Expect Delays Page 5

  I am sesquichromatic, if at all.

  Reading of a book (Robert Hass’s) called The Apple Trees at Olema;

  I conceive of another, mine—The Hamburgers at Barney’s.

  Italian Hours

  “For such things as we all know are done and not said—indeed not saying them is a necessary condition for their being done.”

  —Leonardo Sciascia, The Moro Affair

  Many loves.

  Name one.

  ABUT TO IMAGE

  (relic of missed relationship)

  Ghost Ship on the Pecos

  You can’t teach me. I don’t listen.

  A circle like a drop of water in an oil can.

  Everything Chinese slum.

  Harmless Eats

  Emotional component: Something we do under a tree or in the backseat of a car.

  Once there, if you darken

  “All these pieces are people I know.”

  A true experience of Germany

  Friends of Irrelevance

  “I was happy about things changing without my doing anything to change them.”

  xsA few romances blossomed over a few dead bodies.

  “Kipling” “Coupling” “Kim”

  Definition of Abstract

  “Touchless Car Wash”

  Cast Webs

  the slippery perverse

  the most miserable

  subjects fall

  objects evocative of theory

  new species threaten the system

  a bird suffocates

  dogma’s chaste ironies

  Rob Kaufman says that the objectionable ironies of Kundera and Milosz derive from mid-20th-cenutry horrors—likewise the Russian “Sots” mentality—from cushioned sensibilities post death camp, gulags. Q: Isn’t Kafka’s irony above all this? A: Had Kafka lived [i.e., nobody knows].

  ALL SYSTEMS

  SUCK

  Fidget, Fidget

  Air kisses cover sun and moon.

  Who do you know? Who can say?

  Time-Sensitive Document

  Where is light?

  What is gravity?

  When does feeling become fact?

  unlike most ghosts

  Douroucouli

  Oxygen Mask

  Odgen Nash

  DOUROUCOULI

  =Venezuelan dialect

  =”””monkey

  92 in the shade

  rock rose and fuchsia

  particulate matter

  O den of antiquity!

  National Suicide Day

  (No thanks)

  Dreaming of the Divine Template in Heaven Beside

  Silliness is Next to Godliness.

  Some nudity—

  Study it.

  Entirely artificial.

  August 28

  Alberto Gonzales resigns as attorney general of USA. John Ashbery becomes poet laureate of MTV. There must be some connection.

  Moose calls of the primal Polish Slough.

  Cars and running shoes—same colors, shapes, and functions, more or less.

  Napa, August 4

  In a dream the name “Mark Akenside” appears; I recognize it as that of an English poet, ne’er read by me, but somehow being read or talked about in the dream. A contemporary of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, and physician and author of a poem in three books called The Pleasures of the Imagination, he was slightly lame due to a wound inflicted by his father-the-butcher’s cleaver. Wikipedia says his “verse was better when it was subjected to more severe metrical rules. His odes are rarely lyrical in the strict sense, but they are dignified and often musical. His works are now little read. Edmund Gosse described him as ‘a sort of frozen Keats.’”

  August 8

  “Song” writ in pavement. Mist off tailgates.

  Madame Void, meet Brother and Sister Chaos.

  Mind Transfer, Self-Dazzlement

  They talk like people in documentaries.

  I didn’t know that things “came” to mind.

  I seem to be forever on page 44 of this book.

  Iteration, Utterance

  Reading my poems in Japan, I realize how immersed they are in several idioms, not just New York—not just Manhattan, Upper East Side—but “all over the place” in American English, Anglo-English, movies, songs, Jewish humor (via early TV variety shows), camp, wit, etcetera. Immersion. If they serve at all, it might be as vocabulary drills, tests of grammar, sound checks.

  Dream ending with stacks of books along the path to house—I must move one stack so that anyone coming toward the house doesn’t trip on them. Banging on the screen door, frustrated, kicking: I can’t get into the house. Later Connie tells me the meaning of the dream: “It’s obvious! You can’t get into the Pantheon, you’re not one of the immortals!” She has a lot of conviction about this, but I am not so sure and in fact am puzzled by her even thinking this way.

  Dream I’m at a round table with Frank O’Hara and other friends. A realization that everyone is sad. Frank looks a little like my grade-school friend Mason Hicks; his eyes watery. Why didn’t I know it was all this sad? I think, and wake up with the last lines of “Poem V(F)W” in mind: I see my vices . . . / which I created so eagerly / to be worldly and modern / and with it / what I can’t remember / I see them with your eyes.

  I broke my femur

  Popped a lemur

  Sang “La Mer”

  To George the Hare

  All alone, so all alone

  Oh that Hare!

  Who’ll repair

  My sore thigh bone?

  On Repeat

  In 1980s USSR, whenever a governmental crisis arose, the video recording of a single performance by the Bolshoi Ballet of Swan Lake was aired continuously, day and night, on Soviet TV. Such may be the final issue of the Great Russian Soul.

  The idiots are making fun of you again.

  Is telling a lie the same as towing the line?

  August 16, 2012

  An MRI is not so bad if you are well acquainted with modern music from say, Varèse and Antheil to Survival Research Laboratories and Industrial Rock—and, too, as long as you aren’t obese and remember to breathe. There’s a mirror that allows you to see the room, including the movements of the technician puttering. All the same, after they had Horus and Set became enraged after Nephthys’s deception and had Osiris butchered, Isis ran to put him back together. Garbled, salty mess. Did he too have a callus on one thigh? What if screws have to be undone to remove the pain?

  Staying Alive, Idée Reçue

  Waste of precious time.

  Get the show on the road.

  Ancient Stele

  Here lies Bill

  —Still.

  Mac

  sMarter than anybody

  attAboy

  curtain Calls

  “It’s nice to see persons of moderate celebrity,” says the checkout girl at Whole Foods, black-rimmed spectacles & all.

  “We’re doing God’s work.”—Lloyd Blankfein, chairman, Goldman Sachs

  A Darwin Knife

  Case of double occupancy en la cabeza

  No two alike

  Yet I prefer seeing one at a time

  To apply thick paint as if it were water take a sponge mop

  The straitjacket flies to pieces

  Reliving your childhood through the lives of others.

  A crying shame how no one speaks the language anymore.

  Leaves blow into the lobbies.

  The monkey clan is mad as hell.

  Hearing (360 degrees)

  Listening (“who so list to hunt”)

  LISTEN

  SILENT

  Letting the Back Matter Through

  “On a day when Pablo was painting one of my breasts . . .”

  Not Too Late

  Consciousness: We stand outside the gates of a prosperous castle, hungering after bread and sunlight.

  Oof

  That modernist soundtrack rife with its skips, pops, and dings,
old-time prints of boot heels applied to flaming skulls, and opalescent reflux morsels—oof!

  Henry James said of the American novel that it has “an air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.”

  The opinions I hold, few as they are—my reactions to falsity and disgrace—are identical with those of my youth. But when I was young they were signs of brashness whereas now they are liable to be perceived as the foibles of an old crank.

  Bedsides

  How my mother in her last year asked me for the first time ever to read her some of my poems, and at the end of one bedside reading said: “You take ordinary things and make something beautiful out of them.”

  Another time, very late in the getting-to-know-me game, imbued with all the futility she seemingly felt, in what seemed a despairing sense of ever understanding what I was about, said: “Well, you’ve had an interesting life.”

  SISTER CADENCE

  Accounts Payable

  cantered lightheartedly downstream to their doom

  —Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Somebody down there hates us deeply,

  Has planted a thorn where slightest woe may overrun.

  Disorderly and youthful sorrow, many divots picked at since

  Across the thrice-hounded comfort zone.

  Can’t cut it, sees the permanent crone

  Encroaching aside likely lanes of executive tar

  All spread skyward.

  You got the picture, Bub:

  This world is ours no more,

  And those other euphemisms for dimly twisting wrath,

  A wire-mesh semblance bedecked

  With twilight’s steamed regard.

  Look at the wind out here.

  Delete imperative.

  Hours where money rinses life like sex,

  Whichever nowadays serves as its signifier.

  After the Ball

  Sharp intake as of glitter

  Panoramas long since dumped

  The thinner chapter crowded out

  Approbation bridged within range of a box

  Busying my resolve

  Where cold comfort stirs

  Epic midnight embraced but didn’t get it

  So occupied its share of the immense debit

  Now coming up and on.

  For Jane & Anselm, the News

  Not one beat

  does the heart

  ever miss that’s

  all yours.

  Bleep

  Please do nothing to me but slowly.

  —Rosemarie Trockel

  Pavanes explode in markets of gland

  Social skills regally decline

  King Kong cure-alls cut deep, expiring

  Strangers When We Meet

  Homage/Obit

  I like to have a little secret at the end of my poems,

  The way nothing is ever finished

  Nor do I abandon a thing because

  Of its being just plain bad.

  “My painting,” said Juan Gris, “may be bad painting,

  But at least it is Great Bad Painting.”

  In case of emergency, I write this down,

  And when all else fails, try being kind to strangers.

  Not so funny, Jack, but don’t get me wrong:

  Only deep in the mucous do I see.

  Abdomen Ode

  Paired wrongly with the obvious, a sitting blank

  The walls between names selectively scaled

  There must be some mistake,

  As just when exotic dancers age, the slipper gives pause,

  An old soft-shoe opens for the slacker inane.

  Her I last saw au balcon on point,

  But it was an orbital capture.

  “Ni hao” in Chinese says “Hello.”

  Nothing physical, the mystery thinning out

  No matter, slowly she turns

  In plain English, all eyes, mouth, and hair.

  First Thing

  Drown on all fours

  Pennies from a box flood the frump market

  Blasts of nacre, triage under weather’s speckled pool

  The idée fixe never happens yet can’t be ignored

  Still the moon is half full?

  Speak for yourself with your hands up

  The search is on

  Search and destroy, if you will

  Elimination starting with a lit fuse

  Vacuumed anon

  Your pleasure is the lee shore

  Thunder smites the tundra’s paw

  This should be memorable

  Legs whited out

  The runners advance

  Margin Rights

  Exigency, the golden cloud, steals from another

  Figurine the warmed-over host pours

  Revenge in nipple, orifice,

  Glint of bone matter

  When the hatch slams shut over elegiac tastings

  And tinny banister elves shower the strain

  I will reconvene in stride

  Spottily the Shogun pauses, sniffs

  Smooth or jagged the shades are done with

  And night blazes en route to yon bubbly cosmos.

  Hence, ever more aperitifs to sever at High-Risk Lodge

  Its dithering miseries forensic and pollarded

  In silver-brocade clutches

  Scalding embraces on lustrous ice roofs

  Incise the alabaster scold contingent

  Unseen to date, but lately slid into view

  Exquisite dolor of clear skin and bland incantation

  Commandeering tomorrow’s Moss Palace

  Monogram

  for Bernadette Mayer

  Just one more vintage movie,

  Batwings tonight at the Bal Masqué—

  Another of Earth’s creatures stuffed

  By distinguished pedigree.

  I get a lot of madcap ideas about sentience

  How knowing you has you put down in the book

  Forbidden speech recognition—

  Else why make such a face?

  And now it’s luck no longer mouth that moves

  When fastidious rummage whispers

  To divulge a surplus

  A clue if not the key.

  Prospect my question laps up for good—

  I lean to it. Knowing you,

  First-person dwindle.

  Tweet-tweet. Prick.

  Neither Here nor There

  Racing with the moon

  Nary a world away

  You remember Etta

  She was on the Today Show

  The outgoingness of conundrum

  Vice versas of the asterisk

  Far far from home

  Sister Cadence

  for John Godfrey

  The new sincerity floors us

  quarries steam over towers

  friendlier than comfort

  brings subject home to impetus

  That release-me tone starts lightly

  forms a tree sheds by light accepted

  insofar as acceptance utters

  what wants that want not

  Mere taffeta coinage Lamia says

  loose swerve of sucky wet flavor

  purse takes charge

  where dimension chooses extremities

  So the knowing wobble trills

  place thought next to her in water

  put her there then

  why not who you are who lives who’ll tell what differs

  Condemns the stunner

  the fault stays in the picture

  mine has flaws best known for blurs

  whose night claws come to crawl the change to local

  A certified risk paddles by at dawn

  to claim your bullion for numerous oceans

  filed under blossoms compounded

  the last fraction greater than day for night

  No Argument

  As cicadas split hairs at sun
set

  skid marks reel off frilly increments

  lifting on high the clear carnal sea

  Pure Saturnalia—be captivated if you can

  with that approximate yearning for borders

  like when you first heard the music whispered low

  What it was was Sprechstimme

  echo of life’s primordial Kunstwollen

  blank check of the air

  I always thought a tree house was involved

  the secret loves of a chain-link fence

  you stand mesmerized

  while the beholders scatter

  their potshots getting cozier

  on the last meteor out

  Ancestral faces hang on the old oak tree of a cloud

  time out of reach for the main complaint

  omit the wake-up stifle any kindred sense of smell

  A film is gathering of exceedingly correct proportions

  to puncture maybe tumble into

  not even once

  Reprise

  “Happily ever after”—you don’t know that feeling? After many difficulties, the two stars are kissing with their eyes closed, and the music swells. The screen says THE END in big block letters. Happy ending: you’re set for life. In the seats everyone is choked up, crying for the happiness such prolonged kissing promises. Meanwhile, kissing itself is amazing. I got completely lost in it. I went out and started kissing anyone I could find. Who? I always had good taste in women.

  for Paul & Isabelle, January 13, 2012

  at Mary Valledor & Carlos Villa’s

  Brick

  Late snow dusts New York hurrah

  chill sequins breeze up about

  my right face

  old bells’ incontinent fritter

  reject applause

  embrace adulation

  most things keep moving en media hora

  and pointless wrangles force the weave

  doleful classicism revived

  the greasy crayon writes

  special edition on the Jungfrau