisher.
What if he suddenly thinks he’s Sonja Henie?
What if he just gets awestruck and sits down?

Actually there’ll be an airtight operating procedure.
Polish it off. Take measurements. Melt in.

150

You can do that, when it’s glass.
Goes into what they call a “solid solution.”
“Doping the mix,” they call it. Vary the additive
and the whole ball of glass comes out in a wonderful color:
rose. ultramarine. turquoise. maroon.
It’s enough to make you lose your marbles.

It is a marble.

I know all about marbles, I said, this is my bag!
Will it be a milkie? Will it be a purie? Will it be a swirl?
“Oh get more bulldozers, Ohio,” I said to myself in a ﬁt

of eloquence.

“Toledo is the glass center of the world.”

I felt like the Boy’s Life monthly good luck stories.
“Cabin Boy with Columbus.” “Young Hank Ford.”

I always liked the one where the safari
saves me (I’ve just been orphaned by the Zulu)
and lets me tag along with them up country
into the wild unknown Witwatersrand.
You know the story: how the thieving porter
ﬁlches the beads, and ﬁlls the bags with stones.

Toledo Toledo, I warbled,
even though this Red Yellow Cab Company taxicab is bearing

me away from you at maximum achievable velocity,

even though my appointment is in Bowling Green,
I shall push in the press for deployment of Project Ploughshare.
I shall lobby. I shall make mailings. I shall crusade.
Instant redistribution of silage among the developed peoples!
Riverbanks full of afterburgers! Boom!
Is there a high-gain, high-risk, maximum-impact slot in there

somewhere for a creative projects person with hands-on image-
management experience and a desire to position himself on the

151

forefront of America’s growth industry for the 1990s?

Toledo, I have arrived!

I have arrived in Bowling Green.

Bowling Green State, the Athens of the Midwest.

Emptiness. Houses. Emptiness-houses. Shrublets.
Grass. What am I doing here? This trike.

Here, from his door, to my rescue, comes my host.
He is Ray DiPalma.
He is a poet.
He is from Pittsburgh, Steel Center of the World.

Oh damn. Wouldn’t you know? He is. It’s true.

He is from Pittsburgh Steel Center of the World
And I knew that. I used to have a steelie.
Too heavy, they said, that’s cheating, you go home.

You ever look down deep into a steelie?
Really strange reﬂections.
Whole horizon.
You! bigger than everybody’s houses.
Big-nose.
Steely little eyes.

You know what’s wrong with American free enterprise?
It’s two-bit people in two-bit little places
doin’ a two-bit number on theirselves.

Myself I know the world has a glass center.
Myself I know it’s Toledo, built on sand.
And soon now, in the place of the bulldozer,
soon now, under the battlements and banners,

152

rose, ultramarine, turquoise, maroon,
this scraggy ol’, scruffy ol’, vermin-infested slagpile,
this rubble-in-arms, gonna sing out loud an’ clear,
like a great bell, like the choir of all the angles.
I’ll get more dope on it as soon as I get home to Iowa City.

Iowa City—the Athens of the Midwest.
I have a friend there in the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.
Damned if it isn’t true—Pittsburgh Plate Glass.

Not Pittsburgh Paint now, mind you. Pittsburgh Paint
sells glass put out by Owens Illinois.
At least that’s what it does in Iowa.
Or did, when I last had a broken window.
To tell the truth, that was a while ago.
Recently I’ve been living in New Hampshire.

They make a claim there about maple syrup
but I say let’s pretend they never said it.
I mean I’m all for backwoods boosterism
but when you start to ask folks to believe
this mighty item all wrapped up in blue,
this whopping gobbet of long-lasting goodness,
this great big hunk, this Earth, this greater Mars,
is something with a novelty interior—
a sort of oversized designer chocolate—
well that’s beyond preposterous. That’s dumb.

Sometimes when I consider how this world
is given to outright exaggeration,
I think I should’ve stood put in Columbus.

Columbus Ohio, the Athens of the Midwest.
Home of the mighty Buckeyes. I was born there
and moved away when I was four days old

153

and always like to tell it that way, acting
as if I’d sized the place up and skedaddled.

The Buckeyes are Ohio State of course.
Ohio State is not Ohio U.
Ohio U’s a college, and a good one,
off in a little mill town name of Athens.
God knows what Athens is the Athens of.

Actual

buckeyes—just in case you wondered—

Actual

buckeyes are the kind of nut

you’d pick up off the sidewalks in October
and ram a toothpick into for a spindle
to hold a set of cut-out paper sails
and join Miss Dean’s Columbus-Day ﬂotilla
across the blue construction-paper ocean
to prove the world was chock-a-block with marvels
to make things out of, Right Beneath Your Feet.

I think she made me a Discoverer,
Miss Dean did. And Miss Whitman. And Miss Ide.
I got the real good news about creation.

Merciful Muchness, Principle of Redundance,
Light of the World converted at every turn,
the world is too much for us, wait and see!

154

SIGN

Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now
Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, ﬂung
To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice.

And the ﬁrst rows, shaken with an afterslice
That’s bowled them into their seats like a big wet ciao.
O daffy panoply O rare device

O ﬂashing leg-iron at a whopping price
Whipping us into ecstasies and how,
The whole galumphing Garden swung and swung,

A rescue helicopter’s bottom rung
Glinting and spinning off, a scud of ﬂuff,
A slash of petals up against the bough,

A juggler’s avalanche of silken stuff
Gushing in white-hot verticals among
Camels and axels and pyramids, oh wow,

Bewilderment is parachute enough.
We jolt. A sidewise stutterstep in chorus.
The other billboards ﬂicker by before us.

Gone! with a budded petulance that stung.
So talented! So targeted! So young!
Such concentration on the bottom line!

We vanish down the IRT. A shine.
A glimmer. Something. Nothing. To think twice
Was to have lost the trick of paradise.

155

INCIDENT OF THE BLIZZARD OF ’81

Note: Three incidents of the “vanishing hitchhiker” made the

national newswires in 1980, and in the fall of 1981 a book

appeared, devoted to him and his reappearances. Always, the

hiker talks earnestly of religion. Always, at highway speed, the

car door opens, it must have opened, and the hiker is gone.

I left Fat City, toolin’ my Coupe de Gras.
I’m givin’ them high-hatters the ha ha
Like J. Paul Getty if Getty had been the Shah.

Man with the map of neon in his eyeballs.
Wigwaggin’ with a backpack full of Bibles
Next to the scorched blue chassis of a Ford.
Levels a sixpack at me. Swings aboard
And ballyhoos the good news of the Lord
From Cedar Rapids halfway to Grand Island.

Singin’ his checkered pastureland is my land.
Settin’ the Miller cans up single ﬁle and
Mowin’ em down like Midianites. Nebraska

Vanished without a trace. No road, no landscape,
Just Kellogg’s famous featherweight white breakfast
Shot from the snub-nose silos of the plains.

Seventy per and a prayer in place of chains,
Opens the door and gets out. Shit for brains.
Stunt like that he could pass for Lyndon Baines.

Before he left he spouted some damn doggerel
And handed me six tickets to the Inaugural.
Balls and all. That’s how I met Carl Sagan

156

And got to shake the hand of Nancy Reagan
And heard that stuff about Menachim Begin
I told you back there west of Wichita?

157

ON GOZZOLI’S PAINTED ROOM
IN THE MEDICI PALACE

Lorenzo da Credi
Honored the Lord, St. Joseph, and Our Lady,
But not so hotsy-totsily
As did Benozzo Gozzoli.

What a parade. The sun
Bejewels everyone.
A barebones countryside
Stiffens to take magniﬁcence in stride.

No wonder yokels gawk
And pieces of livestock
Go gallivanting gauchely while their lazy
Husbandmen (bunch of no-count Abruzzesi)

Loaf in a far-off byre
Where there might be a ﬁre
(It’s hard to make the glow out at this distance)
And mummers dance assistance

To someone in disguise.
He seems to be preparing a surprise
Tableau-vivant with Potentates and Peasants
And far-fetched birthday presents.

Never was sweeter, swifter, swanker, sportier
Caravan of the noble genus courtier
Visited on the sticks in one fell swoop.
It’s every bit as special as the troop

Of lallygagging ﬁve-year-olds intuit.
How does Benozzo do it?

158

The whole old Christmas story,
The stagecraft, the accoutrements of glory

Huddled into a space about the size
Of that abstracted foreground horseman’s eyes.
The one who watches us.
Alert, not curious.

Reserved, not bored.
This is the ﬁt companion for a Lord.
A Lord himself, if destined.
None of your bullyragging, lead-intestined

Ravagers of the Apennines, but boss.
The man a man of judgment does not cross,
Ever.
Do not expect Benozzo to play clever.

His game is not distortion.
There is no disproportion
In anything he chooses, tells, or shows.
The facts are not Benozzo’s to dispose.

A landscape has been blest.
The primacy of gentleness expressed.
And to a lady’s credit she
Has been called on by a Medici.

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling

clumbsy.

I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the ﬁrst place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
“The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIII

.”

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every

time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic

can’t?

I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-

cultural-odds.

You won’t get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I’d sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I’m on their side. I better be, after my brush with “inﬁnitessimal.”

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

159

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, “George . . .”

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
“Their their,” I needed to hear them say, “their their.”

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying “tsk tsk.”

I know they’re there. I know where the beggars are,
With their ﬂash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast ’em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let ’em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I ﬁx those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes

hoslgmbn,

And I say one word, and the word that I say is “Oslgmbnh.”

“Om?” they inquire. “No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you’ve only

got two more guesses

And you only get one more hint: there’s an odd number

of esses,

And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no

eight

And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers’ bracket
And disqualiﬁes you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket

160

161

And that’s all the time extension you’re going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don’t be surprised if it’s the bowdlerized regularized

paperback abridgment of Pepys

Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys.”

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood

Brougham

Like something out of the last days of Fellini’s Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each

other “Ougham!

O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!” and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One ﬁnds out as one goes aughan.

162

THE GREAT DAM DISASTER A BALLAD

to Kathy

Have you heard of the great dam disaster
When the ﬂood control project gave way?
They were searchin’ for seven days after.
Then the search party called it a day.

Then the Sheriff drove up in his ﬂivver.
Then the widow collapsed and despaired,
While a couple of miles down the river
An attractive young neighbor declared:

“There’s a somethin’ keeps bumpin’ them willers.
There’s a somethin’ humped up in the brush.
You be brave an’ hang on to your pillers.
Sleep along little darlins an’ hush.

I’ll be back when I’ve doubled the jinglers
On the stakes by the stormcellar door.
When them dead men feel that in their ﬁngers
They jes’ whimper an’ head for the shore.”

Light she ran with her housecoat a-ﬂappin’,
Where the waters was roilin’ an’ high.
There was somethin’ a-waitin’ to happen,
By the strobe-lighted look of the sky.

If you drift like a mist through the meadow,
If you curl to the edge of the draw,
You could nudge yourself up to a knothole,
But you might not believe what you saw.

On the bank where the crib and the shed ran

163

Hard aground in a Red River ﬂing,
She is sprawled on the arm of a dead man,
And the dead man is startin’ to sing:

“Roll me over my lovely my precious.
My migration has scarcely begun.
I can feel myself growing ﬂotatious
To the wandering beams of the sun.

I can feel the old tug of the Delta
Where I drunk myself sick in my teens.
Roll me over. I suddenly felt a
Gnawful lot like a kid full of beans.

When the barns take a turn at the barn dance,
When the sheds start to thread through the trees,
I succumb to a superabundance
Of the Red River drifter’s disease.

Give a kick to my side if you love me.
Cast me loose from this willowy slough.
There’s a damn sight less dam site above me
And a damn sight less fuss and to-do.

They can bury a crate full of keepsakes
From my notable farming career.
They can plead for some feed from them cheapskates
At the Farmers Supply in Grenier.

They can tell my twelve sons and my daughter
How I tended to take things too far,
Like the night I went down for some water
And ran off with the whole reservoir.

It’s a sorrowful name I’m a-leaving.
It’s a sorrowful sadness I feel.
If you get tuckered out with the grieving

164

You can try this address in Mobile.”

Now the neighbor is gone from the valley.
Now the ﬂivver is out on display
In the Bonnie-and-Clyde grand ﬁnale
At the Wild-West Pavilion Café.

Now the widow reclines at the window
By the banks of the new reservoir.
On some shirts that the Sheriff come into
She embroiders a ﬁve-pointed star.

THE UNIVERSE IS CLOSED AND HAS REMs

to Celia and Wally, to Milly and Gene

One. one. one. one.
That’s what God said.
Singular, singular, singular, singular,
Inﬁnitely outspread.

Nothing under the nothing not even the sun.

No weight, no breadth, no negative, no north,
No three dimensions beckoning a fourth forth
With monumental pantomime, no buzz
Of energy-exchange, no instances.

It might have happened. Who knows which comes ﬁrst,
The point ﬂash, or some perfectly dispersed
Extrapolation into time-reversed
Of this explosion, this diaspora?

You like the God that freaks out and goes “Unh!”
I like the opposite extreme. How dull,
How uncollected, how bare-minimal
The necessary element might be.
One. one. one. Eternity.

Dead rudiments. None veer. None coalesce.

A pretty perpetuity unless—
Once one wants one twice two twice two the formalities take

place.

165

166

Sub-elemental sarabandes objectify a space
Extravagantly sparse, and stilled, and stirless, but perhaps
Complicit. Something happening. Collapse.

Absolute bash, and then

Sub-elemental smithereens again

But suddenly and picturesquely clotted
At every scale, down to the not-ness knotted
Into the nothing where a quark sleeps furious
And nags the smarmy noggins of the curious
With pointy-headed notions of the sphere
A quantum mass might shrink to, to cohere
Into its own black hole,
Inviolably sole
And satisfying to the theorist
Who likes his distillations with a twist
Of irreducibility at bottom.

Welcome to basic. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
That does it for the ﬁrst few trillion years.

Now then. If all you spacetime pioneers
’ll dig into your brieﬁng kits, behind
The replicative check sheet you should ﬁnd
A rose-red pair of actuary googols
In case the credit mechanism boggles,
One windfall apple softened up with slug holes
To sniff at, and a parts list for these fogballs.
Mumble it to yourself if you get dizzy.
And hold tight. The next wiggle is a doozy.
Get used to it, ’cause you’ll be getting lots o’ these

167

Interchangeable pre-big-bang hypotheses.
And if the rose-red googols are a dud,
You bring it up at . . .

3 Question Period

Are we the ﬁrst bounce, or the eightieth?

These dead immensities inventing death
Inventing difference inventing brilliance.
How many of them? Ten? A dozen? Trillions?

But if Xerxes
Had had Xeroxes . . .

If the aurochs
Got anthrax . . .

If the Mingel-Wurm
Returns . . .

No seriously. Look,
I mean I’ve read the book.
If having a trick thumb can tip the odds,
Why us-the-klutz? Why not cephalopods?
Put brain behind those graspings and completions,
Tune up those ﬁne calcareous secretions
To gestate little lock-picks and escapements,
A quick squid’d run rings around these apemen’s
Lathes and beams and hieroglyph prostheses
For busting big things down to byte-size pieces.
A thought could be the father to a stack
Of nacreous holography, played back
Instantly anywhere a clammy grip
Fondled the iridescent microchip.

168

And when it came to synthesizing sheer
Spectacle, to outface Poseidon’s mere
Opulence and fecundity and scenery
With monuments of unaided Balanchinery—
Well—what I mean—why us?
Why not an offshoot of the octopus?

(If you knotted a cosmos.
If you twisted its wristwatch.
If you skidded it parsecs
In a picosec.)

But
The Ik . . .

The euglena . . .

The ozone . . .

4 Nap Time

Hush.

Everything in a minute. What’s the rush?

It may work out. The big Let-there-be-light
May keep receding barely-out-of-sight.

Us prospectors can pan among the vestiges
With bright eyes and big dishes, nabbing hostages
But never quite contriving to decode
A backstairs access to the mother lode
That heaved up unimaginably once
And left this avalanche of evidence.
Awake, asleep, it streams right through our ﬁngers.
Once in a blue moon, a neutrino lingers.
It drives these needle-in-the-haystack trackers
Crackers.

169

I like the latest inklings. Just this year
A theorist has posited a sheer
Propensity of Zilch to self-destruct.
That’s what he says began it. That’s what sucked
Somethingness out of Nothingness. Shazam.

ZILCH + ZILCH + NIL + NIL = NAUGHT

Cryptarithm in a puzzle book I bought.

I like the sense of consequence. Hot damn.

All this consequent middle. All this muddle.
Me the unlikely frog in so big a puddle
It puts the perfervid fancies of the priests
Back at about the level of a beast’s
Diffuse imaginings of huger mangers
Where ever more companionable strangers
Scratch him behind the ears and pitch down food.

If only I could see how to preclude
Acting on every triggerable spin-off.

I can’t. It’s going to kill us, sure as gonif
And gizmo gravitate and groove.
The mills will grind; the merchandise will move.

I’m sorry Lennon died, but Lennon did.
What got him wasn’t Belial-the-Kid.

Simple Possession loitered, and it pondered,
And found, until its concentration wandered,
a momentary sense of Rationale.

Recess time at the Okey-Doke Corral.

One possible response of the biota

170

observable in front of the Dakota
Became the probable, since there was time.

Possession was nine-tenths of it, and I’m
Possessed. I have these Titans that I’ve paid for.
Polarises, Poseidons, Mark 12s made for
Me, and I haven’t found a way to ditch ‘em.

If I could tough it out like Robert Mitchum
And take the beating, conﬁdent the script
Would have me up, goof-balled and pistol-whipped
But standing, to choke back humiliation
And pick up the routine of my vocation
After the big-time baddies have their ball.

Not in the cards. We won’t be here at all.
State-of-the-art has got way out ahead of us.

Dumb, then, for the merely not-yet-dead of us
To love the thing that kills us. But I do.

So beautiful, so various, so new.

Some times I want to bang their heads on the Universe

and scream

“It’s beautiful, you balmy bastards! THIS IS NOT A DREAM.”
But no. I take my task as to record
At close hand, for the glory of no Lord,
Delight of no posterity, some part
Of what it was to take the world to heart
When all of it and more came ﬂooding at us,
Absolutely positively gratis
And ravishing and perfectly disposed
To pal around with us an undisclosed
Number of million human generations
Until the Sun god goes on iron rations

171

And zaps us with a real survival crisis.

Wonderful: we just graduate from Isis
And Kali and Jehovah and all that
And start to see how hugely where-we’re-at
Exceeds the psychedelic pipedreams of it,
And whammo.

Tell the whole shebang I love it,

And buck the odds, and hope, and give it my
Borrowed scratched-up happy hello-goodbye.

172

THE STAUNCH MAID AND THE
EXTRATERRESTRIAL TREKKIE

hommages à Julia Child

Stand back, stand back,
Thou blob of jelly.
Do not attack
A maid so true.
I didn’t pack
My Schiaparelli
To hit the sack
With a thang like you.

You maniac!
Go raid a deli.
Pick on a snack
Of barbecue.
A nice Cal-Jack?
Some Buoncastelli.
Here, have a daiq-
Uiri. Have two.

Like a Big-Mac
Machiavelli
She tossed him crack-
Ers and ragout.
She fed him rack
Of lamb, sowbelly,
Absinthe and cack-
Leberry stew.

And while she crack-
Ed the eggs and velly

173

Adroitly hack-
Ed the lamb in two,
Like that weird ac-
Tress on the telly,
Kept up a wack-
Y parlez-vous.

You shall not lack
For mortadelle.
You shall not lack
For pâte-à-choux.
You shall have aq-
Uavit quenelle
Mit sukiyak-
I au fondue.

Not yet you stack
Of parallelly
Pulsating vac-
Uoles of goo,
You sloshing brack-
Ish stracciatelli
Of dental plaque
And doggy doo!

I still must frac-
Ture the patellae
And baste the back-
Sides of a few
Agneaux-de-Pâques-
Avec-Mint-Jelly
Before I ac-
Quiesce to you.

I said back back!
Have Mrs. Shelley

174

Or Countess Drac-
Ula re-do
You you great hack-
Work by Fuseli.
I’m not the quack
To unscramble you.

She threw him mac-
Kerel en gelée,
Mulled Armagnac,
Ripe Danish blue.
She staggered back.
He swore by Hell he
Had come to shack
And not soft-shoe

Just at the ac-
Me of Indeli-
Cacy and ac-
Rimony too,
While she distrac-
Ted him pellmelly,
The massed attack
Came in on cue:

Her Uncle Zack
From Pocatelly,
The whole Galac-
Tica

and crew

On a Kawasak-
I-Granatelli-
Ford-Lotus trac-
Tor cab crashed through.

They had a tac
Nuke from New Delhi.

175

They had a black-
Snake from the zoo.
A few Kojak-
Eries from Telly.
Biff Bam Fppplt Thwack.
Poop poop a doo.

They hacked that frac-
Tious vermicelli
Till the tentac-
Ulations ﬂew.
A rather tack-
Y, rather smelly
Business, but chac-
Un à son gout.

Without a knack
For belly-belly,
Without the ac-
Umen to do
Celeriac
Farcie Duxelle,
What would a crack-
Er damsel do?

SUNDAY BRUNCH IN THE BOSTON RESTORATION

for George and Bab

I’m coming, I’m coming, only a few small purchases.
But look at these little gizmos with the ceramic crankhandles.

Find me the cheeses! Get me a melon! Buy me a lime!
Get me in ten-man tandem with them poets of the olden time
pillaging the quotidian, parceling it up into rhyme
and trucking it off the doorstep of posterity to deliver it
squalling righteous and barefaced like an Edward Everett.

Get thee a heftier tote bag O my soul
we can open it wide and throw everything in we can call it an
Ode to the Boston of Zinn White Wojtyla Douglass Douglas

Tubman and Martineau

we can open it wider and call down inside of it Rise up as one

and be vocative O

baskets O briskets O bouquets O gourmet dishes
O rarebits and rice-boats, tikia-kebobs and shishes.
O microwave chicken Kiev O cashew quiches,
I am getting the hang of it, righthand-to-lefthand-lettered

geﬁlteﬁshes,

weird little items for opening oysters. O knishes

O gjetost oh foozle it shouldn’t be quiches it’s quiches.
As in Gimme your Klimts, your Toulouses, your scenic Helvetias
and where is the waiter and where are our rock-cornishes

ﬂambées Grand-Corniches

and what do they do for an encore, these fabulous groomed-

to-the-eyeballs geishas

steering their highstrung miniatures on scissoring leashes
from the Parker House to Felicia’s I mean Feli-, uh, Felicia’s

176

177

by way of the two-buck prawns and the 3-lb. peaches
of Quincy Market and Haymarket market O sakes O pulques O

chichas

oh foozle again I keep running aground on these rhapsodological

beaches

where as soon as you say geishas you wish you could take it

back and say geishas

but too late! too late! they go vanishing under the feathery

glassed-in acacias

looking as ravishingly underdeveloped as Sam Jaffe’s or J.

Carroll Naish’s

MittelShangrilavian accent when they used to come on after

the Ars Gratias

but look! handpainted Haitian creches I mean creches
but look! ravaging tandems of pitilessly nubile Arapeshes

closing on us like a full-court press-gang for the La Leches I’m

sorry La Leches,

their Chés, turquoise-on-pink, vivid against giant four-color dis-

play Chés

and the vocables won’t sit still it’s like one of the W.H.A.’s
amateur-nights-on-ice it’s like maybe it’s something I ate chez

O’Dea’s maybe it’s pardon me lady that cafe chaise pardon me

cafe chaise

longue I am fainting a little don’t tell me I know it it shouldn’t

be J. Carroll Naish’s

pitheco-Indo-European it shoulda been J. Carroll plain old

Naish’s

as in On second thought we’ll settle for two corned beef hashes
and a cup of joe
and a quick ticket to Nantasket or Squibnocket or Ilot-au-Haut
because as a Nash from the great days of the Nashes might’ve

lamented, O

it isn’t the cuisinart it’s the cuisine argot

178

and I don’t care if it’s the argot as in the argot merchant disaster
or the argot as in What kindsa colada makings the bar got
or all three
simultaneously
as in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
which is about as much help on the point as a set of chopsticks

with a hero sandwich

but at least lends the entire weight of its authority to the inherent

confusion

while the ode goes marching along without me to its conclusion
twirling its objects methodically while the rhymes keep ranks
in spite of an occasional brownbagger or Pomeranian nipping

at its ﬂanks

and holy Ned. Like Nantucket said to the Argo’s hapless master
Good-bye, Captain Papadopoulos, and thanks.

179

ON AN URBAN BATTLEFIELD

Shopper and shopper, grocer and grocer.
Sidewalk delicatessen. Crouch and eat.

Party-of-God? So be it. Posher-but-kosher-
but-consecrated? You got it. In pieces? Neat.

There is no death but death. Hear, worshipers.
Same lockstep with a hesitation wrinkle to the beat.

I take the pollster’s tack and the upholsterer’s.
You need a pricetag and a tally sheet?

When I said battleﬁeld when I said shoppers,
what did your fury seize upon as meat?

Which snapshot leapt up ﬁrst? Which ﬂitch which swatch?
Did you envision Kitcheners complete

with self-inﬂicted quirt-strokes to their jodhpurs?
I am your troubadour. I am discreet.

A jolly Russky ribboned up for openers?
Hush; you shall have him. Harvested like wheat.

180

S.D.I.

It’s nice up here in Air
Force One. I get to wear
my gold-braid baseball cap
and stand before the map
of New El Salvador
and point out which came ﬁrst
our game of chicken or
the other guy’s and burst
into a sob because
I have this reverence
about the selﬂess dead
and when the audience
gets rolling something does
this curtsy with my head.

181

TO A REAL STANDUP PIECE
OF PAINTED CROCKERY

I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters.
Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano.
Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked

tongue once.

Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist’s powders and unguents.
And when John Keats looked at you in a collection of pots
it was poetry at ﬁrst sight: quotable beautiful
teleological concatenations of thoughts.

It’s the proverbial dog of a poem, though:
slobbering panting and bright-eyed like a loquacious thug
or a spokesperson embattled on behalf of a sociopolitical thesis*
to which he has not had access owing to the need-to-know

basis.

And he never says which pot. Just an oasis
of tease in a sea of tilth, kind of a concrete catachresis
bopping along with timbrels, irrepressible as Count Basie,
fabulous I mean classic I mean vout,
keeping the buckwheat in and the weevils out
while the rest of us get and spend and ache and earn
and go to the Bruce Springsteen concert and take our turn
lining up at the Metropolitan to look at the Macedonian gold

krater

and promising ourselves to read up seriously.

*(Beauty : Truth = Ignorance : Bliss). Consult Précis.

182

THE ENCHANTED GLADE

The old days. What a life.
Bards barded. Rhyme was rife.
A farthing for a vocal,
And each and every yokel
Became a singing bird.

The yeoman plied his yerd.
The rhymster chimed concordance.
The druid at his war dance,
The monk at his devotions,
The suitor, his emotions
Deliciously deranged,
Got with it and exchanged
The contents of their purses
For made-to-measure verses
To terrify the Huns with,
Debauch a bunch of nuns with,
Or both at one fell swoop.
It was a jolly troupe,
The customers of rhyme.
Love-sonnets were a dime
A dozen. So were steaks.
The dead get all the breaks.
The big consumer craze
Was ribald roundelays
In Hudibrastic couplets.
It sure beats printing up

LET

’

BOOGIE

bumper stickers.

The hangdog banjo-pickers
Of Albion could choose
From half a hundred hues
And ten degrees of luster
From out-and-out gut-buster

183

To whispered spectral wail.
But thereby hangs a cautionary tale.

It fell upon a day
In Lammastide, the way
So many episodes
Keep falling in the odes
Surviving from the period.
A maker of a myriad
Of madrigals, the Barry
Manilow and Gary
Snyder of his age
(Preceded by a page
And jugglers in procession)
Was plying his profession
The best way he knew how.
Some think he had been hexed because a cow
Had bleated in his path.
At any rate the wrath
Of something must have struck,
Or he just had phenomenal bad luck.

He was, as was his wont,
Extemporizing. Don’t
Imagine something scuzzy
Or slapdash just because he
Didn’t have a script.
The couplets fairly dripped
With lyric ornament.
Whole bestiaries went
Bananas to provide
A moment’s versiﬁed
Illustrative material.
Whole glittering aethereal
Kathismata, replete
With deities in sweet

184

Olympian repose,
Came tumbling when he chose
To hustle things along
By calling down the gods to do the song.
The faster he proceeded,
The featlier he speeded.
This cat was in the pink.
Unstoppable. You’d think
With all the thee-and-thouing,
Ywissing and I-trowing,
Thou-dosting and he-dothing,
A poet would get nothing
But megrims for his pains.
You’d think an olden English minstrel’s brains
With all that extra grammar
Would have took up the hammer
And chisel and cried “Out!”
You’d think he would have turned into a lout
With porridge in his beard.

Yet here he was, a weird
Coherence to his ravings.
And here they came, their savings
Ajingle in their ﬁsts,
His abject gang of groupie-lutanists.
He reveled in his prowess.
To show the yokels how es-
Pecially delicious
A ﬂat and inauspicious
Subject could become,
He launched, ad libitum,
One last improvisation:
A rhyme in celebration
Of Rhyme. It went like this:

“Good countrymen, ywis

185

We take great things for granted.
We know God never scanted
Us wind and wold and wave.
We thank Him, that He gave
The bog, the holt, the heather,
To heap, against the weather,
A crofter’s good hearth ﬁre.
All vitals we require—
Space, Power, Substance, Time—
He lavishes. But best of all is Rhyme.

“For what if rhyme got scant?
Would gallants gallivant
Through battleﬁeld and boudoir?
A vexed hex would hoodoo our
Impassionedest pursuits
And leave us lallygagging like galoots.

“And if rhyme got still scanter?
The palliative banter
Young duchesses require
Might stumble, ﬂutter, crepitate, expire.

“If rhyme got really scarce,

“If rhyme got really scarce,”

(A whole-line repetition
Is right in the tradition
Of mainstream Dirty Blues
And proper for a troubadour to use.

But this long breath he draws?
This second Pregnant Pause?
A horrid thought was dawning.)
His retinue, nine fawning

186

Bards’ Guild apprentices,
Were suddenly abuzz.
Their master, posed as though
To mouth one mighty mot,
Whirled, with a Hellish look,
And in the nonce it took
To send a laser burn
Through each of them in turn,
Hissed out, “Okay, you guys,
I don’t want alibis,
I want a rhyme for scarce.”

Somebody thought up vers
Libre and on they went,
But it had been a sobering event.

187

AMAZING GRACIOUS
LIVING ON I-93

I’ve read the propaganda,
and I believe it now.
I shoulda bought a van de-
signed to squush a cow.
Small cars are “unforgiving.”
They crumple up like foam.
It takes a heap o’ mortgage
to have a heap o’ home,
and if a heap o’ heap’ll
satisfy some people,
then who am I to holler?

They musta paid top dollar
to furnish a machine
for live-in demolition
derby competition
with stained-glass picture windshield
and Playboy Magazine
entablature. I mean
my little thirteen-inch-wheeled
Rabbit must feel queer
to ﬁnd me stopping here
to contemplate the roadside
without a HoJo’s near.

I mean I’ve got some odes I’d
like to ﬁnish yet
before I make another
bunny silhouette
along the fuselage
of someone’s ten-ton Taj
Mahalmobile. Good brother,

188

that comes a little steep.
I like this highway shoulder.
Just sittin’. Gittin’ older.
I like it a whole heap.

189

ERRAND AT THE LONE TREE MALL

This gizmo to spin spin-
aches aches to be mine.

It’s a high-speed disco-disco-
very, very expensive, very ﬁne.

I want it, and I want a set of ten-pound cast-iron bundts.
I want to have a kitchen with some stuff in it for once.

Great rough-hewn rivetty skillets.
Badge Oak cheeseboard and steak-knife sets.

Blowing a wad but who cares, cares-
sing (sing
twiddle kadiddle kachoong)

its digital widgets its rotary gadgets

for slivering almonds and slurrying celery
Diggety dog I got doodads here. Make room.

Miss Checkout, with her loom
gone suddenly berserk
as if it were Penelope’s
and data tapes were tapes-

tries tries
bonking it but bonking it won’t work.

Smiles. Shrugs. Geez.
à la lavender-vendor only wants to tease
out and then bestow

190

a beautiful
empurpled pale memento.

Poor damsel of romance.

She needs a champion and here’s my chance
to be her pal her paladin her hero O

make it a cash transaction what’s the dif.

She can’t believe I said that. What a dimwit. What a stiff.

She shrugs, looks heavenward for her directions,

a Tex-Mex Joan-of-Arc in milkwhite buckskins,
alamode Alamodelivery livery
chased and ornate beyond posses’ possessing,
sing jingle sing jangle a she-sheriff riff.
Bonks it again. Mirabile. Good news.
My charge slip: eggplant purple on pale blues.
My loading platform call slips in coördinated hues.
Whole psychedelic
spectrum of delic-
ious

IOU

I scoop up and skedaddle. No I don’t.
Now I got to pass the

-and-

hunt.

Worse than assessment days at nursery school.

The competition, paragons of cool,
stopped and slapped with a Star Wars scorecard
only a droid could read read-
just just marvelously. No sweat.
Scan for the squiggle. Set
Bic to ballot and trust in

MCI

191

A dollyful of mannequins whips by.
Watch it, if they make contact with an eye.

The new Club-Med Medusa

USA

The smoldering, deep-shadowed, cloisonné
look of a lady-of-Endor endorsing
(sing poke it and pack it, punk)

the autosuggestive the autopsy-
chic the seamy the dreamy the demise-
dated the drunk.

Askance and askancer
(don’t ask and don’t answer)
teleportated, they teeter through,
bound for another department. And vanished. Phew.

No mayhem in the Mall.
Just quick, subliminal
rifﬂes and feeding-frenzies everywhere.

One smurf one Junior Miss one striding rare
Saturday doll with an odalisque air
and the lacquerwork of an Ingres ingressing
(sing singleﬁle Injunstyle whisperless quick)
straight for the tables where superfantastic

hawser-humongous cableknit cardigans,
Labradorean lobstermen’s pullovers,
ultradimensional Gordian oodles
of made-in-Jamaica macramé-mimicry
cry to be hefted and sported and bunched and hugged.

Amazons half-diaphanous, half-shagrugged.

192

I look up and I’m there. I’m at my errand.

Blackness where a Krugerrand
snuggles on its little mouselike pouch.
And in the place of honor?
Gone. Spent.

Token of Incan incan-
descent descent.

Not Atahualpa’s. Not Pizarro’s either.
Some bad hidalgo gives the guards a breather
and swirls his cape, and takes a token ﬁx,
and owns a demon rescued from the mix
of demons in King Carlos’ melting pot.

I’d like to have been there. The ﬁendish glee.

I think the look of him looks back at me,
complicit. Every crammed-in ingot got
cartage to Cartagena, naval escort to Cadiz.
And God is mighty, and the worm got his.
And if the sea rose up, miraculous . . .

Primitive Prospero. Prosperous us.

Whose voice this is that hustles me from twenty
videoscreens at once, I think I know.
He comes into my home when I get lonely
and I don’t mind the line of bull. It’s only
natural natural gas gassing
Sing hey for the loyal few
drilling out here in the channel bringing you
beautiful oceans of bloo-bloobloobloob-loobloob,
beautiful introductions to the crew,
beautiful loyal few a loyal fuel oil. Phew

193

now it is him in a close-up, now the Tube
pipes him aboard in ventuplicate—Hey, Rube!—
as if there came rising to meet you,
out of the depths of time,
out of the La Brea tar pits,

this pained, voracious, brea-breathing Thing.

Can it be just Bob Hope,
surfacing like a jolly periscope?

O Canada O Greylag O Great Blue
heron or whale or goose or caribou
O lords and angels of migration, you
slumber among the Lagunaware unaware.

My opposites across the concourse hold
Brobdignagian snifters up,
deliberately, soberly. Ayup
Depth, body, bouquet. A better terrarium.

A plutocrat among them. Tweeds and jeans.
Diversiﬁed portfolio of gardening machines.
Chard-cherisher, cos-cossetter,
setter of mole’s molestable table of greens.

The Garden Center clerk deployed to ﬁll
daffodil-dogs and majolica-croc crocuses uses
white, violet, strawberry-colored rock.
Great vats of cobblestone and amaryllis.

And there’s a sideshow. There’s a Living Craftsman.
He does Huck Finns. He does Huck’s fellow raftsman.
He wears an eyeshade like a gangster’s draughtsman
and holds a dental drill, and in his hand

194

vanilla-colored scrimshaw minstrels stand
banjoing. Do you like them? Cougars leap
and jacktars dance, and wagonmasters whip
triplescoop conestogawagons up.

A spindle with a butterﬂy motif
sits cheek-by-jowl with Ahab Come To Grief.
He shows the agony in ﬁendish detail.

This is the way the whaleroad and the whale,
four oarsmen and a peg-leg legend end.
Take notice. Price an item. Be a friend.

Curio-user and curio-user
drift outside to the indoor street.

Demonstrators demonstrate devices.

Ekco! The last of the Beat Beat-
rices rices
rutabagas erasers and raw meat.
What an amazing feat.

Gimmicks and fripperies. It’s downright canny.
Our turn to play trinketer and nanny
and kowtow, and keep quipus, and climb ropes.
Our turn to do deep-dyed horoscopes.

No more Golconda. No more pouring pigs
and ﬂooding caissons and upending rigs
into the deep sea ﬂoor.

Now it’s Manaus burrowing to pour
huge footings for the skylines of desire.
Now it’s the Indus’ indus-
trial trial by ﬁre.

195

READING THE FACTS ABOUT FROST
IN THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY

“Lover’s quarrel” hah.
Little domestic
Eichmann in puttees
claiming he simply
had a taste for spats.

This was a real Scrooge.
His son killed himself.
Wait till you hear what
Mr. Thompson told
Mr. Ellmann. That’s

all I know and all
I need to know. Frost
was a pig to his
wife, children, colleagues
and

biographer.

So don’t get suckered,
Undergraduates.
Like by the poems.
Like by sycophants
or apologists.

We can instruct you
also about the
Galapagos: “an
island group in
the Caribbean.”

196

GASTARBEITER

There was an old woman from Szechwan
Who worked in the suitably Brechtian

Town of Stettin
Where she ran a canteen.

Or was it a woman from Szczecin?

No, this was a woman from Szechwan.
She went around kvetching in Quechuan.

Philologists think a
Lost tribe of the Inca

Reside as high lamas in Szechwan.

They came to the mountains of Szechwan
To study Du Côté de Chez Swann

And Melchior’s question:
What time is the next one?

And Leda’s: why don’t we go chase one?

Should Yeats have attempted to hatch one?
Should Christ have turned left at Saskatchewan?

The track of Big Bird
Is erose and absurd.

The trackers morose and Masaccioan.

197

LIKE DOTTED SWISS (FROM A BOOK OF
UNRETOUCHED PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE
PATTERNEDNESS OF THINGS)

for Amy Clampitt

White on green. If a microphotographer froze
this lipid at that angle. In those throes.
Or it’s a satellite image. Something Castro’s
hidden in sheds. Or it’s Mies van der Rohe’s
planet at last, and the highrise greenbelt boroughs
teem. But it’s a caterpillar I

almost grabbed. We were ersatz braceros.
Headachy drenched green Chula Vista bean-rows
Taller than us for miles. This wasn’t Thoreau’s
greens patch. This was America’s preteen heroes’
“war effort.” And there were wasps like Zeros
buzzing the weird-shaped immigrant pomodoros.
And the beleaguered Alien Property Bureau’s
Duce gave us a pep talk. We were pros.
The wasps were our ichneumon banderilleros.
Pretty white beads on green. Pretty as pharaohs’
viscera-boxes. Or a Mikado’s inros.
Poor catafalque of would-be butterﬂy.

Better to be blobs and squiggles, chis and rhos,
white buff apricot cadmium mauve rose,
dotting the air in a weedscape of Corot’s.
All ﬂak and rapture. Beauty that must die.

Not this trompe l’oeil. Arlington. Book of rows.

198

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF
MY REFRIGERATOR DOOR

for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage

A Caledonian megalith.
A tinted bather from Cape Ann.
The 1937 kith
and kin of a Kentuckian
beside their Model T sedan.
The Celts. Who set me this arith-
metic of icons? Who began
by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith-
erpicking rhinestone charlatan.
He tries to be American.

Who tries to be American
as hard as him? Not Aly Khan.
Not George F. Babbitt the Zenith-
ophiliac Zenithian.
As sure as God made Granny Smith
a pricier-sounding product than
the Winesap or the Jonathan,
there is a mystery and myth
to being an American,
and being an American

compounds it. Kurosawa-san,
steady my Nikon while I pan
across the porches of forsyth-
iabedizened Mattapan
in search of . . . dot dot dot . . . the plan,
the weltanschauung, the ethnith-
ifying principle a pith

199

helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan
could pounce on like a ﬁend from Ran
and authenticate forthwith.

The cromlech beetles o’er the frith.
The ultimate American
possession rattles his Kal-Kan,
Prince, you’re a prince. A dog a man
can talk to. What this caravan
of adumbrations and antith-
esises panteth for is Dith
Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran:
Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan
tabulously American.

200

WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL

You notice them at check-in. Power. Dough.
Securing the cachet of their dispatches
With miniature touch-tone satchel latches.
Riding the tiger, going with the ﬂow.
A naked envy ﬂares in me and catches
Who manicures, who burnishes, who thatches
These bronzed embodiments? I know, I know—
Too dumb to trust with Momma’s kitchen matches,
Let alone World War III. But there attaches
To them and their assumption such a haloed
Ritziness . . . And to ﬁnd one in my row . . .

The stewardess has catered me my trayload.
I buddy up with dumbshow down-the-hatches.
A conversation bumps along in snatches.
The Plexiglas is bright with microscratches.
We monitor the murmur of the payload
As if our slice of Fortress U.S.A. lowed
Homeward the way the herds of Thomas Gray lowed
Homeward, and there were centuries to go.

201

PLEASURES OF THE VOYAGEURS

Into the limitless nowhere. Lightly canoeing.
Day sultry. Me desultory. Toing and froing
testing the bottom for bass, or in fact just yoyoing
aimless assortments of ornament up and down.

Very encouraging soundtrack, once you get into it.
Whole Canadian laid-back percussion section.
Woodpecker, marshhen, dittybug, loon, frog.
Sidemen, all of them, happy to just hit-it-when-indicated.

Like spending the afternoon with one of those riff-it-yourself

records.

Bunny Berrigan Band on a golden oldie.
Only the lead madman is absent, or sits obstinate.
He won’t stand up to get “I Can’t Get Started” started.
Why should he? Why should I? Why perpetrate
a Paderewski-at-the-outboard ruckus?

Cryptic and inﬁnitesimal gunnel-thunks
like a dim rockbass bass to the ongoing bongoing.
What am I doing going boing boing?
Am I a mad baboon? I was suddenly pogoing
hugely over the lake I was ﬂap-ﬂap-ﬂapping
like eohoopoes aﬁre, like a red-eyed screecher
out of an early-sixties Fright-Nite feature
hitting itself and croaking “Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!”

It was, you might say, galvanizing, this
demonstration of what the container meant
about “reapplications” of repellent.

I was the Living Dead on moonlight excursion

I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the Laughton version
with the canaille following and the bells echoing
I was the mass of scab velcroing and unvelcroing
slugwise forth I was everything (sproing sproing)
evildoing a nickelodeongoing
urchin ever befouled himself boohooing
home from the slobbering Roxy not to see.

Wouldn’a missed it for the world, not me.
It scared the Missus, damn near totally.
Wiser than Queequeg (and with ﬁercer tattooing)
is brave Nokomis home from his mosquitoing.

202

203

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

George Starbuck was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1931,

to a migrant academic family. In his mid-teens, he studied
mathematics for two years at the California Institute of Technol-
ogy. He also attended the University of California at Berkeley,
the University of Chicago, and Harvard. He took no degrees. He
was an agricultural worker, a military policeman, and a fiction
editor at Houghton Mifflin. He directed two of America’s finest
graduate programs in Creative Writing—at the University of
Iowa and Boston University. He taught English and poetry for
twenty-five years—one year at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, then at the University of Iowa and Boston Uni-
versity. He gave poetry readings in nearly every state as well as
abroad. Due to illness, he took an early retirement in 1988. He
was the distinguished chairholder in poetry in 1990 at The Uni-
versity of Alabama.

While at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in

1963, he was ﬁred for refusing to sign the required loyalty oath.
He initiated a challenge to New York’s Fineberg loyalty oath law
and was successful when the Supreme Court of the United
States overturned that law. Also in the 1960s, he was an anti-
Vietnam War organizer and activist.

His first book, Bone Thoughts, 1960, won the Yale Series of

Younger Poets prize. He subsequently received a Guggenheim
Fellowship. He was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship in

204

Literature by the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration
with the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other
awards. He was a fellow in residence at the American Academy
in Rome for two years and later at the Rockefeller Foundation
in Bellagio, Italy.

White Paper,

his second book, set a standard for charged,

edgy American political poetry. His next, Elegy in a Country
Church Yard,

is the world’s widest concrete poem. Desperate

Measures

tackled, with ﬁne Byronic insouciance, everything.

Talkin’ B. A. Blues

is a book-length rhyming picaresque in

rhinestone-sourdough style. In 1982, Atlantic Monthly Press and
Secker and Warburg (London) published his new-and-selected
poems, The Argot Merchant Disaster. That book won The Na-
tion

’s Lenore Marshall prize, among others, for best book of

poetry. He published two small books with Bits Press: Space Saver
Sonnets

and Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second.

Visible Ink

, the collection of his ﬁnal poems, was published in

2002. The book features numerous examples of his ﬁnal formal
invention—something he called Standard Length and Breadth
Sonnets, or SLABS for short.

He was honored with the Aiken-Taylor Lifetime Achievement

Award at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in
1993. He died at home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, August 15,
1996, after a twenty-one-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

Wyszukiwarka

Podobne podstrony:
0415277442 Routledge Russell on Metaphysics Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell Apr 200
Morimoto, Iida, Sakagami The role of refections from behind the listener in spatial reflection
Chopin The Awakening and Selected Short Stories
A Possible Example of the Action of Selection
What The United States?n Learn From Japan
Manovich, Lev The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers
Georgette Heyer The Black Moth
The Word Yoga comes from Sanskrit
Nanocosm Nanotechnology and the Big Changes Coming from the Inconceivably Small, 2005, p 320
SELECT FROM
Morimoto, Iida, Sakagami The role of refections from behind the listener in spatial reflection
Five Decades of Terrorism in Europe The TWEED Dataset Jan Oskar Engene
Kosky; Ethics as the End of Metaphysics from Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion
Reece, CLASSICAL QUOTATIONS IN THE WORKS OF RATllERIUS
George O Smith The Planet Mender
The Battle of Hattin from a Muslim source
The Works 1 Bodywork
George Lakoff The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor

więcej podobnych podstron