If you’re skeptical about the indefinite articles
Hidden up in the wheel wells
There’s no reason to think the worst my precious pudding
That a child has been caught in there
That some nefarious instrument is lurking
Behind the theatrical scrim the renditions of bark and foliage

Patriots scoundrel-refugees pirate-advertisers pimply typists
Like to whip up enthusiasm feel the god writhing within you
Working the crowd to get down on their knees
Peer beneath aisle row and seat number
Expecting to detect the supernatural adversary
Slick slimy scaly horned or beribboned

Tickets are distributed for a nominal fee
All are invited to watch as the heretics accrue their comeuppance
Look go ahead and hoist the crossover up on the rack
It’s really take my word better to look for brakes than bombs
Or you can proscribe the owner’s manual obscene with explicit cutaways
Join the spectators wild-eyed or squinty at the torch-and-pitchfork party

I will be pleased said the neighbor to the stranger
On whatever path you park it on
Beside the gabled convent where the kids
Were taught their lessons or pretended to be
Behind the bike shop refuge of competitors laggards and go-getters
Small business but not enslaved by supply and demand
Or before the ancient tavern where the motorcycles filed
Pabst Blue Ribbon pickled eggs a jukebox pinball and darts
Or the more ancient cemetery haunt of lovers and bereaved
Or down this very cul-de-sac where all is second nature
No secrets among the settled the restless and the calm
The neighbor thinks all this but says aloud about a third of it
And not in so many words
They call her the Mayor of Lighthouse Cove Lane
That once was fresh and new
Not a lane it contains no cove no lighthouse
No more mayor than dowager duchess
It does have a vaguely trapezoidal boxlike sign

Weird passages out at the main drag
The camera that reads the license plates
The modern temptation flattery in the information age
But the asphalt keeps crumbling
Something there is that doesn’t love a street
Like ticking of an entropic catalog
Green plants push up amid the concrete
At the razed and fenced-in Qwik-e-Mart
A few dissenting voices are raised
As the streetlights flicker to life
The critiques of the crickets the peepers the katydids
The low harumph of the transformer
A firefly just one makes its halfhearted signal
You should develop your observational powers
Learn to interpret the katydid’s ka-zicca-zeir
The tractor-trailer’s frurr
The whippoorwill’s mewl
There is no whippoorwill its cry a lost cause
A classical sunset just a memory
No moon on this side of the calendar
The spongy weather feels different somehow
People make an effort to be nice
It’s weird that they make an effort

Is some upheaval about to erupt
Not an occasion for anxiety or even mild unease one supposes
The guest advises rolling with the punches
But no punches have been thrown
On the contrary all anybody has heard are tranquil murmurs
Zazzing interjections from the fauna
But maybe you’re not paying attention
Maybe you’re just lulled into listlessness
By the close resemblance of Hyundais Fords and Chrysler products
Crossovers from where to where
There is no gabled convent never was
There’s a church with its parochial school out on the street
The nuns live on the premises or maybe there are no nuns
You used to see them in the department store and at the baseball game
It used to be just a street but now it’s a main thoroughfare
With periodic traffic lights and four lanes
Five if you count the turn lane
Most of the countenances are turning inward anyway
As the dusk sidles toward the intersection

Our primitive wish for immortality
Storied Odysseus saw Achilles
As ruler in the Empire of Shades
But the Phthian hero
Scoffing rejected the compliment
Of him who blinded the Cyclops

He’d rather break down corrugated he said
On the loading dock at Walmart
Punch a clock
Than lord it over these ineffectual wisps
Ontologically extant but discontent
Unwilling to slough off the habits of a prince
When he had long since gained the guerdon he craved
Achiever of deathless glory

Great Alexander knew that hunger
To sow the observance of his name by force
Fame an insistent showtune
An earworm in the form of a sword
Place his name on the library
I will force you to remember
Julius Caesar in a pinned-up sheet
Taking his cuts at the middle school
Napoleon posing in the insane asylum

A thing of beauty is a joy forever
And who wouldn’t love to append one’s name
To have it stuck on there by force of law

A bunch of stupid nominalists
That if the name persists post res
The one who once bore it never dies

Recognition acknowledgement remembrance knowledge
Nobody knows very much at all
Beethoven jutting his lower lip and curly-haired
Laboring under disabilities physical and psychological
Is dead
And what does anybody know of him
Who will explain the deathless replicable Ninth

Fame come here to me young lady
What have you to say for yourself
Having contaminated my mind with the error
That the people I know are nobody
The precious beautiful fragmentary ones are nobody
That if nobody knows me
I’m nobody

That the ombudsman the public advocate
Should be remunerated for their effort
Does not deny its usefulness however doubtful of effect
Augmenting the mounds of moldy soap
Intoning ambiguous chords on the Walmart guitar lacking the high E
Which once a child besmeared with processed cheese
Conveying the recyclables to God knows where
Puttering and delving in the cooperative garden
Eggplant tomatoes avatars of deadly nightshade

Today do we commemorate the Confederate dead and the fallen Federals
The fanatics blown up in the basement by their own unfinished bomb
The committed to a cause who bring a couple dozen along for the suicide
The handlers of joysticks raining death upon cities
When their own command center happens to be targeted
That the public servants teachers medical officers elected officials
Are preselected and approved does not deny their necessity
The towhee too seeks tactical advantage
With its chip-a-turrrr

All those well-known works I love
That pall for many with familiarity
I can’t get tired of Satisfaction
Those stalwart fuzzy first five notes
And lyrics that bite on consumer capitalism
If you can make them out
You don’t hear Jagger sound that note much any more once he’d gotten rich
And I Want to Hold Your Hand
Perfect from stem to stern
But I especially love George’s bay-ong
Tell you something cha cha cha bay-ong
How do they come up with that shit
I think about that all the time with Ringo
Right before the chorus in Help
Super quick unison on the snare and the floor tom
Ta ta ta ta ta ta ta
How does he come up with it

I admit that some things I thought I’d love forever do pall
I used to melt at the English horn in the New World Symphony
When I hear it now it’s kind of meh
I was so crazy about Dr Seuss
I could read it all by myself
But now it’s just been superceded its disagreeableness exposed
And Sesame Street on HBO and in big-box stores
How I loved it with my young children
Now cruelly parodies its radical beginnings
Charlie was scared of the Count
But loved Forgetful Jones whom he called Hee-Ha
But this is a case in which the work has changed
And I retain affection for the earlier avatar
Similarly the Teletubbies have declined
With their immigration to streaming

William Shakespeare firmly remains
Possibly not the most white nor even the most male
But really most sincerely dead like the witch of the east
Nobody else mingles comedy and tragedy with such aplomb
Famously in Hamlet of course and Romeo and Juliette
A great play and a mediocre one respectively
A mixture less noted perhaps but certainly evident in Henry IV Part 1
Anarchy amid rigid determinism
And really who does blank verse better
Voicing characters of impossible range
Who better dramatic poetry
Shakespeare’s very unevenness proves a strength
Upon request I’ll divulge the must-see and the skip
Ten sonnets and half a dozen plays

Jane Austen has the opposite problem
With everything she wrote of such high caliber
That nothing stands out
So you could read all six novels
Or content yourself like me with Emma
Peace friends
Pride and Prejudice is not bad or inferior by a whit
Go for both if your life is long enough
They themselves are not that long

Every decade or so the itch comes upon me
To reread The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks
Doctor Faustus and Joseph and His Brothers
I even revisited Royal Highness the other day
Though general opinion is correct that that one is slighter
And surely you can spare an afternoon for Death in Venice

Prokofiev did a good job with Romeo and Juliette
But go for the 1st Symphony

Some great artists are just too prolific
So you gravitate to more or less arbitrary favorites
And you can’t expect them to dwell in perpetual heights
How about sixty poems of William Wordsworth
Too bad he wrote six hundred
The Prelude has its moments
But don’t read all fourteen books
Or all of any one of them
What do you expect for something fragmentary over forty years
Really Tintern Abbey does the trick
But quite a few sonnets
And the Lucy poems and the Immortality Ode
Just read the first four strophes of that one
Nutting I Wandered Lonely The Solitary Reaper
Surprised by Joy achingly sad the death of a child
Westminster Bridge I learned the gimmick of a list
You can prospect all you want
Or get someone to help you find the nuggets
Surprised by Joy is buried in a collection
That treats the rituals and doctrines of the Church of England
I’m just lucky somebody told me about it
I’ve enjoyed every note of Haydn I’ve ever heard
But a hundred and four symphonies
Come on
But 94 still surprises
Bach is great what I can understand of it
The St. Matthew Passion has fits of gorgeousness
But when we enter hour three of
I’m in a coma
Give me the catchy pop tunes the Brandenburg Concertos
Nine poems by John Keats five by STC
Pope and Swift great and great
Gulliver a bit rocky in passages
But Swift’s tetrameters are justified by Celia Shits alone
Rape of the Lock and the first epistle of An Essay on Man
But you can have the Dunciad
I get bitterness but I can’t do boring
Heroic couplets hijacked the eighteenth century
But Pope did ‘em best
So skip all the rest
Gray’s Elegy is quatrains and beautiful most of it
That Paradise Lost is too long is no fresh cut
Hopping back to the seventeenth
And of course the puritanism is noisome
But Milton really was of the devil’s party
Or at least of the Italocentric Aeneaphile renaissance
I’ll ride with him any day in hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition
Which reminds me to remember that
Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Are world heritage treasures especially with their proper illuminations
The prophetic books of Blake not so much
Aphex Twin Brian Eno David Bowie
Even the redoubtable Beatles themselves
All perpetual dwellers in the heights
All too greatly productive to be digested
Or rather
I play favorites unabashedly
Always the hoariest numbers

I can’t speak of literature in translation
Though I make an exception for Thomas Mann
Similarly I love Indian music
But Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan figure inordinately
I know just enough French to appreciate Baudelaire
But Rimbaud leaves me cold
And Mallarmé is over my head
Ditto almost all of Goethe
And Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust are much too much
You have to admit at least The Metamorphosis and the Hunger Artist
And you can’t exclude The Trial
A taste of opera in Italian is okay
A little Verdi a little Pucchini
Bohème not Butterfly
Afro-cuban I’ll eat up all day
But I can’t identify the greats

Literally a warhorse is a mount tough enough to survive a battle
In figurative terms a warhorse is a cultural artifact
That survives irrespective of its possibly modest quality
The word suggests that the piece
Should likely be put out to pasture
And I grew up in the age of the Top 40
At least 37 of which were inevitably dreck
Although the Cracker Jack prize might be number 39 at the bottom of the box
And you never heard anything that wasn’t already a hit
In some consequential market
So on any given week three or four entries seemed to my jejune consciousness
Pretty good
Even memorable
I could never visit the Louvre
But picture books enshrined the Great Masters
My mother and I enjoyed the Jacksonville Symphony
Not among the world’s most prestigious
But one time we heard Copland conduct the Lincoln Portrait
With John Caradeen reading
And at Christmas once Great Melodies of Classical Music appeared
To be played on a kiddie phonograph
Of course the concept is worthy of critique
But I call Great that which induces joy
A received opinion in most cases I admit
But on occasion a celebrated piece will disappoint
While something elaborately discarded will please
And collective creativity always comes up with a new synthesis
And Newsweek and Life featured the current sensation
Jackson Pollock or deathless Picasso
The New Rock emerging from the Summer of Love
So hell yeah I like me some Jefferson Airplane
Some Big Brother and the Holding Company
Some Andy Warhol some Hogarth and Cruikshank
Get Offa My Cloud Paperback Writer Light My Fire
Ooh Break on Through to the Other Side
The Temps and the Tops
Junior Strauss and the Peer Gynt Suite

I am well aware of the arrogance of one
Who presumes to recommend and disparage
When I say it appeals or not
I tell you more about myself than about the work
And you shouldn’t care about me I don’t suppose
But I will say that when I recommend
I have discovered there
And probably it’s been discovered many times before
Some value that others are likely to see if they give a try
And in rare cases though not unprecedented
I diagnose some heinous flaw that disqualifies a work
From sympathetic consideration
But generally I recognize that life is short
Oscar Wilde wrote four famous comedies all worthy of a glance
Wilde never fails to entertain
Even in the put-on decadence of tragic Salome
Or is Herod really the tragic one
But there’s a reason The Importance of Being Earnest
Is performed around the world
By troupes that do not muster the accents of English patricians
Most of the world of life art and physics I do not comprehend
The slender sliver that I feel confident to grasp
Was vouchsafed to me in my youth my childhood
There obtains more gap than presence in the current essay
There is a difference however between deficiency and defect
I do not scorn what I do not know
And many rightly know and love that of which I am oblivious
And with art you must cultivate a partiality for pleasure
The Mikado makes light of truly nasty beliefs
But come now
Tit Willow
Three Little Maids

The jazz greats are consistently and exuberantly unreservedly great
So much so you feel guilty for every tune you’ve missed
Louis Armstrong of course
Duke Ellington duh
Prez and Diz and Lady Day
Bird and ‘Trane and Monk the ineffable Sphere and bad bad Miles Davis
Basey Django Wayne Shorter Cannonball Herbie Hancock Ella Fitzgerald Jimmy Smith
Joe Zawinul Jan Hammer Tony Williams Lenny White Chick Correa Billy Cobham
Ron Carter Ray Brown Major Holley Charles Mingus
Jack DeJohnette Philly Joe Jones Gene Krupa Steve Gadd Art Blakey
Airto Moreira Milt Jackson
Roy Eldridge Woody Shaw Fats Navarro
Cootie Williams Artie Shaw Johnny Dodds
I know that a multitude have eluded my scrutiny or my recognition here
And that I limited in my understanding have given them short shrift
Oscar Peterson who owed a lot to Art Tatum
Sarah Vaughan remember her
And now I feel guilty for starting a list I can never hope to finish
I guess I’ll make a lame disclaimer
A portion of infinity
Sidney Bechet the tensest quickest most righteous vibrato
Charlie Christian Joe Pass John McLaughlin
And blues and funk and sweet soul music
As if there were a boundary line in the spacetime continuum
Mothership Connection Got My Mojo Working Cold Sweat
Anything by Al Green
Gah they crowd upon me with their importunities
The Godfather of Soul the Hardest Working Man in Show Business
Sonny Boy Wolf Muddy John Lee Hooker Booker T and Cropper
Tina Turner was an immensely exciting performer
All around singing and dancing
I loved her superfit backup singers
What Tina did with the microphone in Gimme Shelter excited me
Aretha The Supremes all of Stax and Motown and Atlantic
Smokey Robinson Marvin Gaye Michael Jackson Quincy Jones
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles
Wicked Pickett and Lonesome Otis
Mood Indigo Potato Head Blues The Thrill Is Gone Caravan
Dust My Broom Rollin’ and Tumblin’ If the River Was Whiskey
Stones in My Passway Hellhound on My Trail
Ma Rainey Bessie Smith Big Mama Thornton Etta James
Rufus and Kool and the Gang and The Ohio Players and The Gap Band
Mississippi Fred and Mississippi John and Memphis Gus and Memphis Minnie
Memphis Slim and Slim Harpo
Professor Longhair and Dr John the Gris Gris Man Alain Toussaint The Meters
Luke Jordan Cocaine Blues
And Dick Justice’s cover is a bit of all right
Along with his rendering of Henry Lee
And almost everything else in the Harry Smith Anthology
The Carter Family Buell Kazee Uncle Dave Macon
Sliding a bit off topic now
The continuum is slippery
But many of the immortals listed herein
Appear in that Folkways noble compilation
The Masked Marvel Cannon’s Jug Stompers
I say almost so full disclosure
Nelstone’s Hawaiians sound winsome indeed
But they’re virulent racists sad to say
It’s a shame when assholes contaminate our fun
So let’s quickly give a cleansing listen to
Blind Willie McTell Blind Lemon Jefferson Blind Arthur Blake
Ray Charles
Robert Johnson in a hotel in Dallas
And the Moses and Elijah Charlie Patton
And seven or eight other hundred dozen
The little nightclub in Anytown USA
The ensemble at the college before the basketball game
And I just want to express my boundless gratitude
Beam me up Scotty I’m in a hell of heaven

I don’t care for show tunes
But Singing in the Rain The Wizard of Oz 42nd Street
So blessedly clever
The film score to Lawrence of Arabia
And the film itself is pretty great too though not without its flaws
Would it have killed you David Lean to put a woman in there
The ululating multitude don’t really tick the box
I guess he tried to make amends with Zhivago and his sappy Lara
Imagine Vertigo Psycho or Taxi Driver without Bernard Herrmann
Bugs Bunny without Carl Stalling

I could name a hundred one-hit wonders
And one-hit wonders are great
And as Joseph says in one of Mann’s best novels
Often dismissed as too lengthy
Once you’ve been acquainted with the Most High
Why bother with lesser gods
Who needs a second record from Shocking Blue or even the Box Tops
? and the Mysterians is only one song but that a good one
You can flip back and forth between the Trashmen and the Rivingtons
Misirlou Dick probably had other hits
But this one is perfect starts fast and speeds up
Some artists should have quit while they were ahead
Sequels suck as a rigorous rule
Woolly Bully way better than Little Red Riding Hood
Time of the Season pretty great but no She’s Not There

Mystery Train would be a classic even if Elvis hadn’t sung it
But with Scotty Moore and the boys at Sun it’s hard to beat

Within You Without You is an extraordinary case
The dialogue between the massive London Symphony and a little Indian band
A little girl and her neighbor Totoro

Those better informed than I have denounced Bitches Brew
But I was ready to be transformed in 1970

I must leave myself time and space and thou Dear Reader
For those just short of the pinnacle of greatness
And need I remind you what a majestic height that is
The Doors the Kinks The New York Dolls Jefferson Airplane
The Hollies The Byrds The Who Pink Floyd The Pixies
The Björk-PJ Harvey-Nick Cave wrinkle
The J Geils band were so fresh when
They were slicked-back nasty lads from Boston
Kurt Weill Claude Debussy
The charming sardonic and enigmatic Satie
The German Requiem but really just one section well the opening’s also great
Dark Side might nudge Floyd into the first rank
Outstanding musicianship studio technique lyrical excellence
Jeff Beck belongs here too
At his best with Jan Hammer or George Martin
But Over Under Sideways Down sounds like a shehnai
Played through a Telecaster
And the Bolero is pretty great penned by Jimmy Page
But John Paul Jones was the only genius in Led Zep
And how many groups have even one
Go for Four Sticks
He composer of the strings in She’s a Rainbow
The Velvet Underground let truth be told
And the early works of Andy Warhol
Especially his images of naked death
Transformer is a classic
Collaboration of Reed Bowie and Ronson
Brian Wilson is pretty great
But all I want is Don’t Worry Baby
Daft Punk paid homage to Wilson
But all I want is Around the World

It’s always a disillusionment to discover
For the umpteenth time that a great artist is human
All too human
Take Nietzsche for example
A lyrical philosopher if such a thing is possible
But not a model of coherence
Indeed madness peeps through the curtains of his greatest works
Yeats’s attraction to the overman
Led him to wish for a fascist aristocracy
And his politics were not his sole eccentricity
Best poetic diction though in modern times
And you could fill a hall of fame with the busts
Of great minds ravaged by syphilis
Schubert Manet Baudelaire
Perhaps even the miraculous Oscar Wilde
Who gave his genius to his life and his life for his genius
Of whom bee tee dubs just read The Importance of Being Earnest
We can accept that artists are on the verge
Many of them of cracking up or past the verge
With their drugs alcohol and garden variety crazies
Like everybody else really
Nevermind is a monument of magnificence
And Lithium best of all early specific for clinical depression
But you don’t have to do like Bird to play like Bird
‘Cause you can never play like Bird
And Kubla Khan occurred despite and not because of the laudanum
Gene Vincent burnt to a cinder
Poor diamond Syd giggling in the hall
Sly Stone had a problem showing up
Hemingway Fitzgerald Dorothy Parker
The standard bearers of generations lost beat or grunge
The suicides the abusers and the abused
Ike Turner was a hell of a blues guitar player
It’s a shame though when the author’s defects
Make up the theme of the work
I love me some Wagner
But ever were works of such towering grandeur
Devised by such a shithead

Some artists attain a consistently impossibly high standard
But one title will stand apart
Disraeli Gears Fear of Music Kid A
Hendrix worked the opposite trick
Three out of four titles he more or less completed kill outright
He did have a little sophomore slump though
But jaysus what can you say about Hendrix
The octaves on Third Stone the pathos of Wind Cries Mary
The orchestral expansion of Dylan’s Watchtower the apocalyptic sorrow
Psychedelic music generally expresses exquisite melancholy
Hear the sadness in Strawberry Fields
Which might have made Sgt. Pepper exceed a single disc
Double albums were all the rage for a while
Generally not worth the bulk
But preeminent exceptions obtain
The White Album a bit sad four solo albums some rather slim
Not innocent of longueurs
But Electric Ladyland Exile on Main St
Both highest points of highest points
The Stones created five unchallenged classic albums
Under the tutelage of Jimmy Miller
Add classics after
Some Girls
And before
Their Satanic Majesties Request denigrated at first
But justified by 2000 Light Years from Home alone
Add twenty or twenty-five songs from before albums became a thing and after
What To Do in every category guitar backing vocals lyrics drums
Charley I’m speechless and demolished with grief months years later
We Love You Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows Please Go Home
Jumping Jack Flash Honky Tonk Women warhorses par excellence
Stu and Nicky Hopkins and sweet crazy Brian
Bill Wyman underrated but 19th Nervous Breakdown
And the bass in Satisfaction yet another of its glories
Mick Taylor’s solo on Winter slide on You Got To Move and all over Exile
The coda jam to end all jams of Can You Hear Me Knocking
Sway badass in every respect
Bobby Keys stately Texas maniac
Merry Clayton got one shot and scored
Billy Preston I Got the Blues indisputably the best organ solo
Who saved Let It Be
Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone but it isn’t
Don’t be put off by the lumbering behemoth of the Stones onstage today
Keith can still shake you with a touch
The opening act in 1972 Stevie Wonder and Superstitious
So Talking Book that’s the one
Innervisions that’s the one
Fulfillingness’ First Finale that’s the one
I’ve had a good life and can die happy
Luxuriating in such plenitude
That’s what great art does for you
And if you can have only one Beatles album
Go with Abbey Road
But then Revolver

I can take a homeopathic dose of Grateful Dead
Especially if we’re in 1967 or 1969 or 1973

Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had far better bands
Than most of the rock acts I’ve commended here

I lie awake at night fantasizing
That Jimi Hendrix has joined Parliament Funkadelic

Ann Carson I can’t even tell you what she’s doing
David Melnick was there ever a more sweet-tempered pcoet

I love when one great
Pays tribute to another
Mahavishnu Miles

Two pictures by Titian two or three by Turner
Leonardo Michelangelo Raphael are chelonianly impressive
But how lovable are they really
Admiring them feels like a duty
Velazquez tailor-made for the Foucauldian taste
But as usual the artist far outstrips the commentator
Hard to find a Rembrandt that doesn’t knock you out
Hans and Franz Holbein and Hals
Vermeer perhaps a little more praiseworthy than moving
Constable the healing power of nature in art
Francis Bacon had quite a few but Three Figures stands apart
Duchamp but primarily as groundwork for Jasper Johns consistently great
The latter a kind of Jane Austen of twentieth-century painting
As is John Ashbery of twentieth-century poetry
Who made it strong well into the twenty-first
Another sweet-tempered giant
Dip in anywhere
And his disciple James Tate
Browse leisurely his Selected
Bob Dylan has his ups and downs
Like way way down for a decade or two
But oh lord way way up
Desolation Row and all of Highway 61
Mississippi and about forty others that you tend to forget about
Oh yeah he wrote that and everybody either covered or copied
Jeez I mean Flatt and Scruggs did I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
A big tipoff when the songs in the Top 40 started mentioning clowns
Mozart always irresistible but six late symphonies
Three or four of the operas
All you need
Well you need the Requiem and whoever finished it did a fine job
And you can’t be a decent human being
If a Little Night Music doesn’t make you smile
Magical Vivaldi always a feast of melody
But stick to the concertos for mandolin
Odd-numbered symphonies of Beethoven plus the sixth minus the first
But here the warhorse theory shows its weakness
String quartets piano trios sonatas which of them do you plan to lose
And how about Schubert and his six hundred songs
If a tenth of them are as good as Der Lindenbaum or Erlkönig
And go to the Tate in London and try to decide what’s smokable

I like the hardboiled popular stuff
George Smiley Bernie Gunther
Starting to like Jackson Lamb
The works of Dashiell Hammett always
But Raymond Chandler doesn’t do it for me
The Godfather the French Connection the car chase in Bullitt
Apocalypse Now but not Heart of Darkness or well maybe
Aguirre the Wrath of God
Most of Scorcese
Most of the Coens
Thank goodness for Marge Gunderson
Or absolutely everybody would be a dope
Who’s not a hapless victim
A Clockwork Orange if that doesn’t stretch the point
A wicked score by Wendy Carlos
Assisted by Purcell and Elgar and Rossini and Ludwig Van
The movie not the book or well maybe
Try to refrain from the glossary

Aristotle despite his stout reputation is a wimp
Plato despite resistance has a lot going for him
And a lot harder than people think
Socrates is the greatest ever but you have to go through Plato
I read Euthyphro and the Apology every few months or mean to

I can listen to contemporary classical music if it has a pulse
Like Nixon in China
Atonality I just don’t get
Unless maybe you’re just supposed to go with it and don’t worry about the method
I can appreciate but my understanding is limited
But with artworks as with persons those I love I love indeed
A line I cribbed from Coleridge whom you just want to mother
Ghosts of Versailles mixes in some tonality and some Turkish
The undeniable beauty of a golden bird
Way back to Stravinsky three great ballets
A few delicate piano pieces
But then he turned serial
Back further to Tchaikovsky best in the pathetic mood
But please
No cannon in the concert hall
No imperial anthems
The tunes in the Nutcracker but really they really are really very familiar
The nineteenth century was the age of the giants
Berlioz with his innumerable timpani
Novels you didn’t get many of to the pound
People praise Middlemarch but give me Silas Marner any day
David Copperfield is the one you want from Dickens
Tale of Two Cities is shorter but Dickens shouldn’t do historical
It doesn’t matter where you open Whitman
It’s going to be lovely and we need Whitman’s loveliness
It doesn’t matter where you open Dickinson among her what thousand-and-a-half
It’s going to be shocking and buddy we need her kind of shock
Poe’s tales but not the poems
Okay Annabel Lee’s okay but stay away from the bird on the bust
Moby Dick is great on any page but damn they add up fast
Bartleby is much more to the point
And Byronic heroes stink up the joint
Heathcliff Rochester Ahab Byron himself
Just act like grownups will you guys
But Byron rhymed bodices and Odysseys so that’s okay
Too bad it was on like page ten of the longest poem ever
And Jane Eyre is awesome regardless
And the first half of Wuthering Heights
And Frankenstein in the early version
War and Peace is solid but go for Anna and her sister Emma Bovary
One novel each and you know which one
By Morrison Pynchon Bellow Baldwin Vonnegut Heller Woolf Rushdie Nabokov
Ulysses is great if you can get Richard Ellmann to teach it to you

And speaking of the Odyssey
Don’t read the Iliad
And the story of Dido is okay but it’s a straight shot to fascism
Pious Aeneas virility the pathway to submissive virtue
Doesn’t matter who you screw so long as you do your duty
And Oedipus is amazing but a lot like the Eden story
We’re congenitally fucked
Well wait a minute
The scene where Priam comes to to Achilles’ tent should move you
You cold-hearted bastard
And Hector’s parting from Andromache
And we know what’s going to happen to the kid
The Divine Comedy is just gross sorry
An impressive achievement
Like making Westminster Abbey out of pretzels
But with more juicy skull chewing for all eternity
Italian lit of the renaissance is okay but see literature in translation above
You can read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English
If you ignore the great vowel shift
But don’t bother with anything except
The General Prologue and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
And the sweet story of Chanticleer and Pertelote

Does the fact that I like popular stuff make me a bad person
The Waltz King was more a collaborator in the Vichy sense
Than a servant to the insanely wealthy Viennese
A well-compensated enabler
Ah but Tales of the Vienna Wood
Vibrato on the zither

Much mischief flows from misapprehension
Of the meaning of representation
The problem stems from the variable usage of the prefix re
Which sometimes means again but sometimes means back
We give schoolchildren the former construal
The latter requires some evolution of thought apparently
If you reread this poem you will read it again
But if you return to it tomorrow you do not turn again
You turn back
Similarly retracting is not drawing or pulling again
But drawing back
Like that flap of chest tissue during my heart surgery
A magnolia with three boles and a few plump ivory flowers
Is present to me now right outside my open window
I represent it to you in language now
But language cannot make the tree present again
Anywhere or anywhen else than now in the near back yard
My representation is thus a reference
I attempt with my words to carry your consciousness back
To this thing that you have never seen nor never will
This magnolia flowered and triple-boled

Don’t debate within yourself
The primacy of the general or the particular for example
Don’t torment yourself with the error of taxonomy as destiny
Which came first streets or 1st Street
The answer is obvious but trivial
Unadjudicated debates are pointless
And sequence overrated
Don’t subject yourself to victory and defeat
The subfamilies of the Lepidoptera legitimately concern the entomologist
Let us you and I love the monarch and the fritillary
Whether or not we know them by name

The gutters continue to accumulate the seepage from the days of rain
A dog briefly liberated from domesticity warily and joyfully romps
Rules govern every event except not
And who designates an event
And who discriminates an object
A dog is obviously conscious
Seepage apparently less so
But it’s an artificial contrivance of the human mind
The mosquito larvae know to touch the surface and dive
A madman types decrees on a Royal upright
Demanding the destruction of a civilization as currently constituted
That permits the nose-picking of a three-year-old

Invasive species poorly maintained infrastructure
The unanswerable dictates of priests and kings
Children people of all ages infected wounded by neglect
An economic system founded upon consumption of the irreplaceable
Horrific violence perpetrated in the cause of insane ideology
A million persons displaced in Sudan because former allies quarrel over power
A culture an empire a global dominion of special weapons and tactics
We have little power to defend against these atrocities
But we can refrain from effecting them within our narrow sphere
We can show the world through our actions that good is real

In the name of all that is good
Love yourself that you might love others

I hate to see you suffer dear friend
Events are overwhelming
And you feel your contribution is meager
But your worth is not contingent upon your contribution
Not contingent upon your management of affairs
Not a function of this or that quality
And you contribute a lot in any case
You mean a lot to me

I am by no means a model of probity
But I am benevolently inclined as I know you to be
Partial to the good
We know little and self-control is limited
But we help each other when we can
A bird ornamented with red just perched outside my window and departed
That damned dog is still snuffling around my yard
I think its having a good time

See a way of wagging the hand
So that only the ring finger waggles
A ring or its absence implies no significance here
It’s only a way of identifying which finger
And see a different way of shaking a hand
So that the index snaps against the thumb and middle finger
And note again shaking a hand
Not shaking hands by way of greeting or agreement
And not snapping fingers
As keeping time with Marvin Gaye or Nina Simone
And of course you can keep time with any musical artist
And not just these magnificent two
Just representatives of the whole masterful company
And with middle finger no hostile intent
Though the opposable quality of the thumb might relate
But one finger striking two that cleave together
But confusingly cleave could mean to separate or divide

A schoolchild says How many fingers am I holding up
And you say Five
And the kid says Wrong
One of them is a thumb

We imagine that we can bring the world to order
By focusing the eye
And somehow we involve the focusing of the tongue
Synecdoche of the entire vocal apparatus
The entire conceivable lexicon
To match the entirely separate sensory apparatus
Of which eye is but a representative
In order to disaggregate the significant
From the welter of chaos on the periphery
But doesn’t welter already mean chaos
And wouldn’t it be better to register significance
Before the aggregation
But the world I guess constantly or already aggregates
We come upon an aggregate or composite world
And something is significant only in relation to something else
That which is significant stands out
We make it stand out
And stand a metaphor

I wrote this poem when I was 18 years old
And 68
At 18 never a weed whacker had I heard nor seen
Nor at 68 have I forgotten
What functioning gonads are

I’m supposed to be looking for an object
That might no longer exist
The very definition perhaps of a fool’s errand
For matter is neither created nor destroyed
But the object might well have transitioned into the realm of the unavailable
Where it will abide as good as inexistent
And when will I know in fine that I haven’t found it
I always haven’t found it yet
And in any case a frustrating task
The more imposing after years of insult to the body to the brain
But of course the brain is part of the body
But a special part we say
Where matter is transmuted into abstraction
But the liver too is special and performs its function
Many functions in point of fact
Some of them transmutative
The thyroid the pituitary the gonads
All functional as hell
Broadcasting their messages of command and control
Encrypted in the hormones
And I’m distracted by welter and stand and thumb
The object is not one thing but two
My pair of spectacles is not two things but one
I found the object but my relief at its recovery
Never matched my grief at its mislaying

But it was never matter to begin with
Not so far as we can tell
And why suppose that matter comes first
And what is the significance of sequence anyway
The brain imposes factitious order
On a welter or whatever of sensation

What does a fly see with its compound eye
So exquisitely reactive
A pace of life measured in milliseconds
A lifespan of what a month
Human time humans who measure out the moon
Karl Shapiro called a fly a hideous little bat
He was one of those great realist poets
Shapiro not the fly
Those poets who could and did contrive
A concrete-to-concrete metaphor
A manner mock-grandiloquent that is to say
A tone slightly satirical that is to say
Bitterly and doubtless justifiably pissed off
Who witnessed the horror at mid-century

What do you see and what is it called

The cephalopod’s eye they say
Is as precise as that of a human
More precise perhaps given the cuttlefish’s visual display
That is to say display for visual delectation
And eye again a synecdoche
And what of its molluscan cousin the garden snail
With its sensitive retractable horns
So called by their resemblance to the accessories of antelope or cow
Synecdoches
Lots of other creatures have horns
Corniferous may we say
No we may not
For that word means of or producing chert
But lots of creatures do have horns
Semblant in their relation to the head
And not necessarily in their retractability or its absence
We don’t call the spikes on the stegosaurus-tail horns
But see what ceratopsians have atop their eyes
And do snails have heads
Their stomachs are their feet
Or so we say anatomy be damned
And what about our fellow vertebrate the lamprey
What does it see while socketed
To walleye catfish or sturgeon
Synecdoches
And I can’t imagine that the fish are too pleased with the experience
Of fast-appended lamprey

Remember that time a guy walked a tightrope
Between the Twin Towers
And you picture the Twin Towers to yourself
And think of something entirely other
Than a guy on a tightrope

See the photoreceptive eyespot apparatus
On flagellated algae
Synec uh well you know
Functional for steering toward photosynthesis
Evolutionary descendant of the chromatophore
The eyespot not the algae

A hired man or maybe self-employed
Operates a weed whacker
With a effing two-stroke engine
You see what I did with the article there
Highlighting the bowdlerism
I say Hiya
He says Hey
We both bob our heads a little at the neck and smile
Look
A hawk’s feather blown aside
One edge supplied with barbules
The other fluttering free
And from the feather will ye know the hawk
I pick the feather up and hold it
Between my thumb and my middle finger
And look

As no one can precisely say when day gives way to night
Though clearly a distinction might be made
So artifice and nature remain distinct
And as lovers revelers singers of matins and vespers love most
The passing threshold times of dawn and dusk
When the world is neither this nor that but all contraries met
So great beauty dwells in those things
That partake both of intellect and flesh
And thus in dreams which check the promptings of the will
We mighty playwrights be and cunning shows contrive
So rightly spake the sage of Weimar dreamer of the Faust
And thus the costumed flowers the pollinators beguile
And thus the little birds triumph with potency of song
And falling rain advises with the force of sapient speech
And though but rare to see Aurora Borealis’ enchanted curtains
Reveal and not conceal the theatrical celestial stage
And promise and deliver an Odyssey in space
From which vantage earth appears
A floor of carpets and mosaics curiously wrought
And especially those forests that give way imperceptibly
To grassland where first humans walked
And deathless sing we day and night
With our forbears in the trees

The house sets off on its nightly course
Relinquishes its servant duties
Relaxes its responsiveness to beck and call
And eases into autonomy
No mechanisms to manage
Nor devices to maintain but such as those
That pertain mainly to the interior
The air the darkness
And to a lesser extent the exterior

A breeze enacts procession through a half-opened window
A streetlight genuflects through a gap in the curtains
It will keep up the good work
Until the fullness of the morning
And up and down the neighborhood
The region reverberates not unpleasantly
The barred owl calls in lengthy intervals
Who-oo-oo cooks who cooks for you rrrrr
In lengthier intervals the railroad tracks clatter
The engine sounds its diminished chord
A dog intones and then is silent
Thrusting motions emanate from the highway
The frictioning tires the whine of shifting gears
Trucks hauling manufactured goods the finished and the partial
Emit rough gutturals from their elevated exhaust pipes
Hedonists fast and furious in their Dodges and Camaros
Make bets or raise hell for the hell of it

People elsewhere watch TV
Eat snacks make love
Check in with their social media
But here the house conducts itself as a house
Practicing the tranquility of customary night
Tomorrow the negotium begins again
But here tonight beloved let us rest

I heard a host of angels 
Singing hosanna in the highest
It was only the dishwasher

Gaze into the crystal and see
Redbrown Incubus
The Skinky Lizard
Thunderguts
Metaphor
Plutonic Rectum
Omicron the Variant
Lois Lane
Le Passe-muraille
DK’s Snake
The Bronze Conundrum
Absolutely
Cressida Perpetrator of Illusions
Triumphalist and Sparky
Crushangry
Radium the Geiger Woman
The Ainsi Squad
Iago
The Taxidermist
The Taxonomist
The Taxi Driver
The Taxecutioner
Ace of Comic Books
Ajax the Unmovable
Mata Hairspray
The Rotor
Talos the Reckoner
Secret Agent Garlic
Hippocampus
Salome of the Seven Veils
Snapfang
Moebius Woman and Paradox Man
The Irredentist
Velox and his Inconceivable Velocipede
Schwärmer
Rutstuffy
Longshanks and Curthose
Wormhole Navigatrix
Death
Gabbo the Ventriloquist
Alec Baldwin
The Unnamable
Xtrzcytf from the Tricky Galaxy
The Shropshire Slasher
The Rarebit Fiend
The Gremlin from The Kremlin
The Nascar Malefactor
Screwdriver Phillips
The Margravine of Overflow
The Alchemist
Orba
Habakkuk the Sleuth
Iron Poor Blood
The Essayist Montaigne
Orange Autumn
The Vegetable Brain
Chiromantica
Simulacrum
Sherlock Freebase
Juliette of the Spirits
The Mad Poiuyt
Mesmer
Ceci n’est pas un bad guy
The Horrible Infant
Tombflicker
Edible
Enter the T-Zone
El Tejón
The Seamstress
Timid Infantry
Melvin the Unmentionable
Ultrawhisk
The Frequent Flyer
Bong Contender
Missionary Poisition
Saneema Mistress of Space and Liquids
Quill
The Flashlight Maker
Terza Rima
Allen Driver of Automobiles
CHiPs
On Wings as Toasters
The English Brother-in-law
The Crooked Impostor
Glimmerglass
Snafu the Ineluctable
Odd Wombat
Fingertip
Luke Skymurderer
Snarkshooter
Magic Spectacles
Wifi Man
Mysteriezzz
Mr Polymer
Astrocan
Akhenaten of the Holy Forehead
Sgt. Fresca of the Soft Patrol
Samantha and the Backpack Gang
Charlie Machine
Talking Heads
Giraffeman
Satellite
Cunning Scientist
The Decrypter
The Deranger
The Denaturer
The Decalcifier
The Defibrillator
The Demander
The Deconstructor
The Defriender
The Debater
The Detacher
The Dephlogistinator
The Deliberator
The Defiler
The Glitchy Debugger
The Desturber
The Denominator
The Debacler
The Desister
The Deveiner
The Deducer
The Degrader
The Depositor
The Degrommer
Emphatic Thumb
Cyrl
Pantagruel
Alaska Murphy
The Courtly Highwayman
Opening Act
Person
Uncle Squirrel
Swoooooooooosh
Capitaine Épée
The Extortionist Priest
Arrowhead McGillicuddy
Dr Manikin
Medea the Fragrant Martian
Herbal SWAT
Nietsneknarf
Lexi Midwife of the Supernatural
Bummerslayer and Vibesboy
The Disappearors
The Disappointors
The Disagreeors
Aufgabemeisterin
Subliminal
Ms Pacman
We Happy Few
Throatwarbler Mangrove
Hormonus from the Isles of Langerhans
Passerine
They Might Be Gyroscopes
Mark E Smith
Zelda Episode XXXIV: The Quantum Bassoon
Sexy Mummy
Pancosmico
Frilly Gunslinger
Les Incroyables
puke
The Nativist
Vacuumtube
Robot Sansabelt
Sanitizer for Your Protectionist
Bob the Boy
The Neglectful Orthodontist
Teletransphoner
L6
The Cadmean Tooth
Ambiguous Signifier
She of the Thighs
Mathematicon
Anne the Equestrian Wonder
Return to the Planet of the Grapes
Mike Pilot
Bacchus and His Pards
Fatima and Her Living Crockery
Fairwoman and Foulman
Vampire Weekend
The Awkward Bombardier
Transistor Cormorant
The Epaulet Brigade
Madame Thing
The Astonishing Vertebrate
Swampbuggy
Red Roister
Snoop Dog
The Molybdenum Snowboarder
Technocrat
Pepin the Short
Xenobarbitol
Mirror Maid
Iffy

Whoever said the rain was merciful
Asked the mother in Peshawar
The grandpa in West Virginia
The woman’s case was the harder one
There were fatalities
A child a husband
A community lost
But the old man suffered too
The brick veneer inundated
Vital records precious mementos
The bric-a-brac of generations gone
Or worse
Still there in sodden indecency
And in the Horn of Africa
The wives the husbands the children
Wail aloud for a precious drop
While troops mass on the frontiers
There is no squaring of accounts
Mother Nature is cruel
But crueler still the man who rapes his Mother

This will be a great city if they ever get it built
Terry Street is a gaping hole
Guarded by six burly men
Wearing hard hats bulky gloves and brightly colored vests
One of them might be a burly woman
Not my problem one of them says
So you keep heading north on 25th
And hope that you can get to the east side
By taking a left a left and another left

Woodpecker on the ground dabbing away
The kind with a red skullcap on the back of its head
Doesn’t have to play its part
Stuck to the side of a tree

That last attempt was pretty good
You didn’t do it perfectly but you didn’t have to
After all there’s more to life than technical processes
Conversation at the outdoor table
But then somebody had to know how to make the espresso
They had buy the equipment somewhere
Oh well there’s always next time

Did Milton’s daughters enjoy taking dictation
Did they even consent
Did one of them maybe like it more than the other did

Foods have different properties
It’s hard to tell which one is responsible
For that bout of urticaria
The cheese the wheat germ the fruits and vegetables
The lamb stew like a secular Seder
The glass or two of merlot the creamy dessert
Not one of them is as forthcoming as we might wish
Or maybe it’s some occult combination

Across the lawn they sway in threes and fives
Bobbing like ancient detectorists
Their excrement more harsh than other fowls’
Will wreck the paint job on Nissan or Dodge

They cannot amend nor did they request
The traits with which Natura furnished them
Nor never would species invade did not
Humanity their wanderings ordain

Chestnut-colored incubus lurking in the periphery
Did not design its own bumpy carapace its bifurcated whiplash tail
Peril peril peril peril peril
Warning warning
Alarm
No not circuitry just another gelatinous configuration
Dissolving congealing transmitting
Ductile like a circuit and like a circuit coursing into return
The paleozoic sensors must occasionally yield a false positive
The demon summarizes the sundry threats that infest the domains of living things
Apex predator to the subapical practitioner jaguar to ocelot coyote to chihuahua
Days of dearth stretching into months
Invisible incomprehensible contagion to the prehensile brain
Faulty brachiation and fall to the forest floor

Menace abounds for the survival consciousness
Unto the miniscule myriads in the green expanse
The experience of life is not all beer and skittles
Hence the yearning for a world of inert placidity
Oblivion
Of harps clouds lotus blossoms juicy grapes always in reach
But lotus grows from the ropy slime mucky and defiling
The fingers of the harpist harden
You don’t sit on clouds
You let them shed their merciful liquor upon the place beneath
The grape will ripen only in its season
And its trickling blood in due course metamorphose into
An elixir by no means unique that exposes the illusion of individuality
And grants consciousness thereby of universal joy

A woofy bass innocent of attack
A kick a ride a throbbing tom
A Stratocaster drenched in reverb
Picking rapid to melt a pick

Like Milton awakening I must be milked

We imagine that philosophy to flourish requires an interval of peace
But since peace has never obtained at any time the better to shield our incapacities
We employ a generalized first person and a generalized present tense
Like the interstate highway is now a local boulevard for our commute
And we prefer quiet for our meager lonely perilous moments of contemplation

Prophylactic fashions express docile compliance or untrammeled inconstancy
Sedate carousal or caprine bacchanal behind the fastened gates
Obstinately punctual observances of michaelmas candlemas and the feast of St Blaise
Bless this throat O Lord which thou hast created lest bone of fish obstruct it
Seafood platter crossed tapers ashes on the brow and silken hairshirt evening wear

And some think themselves brave enough to adopt theoretical postures
To convert to the third person under the aegis of deliberate oblivion
They say something or another or they’re trying to pull a fast one
Experimentally innovative only should you deny with merciless self-deception
The eternal return of the same that is of the same old shit the same old traffic jam

The old original original old
Ma’s home cooking with traditional dyspeptic seasoning for all your orobuccal manifestations
Painless [sic] dentistry home in one hour
Spare the rod and just don’t spare the rod
Kick your dog after naming it for your worst enemy

Or you can throw up your hands fuck all go for your own bad self
And linger upon the attempt to staunch the itch of self-interest
With purchases distractives exploitations impressions subscriptions likes and soporifics
The restless spirit of the age in mesmeric packets and hey there’s an app for that
And everybody knows if there is no mandated procedure then everything is permitted

Ballroom dancers have the right idea under the froward surveillance
Finding pockets of freshness in the interstices the featureless spaces between the bollards
Of the stale fermentative Solonic gestures the prescribed structures of affect
The brief exceptions that lurk within the reeking application of the fuller’s art
The jamais vu of contracting religious or commercial fibers the unexpected appositive

And yet problems persist with the exaction of for example the definite article
Those obviously arbitrary tributes of matching belts and shoes
The scoffing naysayers who insist upon the authorized pronunciation of pianist
Per-severing in their exi-gencies they too number among the ambivalent vulnerable
Move the passenger thrown from the car or let them bleed out on the concrete

I intended ironically my summary of the Treaty of Westphalia
How what began as conflict of beliefs became conflict of states dissolved with a quill
And show me the state where law and justice interoperate
Show me the ideal unsupplanted by the completely mendacious real
Show me freedom peace truth beauty love sense and decorum

But justice is no mere operation nor are beauty nor love nor peace mere functions
Truth must be something more than a state of mundane affairs
We perceive a medley montage of angry flux
A hurricane that drives pine needles through stucco walls
Please remain in your sticky seats for the duration of the horrorshow

And what of bitterness pain aching loss the wound that never heals
Hearing the beloved say I’ve tried but I don’t love you
Witnessing the grotesquery of a sweet aged one’s decay
In trouble at school in trouble at home
The death of a child

So the crux is this the question of volition
The hurricanes the wars of six days or a hundred or a thousand years the glioblastoma
These evils do not originate with our sole selves
Action always constrained but always dimly weakly possible
I’ve chosen wrong a thousand times but I hope to find the will to choose rightly

How sad to spend a life immured in bunker
Mockingbirds or friend or foe strike together hieratic poses
The weediest weed breathes nobility
A toddler flinches before the thunderclap and waits at window for another
Both culture and nature ample earnest give of a receptive attitude

See these paltry muzzy numbers hear these wonky tuneless tunes
Taste these sourbitter dainties feel these breezes’ humid boons
Dream the smell of that location where that one event took place
Love yourself and love your neighbor shedding tears is no disgrace

It is a world of words to the end of it
But the world does not give spontaneously of
The molecular much less the atomic or the subatomic substrate
As of objects direct indirect or prepositional
Or the more exotic object complements or ablative absolutes
Or the phonological intricacies of diphthong fricative nasal and stop
Or even less of those vague pervasive interfluvia namely words generally considered
Which sometimes manifest themselves as complex atmospheric oscillation
Measurable as frequency amplitude and harmonic series
Or glyphic renderings in stone parchment paper sidewalk or the cloud
And sometimes as the occult synaptic tides of cortical exertions
Leopold Bloom’s The rol the roll involuntarily lilting
Silent occasion for modest embarrassment in necropolitan carriage
And is rol a word

Let us resort then to the analogy of a planet
Nobody makes a new continent ocean or mountain range
The attempt would erupt as the height of Nimrodian hubris
But oars might smite the winedark waves
Old MacDonald drive tractor and harrow over the north forty
The city fathers break earth for the new municipal edifice
Or capital rip the bowels from Mother Earth at Hambach
And thus mundane violations disturb intactness
But poetry is of the heaven

People have their conflicts
Nature’s peace is riven by predator and prey
Direst cruelty drives innocence into the wilderness
And all return to the one life that is their home
From which they only seem to have departed

We are the rotting flesh that the maggots eat
We are the buzzing flies that the fish eat
We are the leaping fish that the bears eat
And we creeping maggots love the bears’ putrescent meat

A child sat for breakfast at his grandparents’ table
Who served him milk in their own morning mug
This must be snowman coffee the child exclaimed
Delighted to shatter the categories so assiduously assigned
Since the germination of the australopithecine hyoid bone
And grandma brought forth no broom
For no shards threatened the three-year-old fingers
The holy communion intact of family and friends

Long years ago in good King Arthur’s time
All this fair land full filled with fairies was
Who caused great harm to milk and child ‘tis true
Unless the harm issued from priest or sage
Till weight and measure drove them underground
Where yet they dance and sing their fairy round
Still undisturbed by physicist or priest

So there is but the one great poem
To which all donate their mutational allotment
Prizewinners
Bullshitters
Con artists
Sighing lovers
Ruthless demagogues
PA announcers at the calf-roping event
Monks low-intoning Buddhist or Gregorian
Cantors muezzins and yodobashis
Yodelers carolers and trick-or-treaters
Nananana Nananana Hey Hey Good-byers
Singing waiters cabbies and costermongers
Participants in twelve-step programs
Preschool teachers
Bureaucrats compu’er says no
Harmless drudging lexicographers
Sparkling fairy princesses with their unicorns
Readers aloud of news sports and weather
Litigators
Speechwriters
Andean players on the pipes of Pan
Traveling salesmen
Debaters
Mrs. Paroo in the high school musical
Infielders keeping up a lively chatter
Shady characters who employ the argot of the underworld
Achilles and Dido and other shady residents of that other underworld who colloquize or refuse to with Odysseus and Aeneas and other sojourners there
Contributors let us grudgingly concede to social media
Auctioneers
Dalangs
Imitators of bird calls
Jump-roping chanters
Pointy-bearded professors mortarboarded and pince-nezed
Cheerleaders
Pop stars
Painted mummers
Baggy-pantsed comics
Garrulous checkers players
And crooning mothers to their babes
To say nothing of the sounds and sights of nature
The elegant murmurs of beast fowl herb fish and insect
Nurturing Earth her textures and her colors and her beneficence despite everything
The irresistible refulgence of His Majesty the Sun
The signs and wonders shining forth from air sea and sky
All that is sensible or imaginable
Each an intrusion
Each a violation yes but not such as breaks a bubble or singes a sleeve
Not charioted by Bacchus and his ravenous pards
Not even on wings as the curling falcon
But wafted upon such breezes
As from the heaven blow

The family trapped under the rubble in Antakya
The child starved in Sana’a
The little girl killed by a stray bullet while coming home from daycare
The father and child drowned while crossing the river
The businessman whose yacht is so large
It can’t be tugged out of port

People don’t know much
And they have little self-control
It’s not their fault
They didn’t create themselves

A worm writhes on the broiling pavement
A maple lost half its mass in a single gust
Flood fire shipwreck and madness
Events do not punish avoidable errors

And sometimes you do know and you make a choice
While the world proceeds with no guarantee
Except the promise of suffering
So love your neighbor and love yourself

Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
Ars longa vita brevis
I was wrong about that one too but not too wrong
It’s not that an artwork lasts a long time but a life doesn’t
It’s that it takes a long time to achieve art or rather artistry
Longer than life lasts
And thus a lifetime is not enough to become a poet
So I’m right that life doesn’t last very long

We focus too much on things most of us
And not enough on actions
Consequently we lapse into anodyne truisms
In general
In sufficient generality everything is true
By a rough estimation a noted entomologist avers
All animal species are insects

And yet a little bluegreen fungus
Impels itself through the leaf litter in winter beneath the magnolia
I can’t name its genus much less its species
In general we know much less than we think we do
I can see the winsome pileus
But I can only imagine the reaching mycelia
Living network of communication
Suppositious to me I grant but beyond doubt as to their actual though viewless existence
Formidable in their intricacy
And the pretty fruit it may be more greenblue than bluegreen
Might not be called a pileus
I know it isn’t exactly a fruit like a pear or a walnut
I know that it vanishes in a day or two or three
But it occasions joy

Common knowledge rightly holds
That when the doors of perception are cleansed
All things will appear as they actually are
Infinite and holy
But a fact less generally acknowledged
Is that the world and the creatures of the world
Magnificently thrive by the immanent alchemical infusion
That transmutes world into word
Into that creating word that inspirits dull lifeless matter
And thus joy engenders
For all this comes to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment

I present a habit or perhaps a compulsion
A will to exhaustiveness
As these pages show
To try to rule the world or at least render the world manageable
By pasting labels on things
But despite my appellative reflex
The birds the machines the buildings the trees the consumables the fungi and the people
Continue to do their respective things
They do things
Despite the fact that as recently as April 25 2023
I identified the song of the towhee as that of the bobolink
As I had done for decades previously

I thought Mussolini really did make the trains run on time
So successful was Fascism in practical efficiency one was forced to admit
When in fact he merely terrorized the populace into silence
In respect of the regularity of public services and presumably in other respects

It takes a long time to understand things
Longer than anybody’s allotted span
Even the old magnolia
Already towering and prolific when I arrived at this place twenty years ago
Is mortal
But memory is collective and not solely individual
I remember because those before me remember
The bullshit role the magnolia played in the myths of history
Nor am I the first to enjoy the delicious spectacle of glossy leaf and portly bloom
The fair scent of citrus though the flowers have not yet arrived this May
The roughsmooth triple bole implicated with lichens
The deep cretaceous roots
And thus there is but the one great poem

With the sound of infra-blacklight speech
Drawn from the sunless depths of sleep
You answer in the affirmative
But what was the question
For God’s sake what was the question

Vague intuitive spectacles make up the logo
That supplements the site of terse revelation
The Pisgah sight of dividends bubbling impetuously
A wavering field gules with azure bendy
And the legend emblazoned bone-white
Woe ye who embrace chimeric phantasmata

The industrious neighbors build greenhouses
Doghouses swallowhouses and a subterranean cocktail lounge
Upholstered it was said in chlorophyll vinyl with poppy piping
Hot and cold running waxfruit and felt ventilation
While a billboard out on the drag rages in viscous animation
I make sexy teeth

The family reunion degenerated into commercial appeal
One-sided stereo sets
A scheme for harvesting underutilized skymiles
Left boot sent on approval
A book of quotations from the late great Al Jolson
Oh Joe you are a real man after all

Doc note I’d diet on cod
If I could cantilever the murmuring protoplasms
Greenfern Lane used to be full of toads
Wearing sunglasses as I recall
Sipping mai tais under the banana leaves
Beside the heap of CRTs