Acrid verbal curlicues that accessorize
The most foundational of formulating forms
Taking arms against a sea of troubles
Now I know and what rough beast
Here there is no light save on the breezes blown
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
And that damned votive lassitude

I’m not talking about a well-
Regulated militia or justification by faith
It’s the there not-there
In or on manifestly real monuments of intellect
Vestigial virus in DNA
It seems the ornament is the point
Discovered or created begotten not made

You are the stick you throw under the footbridge
To watch it emerge on the other side
Shall we call those navigators victims
As if it were possible otherwise than to float and flow

The skin toughens in the region of contact
The cellist’s fingertips
The elder’s feet after decades of shoes
The child’s knees after the falls of play

You are the knee the finger the battered brain
The organic matter that floats downstream
Whose significant features come out involuntarily
Shaped by the currents of the world

You are the arrow that courses toward its target
To pierce the quarry with cruel geometry
Shall we call that flier a perpetrator
As if it were possible otherwise than to fly and strike

The prey needs the predator as the predator the prey
The raptor’s eye coasts upon the impulsive wind
And skewers the fecund mammal terrified
Who scurries in futile or fortunate flight

You are the agile hawk and you the feckless prey
All play their part in the intricate play
Nobody chooses what or how they are
Shaped by the currents of the world

Seek phenomena find experience
Those fine images from Hubble and Webb
Looking glasses in space
Of which one wears spectacles
Give substance over to artists
Who translate information
Into intelligible color
That scandalous element
In the eye of the beholder
Battering chaos godlike into cosmos
Or seeming so
Galileo’s mirror translated mere size
But let new planets to swim into our ken
While scientists now cull the dark matter of data
Cuneiform of zeroes and ones
Objective truth being both invisible and blind

No wonder then we take refuge
In the fictions of display
Solemn church museum or prison house
Or in waggish worlds verbal or pictorial
We migrate over the borders of space and time
Imagining them real in diurnal round
To the displeasure of puritans and pundits
Hence some say translate to traduce
The nurse on Penny Lane
Feels as if she’s in a play
But she is anyway twice over
And some suppose that our lives
Are tales told by an idiot
But what does Macbeth know of life
Except to take it away
At least his Lady knows to nurse a child

No it’s fine but how regrettable
That these tacky polymers are all that is
No more the simple stick
Notorious hazard
Brandished or thrust into the fire
Primordial tool and universal plaything
And instead the edutainmental programming
Streaming from the glowing screen
Problem solving teamwork and multiple choice
The old days were bad
An eight-year-old dead of sepsis from a fishhook
The new days less bad perhaps
Children bubble in their answers
And comply with the dress code
And yet they still as ever delight in light
Radiant reflected emergent or prismatic

Defensive weapons that can do offense in a pinch
Behind the mask of bourgeois rectitude
Torrents of derision at the number 13
Greek phalanx Roman maniple
Creeping jungle fighters itching for a fire fight
Bivouacked in cortical region
Serve waiting at the ready
While Galileo needed only a glimpse
Of the instruments of torture
To effect his recantation
Which he then recanted
Of the plain facts of the neighborhood
And we attack our loved ones and ourselves
With a viciousness that must remain
Concealed but available
Acknowledged but unspoken
The gross self-indulgence of an infant
Savagery in the seat of reason
In the very heart of earthly erudition
Remainders castoffs rejects and trash
From the age of the giants
The age of brutes

Under the aspect of eternity
All vicious cycles cycle into virtue
And mere contingency resolves

But standing atop the mountain of space and time
The vertiginous vortex obtrudes
Centripetal compression and untimely death
The unrelieved suffering of vermin
Thrashing in the jaws of a spring-loaded trap
Technology of retribution
For the crime of conscious life
And yet consciousness even of pain
Does not pertain to individual objects
Objectivity being an organizational principle
As much a matter of convention as of fact

Oh for the satellite view of error
Mental lapse delusion evil intent
And the invidious judgments of others
As focal cone scorches leaf
The harsh incense dissipating wildly

Women and men sing hymns of praise
And raise martial strains to weaponry
Apply pigment to the remains
Grieve the loss of a favorite implement
This creepiness intimates
The life that flows beneath the clutter

A glare obscures the screen in light
Effacing the man painting with his shirt off
High atop a crane
The whirling dizziness in the kindergarten
The denizens who glide in the portable aquarium
The mincing step of the dancing master
Fashionable and cunningly coifed
The lumbering gait of the muscled rock star
Preening in his old age
The tentative progress of the pre-teen
In her sparkle and fairy glamor
Parting her lips and pressing them closed

Which always dispenses the exact amount
Or maybe just a funky reflection
Glinting off the pearlescent interior
That shifts or even disappears
With the slightest change in position
A severity vulnerable to the touch
But nature too herself plays
The carnival of artifice
Completely familiar
In those mimetic beasts and plants yes
Oracles of magnetism and arcane particles
Taxonomy most diverting
But also in her very mode of presentation
In the languorous waving fronds
Couthe in sondry londes
In seemingly two or more or fewer dimensions
In splash of color or dull monochrome
Shot through with sorrow
Like a matrix of punishment
Less a retaliation than a theater
Albeit of cruelty
Or festooned with the appurtenances of joy
A ravishing discharge
Of petals clouds lights wings and songs
Or the grinding low-grade malaise of ennui
The sluggish awakenings of flowers and reptiles
On cold and overcast spring mornings
The inchoate desires of infancy
The painful complaints of age
Always representations
Such that even the coveted all-access pass
Apparently so limited in its distribution
If extensive in its application
Translates some earlier document
Inscribed in concrete or sibylline leaves
Past and past past bark past fossil ripples
Product of potions or toxic fumes
And respectively their viscosity and opacity
Brittle teraphim and hieratic geomancy
Themselves merely adaptations
Of commonplace phenomena
We thrown into a deep deep well
Make pitiful gestures of weight and measure
You might as well wish upon a star
Map the progress of migratory fowl

A three-year-old kid shot and killed himself
With a loaded gun somebody left lying around
This fact has darkened the last four days
Some slightly older kids seized the occasion
Of the victory parade after a sporting event
To discharge firearms into the crowd
After months of relentless bombardment
A nation-state is preparing to invade
The last refuge of displaced persons
In their hundreds of thousands
This in retaliation for the heinous crime
Of a non-state actor
While a different nation-state crushes
Yet another nation-state under the claim
That the object of the aggression
Has always been a subject state
In the aggressor’s empire
And a provincial potentate
Has lined the riverbed that separates
His own country from another
With murderous lacerating weaponry
And the governor of Georgia where I live
Has traveled to Texas to show his support
For this homicidal puppet show
I used to think of stupidity
As a mitigating factor
But they ought to know better
And indeed they do

Perhaps you could translate these strictures
Into more intelligible thought balloons
How the acorns crunched under the tires
When anxiety filled the air
Like clouds of brimstone
When Lucifer was hurled
In hideous ruin and combustion down
Or Jolene regretted the fall of sparkle
From her rigid ten-gallon hat
Its brim curled up like a pangolin
Or the pages crumbled in the college textbook
While you clear out her house
In preparation for the estate sale
Salting away the inspirational placards
Live laugh love
And thou wast not born for death
Father and son tromped through the cornfields
Well after the harvest was in
Enjoying the chill
Marking the small mammals
Ostensibly hunting pheasant
But he never raised the shotgun
From the crook of his arm
The birds in flight always too far away
And the memory fossilizes
Assuming more angular proportions
As this years model adopts
The aggressive styling of cars
Much faster and more expensive
Tightening the vertices
While the LEDs proliferate
And the acorns just sit there
Waiting for a more expressive rendering

They dropped the seal of approval somewhere
And scavengers performing their necessary labor
Scrambled to collect the remains
To distribute the fungible instrument
Albeit in corrupt and fragmentary form
As Jacob hoodwinked Isaac sidelined Esau
And enriched himself
This is the way the world works
Outsized ascendancy of cunning
As all learned who enjoyed the tutelage
Of one holy catholic and apostolic church
Controlling omnipotence by means
Of doing the impossible
Namely obeying the command to believe
Though the recipe also requires
The recitation of verbal formulae
In scores and hundreds of iterations
And the renunciation of pleasure
And shame will make its epiphany
And shame will attend your nakedness
And thus light will be made to be
And separated from substantial darkness
And the scales will be evened
According to the doctrine of prefigurement
Prolepses of Solomonic song
Sacerdotal gesture of Melchizedek
As for example the storm that currently rages
Prefigures the day of judgment
And the resurrection of the body
Joyful or sorrowful as the case may be
As the pelican pricks her breast
To provide nourishment for her offspring
Or the bear licks her cub into bear shape
Or a slaughter of innocents unattested in the chronicles
Or the true image that appears on a sweatrag
Or a giant who bears an impossible infant burden
Or the slaying of a dragon species not seen since
Or water into wine and back again fit for finger-dipping
Or tresses that suddenly grow to hide her denuded body
Or efficacious relics scapulars medals waters and vestments
Or spaces vast and reverberant
Or the dogwood with its cruciform flowers
Punished by stunting
So that never again could its timber
Hoist thief or traitor or holy redeemer
And leave a little space of earth
For raptor and herbivore

The coming cloud sweeps all away
And both ends conduct against the middle
And drum their likely candidates
Scurrying past the simple dictum
That well begun is half done
The apothegms and the mnemonic courses
A choice of many mansions of many houses
Which they themselves never expected
Or never in any case built
The domiciliary demand for filial piety
And so a not-at-all binary choice
Occupying a space that includes
The abstract impersonal management of forces
And the tender exchange of limpid desire
But nevertheless a tendency a traction
As songs blend or clash of redwing and redbird
While other quieter melodies adorn the noon
When in the course of mundane events
It becomes necessary to elude the bottom line
To take up arms against an indifferent sea
Too great to be affected by words or gestures
Wishful thinking a quixotic attempt
Lacking the idealism of a Quixote
Posing infinite alternatives
Like noisy craft in the vacuum of space
Galaxies as sticky as pie
Or a prescription drug
Its sodden label illegible
As clothing
Foodstuffs
Modes of transportation
Mining
Manufacture
Educational materials
Employment contracts
Conflict resolution
Histories of people and their interactions
Holiday observances
Healthcare
Do-it-yourself home maintenance
Competitive and non-competitive recreational activities
Topographical features
Reticent or animated vocal speakers
Ecosystems
Commemoration of the departed
Sexual orientations
Infrastructural elements
Jurisprudence
Journalism
Politics
Commerce
Travel for business or pleasure
Organizational rationales
Agriculture
Chains of command
Temporal demarcations
Religion
Arts
Scientific inquiry
Communications media
Public safety
International affairs
Moral injunction conjunction and disjunction
And the rites mysterious of connubial love

She invited me to stir
The Jiffy corn muffin mix

The institutions sclerotic in their inertia
Garner the approval of the many
Relieved by their ineffectiveness
So that the great tradition persists that cherry blossoms
Transcend the corruption of artificiality
Cultivation being in this view
A feature of say the Pleistocene
Or more starkly characteristic
Of a cosmos without past without space
Beyond the fond and neighborly firmament

Ah let us be true to one another beloved
Let us recall our irregular history
In order to free ourselves of its clutch
And see the beautiful world as it is
The joy of nature never spent
Our children grown to adulthood and new children
Even as our parents and even
Some of our brothers and sisters have died
Let us recall too the suffering of the world
For new sufferings will have their advent

For many it’s creamy candies if anything
And clustered tiny white florets
Diaphanous tutus en pointe
But see the flecks of shit in the sugar
The flies on the flowers
Dimly aware though perhaps denying
Our own discomfiture
Delegating the vehicles’ repair
Trying to raise a lawn
And the unimaginable sickness
Half in love with easeful death
His soft names in many a musèd rhyme
Or perhaps a barely audible groan
Or perhaps a drawn-out lustful moan
That issues from the vortex of images
Flesh peeling rapidly in the blast
Or slowly deep in the silent tomb
The bloated corpse trapped under water
And the heaping midden covered
With palmetto and sour shrubs
And red berries for birds to eat
Birds crashing into windows
Or sliced by guy-wires
The human skulls teeth worn down
From the grit of bivalves
And how to pry the recalcitrant shells
Flint too brittle and uncured rock too blunt
The plug of antler a perfect mallet
Those noble achievements buried
By misadventure or deliberate harm
By Portuguese by Spanish by French English or Dutch
By Christianity bullion and circular coin
By sword labor and old-world virus

Heidegger crossed out being
And what was the significance
Of that audacious act
Was it an act of audacity
Or an empty histrionic gesture
History has judged him as among
The less of effective of those
Who enthusiastically crossed out Jews
He was merely okay with that
And supposedly not an enthusiast
Or perhaps he cared about career
Maybe that’s why he wore the uniform
And the pervy little mustache
His fame has waxed and waned
As existentialism has trended or failed to trend
And many denied identification as existentialists
As Heidegger preached the metaphysics of dasein
Until Sartre confessed that existentialism
Should be regarded as a humanism
But as their idol Nietzsche proclaimed
All humans are all too human
While Swift expressed his love
For Tom Dick and Harry
And disdained mankind
So there’s an honored place in the pantheon
For both these poets maddened with rage
But don’t point to that O unhappy cogiteurs
For sweet sensible unemphatic Parfit
Steered clear of fretful contraries
As being and nothingness
Human and inhuman
To dwell instead upon facts and reasons and persons
The realities of hands and faces and voices and esteem
And those who exert moral claims upon us
Teletransporter hopeful trolley and jolly saboteur
And in the mixed and open realistic bag
Objects manifestly exist
But events occur and situations obtain
And processes I’d like to add
Merely proceed

There’s a birdsong I can’t describe
Emissions meticulously assembled
In the corridors of evolution
Four sharp impulses
A slur to a chattering trill
And eight cracked staccato tones
Forgive my imprecision
But when you hear this bird
Nor gold nor brass
But flesh and feather
It must push you back
Into an ecstasy of amaze

A slide stained with gentian violet
Projects the tiny fossils that rest
As if in peace in the prismatic glare
They speak of conflicts ancient and unresolved
Take it or leave it they say
Tiny tiny
That residue once a byproduct
Has become the show
With its hoops curly streamers whipcracks
Flames contortions and musical accompaniment
A ghostly city rising on the horizon to the sky
That does not forbid entry
Which nevertheless remains unencouraged
So that to behold the festivities from any inward vantage
A modest act of violence might be required
Little professors bearded and bespectacled
Peer through the arcane exclusive instruments
Measurements like gunsights
In a quest to catalog the variants
Which themselves speak aloud
In tones as forceful as those on the margins
Where excavators unearth the forgotten machinery
Filled with moldy damps and ropy slimes
That cry out in the voice of cadavers
Ropy ropy
If they would only listen
Who are so intent upon registering the quarry
The very terra say of a postage stamp
Or the waxy topography of a fruit
Of which neither would gainsay the legitimacy of the other
Partisans that do not insist upon total victory
Cocktails for example cunning prescriptions
Readily available over the counter
And under the rose
The gentle tincture of a natural process
Wedged into a regular grid
Whence nothing is mandated absolutely
Nor prohibited without exception
Except to take into account
The prefigurements in their unmasterable numbers
To the endlessly antic chromosomes

English is kind of awful
There’s a place in Paris called the Place de la Concorde
A euphonious name for the site of the guillotine
In London they might have named it Concordance Square
But you really shouldn’t end a word
And begin the next with sibilants
When we lionize Shakespeare
We tacitly acknowledge that The Bard
Accomplished his art in obdurate English
And he availed himself of corners to cut
An Italian sonnet might employ as few as four rhymes
But Shakespeare enjoyed the luxury of seven
And when we want sharp precision
We resort to ciceronian Latin or Hellenic propaedeutic
Hence Macbeth’s will to incarnadine
Thus a young man once suffered a brain tumor
And doctors debated what nomenclature to assign
Dauntingly Greek and esoteric
And they reached consensus some time before he died
Nature supplies us with speech
So that we can understand one another
Even in our local poor bastard tongue
And humans pass through transitions
As do other living things
But humans may comment upon them
And we may promulgate our diagnoses
We may make statements or issue commands
But death doesn’t make any fucking sense

I want to imagine that the name
Of Sparks Georgia commemorates
An instance of St. Elmo’s fire
Instead of somebody whose last name was Sparks
As you sail past the exit on I-75
You see cattle in the pasture of a species
Whose horns have been known to display
That phosphorescence of good or ill omen

We read of such phenomena in books
Or other sources of information
That store and transmit fact or fiction
Or that uncanny mixture
Like the hunting of the great white whale
And we try to imagine the regularities
And the chance operations that transpire
Just out of sight and extend
Billions of light years in all directions
And driving a car at 70 MPH or more
We try to maintain focus
Like schoolchildren attending classes
In a bomb shelter during an air raid

Mitigating circumstances always obtain
Whether mentioned in dispatches
Or idling in unknown country
In the schoolchild’s workbook from 1963
Me me me inscribed a hundred times
At random angles on random pages
In the dire life-history of the perpetrator
Convicted of domestic violence
In the perfectly healthy pine
That demolished the neighbor’s porch
In the data stored in files by the department
In the scribblings of the pompous drudge
Rewarded for gratuitous displays of erudition
Who kind of sucked in the outfield
In the maroon Toyota’s lacerated driver’s side
In the toddler’s refusal to nap
In the blackbirds who fly northward
On the final day of January
Their red chevrons bigger and brighter
Than ever before in the morning light

Render aid to the afflicted
Offer refuge to the oppressed

The experience of say first opening Othello
And being so impressed by the achievement
By the ecstatic orgy of utterance
As to miss the point
Not that there’s only one but you see glimmers
Believing involuntarily as all belief is involuntary
That this poet must be more than a human
For what human could accomplish such force
And you detect the worm of envy
Creeping up through the core of your breast
Beauty does not make you feel this way
Truth does not make you feel this way
This anger and this deep resentment
That the virtuosic performance should interrupt
The revelation that you crave
The essence which you know or hope must be there
And we seek a treasure blindly
When we mistake personality or statement for truth
When we mistake precision for beauty

But art is no object much less a function
No kernel awaits its being laid bare
For the artwork demands witness
It must germinate in the world
And grow and blossom and exude its fragrance
Charming or neutral or fatal as the case may be
And what is fragrance but an experience
An instant of pleasing melancholy
Giving way to an instant of foul disgust
Giving way to an instant of implacable desire
Giving way to an instant of dim hope
Giving way to an instant of wretched disappointment
Giving way to an instant of calm acceptance
Neither discontinuity nor sequence
Nor penetration nor interpenetration
But an ever-branching chain of moments
In one moment of transition
Engrossing a world or many worlds
Of gorgeous desirable terrifying flux

They’ll always be beginners
So long as they live and strive
For example Rembrandt and Shakespeare
In the nascence of bourgeois society
When even eminent practitioners
Served as servants to the great titled or not
And stood alongside those with the knack
For fletching shafts or spitting beeves
Always scraping for patrons
For then as now imagination butters no parsnips
Though it brews a strange brew never tasted
And the player went down to Stratford
And purchased himself a coat of arms
Having elevated sock and buskin
Henries and Richards and puckish fays
And made a name for himself and his company
After attempting the coterie works
Reserved by earl and leisurely marquis
And those who strolled at the universities
His gown the costume of the town
And ceased even before death stayed his hand
And the painter befriended city guardians
And earned their coin
As they strode into the light
And saw his fortune dwindle
And his friends pass with his wealth
He too enamored of theatrical appurtenances
The robe the coronet the casket of jewels
To don a turban and extend an ineffectual scepter
They towered up of artists kings
And thus rulers of shadows
But for earthly monarchs the rod of sway
Accompanies lightly the sublunary birth
And while artists may dwell among the stars
Theirs is a destiny evermore aborning
And who would daub canvas or stitch verse
Toils like a sophomore
And chooses the subaltern’s fame

Objects speak to us they do
Printed matter obviously
But equally the soulful creatures
Animate and inanimate that banal binary
This blue pen for example
Not my favorite and related I know
To the aforementioned printed matter
Performing like a pen the duty of applying
Thin sheets of pigment to broader sheets
I went through a phase of experimentation
With the finest points I could find
Until I went too far
With this one too sharp and cutting
Too specialized for incision
To work on the rare occasion of emollience
But how about these glossy leaves
Bowing and rising under the heavy rain
Transmitting the southern sound
Of big raindrops’ portly ploosh
The big magnolia is cool whatever happens
Deeply rooted in the clay
And the bits of foliage designed to detach
Will allow themselves to fall
Some of them not all
If the wind gets too heavy
And the ground around the nearby pine
Wears a skirt of tangs willfully discarded
By ravenous and insouciant squirrels
Alert but confident in the tactics of evasion
And the gravid pine will sacrifice
Some or most of the fruit in her fecundity
And oh the superb microorganisms
Busy intermediaries of the living and the dead
For what we call life and death
Are but snapshot positions
In the infinite and articulate dance

Twist together the hempen strands
Then twist together the strands of strands
Cunningly knot the rope
To fashion the net
For stevedore to load and winch to hoist
It is permissible but impractical
To create the cargo
For longshoreman to unpack

Employ the technology of the digital age
But the analogue techniques that yielded
The open airy Dark Side of the Moon
The dark and muzzy Exile on Main Street
The effervescent Electric Ladyland