COLLECTED POEMS: 1961-2000

 

 

 

RICHARD DENNER

 

 

 

 

All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2001  Richard Denner

 

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Published by Comrades

For information, please contact:

Comrades Press
23 George Street
Stockton, Southam
Warwickshire, England
CV47 8JS
Website: www.comrades.org.uk
email: editor@comrades.org.uk

 

 

Quotation from Kora In Hell © by William Carlos Williams,

reprinted with permission of City Lights Books.

 

“D Press: Jewel in the Net”

originally published in The Temple #16

Tsunami, Inc., 2000

 

Front cover collage: Kim Secunda

Back cover photo: Jessica Framer

Linoleum block prints by the author

 

ISBN: 0-7388-6318-1

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

 

for my mother, Helen

and in memory of my father

Samuel Denner

1900-1998

 

 

 

Here’s splotchy velvet set to hide a door

in a wall and therethere’s the man himself

praying.

 

 

 

Table of Contents

                              Foreword 

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

 

 

Berkeley, Aptos & San Luis Obispo: 1961-1968

Letter to Sito in Time of War

ABCs

Poem on My Birthday

Commitment

Tabula Rasa

Poem on My Return

Captain of Poetry

Song

Patterns

Tale

A Book Entitled

Vision

Spaced

Yes

My Poems

Elizabeth Says

Calculated Lion

Cogito Ergo Shazam

A Bramavits Sits on the Head of a Neo-classicist

Split Pe-rsonality Soup

Ode to Graham Crackers

27½ Before 3

Taxman

Line Drive

Augustus Turns in His Tomb

Sermon on the Mound

Flower Poem

Putting Down Roots

Oakland Should Be

Langtree

Tantrik Tune-up

Detail

Scorpio, Scorpio Rising

Happy Climes

All The Heads of the Town Lit Up

 

Ketchikan & Deep Bay: 1968-1970

Feather

Evidence

Poems

Woodnotes

 

Fairbanks & Preston: 1970-1974

The Beast

Poloot

Big Foot

Islam Bomb

Headwater

Truckin’ the Alkan

Dirt

On the Beach

Seascape

Atman

Sea Change

Steppin’ Out

Printer’s Devil

Hell/Life

Funk of the F Word

 

Ellensburg: 1974-1995

Traveler’s Blues

Scat Song

Get Down

Burger Productions

In Advance of Beatitude

Gold Leaf

Chilling Out with The Eclogues

Relax

At Iambic Feet

Diamond Hanging J Floating I

Variables of Existing Choices

Cattle Are Just an Excuse for Shooting Coyotes

Canis Latrans

Om Om on the Range

Critics Aren’t Agreed

Right Livelihood

Notes on the Back of a Feed Bill

Washington Swine Seminar

Green Pastures

Duke’s Mix in Winter

Living Well

Evolved and Eclipsed

Ecological Hazard

Beeper

Learning New Words

Tortureland

Calf Graft

Now Is Like That

A Tumbleweed Carries It’s Shadow Tucked Within

New Gravity                                                    

Transformation

Convalescent Conversation

Robbers’ Roost

Ordinary Adventures

Leaps and Bounds

Andy the Mechanic

Ancestors

Flake on Flake

Now There Then

Am I Repressed

Rodeo of the Equinox

It’s a Mess

After the Volcano

Old Growth

Slash

Synthesis

What Are You Up To?

All Mimsy Were the Borogoves

A Hill Called Bringer of Luck

Night Deluge

By the Numbers

Love’s Way

Chances

Hermit and Trout

As Above, So Below

Secret Spots

We Love Each Other

Ordinance

By Dint

Beryl

Red Light, Blue Light

Beryl on the Rocks

Erewon

Winter Forest

Slowly

Curve of Wind

Angel

Birthday

Nature Has No Memory

Sure Sign

Astray

Heart, How Close You Are

Interior Rose

Box

Elemental

Gifts

Maid of Mist

Vista

Dark Order

Soul Light

In First Light

Waterdownstone

Green Feeling

Afternoon Feeling

Dandelion Wishes

All Ways

Fourwinds

So

Moonrider

Cookin’

Everything

Two Roses

Two Friends

Walking

Do I Hear Trumpets?

March of Reds

Silent Language

Real

Strained Sunrise

Eyes That Cry

You Gave Me a Ring

At the Blackhawk

Driving Along

F You C K

Up Before Four

Space Out

Dream

Clouds

Light on Light

Shifted

Insured

Below the Rad Lab

Home

Ok

 

Pagosa Springs: 1994-1997

Too Many Horses, Not Enough Saddles

Right to the Point

Clear

What Where Is Here

Method in My Madness

Post-Dogmatist Puddle

Painting Clouds

Once

Transition

Africa

Whatever It Takes

Samsara and Nirvana

Furniture Poem

Shrine for Jimi Hendrix

Deja Voodoo

Too Little Too Late

Warm Light

Our Natural View

Turn Beauty Turn

Party Down, Anasazi

 

Santa Rosa & Sebastopol: 1998-2000

Pebbles

On This Side of the Pass

Beating Against the Rock                                                         

Takes on a Blue Set                                                          

Head Start

Eco Biz                                                           

Sky Line

Painpoint

Intrusions

Moving Finger

Come onto Dry Land                                       

Stake Out

Cold Fountains                                                

Blue Notes

Poetics

Tara

Endangered

Follow the Instructions

Heavy Artillery

Once I’m up to Speed on Quark

Flatline

Man-eater

Back to the Real World

Morning

Noon

And Night                                                                                                                   

Dark Matter

And the Tree of Life Also

Five Abstracts Inspired by Mark Rothko

Vacuumgenesis

Telecosmos

Nutcracker

Cutting a Swath

More Light

Picture from Williams

At East West Café

Diminishing Options

Fresh Flavor

Compassion

Cowboy

Angels

Duet at Sunset

Que Petite Sirah, Sirah

Constructive Rest

Xitro

Singing to the Cows

Singin’ Dixie

Rising from the River

Omni-spatial Matrix

Mandala

I Voted for Ike When I Was Eight

History on Her Hands and Knees

11:55 a.m. on This Planet

Turning and Mirroring

Full Moon

Music of Her Face

Yes, Repeat, No

Across No Divides

Song at Midnight

Eye Roving Over Blue Hills

Trace-tones and After-dots

Approachable But Out of Reach

When My Work Is Done I’ll

Look for the Seven-headed Beast

Heart’s Love & Yearning Misery

Flying White

Luminous Form

At the Center Is Fire

Fully Awake in Your Look

Found Poem

Tapestry

The 12:02

Bear Dance

Following Salvador Dali

Excruciating Beauty

Dicey

Lovers Lain

Coyote Meets Bodhidharma

Israel 33½

Buddha’s Last Words

Bunkhouse at 6 a.m.

Cold Out There

Fable

Clotho, Lachesis & Atropos

Pleides

A Way She Walks

So Sudden

A Lovers Are

Another Day

Wipe Out

Keep Moving

Nestled in the Rose in the Meadow of Midnight

Instructions to My Apprentice

So High You Kissed the Sky

Minaret

Mother Muse

Calendar of the Moon

No O Zone

Time Space Language

Being Just As We Are

Just As It Is

Spit in the Ocean

Pasta Is Fasta Ordered By Phone

Encounter

A Leaf Ready to Fall

For Breakfast

Fragments

Freight

Believe Me, Laura

Timberline

Green Fire

Heart’s Timber

Stubborn Lumber

Where On the Paper Chain Are You?

Planting the Blast

On to the Next Unit

Whip or Will

Vacuum Plus

Flash an Ogham

Five Is the Key

Cold Mountain

Suspicious

Go Song

Zero Tolerance

Napoleon Without a Bone

Irresolute

Open on All Levels

Automorph

Calendar Art

Do or Dot

There There

The Wart Cannot Be Coerced

Space Control

Way Through

Crazy As Possible

Stress in the Field

B Is for Reflection

Interchange of Tinctures

Why2K

Adventures of Psyche on The Astral Plane

How to Proceed

Things Change Yet Are One

President Buchanan Slept Here

Your Bones Know You Can

Calculus

Just When Phoebe Decided Life Held No More Interest

Rules

Space & Longing & a Few Flashes of Light

Sunshine within Sunlight

Flowers Inside the Present

Mutiny Is Fate

Galatic Addressing Code

Give Me Fag Vomit

O, the Hells Ring Out

Trains That Could

Apocyyylove

War Saw

Weapons of Mass Destruction

No Visible Means of Support

General MacThuselah

Terror Angel

Errata

Worn to A Phrasl

Flashburn

Ideogram

The Color White

Geraniums

Gwen

Percy

I Know a Place

Weary Elves

Maddening

Forest Perilous

Billy Meets the Canyon Spirit

Boogie Knight

Maybe a Maiden

Not Anything Real

Merlin Creeping About

Stars and Time

Hear Them Buzzz

Risking the Boundary

Persephone’s Mirror

Hermes on His Rounds

Holographic Paradigm

Phantom’s of the Fayum

Numbed by the Rays

He Who Lists to Hunt

Nectar

Late Knight on the Golden Gate

Perfect

For Jennifer

Seeing Angels with the Inner Eye

In Ketchikan

Marilyn Manson on the Rag

This Script Has a Butt Shot

Sunflower Kitchen

Of Suns and Worlds

High Pressure Center

Box of Nerves

At Every Level of Montezuma’s Consciousness

Love’s Garden

Visionary Designs

At the Game Reserve

Joy in All the Little Things

Wavetwisters

I Am Virgin to My Poem

Soul of the Anti-poet

My Escape Forward

I Know Nothing

Page of Wands

What Is Mind?

Night of Mystic Rain

Magician’s Apprentice

Flowing

All This Inside Me

Vision Quest: So Many Rainbows

Samsara Is an Airport Surrounded by a Delayed Flight

Hookeena Village

Aloha Means Don’t Crash on the Rocks

At Mahukona Beach Park

Wind Blows East, Then West

Pointless Poem about the Existence of Non-existence

Story My Mother Tells

Cord Cutting

Refuge

Juxt Pose

Postcard from the State of Disaster

Sit Like a Mountain

Lost in Tongass Forest

Nima’s First Sweat

Mother of All Sweats

Poised

November Mist

Discovery

Dream

Along the Cutbank

New Forms

Dharma Talk

Building a Fire for the Medicine Man

Eurydice Awaits Orpheus in Hell

Installation

Friends

 

 

 

FOREWARD

 

At Comrades Press, we have a vision—this book is part of that vision.

 

Comrades Press was founded in 2000 as a direct result of its on line magazine. The amount and the quality of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that we received was staggering, much of it from previously unpublished writers. We decided to rectify this by becoming publishers ourselves and, with no funding whatsoever, set about the task of bringing the work of the misplaced poets of the world to the world. The first step in this rather grand and impossible plan (the higher the goals, the higher you can climb) was to be the publication of the first of our yearly anthologies. However, the possibility of publishing the work of Richard Denner arose, and a race began to see which book we would publish first. As both the horses were in the Comrades stable, the race was a foregone conclusion, and I am proud to say that you are holding the winner in your hands right now.

 

By utilizing print on demand technology and on line stores, we are able to produce quality books without many of the overhead costs associated with traditional methods. This means that we are prepared to take risks that would probably have other publishers waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Rather than publishing what we know will sell, our goal is to publish work that we like, work that we believe in, which should be the only reason for anybody to publish anything. Comrades Press works on a non-profit basis. If we make any money from our publications, it sits in the bank account just long enough for us to make the red numbers a little smaller before it is channeled straight into our next publication.

 

This also allows us to produce short-run chapbooks from brand new authors whose work grabs you by the throat and demands to be read or picks away at the back of your brain until there is no choice but to go for it.

 

If this all sounds like a good idea to you, then please do visit our web site at www.comrade.org.uk where you will find details of our other upcoming publications.

 

Verian Thomas

Editor - Comrades

 

 

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

 

The muse is not necessarily embodied in a single person. My first contact with this spirit of inspiration was Juanita Miller, the daughter of the flamboyant, 19th century California poet, Joaquin Miller. She lived in a vine-covered castle among her father’s monuments to Moses, John Frémont, and the Brownings, nestled in the Oakland hills, in what is now Joaquin Miller Park. In our neighborhood, she was unusual. On a foggy Halloween night, some friends and I spotted her in a white nightgown walking barefoot through the eucalyptus. We were sure her house was haunted and dared not go to her doorstep to trick or treat. She rode with my family to church on Sunday, and on one occasion she signed a copy of a collection of her father’s poems and presented it to my mother. I revered this book. I would open it and gently touch her signature. It amazed me that we knew someone who was associated with the arts. 

 

I memorized a poem from Miller’s book, a poem to Lily Langtree, a popular singer of his day. I recited this poem in the 4th grade, and the next year in Mr. Shriner’s 5th grade class, when asked to memorize a poem, I recited the same poem to fulfill the assignment, and the class jeered me, saying they had heard this poem before. A red-headed girl came to my defense and said she still thought the poem beautiful.  A muse can be old or young, peaceful, joyful or wrathful, and sometimes they are teachers. In the 6th grade, Mrs. Latimore whacked the back of my hand with a yardstick for passing a scatological note when I was supposed to be diagramming sentences.  Professor Traugot reprimanded me in front of a freshman comp class at Cal for plagiarizing Alfred Kazan’s essay on Blake, and Professor Parkinson proclaimed my essay, “My Home,” the worst thing he had ever read. I may be forever re-writing “My Home,” but I have learned to disguise my sources with more craft.

 

Kenneth Rexroth was the first poet I heard read. Ernest Blank opened my eyes to hidden beauty in poetry by explicating Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” Mike Sneed critiqued my first poem, a parody of Poe’s “The Raven,” and he pointed out that poems are not Freudian soap-operas. While guarding the balcony of the Campanile on the U.C. campus, Don Bratman taught me how to scan a poem’s lines. Dennis Wier fired my interest in printing by showing me how to burn plates with a light bulb in an orange crate in his closet. Vic Jowers promoted my first chapbook at the Sticky Wicket near Aptos. Up to this point, I was dabbling, but I was primed for allegiance to this art when the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference was announced. My English teacher said he knew Robert Creeley and that I would learn more in one day at this conference than I would in a whole year at Cal Poly, so I  turned in my journal, accepted a C for the semester, and thumbed my way back to Berkeley.

 

A major turning point—an injection of rocket fuel. I want to thank Gary Snyder for telling me Berkeley didn’t need another bookstore and to take the nuts and bolts of what I had learned and move to the hinterlands where I was needed.  Thanks to Allen Ginsberg for revealing that I could be both a good poet and a good businessman. “Just be good,” he said, and I took the meaning of this to apply to both esthetics and ethics. As a bookseller, I always tried to find the right book for the right person at the right time. As a poet, well, you really can’t be called a poet unless your poems survive a couple hundred years. Thanks to Charles Olson for showing me the meaning of epic scale. It was a mind transmission watching him bebop through the universe fusing Gilgamesh and quantum mechanics. To Robert Creeley, who laid down two laws: William Carlos Williams’s No ideas but in things and Ezra Pound’s Make it new! To Jack Spicer, who admonished, “Poet, Be Like God,” and to Robert Duncan for pointing out I could write with or against the sun. To Kirby Doyle for showing me that we are all connected; we just need to hold hands. To Ed Dorn for including me among The New Poets. To Max Scheer for making me The Poet of the Berkeley Barb. To Richard Kretch for inviting me to read at Shakespeare & Co. and publishing my early poems in avalanche. To Wesley Tanner for teaching me to thump type. To Philip Whalen for his blessing. To Moe Macowitz for my initiation into bookselling. To Jon Springer for giving me shelter in New York. To Luis Garcia for giving me his tattered thesis binder, so I could organize my poems. To Belle Randall, Gail Chiarello, Marianne Baskin, Kate Coleman, David Cole, Jim Whelage, Patrick Gord, William Boardman, Don and Alice Schenker, Carry McWilliams, Patricia Turrigiano, Price Charlston, Grant Risdon, Bob Allen, and Cheri Bader for their encouragment. To John and Karen Bader for their patronage. To John Oliver Simon for building an anthology, City of Buds and Flowers, around a few of my poems. I flitted through Charles Pott’s Valga Krusa. I became a Berkeley Street Poet and a Poet of Peace and Gladness.

 

Many of the names above are famous, and I do not mean to imply I have been on intimate terms with all of them, but it was during these days many lifelong friendships started, and all of these people have in one way or another been instrumental in my development as a poet. Luis Garcia, my closest friend and collaborator, has been my greatest mentor, always present with insights and humorous twists of perspective. I met Lu right after the Berkeley Poetry Conference, and we continued meeting with other poets for weeks to come. Lu’s style of writing is unique—playing with the words within the words, he directed me to meditate on the morning light and helped me understand that it was important to discover my own voice, to forge a blade, as he put it. Lu’s poems sizzle. They move so fast, if you aren’t ready, you miss them. By imitating Lu’s use of jazz rhythms and breath notation, I began to read my poems aloud. Just like Leadbelly learned to play the 12-string, I learned my craft by putting my spine against the piano.

 

The choice of poems here is mine. Mainly, I have arranged them in chronological order, except where they seem better situated in the thematic contexts of later D Press chapbooks. I usually self-publish my writing, developing the arts of collage and printing along side the poetry. The printing of my poems is a way of editing my work, bringing what I say into better focus. Some of my poems appear in more than one book and in more than one version. It has never been my intent that any of them be the final version; I am not writing the poeme supreme. Words and phrases, which have bothered me after reading them for years, have here been changed or dropped. Due to format limitations, I have included only a selection of the early poemebooks with linoleum block illustrations. The cyberbooks, Wavetwisters and Another Artaud, are absent from this collection because they require elaborate typography and photographs to be fully appreciated.

 

Many events have affected my view. Many collaborations have enriched my life. I am especially grateful to my family and the many friends of my life. Also, thanks to my publisher, Verian Thomas. My poetry is my experience. This is my secret autobiography.

 

Richard Denner

 

Santa Rosa

December 4, 2000

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

Some of the poems and art have appeared in these journals and anthologies:

Tangents, Cabrillo College, Aptos, 1962

Breastbeaters, Berkeley Pamphlets, Berkeley, 1963.

Poly Syllables, California State Polytechnic College, San Luis Obispo, 1965.

America Sings, National Poetry Press, Los Angeles, 1965.

Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley, 1965-1967.

avalanche, undermine press, Berkeley, 1966.

Polar Star Art-Lit Supplement, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 1970-1972.

Vagabond Anthology, Vagabond Press, Ellensburg, 1976.  

City of Buds & Flowers, Alderaran Review, Berkeley, 1977.

Heart in Utter Confusion, The Dog Ear Press, Hulls Cove, 1980.

Ellensburg Anthology, Ellensburg Arts Commission & D Press, 1980-1987.

Crab Creek Review, Crab Creek Review Association, Ephrata, 1983.

Catalyst, Laocoön Books, Seattle, 1988.

The Temple, Tsunami Inc., Walla Walla, 1997-2000

Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry, Tsunami Inc., Walla Walla, 1998.

Blue Collar Review, Partisan Press, Norfolk, 2000.

The 2River View, Daeman College, Amherst, 2000.

Waterways, Ten Penny Players Inc., Staten Island, 2000.

The Louisiana Review, Louisiana State University, Eunice, 2001.

Butcher Block, Butcher Shop Press, Oneonta, 2001.

 

Published at these sites on the worldwideweb:

Comrades, www.comrades.org.uk

The Physik Garden, www.physikgarden.com

Poetry Tonight, www.poetrytonight.com

The Place Around The Corner, www.1freespace.com/art/olgasearch

dIVE, www.pages.prodigy.net/yog-sothoth

The Junkyard, www.thejunkyard.org

The Half-drunk Muse, www.geocities.com/owatagal

Central California Journal of Poetry, www.solopublications.com

Seeker Magazine (The Gryphon’s Nest), www.seekermagazine.com

Dream Forge, www.pcisys.net

Niederngasse, www.neiederngass.com

NuFoto, www.nufoto.com

Bardo Burner, www.dedcenter.com/bardoburner

Absinith Literary Review, www.absinthe-literary-review.com

Aluminum Baby, www.safesurfer.co.uk/rdenner

In Posse, www.webdelsol.com/InPosse

Fresh Poetry, www.freshpoetry.com

Electric Acorn, www.acorn.dublinwriters.org

State of unBeing, www.apoculpro.org/SoB

Poetry Downunder, www.aceonline.com

Adirondack Review, www.suite101.com/myhome.cfm

Poetry Super Highway, www.poetrysuperhighway.com

Cool Bird Poems, www.usd.edu/~tgannon/bird.html

Poems About Poetry, www.homepages.tesco.net/~magdtp

Eclectica Magazine, www.eclectica.org

Bluff Magazine, www.bluffmag.com

2River, www.daemen.edu/~2River

Story Bytes, www.thor.he.nte/~stories

Moria, www.moriapoetry.com.

Dark Planet, www.sfsite.com/darkplanet

zygzag, www.zygzag.com/pages/ZZhome.html

Melic Review, www.melicreview.com

Samsara, www.sundress.net/samsara     

 

This volume collects the work published by D Press over a period of 33 years.

Poems & Blocks, Ketchikan, 1968.

The Eye of the Vitamin, Ketchikan, 1968.

Denner Recipes, Ketchikan, 1968

Poems, Ketchikan, 1968.

Crankshaft, Ketchikan, 1968.

Untitled Poembooks, Deep Bay, 1969-1970

Chainclankers, Deep Bay, 1970.

Head Soup, Fairbanks, 1972.

The Scorpion, (at Arif Press) Berkeley, 1975.

New Gravity, Ellensburg, 1980.

Flake on Flake, Ellensburg, 1981.

Said Just So, Ellensburg, 1982.

Flower Poem, Ellensburg, 1985.

Night Deluge, Ellensburg, 1986.

Blue Agate, Ellensburg, 1988.

Blood Dust (with Luis Garcia), Ellensburg, 1988.

Slowly, Ellensburg, 1989.

Dark Order, Ellensburg, 1989.

Curve of Wind, Ellensburg, 1989.

Interior Rose, Ellensburg, 1990.

This Mississippi Miss, Ellensburg, 1991.

Moonrider, Ellensburg, 1992.

With Loss of Eden, Ellensburg, 1992.

Soul Light, Ellensburg, 1992.

Vista, Ellensburg, 1993.

Maid of Mist, Ellensburg, 1993.

Two Roses, Ellensburg, 1993.

Crossover, Ellensburg, 1993.

Waterdownstone, Ellensburg, 1993.

The Blank Flower, Ellensburg, 1994.

Too Many Horses, Not Enough Horses, Ellensburg, 1994.

Risking the Boundary, Ellensburg, 1995.

Blue Light, Ellensburg, 1995.

Sambhogakaya Cowboy, Pagosa Springs, 1996.

Turn Beauty Turn, Pagosa Springs, 1997.

One In a Jillian, Pagosa Springs, 1997.

Party Down, Anasazi, Pagosa Springs, 1997.

Talking Trash, Santa Rosa, 1998.

Wide As the World, Sebastopol, 1998.

Constructive Rest, Sebastopol, 1998.

First Flower, Sebastopol, 1998.

Xitro, Sebastopol, 1998.

Letter To Sito In Time of War, Sebastopol, 1998.

Chain Clankers & Linoleum Nudes, Sebastopol, 1998.

New Gravity: A Collection, Sebastopol, 1998.

Islam Bomb, Sebastopol, 1998.

Tack Shack, Sebastopol, 1998.

On Borgo Pass, Sebastopol, 1998.

Hollow Air, Sebastopol, 1999.

Cow Songs, Sebastopol, 1999.

The Spot, Sebastopol, 1999.

Flying White, Sebastopol, 1999.

Bear Dance, Sebastopol, 1999.

Green Fire, Sebastopol, 1999.

Second Boiling, Sebastopol, 1999.

Imaginary Toads, Sebastopol, 1999.

Aluminum Baby, Vol. 1, No. 1, Sebastopol, 2000.

Aluminum Baby, Vol. 1, No. 2, Sebastopol, 2000.

Ice Moon, Sebastopol, 2000.

A Double Play (with Luis Garcia), Sebastopol, 2000.

Wavetwisters, Sebastopol, 2000.

Another Artaud, Sebastopol, 2000.

Poems of the Four Times, Sebastopol, 2000.

Windfall, Sebastopol, 2000.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

D Press: A Jewel In The Net

     

Like Indra’s all-encompassing jewel net, D Press sparkles and shines with an offering of well-crafted chapbooks that reflect more than forty years of publisher Richard Denner’s handiwork with words, ink, paper and illustration.  Available works are always new as the idea of keeping press runs short allows for a quick turnover, a low cost or break even per book, more time for fresh material and other writers to make it into print.  Present titles include Angio Gram by Charles Potts, Celestial Cattlecall by Lee Harris, Rebel Girls by Leila Castle, What Is The Sign? by Gay Shelton and A Year in Cows by Jane Booth.  Belle Randall (Wax Museum) and Luis Garcia (Even Steven) have been performing with Richard for years under the group name Circle of Friends and are kindred spirits.

 

Although conceived in a Ketchikan attic flat in l967, the roots of D Press go back to the Bay Area of 1959. Richard took classes at UC Berkeley (Diane Wakoski was there) and perhaps unconsciously received the metaphysical mantle of alumnus poet Robert Duncan. Soon, Richard found himself reporting for Public Service Station KPFA, getting married and working as a bindery clerk. He became acquainted with every facet of printing: the feel and look of paper, the color and smell of ink, typesetting and the uses of different typeface, the feeding and rolling of presses, the cutting and stitching of recto and verso. After a move to Aptos for more classes at Cabrillo College, Richard became a regular at The Sticky Wicket, a coffee house with poetry  readings and live jazz. Many ordeals and a few years later, he attended the seminal 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, what John Bennett has called, “an event creating white light intensity that rivaled any drug high and had more staying power.”

 

This convergence of the Black Mountain, Berkeley Renaissance, Beat and Northwest Schools gave Richard the pivotal opportunity to study under such avant-garde poets as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Spicer. Later he would study with Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Denise Levertov and Carolyn Kiser at Fort Worden Center for the Arts in Port Townsend, Washington. But it was Jack Spicer’s molding of series poetry into little books that had the most singular effect.

 

In 1965 Richard became a staffer on one of the original underground newspapers, the Berkeley Barb and wrote his first article, Where Is The Citizen?, which according to publisher Len Fulton (Dust Books) put the coffin nails in this floundering Berkeley co-op paper which he co-directed. Besides printing his poems in The Barb, Richard became a street poet who gave impromptu solo and regular group readings with others such as Luis Garcia, Richard Brautigan, Richard Kretch, John Oliver Simon, and Gene Fowler. “I would hold five different colored magic markers,” Richard said, “and write rainbow words on girls’ legs and arms.” Poems from these embryonic years appear in his Letter to Sito in Time of War (D Press 1998).

 

Here I am reminded of Cummings or Snyder, words in vertical order as if they had fallen off a pen, images juxtaposed with ideas to steer and grip the eye rather than rhyme scheme, line length and academic filler. we find/ourselves/in a new/world/speaking/an old/language//we speak//of beauty/and feelings/while the/machines/blast/the birds/ from our/hearts//watch/the words/ hear/the howl/come/to the ear/eye/nose/lip//scream/at the/dichotomy/of the/comma—/a dream/an illusion/how time/passes//dinosaurs/dance off/the map/where you/and I sit/drinking/coffee//we hold/down/this loose/end/of the/universe/feeling/at home/in the/smoke.  Great one breath rhythm here, vowels echo and consonants resonate while war and apathy are clearly addressed. An economy of words, words used like paint or graffiti, well-woven words that challenge and explode with intensity and insight, simple poems not only of use but of beauty and all connected by a central motif—these would become Denner trademarks.  Luis Garcia aptly alludes to them as “dinner” in the title of his book, Poems for Dinner (Summit Road Press 1997).

                                                                                                                            

According to Karl Shapiro, a rational person is least able to understand poetry, and the poet must find inspiration and pry truth from hard won experiences. At The Barb, Richard was suffering from rationalitus with acute ennui and hot flashes of Armageddon. So he took off for Alaska, in search of lost horizons, to find his true self (and what is reality?) through a series of pristine cognitions. He worked as a water-chaser, unsetting choke and bundling logs for a logging outfit. For two years Richard lived with wife and child in a  cabin at Deep Bay off berries, hunting and fishing. Back in civilization, he got a job on the Ketchikan Daily News and worked at a cold storage plant. Tackshack (D Press 1998) is full of such experiences: the Tongass National Forest, glacier deposits, bears, dead salmon, king crab, soil samples, and The Beast (Richard’s Alaskan Pipeline poem which pits industrial horrors against natural habitat and spells indigenous doom).

 

The first D Press chapbooks were simple affairs, printed from a Kelsey movable type handpress and 60 point Boldini Bold, all acquired for fifty bucks. The pages were hand cut, hung to dry in Richard’s attic flat and hand bound, yet showed brilliant illustrations (Aztec Design by Grant Risdon). Good paper, fine cover art with linoleum block prints to accentuate the poems, a balance of art and word, these Dennerisms would become D Press trademarks.  An old picture of Richard adorns one cover: he appears much like young Trotsky in Siberia with wire-rimmed glasses, mustache, student garb and a pensive gaze...he had reason for concern.

 

Up the Alkan Highway, Richard traveled to  the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. He worked in the backshop of the student newspaper and graduated in 1972 with degrees in English and Philosophy. D Press was admitted to the campus library but banned from the UA student bookstore.  Perhaps it was the explicit prints in Linoleum Nudes or graphic poems, such as ‘Musky/Hump/in US/for 69.’ Whatever, feathers flew, and the UA Polar Star (which later printed Richard’s works) put out the story, ‘Books Raise Censorship Question.’ Professors came to his defense; Richard’s chapbooks were found to have literary and artistic merit; and D Press was back on the shelf. It would be easy to dismiss this book ban as provincial fuss, however the ground D Press broke in Fairbanks mirrors the breakthroughs of alternative publishers such as Grove Press and City Lights in the lower 48 states.

 

Next stop Seattle, where Richard took a job with the Queen Anne News and studied at Port Townsend. Islam Bomb (D Press 1998) presents some of Richard’s first post-modernist poem experiments during these years (1972-74). Here there is an expansion of line and poem length as well as consciousness expanding East meets West terminology. Much like Eliot, Richard combines his fragments into a unified whole, and does not leave one in a forest of foreign text (like Pound) or babble (like Joyce). Using even romanized Sanskrit and Tibetan is high risk business, yet Richard explains his diction and uses it as part of a tapestry whose weave is encyclopedic in scope.  In point, his four page poem on the once unprintable F word reminds me much of Robert Grave’s exhaustive piece Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing.

 

From Seattle, Richard went to Ellensberg to oversee a 300 head cattle ranch in Badger Pocket for several years. Between stints in Alaska, he worked at Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley, so perhaps it was deja vu that he opened the Fourwinds bookstore in Ellensberg (1977). This literary nucleus was enlarged to include a restaurant by Richard’s son, Theo, who continues to operate it today. It was here that Richard received a Washington State Arts grant to produce Ellensberg Anthology which featured and promoted local writers. The list of Denner influences East of the Mountains seems endless: more anthologies, readings and poetry workshops at his bookstore, formation of a city arts & crafts festival, exhibition of his books and printing techniques at Kittitas County Art Gallery, a three-day poetry workshop for the Washington Poets Association, and video production for Ellensburg Public Television.

                                                                                               

D Press books began to resonate with new organic imagery in his Cow Songs and New Gravity. In ‘Diamond Hanging I Blues’ the lines are simple and effective, I mend the fences./I tend the herd./...The shit is ten feet deep/and I can’t eat or sleep/coyotes yap all night/below the blown moon. A number of D Press books can be considered pivotal in the evolution of Richard’s poetic style, psychic metamorphosis and creative adaptability.  The Scorpion (1975) combines all of Richard’s loves: astrology and tarot, philosophy, Tantra, Latin (‘Cogito Ergo Shazam’) and the fine art of printing, which Richard learned thumping type for Wesley Tanner at Arif Press.

 

Xitro pays tribute to Richard’s spiritual quest, his teachers, Ginsberg and Tsultrim Allione, a vast range of philosophical studies and Tibetan Buddhist practice. When I read On Borgo Pass (1998), the line drawings mixed with poetry take me back to the novel water colors of Henry Miller and the wild pictopoems of Kenneth Patchen,  apocalypse now/a pair of lips now, or words of my perfect T-shirt/Don’t Worry/Be Hopi.

 

For fifteen years Richard annually planted trees, giving back to the earth and getting in touch.  Now, he plants seeds by teaching at a school run on the Steiner Method and also online in poetry chat rooms. When I was asked to write this essay on D Press and 40 years of Richard Denner, I was told there were about 100 chapbooks, and I thought, pull the other leg. James Tate is called prolific because he published some twelve books of poetry in six years.  Richard is more likely to publish six books in one year along with a bevy of other poets. James Laughlin (New Directions) published William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound for years at his own expense when they were not selling. He did not want them to end up like Blake, being generally unread in their own lifetime. In the same sense, D Press allows greater access to a variety of poets whose vitality is assured by limited editions of selected work.

           

As I opened a 20 pound box mailed from Santa Rosa, chapbooks flooded my table, and I wondered how I could begin to encompass such a literary sea (and most of Richard’s work is out of print). Seamus Heany’s old headmaster used to look over his writing and sigh, “Ah, pure Hopkins” or “Ah, pure Chekov.” My eyes swim through this tidal wave of excellence, collage covers which steal my breath, Leonardo illustrations, such brillig poems, and I can only whisper in awe, “Ah, pure Denner.”

 

Lee Harris

Seattle

 

 

 

 

 

BERKELEY, APTOS & SAN LUIS OBISPO 1961-1968

 

 

 

LETTER TO SITO IN TIME OF WAR

 

we find

ourselves

in a new

world

speaking

an old

language

 

we speak

of beauty

and feelings

while the

machines

blast

the birds

from our

hearts

 

watch

the words

hear

the howl

come

to the ear

eye

nose

lip

 

scream

at the

dichotomy

of the

comma—

a dream

an illusion

how time

passes

 

dinosaurs

dance off

the map

where you

and I sit

drinking

coffee

 

we hold

down

this loose

end

of the

universe

feeling

at home

in the smoke

 

 

 

ABCs

 

it begins

like this

 

and ends

like this

 

and continues

 

.

 

in the

beginning

it was

 

done on

a blank

page—

 

white

on

white

 

on the

day of

creation

 

.

 

hear

here

 

is a bird

in the

window

 

is a bee

a flower

 

a garden

in the

mind

 

.

 

dilute the

potion

 

pour in

water

with the

hemlock

 

open the

windows

 

look for

patterns

in this

dream

 

.

 

a new

dimension?

shaped

words,

canvases

of space

 

.

 

song

bird

 

word

word

 

heard

third

 

.

 

we are

running

we are

mad

 

the stars

point out

the way

 

we are

naked

 

we are

free

 

there are

flowers on

the path

 

.

 

I was

told

 

I was

shown

 

it was

pointed out—

 

the narrow path

the word’s wisdom

 

.

 

so

intricate

 

so

complex

 

so amazing

 

the dead

leaves

 

on the

sidewalk

 

the dog

barking

 

the man

scratching

 

.

 

what’s out

side is

within

 

is there

emptiness

without

awareness?

 

.

 

word

 

wise

will

 

word

 

weed

worm

 

word

 

were

wood

 

word

 

weld

wink

 

word

 

wild

wing

 

word

 

wall

war

 

.

 

construct

something

out of

clay

dirt

 

obscene

words

in the

wash

room

stall

 

VietnamVietnamVietnamVietnam

ietnamVietnamVietnamVietnamV

etnamVietnamVietnamVietnamVi

tnamVietnamVietnamVietnamVie

namVietnamVietnamVietnamViet

amVietnamVietnamVietnamVietn

mVietnamVietnamVietnamVietna

 

no time

not place

no mind

for it—

it is

a dark

sentence,

a joke on

the wall

 

.

 

island

city

 

one can

loose

 

oneself

in any

 

pattern

any tree

 

star

cloud

 

mountain

field

 

.

 

a problem today

is to put down

the black-white

marble of mind

 

draw a circle

take your shot

feed daffodils

to crocodiles

 

.

 

there

is a

cemetery

 

in the

heart

tombstoned

 

we look

for it

the door

 

that

opens

onto

 

gardens

and

graveyards

 

.

 

there

are stars

in the

branches

of the

tree

 

all the

windows

of the

 

moon

open and

close

 

.

 

the count

and how

to count

the count

 

.

 

how is it

sir?

 

how

is it?

 

it is

how

it is

 

is

how

it

is

 

down

that

road

 

soften

it up

 

how

it

sir

 

.

 

 

Spring

do not

 

mistake

me for

 

a flower

or a tree

 

Death

knows

 

there’s

music

 

in the

air

 

 

 

POEM ON MY BIRTHDAY

 

once again this day protrudes

its ugly head out of the debris of the year

 

bleary-eyed & melancholy, strung out

in my Imolian web

 

i contemplate my 23rd time-twisted

space-spun, yelping year

 

with River Lethe flowing

my scorpion soul

 

winds its wayward way

to a shipwreck upon a seed

 

 

 

COMMITMENT

 

when Ezra Pound was released

from St. Elizabeth’s, he said

“America is an insane asylum,”

and then he split for Spolento

 

It appearing to the Court

on this day

the above named defendant

appeared to answer

a charge of committing Treason

 

It appearing that the said Judge

in it appearing that on that date

a doubt arose as to the sanity

of said defendant

dismissed criminal proceedings

in said action

and certified the above-named

for hearing and examination

by said Court

to determine the sanity

of the said defendant; and

the attorneys

for defense and prosecution

stipulated

that the doctor’s reports

could be received in evidence

and the Court

considered the evidence

presented upon the issue

of the present sanity

of said defendant and found

the said defendant to be insane

 

It is THEREFORE ORDERED

ADJUDGED AND DECREED

that the said defendant

be committed and confined

as an insane person

until such time as he shall

become sane

 

the poet sits alone

in the Idlewild Airport Café

sketching his next Canto

‘mid

C Beef 65¢

Coke 10¢

comfort after 14 years

in a Washington D.C. mental ward

 

across the room

a dark-eyed beauty

cool, contemplative

 

Cassandra, your eyes are like tigers

with no word written in them

You also I have carried to nowhere.

 

noise from the juke box

interrupts his cold beef vision

 

 

 

TABULA RASA

 

A clear slate

An empty table

A clean plate

 

He rose

With earthquake and lightening

Pierced and naked

 

He returned

To prove

His identity to those

 

Who betrayed

Feared and denied

Him

 

And

When he spoke

He spoke

 

As one from eternity to

Us

The living

 

A new life

A second chance

A second coming

 

 

 

 

POEM ON MY RETURN

 

i’m back among the living

back from where angels & devils dwell

with no one dead i know

 

i’m back

and see the meager come, the greater go

day follow day as usual

 

i’m back and will live lustily

among the oak trees

 

 

 

CAPTAIN OF POETRY

 

a cold, bleak day—

i’m playing gin rummy with Phil

when we hear on the radio

Elliot is dead

 

i have a photo of him

dressed in a black suit with a cape

wearing a wide-brimmed hat

carrying a walking stick

standing in the shade of a tree

was he ever young?

 

not feeling very young myself

i walk along the shore

and listen to the gulls

watch the waves

feel the whirl

 

i figure he has the answer

to the question now, but

what do you do with it

when you’re dead?

 

 

 

SONG

 

the president of the univers-

ity Ph.D LL.D

acting in good faith

opened the key to symbols

and saw

 

the new requirements

applicable to persons

not embarked

are shown in circles

 

Do Not Fold, Bend

Stipple or Mutilate

 

Beware of kindergartens

early elements

exceptional

specialized

adults

credentials

supervision

 

TEXTBOOKS

MAPS

IRS regulations

 

under the current regulations

peace and gladness

cannot be deducted

 

 

 

PATTERNS

 

look at the numbers

Kant 478a-79d

there is beauty in moral order

and Bacon who should

be in Everyman’s Library

knew Augustine confessed

 

I have a friend who says

there are 3 principles

the good, the bad

and that whichisneither

good nor bad

 

as for the whichisneither

my friend told me to stop

smoking, which changed my life

because I smoke 2 to 3 packs

 

I write this sitting

on a Persian rug

listening to a harpsichord

on a Victrola play

Partia #2 in C Minor

Schmieder 826

 

478 79 3 2 2 2 826

in the bottom of the 9th

 

 

 

TALE

 

an ancient tale

of a river that fell in love

with a maiden

 

my soul stretches as a river

your image is reflected

deeply, quietly

 

blue eyes and bright face

kind, calm

a fresh flower on a spring day

 

when the image is lost

my soul

floods with despair

 

 

 

A BOOK ENTITLED

 

when you die we will plant you

beneath the magic mushrooms

 

they will grow lush and perfect

 

on a night with a full moon

you will hear them cry out

to be gathered

 

eebee

eebee

ooooo

 

eebee

eebee

ooooo

 

Listen!

Prepare the Jell-O!

Light the sofa!

 

 

 

VISION

 

my vision of a fish

brown with a yellow streak

and an amorphous red eye

encircled by a river

has fused with the dead cat

in the gutter I sent

to heaven with flower-stars

 

 

 

SPACED

 

Time stopped—

and like the drool

on the lip of an idiot

 

I hung over the abyss

looking inward

amazed

 

 

 

YES

 

o yes

read first

 

by all means—

 

now, a

string of DNA

floats

 

having

come unstrung

from its coil

 

o yes

I keep a

loose vowel

 

 

 

MY POEMS

 

Who said it

wasn’t just

sound, Gail?

 

You just

happened

to come

 

On a night

when I’ve

lost all

 

Of my poems.

 

 

 

ELIZABETH SAYS

 

I get that feeling

you get in your nose

when you eat ice cream

in my eyes when I hear

the sound of the needle

at the end of the record

like a mouse eating crackers

 

 

 

CALCULATED LION

 

A god

passed by

my window.

 

“Into the

Lion’s

Mouth,”

Lu said.

 

I quickly

jumped.

 

 

 

COGITO ERGO SHAZAM

 

9 times 9 times 9

 

miles, minutes

trains, tracks

clanking chains

 

electronic brains

Harpo Marx? No,

an acustaka

 

often ten

 

 

 

A BRAMAVITS SITS ON THE HEAD

OF A NEO-CLASSICIST

for Wolfman & The Big X

 

3 out of 4 hippies aren’t

 

badminton

mushrooms

mungbeans

moonbeams

 

sitting in Kip’s

with a book and a burger

my valves are loose

and my chains clank

 

 

 

SPLIT PE-RSONALITY SOUP

 

And so it goes and goes and goes

between your toes and up your nose.

 

Take two, one for each.

So far out, it’s out of reach.

 

Can you guess which is best

and which is less than all the rest?

 

 

 

ODE TO GRAHAM CRACKERS

 

GRAY

HAM

 

AND

peanut butter

 

sliced pickles

and

peanut brittle

 

take another toke

 

cherry pie

on rye

 

 

 

27½ BEFORE 3

 

close to a

symbol stupor

 

do not listen

unless you know

what you are doing

 

we must be careful

when filling special

dietary needs

 

beware of toxic chemicals

beware of toxic poetry

 

 

 

TAXMAN

 

clanking chains

electronic brains

a harpsichord?

no, a cowbell

 

there are two angels

one records, and the other

dictates

 

listen to the hum

take a cosmic breath

relax, man, hell is hung

with pretty pictures

 

listen to the sitar

Indian hard-bop twisted

on the frame of a fugue

 

sit and listen

as it tears your soul from you

 

 

 

LINE DRIVE

 

ami

ma moo

ami

ma moo

 

that’s a train

we go on that train

yes, we go on that

train

 

power steering batting average

power steering batting average

 

stop.

 

I cannot ignore

certainly not dismiss

Anulios

 

 

 

AUGUSTUS TURNS IN HIS TOMB

 

bottom of the 13th

Willie faces the left-hander

2 for 5

homerun for the 9th

                       

overcast has blown away

 

in the next room

a sewing machine whrrrs

draining the power

 

static

 

fast ball hit into right

for a base

 

the mood shifts

LeFever is up

 

why is the spectacular held

in San Francisco

when the riots are in L.A.?

 

 

 

SERMON ON THE MOUND

 

apparently

I did not understand

 

when He spoke of the grain

which is the symbol of man

 

looking to the burial of the seed

its death and resurrection

 

I want mustard on my hotdog

 

 

 

FLOWER POEM

 

Gladness linked to

madness to amuse you.

Characters move—

 

rhythms, waves of color

flowers.

 

They whisper to me.

I am a privileged guess.

 

They let me do as I please.

They do as they please.

 

In the core of the bud

is fire,

the bone of desire.

 

.

 

I knew

when a moth flew out

of the moon’s eye

 

the dead

would teach me

to love.

 

.

 

There are stars

in the branches of the trees.

 

The moon’s windows

open and close.

 

It’s right

there

 

DANCE

DANCE

DANCE

 

.

 

Her eyes are for me

to see her heart.

 

While she moves into mine

I move into hers.

 

The grave, cold, simple—

ordained

in the see.

 

.

 

New directions,

old directions, each

is eaten in time,

 

each star,

seed,

stone.

 

.

 

Moon moves

mind into fragments.

 

Visitation comes

wordless, shapeless.

 

It is sweet, the taste

of a tree, children running,

guns clicking,

that shaking of my head,

needles too—a place

in space,

 

song, bird, word,

word, heard third.

 

.

 

 

The moon is a flower.

The day is a song.

Let the dog bark

 

down the hall of fading portraits,

my face in the mirror

above a broken vase.

 

Her mouth quivers.

She sees humor

in the antics of the man

trying.

 

.

 

There is a cemetery

in the mind.

 

We look for it—

 

nine times nine times nine

nails, needles, trains, trees—

often ten.

 

The moon is a flower.

This is to say

I love to say

 

I love.

 

 

 

PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

 

Serge planted a tree

when he was three on Berkeley Way.

Luis did too,

two birch, on Acton.

Peter started ivy

to cover his hideaway.

William grafted roses,

rows of them.

Patrick sowed oats

up and down on Telly.

Wes confesses

he hates green.

Alice says there’s nothing like Oakland

bay laurel for cooking

or as a fact there.

 

 

 

OAKLAND SHOULD BE

 

abolished.

She’s an early bird

that catches the worm

on MacArthur at Manila,

an intersection, a branch

of Oak. O police love her.

City of Merritt,

your lakes and hills

are eyes and thighs.

You lay in asphalt splendor.

Your ways are littered,

and pigs are chased by panthers

orbited by angels dancing

on the tips of your limbs.

City of the Raiders,

what’s it like blasted?

Are you made of aluminum?

Where is London square?

Wolves aware of the sea’s tear

wander in rose gardens

and eucalyptus groves.

Joaquin Miller Amphitheatre

is dedicated to California’s writers,

dead ones.

 

 

 

LANGTREE

 

Joaquin sings

of Lily’s graces.

 

She brought

the house down.

 

The house had beams

musically spaced,

 

columns of concrete

delicate as bird legs.

 

A structure,

a broken shell.

 

 

 

TANTRIK TUNE-UP

 

Wheel your rig into DICK’S—

you’ll get a square deal.

Dick distributes Punch Products.

Punch protects your transmission

parts. Perfect parts

produce the proper frequency

to transcend planetary interference.

 

Pour Punch in your crankcase, it’ll be-

come a peacock with 6 heads and 9 tails. 

After this rite, things will be right on.

Stick it in your gas, it’ll swell

until there’s a tyger in your tank.

Stuff it in that stash behind the dash.

Rub it on the hood or slip it in your ear,

Punch stops heat, sludge, jerking

 

and the formation of calluses

on your eyes

 

 

 

DETAIL

 

Birds that lay

in Euclid’s branches

have a view of May.

 

Spring blows and sucks,

sucks and blows

the eucal blossom.

 

It’s always ragtime,

suck and blow.

 

 

 

SCORPIO, SCORPIO RISING

 

Scorpio

beastie in the bunghole

bugaboo of bugaboos

mite in the middle of the third root race

big eight of the cycle of life

 

maggot of the mind’s eye

mistake, abortion, infection, crablouse

error of the raised eyebrow

 

O deadly persuader

O propagator of corruption

O comic of crimes not yet committed

O gutless guttersnipe

O diddler at the door of destruction

 

let me fall with you into generation

 

 

 

EYE OF THE SCORPION

 

is issuing from the brain

shinning upon us

to block our knock off

in the 13th week

a pearl in wine

the web of life, and a worm

are weaving deep in the earth

a wooden bowl

is being filled with blood

to make bread

as the cauldron boils

more gold and more gold

is issuing from the brain

white is holding a corpse

in the east of the brain

red is holding a banner

in the west of the brain

yellow is holding an arrow

in the south of the brain

black is holding a bowl

in the north of the brain

as the worm weaves the web

in the 13th week

in the eye of the scorpion

 

 

 

HAPPY CLIMES      

 

Athens of the West—

she creates a provincial mentality

by fulfilling through witchcraft

whatever the mind pretends.

 

In Berkeley I was reduced

to monads by the Mænads,

classified scizo-non-decisive,

and given Stelazine and A.T.D.

 

A minor inconvenience—

a nervous breakdown.

Strangled by my vocabulary,

what to do with the stiff?

 

No one knew I was there

until a flood of vomit

oozed from under my door.

 

 

 

ALL THE HEADS OF THE TOWN LIT UP

 

I filled vials with violets and grass.

I made baggies of marigolds and grass.

I loaded a wine bottle with grass

and announced a Party for Allen.

 

I underestimated by a hundred

how many would attend this bash.

I was in a spot, so I put out my stash

and passed my Stetson.

 

Olson filled the papa chair

and passed his pipe—that was some pipe.

Orlovsky and I made it to the liquor store

much to everyone’s relief.

 

Kretch read a diatribe seated on the commode.

Lew Welch swung from the chandelier.

It was Creeley demanding everyone know

where the firemen and police were located

 

that cleared the place. 

So, I added the cost and the cost of the cost.

Nothing was stolen, and nothing was broken,

save for the chandelier.

 

 

 

KETCHIKAN & DEEP BAY 1968-1970

 

 

 

FEATHER

 

unicorn

canker

Ketchikan

the moon

the axis

the exasperation

what can I say?

I saw them on the slope.

I saw them

climb Deer Mountain.

I called my friend

and he gave me

no answer.

I entreated him

my mouth

god

suck

flower

 

 

 

EVIDENCE

 

whereas a fortress

whereas a jade pagoda

whereas a river

of diamonds, a river

of blood

 

whereas the fortress

is the pagoda, whereas

the river is blood, whereas

men and women are diamonds

I ask what is there

where imagelessness prevails?

 

whereas some cosmoses are being

transformed, whereas some are

being transfigured, whereas

some metamorphosis continues

I ask how is this possible where

there is no imagination?

 

 

 

POEMS

 

HAS ONE

TIME TO

 

SEE THE

MISTAKE

 

THERE

AMONG

 

FLOWERS

OPENING

 

TO THE

MARBLE

 

LIGHT OF

CANDLES?

 

.

 

CAN WE EAT

THE GRASS

 

GOOD-BYE

FAREWELL

 

TOMORROW

TOMORROW

 

A TEST

A VISA

 

TO MEXICO

TO AFRICA

 

GOLDEN LEAVES

IN THE SUN

 

.

 

AROUND

ME THE

 

WALLS

MOVE

 

THE SKY

IS DARK

 

WITHOUT

A MOON

 

THERE’S A

DAEMON

 

EATING

MY LIVER

 

.

 

AT THE

CENTER

 

OF THE

FLOWER

 

LOOKING

BEMUSED

 

AT AN

ANGEL

 

RUNNING

A SWORD

 

THROUGH

A WORM

 

.

 

WORD

WORM

 

ACID

ANON

 

LOVE

LICK

 

LEAF

LEAK

 

ONLY

ONCE

 

WIND

WORD

 

 

 

 

WOODNOTES

for David and Jim

 

Seek to realize the self—

the way, the poets say, is difficult.

 

We are situated in a cedar cabin

built on stilts over the water in a cove

a mile across Moser Lake from Deep Bay,

our mail drop, Deep Bay 99901.

Mail arrives weekly from Ketchikan,

25 miles by plane weather permitting.

Mid-winter—there is four feet of snow.

 

Elizabeth and baby Theo and I,

helped by friends, take to the woods

after reading Bradford Angier’s

How to Live in the Woods on $10/Week.

With my last paycheck, income tax return

and promise of employment insurance

we should make out—hoping that

by discriminating use of ecological resources

most of our material needs can be met—

 

Selfless means to a selfless end,

as Ghandi put it.

 

So around this complex

our routine flows—all activities

merge in the pursuit, which deepens

here in Deep Bay.

 

Schedule remains firm.

Implementation of spiritual discipline,

Karma Yoga—wood and water

wood and water, wood and water.

Would you believe, wood and water?

 

Elemental—the meaning is subtle,

but we’re only scratching the surface.

We have stored away necessary

supplies, several cords of wood

cut and split and stacked.

Now we improvise.

 

.

 

Awoke to a 14 foot tide, high

enough to float a forty-footer off

an abandoned logging donkey.

Tied on and rowed it to shore,

breaking a rib in the dinghy near the stern.

Tied up and came in for coffee.

 

Sometimes, I’m the ocean,

man-boat-ocean.

I wonder how hard the wind can blow.

Whips us from the east today.

Whitecaps in the cove, cedar bending.

Gulls motionless in the gale.

February is a windy month.

 

Can we use up our desires?

Not that we don’t have sense cravings.

Food is Number One God here.

And Shelter.

And the twin god, a good pair of Boots.

 

Made a mixture of vinegar, water,

cloves, onion, garlic, salt, mustard,

sugar, ginger for sauerbraten.

Put this mix and a venison roast

in a stoneware crock to marinate.

 

.

 

By the way, I’m told

Ramakrishna uses the simile of the ocean,

the ocean of sat-chit-ananda

the ocean of existence,

consciousness, bliss—dissolve

myself like a salt-doll in this ocean.

 

Lu Garcia writes from Berkeley,

“Things spin as they always spin.”

 

Jon Springer, at this time, finds it

“fetid in the Ukrainian ghetto of 6th St.

 

.

 

How did I get from selling the Berkeley Barb

on Telegraph Avenue to this cabin?

The old personality breaks down, and

the world becomes pure—like Blake said,

as it is in infinity.

 

It is curious how some moves take

years to come about, but then

done with full support of mind & body

they move forward.

 

.

 

The wind gathers strength.

As weather delays delivery of oil,

as the Coleman stove is in parts,

we cook over a makeshift grate

in the Yukon oil drum heater.

Elizabeth achieves bliss of sourdough

chocolate cake, cerealmate bread,

venison strogfanoff, and fern frawns.

 

Living in the woods is a fruitcake idea.

Can others be influenced by seeing how

it’s done?—expanding circle—friends,

town, state, country, galaxy, cosmos

returns me back to myself.

 

.

 

Snowflakes falling outside

and in my mind.

The temperature, 40 degrees.

Nothing sticks.

 

I roam the woods.

Tongass National Forest.

Sitka Black Tail Deer. Beaver. Squirrel.

A few bear.

Much spirit life.

 

While dark, I take to the woods.

When dawn cracks, I’m waiting.

I’m a good shot, felling my game

with a single round from a 30.30.

Death, sorrow, sort of unreal,

this tug of life and death.

 

Repression, exploitation—

leaving the city to avoid the establishment,

and, in turn, I become the Man.

Good weather, one clear day in thirty

in this rain forest—ego hunting—lots

of weird animals in the mind—the mind

itself a crazy monkey.

 

.

 

Somewhere, the Governor of Someplace

makes money in real estate.

Dr. Leary attends Altamont, says

it’s a lesson to be learned.

Theo and I float in our boat, while far away

Neil Armstrong takes his giant step.

 

Hunt and fish, wood and water.

Today, eight crabs in the trap.

Cut and stacked cedar blocks,

using the tide to move them to shore.

I came indoors to paint the cabinets

until Theo knocked over the paint can.

Put him down for a nap and read

a few chapters of Thomas Á Kempis.

 

.

 

Field studies:

Periculum aquillium

a perenial fern, local species “hog braken”

substitute for asparagus.

Theo gets up early to pick the frawns.

 

Tiarella trifoiata

Quileut “gwaqwlatcyu’l”

three leaves (qwal’l=3)

Chew for coughs.

 

Equisetum arvense

“field horsetail”

Used by Quinault to regulate menstrual flow.

 

While reading this aloud, Elizabeth

starts her period.

We have no ailments in the woods,

except when we go to town, we catch

the Ketchikan crud.

 

.

 

A whirly-twirly, sunny day.

Here it rains 200 inches a year.

10% chance of rain means 10 inches of rain.

Made ice cream and had mincemeat pie

á la mode.

 

Watched a sea otter dive for crab.

The sky Gualoises blue, the water

a shade of jade and now smooth.

Buds and bugs and migrating fowl signal

Spring—

I feel like pulling the doors from the jambs,

but I’m afraid of the ceiling falling down

from a ton of newspaper & mattress insulation.

 

.

 

Cut and split another cord of wood.

Supper of red snapper filets, scalloped

spuds, and sponge cake w/berry sauce.

We haven’t seen a soul on the water

for days—grooving on the isolation.

 

By kerosene lamp I read Lone Wolf Smith’s

letters to the Daily News,

always a revelation—

 

Not one new goat trail here.

What for our Poor People and trollers

more rotten Pinks from Creeks

and let Coho go?

Where o where is Gov. Hinkels

Better or Bitter way?

 

.

 

Not sure I want improvements.

Sit and watch the deer on the beach,

watch them turn their heads, twitch

their ears suspiciously.

A little bird settles on a branch,

listen to it sing.

 

 

 

 

FAIRBANKS & PRESTON: 1970-1974

 

 

 

THE BEAST

 

Old Valdez.

275 sq. miles. Second oldest

white settlement in Alaska.

Captain Cook 1778

1794 Bligh Island

Spaniards 1798.

 

1800s whaling. Copper mined.

Route to the gold fields.

Blue fox farming in the 1920s.

Iron Trail by Rex Beach set here.

Young Miss Miller marries

the Maharajah of Indore.

 

New Valdez.

Rebuilt after quake on a new site.

Voted All-American City 1965.

Valdez rhymes with “ease.”

South Terminus of Alyeska’s

pipeline from Prudhoe Bay.

 

Wrathful Alyeska

auger in one hand

marshprobe in one hand

geo-stick in one hand

polaski in another

 

I take soil samples

along the surveyed route

from Valdez to Tonsina.

I follow the Lowe River

through alder swamps

across marshmuck to bogmire.

Streams jambed with rotting salmon.

 

I follow a bear trail

to the cutline where I auger

twenty feet to bedrock.

I sidetrack near Kendal Cache

to collect lichens and weathered

telegraph insulators.

I note the conglomeration

from a glacier deposit.

 

Along glacier benches to bedrock

across rivers to bedrock

to bedrock under ridges, under

boulders, under cobbles, under sill

under sand, under volcanic ash.

I take a rest and get sick.

 

A caravan of Winabegos passes.

A woman points to a dead salmon

and exclaims, “Someone should do

something about that.” Cheechakos.

10% chance of rain in a rainforest

means 10 inches of rain.

 

At Trans Alaska Pipeline

Point on Ground TAPS PG=361+68

I join my copter pilot.

Mustachioed Vietvet with shades

his scarf trails in the breeze.

 

He drops me off on a sandbar.

There’s a field of devil’s club

and a jungle of alder hanging

from granite cliffs between me

and my test hole.

 

King crab to Otterman:

glacierized graywhacky

sandy sill

silly sand

gravel

cobbles

Indian love stones

fucking rocks

over

 

Otterman to Kingcrab:

reading you

alluvial fan

metamorphic composition

zone theory

montage effects

colluvium

colluvium

colluvium

clear

 

Dhal sheep graze below me.

As the Alouette lands, a bull moose

into the brush. 

Up the line, a grizzly and her cubs

into hiding.

 

From the Arctic Ocean

at Prudhoe Bay, over

the Brooks Range

across the Koyukuk River

across the Yukon River

and the Tanana, stretching

 

Across the Alaskan Range

this in temperatures below zero

for more than one hundred days

below forty below for weeks

dropping to eighty below

in arctic winds

 

From Thompson Pass

down a glacier moraine, the pipe

slouches into Valdez.

 

1972

 

 

POLOOT

 

Alaska, who lives there?

Caribou, wolves and bear.

 

This grizzly airs a grudge

that everyone fears to judge.

 

A refinery don’t smell

like Chanel— more like hell.

 

 

 

BIG FOOT

 

One drop goes

a long way to ease

the friction.

 

100 billion barrels,

ten to the tenth power—

while the answer is hair

 

warm nights in fur,

and the best investment

is Sasquatch.

 

 

 

ISLAM BOMB

 

1. inner secret

 

theoretically the absolute p(ohm)e

is defined in a self-consistent way

the unit of resistance

determined with a coil

spinning in a field

 

passion-love-beauty formula

the passion of love

the catalysis of beauty

the passion of beauty

the crystallography of love

the beauty of love

the musicology of passion

the of of beauty the passion love

passionlove of the the of beauty

 

expressed concretely

in terms of smart bombs

(a form of intercourse protexted

under the cuntstitution)

Kenning equations concocked &

cunninglingously composed

paradoxically pertinent when

accepted as parts of patterns

suspicious as it sounds

using Euler’s formula L+2=P+A

& correcting for obscured areas

 

let us begin w/the premise

when we take care of ourselves

participants are swept along

in unacknowledged harmony

true Taoist cyberneticism

 

ask & thou shall receive

what is matter?

never mind

what is mind?

it doesn’t matter

 

sometimes wordgames seem flippant

& worldgames whenso are malignant

yet the awesome Silence prevails

 

Andillusion dogmaradarwowgod

i

begin this line

knowing particular

themes elude development

 

and on the and in the

and on the and in the

and on the and in the

 

magnetic whispers

from the heart of a moth

a frog in a muskeg

evolves into a dinosaur

in the twit of a newt it

(knew(i)t) quantumleaps

 

we are meat such that

we are primemovers such that

the primemovers & the meat

are the same, and

 

whatever Beta may be

(Beta is a cow of mine)

is true when

and only when

a primemover

is prime rib

 

2. intergallactic69pornoputer

 

your Honor, i will speak my peace

i confess to fucking-up

convicted as i was arrested

a bag of predigested meat (that i am)

incorrigible & incapable of rehab

corrupt & spreading contagion

 

your major premise

worth is self-evident

is a 2waymirror

pimping your nose w/yr tongue

you sniff my rectum

& blame me for bad taste

 

NOT FLOOD FIRE OR ICE but

A Deluge of Smutmirth

f/Interpornogallatic Cyber-Messenger

 

grit of true shit for breath

gobs of swarming cum emit

f/throbbing organs against aghast

esophagi, burning bitters

dripping in eyes, ears, on breasts

acrox continents

 

now my blood bdellatomically runs

f/opened veins, a feast

 

OM MATRIX

MANTRA VORTEX

ABEL BAKER

CAIN DOZEN

 

she who meditates on the penis of sorrow

has to ball The Jack

he who dreams of Wombman

must come to rack and ruin

in the Spanish boot of time

 

words of our bodies

seeds of our minds

statements of elements

ejaculations of truth

tables of turns

tricks of trades

 

in that Silence our lives are mingled

& in my mindheart there is terror

 

across the sea of abyss

over the pass of bandits

thru the valley of the beast

i fill in the blanks

 

STRIVING WITH SYSTEMS

TO FREE OURSELVES f/SYSTEMS

as Blake saw

 

i find a place where the rent is low

gardens grow, pace is slow

mushrooms blow

 

whitehole/blackhole continuum

rivers evaporate on Mars

40000 BCE at 8 ‘til eulenspiegel

while a child discovers its feet and

a legislature extends its session

 

into a series of telemetric sequences

another unconscious police action

uniting conditionally imagined

noun phrase verb phrase strings

La Illa Ha Il Allah Hu

 

either/or & both

 

GURU KHAN

HUM PHAT

 

KRAZIGNATZKAT

PUPPIGDUNGFUNGI

X-RAY CRISTALGRAPH

pendulum harmonographic

alpha-particular articulation

that i = an elliptical metaphor 4

misononeismystic Presbyterianism

 

Bohem’s exegesis of Genesis

Buddhist Logic of Exists

differential equations

 

3. plug them in and stand back

 

dinosaurs grazing in pastures of hemp

micro-organisms under an airtight lid

færie-dæmon foxfire dynamos

bunraku hooded trinities

section Xn relative to Yn

Gemini martyrdom

Sze indications of good fortune

soon June vine design

synergistically synchronized valve/relay

yin/yang daisycrazy turkeyjerky

a posteriori experience related

a fortiori in terms of significance

 

KALI APPEARS WITH A NECKLACE

OF FLAVORED HEADS

atom fudge  spinach nicotine

pie are squared  double negative delight

phallic fluff  interarticular fibercartilage

cosmic grout  alimentum ornamentum

Pythagorean lotus bean  jade attle

fissigemnation chainshot

 

psychedelic pink psychodelphi

pink psychoracle lick pink ink pink

the color of lips the color

of the cheek the color of

intestines eyes of insects

winged bleeding things

in inner space

substantives hold their own

adjectives depend on substantives

holding their own

 

STOP

NO U

TURN

 

ONE

WAY

 

ARE

YOU

 

PUTTING

ME ON?

 

automatic replication analogue of

passion-beauty-love

analytic pre-molar political

intersubjective meta-aleatoric

patramorphesis

 

on the blue pole of the South Moon

Venus has a hot cushion

 

4. business reply mail

 

postage paid by addressee

octahedrically this RLD

molecule circles the news that stays news

 

THE SCARLOSIS DAILY SCOOP

THE THERMONUCLEAR CARBUNCLE 

THE ABYSS

THE WASTING TIMES

 

Planetarium            

Depicts                  

First Christmas

 

Council Studies

Concrete Lid

For Reservoir

 

the war is over/it never was/the

war is not/the war is over

Merry Kissmyass the real cost

was the cost of the cost

2 + 2 being more

Christus-Falcon entalloned

Mithras cutting the throat of the Bull

with a zip code

 

CHAPTER TO

on my way from the 12th planet

in n minus 1 (n = 0) solar system

of RLD-59 Andasinwand Galaxy

to the Labor Temple on 2nd Ave

i encounter an old friend

“Whashappeninmon?” i inquire

“Got a vasectomy, remarried

my first wife & found Jesus”

“Does this frequently happen

after vascectomy?” i ask

but before he can answer

the effect of the experience

inhibits my memory

from recalling the event

to which the question pertains

 

daze of trauma stretch to kalapas

until interrupted by the mantra

HARE MARX KARL KARL

HARE BODY HAIRY BODY

SPIRITO MESCALERO

SANCTAS IMMUNITA

 

rainforest/pastureland equation—

MacDonald’s boasting billions dead

has a walk-in fantastic replica

of a Big Mac guaranteed to be

a short path to Sipa Bardo

if piped with Allen Ginsberg’s

Holy Soul Jelly Roll & what else?

just a 1929 ordinance

forbidding moonlight & shadow dancing

invoked  by antediluvian assholes

to prevent psychedelic light shows

 

CHAPTER TOO

in this chapter the flop quickens

...the the figuring as formula, the the

imparting stature to the the

...tautological hokermoker...

just thrust into the thick of the quick

as the media’s view snowballs into ametropia

 

CHAPTER of the OVERALL ORDER

of HUGGERMUGGER

deaf dumb hungry & blind

the eater that is eaten

i am a plucked biped cooked in my juices

by atomic tantra evolutionarily predicated

a as in as b as in be

every effort forever formed given grace

however haphazard i imagine an alder tree

under which a really real rishi rests

 

 

 

 

HEAD WATER       

for Robert Duncan

 

Syntactic order brackets

word relationships,

but this should not prevent us

holding hands

 

Asked what

prevented him when asked

what prevented

him from

internally reallocating

functor categories

f/internally

reallocating functor

categories from non-

exigent conditions

from non-exigent

conditions, he replied

 

Oh, potato chip

prime mover of palatability

bugaboo to step on in the dark

cosmic potato of parabolic curves

let me lick your salty thighs

 

S/Seys

E/Cexy

X/Son of Lucifer

bringer of fire

 

Whether it is a potato or not

I do not know or not know

care or not care

for, for sure, it will resemble

Arp’s navel

 

When asked what

prevented the potato chip

f/attaining inter-subjective

metamorphosis when injest-

ed

 

Edgar Allen

Poe tato

replied

 

Birds of calm

rest on the charmed wave

 

 

 

TRUCKIN’ THE ALKAN

 

“We Drove The Alkan!”

an air-polluted fantasy

a flick to see

for the dust alone

soon to appear

as a bored game

 

Beware the cost!

food, tires, repairs

3 flats in 200 miles

2 ea. 7.35/15s, one

7.75/15, one 6.55/15

& nothing for a spare

added = 2900

divided by milepost

424 is ideogram Sze—

indicates how, in the case

which it supposes, with

firmness & correctness

and (a leader of) age

& experience, there will

be fortune & no error

 

milepost prosyllagism

water is persistent

and hard edged

whereas

earth is subtle

falling away and rising

 

Athabascan beadwork

works strong talismanic magic

given metaphysically camp context

exempli gratia

fossilized mulosk site

behind graveyard of ghost town

near Dawson Creek or now

at SE85PL & 311PLSE

corner 3 blocks north

the center of Preston

 

the waters of Ragging River

erased the tell-tale of the trail

be it beadgames go on

 

 

 

DIRT

 

Dirt makes me itch.

Asphalt hurts my feet.

Kindness an official bitch.

Lawn order on every street.

 

 

 

ON THE BEACH

 

The beach at Miramar

is marked Right To Pass

Revocable At Any Time.

 

Banana skins, plastic cups,

oil derricks, all forms

of rubber, wood and steel

 

ripped to elements,

stripped of character

and dipped in tar.

 

 

 

 

ATMAN

 

My start is slow.

My legs disappear.

My back bows, and

I shoot into the wall.

 

Once again, I am

a moving target.

Once again, I move

to a sound I hear

in a dark fire.

 

 

 

SEA CHANGE

 

I dreamt my cells were bells,

and muck that fixed the deep

rose to surf

 

While all existence hung ten.

 

 

 

STEPPIN’  OUT

for Max

 

Outside the Steppenwolf,

I finish off the wine.

An alley. On the wall

are words by madmen.

 

Panhandle a turkey san

from the grotto,

hike up University

and crash in the bushes.

 

I awake with fingers

in my pockets, roll

into Strawberry Creek—

up the bank and to the tracks.

 

As light illumines the bay,

“Hey, man, let’s smear that queer.”

 

Feet, do your thing.

 

 

 

PRINTER’S DEVIL

 

When l is

a sentence

and e is

a sentence

followed by

a sentence

and H is

a sentence

followed by

three sentences

Hell will be

a sentence

in more than

one sense

 

 

 

FUNK OF THE F WORD

 

Oyez! I plant a seed.

The AHD has as the etymology of FUCK

the ME verb FUCKEN meaning

to strike, move quickly, penetrate

borrowed f/M Dutch FOKKEN meaning

to strike, copulate with.

 

In the AHD appendix, the ME affix PEIK-

also PEIG- meaning evil-minded, hostile

(in Germanic, FIKAL; in OE, FICOL

treacherous, false, fickle).

 

In A Dictionary of Slang, Partridge

using Grimm’s Law finds FUCK

to be cognate w/Latin v. PUNGERE

to strike, linking FUCK to PRICK.

 

Etymology unknown in OED:

1503, Dunbar. Poems.

Be his feiris he wald haute fuckitt.

1535, Lyndesay. Satyre.

Bishops may fuck their fill

and be vumaryit.

1535-6, Answer to Kingsie Flyting.

Ay fukk and lyke ane furious Fornicatour.

1598, Florio. Worlde of Wordes.

Fottere, to iape, to sard, to fucke,

to swive, to occupy.

1680, Anon in Rochester’s Poems

On Several Occasions.

Thus was I Rook’d of Twelve

substantial Fucks.

1684,  Sodom. Epilogue spoken

by Fuckadilla.  A little Fuck

can’t stay an appetite.

1800, Burns. Merry Muses.

When maukin bucks, at early

f_ks, In dewy glens are seen, sir.

 

The ME Dictionary lists FUK

a noun f/M Dutch meaning

a foresail, fukmast, foremast.

 

Phallic connotations aside

the Puritans inscribed F.U.C.K.

upon the stocks of persons punished

For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

 

No FUCK in An AS Dictionary

but FUGEL, a bird is there

& the middle finger extended

is known as flying the bird.

 

In the Magic of Words & Speech

Lama Govinda defines mantra

as tools for thinking that have

no specific denotative meaning

but are symbolic units that through

a synthesis of rhythm & melody

transport the user beyond meaning

into intuitive receptivity.

 

The Mandukya Upanishad begins

OM. This eternal word is all,

what was, what is and what shall be,

and what is beyond in eternity.

All is OM.

 

In Sanskrit the vowel O is a dipthong

constituted of A plus U.

The 3 sounds, A-U-M are equated

with (1) the waking life of outward

moving consciousness, (2) the dream life

of inward moving consciousness, and

(3) the sleeping life of silent consciousness.

 

The primal Sanskrit sound /a/ is produced

at the back of the open mouth

a low, back, rounded, simple vowel.

 

The open mouth moves towards

the closed mouth of the bilabial,

voiced, nasal consonant /m/.

 

Between these two sounds is the high,

back, rounded vowel /u/

formed by the openness of /a/

but shaped by the closing lips.

 

It is from the position of the closed mouth

that all begins, so runs the analogy, and

dreams are compounded of the waking life

shaped by the unconsciousness of sleep,

the closed mouth being the foundation

from which speech arises

as well as the end to which it returns.

 

The first sound in FUCK

is a labiodental, voiceless slit-fricative,

the U sound in N. American dialect

is a mid, central, unrounded, simple vowel

and the CK consonantal sound

is a velar, voiceless stop.

 

F is the fantasy component.

U is the libido urge.

CK is catadromous activity, fishes

going down a river to spawn.

 

The meaning of FUCK

is contorted in different usage.

The Dictionary of Slang posits:

FUCK-PIG, an unpleasant man (1870)

FUCK LIKE A RATTLESNAKE

cowboy expression (1895)

FUCKED UP & FAR FROM HOME (1899)

FUCKER SOLDIERS, Pukka Soldiers more

interested in women than fighting (1915)

FUCK MY OLD BOOTS, euphemistic variant

of seduce my ancient footwear (1918)

CREATE FUCK, protest (1920)

FUCK ABOUT, play the fool (1920)

FUCK MY LUCK, army expression (1920)

FUCKING THE DOG, avoid work (1920)

FUCKED-UP, fail (1925)

FUCKED, extremely weary (1925)

FUCKED BY THE FICKLE FINGER OF FATE

Canadian Army expression (1939)

 

FUCK is used amelioratively and pejoratively.

As an insult it means the object so described

has been defiled, but as a compliment, it means

that the object is held in a position of power.

 

FUCK is used as a means of address, of

attracting attention, opening a conversation,

starting a sentence, and when it is used

as pure emphasis, it has the meaning

of having no meaning at all—it describes

that which is otherwise without description.

 

Sing FUCK, scream FUCK, mumble FUCK,

YOUR LIFE WITH BE SUBLIME!

 

1972

 

 

 

ELLENSBURG: 1974-1995

 

 

 

TRAVELER’S BLUES

 

just down the road a jog

follow the river ‘til it bends

across that field to the far side

up the hill to the ridge—

thataway, as the crow flies

 

I pull up my mount

and peer from the peak

at more mountains on the other side

 

the map I was made

must have been made

to get me lost

 

make camp

rustle up some grub

 

“Ain’t nobody goin’ to git

nuttin’ done, if he’s got mor’an

one choice,” the hayseed said

“I got a world of ways”

and the dude rode on

 

through a vale

across a dale

over a pass

my ass

 

it’s not where I’m going

it’s the going

 

 

 

SCAT SONG

 for Gary Snyder

 

You climb the mountain

because it’s there where

you know where it’s at—

 

Where the bear shat.

 

 

 

GET DOWN

 

Flies mate on the page

drawn by my attic honey breath.

 

Life in Washington is delicious

compared to the worm

eating at the core.

 

Ruskin describes it—a march

of infinite light...intervaled

with eddies of shadow.

 

Note the famine, the flames, the plague,

if only a tapestry of the travesty,

a n+1 number of knots.

 

 

 

BURGER PRODUCTIONS

 

The band heats the air

with acid rock.

Black-lighted bodies

dissolve in the dark.

 

Flames of ice,

flames of flood,

flames of meat,

flames of mud.

 

 

 

IN ADVANCE OF BEATITUDE

 

My dad and I, at the Skyline

Café counter, discuss

Beatnik ethics.

 

Hermes out of orbit,

I fume, albeit

light-years ago. Today,

 

in another place,

my wife warps her loom to throw

a weft of her experience.

 

What strikes me right off

about this woman is the possibility

of traveling light.

 

 

 

GOLD LEAF

 

As custodial head

at the care center

infection control

and safety briefing

I get a hot lunch.

 

I sip my au jus

mistaking it for coffee.

Lab reports are read.

I eye my pie.

 

How many cultures

on a clean plate?

Did she say forty?

 

The entrapment of a mouse

is announced. My bit

of Velveeta and Old Vic

trap makes a hit.

 

Stomp, stomp, stomp

go the days. It’s March 10th.

Alexander Graham Bell invents

the telephone. Kissinger calls

for more nuclear technology.

 

Birds will eat the feed

I put in the tree

by Rose Roberg’s room.

Events—a waterfall.

Spray, white, spray.

 

 

 

CHILLING OUT WITH THE ECLOGUES

 

I smoke and contemplate

autumn at the end of this millenium.

 

I am still

reading Virgil.

 

The leaves turn to gold—

 

So much for Caesar

and so much for...

“Damn, Silenus

 

How do you expect me to rhyme ease

with bees in my beard?”

 

 

 

RELAX

 

Relax and read

the stove’ll go out.

 

You may have cleaned it

and it will go out.

 

Open the grate

and burn your fingers.

 

Get soot on the rug

and get really pissed.

 

Smear the soot deeper.

 

 

 

 

AT IAMBIC FEET

 

there is a hamburger such that

there is a prime mover such that

the prime mover and

the hamburger are the same,

 

and whatever Beta may be

(Beta is a cow mine.)

is true when and only when

the prime mover is prime rib.

 

 

 

DIAMOND HANGING J FLOATING I

 

I mend the fences.

I tend the herd.

 

The shit is ten feet deep,

and the shitters play for keeps.

What are you after, they ask,

a hoof in the mouth?

The shit is ten feet deep,

and I can’t eat or sleep.

Coyotes yap all night

below the blown moon.

 

The shit is ten feet deep.

Shine on, shine on.

Hold it down, you buggers,

or I’ll rope your ass, I sing.

The shit is ten feet deep

and dear.

Hay has more than doubled in price.

There’s no market for feeder steers.

 

The shit is ten feet deep

and clings like it’s alive.

Pour on gas. Set those doggies afire.

Give those cows a kick in the udder.

The shit is ten feet deep

and thick.

Chew your cud, mama,

let those juices flow.

 

The shit is ten feet deep,

and sometimes it hums.

The shit is ten feet deep,

and here and there a head protrudes.

 

The Angus are black—

purgatorial beings.

 

The Herefords are red—

mythological monsters.

 

The Charolais are white—

easy to spot against the dung.

 

The shit is ten feet deep

and covers the fences.

The shit is eleven feet deep,

my shovel is hooked to coke.

The shit is beginning to climb,

making inroads through the hills.

 

O, the shit is infinitely deep

and running still—running.

 

1975

 

 

 

VARIABLES OF EXISTING CHOICES

 

Shorty is now in Glen’s feedlot.

What if I stuck him in a hot box—

a square of electrified wire fence?

 

Turn on the juice, so this steer understands

the concept of fence.

You may call it a concentration camp,

 

but I call it home.

 

 

 

CATTLE ARE JUST AN EXCUSE

FOR SHOOTING COYOTES

 

Lest decomposing acids or infectious

pests affect your stock and feed

take heed.

 

Here’s hoping we are blessed

with bountiful crops

and all our calves drop well.

 

It’s midwinter spring.

I notice rhythmic modulations—

the last leaves on the cottonwoods

 

and birds turning and turning in the air.

 

 

 

CANIS LATRANS

 

Coyotes run with the herd.

Cows pay no attention.

I take a bead on one,

and Trickster says, “Caio, Dude!”

and weaves through my sights.

 

 

 

OM OM ON THE RANGE

 

I received a pamphlet advertising

an artificial vagina, a liquid semen

refrigerator, and a trans-jector

electronic ejaculator.

 

Comes with a lifetime warranty.

You wear it, you keep it.

 

 

 

CRITICS AREN’T AGREED

 

upon meaninglessness. Knowing

the tack helps in taming a maverick.

It’s some struggle, how to place

the what where. A running W

will put a horse on its knees.

 

 

 

RIGHT LIVELIHOOD

 

At first we were cowhunters.

Texas in the 1830’s. We were called

cowboys because of our youth.

Cowpokes poked cows to their feet

through the slats of the cattle cars.

A cow to a cowboy is anything

he can drive.

 

 

 

NOTES ON THE BACK OF A FEED BILL

 

FIRST INSCRIPTION: “Take that statue,

i.e. Hammarabi Code

I. Qualification

 A. Ontology

1. (  )

 ...O.  it’s base Overpowered

...6.023 times10²³

II.

A. Whitespace

1. Points to that which transpired”

...a broken odelisk

 

 

 

WASHINGTON SWINE SEMINAR

 

I write this from the Holiday Inn

where I attend the Eastern Washington

Swine Seminar. African Swine Fever is

an expanding threat to American hogs.

Note depreciation and shrinkage.

 

Between the ten year farm inventory

and depreciation allowance bit and

irrigation system design capacity functions

there’s a bluesy sax thing with moog rhythm

on the Musak.

 

 

 

GREEN PASTURES

 

I push water.

I keep the cowpies out of the corrugation.

I spread it out,

run it up hill if I can.

 

There’s an art to irrigation,

and the cows eat the grass,

and when they’re done

they move to greener pastures,

and then

there’s the delicing, tagging, dehorning

shots, shine and a shave.

 

 

 

DUKE’S MIX IN WINTER

 

One cow rubs her hip on the feeder,

one hits the dust bag, one butts an intruder.

 

Two magpies pick at frozen grain,

then walk like fat Z’s

towards the squeeze chute.

 

Fog filters the light,

sagebrush just visible over the hog pen.

 

Don’t fret—it’s a cow’s life.

There’s a growing cavie in your womb

singing for another bale of first cut hay.

 

A Surefire Heater in the water trough.

Dry snow caps each fence post.

 

 

LIVING WELL

 

October Family Circle

contains Mrs. Earl L. Butz’s

Russian Noodle Casserole.

 

Says Earl, “When my wife wants to be thrifty, we have casserole dishes.

They are very nutritious and very tasty, and I enjoy them. Anyway,

I’ve spent my whole life always eating what was put before me.”

 

 

 

EVOLVED AND ECLIPSED

 

I took my pigs for a walk,

two gilts and a young boar.

Kicking and barking

we frolicked in the fields.

 

The moon arose.

The moon descended.

The bear and the hunter,

the warrior, the lovers.

 

 

 

ECOLOGICAL HAZARD

 

If it weren’t for cats

the mice from the timothy fields

would create havoc. As it is

 

the cats shit everywhere.

 

 

 

BEEPER

for Theo and Elizabeth

 

Siamese, Himalayan, Persian

with schizoid face markings,

he’s only been outside once

and won’t wash his asshole.

 

He pisses on his tail,

and his farts are enough

to collapse my lungs.

He’s a stinker.

 

Theo sets up his dolls,

and Beeper dash-twists

into Big Jim’s camper

and out the side door.

 

A saber-tooth tiger strikes

Big Jim and Tonto at tea.

Big Jim looses a leg

and Tonto a hand.

 

As The Masked Man

readies his mount

a Delacroix feline

leaps on Silver.

Theo shouts, “Damnpissshit!”

I say, “Theo, watch the language.”

Beeper upchucks on my muckluks.

“Letmestranglethesonofabitch!”

 

Elizabeth comes from the kitchen

and soothingly asks us to cool it.

Theo points at the puke.

Elizabeth hands me a towel.

 

Tucked under the covers,

Beeper looks like Blake’s Tyger

with his long ancient whiskers.

He’s done his best.

 

 

 

LEARNING NEW WORDS

 

“Hey, Dad, what does this say?”

I look at the magnetic letters on the fridge.

 

AZOLE MOUSE.

“Naw, it says FUCKMOUSE, doesn’t it?”

 

That begins with an F.”

“What does a F  look like?”

 

“An E  without the bottom leg.”

“There is no F.”

 

“Let it stand as is. Now, off to bed.”

“How about a short poem, tonight, Dad?”

 

Yes, how about it.

 

 

 

TORTURELAND

 

Actually, it’s California.

“When you get there,” Theo says,

“they cut off your head.”

 

Big Jim, Tonto, and the Maskedman

stripped to their pivot joints

and wrapped in white paper and scotch tape.

 

These are torture hats, and they’re suffering

burning brands to subdue their wills.

Theo is getting at the truth.

 

“All right,” I say, “pick up this stuff.”

Theo, “But I want to save this torture stuff.”

“Here, put it in this torture baggie.”

 

 

 

CALF GRAFT

for Glen

 

Count the stock. And again,

still one heifer missing.

 

Down by the west fence line

four legs stick out of a catch ditch.

Eyes rolled back, nose bleeding,

my presence adding to her fear,

“Lay back, Cowslip, relax.”

 

More than I’d rope and tie,

I wrestle her to her feet.

Moaning, she makes for the feed.

She’ll be all right if she can walk and eat.

 

Telling my irrigating buddy,

he guesses I was some kind of lucky.

I see a hide hanging on his fence and

asked if he had lost one, he replies

“Just born and coughed up its guts.

Skinned it out and bought a new calf

off a cow with a blown udder.

 

Put this new calf in the dressed skin.

Cow finally took it for her own, after

I sprayed deodorant up her nose.

 

This morning I smell something dead,

that skin rotting from the calf’s heat.”

 

 

 

NOW IS LIKE THAT

 

Driving along 4th Parallel Road, I see

an Angus cow with placenta attached

and dangling umbilical cord, licking

the sack off her calf’s face.

 

The calf staggers and falls, and his mom

nudges him up and goes back grazing.

Like lightning the calf finds the tit.

My first birth of the season.

 

Around the calf there’s a beige halo.

Or maybe it’s just the light.

Maybe I should shave?

Leave the mustache?

 

 

 

A TUMBLEWEED CARRIES

ITS SHADOW TUCKED IN

 

Round-up is over, and the cattle are culled.

The fences rebuilt and the barbed wire stored. 

Now, I’m painting the barn.

 

I use an electric wire brush

to get off the peeling paint

until it catches on the fly of my overalls

and twists into my groin.

 

I’m out here on the Diamond Hanging J

Floating I Ranch

doing the Bred-Sow-Concentrate Rag.

 

                                                                              

 

NEW GRAVITY

for Cheri

 

Out there—

you walk on air

in your new gravity

 

No matter how

heavy

you’ll keep it up

 

ignoring signs

moving with your heart

 

.

 

A new gravity

 

Disagree, it looses

authority

 

.

 

Overheard—”Those people,

are you one of those, too?”

 

A leaf, you move out

into the open way

 

.

 

You have important things to do

and don’t want your life wasted

on detail

 

Live deep—summon

laziness,

a breeze, the shape

it comes forth in

 

.

 

Some go

the way you think

they might

 

So a leaf

in a warm wind

starts out—these are

orange rocks

 

These are also

rocks—that’s

the sky

 

and that’s

also a flower

 

.

 

Æolus operates—

lips moist, veins

filled with sunlight

 

Wind strikes a chord,

skirts bellow, and bodies

dance whether they want or not

 

.

 

Wind affects a single figure—

so many measures of one scale

then so many of another

 

Wheatfields augmented w/backroads

 

.

 

Fields come to meet me,

wires loose, the light harsh

 

I await a late bus

 

.

 

A sorrel gelding dreams

Hind hoof cocked under an apple tree

Bright apples against the leaves

 

A herd of Herefords steam and stamp

Chew their cuds and crap in place

Magpies pick the warmed grain

 

A John Deere tractor lugs up the track

Meeting a girl on an Appaloosa

The ploughboy raises a finger to his cap

Eyes clouded she trots pass

 

.

 

At rest, I stay at rest

until you enter

 

Do you have a date?

In a manner of speaking, you say

leaving for the Corner Stone

 

Sunday night at Rodeo

down on all fours in the shoots

 

.

 

The grass was brutal

compared to your caress

 

The mint rank

beside your scent

 

The creek’s chattering

overwhelmed our words

 

Earth loved us

 

.

 

Overhead

green shadows follow

the late afternoon

 

To my eyes

a field between

two firs

 

I listen to grasshoppers

Their thighs make clear sounds

in the stillness

 

.

 

The bobwhite bobwhites

and a bird called purplewreath

purplewreathes

 

Another, purple crepe, purple crepe

the chitbird’s chit chit chit’s heard

 

One sings drinkyourtea

one, takeoffyourunderwear

it’s spring

 

.

 

I hear voices, I see visions

but no matter how disordered my senses

I’m no fool—

or, if so, in the grand tradition

 

Knowing all lovers change

although I’d be the last

I try again to impress

my heart in yours

 

Let me move within you

by the reading of my gift

 

.

 

You will fulfill your goal

and be acknowledged, although

you may absorb much that is wrong

 

You will, by instinct, become an artist

if that is what you want

and be remembered for what is yours alone

 

.

 

You’ve got that bod

 

.

 

You are sensuous pleasure

your lips are loved

your clothes, doubly liquefactious

 

You were made to be laid

no matter some find that shameful

 

You have a rare, divine gift

to give love, transforming

what is base into grace

 

.

 

Hand on hand

smile on smile

 

I think and think

I do as I do

 

Unhealed, the hurt hurts

 

.

 

Everything in the past

was in the future once

 

What’s next?

 

“Tell me,” you say

“it’s not just DNA?”

 

.

 

Cool your feet in the Yakima

salute the sun, heat and dust

 

Let it pass.

 

1980

 

 

 

TRANSFORMATION

for Moonstone

 

The scene:  Everything is dense and gray

and out of the heaviness emerges a person

of the city who is met by a person of the forest,

a rishi, who sits by a fire, and the city dude

is covered by a winding cloth

 

Rishi:  Come closer to the fire, share the warmth

see it dance, it’s alive

Dude:  A fire, a real fire?  Why, it is a real fire !

(begins to unwrap the winding cloth, more is

removed as the scene proceeds) Reminds me of

when I was a boy

Rishi:  Do you believe trees can talk?  These

trees gave me the gift of wood and berries, so

I made this tea, so drink, and it will heal you

Dude:  Thank you, that’s a beautiful gesture,

thank you

Rishi:  Thank you, trees

Dude:  Do you live here?

Rishi:  This is my home

Dude:  Well, my house has been built to code,

with art and furniture and a digital TV, but I’m

so wrapped up in this business (tugs at cloth)

I’ve lost touch—I know I’m in here, but I can’t

seem to feel—don’t you miss the comforts?

Rishi:  I like things simple

Dude:  You don’t have any shoes

Rishi:  It’s warm, I like to touch the earth, the

purple rays come down from heaven, and the red

rays come up through your body, your left leg

brings up the red rays, and your right leg sends

down the purple, a perfect exchange, a massage

in every step, each step is different

Dude:  I’ll try (takes a few steps)—it’s lumpy

Rishi:  You’ll get used to it

(They dance and sing)  Walking on the earth

Walking on the earth

Walking on the earth

We find our way

           

                       

 

CONVALESCENT CONVERSATION

 

Jesse: I came from England.

Where did you come from?

Bessy: Why, Ellensburg, right here.

Where did you say you were from?

Jesse: England.

Bessy: Engleburg?

Jesse: England. English, I’m English.

Bessy: Oh, English, you’re English.

Jesse: That’s right, I’m English.

I came here sixty years ago.

Bessy: I’m from Ellensburg. I’m a native.

 

 

 

ROBBERS’ ROOST

 

through this valley

where robbers roost

 

I strive with systems

to free myself from systems

 

easy to see the irony—

implementation’s more severe

 

find a place where rent is low

gardens grow, pace is slow

 

in the end

it won’t matter

 

we can settle on a small

farm in Berkeley—

 

just a radioactive cow

and a few chickens

 

 

ORDINARY ADVENTURES

 

are composed of

remarkable

instances and strange

coincidences

 

Over the top—

the chickens fly the coup

 

 

 

LEAPS AND BOUNDS

for Lisa and Camille

 

leaps and bounds

the heart’s a kangaroo

 

a pouched animal

with a punch that’ll

 

knock you on your ass

eats grass

 

natives call’em

boomers

 

 

 

ANDY THE MECHANIC

 

Square Deal Andy

died of overwork.

He knew too much to be of use

in an up-to-date fix-it shop.

 

Square has negative connotations.

His art couldn’t be assimilated.

He has parked his rig

in the Maker’s garage.

 

 

 

ANCESTORS

 

Grandfather,

I speak for you—

I speak that you may live.

 

Of old,

I did not mind the death.

How long he had sat there,

the hunter with his sling!

 

His eyes on my every move,

he lured me near, and I went

that he would be fed.

 

But now,

they munch on energy bars

(I can read their litter)

and dress like billboards.

 

4X4s rut the roads.

Their radios cackle doom.

Their rifles scope in.

                                                 

 

FLAKE ON FLAKE

 

Love is its own

warmpth and strenkth.

 

Truth and mystery cross

on 3rd & Main.

 

Rigs gear for the coast

with cargoes of hay.

.

 

Through a vale,

across a pass,

down the trail,

my ass.

 

The map I was made

must’ve been meant

to get me lost

as the crow flies.

 

I make camp—

the light gets dark,

the dark, darker.

.

 

Hard to see

the truth.  Shaggy curves

in a fuzzy country.

 

Realm of the densely packed,

in turn a town with streets

that aren’t on any map.

.

 

I’m here

to glue pictures.

 

These bricks should look

like a baker laid them.

 

If it doesn’t look

like a child could built it,

it isn’t.

 

 

NOW THERE THEN

for Jan Mejer

 

Organically rising out

of common motor pools of 5

we find a new world

speaking a new language

 

Let’s look at it—

sky cloud bird

mountain ocean sun

smoke house man

street dog bike

 

No Bike Riding

On the Sidewalks

 

While visiting our community

Please adhere

To a meatless, eggless

Non-alcoholic diet

And abstain from smoking

Mind-altering drugs and

Unnecessary nudity

 

Dig in—be happy

this bizarre circus stretches

beyond metaphysics beyond

meditation beyond your great

grandmother’s condominium

 

 

AM I REPRESSED

 

or is this taking place

in a little espresso bar

along the peaceful Nile?

 

oh, I thought I saw

two shadows

 

I’m sorry—

I’m sorry, too

 

too much coffee

I’m damn jittery

 

.

 

we sit in a cool spot

amid the burning

 

the moon trine Uranus

 

.

 

miraculous water

partings,

waves splitting

finding

in the sand

the Pharaoh’s grave

 

a damn rib              

in her

icy stare

 

 

 

RODEO OF THE EQUINOX

 

There’s an urgency

to his line, the

tension meant to hold

 

a wonder. Orion

lassoes an Atlas-bred

heifer by the hoof.

Nearly tugging free

 

Sterope is tied

hard and fast

with hemp.

 

Not too shabby, all

agree, and space is

taut in admiration.

 

The Olympian buckaroo puts

a silver buckle on his belt.

 

Sterope licks

her burn in

the calf pen.

 

 

IT’S A MESS

                  

by the creek where I squat

with nosebleed after smacking

my face in the slash

 

a crisscross of fire-hardened

barbed sticks, o mama

the dead forest

 

and the hills

lush in bitterbrush and ceinosis

sea of noses

 

o mama

there’s no hope for the trees

 

.

 

slashier slash

rockier rock

 

this little unit

has snow on it

and’s unusable

 

out of shoot #1

it’s Flaming Hoedag

ridden by J. Root

 

o mama

there is hope for the trees

 

.

 

Orpheus instructs the treeplanters

Watch those scalps

Keep an eye on spacing

Don’t plant too deep

No J roots

I only want to see asses and elbows

 

.

 

We plant ahead of progress rates

into full pay with laurels

 

We’re paid to plant a tree,

and we’ll come back

and back again until it grows

 

The trees—

out of their depth

with this logic,

 

driven around in vans,

debated about like dots on a map

 

.

 

Go Fir It Reforestation

in the Land of Many Abuses

it’s well

 

trying to plant in a week

what, destroyed in a day,

took 1000 years to grow

 

 

 

AFTER THE VOLCANO

 

No need to go

outside—there’s

just ash out.

 

Quite a scene

at Joe Albertson’s

during the ashout.

 

A man with a towel over his head

wearing swimming goggles

stocks up on beer, another

wearing a surgical mask

carries an umbrella.

 

It’s dark.

We stay indoors and listen

to Orson Welles’

War of the Worlds.

 

After the Martian smoke settles,

trees drop their pyroclastic debris,

and birds start a new day,

although it’s a bit gritty.

 

 

OLD GROWTH

 

Mother is gaga,

limbs tied with tape.

 

No cedar to see, dear.

Can’t dial 911-rape.

 

 

SLASH

 

Hands at work,

sound of saws,

a drape of smoke.

 

Gaia grotesquely

posed, tossed flesh

that terrifies.

 

 

 

SYNTHESIS

for Bev Ombrek

 

O Mother Earth, O Father Sky

We bring you gifts, our step is light

Goddess of the Hearth

God of Sacred Ecstasy

Lord of the Dance

Goddess of Time

God of the Flowers

 

We give praise with costume & prop

With synthesizer, drum & tambourine

Clap your hands, slap your thighs

Stamp your feet

 

Let the Divine take possession

Be seized by the Strong Force

Tension release, catharsis reach

 

Fire leaps about the hearth

Clouds swirl across the sky

Water stalks the sand

Land rises and falls

Beast, plant, galaxy, atom

Dance is older than Love

 

 

WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?

for Alia

 

Here it is, your birthday,

and you’re 34. Four

is before five, bunnytoes,

 

and three is one

before four. Remember,

too, I’ll love you,

never counting the decades.

 

.

 

I see you see

beauty, as we

 

share sunrises,

join silences.

 

.

 

Sounds pathetic,

but back there

 

a goose merged with a gear,

a tick developed a number.

 

1981

 

 

 

ALL MIMSY WERE THE BOROGOVES

 

Feeling queasy having eaten

a handful of oriental party mix

and a dozen ginger snaps.

Just moved into this house.

New sounds—a grasshopper chirps,

but I think it’s the smoke detector

on the fritz.

 

2 a.m. I’m paranoid.

My dope sits in the open,

and I get a head change

discovering the grasshopper

in a crevice of my coffee table

right beneath my stash.

I can see the dude clearly

and my paranoia vanishes

because, now, I know

I’m not bugged by the narcs.

 

I sit down

to a thunderclap in the south

from the firing range

where the Army plays war games.

Laser wars.

Fluorescence and weird harmonics.

 

The wind picks up.

A helicopter passes overhead.

Sirens in town.

Maybe they’ve contacted Venus.

 

I meditate on my psychedelic posters.

Andy Warhol and His Plastic Inevitable

Plus the Mothers of Invention $2.00

Friday May 27 Filmore & Geary Streets

I’m relaxed and in a new groove.

 

The grasshopper chirps.

 

 

 

A HILL CALLED BRINGER OF LUCK

for Sybil

 

starting with day A and proceeding to F and backing back to B realizing F leads to U if you mean to get to C a Chinese box where you let me into a room with a door I can go through but you can’t and I let you into a room with a door you can pass through but I can’t

 

starting with pieces the book Pieces and your face the typeface I said I didn’t like it the boldness but your face was receptive and I liked it especially the freckles on your nose E dim of ME freken from ON freknur you perusing poetry and I assuming the role of the dark Host of the Ethereal and it was slow and easy standing there imagining a secret place at another time I get out of a car I get off a horse down the street from the Silver Dollar we enter a Quonset hut with a false front

 

you touched the omphallus of my heart and the current was sufficient to set the wheels pinging a new beginning merely by placing your hand on that slim volume the waters rushing apart and we begin to step out on real ground

 

I feel like I have the hands of a chimp signing to the barman for two beers finding seats by the ribs of the beast I take off to take a whiz wondering if I should leave you alone but noting the flag pinned to the curtain and the dark faces I know we are on native soil

 

the head is full of patrons pissing away the night four dudes at the bowl and one peeing the length of the trough three guys in front of me putting theirs under his arc and I try not to get hit thinking what a shot of the pool cue to find this corner pocket I observe there is no subject there is no object so I zip up to an accordion and guitars

 

I get out of a car I get off a horse on Umptanum Ridge and smoke while you change your shoes I wear galoshes lore on how to live in the woods and I step into the creek and feel the firmness and rhythm of your grip

 

you are a stranger in the twilight apprehensive I might strangle you with barbed wire in a hollow by a snag while I’m nagging myself for not bringing a compass since I’m into true north and I want to tell you about the Big Dipper how the Indians see a great bear looking for a place to lie down and the French see a casserole and the Egyptians a hippopotamus with a crocodile on its back asterisms the casserole the possible exception expressing ancient and astonishing wisdom

 

we have to re-evaluate the past but that seems like a lot to lay on you our first date so I talk about the contours of the land and you about the bouquet of bullet holes in an enameled stove and your childhood in Illinois the girls of Fairberry wanting to be on their own going to Bloomington to work at State Farm my grandparents lived nearby in Chenoa and the summer nights full of fireflies whose tails we pinched to make engagement rings and wearing sheets in abandoned farm house rooms like Klu Klux Klan and when the gypsies camp by the river and set up a sideshow my uncle makes them vamoose and my destiny goes with the fortune-teller

 

the Queen broods on her Byzantine chalice like me she’s dreamy like you she’s sympathetic to the man of dejected aspect deserting the cups of his felicity and all that I possess house and archives is riot reflected in the Chariot reversed

 

our treasures and our hearts are there when we begin a short hike that gets shorter and shorter as we climb scree it is wise of me to show you sage by rubbing the leaves in my palms no matter the waterfall is out of reach hunters shoot at the cliffs kids roll rubble from a cave the site of the archeological dig is a mystery nature at her best is a blast of sage

 

I get out of a car I get off a horse and walk beside you a woman a man talking about rock we stop by a standing stone describing the basalt formation in antediluvian times but it leaves out how each star of the Big Dipper of each constellation has several kinds of influence each star has a form in the landscape

 

driving along riding along everything shimmering the branches in the field vine maple? elderberry? wild rose sage rose rose of the desert a red shimmering along the road I saw it and you were happy I saw it too even if I didn’t know what it was

 

1983

 

 

NIGHT DELUGE

 

I see you in white shorts sitting

in your white Pinto on red upholstery

me wanting to kiss you

but standing back, awkward

 

I see your hand outstretched

returning the money I loaned you

wind blowing through as I bend to take

what you owe me

 

I don’t know who is served

by me going broke in devotion to you

yet it’s a wonder you haven’t told me

to shove off

 

Hard to have it like you like it

when nothing’s real until it’s real

and then it’s real forever—I pull up

on my Harley

 

just when you think you’re going

to get some rest

and now you’re cruising without a clue

there’s another gear

 

 

 

BY THE NUMBERS

 

“Numerologically,” you say

Jell-O is a 9”

 

I feel displaced

and circle your room

asking your opinion

giving you gifts

 

Easy to get caught again

thinking there is something

I can do

 

“I can understand,” you say

“your love and hate”

 

 

 

LOVE’S WAY

 

Two eyes look at two eyes

two hands play a simple air

the wind, hot and dry

blows through your hair

 

.

 

Love’s way is a ricochet

if you’d allow a kiss now

it’d be synchronicity

 

.

 

We conjugate the tenses

of the body’s language

relax, love, it’s true

love is senses—nonsense

and double sense intensely

 

.

 

I fly high, I fly low—

questions in the sky

answers in the snow—

love is not less for falling

 

.

 

You’re hot—you’ll be hot

when you’re 50

saying, “I’m hot, God, it’s hot

this house is hot

this cup looks like hell

and I’m drinking from it

but it’s cold and wet”

 

 

 

CHANCES

 

Life is huge and cruel,

and at best we get a chance to dance.

Let’s turn it upside down—

life’s up, down and crosswise.

No one knows why

but you and I.

So, why hide behind disguises?

 

.

 

Love of love makes the poet mad.

He dies and makes death wise.

 

.

 

I called my love false love—

but what she said then,

“Sing Pine, Sing all a Pine”

let no one blame her.

I invite her scorn.

What next? Who knocks?

It is the wind.

 

 

HERMIT AND TROUT

for Beryl

 

I’m a hermit

talking to a trout.

I touch you softly,

and you dart away.

 

I can’t make you

make up your mind,

although I’ve caught

your heart in a net.

 

You might love me

since I’m someone

you can love

more than yourself.

 

It’s September,

and the laughter

of the leaves

mocks me.

 

 

 

AS ABOVE , SO BELOW

 

He wants to know my birth time for an astrological chart. 

I thought I knew where I had put my birth certificate,

but when I look I can’t find it, although I find the kids’

Social Security cards and the numbers I need for my loan.

 

He’s says a Gemini generally has a lot of boyfriends

and goes steady with one or more each week, says I’m

searching for a soul-mate or another side to myself.

He’s older and wise with intense blue eyes.

 

He’s laid back against the door of my closet

and holds a glass of white wine, twirling the liquor

in the glass with the Gemini twins painted in gold

and tells me what I need in a lover.

 

He’ll stay up all night talking with me, remember the words

to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,”

tell me I’m the most beautiful woman in the world

when I look like a dead horse. 

 

This guy is hot for me and wants to wait on me hand and foot.

I’m chain smoking generic lights, and I can hardly breathe. 

I’m weirded out. I can feel the bones of my skull in my head. 

I wish I could dissolve into nothing in peace.

 

1986

 

 

 

SECRET SPOT

 

We are redeemed in Paradise

my tongue in you

now now now

buzz talk

I drink you

and we explode

in this mortal bed

what is this lightness?

 

 

 

 

WE LOVE EACH OTHER

 

you just coming

out of a drunk

frightful bitch

in a dark funk

 

you see me

as amigos

 

see yourself

as we

 

see us

as them

 

I’m deaf, but I hear you

 

 

 

ORDINANCE

 

selected for you

the blue dressing gown,

and far away

the cannon fire.

 

Mrs. President,

the neck is seen

in its cloud rack.

 

The moon is ice.

 

The moon lifts up

and like ice

is fixed.

 

 

 

BY DINT

 

I tried to teach you

what I know,

 

and you said

goodbye for good.

 

I tuned my lyre

to a minor key,

 

and you shot

a hole in my foot.

 

 

 

BERYL

 

like her who

or like her who

 

she who

came to

 

a bag of clothes

a bag of booze

 

o days, o rocks

music seeing her

 

 

 

RED LIGHT, BLUE LIGHT

 

Do you want it back?

 

Do you, do you

want it

back?

 

“No, I want it

where it’s at.

I want it

 

Exactly where’s at.”

 

 

 

BERYL ON THE ROCKS

 

I like the rocks.

I like everything

on the rocks.

 

I like hard rock.

I like Rachmaninoff.

 

I’ve had it straight.

I’ve had it mixed.

 

What I really want

is having it on the rocks

 

beneath the stars.

 

 

 

EREWON

 

Zeroing-in on

the many that are one,

a place

 

where the parts

are not knowable

for the hole.

 

Halve what you have,

enough is enough.

“Good morning, nice day!”

 

 

 

WINTER FOREST

 

January 25th, Saturday, 5 p.m.

Sun 05° Aquarius opposed the Moon

Winter transmutes Craig’s Hill

dense and gray—a dead forest

 

Ethan and Barb and Steve

Tom and Sharon and Jill

circle dance around

the water tower

 

when you touch Earth

red rays rise through your body

when you walk you bring

purple rays down from Heaven

 

meanwhile

I’m drinking Jack Daniels

with a little water

while they dance and chant

 

explaining how, if you’d let me

I’d let you...

when we go in for the hydrogen bomb

 

and it is embarrassing

standing here in a white shirt

with debris falling, yes

 

it’s a long day

if you have an extra sunrise

and a long night

with ultra-violet spring

after a nuclear winter

 

1986

 

 

 

SLOWLY

for Marcie       

 

Can we stay in orbit

without spinning out?

Can we touch

without getting a rash?

Lasagna and yogurt

baked together.

 

.

 

Are you crazy?

No, I love you.

You love everyone.

There’s only one you.

You’re crazy.

 

.

 

Slowly, at a snail’s gallop, we move

between the ocean and the moon.

You’d think we were kiss-proof.

 

.

 

Living in the æther,

one another in the other,

we’re hiding from the void outside.

 

.

 

You’re in your tower,

addled on Freud.

I hear the celestial choir

and beyond.

 

.

 

I’m going west.

Let’s meet in the east.

 

.

 

New York’s the most

expensive place to live.

I’ll get some special shoes

to live in when it’s cold.

.

 

I feel you close,

continuous, and on both sides.

I’d have you stay,

but you ride away.

 

Why does the light dissolve

after we’ve parted?

 

.

 

You’re the breath of  the

in Do the Right Thing.

You can swim more laps

than a black she-devil.

 

You can swim more laps

than I can write poems.

Let’s melt with longer laps,

stronger strokes.

 

.

 

Riddled by love,

shot full of shafts,

I fly through the roof

into a night of stars.

 

Stay—like a star

until dawn.

Turn,

but return.

 

 

 

CURVE OF WIND

 

Rosco and I wait for the fishermen to return.

I sit on a bench and watch the clouds change shape. 

Rosco has my belt around his neck and tow chain hooked to a tree. 

Dogs must be on a leash.

Ducks and rabbits are loose.

 

A teenage girl wearing white shorts sunbathes in the light breeze. 

I see one cloud as Tristram reclining

and a small round cloud as a cup he is proffering to Isoude. 

The girl listens to her Walkman and glances my way.

I cannot reduce her pubescent curves to mythological planes.

 

A tall, burly boy with his gray tee-shirt cut along his ribs

carries an armload of boxes and kicks a couple towards a fire pit.

A dramatic and disruptive act.

 

Above them the clouds move ahead in a larger current.

The breeze off the lake takes up the huge cardboard ashes

and sprinkles them on the girl. 

“Thanks, Ron,” she says, getting up and shaking her towel.

“I’m just trying to help out,” he snickers from his pickup truck.

 

A couple of rabbits hop by. 

Rosco can’t even lift his head with the weight of the tow chain. 

The rabbits disappear under the porch of the Mt. Baker store.

 

Still no fishermen, and the cloud that was Isoude

has become a free spirit and will not drink from the cup.

 

1989

 

 

 

ANGEL

 

You dreamt you saw frozen DNA,

but really it was an angel, coiled

and waiting to be discovered

in the palace of your mind.

 

 

 

BIRTHDAY

for Tresa

 

A Sagittarius, you won’t believe

romantic love is invented.

 

All your cluttered days

culminate in this fact.

 

When friends come to the door,

your living room breathes.

 

The cake says, “Have a happy life.” 

Voices bubble like champagne.

 

You open your presents, laughing,

and risk another line.

 

 

 

 

NATURE HAS NO MEMORY

 

Nature has no memory.

The past vanishes like winter wind.

I look out your window,

down the steep hill shadowed

deep with leaves.

I gaze on the sun,

a lake of joy and pain.

Can I trust the day?

 

 

 

SURE SIGN

 

We are alone in your home,

talking of this and that. We are

the only reality.

 

It’s winter, and it’s warm.

Our hopes are upside down

like chickadees in a tree.

 

This is a sure sign

spring has come in December.

 

 

 

ASTRAY

 

It begins with the sun going down.

Venus flings off her gown.

 

Who is drowned

emerges from the sea of drunken illusion.

 

Astray, I am an atom

twirling.

 

 

 

HEART, HOW CLOSE YOU ARE

 

If you seek me,

look towards the lake.

I have fled from the zoo.

 

This time, I am myself.

My pheromones

are having a field day.

 

 

 

INTERIOR ROSE

for Beryl

 

I turn myself into a bar room.

Drunks roll from my armpits.

 

Awake all night in the gray light,

smudges become masterpieces.

 

.

 

I see you see clearly as we share solitude.

 

The body will decay.

Don’t delay.

 

Our words make light everywhere we look.

 

The body will decay.

Don’t delay.

 

.

 

I like you liking me.

I like it. I like it.

I like it.

 

I could be in Mexico.

A voice says, “Go,”

but I can’t resist

 

being here with you.

I like it. I like it.

I like it.

 

 

 

BOX

 

I’m in a room

with a door

you can go through

but I can’t.

 

You’re in a room

with a door

I can go through

but you can’t.

 

Now, I see your face

in another place

and hear the echo

of your voice.

 

I’m trying to say

just how I feel,

but a mist

surrounds my song.

 

 

 

ELEMENTAL

 

Two friends

near

this fire.

 

You here,

I there

in a garden

 

of fire.

 

 

 

GIFTS

 

Here’s a sprig of pungent artemista.

 

I would also give a sun dog

and the moon, low and round,

the green shade of Manastash cliffs

and the almost voice of Taneum creek.

 

I send sage from my desert to yours.

 

 

 

MAID OF MIST

for Laura

 

Something small,

the size

of a star.

Did you make a wish?

Far away,

far, far away.

Hard, hard

like a star.

 

.

 

A miss, a

mysterious maid

made of mist.

A face that enters

my dreams

and a kiss

I miss

when awake.

 

.

 

Look up,

both ways,

and down.

Splendor balanced

quietly.

Her voice,

a carriage

of song.

 

.

 

Love sighs,

never,

forever.

The world is small,

the heart huge.

Love signs,

never,

forever.

 

.

 

Pices

quivers

on the horizon.

Venus exalted,

her dream is deep.

She fairly

bristles

with romance.

 

.

 

She walks

to work

on the stars,

a goddess

in her constellation.

Believe me,

the stars

are really there.

 

.

 

The stars,

music, joy

in all weather,

and those few moments

we made real.

Under your heart,

I long

to suffer.

 

.

 

Look up,

both ways,

and down.

Morning warmth,

wet mist weighing on me.

So it is—my love

is earthy.

 

.

 

She walks

to work on

the stars.

Love’s location

is hidden

within

the tiniest

of spaces.

 

 

 

VISTA

 for Laura

 

Does love hurt?

—Yes, it hurts.

 

.

 

Half cloud

half wave

 

Half sand

half moon

 

If I don’t suffocate,

I’ll drown.

 

.

 

Sometimes a little

sometime much

sometimes nothing.

 

.

 

What is to love, what

does it mean?

 

If I say “I love you,”

need this be true?

 

What kind of mistake

is there room for here?

 

.

 

Baffled,

I try to walk

backwards,

see backwards.

 

The leaves lighten

and grow

visible.

 

Light

filters down.

 

.

 

Feeling is a path,

and when the path splits,

you must sit

 

and be quiet

until the ground

trembles.

 

.

 

To say “I love”

is not the same

as what I feel.

 

The sense is not

the sentence,

but the words

are enough.

 

.

 

Would you be

the one, the only

one near?

 

Were you here

I would fill you

with my words.

 

.

 

I don’t mean to wheedle,

flatter or maneuver.

 

You are in my poem, your

presence, strong and real.

 

 

 

DARK ORDER

for Karen

 

Moonchild, woman

of innocence,

no love but yours

will tame me.

 

Your beauty is

enough to sacrifice

a hart upon a stone,

enough to turn a heart

to stone.

 

Somewhere in the sea

the fish are awake.

Between the stars

there is laughter.

 

Telling you

you are beautiful

is my job.

 

 

 

SOUL LIGHT

for Naomi

 

It’s after midnight,

hours since I came home

and sat thinking—

hours since I came home,

your blue eyes still before me.

 

It’s after midnight.

Time has passed.

 

I think with my feelings.

Encountering each tiny sensation,

I gather up the warm truths

and the sad ones in the late light.

 

 

 

IN FIRST LIGHT

 

Covered in colored scarves,

you dance,

alone but not lonely,

in a desert, harsh and gray.

 

Crows fly up, and I divine

your name in their flight.

The world’s new and true and lovely,

nothing else to be.

 

 

 

WATERDOWNSTONE

for Heidi

 

We compare our scars

and talk for hours.

 

You sit, I spin.

Love looks through love.

 

.

 

Our dream

will not

sleep.

 

Feeling

jogs us

awake.

 

I hold you,

my heart,

and sing

 

a fool song

to renew

the day.

 

.

 

You want

your plan

to work,

 

your luck

to change,

a miracle to come.

 

I open my heart,

right or wrong,

and sing this song.

 

 

 

GREEN FEELING

 

The rain comes down

on our sunny days.

 

We grow old,

and all we know

 

is memory.

 

Like a dumb snail

we listen to the sky.

 

Our passions

break through to

 

the warmth

and breathing

 

of a fresh, green feeling.

 

 

 

AFTERNOON FEELING

 

An afternoon feeling

brought into the light

the instant I looked

into your eyes.

 

A need to continue,

minute overlapping minute,

no logic to it—

to focus an obscure desire.

 

 

 

DANDELION WISHES

 

You laugh

with the thunder

circling the moon.

 

You see

backlit cows hanging

upside down in the sky.

 

You ride the wind

making dandelion

wishes.

 

You try to flee

but return, sealed

in a green cell layer.

 

 

 

ALL WAYS

 

Always young

always high

 

Maid of earth

made of sky

 

You with starlight eyes

I with voodoo ways

 

I do what I do

to be with you.

 

 

 

FOURWINDS

 

At the Fourwinds

we enter the bourn

that true friendship is.

The table tilts—

we orbit the sun and moon

body, voice and mind

bright, blesséd, kind.

 

But this is bubblegum,

you complain,

where are the dirty feet,

the fish floating belly up?

The table tilts—

no killing the monkey in the hall

or the worm in the rotten wall.

 

Now mild and restrained,

now wild and unreined,

we talk, and our words make light.

 

 

 

SO

 

Even we

even so

 

The candle burns

the candle burns

 

 

 

MOONRIDER

for Sherry

 

In the swing, I can smell

apples in your hair

and, faintly, some

deeper secret in that scent.

 

The catalysis of passion

the passion of love

the crystalography of love

the beauty of passion

the catalysis of beauty—

 

A formula I incant

to induce sleep.

You can’t sleep,

yet nothing awakens you.

 

Moonlight becomes you.

You become moonlight.

Darkness makes a woman

from shadows.

 

 

 

COOKIN’

 

Love is composed

of basic ingredients—

 

shared solitude,

clean sheets,

 

and the fire

in our bones.

 

 

 

EVERYTHING

 

Everything’s

the world.

 

Everywhere

it’s happening.

 

Everything is

everywhere.

 

 

 

TWO ROSES

 

Two roses in the park

two noses in the dark

 

Flowers blooming

in and out—

 

Monsters moving

in and out—

 

Sometimes I think

it has been a fall scene

 

A false scene

since the very beginning

 

Two roses in the park

two noses in the dark

 

 

 

TWO FRIENDS

 

Two friends sit

near this fire

counting stars.

 

Ears hear fire.

Eyes see light

here in this air.

 

Garden of stars,

garden of fire,

garden of air.

 

 

 

WALKING

 

You have a quick mind

and soft lips

 

I have a soft mind

and quick lips

 

Walking up Maple

crossing to Alder

 

“A Hawthorn?”

“No, a Russian Olive.”

 

Around us, the leaves

fall all fall long

 

 

 

DO I HEAR TRUMPETS?

 

Do I hear trumpets

or is it thunder?

 

Shadowy letters flicker

The End—

crazy

 

Inside and out,

just totally black

 

I’m not sure

if I should take a walk

or lean back

 

 

 

MARCH OF REDS

 

A march of reds

and yellows

in a marsh of reeds

 

A marshmallow

over an open fire

in Indian summer

 

We really should know

where the nearest firehouse

is located

 

 

 

SILENT LANGUAGE

 

The touch of my tongue

on your lip

 

Your palm on the curve

of my hip

 

A cut rose in a vase

an invisible rose growing here

 

 

 

REAL

 

I’m glad you too

like to hug and kiss

trees

 

A man and a miss

in bliss—

this’s what this is

 

 

 

STUNNED SUNRISE

 

a stunned sunrise

the sky bloody and bruised

 

make my bed—

I’ll be ok

if I can get up

 

the rest

is gallows humor

 

 

 

EYES THAT CRY

 

eyes that cry

lips that kiss

awake to bliss

 

everything to see

forget

and see again

 

 

 

YOU GAVE ME A RING

 

you gave me a ring

turned my finger green

 

if you want

you’ll get close

 

if you don’t

you won’t

 

silence in the roar

silence I can hear

 

 

 

AT THE BLACKHAWK

 

lovers holding hands

sipping rum & coke

 

soft bob caress

 

wailing

lifting

wailing

drifting

 

 

 

DRIVING ALONG

 

driving along, riding along

everything shimmering

 

the branches in the field

vine maple? elderberry?

wild rose, sage rose

rose of the desert

shimmering along

 

you are happy

I see it too, even if

I don’t know what it is

 

 

 

F YOU C K

 

she’s in a hammock

between two willows

jeans cutoffs and bandana

for a top

 

she says, “If you see Kay,

tell her I want her.”

 

sweat on my face

I stand there—

I’m 14 and don’t get it

 

 

 

UP BEFORE FOUR

for Marjie

 

she’s up before four

stirring up dust

rising with the cows

raising the weather

 

this also, stretching

far enough—

as far as necessary

to find her joy

 

 

 

SPACE OUT

 

I space out

in the dayroom I

 

beat myself, so they

put on a helmet

 

bite at the face guard

in the blackness

 

after all

madness is only madness

 

 

 

DREAM

 

I wander in a dream

near the ocean’s edge

 

How did this crab

get in my mouth?

 

Defiled by the thing

a puppet on a string

 

Yakity yak

yakity yak

 

Every second second

yakity yak

 

 

 

CLOUDS

 

clouds

like smoke

like mist

like smoke

 

feathers

smoke

fur

smoke

 

perhaps

each

 

 

 

LIGHT ON LIGHT

 

light on light

a river of light

a bank of light

a forest of light

 

sharing this sunset

silence is a world

of feeling

whirling through light

 

 

 

BLUE LIGHT

for Sandra

 

trying to talk of love

I struggle with words

tied to my heart

 

only afraid love

will end, love

let us be

 

blissful as bees

in the buzz

of honey making

 

.

 

long night

morning sun—

lady in blue

nice to see you

 

dressed in diamonds

your best suit

ready for business

hardass business

 

harder than diamonds

 

.

 

blue lady

passed through

 

lilac in winter

a wave of blue air

 

.

 

my life goes on

going and going

 

I watch the moon

on snow tonight

blue light

 

bright blue light

 

.

 

sunny moon

several shades of blue

a face whose lips say

she loves me

 

destiny at my fingertips

infinity a little way—

beyond the stars

 

 

 

SHIFTED      

 

a distortion

in the fog

 

a man without

form

 

a man with

one arm

 

a man with

one lip

 

an old man

I finally understand

 

 

 

INSURED

 

lines of light

run off to the bay

 

this house—

comfortable

 

like the face

I live in

 

there’s a medical

clause...

 

the longest steps

are those to home

 

 

 

BELOW THE RAD LAB

 

slanted rain falls

on blank flowers

in a mechanical garden

 

I have desperation

I walk like a dog

without shifting my gaze

 

 

 

HOME

 

dust piles up

 

I don’t think

we’ll ever get unpiled

 

we have a full house

 

I think we need

four big aces

 

to go under

our big asses

 

 

OK

 

if I can

get up

 

if not

I’ll crawl

 

all the way

to Australia

 

 

 

PAGOSA SPRINGS: 1994-1997

 

 

 

TOO MANY HORSES, NOT ENOUGH SADDLES 

for Richard Running Deer

 

Where do you come from?

Before anything

there was dirt

a breast-shaped mountain

a valley, a plain

just dirt

 

Mother Nature wearing

a dress with many pockets

looks over the land

and bends low

moving her hands

she makes clouds

 

Taking seeds from her pockets

she throws a few here

some there, some in the valley

pfff, pfff, pfff

some on the plain, pfff, pff

and on the mountain, pff

she stands up and the clouds leave

and she calls Father Sky

“Bring the sun over here”

this is on the first day

 

On the second day

she takes a look

and makes adjustments

she says to Father Sky

“Take the sun back

back further, over there!”

and she takes some seeds

from a pocket way in the back

that she’s never used before

pfff, pfff, over here

pfff, pfff over there

 

Mother Nature is a lot like us

she’s never satisfied

always making corrections

pfff, pfff, pfff

Then she takes the water people

from a pocket near her hem

and sets them to one side

and the winged people

and the four-legged people

from yet other pockets

she takes the two-legged people

and sets them to one side

and says, “Pay attention

don’t say anything

watch what I do

and I’ll explain later”

 

This story goes on

Mother Nature adds

and subtracts, she points

the water people toward the valley

and the four-legged people

to the mountain and the plain

the two legged people

beg her to have their place

but first she tells

the winged people

to fly over the land

and report back to her

 

She invites the leaders

of the peoples to a circle

the Bear tells the humans

“I will give you wisdom

but you can’t hunt me”

the Elk offers bones

for tools and hides for clothes

and meat for food

the Fish promises

to keep the river water clean

and the Eagle to carry

messages to the Great Spirit

 

And the story goes on

for a long time

and I may have forgotten

a part, like about Coyote

promising to be a teacher

 

The Conquistadors come

with their firesticks

and the Bluecoats with their rifles

now, we’re in the time

of the third language, T.V. land

and Mother Nature looks over

the breast-shaped mountain

at Bobcat bounding

from an alter at Tara Mandala

 

A new moon

yip yap and yowl of Coyote

screech of Hawk

and drumming sounds

from a yurt at the base

of the Continental Divide

east meets west

we’re back to basics

wood and water, water and wood

the energy of vajra

song and dance

 

Our love of the land

is our comfort and strength

this the Ute people know

this the Buddha people know

the sangha is a circle

here is where we are from

awake to the scent of rabbitear sage

ears hear fire, eyes see light

all one taste

garden of fire, garden of stars

garden of air

 

1994

 

 

 

RIGHT TO THE POINT

for Anne

 

what is the point

of low self-esteem

power facades

one crises after another

when you’re dead?

 

spirit, sex, neither

either—

it’s my decision

not to manipulate

confuse or harm

 

 

 

CLEAR

for Bonnie

 

capricious horses graze

on pure mountain air

you lay on a bed

of pinecones and roses

the horses laugh

the river flows both ways

look where we live

 

 

 

WHAT WHERE IS HERE

for Jillian

 

I drive to Fairfield

a fair field

I drive to Riverside

a river side

 

I turn right, then left

our spirits meet

you laugh, I laugh

perfection is infectious

 

 

 

METHOD IN THE MADNESS

for Jane

 

I write, then I type

I retrieve, I retype

I cut and paste

images of real objects

 

a process of recovery

and discovery

a contemplation of silence

in this maelstrom of violence

 

 

 

POST-DOGMATIST PUDDLE

for Cecil

 

all in order

on a plate of gas

Maxwell House

is avant-garde

 

 

 

PAINTING CLOUDS

for Pricilla

 

Clouds are familiar sensations

only their positions are uncertain

 

A pink diver circles Squaretop

a dark hood caps Little Brother

 

A chorus line of kachinas high step

a bony dakini drinks from a skullcup

 

Soft clouds become hard

quiet clouds become loud

 

Lightning has struck her, so

she sings while she paints

 

 

 

ONCE

for Lynda

 

we would go

backhorse riding

when the horses

 

were boys

and the cows

were girls

the dogs were boys

 

and the cats were girls

et cetera

the ducks and the geese

the birds and the bees

 

et cetera

I was also pretty sure

Einstein wrote the Bible

 

later, things got complicated

 

 

 

TRANSITION

for Shannon

 

I make this a song

that vanishes woes

uncurses all wrong

and banishes foes

 

I turn the clock ahead

“Hello, Springtime”

 

 

 

AFRICA

for Richard & Ilsa

 

when you come back

bring me a spear

when you come back

bring me a drum

 

when you come back

bring me a leopard

when you come back

bring me a spot of soul

 

bring me back, bring me back

Africa, Africa, Africa

 

 

 

WHATEVER IT TAKES

for Bruce

 

creations of ordinary reality

don’t forget to burn the sun

 

do whatever it takes

to get that steak to your plate

 

 

 

SAMSARA AND NIRVANA

for Kim

 

she’s a buddha

who uses aloevera hand cream

I’ve heard her say

 

“I need money”

then point to a double rainbow

in my heart

 

 

 

FURNITURE POEM

for Steve

 

start with two marks

wisp of a world

 

on the cusp of chaos

and in this corner

 

a hint of disclosure

about a continent in stasis

 

ambient poetry

elevator murmurs

 

 

 

SHRINE FOR JIMI HENDRIX

for Denise

 

a diamond guitar

spirals out of Sagittarius

 

a god in his constellation

digs the celestial choir

 

moving east

to meet in the west

 

 

 

DEJA VOODOO

for Ashlee

 

o never always

would the mind

let go

 

even the grass

will attain

liberation

 

 

 

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE

for Corinne

 

waiting at the Liberty

how long have I been waiting

how long should I wait

 

am I early

am I late

or am I?

 

 

 

WARM LIGHT

for Brent

 

spring soon

still winter

 

still winter stillness

the brown ground moves

 

bees have no attainment

bees have no non-attainment

 

 

 

 

OUR NATURAL VIEW

for Ivy

 

nectar to our eyes

Chimney Rock, Archuleta Ridge

and the Continental Divide

 

as exotic as Crete

or a grotto on Molokai

we give our blues to the sky

 

.

 

to be and not to be

to be is not to be

 

flower of life

heartstream

 

do you remember

that rock, was it mica?

 

only a sparkle

only a sparkle left

 

.

 

flower of light

being of flight

small birds arriving

 

we stop to look at cows

a magpie hops across

a longhorn

 

.

 

you have a quick mind

and soft lips

 

I have quick lips

and a soft mind

 

that which is soft

penetrates that which is hard

 

promises

promises

 

 

 

TURN BEAUTY TURN

 

scandalous beauty

looks into her mind

 

with lion’s breath

she chants

 

I’m not one

I’m three

 

you have to love

all of me

 

.

 

scandalous beauty

looks into her mind

 

spaced out, she sees

light in everything

 

so odd to reject

what’s in the offering

 

.

 

scandalous beauty

looks into her mind

 

in yabyum

she faces front

 

I’m just you, Dad

with a cunt

 

.

 

scandalous beauty

looks into her mind

 

we know nothing

of one another

 

nothing

each is alone

 

.

 

high flavor, low flavor

one taste, no taste

 

white trash beauty

looks into her mind

 

garlic is the polka

of spaghetti

 

.

 

white trash beauty

you have flayed me

and beaten me with a club

 

I count my days

bite my hand and embrace

emptiness

 

.

 

you draw an arrow

I turn towards my bed

 

shot by the jealousy

in my thought

 

winds ravage within

outside

 

birds crack jokes

 

.

 

redhead

I see you at the drugs

buying ginseng wrinkle cream

 

I smell your hair

and despair sweeps me

into a lair of sea monsters

 

.

 

how can there be

such clarity and bliss

in weariness

 

terrified, I stand in fire

having ridden the wind

and kept your memory

 

.

 

are love and fear

indivisible? 

 

I give you a kiss

you bite my head off

 

sentiment

filled with appetite

 

.

 

the sun is seen

the fun begins

 

stir blood

in a conch shell

 

when the lower part

of the moon appears

 

dance wildly

in the flames

 

.

 

no boundaries

no barriers

 

love is a dark healing

unclean but holy

 

 

 

PARTY DOWN, ANASAZI

for Gaela

 

KYPHI

 

an Egyptian scent

earthy and sensual

 

a prayer to unlock

my mother’s suffering

 

she’ll walk in beauty

silk sent into sunlight

 

 

NAZCA SERAPH

 

weaving illusion

and it could change

 

bird form

spider spirit

 

weaving illusion

and it could change

 

 

OSHUN

 

daughter of the mountain

river goddess, source of joy

 

new moon, love shines

jewels drums mirrors

 

new moon, lamp of love

love shines in your mirror

 

 

MANU

 

manu, bird

manu wai, water bird

 

huruing wuhti

rock clay hardstuff

 

manu wai huruing wuhti

water bird radiant in clay

 

 

NAGA JEWEL

 

rock cut with sand

really blasted

 

snake arising

egg arriving

 

snakesong, eggsong

rock beyond this world

 

 

WORO

 

dancing green woman

plant spirit stone

 

laughing green woman

tracing her shadow

 

singing green woman

“I really love men”

 

 

CHACO RIVER BEING

 

what is it

gives pleasure

 

in a minim?

don’t ask

 

let’s not

force it

 

 

NEPAL

 

a place setting

a place of heart

 

circle a mountain

ride a thunderbolt

 

an awakening

an Ah

 

 

MASK OF YORUBA

 

a reminder of innocence

an initiation

 

beadwork looking cool

each bead is a friend

 

cowrie shell, Orisha kiss

life stone of the dakinis

 

 

MYSTERY OF MUSIC

 

nest of the bird goddess

Sumer 3000 BC

 

first born, first known

woman and spirit

 

this side and that side

rock paper song

 

 

STONEBONES

 

water lines

dream lines

 

song lines

ley lines

 

bones in stones

an oracle speaks

 

 

 

SANTA ROSA & SEBASTOPOL: 1998-2000

 

 

 

 

PEBBLES

 

we are born

to dream

 

we wake

was there something

fluttering?

 

I was going to ask, but

it must have been a dream

 

.

 

too much

or not enough

 

a sound

we cannot hear

 

.

 

swift

clear

sure

final

 

.

 

time and loss

two worlds

 

in and out

 

.

 

held together

the great

the small

by light

 

.

 

mountain and wave

lip and leg

a relationship

of man and woman

and moonlight

 

.

 

in this light

to sit with you

in rest

 

so it is

happiness pours out

like a yellow rose

 

.

 

a glance

becomes

a gaze

 

.

 

one day, yes

another, no

 

.

 

your refusal and departure

swift, sure and final

an injury so severe

nothing can be done

 

except massage my heart

 

.

 

I hold your picture

to my lips

 

your eyes, lips, eyes

 

.

 

in memory of

bug hovering evenings

and the touch of

a cinematographer

 

.

 

apocalypse now

a pair of lips now

 

.

 

I feel like I’m a walking

Freudian soap opera

 

.

 

words of my perfect T-shirt

Don’t Worry

Be Hopi

 

.

 

a skylark in a field

of larkspur

 

.

 

I listen

I feel

I hurry

 

 

 

ON THIS SIDE OF THE PASS

 

On Borgo Pass

suddenly the light divides

and the land on one side

rises to heaven

and on the other falls

no one knows where

—Nosferatu

 

grandeur of dawn in transparent gold

dreamthoughts caught in a net

dew on grass

teakettle whistles shrill

færies to the high ground

time for tea and scones

 

the world is swinging to and fro

and I am standing still

the yellow sky fills with clouds

in this cataclysmic bliss tornado

time has stopped

 

and the tiny spasm by which we hang

becomes an abyss where phantoms nourish

on a child’s prayer

 

I follow the lines of my desire

beauty reflected on surfaces and mirrored

by the crazy monkey of mind

no matter what vampire light appears

 

I drink my tea and eat my scone

 

 

 

BEATING AGAINST THE ROCK

for Lisa

 

gold from the heart

boundless light upward

outward downward

flowers of obsession

 

a promise in the blood

joy in the stones

in tune with our touch

sphinx-like spirit

 

an eye an apple

an oyster a thousand miles

from the sea still feels

the tug of the moon

 

in this bowl of noodles

moon outside moon within

gaze on the dripping light

hear the voice of a star

 

why does the universe exist?

no single answer to this

a bouncing bubble

a ball of strings

 

by all means wear pearls

while you vacuum

and a diamond crown tiara

when you change the cat’s box

 

 

 

 

TAKES ON A BLUE SET

 

I want a metaphysic so loose

the most incredible accident could occur

and it wouldn’t cause a ripple

 

In the meantime, I search for the omphallus

and the continuation of culture

Is Great Pan dead?

 

You’re forty feet tall—

put me in your pocket

and take me with you

 

 

 

HEAD START

 

awoke this morning

with my head on backwards

 

looked in the mirror

at a mess of hair

 

thought, shit oh dear

my face needs brushing

 

after brushing my teeth

with a hairbrush

 

I knew I was loosing

my grip on the day

 

 

 

ECO BIZ

 

the world

melting down

 

we take stuff

out of the earth

heavy metals

and put it into

the biosphere

a closed system

spread the stuff about

molecular garbage

100 pounds of product

yields

3000 pounds of trash

 

time is running out

tick tock tick tock

 

 

 

SKY LINE

 

near you in a dream

crazy as it seems, giving

comfort to your distress

hard to understand

close to you like the air

 

no more looks, no more words

don’t ask with those lips

words like clouds

cloud following cloud, hiding

what you must hide

 

 

 

PAINPOINT

 

easy to say

pain is just pain

like a jagged blade

 

easy to say

pain passes

like night

 

easy to say

pain is a point of view

if you’re comfortable

 

 

 

INTRUSIONS

 

another note on my pillow

the horses are dying

 

unnatural things can happen

in a natural way

 

and quickly

 

 

 

MOVING FINGER

 

the heart

satisfied

with and by

what is

 

now I sit in Wolf’s

Tea Room, Santa Rosa

pushing 58

as I once sat

 

in the Black Sheep

with my mother

in Berkeley

a boy of 10

 

writing on napkins

 

 

 

 

COME ONTO DRY LAND

for Jane

 

your heart’s blank

and your head’s

an empty chamber

 

you feel there’s a brick

between your feelings

and your fingers

 

say no more

your days are flowers of water

you wake to find the river rose

 

 

 

STAKE OUT

 

I set my shutter speed

and adjust my stance

so my shadow falls

outside the frame

 

I check again—

the birds are still there

and I find delight

in their chatter

 

.

 

recorded with directional mic

written in the margin of a bill

toilet tapped, bed bugged

 

an easy one

the guise, the lies

the prize

 

familiar fries

fishing for grease

muffled cries

 

collar or color

play the moister

on the whistle dump

 

ample gum awake

burnish in tragic

plus one

 

.

 

a fragment

of a conversation

 

“I don’t understand

the whole concept—

I don’t understand

like...”

 

and she was out of hearing

 

.

 

I ask the question again

and it sees me coming

and ducks around the corner

 

.

 

no way I’m getting

in her face

 

just keep floating

naively watching

the ads on TV

 

my world exploding

the 20th century is

a fairy tale

 

and soon

every conceivable vice

will seem like play

 

you’ll need a lawyer

to ask her out

                                               

 

 

COLD FOUNTAINS

 

days when I look in my mirror

and see fear

 

and the mirror curves

towards a nest of dread

 

what’s next?

fear to be or go or stay

 

no now there

no now here

nowhere

 

.

 

where does the light

in our dreams come from?

 

.

 

I stalk Artaud

I dis Rimbaud

I burn Villon

 

I look on the world

with a cold, blue eye

 

.

 

a risk

a miracle

a hope

magic of

 

 

 

BLUE NOTES

 

The bug is right,

we’re pond scum, flotsam

in the evolutionary wave.

 

Hear that—

Coltrane, man,

Kind of Blue.

 

There’s a certain shape

to these chords,

a crystal structure.

 

Inside, you can see

naked people, the living

dancing with the dead.

 

 

 

POETICS

 

What is the point, Jack?

is poetry a conversation

among the dead, and the poet

gets it second hand, a vampire

moon sucking off the sun?

 

What is the poet, Jack?

a battered radio transmitting

static between the stations

on a lonely stretch of road

or a punchdruck fighter

whose taken one too many

hooks to the head?

 

Powerful emotion recollected,

the most exasperating art?

Charles Potts makes an analogy

with Mahamudra, Williams hears

a sort of song, Lu Garcia invents

a ragged song, and Yeats sees

tattered clothes upon a stick.

 

Belle says poetry is experience—

I awake to morning light

thoughts sweet as honey

buzzing in my brain.

Swatting them I get stung

by real bees in a dream garden.

 

 

 

TARA

for Emily

 

crossing the street in wonder

about the angle of the earth’s shadow

on your soul’s wanderings

the crescent moon within hand’s reach

you are the path serene

I bathe in your light

 

you paint details on a batik

of Vajradhara in yabyum

while ants march across the table

your snake lifts his head

and your cats cruise among the candles

I am your devotee, speak through me

 

you’ve made yogi tea

and we’ve gone beyond the fuss

of the day into a room warm

in the flow of words and gestures

our glances and grazes become

a store of bargains beyond form

 

you are a star near and far

a fearless guide in my meditation

you step down from your lotus

in the dimension of bliss

granting my boon, soothing my fear

I am your devotee, speak through me

 

totally awesome space, you are

the teaching and the teacher

present and aware in the street

finding smashed glass from a car

your compassionate heart feels

for someone suffering loss

 

walking through the plaza we find

a shopping cart, and you hop in

but don’t let me push you too far

so as not to put the clerk to extra work

at dinner you read my fortune cookie

saying I have consideration for others

 

this really applies to you, who give

a 50% tip and say, “Why not?”

Swift One, I bring this flower

I’m blown apart sitting, standing

eating, walking, your vibe emanates

in all realms and in your presence

 

I find solace with all objects

all subjects empty, you elegant

no stain, no blame, no blemish

full-breasted with kindness

warm heart, cool brain

carry me over

 

 

 

ENDANGERED

for Shannon

 

Birds and rain

turtles on the waves

deep in your heart

you know harmony.

 

Keep your eye peeled

for litter along the way.

If it talks to you, pick it up.

That’s politics, too.

 

“Hi, I’m a moldy doughnut

in the dumpster wishing you

a really nice day

with sprinkles on top.”

 

“I’m a recycled plastic bag

giving you longevity vibes.”

“An aluminum can, here, sending

blessings of happiness and peace.”

 

“No, I want to send peace!”

“Shut up, you dumb Styrofoam,

get back, and wait your turn.”

“Then, I’ll send joy and light.”

 

Birds and rain

turtles on the waves

I sing of lovingkindness as

a responsible use of power.

 

 

 

FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS

 

so wrong and so right

crude and too perfect

 

whatever

 

basically, what does

whatever mean, anyhow?

 

tap gently and keep moving

 

 

 

HEAVY ARTILLERY

 

I’ll listen to your unhappiness

I’ll even hand you a towel

but I’m not going to E.R.

because of a broken heart

 

I had a love like that

and one’s enough

I would just as soon forget

the way she walked

 

 

 

ONCE I’M UP TO SPEED ON QUARK

for Sam

 

after the first 10 to the minus 43rd second

a new layout to the universe

a bouncing bubble, a ball of strings

 

a hundred things to delight

fountains, flags

a butterfly of gas in flight

 

 

 

FLATLINE

for Sito

 

it has a pulse

it has a smile

 

someday, we’ll get down

to the core

 

it’s a short distance

but a long way

 

 

 

MAN-EATER

 

hard to conceive

perfect content

           

hard to be

content

 

with form only

a sphere, a cube

 

or the Sphinx—

target practice for his nib’s troops

 

 

 

BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

 

the bills, the boss, the stress

walk the line

 

walk the dog, wash the car

push the cart, prune the bush

 

“Hello, hello, something wrong?

something on my face?”

 

 

 

MORNING

 

what’s before emptiness

nothing

I have words for

 

I pull back the curtain of the sky

and enter

the mirror that is

 

the World of Nun

chaotic and watery, without sun

“Pack your bags, Tinkerbell”

 

 

 

NOON

 

long afternoon in my rose garden

long evening in the infinite shadows

 

long afternoons, longer evenings

I listen, I listen, I listen

 

long-stemmed beauty

we seem to get nowhere

 

 

 

AND NIGHT

 

a summer night

moonlight

 

we are in a very old garden

dreamkisses free and easy

 

I love you, but what to do

 

this is a dream where I awake

saying, “This is a dream”

 

 

 

DARK MATTER

 

we drift in infinite space

or no space

 

illusion of oneself in an obscure

place

a floating reflection

 

nothing holding us up

 

 

 

AND THE TREE OF LIFE ALSO

 

I go to the shore and sit

I become limpid blue sky

 

seaweed seaspray

seagulls and sand

 

dry wet high low

empty full fast slow

 

bored blissed

 

 

 

FIVE ABSTRACTS INSPIRED BY MARK ROTHKO

for Sito

 

i

 

“O, God, let me out of this world; I can’t live like this, hurting the one I love.”

 

ii

 

yellow

>>>>>>red

>>>>>>>>>>>and red

 

a gesture of friendship

something

in lieu

 

of taking a trip

or going for a walk

with you

 

iii

 

two crash dummies

what>>>>>>>>we

feel>>>>>>>about

>>>>courage

>>>>dignity

>>>>>>>>>>and

>>>>>>>>>death

 

iv

 

a suit coat neatly hung on

a kitchen chair before

a black canvas against

a white wall (prepositional)

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>exit stage right

 

something gone

and then its value

resonates

 

v

 

a wonderful moment

transported from doubt to joy

 

m>i>r>a>c>l>e>m>a>g>i>c

h>>>>>o>>>>>>p>>>>>>e

e>>>c>>s>>>t>>a>>c>>>y

 

oblivion

caught off balance

>>>>>>>>>can you feel the

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>impact?

 

 

 

VACUUMEGENESIS

 

out of nothing

comes a spark

 

energy mind

Adam’s apple

 

cheekbone and elbow

light just happens

 

a gunsel outdraws

his shadow

 

 

 

TELECOSMOS

 

the sunrise

beyond the actual sun

 

is a song you sang

along the San Juan

 

a canticle of water and air

a riff of iridescence

 

 

 

NUTCRACKER

for Lulu

 

everyone listen up

this is a beautiful woman

 

this is a beautiful woman

so I sing

 

there’s something special

about her toes

 

and she knows

she has those toes

 

she points to a pair

of point shoes

 

and I catch a reflection

of her smile

 

and forget

what I’ve got going

 

 

 

CUTTING A SWATH

 

an old man pushes his wheelchair

and a clothes basket down the hall

 

he is slowly advancing to the laundry

with a plastic bag of soiled diapers

 

and with him the whole world comes

 

 

 

MORE LIGHT

 

my father gulps air

jaw slack, hands astray

in front of the TV

sound on full blast

 

he can’t make out the words

but the music helps him sleep

it’s Ida Lupino Month on TCM

May and December

 

his 75th Masonic Anniversary

at the Luther Burbank Lodge tonight

proud he can walk to the East

worried he won’t remember the Word

 

how to tie his tie is a real mystery

his first car, a 1916 Buick

I drive into the fire

to help him

 

 

 

PICTURE FROM WILLIAMS

for Jane

 

she did a painting, which in

keeping with the spirit was to be

a red wheelbarrow

rain-drenched

with chickens

no fuss, straight up

 

finally, tore the sky

into four pieces, each

had a line of verse

and framed the botched wheelbarrow

and too bright interpretation of

chickens with sewn on feathers

by thumbtacking it to a stretcherbar

 

so much depends upon

that first cup of coffee

 

 

 

AT EAST WEST CAFÉ

for Emily

 

The street is slippery and wet, so

East West is refuge from the rain.

I have damp feet and a cold brain,

And there’s a hole in my shadow.

Clarity and charity are fleeting.

The air belongs to invisible fish.

No matter what I might wish,

I’m always warmed by your greeting.

A special touch is what I need today.

You prepare the perfect cup of chai,

And while making change you spy

A tarnished coin and say,

“Oh, it’s worn, but it’s not that old.”

Suddenly, I’m composed of gold.

 

 

 

DIMINISHING OPTIONS

for Belle

 

Neanderthal took his peculiar stones

and Pharaoh his throne and gilded boat.

I’ll be buried with my TV and remote

as well as a cell phone to keep in touch.

 

 

 

FRESH FLAVOR

 

what do I know?

nothing that is known

everything unknown

 

how humming birds fly

where your birthday falls

in the digits of  pi

 

I work beyond movement

I make funny sounds

in the serious stillness

 

much laughter

much joy

pervasive and empty

 

 

 

COMPASSION

 

a heart vowed to eradicate hells

if I don’t help, who will?

 

plunging into black chaos

I know

 

it begins with grace

and ends with grace

 

but in between

there’s a black horse without a rider

 

a black dog without a bark

a blasted tree without bark

 

 

 

COWBOY

 

rein in your mind

there’s rain in your mind

 

don’t shy, relax

let it fall

 

you built it

now, it’s gone

 

so bright

so much light

 

it’s alright

the tears

 

head ‘um up

herd ‘um out

 

 

 

ANGELS

 

angels riding turtles

angels flying kites

angels necking in the park

 

the lady at the county office

accepts my application

although my registration is invalid

 

the UPS man’s clipboard buzzes

says he has a problem meditating

boxes backed up Pagosa to Omega

 

angels riding turtles

angels flying kites

angels necking in the park

 

 

 

DUET AT SUNSET

for Heidi

 

I heard a mother sing

I hold a Symphony that brings

Me peace and gives me faith

A dream of many colors

 

The wind stirs up and hollers

Superstition!

Feel free to go a new direction

Here’s a chilly kiss for comfort

 

The mother retorts

Be still, heart

My songs are nightmares and prayers

Painted with the hues of Windy Bay

 

 

 

QUE PETITE SIRAH, SIRAH

for Mike Dunne

 

I hear what the guests say

Big, dense, robust and rambling

Where is his modesty?

He shoulders the food aside

He’s got too much muscle for the table

Too full of himself to sit with us

 

But who knows my real name?

Or what’s behind my ripe berry smile

Go on about my tell-tale peppery spiciness

Say what you will about my grinding tannins

I may not be supple on the dance floor

But I’ll leave the party with a royal flush

While all the zinfandels rush for power

 

 

 

CONSTRUCTIVE REST

for Pamela

 

This is magic.

It’s the technology

that’s real.

 

The burned, twisted bodies

are real. The beauty

is monstrous.

 

No, you can’t blow it up

even if it is the damned home

of the atom bomb.

 

Your feeling is a path

and when the path splits

sit until the mountain crumbles.

 

Stay strong.

Stay strong for the child of the world.

 

 

 

XITRO

for Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997

        

I

 

I’m sitting in Tsultrim’s kitchen Pagosa Springs looking at a picture you took of her at a table in your kitchen Manhattan clear autumn day thinking how long it’s been since you sat in my kitchen Fairbanks in thin winter light I’m one of your many colorful children spawned from Howl breath spontaneous exuberant misconduct passing original uncensored yelp around Miss Jacobi’s Latin class yes I know the pluperfect of amare amaveram amaveras amaverat amaveramus amaveratis amaverant my mind eager for peyote solidities green tree cemetery dawn wine drunkenness over rooftops I am a candle you are the sun

Wanting to plug in and dig the symbiotic intersubjective meta-aleatoric patramorphesis my first peckertrack poems written to you making them into paper airplanes and sending them airmail from open Derby Street parlor window looking for North Beach with my surfer buddies Stinson Beach Bolinas Bodega Bay where is this North Beach further north? looking south finding Monterey Jazz Festival seeing you or a lookalike reading in a candlelit art gallery Beatniks that’s what these must be Art Ball and me on Dexedrine and Glick Stite writing copy for Ralph Gleason wide-eyed taking it in licking it up sniffing it out poking about

        

II

 

A difficult labor Berkeley Poetry Conference two weeks dinosaurs grazing in pastures of hemp micro-orgasms under an airtight lid færy-dæmon foxfire dynamos bunraku hooded puppeteers all poets Beat Black Mountain and Reed strutting their stuff playing it fast and loose Sector Xn relative to Yn a trig question here a Geminian martyrdom there two synthetic a priori approximations but the real you the King of the May recently rearrived with Planet News even if forcibly expelled from Myakovski’s bedroom with a broomstick up your butt I filled vials with violets and grass I made baggies of marigolds and grass I loaded a triangular-shaped bottle with grass and delivered these to various heads announcing “An Inaugural Party for Allen”

You were selected Secretary of State of Poesy by President Charles Olson’s decree and the oligarchical consent of Snyder-Duncan-Dorn starchamber dada poetry politics I underestimated by a hundred how many would attend this bash and in a spot I put out my stash and passed my Stetson

Extracting some bills from your coin purse you started the collection wisely sending Peter Orlovsky with me to the liquor store no telling what scam a mustachioed poet might contrive to pick up some quick cash ah The wild eyes! The holy yells! when we return you seated in the posture of Milarepa a joint in one hand a glass of wine in one with one you sign your name for the 100 thousandth time with one hand you pat my infant daughter’s head Kirsten dead now two years from Aids so young grim pedophile death what is the age of consent?

Always encouraging the young Richard Kretch reads a diatribe seated on an antique commode while Lew Welsh swings from the chandelier it is Creeley’s remark that everyone should know where the firemen and police are located that clears the place I add up the cost and the cost of the cost = nothing was stolen nothing was broken save for the chandelier

        

        

III

 

All day all night readings to close the SF Wobbly  Hall I ask you about your costume acrylic shirt Van Heusen Classic Collection 35% cotton you say washes and dries overnight traveling bodhiseed mala some one gave you Salvation Army kaki trousers and women’s tennis shoes I question “Men’s shoes women’s feet woman’s shoes men’s feet? you shrug

A wake for the Labor Hall and the end of an era the party rolls on Kali appears with a necklace of 69 flavored heads atomic fudge spinach nicotine cosmic grout Pythagorean lotus jade shuttle fissigemination chainshot aleatory fruit us entangled in a mass of bodies leaped on and dazed I hand you a book from the shelf entitled The Black Box which you sign with the dementia of a crazed Benzedrine addict a black line forming an ever increasing square

 

You Paul X and I hail a cab and ride up Grant Avenue to Gary Snyder’s pad and you comment that I’m a real clown because I’m wearing a suit and my Stetson with a feather which I take as a compliment even though I’m excluded from the party you and Paul have planned me throwing up in an alley to the wail of Pony Pondexter’s tenor sax ride Pony ride you in the cab bebob skat reading neon signs and billboards Star Fun Club Glass Shop Pet Talk Full Service Quality without Compromise first word best word poetry in action

We meet in front of Moe’s Bookstore Berkeley and go for coffee meeting Robert and Bobbie Creeley and Ed Dorn at Robbie’s Cafeteria I can’t help flirting unabashedly with Bobbie checking out her miniskirt me asking you whether it’s better to be a bad poet or a good businessman and in exasperation you saying to be a good something but to shut up and let Ed talk a gunslinging wordsmith lucky of me to get out alive Creeley saying there’ll never be another conference in Berkeley Berkeley is too bizarre

A Human Be In the next best thing Turn On Tune In Drop Out Cheri and I meeting you at Harold Adler’s apartment after your Public Television reading of Wichita Vortex Sutra and you congratulate me for my illustrated poems in the Berkeley Barb cutting my thumb on a jagged door latch and holding my hand and applying a Band-Aid oh Jewish mother chicken soup nurse telling me we’re not our skin you exemplify muse power

         

IV

 

Fairbanks Alaska Allen Ginsberg arriving on the wrong plane from Ayers Rock Central Australia summer there minus 10° when you land waiting for you with an Airforce parka and white rubber bunny boots our breath making cartoon balloons “Where does this road lead?” I’m so excited to be your driver we can drive north only as far as Circle but south as far as Cape Hope “Quit fooling around; my time is short; where can we drive around here?”

 A few miles from Fairbanks is Fox giving you my tour guide spiel 1901 Captain Barnette sets up a trading post at the juncture of the Chena and Tanana Rivers Felix Pedro disco gold near Fox site of Red Dog Saloon and the “Ice Worm Saga” Wild and wide are my borders/Stern as death is my sway/From my ruthless throne I have ruled for a million years a day/  Hugging my mighty treasure/ Waiting for man to Come Robert Service verse miners call this place Fairbanks after an admired Senator from Indiana Charles W. Fairbanks later a vice-president under Teddy Roosevelt census in 1912 is 3500 present population is 84000 Barnette became the most hated man in town when his bank failed

You have on your maroon Tibetan wool scarf your glasses and balding head peaking out we meet a bush pilot in the Red Dog still a funky bar and make plans to fly to an arctic village called Arctic Village spaced out we have to go back for your scarf and on the way I ask you for a mantra to help with cold driving in my VW bus without heat taking out the battery and draining the oil every night to get it started an unbutchered leg of moose frozen in the back taxi-deepfreeze to transport transmission of Padmasambhava’s heart mantra my first mantra oh root poet you had been sitting with Choyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Tsultrim Devi at Naropa and founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Feeling like you were in another world at the village a full ceremony and feast having trouble integrating beaver tail into one taste a young brave having a copy of Howl left by a Peace Corps worker recognizes you this reminding you of being asked by an abo youth in the Australian outback about Dylan and The Beatles small world

Meanwhile I’m on the astral plane pasting up the Polar Star Lit Supplement hearing you intoning Blakean melody Caribou Blues with harmonium Ah your mantra “Hum Bom! Whom Bomb! We Bomb Them” you’ve invaded the airwaves US over Cambodia you over the campus at College “How big is the president’s prick?”

 

Setting up the SUB ballroom for your reading I have STUD ACT Student Activities which you admire Words for my Perfect Tee-shirt we do up a bowl of grass soaked in hash oil left brain right brain splits and  I walk into the sea of abyss ceiling tiles tilt and I see hierarchies of judges stacked in tiers my tears and fears of molestation you calm me in meditation until I come down sensitive to my having been forcibly sodomized Berkeley back room balling and Alameda County Jail solitary confinement terror attack yes there’s a lot of cunt and ass out there does love hurt? yes it hurts gobs of swarming semen from throbbing organs against aghast esophagus sweet burning drippings in eyes in ears on breasts across continents Oh City of Fuck I seize your rising scrapers and winding subways the dweller in the body shines with neon forever rapturous illumination rapturous flesh rapturous parking meters rapturous rapturous homage to your sweet street crossings nose and eyes come to me toes and thighs roll with me in asphalt pleasure tongue clit cock to die is to come to come is to die

Ah kind Allen helping me to undo my homophobia revealing the problem to be aggression start with the self be calm and the answer is on the zafu working back to the Beloved your insatiable curiosity leads you me and young Theo grown with kids of his own now to the musk ox farm musk oxen a kind of sheep with long hair called quivit softer than silk stronger than wool the care taker shows some prehistoric bones and a researcher shows her diagrams to teach native Alaskans how to knit mittens and shawls for Manhattan Fifth Avenue boutiques

Time for your reading the house packed just like the first time I watched you read at Dwinelle Hall in Berkeley when I was a freshman now I’m a senior many years later and a long way from Cal I mention recently hearing Ciardi say that Kerouac was an immature writer who wrote psychoanalyst couch ramblings you said not to worry about Jack his spirit survives his legacy is sound Ciardi just jealous and insecure

And then it’s time to say goodbye the last time I see your flesh in the sad airport cafe so many times I think of you Allen Allen take this Athabascan beadwork my favorite “No you keep it if it means so much to you” but I want you to have it because it does mean so much to me goodbye Allen hello Heaven goodbye hello Nirvana goodbye Elysium hello goodbye you crazy kind misunderstood lacklove honeybreasted semen soaked long-haired commie Jew dope smoking gentle little wierdo freak you stopped a war freed the youth fed them with your mind skillful means and compassionate wise heart bodhisattva so many smiles and tears life life life you sang love and life lord of song god of flowers peace and gladness

        

V

 

I manifest now as Vajrasattva as you enter the Bardo Realms visualizing the 42 Peaceful Deities the Assembly of the Rig’dzin and the 58 Wrathful Deities sing “Father Death Blues” Genius Death my art is done/ Lover Death my body’s gone/ Father Death I’m going home/ Father breath farewell

Your dance is the dance of the babe in the womb your dance is the dance of the corpse in the grave your dance is the dance of the spirit veiled your mind dances within all your phone call comes a message on my answering machine at Tara Mandala hoping to contact Tsultrim for one last chat but she’s in Nepal and by the time I’ve faxed her and gotten back you’ve gone gently into that...into that...

Now you’re with Carl Solomon and he can teach you to be dead don’t hang out too long in the god realms you know that rich diet is bad for your heart let your queer shoulder rest good graybeard you made a difference golden sunflower visionary holy rolling your way through this world in the active-present amo amas amat amamus amatis amant

 

1998

 

 

 

SINGING TO THE COWS

                                     

When I see the moon rising

I think of a cow I saw in Arkansas

and I feel sad.

 

When I think of the years passing

and worry about my knees blowing out

I only need to see your cow eyes

and I’m rejuvenated.

 

I think of you every day

sweet heifer on the ferryboat

between Sebastopol and Bucyrus.

 

Looking through an old yearbook

I see your bovine face

and remember you on roller-skates

at Mel’s Drive-In.

 

 

 

SINGIN’ DIXIE

 

You’re right, Charles

the South did win

the Civil War

 

and America can’t wait

for the next Texas Bar-B-Q.

 

 

 

RISING FROM THE RIVER, FALLING FROM THE SKY

 

Nymph, sylph, gopi, elf, seraphim, wild

and silent, outrageous and innocent,

you say my poems are notes for poems

 

a blind shadow looms

on the door of my tongue

erecting a shrine to nothing

 

while ripples of wind on snow

hang by their thumbs

for astonishing rewards

 

an extra inch or two

lets the faucet flow

kinder than the ocean

 

arms and legs spread

around a cloud learning

potent remembrances

 

hang on, baby, wait a sec,

let me...

 

 

 

OMNI-SPATIAL MATRIX

 

Fire dances in the hearth.

Clouds swirl across the sky.

Water leaps on sand.

Land rises and falls.

 

The sky, the clouds, my breath,

the scent of rabbitear sage.

A La La Ho!

A feast of space.

 

 

 

MANDALA

 

Where am I, and how did I get here?

Why do I feel I must be somewhere?

Did I miss something?

When does it start?

Where will it leave off?

 

 

 

I VOTED FOR IKE WHEN I WAS EIGHT

 

The Incredible Bureau does not discriminate

between polished shoes and Greek statues,

and I didn’t always talk with a stutter,

and I didn’t always live in a gutter.

 

 

 

HISTORY ON HER HANDS AND KNEES

 

She hunts in rubble

for a way beyond

novelty

 

to fulfill the promise

of organism

and will.

 

I’ve heard it said,

Time flies like an arrow;

fruit flies like a banana.

 

 

 

11:55 A.M. ON THIS PLANET

 

song

bird

word

word

heard

third

 

I pick up

the phone and dial

thyme

since I’m unhinged

and can’t tell the hour

from the flower.

 

 

 

TURNING AND MIRRORING

 

Bliss.

Not conditioned.

Enjoying being

undefined

by the circumstance

of sitting in this café.

 

Ha! Ha!

This is magical ground.

I see what this is.

But whose?

 

Instant presence.

A woman sits

at the keyboard playing

Smoke Gets in My Eyes.

 

I smile and receive

a smile.

I catch myself

looking at my-

self looking at

myself.

 

 

 

FULL MOON

 

Which switch?

The witch switch?

You turn on

the witch switch,

and what happens?

 

Archaic

Old

Provincial

Yes, and

Yes, closed—Yoga

Concise

Long Poems

 

in Latin it means,

that’s strange, DNA

Enzymes

 

I am transported to a place of clarity

and movement.

She smiles, and I am transfigured.

 

 

 

MUSIC OF HER FACE

 

making ecstasy

beating up the heart

sweat welds

deep, deep

 

limp limbs

plumb line

what to do?

what to say?

 

short sweet

swing

hard to forget

what’s it to you

 

blue man?

chew the

dog car bark

swim park woods

 

 

 

YES, REPEAT, NO

 

What constitutes outer avant-garde?

inner avant-garde, secret avant-garde?

innermost secret avant-garde?

 

Escaping forword.

Attacking backwards.

Pushing the river.

Drinking the clouds.

 

All oink in the ink.

All in order on a plate of gas.

Beuys buys a refrigerator.

Rimbaud rides a skateboard.

Tension in a vacuum.

Hazard in a blank space.

Sweet unbearableness.

 

No eyes, no ears, no body.

No ideas but in my underwear.

 

 

 

ACROSS NO DIVIDES

 

Dry creek, cool canyon.

Music from the rocks as you pass.

 

 

 

SONG AT MIDNIGHT

 

Hard whites, infernal yellows,

sulfur and yellowgreen.

 

 

 

EYE ROVING OVER BLUE HILLS

 

The I merges with the All

but remains I.

 

All is bright red.

 

 

 

TRACE-TONES AND AFTER-DOTS

 

Smells of fungus and fir

rough bark and smooth rock

remind me of a boy

 

escaping up a creek

in search of Excaliber

or ever elusive El Dorado.

 

Now, on the more traveled path,

I rein in my passions and

act on consequence.

 

Crisp though I am from compromise,

a salty will o’ the wisp

turned into a vulture snack,

 

my mind still shifts and drifts.

 

 

 

APPROACHABLE BUT OUT OF REACH

 

Knocked out, loaded.

After you left, I drank the wine

from your cup.

 

You said it’s fine under the stars,

although we looked into the darkness

between us.

 

Pay attention, whatever you do,

to the grain of the inlay

and the twist of the grass.

 

 

 

WHEN MY WORK IS DONE I’LL

 

work to live to drink

to live to work to live

to work to work.

 

 

 

LOOK FOR THE SEVEN-HEADED BEAST

 

A lot to experience

in the instant of a sneeze

or a blow to the heart.

 

Why assume the sun

will show tomorrow?

 

Why assume

October’s final night will not

trick us

and repeat—

 

29, 30, 31, 29, 30, 31,

and again

for a thousand years?

 

This year

painted jack-o-lanterns

decorate my block,

and I am told

the children’s costumes

have been catching

fire.

 

A little girl

dressed as a Quaker

wishes me

“Happy Halloween.”

 

Her mother hovers,

stern and protective,

because there are

ghouls

and goblins out,

as well

as other invisible

animals.

 

The future

and the past

are shadows,

and the calendar

masks

a cannibal.

 

I fill my bowl

with treats

and invite everyone

to feast.

 

 

 

HEART’S LOVE & YEARNING MISERY

 

Sensuality. Intimacy.

The tastes of the body.

 

Sympathy in the original sense

of feeling with another,

which rises within me

 

when you tell your stories,

share your hopes and fears.

 

What ails the maiden?

Would she like breakfast at Perkins?

The Grail is in the asking.

 

 

 

FLYING WHITE

 

Rising with sun,

arguing with darkness,

 

I set my hand to move

willynilly through a repertory

of cyclic gestures, assembling

lines which wittily approximate

a sea a tree a hill a face.

 

This is the best day to be alive

because if I’m dead, I’m dead,

and even if I’m dying while I’m alive,

Creation is receding to its center

to make room for me.

 

Glory! Glory! Glory!

 

 

 

LUMINOUS FORM

for Sito                        

 

I’m looking up.

I’m looking down.

I’m looking ahead.

I’m looking around

 

among dying shadows and wet leaves.

I hear vultures argue

in the topmost branch of an eucalyptus.

 

An old man with his pockets of pain sits

on a bench among the white gravestones

eating snow.

 

A city full of hungry ghosts is never full.

I drift off somewhere.

Later, I hear, “Poetry’s useful if it shows

its emptiness, leaves its skeleton.”

 

Did you see that pale, pasty old fellow,

wild hair and bloated cheeks,

dance into the fountain mountain

star cloud sea tree?

 

 

 

AT THE CENTER IS FIRE

 

I take note of the naked

zero

 

in the spinning fall of leaves

 

and gauge the browns and reds

of frost.

 

 

 

FULLY AWAKE IN YOUR LOOK

 

Fierce dakini shimmering.

Radiant rupture of my dreamstream.

 

Misery, mine, I twist and turn,

caught between the rock

and the bottom line.

 

All I can think to say is, “Nice shoes.”

 

 

 

FOUND POEM

 

just a transformer

passing through

you through me

me through you

 

I stop—interchange—

inner core—data—renew—

just a transformer

 

 

 

TAPESTRY

 

Earth assumes,

fire consumes.

 

Stars, rivers—

wind delivers.

 

The wisdom of the East

is west of us.

 

 

 

THE 12:02

 

You’re a time passenger,

someone I’ve left behind.

 

I know you’re still there.

You’re just out of sight.

 

I’ve cried about your beauty.

I’ve lied about the pain.

 

I bought myself a ticket

on the last thought out tonight.

 

 

 

BEAR DANCE

 

I am a hand

unconscious of design

performing a miracle of signs

—frozen mind—

one with the big picture,

a bear dancing with the sky.

 

 

 

FOLLOWING SALVADOR DALI

for Claude

 

It’s a cinch—this

paranoiac-critical method

as a spontaneous method

of irrational knowledge

based upon the interpretive

critical association

of delirious phenomena

whereby the double image

may be extended, continuing

this paranoiac advance

to make the image appear

and so on until there

are a number of images

limited only by the mind’s

degree of paranoiac capacity

 

 

 

EXCRUCIATING BEAUTY

for Laura

 

My favorite things—

flowers, fountains, flags and fireworks

 

But when I’m near you

the ground beneath me sways

clocks bloom, cars flap—

the whole world is a display.

 

 

 

DICEY

 

We play without a game board

both feet off the ground

flying sideways—a few tosses

and my life is salad.

 

 

 

LOVERS LAIN

 

On an old apple tree

Ken carves his love for Barbie.

Here they make their bed.

This is how they wed.

 

Although the heart be resolute,

beware of plastic fruit.

 

 

 

COYOTE MEETS BODHIDHARMA

 

There’s more to a Zen garden

than raking rocks.

 

Sore in the saddle,

cobbles in my socks.

 

Gossamer of thought,

overlay of analogy.

 

Fight smog—

turn on a horse.

 

 

 

ISRAEL 33½

 

I met Yehezquel in the parking lot

and he said to me, “There’s no way,

Jose, how the Mayans factored it.

The End will be in June—

blow the month of July away.”

 

He showed me his designs of diamond guitars.

There’s one in Sagittarius, and another

spirals out of Taurus. Time and space,

there’s no death, he said—just a dark river.

You might call it main stream.

 

 

 

BUDDHA’S LAST WORDS

 

This stuff is just stuff.

Keep on keepin’ on.

 

 

 

BUNKHOUSE AT 6 A.M.

 

My boss barges in like a Brontosaurus

and gives me thirty days notice.

Says he’s going to get a divorce

 

Sell his house and horse,

buy a boat and go to sea

so he can be fancy free.

 

Then, Buck shows up

with a cow elk tied to a string of ponies,

and I hang the whole thing in the rafters.

 

This is a lot to process, let alone digest,

for one morning.

 

 

 

 

COLD OUT THERE

 

I heard her complaint.

The pipes froze. The drain was frozen.

The car wouldn’t start.

 

My hands are numb. My feet are numb.

My knees are knocking.

I had to go to logic class

 

Which gives me the chills. 

On the way,

my boyfriend gave me the cold shoulder.

 

 

 

FABLE

 

The tortoise win? The lady sleeps.

She signals to move.

 

Stood up, he carved.

The huge knife stirred.

 

 

 

CLOTHO, LACHESIS & ATROPOS

 

These three goddesses

determine fortune and mortal life.

 

At the Skyline Café, my dad and I

discuss Beatnik ethics. It’s 1959.

 

Hermes out of orbit, I fume

albeit I see a chance of traveling light.

 

The Fates warp their loom

to throw a weft of experience.

 

 

 

PLEIADES

 

Orion chased them.

Sterope fell into a faint.

 

Vulcan set a net to catch

Venus in her embrace of Mars.

 

Sappho saw the seven sisters set.

She knew love makes a poet into a boar.

 

You say, “All’s fair,”

and I, “Boars have wings.”

 

 

 

A WAY SHE WALKS

 

Fire is water falling upward,

says sage Hereclitus.

 

An old man stutters when he talks.

A girl in pink flutters when she walks.

 

What is the limit she’ll permit?

 

Fire is water

falling upward.

 

 

 

SO SUDDEN

 

With an eclamptic convulsion

of cataclysmic proportion

 

The man in the house

is no longer a man, and

 

The house is no longer a house.

They are parts of a relationship—

 

And minor parts, compared to

the woman who’s lost her VISA card.

 

What dress was she wearing?

What print? Did it have pockets?

 

The scale of demolition

is proportionate to the folderol.

 

 

 

ALL LOVERS ARE

 

crazed.  Running about

looking for poems, and

here they are

on the tip of my pen.

 

Love on the run

—stolen kisses—the spark

and the suffering.

 

Mixed emotions,

green and orange colors—

a tree of frozen fruit

in a winter haze.

 

It’s bargain night at the Raven,

but you’re too tired for

Shakespeare in Love.

 

 

 

ANOTHER DAY

 

Another day—

still hot for you.

 

Another day—rain

and fresh earth—

still hot for you.

 

Another day—vines

laden with fruit—

still hot for you.

 

Another day—grass

burnt in the sun—

still hot for you.

 

Another day—flowers

freeze, but my desire for you

remains.

 

 

 

WIPE OUT

 

Nothing I can do

but let you go.

 

Am I disappointed,

you ask? Only that

 

I want to throw myself

in the ocean.

 

I sit on a beach log

and watch surfers

 

Tumbling in the waves.

My feelings exactly.

 

Mist—then a  few drops

of rain, but this

 

Heavy coat of sadness

keeps me dry.

 

 

 

KEEP MOVING

 

I walk away

putting

one foot

and

 

then

the next feeling

bluer than

blue

 

I scope out

another place

another face

 

but my blood

remembers

 

the tree

by

the river

 

the cup

the flame

 

 

 

NESTLED IN THE ROSE IN THE MEADOW OF MIDNIGHT

 

I breathe—

how certain my love,

 

And in the window’s fog

I trace your form.

 

Moonlight gleams through.

 

Lover, the living

wears me down,

 

But I find a luminous

stubborn joy.

 

 

 

INSTRUCTIONS TO MY APPRENTICE

 

Plow art

is never done,

and rest,

 

Rest is more

than time away from work,

more than that.

 

Hoe the row, queer the wheel.

Queerer still, the elf light—

candle of the warrior.

 

Were you there

when the rat came out

of the toilet?

 

A memo:

include the weeping

and the hilarious colors.

 

 

 

 

SO HIGH YOU KISSED THE SKY

for Steve

           

Thinking of the past, not seeing you

in the future, listening to the melody

of galactic globes at aphelion—snowflakes

catch me dreaming of white sand beaches.

 

The mashed thumb of the moon arises.

Just do a folded-wing snap roll, then soar

for the horizon. Direct your flight

towards Proxima Centauri.

 

Interstellar conditions favoring eclipsing

binaries are methodologically determined

by trigonometric parallaxes. Fats Waller

blows Tea for Two on the intercom.

 

 

 

MINARET

 

Holding sand in my hand,

holding the world,

I feel sky space at ocean’s edge

and watch my castle crumble.

 

 

 

MOTHER MUSE

 

Borne on a snow white goose,

Old Mother Muse

when she wants to wander

flies with wings.

 

 

 

CALENDAR OF THE MOON

 

Moon of soft dreams

Moon of sweetness and smoke

Moon of wax and tar

Moon of scaffolds

Moon of the charnel grounds

 

Well-hung moon

Full-bosomed moon

Moon of a face I sometimes hate

Moon, Moon of a face I adore

Moon that turns to flame

Moon that turns in pain

Moon that goes as far as I go

 

Bandaged moon bruised and bloodied

Tangled-tooth moon with a mouth of cotton

Babylonian moon hiding in a cloud rack

Old man moon sitting in a chair

 

Moon covered with lost socks

Moon with astronauts in her mustache

Moon cruising in her black Mercury convertible

Moon dancing in a diaphanous gown

Moon peeping in at me through my window

 

Cryptic moon

Perfumed moon

Drunken moon

 

Moon of the raven who sat on the flagpole

when a bolt of lightning struck

Moon of the Humpies jumping in the stream while

I’m doing the venison jerk to the stove rag band

 

Moon on a hill in a tree in the heart

Moon in a place I’ve made

Moon just beyond my hand

Moon, will you be free after work?

But, no, you have to work a double shift

 

1999

 

 

 

N0 O ZONE

 

 

deadly rays

not easy to kiss these off

 

bodies piled in heaps

arguing over the sky

howls coming from shrouds

totally dismal

the darker it gets

something serious

seriously out of control

maximum out of control

a landscape of refrigerators

wrecked cars and black feathers

 

tempting to say

“To hell with it, I’ll

eat while there is food

drink while there is drink

love while my flesh is still fresh”

 

 

 

TIME SPEED LANGUAGE

for Claude                             

 

standing on a street corner

without sleep for a week

watching the light change

a man walking/a hand/a man

 

a mysterious thing

a man

speaking from inside a tree or a rock

here I look at the sea

hear the waves

break upon the shore

and in my heart

 

a woman sails by on springs

and a man pulled along by a dog

a snake sluggish on the concrete

a leaf ashamed of falling

 

time speed language—

the stones plead with the stars

and are rained away

while we watch

the children’s costumes

burn

 

I take a bath and wash my hair

I lay out my dress shoes

my new tie and a clean shirt

I’m so happy we’re going

 

going going way beyond

going on the way

on the way to God

through love

 

 

 

BEING JUST AS WE ARE

 

we shall be one

even when the hollow faces

on time’s screen stare leaning forward

across the distance between here and there

 

in morning calm

we sit at a red art deco glass table

drinking espresso, Bongnan and I

along our own 38th Parallel

 

a story about a water tower

falling on your head and being trapped

in the dark and mud for hours

and you laughed, Bongnan

at the ghosts eating on festival days

telling your mother

the chopsticks didn’t move

 

after you left, I sat where you sat

with my arms around my knees

trying to feel your presence

sitting in your place

 

 

 

JUST AS IT IS

 

I watch

with mystic

horror the sun

darken and

shimmer

through violet

haze

 

dream green

nights

and watch

distances shat-

ter into foam

while feeling

 

slow kisses in

the midst of

calm

 

 

 

SPIT IN THE OCEAN

 

58 this Sunday, how did I get to be 58?

taking mom to IHOP for potato pancakes

seeing a sign advertising one free meal

with the order of two for senior citizens

I’m unable to take advantage of the savings

frustrated insecure low self-esteem low

grade depression impotency introversion

freaked out flipped out and flustered

 

a lot of this going around

maybe I need mistletoe injections maybe

I need Viagra maybe I need more yang

in my diet do a few pushups along with

the Qigong and a class at the JC relax

quit worrying about what LIFE means enjoy

my millennial anxieties and Y2K paranoia

nothing serious here just a momentary

meltdown

 

 

 

PASTA IS FASTA ORDERED BY PHONE

for Jane

 

tucked away in the Missouri hills

you have heated up this morning’s coffee

and dumped sugar in it

put on pink bright lipstick

 

air crisp like a diamond

the edges of the leaves showing

you leaf through glue-rumpled pages

of Art News and Vanity Fair

 

cutting out favorite images

(after removing the perfume inserts)

slicing and dripping and copying

bits of poetry in and around

 

I sit here with a tuna sandwich

ensconced in country club suburbia

slicing and dripping and copying

bits of your letter into this poem

 

Long live our brilliance!

 

 

 

ENCOUNTER

 

My way

is a maze in a haze

a cold front where

I await an image

mist or rock.

 

Outrageous hair

and a pretty face

behind the not so pretty

abstract countenance

saying, “Touch my ice,

be tender and talkative.” 

 

 

 

A LEAF READY TO FALL

 

The stones plead with the stars

and are rained away

while we watch

the children’s costumes burn.

 

I take a bath and wash my hair.

I lay out my dress shoes

my new tie and a clean shirt.

I’m so happy we’re going.

 

 

 

FOR BREAKFAST

 

I take a sheaf of clouds

from the top shelf

and a burst of sunlight

from the pine trees.

 

I run around looking

for the croak of a frog

and find it in the center

of the earth.

 

 

 

FRAGMENTS

for Gaela Monamie

 

Infinity is a turtle

on a slow track

 

Solid void

a cosmic hit

 

A touch of ice

a chunk of winter

 

Exposed, cold

drooling

 

A wide hole

a vertical wall

 

Wonderous gash

sheet metal thighs

 

“Next”

means you       

 

 

 

FREIGHT

 

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Cotton Belt

Cushion Ride

For Fragile Freight

Great Northern

Great Northern

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Cotton Belt

Auto Pak

Cotton Belt

Auto Pak

Cotton Belt

Auto Pak

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

Milwaukee

 

 

 

BELIEVE ME, LAURA

 

while listening to children

singing and swinging in a tree, I think

a good treeplanter

can be comfortable even in Hell.

 

 

 

TIMBERLINE        

 

Should Anarchists be given

U.S. Forest Service contracts?

Only if they can sign their names.

Davy signs Galloping Antelope,

Galactic Emperor, Son of Earthworm.

 

This contract is 67 acres,

a diamond shape on Big Hill.

We awake at 6, bag up at 7, climb

a mountain of burns and bramble.

Green fire—the image leaps out

 

as the ashes choke us. Who are

these people to whom we trust

our forests?  Who is this crew

who sings, When my work is over,

I’m going to fly away home?

 

 

 

GREEN FIRE

 

Green fire is the future.

The spike brambles and the mountain

of burns recede, and an oasis of trees

arises from the ashes.

 

There’s no way into the future

but flight—take off

from the tallest Doug Fir

and spread your tail feathers.

 

Take a turn and look

at the next century—hope

for the next century—turn again

—can this be easily managed?

 

 

 

HEART’S TIMBER

 

I see you in profile in this moonlit rock

at the edge of the cut bank near Ardenvoir.

Lady of My Thoughts, honor and praise,

your image powers my work.

 

A dead forest is a strange place

to be in evening dress—beautiful

intensities—the field vibrating

with the spirits of young trees.

 

Two year old Ponderosa pine,

2-0s, there’re trying, but it’s hard. 

Underground, the work gets done,

a whispered AUM to go on.

 

 

 

STUBBORN LUMBER

 

Can there be emptiness without awareness?

Ask George.

 

Imagine a tree falling and no one hearing it.

Imagine, also, its twisted limbs.

 

The trees arrange themselves—I don’t

have anything to do with this.

 

The trees follow me.

Imagine them growing.

Imagine no one hearing them.

 

If you open the door to knowledge—remember,

the peanut butter is on the shelf in the door.

 

 

 

WHERE ON THE PAPER CHAIN ARE YOU?

 

Flaky footing on the high unit

wind cold, cold snow at 4000 feet a bitch

but it packs well around the pine plugs

above Indian Creek in the rocky outcroppings

not a forest, a farm, slash and burn, a war

 

We’re riding in a crummy

an orange International van beat to shit

the bad karma tipi that takes us to work

we’ve named it L.A.

so we can drive to work in L.A.

 

I want my forest cut into chips

so my grandchildren can have toilet paper

 

On the other hand, we need air

and the mountains need cover

and the animals need homes

no matter if they’re in rows

 

Breathe into the pain

or step out of the way

 

 

 

PLANTING THE BLAST

 

On the moonscape

of Mount Saint Helens

I’ve developed a new technique

I call the pumice pump

 

Place the tree roots on the ash

place the hoe on the roots

and push the roots straight down

 

Speed planting the last ash unit

trying to get the trees in straight

over-planting every plot

and praying the roots

find something to live on

 

Some trees I dedicated to Bongnan

some to Lulu

some to the protectors

of this silicon mountain

 

Putting the right tree in the right hole

while picking rocks out of my nose

made of snot and volcanic ash

 

The inspector turns up

“Stop, stop, don’t throw

those rocks

down the slope, you’re

hurting the trees”

fantasy of tying the inspector

to the hood of the van

as a trophy

 

Lost in a pause—

where should I be on the unit?

I should be on the line

which is always a mystery

 

Outside the orbit of stars

lost and found inside

myself

creation arises and dis-

solves

in

a magical display

 

On to the next unit

 

 

 

ON TO THE NEXT UNIT

 

Tree planting on Mount Baker

this contract is 180 acres

long with diamond shapes

known as Dragon Tail

 

I fly high, I fly low

at Concrete Sauk Valley Road

one mile to orange bridge

turn left follow river

to Finney Cumberland Road

turn right single lane with turnouts

6 miles tall tree on left

with winding road sign

8 miles bridge with guard rails

9 miles small clearcut with twisted culverts

10 miles waterfall on right

mile 11 turn right up hill at white stop sign

 

When I arrive, I’m no longer lost

what I’ve lost I find everywhere

 

 

 

WHIP OR WILL

 

Your fullness, your feathers,

something strange, strangely familiar,

 

one of those things—an affair—

that will never work.

 

“Stay faithful, but don’t love me,” you say,

while I take a flying fuck at the moon.

 

 

 

VACUUM PLUS

 

Standing in the museum entrance

an old man, unshaven, palsied, pushing

a shopping cart filled with bags of cans,

stuffed animals, coat hangers and the dust

from clocks—a rag picker in a raincoat

with the back torn out, beneath that

is a splotchy trench coat, beneath that

a molting overcoat, beneath that is what

those passing by fear he might expose

from an alley along a dark street.

 

Not at all, he exposes it right here, now—

in the sunken recess of his body

glow the high-polished parts of a machine,

and raising his eyes to the sky, he croons,

“You may think I have a vacuum, but this

is a multi-purpose machine, a vacuum,

a rug cleaner, a shampooer, it dries hair

and sucks dead skin from your mattress,

a drill, a sander, and now, a breakthrough

in the technology, after years of research—

the power-driven dildo and buggy whip.”

 

Vagabond, my brother, you rise up like a ghost.

I quickly split.

 

 

 

FLASH AN OGHAM

 

A Druid might use an ogham as a jest, yes, even as

an invitation to dance—flash an ogham, and see.

 

Flip the darkness the finger, and the darkness

will keep it. 

 

 

 

FIVE IS THE KEY

 

Five is the number of change.

Four are the quarters.

A fourth is a quarter.

A quarter is change.

 

Four quarters make a whole.

Five nickels in a quarter.

A quarterback gives the signal

and receives from center.

 

Four are the fingers.

The fifth is a thumb.

Two fingers is a shot.

A fifth is a lot.

 

Five is an element

beyond the known.

Here, you believe in æther,

or you don’t.

 

Four is for squares.

Five is a head

high

above the town.

 

 

 

 

 

COLD MOUNTAIN       

for Charles and Nancy

 

At my reading

a man named Neah

asks if he can say

a few words.

 

I say, “No,” and

he turns away.

And then,

the mist clears,

 

and I ask him to do

his thing—

a bit from Jung

on the eternal fountain.

 

Try and buy the well,

and it dries up

and then springs up

somewhere else.

 

My shadow and I

make a wise choice

on this western face

of Cold Mountain.

 

 

 

CURIOSITY

 

Up with the sun—watch the deer

on the beach turn their heads,

twist their ears—listen to a bird twit.

 

I was digging clams, and a young deer

crept behind me and sniffed my butt.

I about jumped through my hat.

 

 

 

GO SONG

 

Truth swings her hips and argues

with casual laughter.

 

She turns the corner and

leaves the air shimmering.

 

I watch her

until my contacts pop out.

 

 

 

ZERO TOLERANCE

 

Cumulus clouds cross the moon

above this dust ball of trepidation.

I watch TV—another vengeance film.

 

I know this story by heart.

I watch and listen as the heroine

pleads with the hero—

“You promised to serve and protect.

Do this, you put yourself on his level.”

 

City workers uprooted the spruce

in Altursa Park, and I can see down

Pine Street to the Liberty’s marquee.

 

My window opens on a world.

My TV opens into a world.

The moon sends down a blessing.

 

Who wrote this script?

The show’s not over, even when it’s over.

 

 

 

NAPOLEON WITHOUT A BONE

 

Politics determines our destiny

along with mud and the power of romance

 

tentative

halting

difficult

irresolute

daunting

 

mystery, exile

a bone apart

 

Not so far to Corsica from here

Not so far

Not so far from here

 

You who lead me

You who look on my pangs of

cyclic loneliness and fear

 

I awake and say, “Good Morning”

to my bones

 

 

 

IRRESOLUTE

 

Between thought and act

Between cause and sequence

Between fate and abeyance

Between nature and our hearts

 

The parable of Self works itself out

My myth unfolds

Between the illusion and the confusion

I swell with strength

 

To live Nature’s force

by emulation or by imitation

to take Life in its green fuse

with intention

released from shadow

 

To study, map, decode

utter, know

 

Working ahead of all process

continuously changing, merging

while indecision meanders down the river

 

The root of poet is poietes

Maker, make your luck

 

 

 

OPEN ON ALL LEVELS

 

The moon rises

in silence—

a rose in the garden

of midnight

 

Hard enough to explain

but I’m going to proclaim

all it takes is a beak

and a few feathers to fly

 

Shower me with care

gifts common and rare

health and happiness

top my list of wishes

 

The familiar owl

has not returned

I search and find

funky scat

 

 

 

AUTOMORPH

 

Being in the body

being in the world

curves in space

I love it all

 

A tree and a rock

a sacred spot

because it is

it just is

 

I look

I think it through

I do, or I don’t—

two fish meet midstream

 

 

 

CALENDAR ART

for Claude

 

tIME IS

tIME WAS

tIME WASN’T

 

Lunch Wed w/Tamara @ Slice of Life

Poetry Slam Burbank Cntr 2nd Mondays

Teens Against Violent TV tonight

 

I peek through a keyhole of soul

Been here and gone

 

/we/they/dispersed thru a black hole

into reckless space

leaving only a few after-dots

 

 

 

DO OR DOT

 

Don’t dot it

Do it

 

Dot Dot Dit Dot

Dot Dit

 

What is more

is code—

 

Dash Dot Dot

Dash Dash Dash

Dash

 

Dot Dash

Dot De Dash

Dot De Do

 

Dot De Do

Do it

 

 

 

THERE THERE

 

The mirror curves

toward my dread,

and I start fading

because I can’t

face the place.

 

This time, I know she’ll say

“No,” so

I fail to commit

to the encounter.

 

I know there is no there there

but there is a here here, even

if I feel like I’m nowhere.

 

Nowhere, and

now here.

 

 

 

THE WART CANNOT BE COERCED

 

head of a boil

occurs once OE

16c. small lump

clot, a minute

spot, speck, mark

1748 roundish mark

made with a pen

1816 mark with dots

scatter like dots or specks

point used in punctuation 1858

a little child or creature 1859

a woman’s marriage portion,

the income of which is under

her husband’s control

 

.

 

poets knew it (knew(i)t) little i

newt, no(tat, tit for tat)ed

knit it (knew it) dotted it down

 

 

 

SPACE CONTROL

 

Since I cannot rise

to omnipresence

or fall to nothingness,

dull orange sand

fluorescent sheen of wave

wave curling,

I constrict

and drip from far to near.

 

Trace tones replenish

with paratactic breath

the objective world,

 

The subjective itch.

 

 

 

WAY THROUGH

 

All clam

still stor-all

my gift wrap

tit, toe

tell tore six

live one

without a muffler

fuse count

bell tower

fake the rank

wormwater

former rag down

the yellow voice.

 

 

 

CRAZY AS POSSIBLE

 

Line must have green in it three times.

Line must have reverse of earlier line.

A refrain with time and place.

A refrain of non-sense words.

An animal with parts of other animals.

 

with snow coming down

like green umbrellas, I stepped out

to buy some dog food for the cat

 

 

 

STRESS IN THE FIELD

 

I’m waiting.

I am exploring non-thought

on Occidental Road

as I hunt in litter for a piece for my collage.

 

(Silence.)

 

I am the world.

The world is me.

 

(Sounds.)

 

I think to say something.

I try to say something.

I think without words while waiting.

 

 

 

B IS FOR REFLECTION

 

I hover above virtual.

I jack in.

O O O O

that Shakespearean tag—

 

My worm-worn voice sustains

a single note, a ghost tone

played on an invisible glass harmonica.

 

The note floats, folds, flows into color,

lavender and wrinkled gray

caressed by ash in the zero sky.

 

I plod the cross-plowed fields,

a hard-driving, warbling, woodnote

sort of guy.

 

 

 

INTERCHANGE OF TINCTURES

 

Plutonium has a half-live

of 250,000 years—

and unless we can raise the tone arm

and get ourselves individuated

or differentiated or TOGETHER OR

on top of it

we won’t have a millennium to stand on.

 

In spring, bud out.

Dovetails come later.

 

This is the later Kali Yuga

The Fourth World

The Iron Age

The Fifth Sun

The IXth Hell

The Age of the Hunchback

The Era of Enforced Disillusionment

 

 

 

WHY2K

 

in the Springtime, etc.

to be precise

1987 was the conclusion

of the 16th 60 year cycle

of the Kalachakra System

and the climax of matter

 

in the Springtime, etc.

2012 is the conclusion

of the Mayan Great Cycle

and a period of hard choices

 

in the Springtime, etc.

I dream of the New Age

although I know

it’s hopelessly sentimental

 

in the Springtime, etc.

 

 

 

ADVENTURES OF PSYCHE ON THE ASTRAL PLANE

 

Venus receives the file

on the Psyche case

from Mercury, S.I.D.

 

Squad detached to precincts

by Our Lady of the Myrtle

c/o Aventine Hill, Rome.

 

The Reward—

7 sweet kisses and a honeyed tongue

thrust, exquisite and delicious,

between the lips

for whomever returns the slave.

 

Behind the right ear of Venus

sits the Throne of Vengeance.

 

Psyche say she ain’t nobody,

but I say she ain’t ain’t nobody—

she somebody—cursed with beauty—

more powerful than the gods.

 

 

 

HOW TO PROCEED

 

Numb and in a quandary.

Dazed, disengaged and

stymied.

 

Here is your birth chart,

which I have calculated

and drawn by hand.

 

I deliver it by hand.

One can’t be too careful.

 

There is much here about

fear and loss of control.

 

Take this mosaic, these

jagged bits, disjointed

and elusive, for in it

 

I see gossamer sails

filled with the moon-lost wind

ride the ragged waves.

 

 

 

THINGS CHANGE YET ARE ONE

 

Mountain Blue Bird

Varied Thrush

Starling

Stellers Jay

 

A Jay and a lizard in a fray,

Lizard tugged by jay.

Jay pecks yet kept at bay.

Clap of hands—jay flies away.

 

Porcupine

Red Squirrel

Shrew

Wood Mouse

 

Lists never end, nor do difficulties

and obstacles.

Not easy to outwit the fox of desire.

 

 

 

PRESIDENT BUCHANAN SLEPT HERE

 

Expanding Our Dominions

With Might and Right

With Axe, Rifle, and Plow

With Computer and Hydrogen Bomb

In the Course The Propagandists

Mark on the Soil and in the Sky

For the Stars of Empire

With the Policy of New Possessions

Beyond the Seas and the Atmosphere

According to the Logic of History

And the Duty of Destiny

 

All for Power, Sex, Money, Death

 

 

 

YOUR BONES KNOW YOU CAN

for Naomi

 

Live on the pulse.

Drown in life’s flow.

Laugh at inertia.

Resist—even if you’re hustled,

throw it out there,

and let come what may.

 

Life’s more than a love story.

Life’s an inspired gamble.

 

 

 

CALCULUS

for Sabrina

 

In this formula there is no limit

to my feeling—X follows Y

across an ocean of space.

 

 

 

JUST WHEN PHOEBE DECIDED

LIFE HELD NO FURTHER INTEREST

for Sito

 

This game has four outs,

Only you hide the extra out

Under the mound

Until you have a mound of outs.

 

Then, every fourth time up,

You are already out.

 

 

 

RULES

for Mary Helen

 

That which cannot be read

Shall remain so.

 

That which we believe to be correct

Shall, in fact, be correct.

 

 

 

SPACE & LONGING & A FEW  FLASHES OF LIGHT

for Jane

 

Early morning in the garden

different intensities of color

grass and stone.

 

So hot—no hurry—heavy air

water-loaded air moving slow

across the yard.

 

Practice no-resistance

just a fan and a hammock

in Tornado Alley.

 

 

 

SUNSHINE WITHIN SUNLIGHT

for Shannon

 

Trees to see

sea to feel—I make friends

of feather, fur

and earth.

 

Magic

and magnetic

 

I’m a leaf dangling

from a spider’s filament,

 

Pointing.

 

 

 

FLOWERS INSIDE THE PRESENT

 

Don’t sob—

it makes the boat bob.

 

Yes means never.

No means maybe.

 

Moist words.

Written kisses.

 

In place, I’m

on a roiled lake.

 

I should shower,

but I’m too wet.

 

Fill the bucket,

and let me boil.

 

 

 

MUTINY IS FATE

 

Five times I’ve left Berkeley.

First, after my father told me not to

show my sorry ass at his door,

and I split for the Big Apple.

After I got a 0.9 grade point average

for my year of free speech protest,

and I regrouped in Aptos.

After my bust for redistribution

of capitalist wealth, when I sold

a copy of Macroeconomic Theory

back to Cal Book Exchange

without first buying it.

After a jealous husband took my scalp

but left my eyes, just for the glow.

And on my own—kissing the sidewalk

at San Pablo goodbye, I drove away.

Then, the weird poem of my life formed.

 

A sign says Hillside, but I should be bayside.

I see an emblazoned Blockbuster Video.

I ask a clerk how to get to Richmond.

She says, “I hardly ever leave Pinole.”

Where’s Pinole?

 

She asks if anyone knows the freeways,

and a dude in a stocking cap with an earring

through his eyebrow steps forward,

and I know that I’m in a timewarp.

Up the hill, the Parkway has four lanes

with a street lamp every couple hundred yards,

no cars, and everywhere outside the road

in total darkness—signs pointing left or right

to Sanitation Depot or Landfill.

 

Listening to Mister Mysterioso.

Around a bend, there she is, legs up to her ass,

tight mini-skirt, bare midriff, a tousle of hair

and hip bent as she throws her whole body

into a wave to hook a ride.

DAMSEL IN DISTRESS///DANGER.

 

I see the glitter of the Chevron plant

as I sail by, and I know where I am,

but does she know where she is

and why she is where she is and what

the odds are of getting carjacked.

By then I’m a long way down the road,

and she’s a memory,

bright lit against the cyclone.

 

Months later, I’m water chasing logs

on a small island in the Tongass Narrows,

and I see her—never could a girl

make my dreams like she did.

 

[Attention—in the following series of poems  put the poem at the top of the page and the prose section at the bottom of the page, like a footnote]

 

 

GALACTIC ADDRESSING CODE

 

Every heart must have a correct address.

Because yours in not consistent

with the established numbering

it is necessary to correct your address from

unknown.

____________________

Dear Jack,

  Sitting in the back seat of that Buick during The Berkeley Poetry Conference, you said,  “Go in there and come out with a jewel.” It was small, but it was beautiful. My first book, Breastbeaters, was an outpouring of adolescent feelings automatically unreflected—jazz jam sandwiches, moveable type sandwiches, the President’s sandwich—language up the kabuki—all very far art, you can pause where you please, yet voodoo as you do, winning out against the poem. After a couple bottles of Green Death we felt the Dixieland of opened heart and mind. Thank you, man, for removing some of my fetters. I will always believe the birds.

Love, Rychard

 

 

GIVE ME FAG VOMIT

 

Fucks US

under the stars

and stripes

where the Axis

(no, they don’t ask us)

 

and the Allies

(of course, it’s all lies)

create a suction,

an enigma

in the ice box.

 

You can see

in the dawn’s early light

his dong is long

past the pull date.

____________________

LBJ keeps poking the obvious member of the sleeping dragon of the Orient because, for the life of US, he doesn’t know who he wants to invite to his barbecue. Old presidents don’t die; they just bloat up.

 

 

 

O, THE HELLS RING OUT

 

Noriega’s sentence reduced 10 years

British jets hit Iraq

Ugandan troops kill 15 Hutu rebels

Record warmth triggers coral die-off

Three Serbs slain by Kosovo rebels

74 million saw Lewinsky on TV

 

I was sitting on the beach.

The sun was just setting,

and up walks this gal who says,

“You have a beautiful shape.”

____________________

Goodbye ceps. This is a story Lu told me. He said he asked her name, and she said it was “Showers,” and he thought it best to pass. As for the count, how to count the count—who do these numbers refer to?

 

 

 

TRAINS THAT COULD

 

I sing

To cloud to tree to wind to T.V.

 

I sing

Watusi wa

Watusi wa tu

 

I see two

Watusis in tutus

___________________

Stopping the troop trains, it was a bad day in Berkeley. Some of it was subtle. Some of it was gross. All of it was ugly.

 

 

 

APOCYYYLOVE

 

Archaic

Provincial

Old

Concise

 

Yes, and

even though everyone else is wearing

their cap backwards in Military Sci.

 

I focus and try to keep my sights steady

FOR LOVE.

______________________

This will be the only appearance of Oliver North in the poem. His escape is forward.

 

 

 

WAR SAW

 

This is how it is, Sir—

Sack and burn,

Rape and pillage,

Every town and every village.

____________________

Clausewitz was right—war should be left to the Generals.

 

 

 

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

 

The Fookers were revved all night,

grounded

with their canisters of mustard gas.

 

EXHEXDEXODREAM

SCREAMCREAM

 

Poor Apollinaire.

____________________

Pour Apollonair was a face cream frantically sought in boutiques in Paris under the Vichy government in That War. These Fookers are Messerschmitts.

    

 

 

NO VISIBLE MEANS OF SUPPORT

 

from Ketchikan I wrote

Life is a backdrop

the first house governs the body

 

the next, phenomena

then communication

Death, Sex—to die is to come

 

Orgasm has been defined

as a long, highly complex molecule

 

from Ketchikan I wrote

Love is a prop

____________________

The poet objectively considers his materials, his words as energy-vortex (nouns = verbs), and so the poem becomes concrete. This principle operates in the Hammurabian Code and the calligraphy of Medieval manuscripts.

 

 

 

GENERAL MacTHUSELAH

 

Genesis V 27, his days

were nine hundred sixty and nine years.

 

Forlorn is foul

weather—none

 

better or

 

brighter than his

shield.

 

He returns and returns

and returns again.

 

Landmines in the sand

are not compassionate.

____________________

Lu, I would remake the whole universe for you if I could, but the ghosts are hostile. I’m afraid they’re dug in and have lots of ammo. It’s all the same war. The generals just fade in and out. Beware of the sharp explodings.

 

 

 

TERROR ANGEL     

for Claude

 

I press you to my heart,

Lambmine.

 

We sit in the light of God’s golem eye

sampling images by Miro, Tapies, Picasso,

and Mary Smith.

 

She has such impacther vibe, her energy!

Liable to go off at the slightest provocation.

____________________

Buster Keaton created mistakes. His mistakes worshipped  him as their greatest leader. 1927—the end of the Silent Era. Hard to believe things could get out of control so quickly. The General is a mess.

 

 

 

ERRATA

 

read lankmines for lambmines

read lampmines for lankmines

read limpmines for lampmines

read linkmines for limpmines

read lessmines for linkmines

read lostmines for lessmines

 

In the early morning wind—

Diamonds and Wild Cherries.

____________________

Re: form—the same extension which constitutes a body constitutes space. Re: content—a life lived with respect to mistakes, a jest of meaning. A joust.

 

 

 

WORN TO A PHRASL

 

Blake had tea with me in the garden

behind Willow Wood Market, and I asked,

“What is there where imagelessness prevails?”

 

He told me, “Whereas some cosmoses

are being transformed and some cosMoses

transfigured, whereas Peter Max paints on

public transit, some metamorphosis continues.”

 

“How is this possible,” said I,  “where

there is no imagination?”

 

“Well,” he replied, “On the Day of Creation—

upDOWNupDOWNupDOWNup.”

____________________

The sun was high in the heavens at mid-second light while we talked and drank our Wuli Oolong. The day was a cup of poetry.

 

 

 

FLASHBURN

 

Here half my days gone and my light nearly spent.

 

The first trickster said, nothing lasts.

Or was it—you can’t cross

the same beach twice—or once,

for that matter.

 

This morning I couldn’t open my eyes.

Poured in a dose of sulfate and alcohol,

and they opened like the doors to a tomb.

When I closed the lids, a grating sound.

____________________

Blindness is a deductible expenditure. Some consolation, that.

 

 

 

IDEOGRAM    

for Carolyn Kiser

 

A stick figure, I open my mouth—

two swallows spin out.

 

 

 

 THE COLOR WHITE

for Bob Kaufman

 

Salt, snow, endless abomunisms—

my sheets before Lorca.

____________________

Denise Levertov and Robert Bly argue in the Captain’s tower.

 

 

 

GERANIUMS     

for J.W.

 

to the wall up my face down the river

running  rapids without a paddle

hallway filled with fading portraits

in the shadows of the corners

I begin to see things begin to move

 

damn piss scream belch barf

down the road I walk with a sign

NO U TURN with a bottle of scotch

and my brains in my hands

 

you cut yourself and saw worlds within

worlds within worlds

 

Burma Shave.

____________________

A lifetime under house arrest. Outside I hear the keys of my executioners jingle. If you wear a blindfold does the firing squad exist? 

 

 

 

GWEN

 

Yes, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes,

this must stop—my soul is dark,

and it’s flowers are nightshade and wolfbane.

 

We must put this behind us and get back to work.

 

Damn the sun and its flowers.

Damn the glass eye of the moon.

Damn my weakness and this heavy hour.

 

My heart quakes. Thank God, it’s Friday.

____________________

This is a transcription of a tape recorded by Linda Tripp. Nothing was ever made of it because the events in Dallas superseded this situation in importance. Camelot is now a wispy memory.

 

 

 

PERCY

 

O, Joker. Humorous in all situations.

The center of the pack—the hero

of transformation, an innocent fool.

 

He has frightening brightness in the eyes.

He laughs his bright laughter, and like

Stan Laurel does something unexpected.

 

Entranced by a few drops of blood

on the breast of a seagull in a parking lot

he shoots a half-court basket without looking.

 

Half a mind. Half a question. Half a deal.

____________________

Dotters, granddotters, and great granddotters of President Polk—a dot in her story, pinning the head on the dotting Old Fool.

 

 

 

I KNOW A PLACE          

for Robert Creeley

 

I attended him as he spoke,

his logic like a rapier, bent

in with a twist, then out,

phenomena trailing from my wound.

 

Jack, he said,

which is not my name,

the next tournament

won’t be held in Berkeley.

Berkeley is too bizarre.

 

Better Oakland, it was

noted for savage eucalyptus

and wild animal life

long before there was road rage, let’s

drive to Mel’s for cokes and fries.

 

 

 

WEARY ELVES

 

Lovers abide their time

in uninterrupted bliss.

 

Gentle forms

hovering above the steep hills

grieving, grieving.

 

Nature molds a new day

from filmy vapors and dissolves

the confusion of joy and pain.

 

Stars reflect

in the lake—

order

peace.

 

 

 

MADDENING

 

Those lines

those lines

those damn lines

 

and all this blank space—

a place with no one in it

 

and nothing below the surface

and

nothing above the surface

and nothing on the surface

but a white rabbit

____________________

One way to liberate the lovers from syntactic-semantic relationships is to encourage them not to sleep between the lines.

 

 

 

FOREST PERILOUS

 

O, wild bubbling brook

in this forest among the ferns,

naked to the sky and the flowers

and the animals that drink you,

 

Your sweet liquid, so pure,

rising to my lips is purer by far

than time or the rambling

of this wooden-worded line.

____________________

A knight in rented armor (in dented amor) having shed tears and blood and spilt his seed in foreign hands pauses for refreshment before continuing his quest for the perfect snack.

 

 

 

BILLY MEETS THE CANYON SPIRIT

 

Dawn of the manicured fingertips.

Billy swallows a handful of peyote

and pulls himself out of bed

and away from the warm señorita.

 

He walks up an arroyo and into a canyon

a mile from his hut. The spirit of a bullet

ricocheting. There is the hiss of cymbals.

Billy’s hand trembles in the fake landscape.

 

He blazes away with his Peacemaker.

He fires six rounds. Reloads. Fires.

He shoots bushes, rocks, holes in the ground.

He shoots bullets at bullets in the hot air.

 

Billy the Kid shooting in the chaparral,

he outdraws his shadow.

 

 

 

BOOGIE KNIGHT

 

Billy’s in the closet checking out his arsenal,

trying on different outfits—

 

A Colt Anaconda and Colt Python 

to crossdraw under a frock coat

 

A Browning Buck Mark with scope

and a Walther for backup with backstrap

 

A Smith & Wesson Model 640

with a Kahr micro 9 in patent leather

 

The Para-Ord double-action  l4 shot .45

The Bland .577—the ultimate manstopper,

 

Your fresh face.

____________________

Marc, I dug your article on Rebel Angels, reminding me of Blake’s Your Heaven gate might be my Hell door. Hard to know which way the angels blow in these poetry wars. So many confused flags.

 

 

 

MAYBE A MAIDEN

 

Hard to know.

She lives alone in a castle on a hill

with a garden of shrubs shaped like dogs. 

Poodles, beagles, pit bulls.

 

In the second light, she sits by the window

feeding birds. Surely, they are nightingales.

No one is ever seen in the garden,

yet the shrubs stay shapely and tasteful.

 

Strange, her mode of life,

desiring nothing, to be left to herself

in a topiary garden, desiring nothing. 

Quite weird, really.

_____________________

These peculiar settings and puzzling people, it’s enough to make me cry,“That’s it—let there be fire in the sea, earthquakes, hailstorms, avalanche.  Let the sky open and the gods ejaculate.”

 

 

 

NOT ANYTHING REAL

 

I dreamt you entered my tent

high on a ridge above a clear-cut.

I thought you’d come, and I came,

but you were only the moon—

and I came.

 

I told this to my Theosophy Club,

but they didn’t think it was mystical

and were a little shocked. All it was is

a poem.

 

I am filled as I am emptied.

___________________

The Grail is not the cup Christ drank from, but the serving plate from the Last Supper. It is shaped like an eye, a fish, a vulva, and is the geometrical form of  pi, the relationship of a radius to the circumference of a circle, which can be revealed by two overlapping circles whose perimeters intersect one another’s centers, a vesica pisces.  

 

 

 

MERLIN CREEPING ABOUT

 

Usually they meet in the woods

for dark, secret conduct

in the frenzy of the moment.

 

I see them often, and I remain

hidden—not that I need the titillation,

but it’s OK under the circumstances.

 

So much power in a secret—

yes, I too come to the woods

for dark, secret conduct.

____________________

I was locked up in Alameda County Jail. The ghosts thought I had come to liberate them. They wanted better shit to eat, and they believed my lambmine was the Holy Grail.

 

 

 

STARS AND TIME

 

all

and

all

and

all

 

this line

this rhyme

this line

 

dances

on the stones

in the trees

to the star

____________________

Nothing anagogical here. I spent the day painting a nude, who complained of cramps, but I explained she had to hold the pose. Models don’t know what they are.

 

 

 

HEAR THEM BUZZZ

for Jack Spicer

 

With the gums gone the

words within words, no kidding,

the birds chatting with other birds,

are barely heard.

 

And though the nose is

green and blue,

it’s much too hot to twitch.

Nothing

 

Stirs except a blue-bottle fly.

The eye IN my head

sees me coming toward the river,

and a sound says,

 

“I will die outside your window.”  

____________________

Two rivers—the River Styx and the other one, I can’t remember, the Russian, maybe. You’re embalmed, and there’s no place to go to piss to scream. If you follow me into the Underworld, bring three coins and some extra honeycakes.

 

 

 

RISKING THE BOUNDARY

 for Chanon

 

There’s somewhere I want to go,

and so I cruise the limits of the visible.

I feel the barrier, weird yet familiar

to my touch—is this a warning?

 

A car burns beside the road

where I meet the guardians of the way,

an old woman throwing bones in the dust,

a young man rolling stones on a board.

 

“Who are you?” he asks, “Elven queen,

white witch, she who has trouble

making up her mind?” If I pass, I know

I cannot return, but what more can I loose?

 

The wind carries me—I change.

I have no eyes. I have no sex.

I dance to the rhythm of the stars,

a dance that is older than love.

 

 

 

PERSEPHONE’S MIRROR

for Beryl

 

I am that woman despised

by all other women

and most desired by men.

I am tormented

 

by the hostile sex

that saturates me.

There are days and days

when I feel ugly,

 

and no one likes me.

You say that within

a golden goddess sleeps,

although I am forbidden to see

 

anything but under ground.

Unfolding as Spring,

I yearn for whoever

can understand my pain.

 

 

 

HERMES ON HIS ROUNDS  

for D.C.

 

rain hail snow wind

blow down books blood

banks banker’s daughters

 

sweet stain coming soon

sooner than the rain

hail snow wind

 

help hang hold

 

words zing in my head

flowers tremble at my feet

can’t keep my seat—in debt

spent—can’t repent—

pay the rent the car to split

my head

 

fish man star

 

this is an old tale story rhyme

line dance tune

in—here in

the mind in tune to this

 

 

 

HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM

 

I see a birdman very rigid, very freaked.

I see a bison also stiff,

the left foot turned so the cleft is seen—

eyes, nose, thighs, toes speak to me.

 

There is a break in the shaft.

There are breaks in the staff and dart.

Flickering torchlight and psilocybe—

best I omit the Cro-Magnon ceremonies.

____________________

Whether it is argued the proportional harmonies revealed in the Well Scene were arrived at intuitively or intentionally, I want to dispel the notion of a haphazard or awkward placement of the figures in the composition. With God’s cosmic dick out in the conversation, His will and testicle on the tongue is revealed in the golden section of the forth part of the first section.

 

 

 

PHANTOMS OF THE FAYUM

 

I see a man with two birds in one hand

and a snake in the other walking upon

a bridge above fishes.

 

I see a woman in the background.

I see flowers like bird tails.

 

There’s a butterfly landing on the man’s foot.

The butterfly is larger than the man’s foot.

The man is broken like the land.

kThe woman looks the same as the man.

___________________

Who was kThe? His wife? She wears a diaphanous gown, carries an Ankh, and has a dildo on her head. The naked, kneeling figure between his legs must be a servant. He beats the bush with a stick that resembles a snake. It is a boat made of rushes and not a bridge. A cat in the papyrus is trying to swallow a duck.

 

 

 

NUMBED BY THE RAYS

 

of things which are dimensions

which are worlds

 

Ech!

—not rational, eats worms, tastes musty—

LIFE, LOVE—my honeyed breast

my hairy ass.

 

I’ve ghosts in my closet.

“Seven for the seven bright shiners, six for the six

proud walkers, five for the Pentecostal, four for

the gospel makers...”

 

“Stop it, or I’m going to kick you in the teeth,”

shouts a spook from the closet.

 

“...one is one and all alone.”

____________________

Back in the hole I eat canned peas, instant mashed potatoes, and mystery meat. Illumined by a low watt bulb in a cage, that’s me, naked on a rough mattress.

 

 

 

HE WHO LISTS TO HUNT

 

Flower

Unicorn

Canker

Ketchikan

 

what can I say?

I saw them climb

Deer Mountain.

 

I called my friend, and

he gave no answer. 

I entreated him with

 

my mouth

God

suck

flower

____________________

Once Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he never looked back. Part of the legend is we kidnapped Robert Duncan. We made it as far as Vancouver on his Master Card. The army still lives off the ransom.

 

 

 

NECTAR

 

drop drop

rain on window

right on time

 

drop drop

morning glow

sun’s confession

 

drop drop

behind bars

reading the Gideon Bible

 

drop drop

news that stays news

completely confused

 

drop drop

and now Paul Harvey

with the rest of the story

 

 

 

LATE KNIGHT ON THE GOLDEN GATE 

for Frank

 

You were AWOL.

We’d been out all night

driving about, drinking stout.

 

You wanted to cruise the bridge,

and we said we’d pick you up

on the Marin side.

 

They must have thought you suspicious,

two Highway Patrolmen—you freaked

and leaped into the fog.

 

The hill seemed closer than it was—

200 feet down, you were agog

when you landed in the muck on your ass.

 

Man, you were a true stand-up,

with your last breath saying,

“It only hurts when I fart.”

 

 

 

PERFECT

 

arguing into the early hours

about the global economy

and the greenhouse effect

we solve the world’s problems

for another night

while the stars shine

through the colander in the sky

 

after you leave I continue to drink

until I’m topped up and tipping over

 

miserable fuck that I am

I crawl across a gravel pit

and down a culvert

where I find a pinhole of firelight

and I laugh and laugh and laugh

happy to find light

in the middle of the tunnel

 

 

 

FOR JENNIFER

 

Your smile like a Monet sunrise—

right from the start we’re old friends,

although only once in three lifetimes

could I find you.

 

 

 

SEEING ANGELS WITH MY INNER EYE

 

the river runs both ways

innocent pristine untroubled

in a clean environment

I’m always making the same mistake

 

looking closer I see sludge at my door

and the road detour through acid rain

as the bills of regret mount higher

I’m always making the same mistake

 

I read love poems on the leaves

blessed by the air’s deep prayer

I enter the heart of spring

I’m always making the same mistake

 

night feels like a rotten tooth

to move I have to roll snake eyes

a million times in a row

I’m always making the same mistake

 

let the stones simmer on the lake

I lay down in sweet pastures

I take refuge under the dress of a flowergirl

I’m always making the same mistake

 

 

 

IN KETCHIKAN

 

walking with Frank Boardman up South Tongass

from the New York Hotel  toward The Beanry

Frank listens to my recitation of Lu Garcia’s poem

and says it heralds the death of poetry

 

Biff!

Bam!

Pow!

 

Holy Cow!

Holy Cow!

Now we know

 

Batman is

God

is

 

the Devil 

knows

who he is.

 

“Don’t go on like that,” he pleads

and falls into a funk

 

 

 

MARILYN MANSON ON THE RAG                                                                  

for Tamara

 

 

Billy Blake wanders in the chartered streets

crying weep weep weep

Sylvia Plath lies in a basement

her cunt full of worms

Williams Carlos Williams crawls

to his Asphodel

 

Dylan slashes his eye

Villon thrashes on the scaffold

and the Old Gray Poet

mad blind gay

SEES

all the stars and all the grains of sand

all the bacteria in the shit pile

are children born trembling

 

 

 

THIS SCRIPT HAS A BUTT SHOT

   for Jillian

 

shooting video in Echo Canyon

picking up voices of Mexican children

bouncing off the walls I dance freeform

in the piñon pines spooking a murder of crows

 

cut to

Ghost Ranch

I’m wearing black

a man with a briefcase

walking through the desert

I work out a bit where my clothes

are a rippling specter floating on a mirage lake

 

I jump out of my suit, drop my briefcase

run stark naked toward the highway

a car passes in the distance

dissolve

 

accidentally left on, the camera sways

catching our torsos at odd angles

hands rolling a cigarette

smoke and mirrors

hands driving

 

chatting about freedom and responsibility

and the need to awaken the sacred

in our present commercial

progressively degraded

mode of being

 

a wrap, after we shoot the sunflower room

sunflower wallpaper sunflower hotpads clock calendar

cups curtains you in a sunflower apron cooking plastic sunflowers

serving up sunflower soup in sunflower bowls

on a sunflowered tablecloth without

a hint of script

 

 

 

SUNFLOWER KITCHEN

 

sunflower tablecloth

sunflower calendar

sunflower curtains

sunflower napkins

sunflower dishes

sunflower clock

sunflower cups

sunflower vase

plastic sunflowers in a bouquet

 

Jillian in a sunflower apron

cooking up sunflower soup

her brightness and pulse

in every spoonful

 

 

 

 

OF SUNS AND WORLDS

for Jessica

 

pink cotton candy in the pine trees

my assemblages looking

FINE

hanging on my bedroom wall in morning light

after worrying about their (aughh!) MEANING

last night

 

my dried grass imbedded in handmade paper

with dried grass laid on a photograph

of dried grass under an ink drawing on

a transparency and water-colored engraving

of dried grass entitled even this alchemy

converting each moment into the next

forges locks on your heart had seemed

TRITE

and a trifle overdone

 

drawing with my finger in the air

does any of this exist?

 

 

 

HIGH PRESSURE CENTER

 

from fair to foul

wind snow

moon sun

a balloon some

alone

 

at her weeds

the raven went

bent with a drill

around three trees

went

 

turn down the dream

tear down the drug

blow down the bank

soon a sign rain hail 

blow

 

in the spun bud

I mark clean

the naked zero

that registers

life

 

 

 

BOX OF NERVES

 

walking on the sea shore sea surf

sand dunes sand in my shoes

salt sun sea sand in my hair

rock water mist air waves breaking

sea foam sea weed sea wreck serenity

 

dearth decay division disaster

when I come back to town

I feel like a robot standing in a haze

tape hiss follows me

I’m sure a dæmon is eating my wiring

 

the chair says, “gow”

the light bulb says, “pfup”

the bed says, “let the snake coil

and the tiger bite”

 

 

 

AT EVERY LEVEL OF MONTEZUMA’S CONSCIOUSNESS

 

Spirit O Spool

did you punch him for his licoriceship?

did her blondness run out in cold

thick drops?  

did I fork a virgin zero from the globe?

foul the cherub cheek winds?

clog my veins with abuse of 4/4 time?

 

Behold the new born terror!

Behold all things new!

 

.

 

Pawing through the hospital dumpster

I find an aluminum Xmas tree

decorated with gauze and syringes

 

Insanity and murder, devastation and cruelty

fatal epidemics and contagion

O Furies, I look for you

bringing my Great Plan

 

 

 

LOVE’S GARDEN

 

I see Eden in fire.

I see Eden in water

and air.

 

Interrupted,

or alone and still,

I see her.

 

 

 

VISIONARY DESIGNS

 

Lu and I drink tea at Nefeli’s on Euclid

then hike around the Berkeley hills

looking at houses

 

this is the Lawson house

built by Bernard Maybeck in 1908

after the great earthquake

making a connection between past

and present

the house resembles a Mediterranean villa

and links

the earthquake to the volcanic destruction

of ancient Pompeii

 

each linked to each

I’m planning a house to look like a jet crash

to connect the present with the way the planet

will look over the next hundred years

 

 

 

AT THE GAME RESERVE

 

a drove of binocular

persons

observe elk eating hay

one man’s belly fills

his whole car

someone says

“a big sucker”

but he’s talking

about an elk

flesh elk

and belly

a balsam moon

at apogee

when I’m near you

my sap rises

and I feel like

locking horns

 

 

 

JOY IN ALL THE LITTLE THINGS

 

Cheri Quigley in pink

a pink pillbox hat, coat and dress

drops her purse in Howard’s Cafe

and it opens

and her birth control pills roll out

and I pick them up and ask her name

and I think she says Cherry Quickly

and I tell her I would like to, but

 

the elfish brightness in her eyes

undoes me

and she knows it and laughs

bright laughter

 

if she has her way

I will dance to mad atonal music

made from hitting garbage cans

and the ringing of cow bells

while she claps and laughs

 

 

 

WAVETWISTERS

 

wave twisters

we’ll live forever in bold letters

worm

mexlady

magdelena

“JoViolent”

glitter

rads

fairygirl

sicseed

unknown

KnightWalker

WarriorLady

jabborwocky

missing

Dreamy ~(-_-)~

cricket

devildoc

gypsy

Mystic-Rain

Rimbaud

sinkforil

starache

TigerLilly

wings

baps

punkerpoet

Magichex_g

Themis

siouxgirl

Olivia©

negative_bullshit

ghosthusky

1SickPuppy

unicorn

Neon-Ratio

AFROdite

zin

jvisionaire

darkpoet

beatnikig, that’s

beatnik in disguise

FallenAngel

nannycate

rooster

pokadottie

Sculpture

pootzygirl

standing_in_the_rain

Teawhisk

puravida

NormalBoy

Akira

aura

zane

eclips33

Scorpion

4Play4Ever

disintograte

milk_this

summer

orge

Kolorblue

2cool

Bonfire

scribe4rent

beauty

diogeneslamp

wiseowl in NJ

willow in Korea

alex in IL

Ethan in AL

}StUPidGirl{

Michaelangelo

in the room we come and go

 

 

 

I AM VIRGIN TO MY POEM

 

Gurgling, puking blood

a toothbrush jammed through my cheek

bricks tied to my ankles

a guitar string around my neck

a fireplug exploding in my heart

my fingers pinched in a car door

a cat clawing my eye

trampled under foot

stumbling through piss and shit

with my head through a ladder

I step on a crack

and sacrifice myself

to the immaculate conception of things.

 

 

 

SOUL OF THE ANTI-POET

 

Spring into movement like 111 or 666—

it’s all in the wrist.

Take your hat off, and stand alone.

Wipe that smirk off your chops.

 

Don’t fart.

Salute the sun.

The mucus of life is before you.

Eat up!

 

 

 

MY ESCAPE FORWARD

 

What’s up?

What’s down?

What’s there to do?

What’s done?

 

It doesn’t matter if I go up the Congo

down the Mekong

or follow Strawberry Creek

if I go far enough I’ll loose my mind

 

Strawberry Creek runs down the hill

past the Cyclotron through Faculty Glade

I sit by the stream

and my dreams are full of heavy metal

 

My freshman year at Cal

Professor Parkinson thinks my essay

My Home

is the worst thing he’s ever read

 

These squiggles are my class notes

for Atomic Radiation and Life?

must be the paths of neutrinos

no mass, just spin

 

Frank Chin takes off his Rotcy uniform

and sticks the barrel of his rifle in the ground

Walking off the drill field in his shorts

he’s no chickencoop Chinaman

 

The Un-American Activities Committee

is in town—Black Friday—the police

fearing they are loosing control wash

the protestors down the courthouse steps

 

At breakfast my dad chokes on his toast

I’m on the front page giving a sieg heil

What he can’t see is the mic

I’m holding for KPFA

 

A war machine slouches towards Saigon

I hear the litany of the dead

A protest movement is born—

the formation of a hive

 

Released from the Darkness

a pair of calipers measures my skull

Is my brain pan enlarged

by Tibet, by Nicaragua, by Burma?

 

A child might wonder why

the earth seems flat

note the lines

connect the lines

 

Eventually, they form a circle—

Bosnia—East Timor—Kuwait—

now that your world map is complete

the name of the game can be changed to

 

Genocide for Control of Oil

The New Super Bowl

It’s an end run...

the SCUDS vs the Patriots

 

It’s a blitz

on a fortress, on a mosque

creating a gulf of blood

and a nightmare of smashed faces

 

And in the aftermath

open sewers and squalor

with a half million children

dead because of sanctions

 

 

 

I KNOW NOTHING

 

Silence before me and behind

preceding speech

 

What I am now saying is false

 

The sky passes

passes through my senses

 

Everything smells of mock orange

 

I skipped today, went

around midnight into tomorrow

 

I knew those hours were broken

 

 

 

PAGE OF WANDS

for Noella

 

don’t you want to know what is going on?

black on black on 

black, black dress, black nails

black eyeliner, blonde hair dyed black

dog chains

and combat boots with 2 inch soles

you want to learn tarot

but don’t care about Ancient Egypt

or what is hidden in the cards

just how to read them

gothic

my mood, your costume

no need for all this blather

ok, I’ll forget the traditional path

take you to a coffee house

look at the art

here, let you play with the cards

go off in every direction

from any vantage point

correspondence

with whatever comes next

that girl’s tattoo

it says BROKEN across her back

in bold letters—

the coal miners’ strike in Harlem County

Kentucky in the 70s—

no kidding, things get me down

better now we’re sitting in this café

note my inflection and the emphasis

put on precision, value, fun

coming at you sideways

first a double mocha, then history

then a balloon

inside, I write, “Poot was here!”

and vanish into air

 

 

 

WHAT IS MIND?

 

Dad awakes, he’s shaking—

says he’s embarrassed, he’s wet his bed

and doesn’t know what to do

Here I am

bringing diapers to my main authority figure

 

He also wonders if there is a drive on

to change the color of the grass

I can buy into this

I wouldn’t be surprised if there is

 

Friggin’ scary

even a bit moribund—

feel this way because I am still

indulging myself

in life

and fear the weirdness of dying

 

 

 

 

NIGHT OF MYSTIC RAIN

 

I have been watching a cat

and now it’s dark

and the cat appears blue and yearning

with claws ready to scratch the night

 

I am going out

to look for you on the bench in the park

expecting to find you wrapped in newsprint

sleeping red in the dark

 

Rain in the yellow trees

there is a song under the table

I have enough love to make the stars ache

and I can afford to I buy the silence I become

 

 

 

MAGICIAN’S APPRENTICE

 

I cough, sweating, knots in my shoulders

He knows I know where the drib lies

where the energy emanates

 

My nausea is the key

Follow my stomach heaving

find the spot in the earth

 

He points to a rock

moves his hand in a circle

I remove the rock

He hands me a sharp stick, and I dig

 

I hear chanting in the yurt

It’s daylight, but it’s like a long night

 

He points to a new place a few inches away

and I dig there, another address of agony

He points to a spot a foot away

more digging, a piece of paper appears

I can see script bleeding in the damp

I want to unfold this dark treasure

but he makes a gesture for fire

both hands upturned, fingers wiggling

I build a small fire with leaves and twigs

 

A wind begins, then vanishes

although it’s still here

 

I cough and blow on the flames

as the paper catches

and curls like a question

 

My nausea is gone

 

At the sight of him in his robes and tennis shoes

doing a playful little shuffle, I can’t help but laugh

 

 

 

FLOWING

 

The clerk at the health food store

gives me a dead look

when I order some sweet whey to go

 

Outside, I see a little dog

I wonder why he doesn’t have any hair

I wonder why he doesn’t have a tail

I wonder why he doesn’t have a head

I wonder why he doesn’t have feet

I wonder how he trots down the street

 

I’m a distortion in the fog

a man without form

a man with one arm

a man with one lip

an old man I finally understand

 

 

 

ALL THIS INSIDE ME

 

I enter the quiet

where flies buzz and leaves rustle

in their immortality

 

The silence ends at a yellow bird

a Western Tanager—I looked him up—

atop a stalk of last year’s mullein

 

 

 

VISION QUEST: SO MANY RAINBOWS

 

The mothers sat by the fire chanting

I could see them in the lightning flashes

Rain came down in sheets

I couldn’t tell if it was all rain or the mothers’ tears

 

 

 

SAMSARA IS AN AIRPORT

SURROUNDING A DELAYED FLIGHT

 

I’m stretched out with my eyes closed

listening to the travelers’ voices and the intercom

 

“...want my money back...”

“...want to be in San Francisco, now...”

“...really no reason for this...”

“...is it really raining there?...”

“...will my luggage arrive?...”

 

“Will the pilots for flight 2807

please report to gate A6?”

 

This presence

that is all

that is

 

Given

each moment

each breath

 

“This is your final boarding opportunity!”

 

 

 

HOOKEENA VILLAGE

 

Camped on the beach at Hookeena

an embittered youth goddess, slightly overweight

says she’s been here a month and not been hassled.

 

A scuba diver surfaces and wades ashore

and a sunbather rolls off the table she’s been sleeping on

and waddles to the Chew Chew Caboose.

 

I look around for my shoes and find them on a bench

where I left them yesterday when I was cleaning fish.

I’m continually pelted by mangos.

 

Wind scatters and gathers—

Buddha sips a beer and says, “All this is transitory.”

 

 

 

ALOHA MEANS DON’T CRASH ON THE ROCKS

 

I sit below the ruins of Pu’nkohola Heian,

a temple built by Kapoukahi

on the Hill of the Whale,

dedicated to Kukailimoku, a war god,

built with a human chain of rock.

 

I feel lonely and off-centered

listening to the silence behind the hum of insects.

Not questioning,

just staring dumbly at the water slapping me awake,

wondering

what draws me to this savage place, to eel and shark.

 

I find my way—

I put on my wet suit, take my spear

and swim out.

 

 

 

AT MAHUKONA BEACH PARK

 

I caught a bottom fish off the lava cliffs

made of winding lava called Pali’s hair

where Pali touches the sea.

 

The road is closed by a lava flow

ahaha lava dotted with pink and yellow

marriage flowers.

 

Love carved on a park bench.

Buds in the rain.

Jaws on grasshoppers.

A gekko in the telephone coin return.

 

Easy to see

there is something bigger than myself.

 

 

 

EAST WIND, WEST WIND

 

A beach bum plays classical guitar.

I look up and see a girl

dancing to the last rays of the day.

Her eyes closed,

her hips in sync with the strumming,

her feet pattern the sand.

I’m transported to a green place.

 

I turn my head.

What is this?  Where am I?

Festival day at Spencer Park.

The natives glare at the howies.

It may be Spencer Park to us,

but it’s The King’s Beach to them.

Their eyes say Private Property.

 

 

 

POINTLESS POEM ABOUT

THE EXISTENCE OF NON-EXISTENCE

 

Sitting in Mercy Hospital in Durango

I wait for Lama Tsering.

 

An obese lady to my left in shorts and tee-shirt

paints her toenails copper.

 

A tall Indian in a set of tails, his hair in a braid

turquoise and bone necklace

dark glasses and cowboy boots

paces the floor.

 

A tough-looking dude with a tattoo on his calf

blood on his shirt

his right eye mangled

bounces a baby on his knee.

 

Aliens 3 is on the TV.

 

 

 

STORY MY MOM TELLS

 

1939: Globe, Arizona

and in the spring, about May

we visited some friends

lived up in the mountains.

 

That was Geronimo’s territory

and I asked Mrs. Craig

“How did you ever exist up here

with no roads and having to ride

mules to get out and to bring in

your furniture and Geronimo

running through the country?”

 

“You kept an eye pealed,” she said

“and your kids close at hand.”

 

 

 

CORD CUTTING

 

Yeshe asks me to be her surrogate father

Lloyd, born 1917 in Arkansas

Shirsten will play the part of Emma

the mother, born in Peru

 

We meet at the sweat lodge

Yeshe is wearing peasant clothing

a long skirt, a white blouse

Sparky Shooting Star and Tsultrim

stand to one side to guide us

 

The three of us form a triangle

with a ribbon around our waists

and Emma and I speak to our daughter

how she has lived up to our expectations

time, now, for her to be on her own

 

As she wrestles with this separation

we cut the cord of one too long in our service

and her tears fling aside the pretence of the rite

and hammer home the meaning of being grown

 

 

 

REFUGE

 

Don’t look at this poem

You are staring

I stare back

Your eyes are clamped here

It is damp here

but my throat is dry

 

This poem is a shamble

down an alley of broken glass

relief from rowdy talk in The Tav

 

You are asking questions

this poem

cannot answer—

at best you can rest

here

 

I cannot answer

but I can sing

 

 

 

JUXT POSE

for Meg

 

Here, rock stillness.

Here, a falcon’s free-fall.

Here, dangling tassels of wisteria.

Here, a Tibetan mudra mystery.

 

 

 

POSTCARD FROM THE STATE OF DISASTER

 

These mountains—

mountains

mountains.

 

I read a note in a trail box

that said there are too many rocks

in the mountains, so please

dynamite these obstacles

into ski slopes.

 

In the scree of time

dynamite is a joke.

 

 

 

SIT LIKE A MOUNTAIN

 

I’m in the tent of self-produced mind

late at night, candles flickering

soaking up his mind essence, like

being in Tibet a thousand years ago

with Guru Rinpoche, tough and gentle.

 

He taught 3 words that hit the point

this old lama doing it the hard way

sitting on his ass in a cave for 20 years

until his bone touched the stone

listening to waves of bliss-emptiness

crash on the shore of nirvana.

 

Noise floods in from the street.

Here in the pure land of Santa Rosa,

one taste in the supermarket aisle

and new asanas for highway maneuvers.

 

 

 

LOST IN TONGASS WOODS

 

Which way?

got turned around

drizzle, muskeg and devil’s club

mountains on four sides

 

Let’s see

I came over that rise

knelt and backed up

turned and sat down

adjusted my gear

got up

and...

 

Fear I’m in Death’s maw

when I hear a shout

and see the beam of a torch

Dale at the trail head

with a bag of trailmix

 

I’m gobbling it up

when he tells me he added candle butts

in case we need to start a fire

but they’re gone

 

All one taste

 

 

 

NIMA’S FIRST SWEAT

 

New Zealand

To the Continental Divide

At the edge of the fire pit

 

Vincent tells this warrior

To sit in front, and Nima sits

As close he can sit

 

The scar tissue of an old wound

The scar tissue of his past

Blisters in the babbled prayers

 

Ute and Maori know

In the beginning something is broken

 

 

 

MOTHER OF ALL SWEATS

for smallfeather

 

It’s the equinox

a lot of newbees in the lodge

maybe too many bodies for 40 rocks.

In the first round

a girl behind me starts to cry

and in the second round

Jack, a veteran of many sweats

passes out.

 

Vincent tells Jack to sit up

and Jack sits up

but soon his head is in my lap.

Third round

a boy near the door asks to be let out

and the girl behind me, moaning now

says her body is numb.

She is shocked by this big Ute

spitting water in her face.

 

We’re in the womb.

No one leaves prematurely.

Teetering at the edge of the pit

a man is talking to his selves.

The spirits are moving.

He’s asking why he is here—

“Let me out of here, I can’t take it.”

Vincent has never seen such a thing

but he lets them out.

 

The Tibetans have a saying,

Until the head is cooked

of what use is the tongue?

 

 

 

POISED

for Webster

 

Why is there a Universe!

How did the Universe come into being!

Shouts of joy or fear or accusation.

 

Bumping my head against the wall

like La Motta in Raging Bull,

“Stupid!  Stupid!  Stupid!”

 

Bertrand Russel’s frustration

when, as a child, he asked,

“What is matter?”

 

And the answer, “Never mind.”

“What is mind?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

 

The Universe is big

and getting bigger, expanding fast

and ever faster—a basketball

 

crossing twenty-four time zones

on its way to the hoop.

Only there is no hoop.

 

No end to an expanding Universe.

I drift in infinite space

(or no space), an illusion

 

of myself in an obscure place,

a floating reflection,

nothing holding me up.

 

What’s nothing’s circumference!

Pi and light

the defining functions.

 

A circumference of no-space expands

@ speed of light towards a critical radius.

The impalpable algebra of infinity.

 

This U

a sub-atomic structure

of a larger U.

 

No U,  just dots on a time line,

or like a bulb on a timer

on/off.

 

Vacuum soup. Eternal mind.

An egg, a holy word, a string.

Winos and zinos in stasis.

 

Black bodies, black holes, blue lights.

Anti-matter, negative space, and big bangs.

The quarks of love and strangeness

 

and the quirkiness of God.

No limits: multiple Universes.

Limits: a one night stand.

 

Singularity is the instant

the Universe appears, every region

squeezed into a single point

 

on an axis of time.

Poised.

A=pi r²-1/Threshold/+1E=MC²

 

Empty: does not exist,

has never existed,

will never exist.

 

Empty: has potential to exist.

Primordial mind pool.

Heap of awareness.

 

What is truly empty!

Every minim has stuff—

even without mass, there’s spin.

 

Exists and not-exists at the same time.

Either/or, neither/nor, both and.

Nothing spinning—no word for this.

 

Given previously annihilated U,

then there’s potential

for a new U to come into existence.

 

Things are already out of hand

by the time the Prime Mover

produces/invents/creates the U.

 

Angels cruise by in an ‘00 Ford Escort

with automatic weapons on their laps.

I hear them peel out

 

on the corner of Hall & Piezzi,

laying down a streak of rubber

before their Dunlops dig in.

 

A mirror in the void.

A flight of photons

against the force of darkness.

 

Can’t see the bullets coming.

A bullet from the past

and one from the future.

 

A bullet on the chart

and one to the heart.

Spirit tries to reach me,

 

but it hits an event horizon

like a bug

on the windshield of a car.

 

 

 

NOVEMBER MIST

 

I’ll accept the emptiness

and give

the sullied figments

form.

 

I’ll follow these ruts

back to a field

filled

with blue light on snow.

 

 

 

DISCOVERY

 

Come to this.

How to know?

 

I trusted.

 

I dreamed a bit

but

I’m a stranger

to myself.

 

 

 

FACADES

 

Night comes, and moving into the heavenly darkness

I engage in the slow seduction of a woman

who looks like Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box.

 

We are digging graves in the center of a road running

through the high, open fields of Umptanum,

going slow, a problem with rain and with our will

to dig.

 

Standing in a shed, looking through the drizzle,

telling her she can do it, not to leave,

and convincing myself we can finish the job.

 

She puts my hand under her shirt and lets me kiss her,

then puts my cock insider her, but

when I realize we are in a showcase window,

I awake.

 

 

 

ALONG THE CUTBANK

 

I see your visage in the rock

where you spied some birds

to add to your Life List

and then spent an hour

trying to identify the common jay.

 

I shut up and squatted and picked my nose.

 

I roll a rock into the river.

A new moon shines on all that has vanished.

It’s all here

including the hole in my shadow.

 

 

 

 NEW FORMS

 

Where do I go from here?

New will is born

with the flowering of spring—

 

A place smaller than the heart

but bigger than the world.

 

 

 

DHARMA TALK

 

Blue flurry

where prayer flags flutter.

A jay drinks

from one of my offering bowls.

 

I try to teach this jay to chant

without much success.

He nods inquisitively

then continues his way beyond training.

 

 

 

BUILDING A FIRE FOR THE MEDICINE MAN

 

I throw a few leaves in the fire pit

add a cluster of twigs

stuff in a napkin

stir the ashes and

light a match to the confusion.

 

A puff of smoke from the leaves,

a branch catches, crackles

and goes out.

 

Horse asks, “What are you doing?”

“Making a fool of myself,” I answer.

“Just wondering,” he says.

 

 

 

EURYDICE AWAITS ORPHEUS IN HELL

    for Sasha

                                                        

I wait for Orpheus in hell

knowing his lyre is on fire

 

the distance he must go is

further than a raindrop

further than a poem

drips

 

in either

world

 

.

 

he thought ahead

when he brought

three coins

and

an extra

sandwich

 

I hope

Cerberus likes

pastrami on rye

 

.

 

Harpy claws pluck his guts

and our love is carrion

on the winding stair

yet

 

there is triumph

and tenderness in his last look

 

 

 

 

INSTALLATION

for Gay

 

Turning off Fulton onto 12

maneuvering to the left

no, right

 

Fan belt whine on the freeway

skill saw whine in the supermarket

 

Different scripts reverberate

in the silent inclined

box with masking

tape, paint, brushes, pan

& roller tumbling

to the floor

 

The doors to my senses

open—I see my room

in the gallery—

eyes, ears, nose, mouth

 

Black rectangles the size of doors

painted on the interior walls

thin strips of black

running parallel

to the black kick board

using stick pins, black yarn

mixed with wire & colored cloth

neither nest nor web

 

A handful of fog

mirrors and masks

a collection of wrapped thoughts

& small boxed images

revealing the true phantom

speaks the truth

 

 

 

FRIENDS

for Sito

 

A man starts a fire

in a fire place.

 

Another man starts a fire

in a fire pit.

 

Two friends

are lit by

a single flame

 

that

dances to a sound

it hears

 

in a place

as round

as it can be—

 

a circle of fire,

a circle of friends.