SINCE YOU ASK
1.
Much that is sad, hurt, beautiful must be disregarded
like the gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace be-
ginning at the end of our sentences, which out of the
tearful coliseum beg repeating in the slaveful climate
that fostered them. Meanwhile, the town does not
exist for the drowned woman. But the fence makes it
our own. At the beginning of March. I waited like a
broken diving board, butterfly and overall kick-drum
target as their sons grew suicidally beautiful and galloped
terribly, alone and desperate as sour pumpkins in the
patch with the train-rustling of stadium coils and thunder
in the bushes, high above the city where, in fact, the sand-
spur promise of learning is quite simply an objective de-
lusion solid with reality: masks and faces for your next carnival
plus plenty of those formal facts and kisses; notwithstanding
heroic acts of the penguin and pawn and pelican for princes
who easily could be cast like frogs. Some day. To go ribbit
into the sewer and out of time’s great expansive emulsion,
though nothing conforms to the new rules that living in a
yellow u-haul has made of flossing. Better, you said, to wait
around, brush your teeth and stay cowering n the crooked
charity of hard moments for which the Angels mix their joyful
sirens with those of the police squadron, desiring ‘Monuments’
from the thoughtless shore where (will you remember already)
Alas!–I died accepting their long beers & bearded caresses
with so many attitudes that left me much with depths and passions
as beautiful as this here ripe, gentle corpse. I look down. Hardly
anything grows here though the boughs hang heavy, dividing
2.
the indifferent blue you have placed under the sun, which now leaves
bare and brown no blade of grass, no skein of star that might set against
the black April clay of eternity where the ships congregate on the waxing
ebb of nothingness, shining their metals and million eyes of polished boots
without decent expressions for their three-personed God of the Fly.
Outside the open window, vivid as delirium, the lacquered soul of
American Pie hovers like a stain beneath the sap of Yggdrasil,
the gout of mistletoe, the old moon’s dark corpus awash with tree-
shapes and angels flying in switch of place, keeping their dark habits
of difficult balance unmarked by terrible speeds of the unnameable
gentle voyage, riding high or low ahead, where most days I cannot
remember walking back in cheerful fear and loathing even though
I’ve nothing against life as it drools out its mouthful orifice of panting earth.
In the crooked sight of heaven: rows of green-glass bottles with nothing
but a key inside for the mind’s skull puzzle. However, it was more than that
if all the great power assumes itself and forms the one landscape, a secret
system of caves and conduits carving out of limestone the silent springs
that spurt out everywhere that death is once and for-all a fact that makes
no further point.
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