First thing this morning
I wanted to write my syllabus
I wanted to tell of reasons
And good in the reason-giving sense
I wanted to tell of value and judgment
Of dialogue and understanding the significance of facts

But instead my attention was captured
By a short-leaf pine and a pin oak
Rooted in the ground as one
Which I had never noticed in my neighbor’s yard
And admittedly separate boles split off
After the first three or four feet

But it definitely isn’t a pin oak
On second thought perhaps some sort of hickory
But the longer I looked
The less confidence I felt
That I would ever know
What in itself it actually is

Molecules of nitrogen oxygen and carbon dioxide
Impact the membranes impermeable semipermeable and permeable
Water droplets dust motes pet dander
Strike the crust of dermis
The backcountry lanes of sticky phlegm

Danger and the anticipation of danger
In a world sufficient to nourish
To make thrive flourish and fruit

Imogen carried close to make her drowsy
And with each circuit the carrier takes
A morsel of strawberry cantaloupe

No it would be too wicked
Even to imagine considering
After such a decoction of verities
In this long lacuna
Or perhaps briefer than you think

The novelty of nostrums
Of efficacy famed for
Tetter gout elephantiasis ringworm and tired blood
Cramp stone wind sand runs gravel and halitosis
Headache backache toothache neuritis and neuralgia
Thrush dropsy porphyria carpal tunnel and jake leg
Acne eczema and impetigo
Strabismus astigmatism myopia flashers and floaters
Corns calluses bunions and cauliflower ear
Vacillation of the heart
Congestion of the semicircular canal
Irritable bowel
Caked breast
Uncertain stomach
Deviated septum
Defiant sphincter
Enlarged prostate
Peritonitis gingivitis laryngitis bursitis tonsilitis and tinnitus
Piles impaction and impostume
Ganglioma glomus and schwannoma
Mole boil strain drip and clap
The sweating sickness
The dolorous removal
The French disease
The German measles
Mal de mer
The Spanish flu
Undescended testicle
Hansen’s disease
Hodgkin’s disease
Koch’s disfunction
The English disease
The Prussian croup
The profit motive
The laughing plague
The disease of unknown provenance
The greenapple quickstep
Detached retina
Dishpan hands
Cirrhosis of the liver
Loofy-goofus of the goofy-loofus
Kidneys of wheat
Hardening of the arteries
Water on the knee
Wart peduncle and ingrown dewclaw
Running wen weeping abscess and delirium tremens
Sir Peter’s quinsy St. Vitus’s dance Bell’s palsy St. Lawrence’s catarrh
And all the underminings of the physical frame

And further
The unwieldy catalogue of mythopoeic phantasms
Adumbrated by madcap stimulants and dull opiates
The panoply of psychotropic arcana
Nightmares mygrim hallucinations and apparitions demure or minatory
Kelpies banshees imps poltergeists and incubi

Yea these are the premises
In both the propaedeutic and the domestic senses
For which appertaining
A hogshead of cheese
A butt of sack
A bunch of Parma violets
An erlenmeyer flask of fading chartreuse
A demijohn of absinthe the Green Muse
A cask of Amontillado
A jug of akvavit
A dram of paregoric
Microscopy electrophoresis gas-liquid chromatography
Computer-assisted tomography magnetic resonance imaging and palpation
Electrocardiogram electroencephalogram sphygmomanometresis
Cast traction and spinal adjustment
Splints prostheses and ace bandages
Stents bypasses root canals and reamings of the prostate
Appendectomy and episiotomy
Phlebotomy and shock wave lithotripsy
Fractionated radiotherapy
Endo- and epicardial ablation
Dietary supplementation with vitamins and iron
Application of topical or general anesthesia
Transplantation of the heart kidney or cornea
Defenestration of the ear
Trepanation of the skull
Bicarbonate of soda
Milk of magnesia
Tincture of iodine
Elixir of Ishtar
Distillation of mummy
An ampule of ipecac
The brown scapular
The brown acid
St. Christopher’s medal
St. Valentines’ fig
St. Veronica’s napkin
Spinal tap
Scalpels retractors clamps sutures and toothpicks
Laxatives purgatives and cathartics
Bulks lubricants and osmotics
Puffs powders patches and pomatums

You must resist
Charge the towering bastions
Apprehend the evanescent trophy
Seize the contingent triumph
Or dwindle in the immemorial yurt
Or flourish indefinitely in the mirthful pillory
Take action lieutenant but not too much

What is this Higgs boson
Of which discovery you the scientists boast

The VU meter registers units of volume
What is this volume that it purports to measure

The instrument delicate as diatom housed in glass
Reacts to the most insubstantial of phenomena

What is that and what is that
What is all this really

And how did this come to comprise such beauty
And what art thou beloved of my soul

Competent well-educated
A technologist a scientist
She reserved those terms for her husband
Though well she merited them herself
Knowledge of and beyond
Education profession and babies
But she had trouble with certain words
Which she could not pronounce with conviction
Velcro condominium Chik-fil-a
New words not current in a youth
Of Great Depression and all-consuming war
But she was not stymied by neologism alone
It can’t be just intellect she said to me once
It can’t only be intellectual
Speaking of our religious beliefs
One could hear that she suspected
An r sound lurking somewhere in intellectural
Never specifying what stood beyond intellect

She had converted in order to marry
My Irish Catholic father
He boisterous and commanding
She retiring and self-conscious
Owing perhaps to the poverty of her childhood
A Protestant of Calvinist tendency
She took a dim view of many things
But she took me to hear the symphony
And when she would see her youngest brother
They would laugh in torrents of weeping laughter
Yet I never saw her weep in earnest
Her spirit strong and resistant
Her stoical body relentless
Long after her spirit had departed
Obdurate power within the withered frame
Her body refusing to surrender
Until like a fussy baby
At last it consented to sleep

What a flagrant rookie error
To imagine that the poetic frenzy
Should require the descent into literal madness
When poetry scorns the literal
As these leaden lines doubtless show

But the case is subtler than that
The prayer for madness a retrospective revision
Like the rationalization of the dream image
The ravening monster composed of socks
The looming shadow of a teddy bear

Thus the serendipitous discovery
That mental illness really did
Offer a wealth of conflict
Conflict being poetry’s mother’s milk
And can I reach for sanity and write a poem

I am but mad north-north-west
Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2

Might one seek madness in the opposite direction
In the balmy clime of the south-south-east
Instead of Eva Marie Saint dangling from a president’s nose
An aged man might assume the posture
Of wild youth standing atop the golden hours

So easy to exaggerate the threats
Martin Landau’s sadistic shoe
Matter for the ticketed thrill ride
A taste for action need not require
Renunciation of a moment’s repose

To remember momentarily the unity of all being
To forego the diffident pose
And accept for a moment the miracle of the salt marsh
Of the soft green hills
Of the holy communion of family and friends

Not to waste in striving against strife
Conflict is all around no need to seek it
Error a mere epiphenomenon that causes real harm
The privilege of all who wear matter’s mantle
And blessed are the peacemakers

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old
And thus I allow myself this gentle exhortation
Remember the stars that night in Virginia
The girl in the kimono that morning in New York
Allow me crazy to remember love

If I don’t get out of the sun right soon
I will die like my fair-skinned ancestors
At the end of a Viking’s pike

No poem will ever make a splash
No poet will ever be an influencer
No poet will ever be an acknowledged or unacknowledged legislator
No poem will ever improve the situation
No poem will ever kill me softly
No poet will ever die laughing
No poem will ever give the ultimate answer
No poet will ever ask the ultimate question
No poet will ever set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation
No poem will ever butter any parsnips
No poem will ever put a man on Neptune
No poet will ever predict the future
No poem will ever seize the day cast the die turn the corner or cut the Gordian knot
No poem will ever fish or cut bait
No poet will ever square the circle
No poet will ever communicate in vague or decisive gestures
No poet will ever form a more perfect union establish justice insure domestic tranquility provide for the common defense promote the general welfare or secure the blessings of liberty
No poem will ever achieve the texture of rich Corinthian leather
No poem will ever cultivate a garden
No poet will ever solve the problems with the wifi
No poem will ever enlighten the unenlightened

1
Hear and Obey

My Captain’s so mean on me
He says What are you deaf
And I say Yes sir that’s right
And he says Well you better get a hearing aid
And I say I already got one sir
And he says You better get a new one
This one ain’t working
He’s got all the answers

2
The Balls of Your Feet

My Captain’s always switching it up
He says
From now on we’re working from right to left
You runts are tripping all over each other
A week later he says
From now on we’re working from left to right
You runts are slow as Christmas
With him you got to be ready for anything

3
Pay Attention Think Ahead

My Captain’s always telling me
Think about the next step
So I didn’t finish closing the cap
When I set off the sprinkler system
That happened once before
When I crashed into the guard rail
I was thinking about the next turn
Because I didn’t know if it was left or right
Kept going around the exit ramp
Kept going around
Then I had to pay for it
But my Captain doesn’t care about all that
I’m mopping up the puddles
I’m filling out the accident report
I’m thinking about my complaints
How can you screw it up every time
You can if you’re stupid
It’s something I’m good at

4
Mind over Matter

My Captain’s a hard man
He says
You take a sick day you get a note from the doctor
Or don’t bother coming back
I say
I can’t afford no doctor sir
And alls I got is the pukes
And he says
You puke in the shop and you’re fired
So I guess I’ll quit puking

Oh that I could shed my skin like serpent
To emerge otherwise than who I am
Myself am hell
Myself am hell
The outer layer a mere epiphenomenon
And so to enact the fatuous regimen of self-improvement
Myself am hell
The third alternative would cause pain
To those who love him who is hell himself

A matter not of if but of when
The mockingbird faster than bird ever flew
Into the dark devouring embrace
The universal failure the universal sin

Entire systems devoted to denial
The armature already in place
Mechanism of consciousness
A dream of a dream of a dream

Well might you turn to the animal crackers
And invite the psychedelic breathing chambers
The frisson of free fall and deep dive
The whirr of zoetrope and automaton

Meanwhile back at the ranch
Dale whips eggs and waits for the boys’ return
And when they don’t
She hops on Buttermilk to effect the daring rescue

Solomon cuts the gordian child
Samson knocks the building down
They weren’t so innocent Samson protests
They approved what their governors promulgated

All your cleverness all your ingenuity
And erudite allusion contrary of invention
The foul rag and bone shop
Of the rebellious left atrium

The mockingbird’s call
A Bucephalus bouncing ball
A long tone and a trill
An old sweet song ornamented with bitterness

By the time I got the peaches home
One had been badly bruised

Is there a moral imperative for intelligibility
Does command necessitate commander
Dozvon effrenteos mragra pmisti effrent
Is the knee the contact or the space between

Cleave to and cleave apart
Suspicious acts suspicious minds
Ravel and unravel
Pass and Stow

Lenin said that marxism is the philosophy
In which nothing is abstract
He who has been gathered into the artifice of abstraction
Nothingness is an abstraction

I’m happy so I dreamed of a helicopter crash
Woah that was too close I shouted
As it zoomed just over our heads
And stretched the utility lines like rubber bands
Get back follow me I yelled
Nobody followed
Murmurs arose amid the cries of horror
It cut his head off it cut him off
I hoped that they referred to the pilot
I saw in the distance behind me
A young man who had wisely moved toward safety

Repress I guess the lust for commentary
For food for drink for sex
Starve the body and punish soul
Slow that manic thrill ride
On the Route 66 of the mind
Where you get your kicks

Why waste the glorious springtime in resentment
Rehearsing the explanations that would fill the speeches
That should have been delivered yesterday
Or a thousand years ago
The springs on the clothespins are weaker than they used to be
Manufacturers use half the metal and it still looks like a clothespin
But springy clothespins hadn’t been invented in the eleventh century
So let’s spread our damp laundry on the hedges to dry
But there are no hedges in these parts
Except the decorative ones useless to keep out a fox
But useful perhaps for concealing a security camera

A young woman received a prize
For her contribution to the panopticon
For how else would we have known
Of the police department’s belligerent disposition
Toward the members of the community
But it doesn’t take a smartphone to know
That the world is driven by survival of the vicious
To have their profit to have their prey
Not individual players mind you
Just the universal truth that living long means
Somebody else is dying soon
Living fat means somebody suffers
The murderer’s claim he had no choice
But to crush the life out of one who lived

And which of the sins is the unforgivable one
Keeping in mind that sin means
Not wrongdoing only but giving offense
Like all my neighbors I live in a palace
Which like all palaces traces its antecedents to fortress
Security the handmaiden of luxury
There’s a kind of gun equally useful in battle and at home
So why do I feel so insecure
Why not forget the past
And better yet forget the future
And hear the cardinal’s two-note pronouncement
And see the clover’s irrepressible carpet
Or should I mow it down

They weep as they enter this new world of death
As they cried aloud at birth
The passage being painful
From one form of being to the next

And they weep in their bewilderment
As an infant cries from the welter
Of sight and sound and unfamiliar feeling
After so long in warmth and murmuring darkness

And now a new darkness unknown before
The shade of shades
The dim twilight of forgetting
Of earthly motions just out of reach

And the half-light or less than half
Of dim recognition
Great Achilles is learning weakness
The true beloved is learning estrangement

Nature loves the spiral
Fibonacci sequence in snail and daisy’s eye
The swept-back arms of galaxies
Mary Pickford’s hair in casual ringlets

Things that double back while rising or falling
Both nature patterned but indifferent
And art interested and ornamented
Love to wind around the ghostly bobbin

They tread upon the rhizomes
Bare audacious unashamed
Handlers of fire
Twisters of bark
Successful mutilators
Successful because mutilators

Neither hedgehog nor panda
Beside or upon the motorway
That scoriates the landscape
For who invented landscape
Scarifier of face and arms
Featherless impaling shrike

Birds or rodents might have occupied this niche
Of frenzied artists who dismantle all niches
Who define to obliterate
Imperators of the fragile little planet
Contrivers of blades and plastic bags
Useful for hunting and for suicide

Today I dropped only one atom bomb

Nagg has fallen from the garbage can
Pushed out by particulate plastic
When the games began everything was not enough
Being coupled with nothingness
Shot through with emptiness
Lack of leg
No hole to stash the valuables in

Midgame now and light not at tunnel’s end
But just behind us where the father’s fathers
Lit fire the incendiary device
Eyes too many radiant flare too many
King’s horses king’s men king’s wild-eyed goons
Cameras now on the telegraph poles
Eyes behind the romantic arras

You can look it up
In any of the competing compendia
Behind the mask of the former capital
State your business
All rise for the superior cleaver
Grafting the daring new appendages
Onto the same old moist quivering bodies

Dream not ye dreamy dreamers
Of relief-providing apocalypse
Neither vainly wish for cleansing flames
Nor fateful resolution in harrowing revelation
Nor banal closure in furnished rooms
These sullen embers can chill indefinitely
And haply erupt in fury or croon themselves to sleep

Do I exaggerate myself
Very well then I exaggerate myself
I am complex and composed of fragments

Have to find the lost
Have to line up the bobbins
Have to clear out the drain gutter
The skaters have redoubled their figures

That kid has left his jacket on the swingset
Where once she embroidered fantails
No it’s just a patch with his name
Manufactured to look like embroidery

Folded up in the back of the station wagon
Like an old-fashioned carpenter’s rule
Emitting sounds
Of tormented celebration

Foursquare bannister
Oblique safety measures
Embedded in the poignant reflection
Have to arrest that tumbling mass

Have to reduce the viscosity
Have to register the variants
The clouds look like applesauce
Have to remember the

The bathroom door opens spilling shadow
Shadow where the light should be
The light that should be cast like a shadow
From the ineffectual bulb swinging from its wire
But here there is no light

This torment took place ages decades ago
It isn’t happening now
But every time you open that door
There’s that shadow like a pool of vomit
In the shape of a bat or a bird

The elderly woman bespectacled screams
Just after the slash of a saber
The birdlike creatures eaters of carrion
Begin to cluster around
Stretch out their long necks to inspect the snack

The pinks the greys the big brushstrokes gently curling
The glory and the freshness of a dream
The draperies demurely hinted at
A promise of the impending Baroque
Empires and Velázquez and massacres great and small