Okay
I’ll give up calling them poems
I could learn how to write a sestina
But I can’t believe that
That’s what I should do
I could limit myself to noble sentiments
Suppress the autobiographical subject
And commit exclusively to moral and emotional uplift
Primary colors and major triads
I could go back to school
I could risk rejection and try to publish
In a literary magazine
Perhaps sponsored by a university
I could adopt conservatism
And tell history to halt

Ignorance is infinite
Especially among the self-described artists
Tennyson thought trains ran in grooves
You’ve got to prove your worth
You’ve got to earn respect
And once you accept these necessities
You’ve got to give up and quit
Because knowledge is always partial
And sorrow witless
I’m not respectable
I’m not worthy
I disapprove of my actions and of myself
Bad art is art nevertheless
And so I no longer care what you call them
Call them compulsory excrescences

Well of course things fall apart
That goes without saying
And the buildup too proceeds
In momentary equilibrium
Complex hues and subtle dissonances
Though seen of none save
Well nobody probably
The minute particulars lose themselves in generality
And will flame out in distinct preeminence
Ah but when and when
The Bacchantes on the Ed Sullivan Show
The Suffragettes the child crusaders
What’s needed is an epidemiology of culture
Where did I get that benign cyst
Of medium to large size

Is that what it’s for
Just to pass the time away
Is that why uncle went to war
And got shot down in a B-17
While father-in-law escaped with his life
They were worthier gentlemen
Though they did not choose their lot
For the next generation to enjoy
Their extruded snacks
And episodes of Friends
The latest devices
And unknown modes of being
Poetry butters no parsnips
So I guess I’m glad
They’re not poems any more

I seem to have ignored the great problem
I seem to have misread the tenor of the times
I seem to have overlooked the universal grievance
But more than one injustice makes the claim of universality
Different constituencies nurse differing ancient grudges
Each wound becomes a prized possession
And all insist that there is none worse than their own
But can you calibrate which evil is the worst
And nobody questions the accidental inherency
In cobbled language of the superlative
So like in function unto the future tense
That established panic fatality
So easy to say
What will be will be

And yet and yet
Is it not pointless to try to quantify suffering
And yet and yet
When infant mortality rates were higher than they are now
Did parents not grieve
How dare one pick at his minor wound
How trivial must a trauma be
To demand treatment with poems
Reader turn aside
Call them stomach pumpings
Call them violent purgations
Call them emetic constructions
Call them inexorable spewings
Of one who won’t allow another’s pain
To interrupt his own

Ours is a land
Rich in saxophones

I will not read Pound
Why would I
The man was a fascist

Whoever said The Triumph of the Will was good
Nazis mostly
This is not just name-calling

And truly if we reject every work
That arises from a belief we disparage
We will reject so many

And denial
As so often
Tantamount to confession

Like other actions
Poems are motivated
And not just for art’s sake

How the leaves on the tulip tree
Fail again to tremble
Unmoved by the inspiriting wind

The wind surprised
By the jutting skyscraper
A momentary Bernoulian tumult

O the times
O the mores
O the lost simplicity of grief

Cause effect and a melancholy syntax
Effecting morose retreat
A window closed to the elements

Here might be no dispute at all
That lies are ugly
And houses not geometry merely

The sailor sails
And having made landfall
Walks for some time on sea legs

And perhaps displays permanently
The anchor tattoo bendy
Athwart the pierced heart gules

Is there a character here
A plausible embodiment
A laconic integer

Moves are not movements
Strategies not faith
You don’t believe in cartoon jalopies

It’s more fun when you compete
The legend on a gaming machine
Knucklebones and physics engines

No verbs in the carnival of abstraction
No resonant vowels
K-k-k-k-k-k-k

The frogsong of accomplished facts
Ascends with the ascending melody’s ascent
The fool’s fire of cynical history

Is more time past or yet to come
With so much anterior action
Hard to imagine a vivid future

Like seeing the lines
Of longitude and latitude
From space

The errors were necessary
An ineluctable stage
Toward clarity

Take the pledge
Carry out the commission
Project your ragged testimony

Project your old blue cloth
Emblazoned with the true icon
A circumscribed mimesis

The story of Rachel and Jacob
Or Sam Spade ill-shaven knight
And the quest for fittingness

At least in potentia
That’s how it is
With mad pursuits

A modest enthusiasm
A rapprochement
A negotiated settlement

Having committed long since
To certain predictable regularities
As of force particle genre manner and belief

Consequently most folks accede
To the unavoidable consequences
The rank and file ennuyeux

Defense of inherited error
Doubling down
Lest mere chaos be loos’d

Everything signifies
All is symptom to the medico
To the sybarite all is treasure

Once it was a simple pleasure
This tobacco
Once it was a doctor’s advice

Emblem of genocide and enslavement
Drugs and comfortable clothing
Comfort for the masses

Ah yes and stodgy food
Fats and starch
And plenty of salt

Cancel the subscription
Put the boxes in the car
Casually drop the forwarding address

The rotating chair
Sweeps across the urban landscape
Perched on one leg an axis

Defining a rectangular prism
Straight back flat seat
And legs nor stout nor spindly

Mounted atop an unseen vehicle
Rotating like a radar dish
Or the summit of a periscope

No expansion no contraction
Turning and turning
In dynamic stasis

There are only reasons for
Never reasons against
As for example reasons for definite omissions

Should one feel at home
Like Virginians in Virginia
Or adopt the outward vein

The poet called himself scumbag
Or his thinly dramatized speaker did
Was it from shame or from fear

The village has no voice
The times are declining
We fear what we love and loath what we dream

The melancholy long withdrawing whimper
The placebo requires commitment
Taking on the wonted anatomies

Pound Eliot Yeats alas
Modernists sickened by modernity
Invoking further atrocity

Calling in the air strike
Conjuring gorgon and minotaur
Denouncing the placidly rotating chair

They grasp the memorial katana
Replay the corrupted ceremony
Laugh over the popular solecism

The monsters enjoyed martinis
Everybody else was forced to slalom
Between the hash and the small robot fingers

The apotheosis of manhood
The leaders the innovators
Westcoast promo Disneyesque lemmings

The angry laughter of men with writing desks
A raven for a familiar
Pegasus a totem

Fake frivolity
Denial of the senses
A lie-revealing lie

The empty shell
The discarded horn
The exhausted magneto

The picture on the motel wall
A fantasy of pastoral embarkation
When in fact the shepherd’s life was really hard

I envy the eighteenth century
Despite slavery insolence and the pox

A world in which each knows his place
Wildly unjust for persons

But for poetry a good thing
The fitting of matter and manner

Grand language for the grand parts
And tender language for the tender parts

And awareness of grandeur and tenderness
Of advent and requiem

Alternative to blame blame blame blame
Blame blame blame blame blame

To know what is good is good
Though one’s belief might be mistaken

We who live now know only what is efficient
Mass production mass destruction mass delusion

We need not approve of the arrogance of emperors
The hypocrisy of republicans

But do not deny the magnificence
Of Bach Watteau and Goethe

I mean the perfection of their works
Not their human incapacities

Assertion
I rage against injustice

And can poetry persist
In an unjust age

And when has there flourished
An age of justice

And in the artifacts of culture
Let there be balance discipline order sensibility and taste

Decorum is truly art’s Holy Grail
But art disdains a goal

I envy those who believe their belief
Not to be mistaken

A world that knew what was right
But not what made right right

A singing riddle
A mystery and a malady

Let a century of art commence
A century of knowledge and judgment

Just
One century

From each rose with which you pelt me
The thorns have been delicately amputated

A thoughtful touch

Although

Iens prost sazty en Effrentiana
Ger tist da U kil trguh
Wunizs ger tiftaeg Melniciana
Cvmwoflux riz dn sguh

Fe sdargid ib dhe dur ghe mrednin
I pugk mli an kalor
Fe reagas trab mrerod els dradnin
Doz prisgarm els dedor

Not the tree but the vine

I like my poetry wet
My cookies slightly underdone

Blessed are the truly dead
Untroubled by an afterlife

Am I boring you I’m boring you aren’t I
But know this I’m trying to do it right
Not to make it new or even to make it good
To fit in the chance encounters
To fit in the parts that just don’t fit

It would be pleasant to see a seascape
The boats afloat on their foamy billows
It would be ennobling to witness the hero’s struggle
It would be charming to overhear the lovers’ murmurs
Pass the time make death arrive more quickly less painfully

A child was run over by a car
A woman died of cancer in her early forties
A city was reduced to tinder and the tinder set ablaze
A teenager committed suicide
Convinced that he was going to hell

Let’s watch television
Let’s go for a drive and listen to the radio
I hope my friends will be impressed by my new jacket and shoes
But I feel hollowed out
The emptiness no snack will fill

I can offer you no excitement no entertainment
There is no riddle
Science will never reach the limit of suffering
Technology will never fail of ever-greater torment
I will continue hacking at this unyielding block

The world is fresh and ever-blossoming
The clouds swell and drive in their accustomed track
The predators stalk and the prey evade
Successfully or unsuccessfully as the case may be
Call it an update an interim report

I know too much and control too little
Is this how old age is supposed to be
This mixed bag
This compulsion
I cannot like an optimist dig with a pen

The opposite of social responsibility
The ills I descry not avoidable errors
Who talks like that
Some parts do not and will not fit
There’s a certain liberation in futility

A celebrity had announced his own incipient dementia
He was famous for achievements neither insubstantial
Nor likely to alter the course of history
I made light of the emergent fact
Thereby earning the disapproval of all around me

If I had been a character in a play
If I had been a beautifully contrived concoction
Polished optimized revised and corrected
I might have extemporized some slashing riposte
To cast the philistines howling down to bottomless perdition

Being actual I voiced my objection silently
That the world suddenly notices greatness
After the great have fallen
But it was the fact of my having been denounced
And not content of the denunciation to which I objected

And so error proliferates
Why should I have derided so gratuitously
A harmless and overthrown clown
And why resent so furiously
The public registry of my error

And why let it be asked
Lacerate myself so mercilessly now
For acting according to how I am
Unless it be that I reserve for myself alone
The power to deride resent lacerate and denounce

For mine is the power the fury and the mercilessness
And let it be stated
Mine the deception
Both of the silent riposte and the secret punishment
Mine the shame

I was ashamed of my insensitivity
And of my sensitivity
And though I had not chosen to be sensitive or insensitive
Still I deplore
Those qualities of my framing

So many years to reform my character
So many victories and even more defeats
So many opportunities to change my ways
And yet they change if at all
For the worse

Each domino larger than the one before
Each iteration a subtle variant
No image
No palliative words
No eternal return of the same

Not a registered breed but a feline mongrel
A perfect Siamese but a bit heftier
With a white spot on one side
The left
Of his lip

He knew secret passageways
To escape to the wild outdoors
He could smell the good of it
We speculated
He paid the price

For months he crouched in silence
Underfoot as usual he ate his food
Until one morning he never moved
I moved him
Stiff and stark

And for years thereafter and even now
In the side pocket of my eye
He lurked as usual
His hefty bulk
Bunbury’s ghost

Little round bird
With upturned tail
Searching with hurried nervous pranks
Down to the planking up to the rail
Orange throat and toothpick legs
Find your true beloved
Find your daily bread

Yup that’s me
I’m not surprised your recognition
Was other than instantaneous

Changed no doubt from what I once was
The bright-eyed boy
The teacher’s pet

One wonders whether the transformation
Gradual to be sure
Owes to the thousand natural shocks

Or to artificial mods and projects
Self-imposed
Or hoisted by some brawny saddler

Or perhaps less to events
Than to responses to events
Tabulating consecutive reasons

Or failing to respond
Continuing to drive
After the bug has spattered

And bitter error
Occasion for remorse
And cold fear for what’s to come

This ragged beard
This hooded eye
Rough unruly repellent

Do you love me precious other
Or has love too eroded
Caught in the glacial progress

In dreams I stand at the fork
The garden of delight
Or the prison house of consciousness

I can do this
Ask me who my parents are
Ask me why I a stranger helped out a stranger
Ask me anything

I’ll give you no dirty words
No arcane locutions
Or well I’ll put it in other words
If you like

Sure I’m a pleaser
Pleasing others pleases me
With the second and the third attempt
Silvery partial messenger

Unfixed
Unmoored
Unattached
Untroubled

Or well the troubles go
As quickly as they come
Porch delivery
On the circular drive

Dynamic stasis
Minutely vibrating stillness
A pilgrim’s staff and sandals
Waiting

A prophecy
Camouflaged amid the lists
Nestled among the nouns
Displayed like a purloined letter

Mood swings yes a few
Palsied with age
Or mewling and puking
Grand touring fiasco

Or a horny boy
Trying to maintain his cincture
Or straining
To burst the bonds

The negative telescope
The nearseer
Woodgrain
And woodflake

Every object
In the dream
Every vessel and implement
Seems a casement or threshold

A melody stretched and pressed
Fast-reverse faster-forward
Finely twisted
Frivolous filigree

A distortion
Or an accomplishment
A katydid trilling
On a long-stemmed rose

Elegant observance
The revelry of composure
The orgy of ceremony
The interwoven round

An insect song
To feather’d Mercury
A dancer windblown
In the velvet petals

The generative melody
The revelatory mask
Ask me anything
I am capable

One can never say before the fact
Surely a revelation is at hand

A stain on the ceiling of the old apartment
Resembled a face in profile
We covered it over with the most opaque paint
But I could see it there until the day we moved

Our cat a most underfoot creature when alive
Did not lunge from the shadows
But sauntered from hiddenness to interrupt the step
For years I half-tripped over Bunbury’s ghost

And for years I saw a different spectral image
The burners of books and bodies
But when the living candidate pledged to round up illegals
The mob chanted their fury and approval in the ancient manner

The festival of rage and adoration
The same assemblage more or less
That cheered on the auto-da-fé
That jeered on the road to Golgotha

You act like a celebrity
The center of attention
You think you’re entitled

You’re in the same hell as everybody else
The same drudgery
The same hell

A specimen of the Mannerist vogue
For complicated landscapes in the background
Smeared with much aerial perspective

To the right of the sitter’s golden curls
One can barely make out
A structure or growth jutting into the low cloud

To her left is a ruined tree half gutted
So it isn’t that picturesque reflex
A catapult maybe

What is this thing what is this picture
Does it offer a secret inkling
Of warfare or some other slaughter of the innocents

And in the most distant background
Most smeary most illegible
What is that pall of smoke extending to the frame

I am not completely naked
I’m wearing socks
Having overindulged as usual
I took a dip in the motel pool or
Perhaps somebody gave me a prankish nudge

I undressed upon my emergence
From the immersion
Somebody captured my grinning visage et cetera
And took the trouble to scan the image
So many years later

And yet
Followed by some uplifting statement
You’ve still got your health
Look on the bright side
Better luck next time
It’s how you play the game that counts

Hearts and flowers ruffles and flourishes
Kudos pour in for the lifeguard
An ordinary person with extraordinary skill
For an extraordinary responsibility
In the service of the ordinary general need
For safety and security

What are the facts is a basic but not profound question
The injury will heal to some extent
So there’s a bright side no doubt
But a dim side too demands
What is the significance of any fact

Marian’s ancestor dug ditches
And died when the fifty-foot-high wall
Of a burned-out factory
Collapsed upon him and his coworkers
And his boss

Everybody alive when that disaster happened
Is now dead
An insignificant fact
When one who didn’t have to die
Died in a deadly job

I meant to satirize Pollyannaism
To laugh a Positive Mental Attitude
Into impotence
But I just can’t find it funny

And multitudes will continue so to die
Many after suffering more prolonged than that
Of Great-Grandfather
Although digging ditches is no day at the beach
The only bright side being that
The suffering of any is the suffering of all

And yet
When we look on the bright side
And reassure ourselves that we’re doing alright
When somebody else drowns
We mute the facts and dwell in falsehood

It’s not okay
You saw the picture
The man drowned with his daughter
To dwell in falsehood
Is a criminal act

The first step is to know what there is
This is the easy part
Certain devices tabulate such information
Much harder is the composition of here
As any mystic will tell you

The comfort the blindness of familiarity
Dishes toys auto parts
The grinding conflict of dysfunctional relationships
Work work work work work work work
The momentary solace of getting a little tipsy

The dancer is very strong with there
Having placed here under control
In the service of there
So too the reaper
Looking ahead to the next swath

But alas poor poet
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon
The same out yonder as nearby
Though storms may lash the ships
Theoretical storms matching their taxa

While here who can comprehend
Religion politics economy the arts
Oh dread the didactic finish unaimed for
Glory be
To the past the present and to the future

I was driving when the flash floods came
On perilous crowded I-75

I took the exit
After a particularly horrifying slide

That made the passengers free
In their expressions of unease

The back road lost somewhat its rural charm
In the relentless torrent

Thus the double bind
Courage the mastery of fear

But fear nature’s suggestion
Freeze flop or get out of Dodge

That’s dangerous she murmured
Just a shower answered I

Later the news came through
A town flattened in Alabama

I had to wear a hospital gown
I managed not to say out loud
See what you have become
They say clothes make the man
I’ve worn neckties handcuffs bellbottoms and gardeners’ gloves

Some folks claim to know who they are
Some even demand that others acquiesce
I’ve been sitting on this fence so long
I have a fence-shaped crease
In the seat of my pants

If I died now who would go to hell or heaven
The professional the criminal the hippie or the gardener
Some folks claim to know
But maybe death is not a change of place
Just a change of clothes