INVISIBLE SHEEP

Every day the animal
needs maize and leafy boughs
and water.
Booted & wrapped up in sweaters
I push out into the cold
snowy morning
with a fig in my pocket
(she loves dried figs)
and a bowl of corn,
heading for the barn.
Everything is black & white,
and my footsteps squeak
along the path
as the frozen oaks
twist & shout in the north wind.
Down the slick stone steps
leading to the stavlos
a sudden explosion
of petrified bleats,
a thrashing cloud of snow,
and something bangs
against my knees
spilling maize,
figs, hat, gloves, me
onto the goddam unmoving rocks.
Sheep are invisible
in the snow.
16 February 2004

BANGLADESH

I languished in Bangladesh
that dizzy afternoon.
All my hazzardry
was wasted,
spillin' me out of an empty sky
onto the emptier strand.
But I was not alone!
Who izzat blowin' some honest jazz out there,
like the hippest city duster
on Lennox Avenue?
Sure 'nuf, a zendic playin' a silver zinke
comes tumblin' outta the surf.
"I know you," says the zendic.
"I seen you at the church by the riverside
they call Rockefeller's Apology."
He capered off
as the notes flew out of his zinke like bats
and stuck to the lines of heaven.
I tell you,
I was gobsmacked on the sand.
24 February 2004

SMOKE OF CHAMPIONS

Rolling along the highway
Across the yellow plains,
Riding the dog again and
Diving into the dusty wind.
Through the grit of the window
I can see a billboard
Disfiguring the emptiness.
Scowling at the road,
The bleak face of Attila the Hun says:
"If I were alive
And spreading terror today,
I'd be smoking Galoise."
7 March 20004

STONES LIKE FLOWERS

Stumbling along the Prospekt
With Mayakovsky, howling at the sun,
"When are you going to change your shirt?"
He croons, "Don't you know that stuff
Is all used up?" His eyes
Were full of disappointment;
The eyes of a tired hero.
The masses of masses are with us, I said,
Just look at them swell and sag
Like the tide, and every one is as lonely
As the icy birds on the shores
Of the Sea of Tranquility.
He looked at the lump of bread
In his hand, pulled out the stump
Of one of his rotten teeth
And heaved it at a stray dog.
"Creeping Jesus! I need a smoke!"
He groaned, and batted his pockets
Until the yellow dust rose in clouds,
And I could sense words in his head
Boiling sluggishly, like a cauldron of syrup.
I looked down at his vast wounded shoes
Dancing on the cobbles,
And at the cruel embankment behind him.
Stones have their scents and their seed,
I thought, like flowers.
March 2004

A WHIFF OF ETHER WITH GEORG

It was the coldest winter of the war
And the light was comfortless
That sifted through the split slats
Of the barn. We squatted on our heels
Pretending to be warm among the stiff heaps
Of bloody bandages. Rooks quarreled
In the broken birches of the dead garden.
"Listen," he croaked, "music grows on trees."
The empty syringe at his feet
Shimmered like ice and silver.
He opened a can of ether and took
A deep, sweet breath. "Try some of this
My friend, and you'll never freeze
Again." My teeth were clicking
And my breath frosted my beard.
I stared through the gaps in the wall
At black branches and humps of earth.
"The leaves deny the winter,
But they fall," I said. Trakl
Looked like a man crushed by a question.
I pinched a little loose machorka
Out of my pocket and began
To roll a cigarette with the torn scrap
Of a poem. Trakl nodded on his heels.
Just as I was about to skin the lucifer
With my thumbnail, he lurched forward
And smacked the match from my hand.
"Are you mad?" pointing to the open
Can. "Are you mad? Are you mad?"
8 March 2004

INSUPPORTABLE

All the windows have been broken,
limbs litter the cobblestones.
Rosy prints on busted mirrors
cover up the wretched rails.

The situation is insupportable.

Words to roses now unspoken,
fears are whispered monotones,
and the numbers of the terrors
multiply when pity fails.

The situation is insupportable.

Liberty's a rusted token
in the fists of empty drones
not even conscious of their errors,
blindly swinging bloody flails.

The situation is insupportable.
19 March 2004

INTERROGATION OF BOB KAUFMAN

Bomkauf, silent poet, Buddhist warrior,
Let me ask you a mouthful of questions:
Okay, Mr. Holloweyes, what DOES the secret mind whisper?

It speaks in the sizzle of the ride cymbal,
In the bleet-blat of the alto,
In the melted metal butter of trumpet soup,
It mutters in your ear: "All anguish is joy!"

Say then, Mr. Brownfoot Sandal,
What can you spell with the dialectics of abomunism?

I spell a ladder from the carotic city
To lush moons where herds of quaggas graze;
I spell a path through the Immense Inane
To the pasture of Shelley's unburnt heart;
I spell an eclosion of your carked self
Out of the crust of Things.

Please, Mr. Bluemute,
when will that second April blossom?

When we stop the trivial abuse of frivolity
In the meaty face of Time;
When we make the moonlight men
Go blind with seeing;
When we listen right through the false notes
Of the present, to the infinity inside it.

All right, Mr. Bopchops, I see you got the glad rags on
And your silence drives like a drum.
Naphtali of the alleyways, your voiceless
Dissonance moves towards perfection.
You are quick and quiet as a bat.
We try to read the letters you zigzag
In the darkening sky.
17 March 2004

POEM BEGINNING WITH THE LETTER Z

Z turns north, pointing
his long winter face
toward Carnegie Hall,
humming a little Bach
partita in his head.
Leaf by leaf
the music exfoliates,
uncapping the crown
at the center.

Z carries a Latin dictionary
in his right hand
("Learn, learn! Act, act!")
and boosts his glasses
up to the mighty
bridge of his nose
with his left thumb.

["Your young men shall see visions,
And your old men shall dream dreams."]

Cafeteria debates
arrange themselves
like counterpoint -
glasses of tea gleam
through the cigarette smoke -
men and women slouch
in metal chairs,
or hunch over tables -
a thrashing of arms -
a clashing of passionate voices
in the cafe
by the Daily Forward.
Plato in brass,
Spinoza in strings,
Hegel in woodwinds (naturally),
and the Marx Chorale
belting it out.

["I will give them the Alphabet of love.
I will show them how it is spelled."]

Mesh the fretwork
of personal life
with the armature of History,
add colored tiles
from all the poems
you've ever read,
arrange the vowels
in a quadratic equation,
submerge the themes
in fugal patterns,
then open the window
for street noise
and fresh air:

now you have the Big Poem,
a mosaic so vast
no one can see it all.

["...that tree which father Huc saw in Tartary,
whose leaves were languaged."]

Old Mr. Z and his fiddlers three
built up a city that looks like a tree:

the trunk hides the root,
and the leaf hides the shoot.

On a branch, like an owl
on a feathery cowl,

Z on his flute
blows a soft hoot,

with Celia for song
and Polaris on gong,

while a boy plays the bass
without showing his face.
19 March 2004

NO CONVERSATION

He was alone, as always;
the chamber was all shadows.
A single sunbeam blazed
through the notched shutter
onto his long-fingered hands
and his thick black notebook.
Scratch-scratch went his pen.
Darker than the gloom:
his hunchback, his heavy head.

Patchen floated into the room,
supine on his bed and
wrapped up to the waist
in a quilt of scarlet marvels.
The brush in his hand
swooped and flashed,
shedding greens and blues
on the paper as animals were born:
ivory lions in pink trees,
blue polar bears in telephone booths.

There was no conversation,
but the air curled and smoked
like honey in a mug of java,
and shed a scent
like the cigarettes
of solitude.
They didn't need to speak.
19 March 2004

STERLING ON THE BEACH

He wig-wagged with his stick
Like a boyscout on a bluff
And with sliding, slithering gait
Made his way down the slope
Towards the sea. Everything was grey
And blue, like silverpoint. I watched him
Approach. With his one good leg
And that twisted branch he used
For a crutch, he looked like a stork
Trying to cross a hot asphalt road.
He couldn't see me, just one more ghost
In the bitter wind. Puffins
And cormorants spooked at him.
He was shouting, but the surf
Drowned his cries. I groped
For a cigarette. Empty pockets.
The foam was soaking his shoe now.
He heaved his stick up and back
Over his shoulder, and it turned
End over end, in a confusion of birds.
He half-hopped and half-swam
Up to his shoulders, then the green wave
Took him and pulled him free.
The clouds paused, and only the birds
Whirled and keened.
14 March 2004

"MOOD INDIGO" (Karen Shea's big blue fields)

hope is to sow
fields of color
and form
on the empty steppe

do you still have memories
you painters
of a place without volume

I have tried to recall
the shapes
which were born
without substance

sometimes I think
I remember
vast expanses of emptiness
uncontained by geometry
unstained by pigment

when I open my eyes
the blank of day
is right there
like a plain
without forests
or rivers

and desire rises to people
the distant deep horizon
with the bodies
I can love

the mind moves and the grasses
tremble in xanthous light
flax shocks the air
and the mouth
a glass of scalding tea
drunk on the slope
of a blue mound

and to reach
the hand out
to apply paint
with the fingertips
indigo for example
which thrusts a black
catheter deep as sleep
into the thoracic aorta
of Hispaniola

this is the plasma
the painter strews
when she thrashes her brush
in the spacious air
over the frontier
on her side of the window

around us the noise
the brutal squawk
but here before this paradoxa torus contained by a flat surface

a key can be found
pressed in a palm
smeared with oil
and a map
to the core
of a paradise of indigo
feathers
and songs
too beautiful to be
entirely grief
January 2004 (Improvizaton based on an older poem)

MELTEMI: THEY CALL THE WIND RAY CHARLES

Is it the trees singing

Is it the house moaning

'When you walk
I want to walk with you
When you talk
I want to talk some too'

It is the wind drumming

It is the wind's block chords

'The nighttime is the right time'

The wind beats the black cypress

It strums the roof

'Shake that thing
O baby
shake that thing'

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