A Surfeit
yesterday, all day, I suffered a surfeit
some hunger before then had entered my dreaming
and whilst I lay sleeping I must have devoured
whole mountain ranges, their ridges still covered
with crusts of late winter’s deposits of snow
and valleys just entering April’s release
of watery gestures
which beckoned their brooks in plain voices
to narrate conceited expressions of spring
brought with them squirrels,
tree monkeys
that scrounge about gardens
which are wondering when
to arise and produce something gladdening,
crocus or daffodil, which should it be?
And I found in my throat a great forest had lodged
with its bare twitching branches and twigs lightly scratching
though I felt in this scratching
the faintly pink whispers of leaves in their bud coats
awaiting a signal I could not discern
and besides in my belly were birds building houses
or warbling so loudly I belched into song
so to quell this unease I was forced by sheer torment
to empty its contents upon this blank page
in hopes that the teeming and roiling within me
should cease if released to its natural spaces
these blue ranging mountains, wide verges of forests
and chorusing crowds of discourteous birds.
A Thought Induced By My Disease
An august evening
august for month and moment
but at first notable for nothing
unexpected.
An empty bedroom cluttered
with the studied scraps of life bewildered
by itself and grief.
A corner work desk
recent dust and old ideas float
and light upon a keyboard
set below a flick'ring screen.
A coleopteran
of unknown species
and a mammalian
described as sapient.
I am fingering
through fingertips to screen
my thoughts as old
as dust disturbed by
grief
in this oppressive evening.
He is perched above
on wiry limbs that rock
joints bent and flexing in a creaky sway
that tickles at my nerves
so tautly balanced
this torpid evening.
"What do you mean?"
I ask of him, like Poe
interrogating birds to thrill
an audience
with poppy driven dreams.
Two minute spheres collect my light.
Fine points of dark define a head
surmount mouthparts and
disappear beneath two
undulating hairs emitting
pulses on the air this evening.
I am one who has observed and triumphed
in my immensity and chiefdom over insects
each moment of my time ignoring million multitudes
of death and passing
numberless annihilations.
"They dropped like flies."
I must amend upon this quiet evening
my complaisance, felled
fallen, struck by stroke of
unaware antennae
communicating equations chalked on air
weighing my life as balanced with his own
he on one side of the sentence, I on the other
balanced alike
sentenced both to equal share.
Shall I be frightened, angry, or amazed?
Amused I am and tasting of the news
delivered on this odd and august evening
by so strange and slight a messenger,
but not slight seeming as I take him in
poised as he is atop my shimm'ring screen
and gesturing as though he is a mime
set up to entertain me with this joke
or challenge is it? made to me this evening
not joke but joust, his weapon metaphor
my choice to take him on or blot him out
Do I accept? Do I accept?
I do.
American TV Goes to War
confiding their knowledge to purveyors of news who ask over and over repeating
repeating the questions for watchers who stand by their irons and stoves and their desks
in their shops and their schoolrooms and in comfortable houses and places of business
and portraits of murder both professional and amateur, professional being bodies in
uniforms, amateur those of unlucky bystanders, no gender or age being exempted
but bewildered the same by their fortune uncalled for but given as a blessing
by men and machines from a world not their own crying, freedom, good freedom, pure
freedom for sale for simply the price of your lives and your bodies but not all of you, just
a few to pay for the price of the blessing that’s due to our well-equipped business-like but
playful and kind saviors of country and home and peace the peace of dead children, dead
wives, and dead fathers, the peace purchased dear by dead fighters dead husbands and
wives and dead mothers and daughter and sons
Americans at War
Born of a nation
both naively innocent
and riddled with arrogant guilt
Grown old
with jointly shared
violent fantasies
now watching
the business of warfare,
conducted coolly
dissected minutely
young men’s voices
calling directions
as if
in a game
just played
for the winning
the casual exchanges
that exhort to action
the equipment
of murder
refining and exact
and serious
interviews
with professional watchers
explaining the action
from all points of view
​
Bethlehem, Poetry Capital of New Hampshire
Suspiciously
I read the signpost’s brag
astride the highway.
“Warning,”
it signifies,
“poems under construction.
Read with care.”
A passerby
might tumble
unaware into a poem
and lost
amid the lines remain
forever mystified.
Above
white crackle painted cabins,
illumined in the air,
“You are a stranger here,
but once.”
The certain promise
drops like bass notes
solemn blown
from large brass horns,
this neon affirmation.
“Fin’s Fine Firs,”
alliterates another.
And one proclaims,
“The Three of Cups,”
its enigmatic name.
Behind the glass
a mannequin is held
as in a capsule
dedicated once to laughing ladies
chiffon draped in shimmying chemises
lips bruised, and eyes raccooned
mocking from beneath
small peacock-feathered caps.
Within,
two cups were seated
on small stools
sipping herbal tea
pooled in scant sunlight
borrowed from without
plain women clad
North Country coarse
clothes vast, thick-knitted
russet, green and brown.
An ancient lady’s chamber
this dream closet
strewn, festooned,
arrayed with vanities
of lace, brocade and satin,
velvet hats, veiled slyly
sporting rhinestone beauty marks,
long gloves concealing fingers
marred
by kitchen service.
Old women, young,
gay bachelor girls,
tired wives resigned
to disappointments,
daydreams
danced with brooms
of lives relived
nameless
lent this murmuring melody
of women’s dreams
a tone
to this tone poem
a thought
in silk
in cotton crisp
once white
now tea-stained, time-stained
yellow.
Two sipping ladies
presiding over
poems
one thousand ladies
lost
and found
among wine satin waists
stiletto heels
danced dull
on evenings under candy bright confetti
cast by spinning multi-mirrored spheres.
Bethlehem,
where are your poems?
Where is the poetry
in poet’s country…
cast like pennies
in commercial coinage
or closeted
with sipping ladies
amongst remains
of women’s whimsies
forget-me-nots forgotten
for a time,
but not forever?
Big Words and Little Words
War is made up of Big Words
and
little words.
The Big Words are for Generals and Presidents.
The little words are for everyone else.
In war the Big Words do the Big Jobs
and
the little words follow.
The Big Words are
Strategy, Tactics, and Being on Plan.
the little words are
casualty, collateral damage and friendly fire.
Dazed By Comfortable Love
In your absence I rehearse
your face.
With imaginary fingertips
I trace
across your brows a linear contour line
that slips
and edges sideways over eyelids
tending downward
to your lips.
Then dizzied by the liquor of your breath
stumbling upon your smile I lose my place;
and though I meant to take the rest of you by stealth
in sensuous wanderings I return, retrace
the pilgrim journey deemed a sly surprise
when I am interrupted
by your eyes.
Elevator Etiquette
Announced in electric numbers its advent expected, awaited
the aluminum panel slides open revealing a cube of stale air
kept in check in its boxy innards and lit by mysterious sources
It allows the breach of my passing into interior spaces
I enter assured of my safety to ride in this package of air
up and about in a building alone and quite easy in manner
But then I am stopped by a button commanded from elsewhere
and into my cubical passes another,
now what must I do?
How long will this stranger and I travel ensemble in silence?
Unbearable thought.
I must venture a subject of suitable content
to last for the length of our sojourn.
I should have expected this quandary
and prepared to be met in traverse
with a list of potential assignments
across a broad spectrum of texts
designed generically useful
for the distance and pace of each trip:
1 floor – a stab at the weather
2 floors – the weather in depth
3 floors – the weather last winter
4 floors – global warming in general and
the drowning of New York in particular
5 floors – risk political subjects
but speak with a smile and a nod
6 floors – look for signs of affection
take a chance on romance just this once
7 floors – you make a commitment
you can always get out at the next
8 floors – break it off as a folly
9 floors – reunite with a kiss
10 floors – stepping out hand in hand on the roof
look out at the city’s delights
reminisce on a lifetime together
and your trip from the depths to the heights
Free Not to Know
I am an unrepentant atheist
who loves the mystery of uncertainty
and the possibility of possible answers
to be both possible and impossible
I love an empty darkness so full of nothing
that every something is hidden there
ambiguity, guess,
maybe and perhaps
are my dearest friends.
Gloria in Excelsus
shall I attribute my euphoria
to spring?
why not,
it has its own excesses
of damp and noise and stink of mud
and captive smells
released from crystal tombs
fragrant gasses popping out of ice
and dropping verdure into poor men’s hats
but how explain this jigging in my bones
can it be fishes
tiny silver ones
that coursing in my blood mistake my bones
for reefs of coral
and nibbling at these whitish forms
peck hollow nests
in which to lay their glassy eggs?
no, I don’t think fishes
maybe birds
barn swallows which mistakenly
take occupation of my heart's great cavity
for mud nest building
take to soaring, looping, spiraling within
and bumping willy nilly
into my gas bag lungs
which intake sudden breaths
in frighted recoil
no, not birds
but something quainter, more absurd
if truth were told, it’s busy, tiny monks
each occupies a cell
and there are countless trillions,
such an army in all such single cloisters
I am become in veritas
a medieval scriptorium
of scripture writing copyists
who wave ecstatic feather pens
and drip
illuminating inks
in splashes
over minute sheepskins
stretched upon small stands
inside my million billion cells
and frequently at intervals
they all complete
the gilding and embellishments prescribed
in copying their capitals
at once
upon such moments
and in unison
these microscopic holy men
cry Gloria in Excelsus!
reverberating fiber, bone, and protoplasm,
fluid, beating pulse, pulsating
Gloria in Excelsus! echoes
Gloria in Excelsus! in Excelsus!
In Suburbia
The naked earth gets dressed up every day
to go to a party thrown by her inhabitants
Unfortunate corpulence has created
unsightly bulges where
trees, grass, etc.
protrude in pockets
from otherwise neat undergarments
of attractive black asphalt and cool comfortable concrete
Never-the-less she is suitably proud of her fine outer garments
tall brick and granite, glass and stucco, frame and shingle
side by side, close and tight, safe as houses
rising up and stretching out to almost obliterate
obscene clusters of
grass, trees, etc.
of which the naked earth is quite abjectly ashamed
Ladybugs
ah, winter is near
and clumps of ladybugs appear
like tiny grapes in clusters
in the corners of our house
Late Autumn on the Kancamagus Highway
From high above me
damp gray volumes
hung vastly down,
curled soft at edges
scarcely moving,
quietly collected
cooling mists,
and spilled them over rocky shoulders
of gray bristled beasts,
beasts watching over valleys
their lusty rooting snouts
immersed in splashy verdure:
yellow birch and beech,
crimson maple, sumac,
rusting amber sleepy stolid oak.
Can you hear winter’s howl
under rooting snuffling murmur
sneaking early now
soft ice-forged steel to mow down
autumn’s tresses?
Am I like you
too drunk with easy seasons
to care for final warnings,
too drowsy with sweet syrups
dropped sticky on my lips
and scenes that fool my eyes
and irritate my senses
with bright articulations
of eternal autumns,
devoid of endings and
too beautiful for death?
Paleontological Limericks
An anthropocine name of gracile
Had hands and a jaw that were facile,
A true vegetarian.
Ask any antiquarian,
But further ascent was impossible.
In human evolution neotony
Put an end to animal monotony.
After birth the skull spreads
Making brainful big heads,
And study in physics and botany
Cretaceous tree sap was quite sticky.
It trapped a young beetle named Ricky.
Getting out was impossible.
He became a bright fossible
In a ring on the finger of Micky.
A soft, feathered bird named Sam Kyle
Said,” My thousandth great grand's a reptile,
Not at home in my nest
Staying far off was best,
But the thought of his scales makes me smile.”
Why do living things come in this version?
Blame Burgess blue shale post immersion.
We've two eyes and a mouth
On the north or the south
Served up in the Cambrian explosion.
We arrived through quite natural selection.
Just how, science makes close inspection
Was it by kin or group,
Or in both in a loop
To arrive at this present perfection.
Prokaryotes used imitation
Without sex and without variation.
Eukaryotes finally
Took up flirting divinely,
Which led to complex procreation.
Ma Nature in Mud Time (Early Spring in New England)
Ma Nature gets up.
The blowzy broad creeps from under a sloppy snow cover.
At first only one large leg slides varicose veined and blotchy
into a pusillanimous and stingy sunlight.
“Wher’ja put m’slippers?” drawls a voice
that caws like a flock of invading crows
and growls like bears come hungry out of holes
to raid bird feeders and topple garbage cans.
Eyes crusty in the corners, lips thick with sleeper’s slime
and nose stuffed with a long season’s detritus
she shakes
and damp cigarette butts fall off her head
like dead fleas off an old dog.
“Gawd, I’m bunged,” she bawls,
“Bring me a crocus!”
My Life As An Improvisation
exploding what
of uncertain days
weaving surprise
and give me all
jumping in jazzy
spontaneous meaning
meaning everything
and nothing that
can be measured
or wears a hat,
cannot founder
on limits of time,
syncopated living
in trivial time,
nothing too trivial
to be
important
or so unimportant
to be
nothing
One Act Plays
Enter Sophia
Blunt lady with no apparent abstract means
Sorts cards with her thumb
Doesn’t believe in love without some money
Looping film-strip of mind, can repeat in consecutive order
And will
All ideas contained thereon
Past Tense
When you speak of me in the past tense,
Will you still see autumn through my eyes?
Will you turn to glance at ladies
dancing in romantic antique frocks,
And shelve my ambitious unread texts
that fondly lean
against your somber literary works?
Will you leave a clutter on every kitchen counter
to mark my absence like small cairns
standing still where I would let them lie?
Or in that void whose darkness can’t be breached
Shall I be lost to you as to myself?
Erased, invisible, inanimate,
quenched, and dispossessed
Sometimes
Sometimes I don't want to bathe
or comb my hair, or brush my teeth
or give my body any indication that
it deserves the least attention from
the one who drives it like a careless motorist
bumping into curbs, sideswiping other vehicles and
putting into the tank inferior products.
I would forsake it if I could
discard it like a worn out pair of shoes
give it a rest in an out-of-the-way corner
let it stand like an unused hat rack in the hallway
throw it out with yesterday's Sunday paper
keep it in the garage with obsolete cans of solidified paint
put it high on a shelf in a box in the back of a closet
reserved for sewing baskets, saved wrapping paper, and string
fold it neatly to be placed on top of luggage awaiting a journey
slide it into one of those albums filled with family pictures
taken at picnics, parties, graduations, and for no good reason
except a loaded camera and a sunny day.
Sonnets: Remorse and Resurrection
Remorse
A moment soft one spring I suffered you
To leave my life, as one drives off a dream
Disturbing, dark, untamed, to woo
An empty peace excused from fierce extremes,
And found in emptiness a death of mind,
A blinding dullness driving deeper wounds,
Than all your tumults tearing at my rind.
Days, your phantasms in my calm seas drowned,
Nights, disinterred, they demonized my slumber,
Reviving fires lost within my loins,
Unconscious cries to taste your sullen dangers
Dropped from my sleeping lips like worthless coins.
Frozen, awake in wastes without desire
Dreaming, I warmed at incorporeal fire.
Resurrection
A note announced your name in modest lines
And beat its fragile folds against my face,
Delivered from some other where than mine-
Unbidden pardon (for my loss of grace)
from silence suffered for a thousand days.
Ten-thousand frozen moments meas’ring time,
Rolled, monolithic, moving like slow waves,
Piled numbing on the margins of my mind,
Disgorging dull confessions of regret,
A thousand-thousand half-lives tempest shattered.
I’d thought your voice was lost to me; and yet,
Out of a mean, insensate void it fluttered,
And like a white and legendary bird
Breathed song to speech, significance to word.
Uninvited
Tonight I fall asleep to dream
of digging holes
and turning over earth
cemented by the roots of weeds,
unfriendly garden children uninvited
who play among my treasures roughly
breaking into cultivated beds and
snatching food from out the mouths
of neighbors never trained to play with
such rough and tumble characters.
I turn the clods, lifting weed mats
heavy with rich soil placed for my darlings
and shake them roughly, thumping them
against the ground to wrest from them
the nurture they have stolen.
Yet I know each one has left a seed,
a runner or a root to hold its place
until the sun returns from winter’s absence
and calls them up to terrorize
my garden once again.
Such an uninvited guest has
taken residence inside my body
to spread its roots
and so make me its own
that I must lose myself
to it and to my loves and
so to all my trees and
flowering children of the garden
and my autumn golden days and
finches waiting mornings
for small offerings I hang upon their garden poles
which seem like upright plants containing succor
for these wayfarers of the air.
Can such a miniature intruder play
so huge a role upon the stage
for which my life’s embellishments were made?
How can so infinitely small a beast
that sense of sight and smell and taste
and touch and voice will never know
so thoroughly annihilate immensities of world
created by those senses turned so hungrily to life
and grind to nothingness that world,
that soul reality I’ve worked so tirelessly to make?
Am I Goliath and this thing a David
the proof that grains of dust can shatter mountains,
and that in truth
greatness and forever
are a myth we tell ourselves
when crouching in the darkness
lighting little fires
to fool the night.
Vacation
Your life takes you on a vacation from oblivion
your round trip ticket is booked in advance
arrival and departure dates are indeterminate
depending much on whims and whimsies
not under your direction, although
you may choose an early departure date,
if you are so disposed.
Coincidence and intent, luck and misfortune,
passion and indifference, glory and defeat,
ambition and resignation
you visit them all.
Generally, on your departure
a great “going away” party is thrown
After you return to oblivion
the crowds still faintly blow noisemakers,
wave a few faded banners
and then go home.
Visits from a Geothermal Fellow
He arrives presenting special pressures,
pushing heavy atmospheres before him
through empty rooms,
trailing swaths of ozone,
and occasionally releasing
feverish lightnings;
but mostly in a light absorbing fashion
drawing it into himself
creating vacuums
where once the air
was dense with light.
Like old Italian peasants wrapped in black
we villagers erect our small defenses
and wait uneasy
mumbling supplications
against forewarned but unpredictable events
that force the rising heats to break the surface,
punctuate the brooding airs
that swirl about his head,
and fulminate hot miseries
from out a gaping twisted mouth
embedded in a face that flows like lavas
into contorting and distorted ridges
torn by convection currents
waking from their dormant slumber
in the throbbing centers
of a troubling man.
No portent of these unavoidable events
has served to warn of their ungentle comings.
Chaotic science might presage, explain them;
but docile, dumb we stand to meet them
holding to our old beliefs and flinching.
White Mountain Winter
Birch, maple, oak and beech shorn
nearly naked by October’s breath
crowd close, exposed.
These bristle brushes silver-gray and mouse,
mill on slopes like sheep
against the teeth of autumn’s shears.
Among them taller
stand straight shepherds,
green clad still.
Like soldiers
balsams, pines, and firs,
high hemlocks watching now for snow,
or wolves-
hulks patient hunkered huge above the flock,
sharp haunches
hung with clouds,
mist moistened shoulders hoary
dusted with first frosts
awaiting heavier weights
of winter’s wool.
Then will they shift
their slumberous sides, rise,
shaking frozen rivers from their flanks;
and multitudes of crystal fleas
in airy clouds
upon the forest sheep swarm
an occupying army
clinging tight to fragile hosts
until the earth
while pacing round its boundaries
completes a quarter,
turns the vernal corner
in perambulations equinoctial
and facing southward
into solar quadrants
trudges on toward April’s exhalations.
Fumes tickling backs of February sheep,
rub blooming blush
into blanched pallid tendrils
their fingers sifting
combing out small vermin
which lifting
drop again
as perspiration.
The sleepers stir accepting green and April.
The wolves relax into a mossy slumber-
heat pulsing in their hearts of rock and crystal.
The shepherds concentrate on cones
until September.
A hollow, globular, enclosing, and uncertain immensity
I am awake in the night. I feel myself hanging by a silk spider-like thread of my own making, suspended over a void that is the unknowable accumulation of days I will be assured to know, and an inescapable end. It only appears to be a void, as its confines are undetermined. I measure it daily with small incursions into its open, sometimes sunny, other times dim spaces by painting, writing, compiling biographical information, finding answers to insignificant questions that arise spontaneously, seeming to migrate to my head from the air about my life. These because they are beginnings and tokens of continuation. But if the thread should snap, I’ll reach terminal velocity quickly or in a while, though when it happens that I am come to the boundary of my assembled selfhood I will not be there.