In A Heat Wave

I’d be happy in such a beautiful house,
it is simple and elegant --
it would be a happy place to be.
I feel its russet warmth,
pearlescent those lustrous walls
and ceiling

inviting touch at every turn in my bed --

lull about with a gigantic foot
out the door
bathing in moonlight or clothed in
a knitted sock flowing and red
as Marianne’s nose,

or a glass building molten
at sunset
with the fine powder of
boulevard magenta --

any breeze
would do just about now

as things stand barely propped
open by a stick
the fine forms that lava lamps and nebulas
insist upon dropping
on us
-- an image of those breakfast nooks
across frolicsome summers of the last century, it is empty but for
the light of this
time of day --
as if words alone could
shoehorn any

of these into
any more of those vibrating lines
which we have come to depend
so much upon.  Sound mountains
and setting free.

On The Frontier

at swim in trembling alpine
pools,
a double dream of ice-cream --

In a heat wave with all of God’s children . . .
In a heat wave these thoughts give little relief, but

midnight, your skiff on the dark water
its wake gentled by moon-blossoms
and stars.

Crossing over frontiers of sleep
into realms
of wakeful surprises lunging
in birthday pajamas from beds humid
with sleep.

Saturday afternoon
a rebel crashes symbols
somewhere

in a veiled wood
playing drums
in reckless flight,
but also
very workman-like,

tracking-in on the rails --


And rolling
the waves

spreading through briars
and descending a
hill --

and

down the children roll
in silence, or in laughter

down down in delight
they go
a blur those round faces
made ruddy and swollen
with mirth and mayhem

emollient across a
film of after-images 
in the pellucid light --

O, the longing to be
pierced by further
color saturation!

Rolling down the enamel sward
frozen horizontal -- as if conducting last rites over
clenched fists
with little arms braced and rolling
golden koala-like
spun in lassoes of
damp hair and flesh
flecked with bits
of weeds, and fresh-cut grass.

Or countenance closed --
within a blue chrysalis
glassine with time and motion
before all stillness
-- whether silent, or laughing;

as if pressed behind glass,
as if in quiet reflection.

Poem

The rose
recommends
the thorn

A boxwood
exhales the
heat of a
Summer’s day

The Sunflower
stands shyly
before the
whited wall.

The Skate, 1967

The rains have come
the heat wave
has broken.

In the café
people are animated
their conversation
lively and bright

the cooling rains
have come as
thirsty plants
turn their leaves up
in gladness.

A city tour-bus
goes by, slowing
for the sightseers’
interest in the
cathedral

-- translucent and
beaded with rain
their complimentary
parkas with hoods
pulled over
their heads.

The café goers
seated at their
tables, the Sun
comes out
the world is born
anew

Yes  those plastic
parkas meld into
a fogged frame
of film

exposed to the
light

a
skate ghostly
as it ascends
out of darkness
drifts along
-- fanciful of the silvery,
melodious roof of
its aquatic world.

There is only a
little boy there,
leaning over the
side,

Calyx

 I.
Much above these things I remember that dry season,
the bird was the word and perfumed were the nights
with their cans
tipping music into the street as all that young talent sings
endless vocalese with bright maracas in their fists,
sung it and continues to sing it, but nobody is listening
as it leaks into our vertical experience of riding
atmospheres
feeling any decompression in the spiral
cochlea, riding up
feeling a little shift, that somehow things will be
different
this time, a little fresher perhaps, like stepping out of
your door across the threshold of morning
and being pleasantly surprised that a cold-front has moved in
during the night
and brought with it while you were sleeping a shower of rain.  But
the Minkowski Space (the poetics of which you love) and your
graceful arc

through it
flattens out as you approach your high floor
and stop --
there is a mild feeling of suspense;
air compressed behind your lips,
waiting for the door to open . . . and then
expelled,
an inaudible puff
on which some ultimate question drifts --

while all along the music soaks the scene. 

 II.
           Meanwhile night has fallen and the park lights have
reclaimed the gloaming where I sit on a bench and write this. 
Much went on that I want to tell you about.  Chiefly I noted but
did not write down how the light after sunset gradually changed as
every contrast deepened all around me.  And as this happened

and I was writing,
the page of my notebook brightened with a soft, bluish tint as if it
were freely furnishing its own light coming from somewhere
within, and behind the words which flowed from my pen. 

And it is this special quality of light which I wish to be poured into
the street scene and the ultra-modern elevator up the mile-high
skyscraper of which I have been writing
about.  Enough said about that, only do find the best
cinematographer working and place the laurels
high
upon that head!

           Vertigo? you suggested --
well, perhaps, since I have been experiencing mild bouts of it with
a summer cold the past few
days.  But what I’m really
thinking about now is a slice of pizza at Two Boots --
Care to join me?  Ice-cream afterwards?  Then home for a long
soak in the tub, and later -- type up my poem sitting on the end
of the bed, and see what we have . . .

 III.
Beyond the refuse combines of art you have crossed those
luminous margins --

now
return to life!

A Surrealistic Poem

 1.
Throw open your salmon colored shirt,
you come bearing a tray full of burning candles
to illuminate those firm and
pendulous breasts with nipples of dark aspic.

Young motherhood agrees with you! 

Come bearing your tray brimming with
candle light
and as you find your mark let the camera find your sweet
and cheerful face

O, beauty!  O, joy!  Let this be
a long and simple scene
come bearing candles and who cares of
a continuing story --

Young mother-
hood, love, and
light!

 2.
He lay down beside a curl of her hair
to enlarge her smile

in the soft grass

he lay down at the foot of a curl
to see her smile big as the
sky

Love me, he said.


It was her sky
but he wasn’t there

If he wasn’t
there
then who was there in her hair

laying in the grass looking at her smile?

Not I, me lord!  Not I!

If not you, who then?

Me, I was mostly sleeping.
A corner of a pillow
in my hand.

A fluted column,
a glass of champaign
as we were happy to have been catching
the wind.

Did he call after you as you went?

Under the sign of the inn:
“Fare thee well, son of mine!”

But going hence I then doubled back.  Knowing it would not be in
the script, it was as far as a voice could humanly go,
possessed by the song of the desert,
the mournful appeal of the mezzo forte calling
the prayerful to rhyme.  But in
my sandaled feet, and carefree,
a shepherd with his pipe piping I went.  Happy
was my song.

It was not in Russian, it was
not in Japanese

Playbill Platypus

 1.
I hear the cicada it must be summertime,
shadows lengthening toward evening’s end
as the golden chariot again plunges into
that mauve colored powder puff at creation.    
How come loneliness?  And of what palpable absence now in your life,
full stride into middle-age?  Youth flown on waxen wings.  Her painted
face, a painful memory now that she is really gone, also brings succor
when dreaming. 
Find the place between footfalls --
fold the page over to where the city cicada meets one of
my childhood.
Breeze like soft applause in tonight’s program,
Let this sunset fold into another,
no less momentous.
Say that we can feel this like our fingertips touching; voiding all
distance, cancels no sadness in a sad world, no --


 2.
The corner
where you stand and where I stand is the intersection of
what imaginary number?  You see how I jump
at the conclusion, albeit haltingly as if through
a prismatic light in a
cloud chamber.

The ringing of bells.  Tho scarcely the precise chime followed by the
expected ringing away, but the wake at the widest part of
the Vee (all effect adrift, and bereft of its cause)
toward the taut vellum of the world, at which center the storied
omphalos at Delphi.  Here we have now arrived
at the great chain of being.
One child’s mandala in the turn of a toy kaleidoscope.

Even so, I have taken pleasure out of your philosophy of life.
I look forward to sharing
my thoughts with you about your
saraband; about the part of just fitting in before everything
falls apart.

Crème Brûlée

The wave came round
and Marianne and her nose.  Bearing his shadow
combing in the grass,
she listened -- a little odd
the coup de dés a little odd the movement toward
a new equilibrium on green baize. 

Far and away the most interesting place to visit.
What about independent wings?  Oh, they’re smart
but not so young.

Which sounds or images are reproduced.  I don’t care
I’d rather sink than call him.  Not a straight
line.
Division of the cross of fat and felt.  Everything I loved had the shape
of people around me.  The astute calligraphers,
the hunters.

My body is upon my legs.

He rolls parallel to the edges.

And that which is the pith of his motion.
A snafu of the heart.  Musica.

Sir, Sir!
I’ve got a spot for you -- I know a place that uncle makes.
Raisins dry on wicker trays, coke fires burn
in the foundry.  Recalls the songs, the pure threshold --

To really see a sunset one must turn one’s back to it
and see the objects which it illuminates:
a tree its crown frozen out of sleep by a dark cloud
stretching its chemical chains toward
nuanced colors; the dragonfly, if you will.
A hard to get at feeling in the grass darkening
toward the enigma . . .
If there can be voiceless reverberation in me when stating it thus, as
a changeless quality of light holds its beautiful curve
going over into darkness.  The summer firefly surges unto it. 
City traffic.

Nothing to do but to hold on to it
as we feel it like we feel a departing
lover letting go.  Every particular nuance as it relentlessly releases us,
and yet cleaves to us upon a brightening page.  I speak of
future images. 

But you there screwing up your face I’ll understand later
as a prelude to a smile.
This as you placed before me the crème brûlée
in its ceramic heart-shaped dish this evening at the café.
Such extravagance! you’ll say.  This winter, there will be
ice skating.  The crystal panel and its distant hills
will be flanked by swift borzoi.  Hands warmly

nested in a muff of the softest ermine.  It will be snowing.
It was snowing and will continue to snow, she said.

Tender Shoots

Whoever encouraged that delectable entity to stop over
there and smell the flowers, did not take into account those
free range pythons of yours angling in the sea of dark ferns. 

It is the sheer and endless pleasure of those flowers that have us
casting off to the wind our mourning weeds.
Meanwhile you do me untold kindnesses writing words on me, coming

out again and again to greet the morning,
but hadn’t you better get up that tree waiting nearby for your flight
to another time-zone?  Thanatos is peeling away those tender shoots

stained with sleep, peeling them away
-- you could divine as much, but who would have thought
a rip-tide surged through so much placidness as a day like this

inviting us to deeper reflection.  Cinnamon.
And crushed rose petals the color of Wednesday’s sky
after sunset. 

Scenes From The Hunt

Come out and greet the day!  The sky is
brightening blue, as a pigeon cuts the airy way --
a loving blue painted with a feathered wisp of cloud --

Runaway the fugitive train, balling up pure presence
in a strike-force, scarcely ruffles light or air --

Light Turnouts

He rode here on a tandem bicycle.
I couldn’t find you for the crowd.  We’d expected light
turnouts, what with those helio-
raptors menacing the local fauna lately.  And now since
they released all those kittens into
the public parks system!  These simple breezes westering off
the water
can not cover o’er the tracks of my feelings for you
-- thou these, like everywhere else, are shifting sands
which famously snake their way over the
farthest Saharas.

Fluttering too, like loose hems of summer dresses --
provincial girls on their bicycles tossing laughter like ribbons.  Skipping
mountains.  Their amber lights beating against the current
as assiduous as fireflies.  But over the distant and immediately
receding horizon a distant lightning, bereft of thunder. 
“You act tough.  You act like Senorita,” she said.  The hard bite
of channel tunnels and soft fern

repairs the contemplated line
the music of the cowbell, like hoop-skirts collapsible with their giving
light
unique unto a particular shape unto their own.  Moving to
those louvered windows over there --
brushing
the green fuse aside to close the aperture of
“the too much” down to the last stop
where you are tossed simple packets of the day
on the sleep-stained cuff of the receiving platform.

It’s nothing it’s just a little nothing;

but your art -- sometimes I just want to throw my arms around
so much
wonderfulness,
I mean with all those something or others running around
shuffling off the pointed but well placed word here and there

even as we look elsewhere for the root
dark and resinous.

Green Light, White Banner

A fountain two fountains in the sunlight
and there behind me from over my left shoulder the glaucous eye of the Moon.  It does not look at what I look at peering over my shoulder but raises its fogged eye swimming in blue raises it to some higher purpose.  Old Moon, blind seer that you perhaps are, what do you divine out beyond this celestial sphere of green abundance the muddy earth and living rock of this world which is and is not our world?  O, Fountain! O, Moon!

Meanwhile, small, insignificant thing wandering the folds of my denim trousers joyous is the day when we stop to smell the flowers, but there are certain eyes such as those of the canis lupus all compacted at the brow thus giving birth to a purer center signifying whose the hunter and whose the hunted. 

There would be scarcely time enough to crush the rest of those rose petals and rub them into the burnt umber made velvet by distance, a smear, if you will, as if with the thumb to quieten a clarity which is too clear, too purposeful in an altogether tentative atmosphere melding with your flesh and your sentiment in such a way as to suggest

too much clarity, such as the eyes trekking through the pleated dark of the pine-wood forest, not fierce but nearly blank but for a single purpose, but too much clearness would also be too much sentiment, fussy while also displaying accomplishment thus inviting the spontaneous act and the negation -- Love and nebulas have been born of less.  

As Unidentified Objects Avoid The Gentle Abyss

As unidentified objects avoid the gentle abyss there is one
which holds us enthralled even now, a long time sheltered in the
velveted sky, shedding flakes of old loves like torn images peeling
and falling.  O, un-annihilated thing! orphan wandering the dark
oceans!  The great crest of that high crown!  Roseate, its ember
burns within as it grows ever hard and resolute. 

Pure and smooth
against all the imperfection all around, and within us.  
The lambent and the deep.  “We searched for guy-
wires -- anything, an old fuse box.”  There was nothing but this
enormous, perfect thing in an uncertain light as if wrapped in
ornamental clouds for all future combers till the end of time.

A Film Noir

Open the venetian blinds of that pleasure craft of yours so sleek and
low slung in the water, light a cigarette and pluck a grain of tobacco
from your lip as you stand at the window listening to nothing seeing
nothing even as the tide rolls in and a fog horn sounds in the distance.

Open the venetian blinds of that pleasure craft of yours
long and sleek, and low-slung in the water --

Thursday

As a purpled smear deepens, breaks off,
a storm-front darkening the water while even now the small minnows
feeding at the green skirt of hewn rock fitted along the near bank,

and calm the water lapping the shore with contented sighs and soft
murmurs scarcely aware of the coming storm the color of plum
dusted with fine grains of a paler hue;

yet even now as I speak it stirs vexed as if over some indigestion of
mother’s milk, but out there plying the water a fishing trawler in the
deeper channel sounds like that cat who was in the news recently

for clocking somewhere over one hundred and twenty
decibels
the loudest purring cat ever recorded -- loud, voluptuous.

But in my dream it’s the small fry feeding on cavernous rock;
after a slow promenade down-low and close to
a flower bed to the accompaniment of my violin, and the gathering up

the pleated folds of incidental music with those various flowers of
ambient sounds which have been there all along pretending not to be
noticed:

murmurs of the playground such as the soothing metronome of
the swing
of the swing somewhere behind us swinging a silent child

kicking heels in the air, or a mechanical bell to be ratcheted by
the thumb free of gripping handlebars, and some sort of broken
kazoo fluttering as it is sounding

-- trails off and then is found again
and then lost like a particular coin falls between the plumped up
cushions where it waits to be found again --

among fuzz-balls of distant traffic, and yellow taffy of passing horns.

Cezanne's Apples

Just before train time, the trees

feigning distance -- suggesting something about clarity of
objects and

their relations writhing with that ecstasy of desire
which heedlessly traffics in words and color --

pretend that nobody notices, but another blazing-up at the turning
of the crystal troposphere, not too much or too little,

as we gather our rewakened sense of a will or a sensibility
at the edges of things pressing a convex world flat

we are presented with those
apples

The Stain Of Love Is Upon The World

A blind man walks in the park tapping a white cane
on a path of compact red earth.
He has snowy white hair, and wears a light blue shirt
with a pair
of chinos and brown leather shoes.
I meanwhile sat nearby on a bench -- he halted in the middle

distance.  Raised his wide, open face to the
high crown
of a wind-tossed tree.  For it was a windy day.
And in that tree a yellow Oriole sang,
and it sang till your heart would break
for it!
A lovely song it was.  And even if these were

the days of ancient Rome, that moment would be
ever present
and could never be erased -- so it is today, and forever,
now; thus
(what I mean to say is) we made a lovely triangle
whether in chinos or togas or yellow feathers --
and all about us and within us a little heaven which
never ceases
to overfloweth with goodness and pleasure and sweet happiness.

And now all about us birdsong and the gentle rays of an evening
Sun.  

My Movie Idea

The New York sightseeing bus that just went by: The poet stands up
with a microphone in his hand.  The tourists occupy every seat in the

roofless, double-decker bus.  They all ride in different attitudes of
sleep as the “tour-guide” feeds words to the dreams of this sleeping
audience.  As we gaze down from the café of the Renzo Piano

building on West 120th Street, air conditioned with high, glass walls,
what occasions a privileged perch such as this?  Meanwhile, a green

balloon breaks free! and rises up and goes where the avenues ride --


Just blow off the steam, he said, and that’s it! even if that was the
mega-star that just went by on his bicycle it makes things a little more

elegant so the ball moves a lot slower, but the lengthening wedge that
you represent means everything to me, especially at this time of day

when the others busy themselves to back away twisting down empty
stairs, or across promenades and green grass enameled by

that part of you which is drawn to our reflections with a foreign tongue
assiduously probing mellow lights, cross-currents the perfume hatches

certain flowers, these and ever rolling waves behind us at sunset
cupped even as they spread out mounting ever wider across a quarter

hour when comes the brightening of the quarter moon and our body’s
transformation into silhouette against the mauve fingered end of day,

undulant and voluptuous --

Miraculous these coastal waters, free of all pleasure craft. 

The Silent Era

 1. The man from the gray house said he was coming to my house.

I saw you and then I didn’t see you . . .
Two butterflies make an
arabesque in the middle distance -- white butterflies. 


 2. What more can be done? 

The pigeon yesterday
crushed and flattened in the street could be so
no further --
crushed and flattened like aluminum foil under all those wheels
in the course of a day, perhaps --
such a process in the fullness of a day could make it
no more a bird-
having-

become-an-emblem-of-itself.  What more could be done to it, to us?


                     A tiny bud of a flower waits to open;
it is closed, yes, while virtually open meanwhile to all conjecture --
Unfurled and already open
next to it a red flower.


 3. Following the eye along the rim, the pendant hasp,

Be careful with the paths intersecting each other or you could
end up
who knows where --
a thicket, a dark wood  wayward and lost.  But freedom

is pulling the leg at the fork up ahead, like desire which also
waits
sometimes hovering as if sometimes above some expectant flower

open already
cupping light

exhaling sweetness and color --

Swoons ruddy boys all afire
snapping towels at errant flies
sunning themselves on rocks, stripping down for a birthday swim
these pearls of youth

they swing on the braided vine up high and
out over the water -- each like a sequent frame
of that gem of The Silent Era, The Fall of Icarus.

What else can be done but to make
parabolas in the air, jump-cut --
arabesques in the water with hands and with feet
and with flashing heads in the Sun
at swim?
But from here, under the cool shade of the Cherry tree
the breeze
shifts low-hanging branches; plays about my hair, over my shirt-
collar
and cools the back of my neck.  And somewhere from
behind me, a bird

Early Rain

Lie in the grass and look at the sky
the beautiful boat rocks to and fro
on the water,
a sloop from the old rum-running days
it raced the stars where the Bermudas ride --
“If it were mine I’d name it Nostromo . . .” and sail it up the river

to visit the poet in his summer hamlet.  I’d also love to
have someone like you
here to share “this single solitude” with 
-- Or reach sometime round the other way
for a meeting on the Cape --

While others, out on their morning walks, drift among a confetti of
flowers and
a light patter of raindrops.

Poem (To Georgia)

To sum up my last letter to you:
The house has at last disgorged its ancient
but no less colorful contents, fed by
a desperate milk, and I am back in
the city, I’m back in Harlem
now:

it’s taken a hundred bananas to determine the curve of
my ill-fitting head,
and you feel the meshes pass over you like sleep --
and binds your feet and ankles
as morning and the milkman arrive

and the strawberry man vocalisimus in the street,
or the image of you at hoops in the Tuileries,

or my loving those feral cats
in their little patch of sun next to The Firehouse Theater;
beautiful is
the pearl necklace as you toy with an orange peel
laughing as you fashion a planisphere,

an opera house.

Poem (To Wes)

If the traffic is flowing the crow must be flying.
Me, Tivelo, and Beau are happy in the window
sketching bare buttocks and hair dripping with
the voices of the trees goading a bird to sing.
Here an ampler air clothes the grass
where children play

And you there, how does thee? Muddy? and his dog?
The old black crow on his spredden wings, the old gray
sky? In the colonnade strike up the melody now
with fingers and now, over again with the loaded brush

Yet bestowing a little to endow our little left
turns with the strange --
and of all vigils’ music which proclaims the near, the clear
its loose meaning mournful and simple like your panhandler’s
music.  The broken guitar
it now leans propped in the old vertigo against the carved oak
monk’s chair.

The Waves

 1.
In these latitudes of indiscriminate waves that sweater you
knitted for me last winter keeps me warm, even though it is scarcely
summer here.  I am speaking of the night:  here
it is all about houses and warm hearth fires,
I mean the place is what remains after any important event
as we wend our way home under the interrogation of the stars.
Its loose meanings are
what we come here for, to experience time like the weather -- falling
stars, and once, rain-streaked the face almost mine
in the mirror of
a tidal pool
-- “to renew our lives” -- for fear of being
too something in saying what it means to me to be here --,
but the parts of the world once
assembled can they ever be complete?  Can they, can it be?

-- although,
as we know the doorway between the kitchen and
the bedroom is a failed-hallway mixing two spaces,
a simple stanza-break, a failed
hallway or one just coming into being

we easily step through it, or linger as if a word
which hangs relative on the tongue

slow in its awareness of a room waiting to receive it

or shy
it wavers like a soap bubble

not yet born unto the currents of air

redolent of warm bread
and rain 

-- But the parts of the world once
assembled can they ever be complete?  This pile of
stony rubbish untidy and simple like a threshing floor.  

Yes but the waves
born unto the patient anesthetized upon
the table, as she wakes to the remembered
name?  As if chance has returned us safely to our moorings.  While
from
across the water come distant strains of the master conducting
the Philharmonic in motifs of sleep and articulated
birdsong.

 2.

The waves there was so much to do and to see
she might not have come back

Who knows what the birds thought of the music? that it was a work-
shop or an opera

They meanwhile sang that old standard, We’re in the Gloaming! 

The harbor
museum features a submarine disguised as an iceberg

We have been given to understand that it recently received a new
coat of paint

Transfixed was my eye on the whites fading
on the black water

Jeweled necklace makes a catenary upon
the distant shore

The Gay Cyclops

This is not the grass
I knew in my youth,
but the cock sounding the new morn,

and the rooftops --

her recumbent body

come from sleep with
hair dripping rain . . .
come down the ladder
with the keys to the doors --
these opened simple domestic
spaces

spread out and tremulous
as green ferns prescient
of rivers and mountains --,

a loving cyclops
meanwhile waits for us up ahead
having emerged, we’re
given to understand, from the tidy and complex pattern of

the pinewood
door of the closet in the bedroom,
and his twin
as we shall soon see goes
with him; and there is a third always
inverted and adrift

upside down with the gentle currents of their
passing.