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

Euthyphro and the Apology

Gilly had taken a big hit of windowpane
Which was a bad idea because he was driving
But he didn’t wreck the car as far as I can remember
But I do remember thinking sequence doesn’t matter as much as people think
Especially in the middle of the proceedings
When the disco ball expanded to fill the entire colosseum

The drab little professor with his pointer and mortarboard
I was thinking he needs to get a hod to go with that hat
But he ended up saying some pretty good things
About Bismark and the banks and how earlier
The revolutions of 1848 were a turning point in history
When history failed to turn

But you can’t have a doughnut shop without grease
You can’t have an immune system without lymphocytes
Nothing is perfect in this world
That reference to the werewolf’s hair was a poetic hyperbole
Amanda said Can’t you ever talk about anything except the Gators
And Gilly chuckled and just kept driving

Gay men capable of true gaiety
The steady-eyed spinster active in her milieu
Denizens of the demimonde who could take poetry or leave it
Wives of high-cultural celebrities
Phlebotomists and augurers of the sphygmomanometer
Workers in the convenience stores the warehouses and the fast-food restaurants
Decadent aristocrats
Heroes of social justice feckless dilettantes and scions of great families
Hipsters in their implausible garb
Gray drudges with a secret passion
Outsiders of problematic mental health
Neurodiverse entertainers who dwell in the ambiguity of gender
Executives of going concerns
Magistrates generals technicians attorneys obstetricians
Teenagers boisterous or withdrawn
Prodigious children who lisp in numbers
Rude mechanics and effete aesthetes
Sighing maidens born to blush unseen
Dowdy dour professors solemnly chanting through their pointed beards

What are we after here
Statements expositions analyses accounts
Songs laments jubilations libretti dirges cries of the heart
Architectonic verbal edifices spontaneous overflows
Sonnets villanelles heroic couplets blank verse
Ballads spenserians pindarics or poems in prose
Massive narratives in ottava or terza rima
Notes queries arguments
Limericks tongue twisters jokes puns and acrostics
Metaphysical conceits
Scurrilous attacks
Obscene broadsides
Minute renderings of the smallest and most remote county
Intrepid evocations of cosmic immensity
Arimanes seated on a globe of fire
A sparrow pecking at the gravel
Sweet serenades to ripening love
Sour cocktails compounded of ennui
Salty chanties of ribald fancy
Bitter denunciations of vice and folly
The lubricious umami of vowels fricatives nasals plosives and stops
The just representation of general life
The egotistical sublime
A thing of beauty and a joy forever

The forest primeval the Spanish Steps
The sounds smells and pace of the city
The field where man follows the plow
The field where woman binds the sheaves
The shop with its gear tackle and trim of all trades
The wandering clouds the looming mountains the restless seas
The leafy branch whereon the songbird sings
The soft earth wherethrough the tender flower peeps
The slender skyward fingers of trees in winter
The great bridges towers spires blockhouses roundhouses and vehicle assembly buildings
The wagons ships aircraft freight trains cars nuclear-powered submarines and oxcarts jogging on pneumatic tires
The virtual spaces defined by distance-obliterating media of transmission and reception
The hutches stalls and kennels of our brute companions equine canine or feline
The homes for the aged in their wisdom and cognitive decline
The church the school the place of business
The field of contention and the refuge of peace
The daycare redolent of paste finger paints and infantile effluence
The equivocal resorts of rage lust and melancholy
The granular details
The abstruse speculations
The daunting search through the universal library

Human persons treat of these subjects these places
Who have occupied some place of their own
Gelatinous organisms with the gift of speech
No different from anybody else
And everybody is different
All perforce take action in the world
And some shoulder the doom of squaring the circle
That is
Of wording the truth
Valorous endeavor
But is the particular compulsion
To cry to expose to disclose to overflow
Worthy of particular attention
It is not
For we must regard the issue and not the issuance as the matter prime
The progeny and not the gestation
The poem and not the poet
The life is not the thing
Except insofar as it looses the latch
To open the gate
To set out on the excursion
In the realms of immortality

What’s fair play in poetry
I don’t mean what are the rules
Inasmuch as for some time it has been the case
That the best rules are those unspoken
Those incapable of being spoken
And poets therefore have labored at the miserable job
Of reinventing the wheel

Or to shine a sunnier light
Poets have always had to exercise care
Lest they commit some blunder
Blatantly obvious to the world
Though entirely opaque it might be
To themselves

You should rise above concern about the world

You should probably insert an image from time to time
So the current exercise is already wanting
You should attend to the sounds
And try to establish some rhythm preferably subtle
So wanting wanting and wanting

And shouldn’t there be some sort of theme
I mean shouldn’t you have something to say
And is it a problem that stating and expressing
Never quite match up
And even so mustn’t a statement or for that matter an expression
Contain some content

And what of foul play
Aren’t some topics word choices images and attitudes
Self-evidently forbidden

And if the rules are hidden
Is there such a thing as cheating
Starting off a poem with a conjunction say
Or deploying an unfocused demonstrative
And yet a decent poem might begin
And on that day

. . .

And pronouns sheesh
Some he or she or it gallivanting around
Performing actions unanchored random unimaginable
And don’t get me started on I

And what on God’s green earth makes a poem good

And adjectives so cheap
Onerous
Shy
Salty
Transparent
Uncultivated
Snippy
Malodorous

Wit wisdom sagacity discernment juice
Skill ease virtuosity flair sprezzatura
Peace justice compassion beauty truth
Fact
Nobody on earth can write a poem
And yet millions of poems have been written
Or maybe just one

So love a poem as you love your neighbor
Let it do its thing

The tears should have been golden
We could have shared a fond idea
Instead of wasting our reserves in theoretical consultation

But all of our expressions
Mere triangle-1 PETE
Spuriously interchangeable

The shapes of green soldiers
The Kevlar-coated gladiators
The ecstasies of tactic and kill-ratio

Can we not weep together
Can we not agree on that much
Or are we prevented by the iron-clad doctrines

And what lies behind the seeming-durable exterior
The soft metallic-looking plates that corrode
But never fully dissipate

Enamored of the armatures
We neglect the gelatinous organism
The permeability of a frog

Dazzled by our tower of plastic
That stretches to the highest heaven
And strikes not dumb but glutting in spoken cacophony

Thereby drowning the opportunity
For a single instance
Of the aha-recognition

One party devoted to the mechanisms of history
Another devoted to the mechanical operation of the spirit
Both confusing numerals with infinite number

We tread upon far planets because we must
We must employ the latest invention
We must sustain the lust for dominion

The genie’s out of the bottle again
Another genie another bottle
Another bout of deadly wishes

And thus a universe of unmasterable indeterminacy
Of a lonely neutrino
Amid the one life within us and abroad

No ideas but in things they say
But what is a thing
What somebody says it is I guess

This magnolia casts up offspring
From its sickly fecund roots
Which tree is the tree

Or maybe I’m wrong
And seeds sprung where they fell
And root and bole alone but never soil

I cannot justify this paltry mumble
In the plaza of great actions
And innumerable speeches

I cannot bring myself to formal exercise
Nor can I bring myself to weep alone
And thus the silly unintelligible madrigal

The tears should have been frankincense and myrrh
We could have forgone the histrionic polymers
I should have clad myself in blissful silence