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

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