Sunday Afternoon

for Hayden Carruth

Watching TV, reading Twilight of the Idols,
as usual looking for a clue to what to do
or think or what kind of man to be and who
should I really read to find what I seek and use it,
at least fifteen books open on my desk,
a coffee cup, my pens, my desperate notes
not to forget CoQ-l0, toilet paper, wheatgrass,
then back to a western, any violence will do,
then out to buy chili, milk, cheese,
egg salad, thinking nothing (Zens say do this),
wondering why it all turned out like this
instead of my deep fantasies of cash and condo,
rich piece of ass supporting me in style
while poem after poem flows out of me, screw

perfectly each time, spinning her head off, then
stumble on "The Four Great Errors," section 8:
"One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being
in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions,
to accountable facts . . . Men were thought of as 'free'
so they would become guilty . . . Christianity is a hangman's
metaphysics . . . No one is accountable for existing at all,
or for being constituted as he is, or for living
in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives . . .
The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled
from the fatality of all that which has been and will be . . .
In reality purpose is lacking . . . One is necessary,
One is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole,
One is in the whole . . ." and think — That's it!

Everything stays the same is the truth of truths;
everything changes whether you believe it or not.
Take today with its bright saucepan sky; humidity,
September dying into itself, each leaf
hitting the ground, clouds scurrying across, desire
attached to nothing possible anymore.
Take it and do what? It is, each leaf
A separate koan to be solved by nature.
Maybe that's the right way to think of things.
No-mind. 3 o'clock. Reality a pure question.
Upstairs my tenant running the clothes dryer.
Propped up next to Whitehead's The Function of Reason
Dogen's Shobogenzo next to a snapshot of Sydney and Ivy
crawling through a yellow nylon tunnel smiling at me.

-- Stephen Berg

Puedo Escribir

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: 'La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.'

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oir la noche inmensa, más inmnesa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guadarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

-- Pablo Neruda

Postcards

I

Outwards

A Francis Jammes

L’Armand-Béhic (des Messageries Maritimes)
File quatorze noeuds sur l’Océan Indien...
Le soleil se couche en des confitures de crimes,
Dans cette mer plate comme avec la main.

— Miss Roseway, qui se rend à Adelaïde,
Vers le Sweet Home au fiancé australien,
Miss Roseway, hélas, n’a cure de mon spleen;
Sa lorgnette sur les Laquedives, au loin...

— Je vais me préparer – sans entrains! – pour la fête
De ce soir: sur le pont, lampions, danses, romances
(Je dois accompagner miss Roseway qui quête

— Fort gentiment – pour les familles des marins
Naufragés!) Oh, qu’en valse lente, ses reins
A mon bras droit, je l’entraine sans violence

Dans un naufrage où Dieu reconnaîtrait les siens...



II

British India

A Rudyard Kipling

Les bureaux ferment à quatre heures à Calcutta;
Dans le park du palais s’émeut le tennis ground;
Dans Eden Garden grince la musique épicée des Cipayes;
Les equipages brillants se saluent sur le Red Road...

Sur son trône d’or, étincelant de rubis et d’émeraudes,
S.A. le Maharadjah de Kapurthala
Regrette Liane de Pougy et Cléo de Mérode
Dont les photographies dédicacées sont là...

— Bénarès, accroupie, rêve le long du fleuve;
La Brahmane, candide, lassé des épreuves,
Repose vivant dans l’abstraction parfumée...

— A Lahore, par 120 degrés Fahrenheit,
Les docteurs Grant et Perry font un match de cricket, —
Les railways rampant dans la jungle ensoleillée



III

Homewards

A M.P. Bons d’Anty

Au Waterloo Hotel, j’ai achevé mon tiffin,
Et mon bill payé, je me dirige vers le wharf.
Voici l’Indus (des Messageries Maritimes)
Et la tristesse imbécile du ‘homewards’.

— Quelques officiers français qui reviennent de L’Indo-Chine
Passer en Europe un congé de six mois,
Commentent l’embarquement de jeunes misses, assez divines,
Avec lesquelles je ne flirterai certes pas!

Sur le pont mes futurs compagnons de voyage
Me dévisagent...
Puis on passe une sommaire visite de santé –

(Cette année la peste a fait ici bien des ravages!)
— Enfin voici la cloche du départ, qui sonne
Que je ramène, pieusement ouatée,

La fleur de ma mélancholie anglo-saxonne.

-- Henry J.-M. Levet (1874–1906)
.

Little Winter

Wet flags. Asphalt curves. Snow-dusted
Gravel. Fur ads in the background, snow
Spat on & somebody who bit into a bag.
Was the world inside any warmer?

The Righteous Brothers of the Calcareous Alps
Were playing on tape (in the vegetable section ...)
& deep inside the skull of the dances something
Was going on – wild monies, coated sparks.

Two country buffaloes stood in front of a
Video machine immobile: A black rhythm
Diva hissed at glittering instruments &
The instruments howled back at her.

A net of oranges was pushed by.
Rather colorfully packaged babies occurred.
Did a tiny little brain shutter open up? (An old
Flower child manned the cash register &

Knew all the prices by heart.)

-- Erwin Einzinger

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

-- Sylvia Plath

SALT PLUMES

A pleat of light has been here twice
back to the day and the day back
a bearing refused at its source
the stalled mercury fused in its glare
with no conjecture to mark the limit
the motion is modified

convolutions of ancient scripts
half drawn half animal birth

the arch of the back

one surface
one depth
one changing shape

an apology for
crossing the pulse of offspring

•

Uncommon offerings commonly intuited
a wooden bowl with a gilded edge
five dark stone knives
a small clasped vessel for oil with a floating wick
flanked by two wax birds

space is a factor whose
mapping disturbs
our conversation
a prospect of careful planes
tended by argument and birdsong
then abandoned to palindrome

the flex of barrier
and immaculate reticence
relent in equal shares unseparated
by edge or rhythm’s orientation

amid the subtle claims of threnody
no other sense of praise
than wonder

•

Predation
mythic proxy inflected
the unanimous struggle of particulars
primed in situ
white for decay
red for the eye
blue beneath the snow

a cold wind noticed too late
now equitably disposed
something brought to completion
though the worm was in it
beyond the forms of Baal

•

Emptied markers burning in the ruts

deliberative motives
more in balance than real
fixtures of an arguing anxiety
more generous less fragile

neglected by speculation
plainest increase finds the barb
in the morose distortions of small forms
and the thin yellow words of the infatuation

it brings its own set of questions

like something brought to be abandoned
by the side of the road

•

Description is what has been taken away
the infinite lost in the simulacrum of displacement

a number not in arrangement but farther on
not in the distance but insistence

the hours gained in anonymity
the years lost word by word

contradicted by the myopia of its internal logic
uphill favors sediment

imago the gift imparted
the cross-eyed shuffle of expedience

too late the song too late the door flies open
too late the spoken mercies too late the fabric bone

•

Wandering ligatures accelerate expansion
to primary acquisition

nomadic recourse
absorbed in gerundive detail
reclaims the discretionary pursuit

essentials
the exactions of light
extolling the riot of genetic ambivalence

no ulterior duplicates
no delivered verges
in shallow equilibrium

only the instruments make rapid movements
adapting to internalized mechanisms
adjusted by accretion

•

Proliferation
and impossible replicas

regret or loss
become a gesture for that limit

schemes of evidence
offered in contradiction

•

As intimate as doubt
all that is personal in chance
distinguishes one to one from
the one from the other

reinterpreted in the dark
and shared only with number
the objects in the room
the articles on the desk

are an assent to a consequent perfection
that is abandoned in moving on
pursuing neither a conclusion nor
a new point of entry

what had become unacceptable
is now overburdened only partially remembered
timed to the word denied with nothing
else to take its place or make its order

sustained by mechanism and the simulation
of some capable version or familiar resource
a preemptive predecessor quietly virtual provides
something other than an option

-- Ray DiPalma

Please Mr Please

In the corner of the bar there stands a jukebox
With the best of country music, old and new
You can hear your five selections for a quarter
And somebody else's songs when yours are through

I got good Kentucky whiskey on the counter
And my friends around to help me ease the pain
'Til some button-pushing cowboy plays that love song
And here I am just missing you again

Please, Mr., please, don't play B-17
It was our song, it was his song, but it's over
Please, Mr., please, if you know what I mean
I don't ever wanna hear that song again

If I had a dime for every time I held you
Though you're far away, you've been so close to me
I could swear I'd be the richest girl in Nashville
Maybe even in the state of Tennessee

But I guess I'd better get myself together
'Cause when you left, you didn't leave too much behind
Just a note that said "I'm sorry" by your picture
And a song that's weighing heavy on my mind

Please, Mr., please, don't play B-17
It was our song, it was his song, but it's over
Please, Mr., please, if you know what I mean
I don't ever wanna hear that song again

-- Olivia Newton-John

PLOYS

PLOYS

HOLP

ME

--- David Shrigley

To Various Persons Talked To All At Once

You have helped hold me together.
I'd like you to be still.
Stop talking or doing anything else for a minute.
No. Please. For three minutes, maybe five minutes.
Tell me which walk to take over the hill.
Is there a bridge there? Will I want company?
Tell me about the old people who built the bridge.
What is "the Japanese economy"?
Where did you hide the doctor's bills?
How much I admire you!
Can you help me to take this off?
May I help you to take that off?
Are you finished with this item?
Who is the car salesman?
The canopy we had made for the dog.
I need some endless embracing.
The ocean's not really very far.
Did you come west in this weather?
I've been sitting at home with my shoes off.
You're wearing a cross!
That bench, look! Under it are some puppies!
Could I have just one little shot of Scotch?
I suppose I wanted to impress you.
It's snowing.
The Revlon Man has come from across the sea.
This racket is annoying.
We didn't want the baby to come here because of the hawk.
What are you reading?
In what style would you like the humidity to explain?
I care, but not much. You can smoke a cigar.
Genuineness isn't a word I'd ever use.
Say, what a short skirt! Do you have a camera?
The moon is a shellfish.
I can't talk to most people. They eat me alive.
Who are you, anyway?
I want to look at you all day long, because you are mine.
Might you crave a little visit to the Pizza Hut?
Thank you for telling me your sign.
I'm filled with joy by this sun!
The turtle is advancing but the lobster stays behind. Silence has won the game!
Well, just damn you and the thermometer!
I don't want to ask the doctor.
I didn't know what you meant when you said that to me.
It's getting cold, but I am feeling awfully lazy.
If you want to we can go over there
Where there's a little more light.

-- Kenneth Koch

until words turn to moss.

This was all roses, here, where an overblown house crowns
the hill, the whole field, roses, all the way to the end;
when the rosarian died, the partition of roses
began. We’ve come out of nowhere, literally,
nowhere, autumnal towns marked for destruction
by a phantom hand; houses held underwater, every bed
a sunken tub, tools drowned between rows, every keyhole
caulked; clouds hallucinating girls asleep on a wedge
of wedding cake; the white rose, among the greatest of liars
beginning to show the debilitating effects of fame,
the ever-popular blaze placates a vase; the bad sons
of thunder beating back a strand of light; someone
who knows nothing apart from the rain
standing on a chair in muddy legs; the roses
blown into their cumulonimbuses,
and someone whose glove is recovered, a face
that doesn’t come clear, a face drawn under an umbrella,
beautiful, charcoal, beautiful, like words
that never get old, the sons of thunder beating

-- C.D. Wright

Reality and Its Antecedents: Fifty Statements on Life and Art

1. Nature is weak in narrative.
2. Indeterminacy has been overdetermined.
3. Nothing is worse than a reasonable poem.
4. Surrealism is a form of the metaphysical.
5. The metaphysical is a form of empty space.
6. Empty space is the source of all creation.
7. In postmodern culture, irony is taken on faith.
8. Style is feeling in search of a sentence.
9. The future is unlived. But it can be experienced.
10. The sign of a good writer is how variously he expresses his one idea.
11. "It is only the point of view that creates the object" (Saussure).
12. Nothing is less erotic than a paragraph.
13. The future has a long history.
14. The present is always a little behind the times.
15. To read the world is also to write it.
16. The soul is nothing but knows something.
17. The tenets of postmodern cosmology are:
a. Since nothing has unity including the object, only the broken is real.
b. The broken (the fragmentary, the flawed, and the half-made) is therefore ideal.
18. Lyric poetry rescues pain from the jaws of pleasure.
19. "Beauty-impurities in the rock" (Lorine Niedecker).
20. "The poet takes too many messages." (Jack Spicer).
21. A poem creates pleasure through the impossibility of completely grasping it.
22. The folk poet is "one-among-the-people," therefore socially at ease.
23. The postmodern poet is "one-among-strangers," therefore restless.
24. Each poem requires a new language.
25. Imagism is objectification in a moment of feeling.
26. Objectivism is imagism in a moment of syntax.
27. Of the senses, touch is most distant.
28. Of the literary genres, poetry and plays are the most ceremonial. This explains their
long association.
29. Poetry values the unknown, the real, the potential, and the silent — everything, that is,
which has no value.
30. Poetry always begins with a sounding.
31. Poetry is closer to the rune and spell than it is to conversation.
32. Lyricism is slowness, as in the drawing of a curved line. This is why nature, which has
no straight lines (Emerson), often verges on the sublime.
33. Artifice is also required of the authentic.
34. "Man is a curious being whose center of gravity is not in himself" (Francis Ponge).
35. "The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share" (Hayden Carruth).
36. Poetry is desire having words with itself.
37. The unstitching of a line (Yeats) is more important than its stitching.
38. Life is closer to art than it is to aesthetics.
39. Nothingness is only a concept — the world is filled.
40. The symbol for infinity should be on the keyboard.
41. The most impressive thing about a parade is the leisure you have to watch it.
42. The tragic hero is a bad reader.
43. Irony is a form of sincerity.
44. Music is silence making itself complex.
45. "All deep things are song" (Thomas Carlyle).
46. The closer it is to absurdity (without passing into it), the better a work of art.
47. Without thought, there can be no feeling.
48. Poetry might as well be profound.
49. The serenity of objects disguises their anxiety (cf. de Chirico).
50. "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition would have left him alone" (Thomas Hardy).

-- Paul Hoover

Georgia O'Keefe's Red Poppy

Loneliness was always a retrieved joke with her.
When I objected to her violence she quoted Dante.
It's disastrous, it's absolutely disastrous.

Let's go mad and pale this tawny afternoon
like some Te Deum to autumn let's spirit away
and be late, turning back

-- Jeff Wietor

Complete Calvin & Hobbes & Collected Kenneth Koch

Complete Calvin & Hobbes





The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch

THE PEOPLE OUT ON THE LAGOON

Mr Zeuch and his wife Mustafabelle
The Quinzies and the Pargs
Lord and Lady Foote-Smythe
The Baallgs and their daughters
Margareet and Gritae Baallg-Syffert
The Rhuele twins Hoost and Byle
And their cousins Leff and Lugre Wettewin
The Right Reverend Elvira Klaww and her niece
Benedicta Fustus-Jowle and nephew Clarus Minor
The Hunderts and Pilchrings
The Crashelberies and their maid Vinta
The Hyes and the current ambassador
To The Sijille Isles Protectorate Hank Loomish
The Marquesa Niftt with her dog Yel
The Mittagessens from Greensburgh
And their friends Thalassa and Yufik Tythe
Piol Dewsquil the former heavyweight champion
The Rabbi Uen Vy-Vdeuin and his son Noakes
Herr Doktor Brueler Hencken und Frau Brueler
Ytre Ahl the architecht of Podz
The Notheliers and the Ghuushtzies Khaa and Lill
Mr and Mrs Hasch-Heft and their chauffeur Gristikh
Pongo the swordswallower
The erstwhile Jesuit Winterts Rainwind and his now wife
Fifi Woden the ballerina

-- Ray DiPalma

Three Poems

A Bucket of Pink Sand

A madrigal of knifings,
as paths explained:
a red bandanna to frighten the crows
and put a rumor among the stones
with lengthy applause on summer days

This occurs frequently — all umbrella, gun, and fountain pen:
then after lunch a recitation of
several questions to accompany
the printed version
The Neva, Vade Mecum of Science
Its author hums a syllogism —
Next stop: No Stop, Nevada (Pop. Unkn.)
a Podunk of samovars and drowsy intimacies
where you find the light too busy, for instance,
too secretly colossal, foreign stance



Gynt, GENT.
Here’s some new information.
Will you take delivery?

1

Dragged naked and wet from the icey river
then hauled away in a crouch
you’ve been lamped for a time-honored pilgrim
still falling backwards

Like a three hour matinee
up and down the scales
just wait until he finds the notes
with all his fingers — you just wait until
the man gets there — still bright and still
no warning — knowing
as he does what your money’s worth —

I look at you and I see anyone else



2

Ragged chanters on the sagging gat yodel
the melodies mysterious —
reluctant anxieties, calm ironies and nimble pieties
delivered in song after song

Once all big tippers and nice to the help
one hundred percent legitimate
Now it’s physical torture mental torture and
vig out the ass — real aggravation

But I’ve got another deal for you. . .
Because you never know when
you’re going to need something extra




Shelf Talker, Smiling Stranger

I don’t remember how it began:
The exemplary widow and the weak-minded son,
A blue comet, a mix of eras,
All episodes of the struggle,
Intent on the marble trail running
Through the haunted quarry.

Trying to overcome the answer to a question,
The result of a disagreement over an apology,
The bloom of pressure and obligation —
I think there’s I think there’s
Is what is thought. Evidence that a stone fell from the wall.

-- Ray DiPalma

Danny Evans Photography

Danny Evans Photography

Tiny Umbrellas

she twisted her ring finger & a jar opened & i found myself at a peruvian bazaar
selling rum drinks w/a twig in my hand, my name tag read "crayola" but when i
spoke it out loud it sounded something like "you have lived your years terrified

of beautiful ponies owned by dentists & know little of your second self." books
are like that, & even if you never actually owned a horse wouldn't it look at you
once & understand? stranded here in this cleared cloister of a world one thought

keeps me court & kin: i want to wake up & run my fingers through a cashmere
spock because there's only three ways to see. i catch myself speaking when no
one's around, i'm speaking in a language of hammers ringing like a set of inner

ear drums & examine the faces buried in the facets between the folds - i twist my
finger - back from the bottom i see a salesman at the top holding a pocket watch
& a bucket of birds. somewhere high in the andes they're stockpiling their stash

of those tiny umbrellas made from paper but w/out a map i'm just another tattoo
searching for a thigh to call home. yesterday my biggest concern was whether i
should make a doily out of our scraps of chicken wire or bend them into a shade

hat for my sunday walking & now here i am the judge in a high-stakes cook-off
of fried llama w/out the words needed to get me back to the boat. my ears! i'm
moulting! i wasn't built for such a sandpaper sun! if i took three steps back i'd

be two steps closer to understanding crayola after all, i'd be eating an apple next
to a bookcase waiting for a dentist to walk right through the wall, my last chance
at making the mountains fading into this reckoning over where it all went wrong.

-- Jeffrey Little

Sonnet XV

In Joe Brainard's collage its white arrow
he is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.
Or Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth white--
I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
and ate King Korn popcorn," he wrote in his
of glass in Joe Brainard's collage
Doctor, but they say "I LOVE YOU"
and the sonnet is not dead.
takes the eyes away from the gray words,
Diary. The black heart beside the fifteen pieces
Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie
washed by Joe's throbbing hands. "Today
What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
does not point to William Carlos Williams.

-- Ted Berrigan

The Trick

I made love with a man—hugely muscled, lean—the body
I always wished for myself. He kept pulling my arms
up over my head, pinning them there, pressing me down

with his entire weight, grinding into me roughly,
but then asked, begged, in a whisper of such sweetness,
Please kiss me. Earlier that evening, he told me

he'd watched a program about lions, admired
how they took their prey—menacing the herds at the water hole
before choosing the misfit, the broken one.

What surprised him was the wildebeests' calm
after the calf had been downed, how they returned to their grazing
with a dumb switching of tails. Nearby the lions looked up

from their meal, eyed the hopping storks and vultures,
before burying their faces, again, in the bloody ribs.
As a teenager, I wished to be consumed,

to be pressed into oblivion by a big forceful man.
It never happened. Instead I denied myself nourishment—
each un-filled plate staring back satisfied me, deprivation

reduced to a kind of bliss I could lie down in
where I remained unmoved, untouched.
Early on I was taught that the body was a cage,

that illness was a battle fought with chaos,
the viruses themselves unnatural; that sex lived
in some pastel chamber that gave way to infants,

first cousins, the handing down of names.
No one ever mentioned being taken in the dark,
or wanting to be broken open, pushed beyond words,

tongue thickening in another human mouth,
or how a person could be humiliated and like it.
To my surprise, I found myself struggling under this man,

pushing me chest up against his chest, arms straining
against the bed, until some younger, hungrier
version of myself lay back on top of me and took it—

the heaving back, the beard, the teeth at the throat.

-- Mark Wunderlich

The Last Dinner Party

1 Penelope's Lament

Back in the sidereal day, remember how we admired
the elaborately-dressed caryatids and,
after cocktails, listened to some colporteur?
That was delicious, wasn't it? Well, Mamma's tired

of waiting, waiting. I have a tight new weave,
I swallowed all the nepenthe in the house —
my little incunabulum.
I want moiety.

There is too much sadness in the sea,
which is as slippery as a vowel.
For the nonce, I would like to bury one, the O —
invocation and the cruel beginning of your name . . .



2 The Last Dinner Party

The foretaste of duck squats in exalted butter.
A word, mélange, slides off someone's fork.
Of course, cork floats in the Merlot, lovelorn,
the salver drools, and there's talk
of turning the clocks back,
of O Maria, virgo davitica, anonymous, seedy.

For dessert, let us play Anagrams
with the names of our dead friends!
Dan Glen becomes England;
Tom Anderson becomes, oh —
a demon snort. What fun, and so on. Tintoretto
should have painted us — circumspect, verily celestial.



3 Après la Première

That was a lot of seat. Though I see
how your crit. fits into a Polonius sandwich.
And another thing — her hair. Sketchy.
It's only natural to expose the Botox:
Unsex me here, she said. Lady. Not
on my wrist watch. (Perhaps her buskin
is couture — that might selvage the night.)

But I like the part when bustards
ran out from under her pannier. Is that legal?
Her private life is very pedicular.
Now the paparazzi are all abuzz: a velvet
has left the building, in an off-road lexicon.



4 High Handicap

The green is glazed, like my ex-faïence,
yet less meretricious. That chicken-wing finish
will get you nowhere, however —
skin's game. Check out the filiopietistics:

because of all the yipping doglegs,
I waggle and skirl, a big girl. Meanwhile,
a swing plane mows the élan vital
down to its white balls,

which are held by my plenipotentiary
deputy. He hands me an iron
and his laundry before we allemande blindly
onto the second. The eyes open to a cry of police.



5 Pot Luck

Our dialectic is in trouble,
so out of respect we grab the writhers
by the hilt. You'll go blonde
if you keep that up! Allegedly, someone's corsage
has fallen into the dip,
dermabrasion is the new black,
and a doxology with short legs is asphyxiating.

Indeed. Narcissus lies by the pool, uncoiling
his pantyhose. (I'd be happy to fluff him
before the eulogy.) Now the swimmers lip-synch
late Gloria Gaynor from glory holes,
their shoes fin de siècle, insensible . . .



6 Blind Date

A bit scurfy and fubsy, perhaps —
but in a nice way. He took my coat;
his edentate cat implicated me

with a look — the little criticaster. The sushi
he served was off-the-hook,
but I couldn't tell if he was nictitating

or had soy sauce in his eye. All the talk
was of his tontine, how to peculate in the market;
his langlauf years. Life hung by what he limned.

On the divan, I tried to ignore
his blatant stridulation. Whoa, nelly. Feigning a fit
of polydipsia, I politely absquatulated.



7 Falling Asleep Over "Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid"

Two words: gagged Italians. The page,
its broken-winded rage
a fine oneiromancy; the fire
hella yellow — Aeneas, fresh from the pyre,
unsheathes his rod
for a little lucubration. (Good God,
if one wants to flocculate on the files,
do so with concinnity, with miles
of tonal holiday flair.) The only chariots are rolls
of tulle et paper — hey, these poles
are made for dancing! Peep at the Trojan men,
reticulate, absolutely glabrous now. And then.



8 The Rape of Ganymede

As Rembrandt saw it (the boy's posterior
bare, fleshier than a man's; the black air,
Macedonia's smoke; the rosy Trojan
all in a tizzy, his rags hitched-up, urine
yellowing his left foot,
the jut of his white gut),
myth is a hoot. Look in the eagle's eyes:
he's slightly amused at the size
of the brat's fat hands, the fact of his death-
grip on a pair of dangling cherries, both
of which are overripe — the eagle knows
the weight of thugs, of thunderbolts, of Eros.

-- Randall Mann