Who hears the little fiction of a joke
Recognizes something familiar or unfamiliar
Lurking in one’s own life
Or that of a person unknown

You don’t get to be sixty being a fool
Or all the fools are dead by sixty
But everywhere are seen old fools
And the dead no more foolish than the quick

Some happy few no doubt retain
The brains of a twenty-year-old
But grouchy befuddlement increases
And what word was supposed to go with elegant

Narratives of trauma no longer fashionable
Not even those of entire peoples entire continents
The recipe supposed to be followed in sequence
And insults to the brain well before twenty

So they never have been poems
And their creator no poet
And somebody should now step in and say
But you are a poet

Still to step in
Though no longer graceful nor elegant
No longer working the illusions of grace or elegance
Yet still to perform the chaste minuet

We launder the sheets
And set to work dirtying them again

An angel came to me last night
Who played the role angels classically play
Deliverer of threatening messages
Issued by the Most High
A being of indeterminate gender
Or rather of no gender not having evolved
From earlier vertebrates
And yet its eyes nose mouth feet and hands
Were all in the normal places
Uncannily tall thin yellowish and translucent
The angel wore a trapezoidal caftan
When it spoke I could not make out the words
I checked to see whether my hearing aids were in
They were
How odd I thought for a messenger
To emit unintelligible speech
And why should the Almighty
Need to rely on servants

An old man said I dreamed of an angel
That means I will die soon
But no need for an immortal to disclose
The brevity of life on earth

Four-score years ago a historian gave out
That the loss of structure in works of art
Exposed a culture in decline
If so then these pages effect such exposure

And was Whitman’s America more in decline
Than Baudelaire’s France
He who created alexandrines
Among the vers libre

And what is this structure and where
The millions of heroic couplets
Marching through the neo-classical age
Spoke they of a culture ascendant

But the historian found charm
In mannerist deformities and weightlessness baroque
And Pater too admired a comely decadence
Rigor dissolved in deliquescence

And yet it takes energy to persist
Amid lassitude and enervation
It takes will to take on willingly
The disease of poetry

Imaginary island
Unfamiliar fruits ready to drop into your hand
Strange beasts inclined to servitude
Meteorological conditions that heal wounds instantly
Gushing springs that prolong life indefinitely

Impoverished island
No people unready to comply
No people disinclined to servitude
No people who whether you love them or not
Will suffer and die

Blackbirds stream from my right to my left
From northwest to southeast
So quickly their crimson chevrons scarcely visible
So masterfully do they pass through the leafless tree
As if it were a mist or an idea
And yet a few pause to light momentarily
Only to rejoin the surging multitude
Now great now smaller
But uninterrupted and always in one direction

I cannot stay to witness the spectacle
I have my own compulsions to obey

I stand corrected
You are quite right
To point up my falsity

How reprehensible
To employ an absolute
When the case was merely relative

I hope you will always be here
To catch me in my crimes

A flock of blackbirds on the lawn
It seemed to matter
That it was smaller
Than last year’s horde

The trees unusually fecund
The mounds of acorns
Heaps of helicopters from tulip trees
Seemed to matter

The old poems seemed rehearsals
For a lie I planned to tell
To tell the truth the truth is simple
It’s the telling that’s complicated

I watched a little hawk perch in a tree then dive
To penetrate the low bushes in a lightning attempt
But the mouse or bird made a break for it
Too quick for raptor’s grasp or human sight

For years now I’ve seen more hawks than mockingbirds
Heard more often the high aggressive screech
Than the solemn antic melody
The careful alternation of play and grievance

Mockingbirds sing to ward off rivals
And to call hither their candidates for beloved
Hawks call out I know not why
Though like mockingbirds more often heard than seen

But this hawk sat silent upon the bough
And silent made its attack and made a silent second attempt
But when its quarry twice played away
Twice issued the anguished cry of defeat

And for the mouse or bird that got away
The hawk’s defeat meant no victory but mere reprieve
Nature requires the extremes of withdrawal and attack
The disparate parity of seizures and escapes

And all that lies between and beyond the extremes
The furtive herbivores the patient herbs
Molds that corrupt the dead
And trees that grow from the corruption

And those who traded the hunter’s cry
Traded the hunter’s few wins and many losses
For the risk-reduction though risky enough
Of agriculture and its discontents

I love words
Music
The holy communion of family and friends
The venerable capacity to respond to reasons
The inviolable dignity of persons
Sex
Babies
Slow pensive walking
Expressions of the tragic view of life
Expressions of the comic view of life
Images of dream and nightmare
Baseball and sumo helplessly and to the exclusion of other sports
Expertly prepared food and drink or even less-than expertly prepared
Plants their rhizomes boles and silicaceous exteriors
Seeds their husks helicopter wings and embryonic leaves within
Flowers their power to tempt and delight
Animals their pelts tusks colors bright or muted bodies segmented or continuous
Animals their social organizations lone predatory instincts drive to reproduce
The adaptive decorum of living things
The significant decorum of works of art
My cat Citrus his many faults and talents
Contrails
Clouds
Clear winter skies
Lush summer landscapes
Rain showers in Florida
Salt marsh
Wet places their appearance and aroma
Oily little rainbows in puddles lit by streetlights
Steam arising from the street
Fire its heat light and colors
Fire its ambiguous symbolic value
The symbolic relation of lead and gold
Symbols emblems metaphors analogies maps schemata and the devices of heraldry
Mountain plain and ocean
A child’s reaction to wonders natural and artificial
Fashion in architecture and apparel
Technology despite its expense and risk of harm
The holy remembrance of departed family and friends
The recollection of events joyful sorrowful or full of conflict
Sunset sunrise the course of the sun across the sky
The moon in all its phases
The wealth of stars one night in Virginia
Deserts and dizzying peaks inhospitable to humans
Pictures of places where you dare not set foot
Ancient dwellings monuments paintings and petroglyphs
The art science and history of writing
Knowledge of the miraculous processes of the universe
Knowledge of the miraculous web of life
Knowledge of the miraculous achievement of empathy
The miraculous growth of a child or an adult
The miraculous products of creativity

I love the excrescences of creativity here in these pages
Not good
But truthful

I drove a truck from Oregon to Georgia
I could spare no attention for Columbia’s flow
The Rockies’ majesty meant nothing to me
Except as a challenge for gears and brakes

A bighorn sheep trotted westward
Gone in an instant
And I grieved that I could not stop
To pay my respects

The old bad feelings
Which in my delusion
My wishful groundless hope
I thought I had overcome
Have returned

Too cowardly for pessimism
Too scared for despair
To face a future
In which I and those I love
Will suffer

But chiefly I
In narcissistic self-regard
A comfortable burgher
Counting his wounds
Luxuriating in regret

A liar and a plagiarist
Once I claimed that
Fair trains of imagery rise
But I have no imagination
No ability to produce images

The claim is Wordsworth’s
Word for word and not my own
No imagination
But only strategies
Of compensation

I have no imagination
But I have a great vocabulary
And yet I did not think to employ
The word trains
Much less the word fair

My imagination is auditory
I have told myself
But the sounds are no richer
Than the sights
No rhyme no rhythm no resonance

I fail to recollect emotion in tranquility
Due to a lack of tranquility
So I have protested
When only the throes
Stimulate my composing

A great poet
Finds fit epithet
A phrase of Keats
Even for despair
And seems it rich to die

Why then the compulsion
To compose
To congratulate myself
To simulate greatness
Without the risk of publishing

Discovered after death
Dickinsonlike
Or maybe these postings
Will make a splash
But poems don’t go viral

And how can these lines
Of unpunctuated prose
These pellets
Ever qualify
As a poem

It’s not poetry
It’s just a stupid symptom
Diarrhea or a flow of pus
A defect a stain
It’s snot poetry

Martin Heidegger
Nazi and willing accomplice of murder
Answered The Question Concerning Technology
Which purportedly alienates man
From Being in its primordial pristine purity
Or perhaps now and ever opens the door

Technology
Cattle cars
Zyklon B

For the primal truth must be revealed
Unconcealed by way of concealment
As in defeat you beguiled the victors to conceal
Willingly to shroud your crimes in oblivion
Which now and ever cry out to heaven

V2 Wernher von Braun
Bodies tortured and enslaved
ICBM

I will not take lessons in purity
From vile dead Martin Heidegger

Revved-up cars and long black guns
Too fast too furious

I heard merpeople conversing
But being hard of hearing
I collected only a few scraps
Force of gravity
Unwavering light
Big plants that never move
Sky that always changes
Sky that always stays the same
But never did I hear them mention
Those shadowy oligarchs
The people of the land

Old seafarers never considered
Mermaids in the phylogenetic sense
Never referring to mermen for example
In any of the old accounts
Nobody ever saw the absurdity
Of centaurs with six appendages
Six also for griffins and angels
Though seraphim have many more
Humanoid centipedes with wings upon their backs
Mermaids with only two
To which is added the piscine fluke

I don’t suppose they knew of my eavesdropping
These inexistent monsters
Monsters only in the phylogenetic sense
They did not behave like Frankenstein
Or the Creature from the Black Lagoon
Seizing raping or murdering
Or interacting in any way
With creatures to them merely mythical
Creatures to them worthy of oblivion
While they themselves live
Out there and below the surface

A girl a mod striding always striding
Shakes her shaggy short hairdo
Her blouse billowing above the rigid skirt
Such as Pharaoh might have worn
She turns her head away
From the direction in which she hurries
Toward us spectators
But her eyes a little askance
Seem to seek the past

She is a grown woman
But the custom of the time calls her girl
Not childhood but the apotheosis of youth
When youth exercises its prerogative
Or is depicted commercially to say
See our vibrant bodies’ life
You who are closer to death than we

Without death
Only life’s prolonged distress
With death
Life is no problem

Or perhaps her cornered eyes express dismay
At being so observed
Of being placed so as to be observed
Of being judged for her performance
Maybe she likes the billowing blouse the rigid skirt
Or maybe she is complying with command
And doubtless she’s been paid to pose midstride
And payment or compliance
What’s the difference

Life is a problem
For all who live
Close to death

Oh to devise a line that would soar aloft
On the wings of its own magnificence
And would rise above the gaze of the immortals
Who made the page their Kitty Hawk

Those bastards the artists
Who make it look so easy
Tempting the child to emulate their manner
Ignorant of their discipline

And once in a while the inexplicable
The Mozart or Handel
Tossing off masterpieces
Like a candy bar wrapper

Thank heaven for Keats
Who struggled to find a subject
Who struggled with the techniques
Which his lordly rivals wielded like saber

But then he outwielded them all
Sustained only with a love of beauty love of truth
All the while retaining the marks
Of hardscrabble life and education

And Dickinson another anomaly
No development no apprenticeship
An Athena born fully armed
And one golden monument after another

Perhaps then we should look to Blake
He of the golden cage
The prison of eros and poetry
Driven to reinvent the world

And a drive is no choice
And achievement no gift of chance or pale inertia
Look on their works ye puny and despair
And upon the crushing treadmill trudge blindly on

How do diatoms acquire the silica
With which to construct their glassy walls

How do large mammals avoid infection
From the pathogens in a stagnant waterhole

How do penguin parents recognize the cry
Of their offspring in the multitude

How do grazing animals discern the edible plants
Amid the noxious ones

How do subatomic particles come by their power
Of attraction or repulsion

How does one species exert dominative knowledge
In a world it cannot know or understand

It is said that of that which we cannot speak
We must remain silent
And yet I say of what I cannot say
That I cannot say it

The tender leaf of tulip tree in spring
The same fragile leaf in fall
How my mother invited me to pour the milk
To make the batter

The peculiar slant of light in morning
To one accustomed to staying up all night
The impressive effect of technical prowess
The emptiness of virtuosity

The great cat’s failure in nine out of ten tries
The earthworm’s continued futile striving
The bewildering plenitude of childhood experience
The bewildering proximity of dogged death

I already know too much of the future the past
How winter will pass after it has slowly arrived
How the Lions Club’s barbecue in Birmingham
Upon a Labor Day that will never come again tasted
How the pets will die and have died

Of deaths dauntless or cringing
How after long days of comfort bad days will come
How the routines of satisfaction will pall and fail to satisfy
How the striver will succumb at last
How notwithstanding denial youth will be better than age

Of manic sorrow and composèd joy
Of helplessness in the face of catastrophe
Of self-reliance and narcissistic complacency
Of humanitarian virtue and nihilistic contempt
How the mockingbird prophesied horror and degradation

The orange will still express its acid sweetness
The ocean wave its unique recurrence
The larva its unconquerable appetite
The mountain its imperceptible erosion
The poem its teasing incompleteness

1. The Ideal of Totality

Behold the deep interior trauma
Midway between wound and scar
Healing with imperceptible deliberateness

Why must it always be pain and suffering
Why must it always be trauma
Why never the sweetness of oranges at daybreak

Pleasure however noble flies
But pain persists living and durable
The bosses the teachers whose word was law

Whose word becomes part of oneself
And so express apprentice the whole shebang
The wound the scar and the fleeting sweetness

2. The Fragmentary Ideal

But pleasures too leave their residue
And the greatest of them haunt like trauma
And return unexpectedly

And their sporadic recurrence will not suffice
Nor should anyone demand as much
To resolve the ragged gash

No person is perfect whole or entire
But reliant upon poor humanity
To live tentatively up to the pale hour of death

Senility is a kind of mercy
That blunts the blade and blurs the rose
In memories of memories of memories

3. The Unruly Complication

No mythic fall from primal perfection has occurred
Things did not fall apart upon a day
Nor will they soon coalesce in the brilliant telos

Perennial problem exacerbated
By the times and my own incapacity
Everybody searches for solace for healing

And yet exceptions obtain
So no
You can’t say it all or anything much in these little broken lines

A fragmentary expression of the whole shebang
Or an exhaustive survey of one or two pieces
Fall and the beautiful banal maple

The great seaplane descends and alights
Its motors and propellors innumerable
Its silver skin grayed out in the haze
So is it with our attempts
To prevaricate to disguise to conceal
The broad outlines still visible
Though sapped of their lustre

As also our clumsy attempts
To master to exert control
The ancient platitude
Free your hand to allow the task
The burden never willing
The skill never complete
The silvery instruments soft as clay

The surest way with heretics
QED quickly ends dandruff
Give your fine furniture a lustrous finish
101 jokes to keep your audience in hand
S&H Green Stamps available at your favorite grocer’s
We will decide what consequences to apply
Somebody shut that crying baby

It came to me again returned
The empty black token of lifelessness
This time in the shirt with the Roman collar
Worn by a protester on my front lawn

Three of the aggrieved had entered my house
A woman and her two daughters speaking in tongues
Their hair the same glossless black
And beyond I saw the milling black-clad throng

Come to exact retribution
To administer justice
For my blasphemies
To draw me resistless again to death

The hack will not support you
Full daylight and the sun
Will crest the trees in its own sweet time
Let the ponderous words rest alone
A life of sensations
Arduous task for the recluse
The bookish near-invalid

Ponder only the empty space
Let it be filled with the sound of waters
Flowing from the dead past
Into the vacuous future
The sound of sunlight glinting upon the ripples
The sound of tart strawberries
The uncanny singularity

Let the words wash aside
Let them defer to other apparatus
Let the symptoms the spots the stripes
The painful lesions ripe with significance
Recede into fractal nothingness
The nothing surrounded by
Enveloped in the something

What are you afraid of
What mammalian reflex can’t you defeat
All the techniques all the virtuosity
Avail not
The sharpening focus of the will avails not
Only the ceaseless flow
From zero to one and back to zero

Now is a good time to despair
When those alive today assiduously fuck it up
When they have fucked it up for generations
And fucked it up for generations to come
Thrashed beaten and flogged
Hanged crucified crushed beheaded and assembled the firing squad
Burned villages and deleted cities with nuclear weapons
The great inflection points merely benchmarks
The Second World War
The First World War
The Second Punic War or the First

The entertainment revolution
The revolution in transportation and communication
The industrial revolution
The intercontinental revolution
The colonial empires with their slaves
The agricultural revolution
The language-technology revolution
The digital empire
The empire of capital with its slaves
The empire of God
The empire of the state
The empire of the emperor-god
The immutable castes of masters and slaves
The duty of one’s state in life
Justification by faith
Justification by making a contribution
The periodic eruption of victory and defeat
When the battle is lost and won
The pyrrhic victories when all is lost

A mother nurses her baby
And contemplates the myth of destiny
Greatness an unlikely attainment
And at what cost
A puppet spoke for the wise man
And said We must cultivate our garden
But that’s where all the trouble started
All that toil for a distant future
For the boon of a dubious harvest