Too Fixed A Sense Erases Your Art In Its Faint Traces

A Cento

I had not taught you then the alphabet of flowers;
and all between the margin and the mountains
you lounged like a boy of the South
unshaven, with a pocket full of currents.

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
in every tiny grain
with rocks, and stones, and trees
toward that timeless clarity of the last and inland sea --
The air thrills with the hum of insects,
fountains mingle with the river --

that some strange day will either the quiet catch
ponderous upon my senses a whole moon,
or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
you kissed me awake and nobody was sorry.

The water never formed to mind or voice;
your hands lie open in the long fresh grass.

Notes On Cinema

All of your friends have such pretty names: 
Eva, Lester, Isabella.  And Alexandra!  So many things you can do
with that name:  Alex, Alexa,

Cold comfort if you ask me
just wanting to fit in hoping no one notices,

but really I like those very round paving stones don’t you?  Oh, yes,
the way light plays about them after a rain at the end of the day.
Planning shots for tomorrow at Joan Of Arc Island . . .

Yes, you are beautiful I tell her.  And you as well she says.  Poking me 
in the ribs were two rigid fingers --
"Maiden’s hand to dead men's fingers we call them
in these parts."

All of the unschooled nymphet she’s been made-up to be, off-
set she clambers the particular rocks hurled by giants in bye-gone eras
to devour the classics

-- Virgil in the Latin, one can not help but notice;
Pindar in the Greek.  Aeschylus.

But to see her discoursing with friends, all dimples
and conspiratorial tones -- having
scarcely put the two together before:  Confessing as much 
to her she straightened my jacket-collar and said, "What 
manner of man is this
who carries his balls in parenthesis?"  Making fun of
my small stature as “a mental midget” no doubt, my 
saying such silly things.  What? I said.
For that wise remark, she said, you owe me
one fondue at Café Lalo . . . O, Ladybug! she cried.   
On your shoulder -- Make a wish!  Heliotrope.

My World And What Happened To It

Having just spilled coffee on my shoe I remember a dream:  last night I dreamt that Tennessee Williams was comforting me, he was holding my hand and stroking it saying No, no, no.  I had felt that I’d been called before these two men in suits because my sanity had been called into question, and that it was somehow crucial that I prove my soundness of mind to them, and for some reason the great playwright was there, too.  He had a sadness about his eyes and he wore a full beard.  I had just said the word Duck, thus breaking the terrible tension in the room.  Instantly the two men whom I took to be chief doctors looked surprised as they turned to each other, and abruptly left the office.  I could not maintain my composure any longer, I could not, and dissolved into tears.  This is when Tennessee Williams took my hand, and I said, “The duck flies -- it bores a hole through the sorrowing in all of your work --, I had to show them that I was not crazy.”  And he stroked my hand and said No, no, no . . . Oh no, no, no.

How To Write A Poem

 1.
Locate the madness, if you can. 
In song it yearns for us.  Chiefly, let it be
in every gentle resisting of the intelligence
that nameless thing, more tropical than topical,
where it eschews all manner of
such forms such as the perfect memo, for
instance, smug of some hapless muddled
middle in its very exemplariness.  “A flower
in your beard before parting!”

 2.
A plush carpet is a fine thing, it is fine for the feet
and it is good to deliver sparks by.  This, and to pirouette
a fresh center every time can bring
no end of delight.  But what wavers at the edges
with such soft siftings going on, although
scarcely anybody can be certain, sets the teeth on edge? 
How do you classify your stars, and into what 
constellation, before you set your brushes   
down?

The Elephant of Paris

And all the dreams were on the floor
and it felt that they would have been in my lap.  Like outcroppings of 
fresh ginger-root suggesting a running boy with a sac of burlap in his hand,
and he himself dreams perhaps, dreams not that he is running, skimming 
along
like a smooth stone free of all worries, no, but he dreams that he is in
France and has had to abandon his elephant at a train station

and the journey presses on him in search of his loved ones at the frontier
and he is inconsolable, “Even though in France they are kind and they
feed stray elephants from their back door, and sometimes even
take them inside don’t they?”  And forever the parting look in those mild eyes
so deep with kindness and understanding as the potato boy, 
for that is what he is called, wakes dumbfounded and
perplexed and then he remembered the French country-side as seen
through rain spattered glass -- his train speeding South. To puzzle

it all together he needed air and a little less sunlight in a space grown
wide.

A bird, nevermind

leaps, no, but really sings into flight
from the plush carpet of green moss

-- and all the more greener as seen through
my polarized sunglasses! -- psychedelic along

the water’s edge fringed with mad waves
wind-driven, displaced

by dark hulls of passing ships cutting
the choppy water
 
-- but suppose it is really desire which pulls all these
things along?  Pull the intensifying colors from

their source, the crashing waves, the mighty ship
made serene by distance

as the sublime sweetly, patiently waits
for us.  

Apollinaire Enameled

 1.
An ice covered
skyrocket

an ocean whale
in clover

One makes progress
to a deeper blue

The other rolls
about in flowers,

fields of flowers
next to a brook

which waters run
clear along mossy

banks, and from
the gathering twilight of

the forest of tall
pines the repetitive

but no less interesting
music of the mill,

the old mill as
its great water-wheel

turns to the
accompaniment of August bees.


 2.
Soon the undulating
country gives way

to the black and
white balance

and soothing
equanimity of

tar pits and bleached
bone and white sand.

He did not have
any place in

particular in mind,
but perhaps the

moose recalls a
certain childhood

moment passing
in the heat

of a fleeting
afternoon redolent

of the fresh
asphalt of the

newly laid road
under progress

still  as yellow
trucks and men

move in a hubbub
up the street

 
 3.
-- An early cartoon
was it?  A moose

has recovered itself
from a pool of bitter chocolate

as it blinks
dumbly at us

endless seems to
flow the chocolate

from its enormous
antlers and over

its great back
and down its legs

and over the white
sand fading before

the numbers and
sprocket holes . . .

Magenta Boulevard

The things that recollect us.  Cigarette ends
and bits of paper of scribbled poems
and napkin drawings.  The cones come in 

countless flavors along the magenta boulevard.  

Two boys a Sunday morning sleep 

naked on a dirty mattress, 

wake blear-eyed and hungry
in Winter light.  But far from the James
the silent Hudson flows to the sea. 
In his plush solitude the meta-
physician twangs a steel string of

a mostly broken guitar.  "Speech too was
thought to be inhabited by a god."
Now the suburbs and the falling
gray flakes of light.  Tolling reminiscent
bells.  Autumn bees.