A great boxer famous
For the grimness of his visage
Remained undefeated
Until the match when he was felled
By a fatal blow

He smiled as he lay supine
And exclaimed in his dying words
At last I have learned how to lose

A sensitive
But mannered
Performance

When all is unsatisfactory
And things that are
Are worse than nothing

When windshear vitiates transportation
Aircraft fail to land safely
Cars are blown off the thoroughfare

When reports come in
Of the machinery of war
The chemistry the radioactivity of war

When weather moves
From amusingly changeable
To threateningly hostile

When memories invade
Of infestations and injustices
In sleepless nights alone

When doubts creep in
That the future might be even worse
Than the bitter past

When nothing is satisfactory
And nothing is worse
Than things that are

When emptiness worse than satedness
And vacancy worse than occupancy
Attend your projects

Then throw it out
Or carry it out

Say silently where we were when first we loved
And again speak only in words inaudible
Where we were when first we wept
And again where when our sorrow
Lay too deeply for expression

Time hides her machinery
Permitting only the sharpest turning points to show
Like babes peeping out from the bedclothes
And space so variously furnished
Like the shadow of an airplane passing over the landscape

Ah beloved
You punish me
With your martyrdom

The golden cup
Even so in which
We mix our memories

The pain we have caused
The pain we have suffered
The joys we happen upon

We lack language
To express
Our persistence

Why we remain
Or is it
Mere inertia

We are old
Dear beloved
Old and ignorant

A tulip tree
Vessel of peace
With three trunks

We could
Have chosen otherwise
The choice remains

And yet and yet
Daily we renew
Even on bad days

Daily we charge
Without a thought
The golden cup

God save me
From insistent adjectives

Trinity and Hiroshima
And those prehistoric heroes
Enabled by metallurgy and mechanical advantage
Plowshares beaten into swords
Unashamed of their rapes murders offhanded cruelties
We have plenty of wine left from when we sacked the city of the Cicons
And for millennia princelings and charlatans
Styled themselves each a noble Hector or a furious Ajax
Epitomes of honor and of the honorable few
Or else flamboyant strategists like the Ithacan liar
Illiterate and boorish
They entrusted their stories to servile biographers
Adept at giving atrocity the shape of significance and the charm of style
But who in the process bequeath shape and charm
And yes beauty and truth

As when the report of a catastrophe hisses across the radio
And all say silently or aloud It is as I feared
For the technology indispensable for human life
Has turned yet again against human life
Wielded yet again by the masters of strategy and honor
And the reporter’s words speak not of them
And their vicious hubris
Or of the dangerous fuel or the threatening hooked cross
But only of the dead the burned and lacerated
With the cry Oh the humanity
While a weakling in Oklahoma
Every man his own Hitler
Exterminates scores of innocent with a truckload of fertilizer
So we read the one great poem
We see the picture of the firefighter the toddler in his arms
And hear the beautiful song of sorrow and suffering
Love for the child
Dread for the beautiful child

The Supposition
The Wedge

The Chela
The Metonym

Large I contain

Commend each day the agile tongue
The trilling thrills from the tip of it
The liquid resonance that runs wildly around the edge

Raise applause for the lively ear
That wakens to answer to vibrate sympathy
In the corridors of its spritely architecture

Appreciate forever the glory of the hand
Shaper of useful objects
Shaper of objects sublime in their uselessness

Rainbows blossoming
From the white-hot core

These bad hands start dropping things
The pills have scattered on the floor perhaps for the last time
People are yoked to disobedient appendages
That lack the capacity to concentrate

The violinist struggles against weak intonation
The watchmaker strains to apply the tiny jewels
All note but none think to mention
The difficulty of actions previously so convenient

I can no longer grasp the simplest fact
The tendons of my intellect degenerating
Porous curiosity declines to probe
And I signal defeat in gestures of tremulous ambiguity

The sages in the stone
The sense in nonsense syllables
The state of true peace
The fusion of sound and sense
The origin of the inexistent species
The real flying cape
The song of the griffins
The opening of a cedar box
The names of those who have ever suffered
The unity of all being
The ineffable grace of consonants and vowels
The correction of errors made in ages past
The A minor arpeggio beyond the limits of the audible
The brazen cars
The wingèd boy
The derangement of the senses
The indisputable argument of a child’s caress
The articulation of the unutterable
The virtuosity of a yellow and black spider
The flight of angels
The fall of angels
The reincarnation of Socrates
The sublime thoughts of scrubby plants
The victory of the underdog
The superfluity of victory
The laurels having been cut
The dominion of good
The roasted manningtree ox with the pudding in its belly
The distortion of space and time
The forgotten chord
The stars loos’d from their sphere
The dales of Arcady
The poems written by executives of large insurance companies
The tales of mystery and imagination
The ride of putti astride dolphins
The world evermore about to be
The world of perpetual intimacy
The allegorical masque
The exhaustive list of things
The beauty of inflections
The tiny woodpecker perched on my sleeve
The ten-foot sphinx
The ranks of immaterial armies
The maiden’s tenderest hope
The flowers of evil
The taste of remembered delicacies
The utterance of the inarticulate
The garden of earthly delights
The first conscious fantasy
The sleekness of an otter without the otter
The digits of pi
The derangement of the senses
The poems written by unemployed medical technicians
The slapstick procession
The fictive landscape in total darkness
The fly’s buzz when I died
The great unveiling
The hilarity of the letter C
The solemnity of the letter O
The Pmist effrent melniciana
The prince of love in the sunny beams
The saprophytes of Thermopylae
The wild guitar
The purification of the mind
The improvised modulation of unheard melodies
The lost sin of Gomorrah
The propinquity of the beloved

The Age of Containment

The Age of Remorse

The Age of Darkness

Upir & iupir
Chrans & methochrans

It is certainly true that without conflict is no drama
If Vanya and The Professor work things out like responsible adults
No shot will ring out and no tickets will be sold

But is it not equally true that without drama is no conflict
For do we not agree to play when hostilities erupt
The intransigent ruler tormented idealist or put-upon ingenue

We live our lives in a veritable commedia
Behind the mask of zany or ballerina
Or dashing swordsman or melancholy bourgeois

No script but only the true disguise
The dance raises a sigh the blade cuts the flesh
The keeping of accounts makes Pierrot sad

Elsewhere everyone tastes the fruit of harmful gestures
Tersely the movement across the plaza costs much
A filament broke upon the occasion of the hanged man
Porters forebear to deny the attribute pulled apart
Inevitable ripples seize the implications of erratic rhythms
Viewing the flight a sinister audition will linger
A command to leap at bins bearing forward
Peristalsis and urban traffic patterns viewed from on high
Once more into the rut my dear conspirators

          With apologies to Emanuel

Reflection or refraction seedlings in an opera cache
Red cat decrypt an aerodynamic morsel
Blisters from mustard gas a dispute about authorial intention
Perestroika soothing intimations of static verbs
Father said the child The gate is damped
Drive to enumerate wrought unto the outer darkness
Plague and the king who jams the plague
Do I expose myself very well
Right now right now persuade right now right now
Particle or viscosity residue of the strategic capsule
Stair-stepping transparency its erotic harmonies
Finial emplacement gouge atop these mumbling bards
Mangle-iron rapid-digited fiber trial
Because they will have forded in forth
Touch and capture self-described minimum
Their emblem athwart the galley proofs which flex precipitously
Gain regain never revenge his grease his determinants
The chair recognizes the takeout rifle casket
Search and search again in the defective territory
Porters mock the hatted agronomists
The lath exposed by some fallen-away coronation
There must be some trick claimed the uniformed diver
Passenger or stowaway renunciates for discord flower
There is no compulsion nevermore to rove
Infant parasol greens the putrid fancier
Pale in comparison wan iupir delight
In sorrow or in vain steep the tresses in the container
Purse the wastrel mince in cystic encumbrance
Dosed with incarnadine e replete with enjambment
A touching derangement is here much amiss
Omnibus derangement kind of an entrepreneurial cult
The last turbulence embarks even timely the decline of disco
Running of containment apart effrent days foolish and less wise
Academic ruler south beyond inborn truth
Two mere exempla thus cramp a broad voodoo
Past the cantering leaves too much emulation for novices
Blame upon blame keep upon keep
Lift up your kindling starbeams you troubled tardy
Facts and the lodgers who predict the facts
The architectural females testing the tastes
The command came down among the oenophiles Start making sense
The beleaguered option to decline the asphodels
Emboldened charactery facile dimension the one true facet
Pantomime or audit dirges through a various tag
Do I conceal myself very well
Repetition the one nuance unavailable to manifest
Shadow tumble for grey dusty institutes
Aurochs Lennon precipitates the ungainly monument
Indisposable shaft indisposable tipping
The portcullis has failed

In a pub well after midnight
Two students finally got to the bottom
Of The Seventh Seal

A small speckled woodpecker hopped about outside the window
And because it could not hear me through the glass
It did not fly away when I spoke to it

The watermelon
Had chilled in the stream
And it was good

A young woman in a kimono
Greeted the taxicab
As it arrived at 27th Street

A small boy opened the kitchen door
And announced aloud or in silence
Now it is spring

Nothing remains
All is change and falling away
Thus was it ever and ever shall be

Faerin ko terr tin durst ma durst
Denspiit npla dhsucs foleran
Ninfnats cyr teldedlers lochtra
Mi srowes biurte Alveshlist
Mi jui Anugermardiclu
Blisit jmundel
Sit elles hich sit ey veaurx siites

I will write a cheerful poem
A poem free of self-reproach
Free of reference to universal sorrow

My father strolled in the garden
Sang a song about Violet
And whistled when he forgot the words

We’ve felt this way before
The celebrants
Exhausted
Continue their revels
Persist in the riotous acclamation
Of their champion

The antagonists again
Raise their fists
Their weapons
Their voices
Uninterrupted
Now is no time for reason

We’ve felt this way before
The quiet few withdraw
Defeated they slink away
Relinquishing defense
Perhaps a protest
Perhaps merely a gushing wound

Who cares she said
Just before the conclusion
Of a narrative the burden of which
Was that I care

In table-talk banter I was lamenting
The loss of thou
Stolen I averred by the Puritans
To crush intimate address

To give all discourse even that of lovers
The formality of the signing of a deed
The regulation of a business appointment

And the very voice of the beloved
Punctured the smug clowning
Of him who talks too much too enthusiastically

Never give vent to feelings Dear Reader
Except behind these hidden pages
Concealed like a purloined letter

But is it not true sir
That you called yourself a sack of shit
Only after the saucer had received its chip