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

You can do a lot with your phone
I just finished the New Yorker article
Covering disaffection among adult males
The next story gives an account
Of atrocious treatment leveled against
A group of people by another group of people
So I decide instead to make a note to self
But find little motive beyond boredom and avoidance
For hacking out these lines
On the unpleasant small touchscreen
So much for hooking the reader’s interest eh
So now I’m free to express myself uncensored
And I rack my brain a little bit
Seeking some inflammatory disclosure
I should have been a more patient and affectionate father
Not that inflammatory
I used to take drugs and drink too much
A story far from unique
And kind of a humblebrag in the used to
At the suggestive age of 69
I’m not the sexual athlete I once was
But my wife and I married in childhood
Or rather I was a child
Though she is younger than I
And oh the pleasure of her well-grown body
Have remained faithful and in love
I became somewhat adult when children came along
With the responsibilities yes
But also the distractions resentments sorrows and cares of adulthood
Rage joy and uncertainty
Annoyance annoyance and irritation
And the vicious irrevocable errors
But not the special sins of great sinners
So I’m not the lurid stuff of the tabloids
Outdated reference
The stuff of reality TV
Not particularly fresh
I’m old and not quite dead
That’s the ticket
Obese and hard of hearing
Apnea hypertension and reflux
Six pills in the morning and two at bedtime
I’ve even shaved off my little professor’s beard
Once so dark and commanding
I just received the good news that an hour in
My car has just made it up on the rack
Why do they even pretend to have made an appointment
I still play tunes when I can in the basement studio
And populate these pages that offer some relief
In utterances timely or untimely
From the tedium of free coffee
Or what claims to be coffee
While awaiting the outcome of the recall notice

Consequently I attempt something fictive
Enter the realm of dubious gestures
And cash the portal out for genuine articles
Regardless of the putative existence or its lack
Of a fiction designated as supreme or transcendent
You’ve seen these paltry measures
Parking meters grease-stained menus
The trailing plant that took over the living room
Satisfaction lurks in such familiarities
A vital nutriment under the parasols
Bodies encased in the speed-can
Persisting well enough apparently
Consuming their podcasts
Children drawing pictures of tiny family members
Practitioners of shibboleths and elaborate handshakes
So stop fretting over whither is fled
The visionary gleam
Allow yourself a favorite song
A favorite story
A cup of coffee a sandwich and you-oo
Enjoy the harsh morning glare off the road surface
Made of seashells in southern Florida
Remembered in the tightening grip of age

On the other hand who doesn’t love
The shock of a world-altering flash
The steep light that abrogates gravitation
Such a height from which to fall
Such a wind to tear a sail
Such a vast expanse as to stretch the eye
In short the sublime
The above above the above
Unbearable achievement and hideous ruin
For we will not cross beyond
On tank treads of weight and measure
Through the reservation of provision
But only through fiction attractive and supreme
The alchemy of shit into silver
Cursed be the one who harms another to get his jollies
To hell with those unimaginative
Who wish to conquer the physics of mountain
Only to be rescued by helicopter
Tin toy and brassy money
Conquer yourself and explore the regions of hell
Praise the image of all-consuming fire
That purges matter to find incorruptible soul

Ow tremfordan
Aw mroses

Molbakay
Zer tonse bu nur byer

Everything in nature gives of a fine decorum
Lobes of air coursing under the ice
As passing through a turnstile one by one
In humans not so much
These blackbirds that cross the sun in battalions
Some above the orb some below
All tending roughly northward
Strange direction in winter
But they know what they’re doing
People used to think that such phenomena
Said something important about people
As constellations reflected or even determined
The course of human events
Not a completely crazy idea
Nature being consistent within limits
And always making sense
But humans our technology I guess
We’re strangers in our own home
Watch the people making u-turns
As they try to guess the next move
From the playful voice of the maps
And in this town you must be particularly alert
To Peachtree Road and Peachtree Street
And West Peachtree and Peachtree Battle
And Peachtree Boulevard that until recently
Was Peachtree Industrial Boulevard
And NE and SW
And everywhere styrofoam cups from Chic-Fil-A
And among the weeds those tiny plastic bottles
From the counter at the liquor store
And wearily checking the phone
In the morning and when the sun sets
To give occasion for flights of birds

What nobody dares to do
The armatures of varying length connected end to end
At hundred-degree angles
A change of direction every fourth vertex
So that by the time you get to the end of it
And there is no end
You’re sick of the entire proceeding
A flight of birds passes before the sunset
And for a moment you imagine some detachment possible
Before falling back into habitual simpering
Worse the new product
Delivered to your very doorstep
Withholds the gratification
That you’ve always doubted anyway
But it does vouchsafe the salutary disappointment
That typically accompanies acquisition or attainment
The storm has deposited the customary residue
Vegetable matter and petroleum distillates
Paper plastic and glass
In the streets and in the gutters
The sewage drain at the corner issuing the usual complaints
The constellations emitting the usual tacit disregard
What do you want and why do you want it
And are you in fact acknowledging the disparity
Of reasons and motives
You did not create the world of mandates and purchases
Of the relentless pressure for affirmation
Any more than you created yourself
So why torment yourself with the debate
Over whether to grumble

Similarly
How are we to understand
This blank carcass of whim

But then how are we to understand
This sunset this flight of birds
This fire set under an overpass

I want to eschew autobiographical reference
But I’m in so deep now
I can’t retrace my steps

I want like the master
To let objects tell the tale
But they don’t connect and there is no tale

Or maybe the mind or the brain or whatever
Deduces a tale where there is none
Very like a whale

We repeat ourselves we homo sapiens
Like addicts like OCD patients
Recursion of impulsive carcasses

The rut becomes clear only later
This much is plain as always
The festering symbol of shy invention

A logic of averaging out
Of augmentation
Both ends against the middle

But since there are never simply two
Our tertium quid remains
Quite flat and ineffective

And a world persists outside ourselves
Where untold corollaries assemble uncertainly
Cold and wonderful

The locus of incapacity
Sharpened as one applies the tools
The fateful and forgotten implements

The healthy or harmful habits
The appliances we use to sustain them
Supplement this descent into decay

Zum card def Nemprobal
Canst dar vellum zin juasussus
Thoei inston castrman
Callig mmemremnem
Hwaetime shasyr blict dem Devra
Ortrbribou se corff
Tog ak crebbee hreuly drep stinniws
Hemfliw oc peshkal lana

A club for people
Who think hell is people

I had come quite a ways to visit him
Or visiting him was part of the festivities
Lots of other people around
Familiar and unfamiliar
It didn’t occur to either of us
That this might be the last
His dark hair and beard now gray
Not fully but sufficiently
To alter his appearance after a long absence
He looked like dusty death
Smaller than I remembered
My older brother after all
Sunglasses as usual
But sadness visible in his eyes
That always wore a taint of sadness
Or perhaps I saw what I expected to see
And resentment that those he loved
Or was bound to at least
Had disappointed had betrayed him
And I feared that I numbered among that throng
And he was right to feel let down
All are mortal and incomplete
All recover too slowly for life
I said hi and then we said goodbye

A tennis visor with pink gingham bow
Shocked that the author should invite us
To nourish remorse as we do vermin

A stain of white paste on the office chair
A residue impervious
To GooGone or Bon Ami or harsher solvents

Spend the morning attempting to levitate
The afternoon in telekinesis
Behind the rabbit’s ears
Beneath the languid lotus
Dream of a fecal transplant
A subtle rearrangement
Having done say five of that
Hang upon the utterances of celebrities
Hear the admonishments of more proximate personages
But those pronouncements stagnate with familiarity
Better to apply the strict provisions from elsewhere
Pmisti effrent x through r
Explosion of blood and saliva
Smash the contract
The workplace accident report
Adopt outlandish garb
Albanian cape Ghanaian crown
Revel in dissatisfaction
Like buried the track calliopes in hidden

Cheerios were all full of carbohydrates
And Keds made kids jump higher and run faster
Mothers used to yearn for cereals and shoes
That would sap energy and slow kids down
But animals small mammals small children
Are not vegetables or minerals
We vertebrates love movement
The ballet of ungulates on the plain
The freaks and pranks of our arboreal forebears
The shimmering synchrony of mackerel-crowded seas
The flocks of innumerable redwings
Turning on a dime
The irresistible force of vehicular traffic
Occupied of course by human operators
And shuttling like the crescent products
On an automated assembly line
Viewed externally the site of frenetic activity
But the gelatinous organism within
Locked in the stasis of a contour couch
Belted and stabilized airbag at the ready
The shell of metal and plastic hurtling uncannily
Until it cruises to a gentle stop
Or meets a catastrophic end

The pedestrian on the street made for cars
With its nominal sidewalk slim refuge
From the speeding vehicles large and small
At various point in history decisions were made
By nobody in particular
Or by people whose functional roles
Remained obscure even at the time
Council members expert advisors agents of industry
Concerning transport housing and communication
But in such case the world of systemic instrumentality
Developed according to nature-like processes
Subject to only the most diffuse of intentions
And we seem to get along pretty well
Fulfilling our obligations
Working and paying
Waking and sleeping
Belted and stable
Finding time for mandatory recreation
Or slavishly enumerating objects in the room
And drawing diffident inferences
Both in our comfortable interior spaces
And out there on the roads
The crumbling hazardous necessary roads

You can’t just decide to adopt a festive tone
Or elegiac or libidinous
And then choose a form coincident with it
You can’t just match up matter and manner
Like the sides of a jelly sandwich
Hence the folly of binary thought
The folly of calculating means to ends
Here then is our sorrow
For the great work the finished work
Exhibits just such a decorum
And yet every creation fulfills a commission
More or less imposed
The most monumental works
The least personal in origin
So as usual we despond to apparition
As if a sunset or a bluebird or a poem
Had succeeded in success
And managed to defeat failure
And so it becomes a question of method
But one doesn’t choose the psychological pressure
And even in the economy of ripe expression
Beauty does not grow of will

The houses at the beach fail to materialize
Nor the mountains loom around the curve
In western Washington
They drive in the rain and exercise caution
Or perhaps merely warn others
Of the danger they represent

They’ve already transitioned into an afterlife
Hopeful of transmigration
Into a happier form if itself ephemeral
In which the thrill of excitement persists
Through time suspicious medium
And outside time
Freed from concern
To seek the return to nothingness
To renounce officious propriety

White belly and ocher breast
Bird on a wire
And taking flight the blue cape and wings
And next the mate arrives

This game is too complicated
The counterintuitive sequence of switches
The rules that vary from situation to situation
Apparently infinitely
They didn’t know that causing damage was wrong
Self-serving contention but sincere
Risking harm and a fate
That sometimes succumbs to temptation

Seven small snakes turned up with raking
Four shockingly energetic wriggled away
Two died outright or apparently did
The last tightly knotted stretched forth its black tongue

Emotional postures proceed through fashions
At least in the post-Gutenberg age
When trends can circulate somewhat rapidly
Hence modern times commenced with the primal eldest sin
Of dividing the human family into colonies
Into the abstract strata of empire and subject
With their destructive and exploitative concrete effects
And thus the extractive conglomerations of modernity
Imitated the style of ancient instances
And hence in the eighteenth century everybody
Who was anybody wanted to be a stoical Roman
Stoicism the stately attitude of imperial hand-washers
For the upright pity the downtrodden
Whom they themselves have trodden upon
All the tragedies ended
With somebody falling on a sword
Hence the plighting of sacred honor
In the Declaration of Independence
Whose primary author was memorialized
By a little Pantheon in the District of Columbia
Patrician upon the little mount in Albemarle county
Holder of enslaved workers and lovers
But when the time came to commemorate Lincoln
Not a founding patriarch but a paschal lamb
A martyr dead for our sin
All the hipsters had gone over to Greece
Hence the Olympian temple on the mall
Things never begin in history
They always pick up from something else
Wherefore a few wispy souls
Like sighing scions of Petrarch
Unmoved by martial strutting
Savored the pang of sensibility
And lamented softly that a flower
Should be born to blush unseen
But a signal moment came
When Childe Harold left Iberia
To sojourn in Hellas
But there are always earlier beginnings
Napoleon idolized Alexander
More than he did Caesar
And he like Alexander conquered Egypt
But when immediately upon the fall of Buonaparte
The Elgin marbles including friezes
Rescued or plundered from the Parthenon
Arrived in England
Egyptomania which nevertheless persisted in France
Was overshadowed by Philhellenism among Britons
And thus Keats born into a livery stable
Plebeian of Hampstead Heath
Could discover that heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest
For she the bas-relief heifer
Mourns her imminent demise
Being led by the mysterious priest
To the perennially green altar of sacrifice
And the age of melancholy had arrive
Ushered of course by Lord Byron
Who would enter a fashionable gathering
With that peculiar gait
He spent his brief life long trying to conceal
Outward sign of his inward Sophoclean flaw or flaws
To take up a fretful posture in the corner
Awaiting the flock of female and male admirers
To congregate around him
And the heroes so tragic and Byronic
Quested after their white whales
Americans being typically behind the times
Or more punctually glowered on weathering heights
Or brooded in lowlands over their noble
If self-induced lacerations
But short-lived Keats the commoner remained
The true the blushful connoisseur of melancholy
Whom the sensitive aristocrats Shelley and especially Byron
Treated disrespectfully in private letters
But they tried to change their tune when he died
Shelley with a noble elegy
Byron with a flippant parody of Cock Robin
Both insisting with astonishing insensitivity
That critics not consumption had killed John Keats
A mosquito bite killed Byron in Greece
And Shelley’s death more ambiguous
Came with a sudden storm at sea
And the little bark Ariel foundered
And before long the romantic age of dejection
Gave way to Victorian pieties
Thus Tennyson devoted his career
To obsession with the death of Arthur
And Dickens to depicting his English eccentrics
Neither one expressive of
An aching heart or the pain of drowsy numbness
More now a matter of guilt and atonement
For the timeghost had drifted beyond
Moping dreamers and atheist rebels
To reside with evangelical fervor and imperialist grit
Feeling became religion and religion feeling
And the finest among them could not stop for death
But death stopped obligingly for them
And it needed France to discover
The ennui of yearning for the ineffable
Amid the sparkling jewelry and the shopping arcades
Inspired by the American prophet of the nevermore
America driven for profit
More compulsively than even its European conquerors
But the great genius of the fin de siècle
Was Irish and found gaiety
At the fraught intersection of art politics and sex
But power dedicated to earnest hypocrisy
Rejected the importance of irony
And punished the poet for his failure to comply
And a new century began with old miseries
Of empire industry and command
But this grim trio brought hitherto unimagined horrors
Of holocaust and mass destruction
Giving rise to an age of anxiety
And anxiety induces depression
That far exceeds the decorous melancholy
Of being too happy in a songbird’s happiness
But one slender mercy obtained
In that twentieth century of ungainly brutality
The blues manner of madness sadness libido hope and loss
Product of survivors of the colonialist fury
Torn from their mother to toil
In Mississippi Virginia and Georgia
And yet even by the rivers of Babylon
They raised their voices in song
And for a time a brief alternative obtained
Blessed by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith
But was soon subsumed within the systems
Of politics and mass production
And convenience and mass consumption
From which it was never free anyway
Diversion for gangsters tycoons ordinary people
Functional nodes in a totalizing system
Mickey Mouse Garbo Gary Cooper
Beatles Stones Nashville and Motown
Culture an industrial product done on the cheap
And technologies chemical electrical and digital
Deadly polymers and merciless algorithms
Absorbed all lives and all life
In an economy of lies
A religion of weaponry
The dictatorship of market share
The idolatry of data
For now sadness is a clinical
That is to say systemic malady
And all are citizens of the Prozac nation
Ask your doctor about the panacea Pharmacorp
And many self-medicate with dismal enthusiasms
For cults for demagogues for entertainments
And for mostly for sports intramural and international
All is conflict
Somebody must lose
That’s common knowledge ask the man on the street
So hurray for the home team
Death to the opponent
Who in opposing deserves painful death
Torture the enemy
Scour the enemy from the face of the earth
Man woman and child
We have the technology
Nothing on earth means any damned thing
So success above all and victory and vengeful butchery
And drown your sorrows in lustful blood
And sleep the long sleep of the opiated

I’m not that kind of courageous
To defer to you dear reader and efface myself
I would rather share my imagining
Which you may take as you wish or leave behind

Here come all the gumballs again
Tumbling rolling spilling to the floor

There was this lucky lucky boy
Who got to drink from the fire hose
It was the 80s when he went flying
Across that glaringly lit studio
That’s easy for me to say

Cyrano’s five-dimensional bicycle shop
With pistachio ripple

The turnip tops cooked in vinegar
With turnip root mixed in
That one really happened

The small children playing pretend
With me as the protagonist
Instead of those witless beasts of the Paw Patrol

Space centaurs male and female
With rocket streams coming out of their butts

The gummy babe at the nipple
Eyes rolling back like the eyes of a knocked-out boxer
Smiling and twitching like the defeated
Who descends slowly to the canvas
That one really happened too

Or that one occasion when I almost got to play
With the Grateful Dead
Back before Jerry tuned in turned on
And dropped way way all the way out

And the dream woman with the belladonna eyes

And if you allow me my crotchets
I will regale you with anecdotes
Of my time in TV heaven
With Peewee Herman and Captain Carl

Have my peaches free gratis without fee
You need not even shake my tree

For the association of poets
It’s a world of words to the end of it
But the poet plays many roles besides that of poet
Sailor homemaker negotiator mammal fool
Compounded of attitudes experiences expectations
Some commendable some less so
Ephemeral and somewhat nugatory
But the poet is not the poem
Which is of the world
Outside and inside itself
And not a person place or thing
Well it is sort of a thing
But neither fully abstract nor fully concrete
Rather like that first world that we call the world
And to enter a poem a painting a story or a play
Or cathedral arena theater bank or humble home
Is to enter a world of artifice
That might as well be made
Of color stone or words
Which are of nature
And so we cannot know which world comes first
And so the artistry is only in the arrangement
The piling of stone upon stone
And even that is no more than the skill
Of handling flint steam or semiconductor
Which compose nature’s measurable surface
But space image line sound and concept
Denote significance beyond themselves
They express something
And words especially exercise this power
Of driving truth into the world from their world
The fantastical rhythms of understanding
Everybody already knows the dawn
But remind me please of her luscious rosy fingers
Remember to me the glory of His Majesty the Sun
Show me again the tenderness of the nursing mother
The gentle rain that droppeth upon the place beneath
The night time that is the right time to be with the one you love
The alarming spectacle of butterfly upon flower
The cunning of the predator
The power of storm that torments the sea and the land
The intelligence of scavengers and fungi
Their stately obsequies for the dead