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PART I
S T I L L L I F E 1
The straight handle of a steel spoon
Stands in a white mug
On a pine table next to a pink pot.
A tall girl in a green shift
Rests her head in one hand
And stares at a book--
Face-open on the table.
Spread on her lap with paws gone limp,
Lies her cat at rest, its bell silent.
The light from a paper globe is caught up
In the still luster of long tanned legs
She sits upon in a womb-like straw chair.
Her brownish-blonde hair sets
In wisps against her cheek and neck;
One hand extends over her knee,
Poised above the tufted floor.
A child lies in the next room, asleep--
Our child--
And the clock on the wall has stopped.
G A R A G E S A L E 2
Bits and pieces
Remainders, remnants
Junk and treasures--
TWENTY YEARS
of memories
souvenirs and
tokens--
ALL FOR SALE
For bargain prices or
“Your best offer.”
Everything must go
Before we leave--
our house
our home
our refuge
From the fray--
For another place
And another day.
G E N I E S I N T H E G A R B A G E 3
Ali Baba jars, large and round,
Line back-door alleys all over town:
Black ones and green ones with
Hinged-doors in hinged-lids
Harbor garbage, refuse, bottles and cans
With room left-over
For genies on-guard
To rise in vapors
Encircling in whirling winds
malodorously pungent and
sweetly rotten--
Those smells almost forgotten
Save for and
Saved by--
our genuine genies
WHO
over their thousand and one nights
Have collected in storied and stored-up vaults
Decaying pleasures and discarded delights
In desert places.
C R Y S T A L V I S I O N 4
For enchanted MERLIN
Overgrown with ancient ice--
He waits one darkened night:
Frozen tree-fingers snap noisily
In sub-zeroed winds as icicles
Drip into instant silvered daggers
Descending from the frozen tips
Of blackened bracken-branches
In bushes laden and packed hard
With sepulchral snow, silent as night,
Since Sunday last--
Unbeknownst to him, fast asleep,
Expecting MAGIC to come.
When, suddenly, winter storms
Flock his barren landscape in
Christmas strings of glowing blue ‘n white
Shadows that play upon him with lights
From setting suns set streaming
In their spiralizing horizons of ocean waves
That send him flowing in suspended scenes
Of iced crystal palaces formed in filigrees
Of frozen snowflaked-lace
Crocheted in cryptic encrustations of--
C H I V A L R Y.
Gawain dreams--on and on--
As his woods fill up with snow.
E D G E S 5
Hard-edged angles
Chisled out of precious metals
Micrometrically accurate
To one-thousandth of an inch
Fly about the sculptor’s studio
As he chips away at
His innards, heart and mind,
To form out of precisely hewn rock--
Statues of fire.
Or so
He would have it.
F I R E N Z E 6
A distinguished and elderly English gentleman
Matted down in rust-colored, nappy tweeds
Wended his way
Through labyrinthian alleys
Pensive and lost--
A tourist abroad, like myself.
He came upon
An intricately wrought iron gate
That opened into a courtyard.
Cautiously, I watched him
Step inside--
And there
Rising around him
Hung terraced gardens
Of secreted apartments
Each inhabited
By luxuriantly accented voices:
“BUON GIORNO, SIGNOR!”
He felt at home;
Would I ?
D A Y 7
Let us wake
Let us not lie abed.
The sun breaks to us now
If we will but wake.
Let us rise now
And go forth and fill ourselves
With the joys of this new day.
Let us walk and stretch
Let the light brush the sleep
From our eyes.
Let us live this infant morning
As if it were our first--and our last.
DAY--dawns to us, now!
DEATH IN THE O.R. 8
Strapped
to a hard, cold table
Covered
by a thin, green sheet
I lie naked
Staring up at lights
Listening to the click
Of instruments, cold and clean,
Ready to rip
My inner-body
Cut-and-clip
Broken parts
From my damaged flesh--
AGAIN.
Tubes and needles
Invade my veins as
Dripping drugs of M E R C Y
Close my eyes to
Buzzing silver-sounds where
Lights elide quickly
Rushing into dark.
And consciousness ebbs
As a bulb on a dimmer switch--
Fades to black.
SHALL I COME BACK?
D R A G O N F L Y 9
Circling P again
Diving-Down U
Soaring
Skimming the surface of a pond or pool
With cellophane-see-through wings
Whirling
Churning
Buzzing in blurred circles--
She flies hypodermically hunting for
Pink rosy flesh :
What daring airy ability to my earth-bound life--
This oversized fly (a caterpillar
canterlevered outward
not any dragon, then or now)
Hovers, hanging over water
Endlessly whirring on whorling turnings--
Stops, starts, startling those nearby
With threats of poisoned stings from
Nosey protruding needles.
“Thou art unseen,
Yet I hear thy shrill delight.”
10
E = M C²
The mathemetician ponders
R E L A T I V I T Y:
“Formulated abstractions
Attempt to reduce to fractions
Secrets locked in equations
Extrapolated from obfuscation
The ‘laws of nature’ for interpretation.
That ENERGY can be measured
By simply multiplying the MASS
Of the object-in-motion
By the SPEED OF LIGHT squared
Is a relatively valuable idea
For one interested in such things--
And I am.”
MR. GUPPY 11
A blanched fish-faced man
Of guppy eyes and guppy mouth
With a wisping lock lingering
Next to his smoothed forehead.
Speaks, always in arrears,
Venturing forth indirections
To find directions out.
An oily eel insinuating sinuously
Into the affairs of others
Vaulted above his grovelling station.
Yet a man of genuinely ingenuine
Sentiments; or so he would
Have people think.
Misunderstood,
Mistreated and
Misbegotten--
Dickens only knows.
J O U R N E Y 12
Sheets of ice
Collide and crash
Within my brain
And I cry out in
Silent seething pain.
Until the beam has bent
And broken
Into dreams
And winds relent
resume
subside once more
And the warmth
Returns to
Linger long.
S O U P 13
POST-OPERATIVE CONSIDERATIONS:
Primordial puss oozes and organizes
Inside scraped-out stomach hole
Behind abdominal walls that realize
Into newly-forming flesh unfolding.
Biological lava-like fluids of blood
And gristle and thread and goop of nerves
Knit themselves together in red-hot cud
Flowing in magma-motioned speeding curves
Around a lining alive with burning fire--
Screaming pain in my rising ire.
A new body-part is being born
In muscled, scar-tissued soup
Growing daily, deep and dark
Around my intestines--
As in and out it loops--
For now.
M O T O R C Y C L E C O P 14
Growling, growing thunder reverberates in the
Air around me
As a black leather-jacketed
Ivory-helmeted lone ranger of the law
Curves and careens in my rear-view mirror--
And I decelerate accordingly--
Faster approaching, gaining on me steadily
Until he pulls up, alongside, then passes
To my relief, leaving his rear
RED, BLUE and AMBER lights
Pulsating in speeding distance
Ahead and away
From my beating heart and anxious brain.
Who WAS that masked man?
And on what mighty horse-powered steed
Does he ride and rove and speed?
This lawless LAW, no less
Tied to the ground by a zooming machine--
Mustachioed, truly blessed--
And mean.
e. e. 15
what of a much of a which of a
MAN could lift your heart times-two
and sprinkle everywhere with
Spring-time balloons and yes and true?
un-til did you(and me and she and we)
would be-leaving him and his
games up mixed letters squriming with
(all ways re-ever-turning
to i plus you
is us in-love)
now
here then
there
everywhere
evermore?
What say you--
In plain English--
mr. c?
M O R P H I N E D R I P 16
“Hypodermic needles out ;
Nurses freed.”
He pushes the clip
to hear the blip:
then
waits for the drip
begin
to
rip...
He feels no pain
for the gain
Of masks made
for blocking brains
In drowsing drifts.
His heaving heart struggles
to be sane
And gasping lungs bend
to distraction
Before dripping drugs start
their coping
actions.
NOW, he sleeps--in peace.
Y E L L O W M O N S T E R S 17
Pre-eminent domain dominates the landscape
As growling, grinding yellow monsters
Cut into living earth
Squelching its soggy skin
Squealing as its flesh is ripped
AWAY--in chunks and cast aside.
While next to a newly sliced swath
Of muddy soil stands a pool of water
Reflecting sky above with
Mottled clouds blown by.
There’s always WYOMING !
-end PART I-
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