a butcher, his cleaver hacked
into igneous lamb
--Stuart Dybek, "The Volcano"
Stuart Dybek has turned into a brillionaire overnight, and I figured as long as we were effulging all over his face I might as well pitch in and make his igneous lamb fantasy a reality. Here is your molten baa-baa, Stuart. Ho ho, who's the brillionaire now?
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LITTLE LAMB, WHO SPLAYED THEE?
Show me a poem from ankle to fleece,
Honey and hive, honey and hive.
“Okay, but don’t touch or I’ll call the police!”
Fly away and thrive, fly away.
My littlest finger, then maybe my thumb,
Honey and hive, honey and hive.
“Then drumstick and billyclub, you must think I’m dumb!”
Fly away and thrive, fly away.
THE HOLE IN THE CLEAVER
It’s a kind of perfection,
Like a herringbone line of hair
Down a young girl’s belly,
One who doesn’t know where
Her pee comes from
Except generally. Only that
The hooded hoplite and her own
Gilding honey have a genius
For sacrifice, but defend
The country’s interior artillery,
Contranym and analogy,
That apples depend on bear
To swallow their arsenic seed,
And scatter them liberally.
SALVATION ARMY DAY
The palace of reality! It’s built
From moments of intimacy.
I was a toddler of three and permitted
To watch so I wouldn’t get lost, my mother
And two other Salvation Army officers,
All of them blondes, soaping and rinsing
In the locker room shower after a major
Parade, but when toweling off
One glanced at another and cried,
“Mary! What’s happened to your navel?”
To which Mary frowned and replied,
“You carry that flag all day
And see what happens to your navel!”
A ruby of wisdom gleaned
From the foundations of memory,
Oval, unblinking and grenadine
As the cyclops gouged blind
In Homer’s Odyssey, a gold lamb
For a beard on his grim cleft chin,
Pointedly effulgent and crinkled, known
To drip blood and glisten
With happiness and honey.
Your extemporaneous gifts are considerable, sir; how on earth do you do it?
Sorry, can't answer,
My head's in a daze,
Suffering qualms
Of Tricia's faint praise!
You wound me! I meant it to be booming.
Sorry, sorry,
To be such a heel!
I slipped on faint's
Banana peel.
HOW
The imaged word, hushed willows echoed
In its glow, and you, woman and child,
To wonder how this is so. Rhyme,
And a studious blur of symmetric purposes,
The polar crystollogy on a window pane,
Rime, which kisses melt
Into the clear magic of a peephole.
A lady I knew lost her swimsuit top
At a campground pool, and had almost
Rescued her modesty, flopping
With worried hurry in folded arms
Barefoot up the gravel path
To the bathhouse, when a little boy,
Me, popped out from behind a spruce,
And asked her, “Miss,
If you’re giving away those puppies,
Could I have the one with the pink nose?”
The mutual root of rhyme and rime
Is truth’s riddle, and the mutual spell
Of hey diddle-diddle.
HOW TO
O you who would mellifluously grunt,
Point the tip of the hard pigskin
At the earth, cognate of guess what,
Oops, cunt! You Gaea, girl! wife
Of Uranus, which needs no gloss,
Caressed by the best looking guy
On the pasture’s thumbs, who like a bull
Pawing turf impatiently pumps his leg,
Yells a string of occult signals,
Then cries “Hike!” and suddenly
Quasimodo, cousin of Proteus,
Bastard son of Neptune and the moon,
Scrambles for Our Lady’s towers,
The bats and the bells, thinking
Of glorious noises and sleepyhead girls,
The idea being not to stop once you’ve started,
For contrary to Megan O’Rourke,
Helen Hennessy Vendler, Alice Quinn
And an army of similar Ursulas
Twittering like quaint saints and cosseting
Worm-fretted radishes, poetry is not
Only for the fervently faint-hearted.
CELLE QUI FÛT
1.
The crone in question, leathery hen
Of sixty-seven and revered
Birdwatcher, whose boyfriend
Has grandchildren, who in thought
Would not study, but emulate
Darwin’s plights of troth, was once
A meerschaum and moss poet
Of unicorns, inclined to close her eyes
And adore in a trance the wooden
Flute-note of a dove or antique recorder,
If that Pennsylvania coal town
Where bungled anthracite veins
Have smoldered over half a century
2.
Had doves or recorders, but one riotous
Friday night we cake-walked
Like bums indestructible on the high-wire
Of life’s barricades, its defenses against
The likes of us, the uphill mile
To my apartment, College Avenue
To fucking Boalsburg just about,
Fucking what it was all about,
Busting into a traveling friend’s
Unlocked apartment to use the sofa–-
Does that mean knowledge?–-rousting
The couple to whom he’d loaned it
Legitimately bedded in the bedroom,
3.
Her hair in toilet paper rollers, cold cream
Brightening her face, husband too amazed
To be indignant until we’d fled again,
Still treading the tight-rope
Of my inventive palaver and audacity,
A hard act to follow, so I never did
Follow up on that solo miracle, long
Crazy walk, so when I contacted her
Out of the blue, out of the gray
The other day from a nearby town
Where I’d found a smelly relic to spice
My erotic nostalgia, a phone booth,
She was annoyed and wouldn’t talk,
4.
She and Thomas Jefferson, with their
Self-evident truth, but we’d held hands,
Passed smoldering culms, crossed
A long misted ravine on a railroad bridge
Choosing not to trudge
The creosote-tarred crossties,
But to balance hi-ho on the shining
Steel rail due to a burning resolve
She’d forged in her soul’s fire, a mistake
Like a match tossed on black powder.
But what was she doing that Friday
Night in a frat-rat bar? Though
Of course, we never got that far.
We are all guilty of writing a Centralia poem or two, but few have used it as a backdrop for trespassy youthful couch-fucking, so kudos to you!
COUNTING COWS
Zoologically speaking, the distance
Between lambs and kids
Is cosmic. A lamb goes
Bah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! And a kid goes
Yah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You see
The difference? Like between
Stupidity and persistence. Maybe
The blogosphere is what Hegel
Foresaw and meant by the darkness
In which all cows are alike,
Jumping over the moon with their bags
Flapping, betrayed for magic beans
Without making a peep. Count
Some cows. It’ll help you sleep.
RAW MATERIAL
1.
For “free female amateur exhibitionists,”
There are twenty million sites
On the World Wide Web, enough to populate
Many small countries, Bulgaria, Macedonia,
Greece, plus several corners of the globe with real
And virtually damaged Displaced Persons, sites
And indexes, lists of links to homologous,
Under-employed auditioning actresses of pluck
And luck, more than Google or Yahoo can manage:
A surfer’s advised to improve their search
With terse, businesslike, barely polite
Asperity, a window which asks, more or less,
What is it you want? Who knows
Until after Eden what one wants?
2.
It’s not morose power over a captive orphan
Paralyzed in pixils. The amateur sites
Are not always hardcore. Display varies
By class, confidence, peculiarities of sexual
Treasure, national origin, pathological
Pulse: the young, poor and under-endowed
Show more. They hope you’re not sorry.
Will join their fan club. Send money. But one
Is eternally sorry. Or worse. One warm
Afternoon, jogging in the old
Colonial cemetery on Portland’s
West End, I passed by a well-freckled
Young woman on a yoga mat
Sunbathing toplessly. A freshman
3.
Majoring in art, I knew at a glance,
Jogging without staring so as not to flunk
Test passage to Utopia, this green-card lottery
To gooseflesh on grass, which didn’t
Perk up my pace, but offered subject matter
For the bleating which proceeds as the sheep
Of my reveries graze in lands of chances
Missed or imaginary, and who look up, up,
But are not fed! Years later I rounded my corner
And saw a lady exit her second-floor
Shower, and thought instantly of poetry’s
Poverty: Between her thighs, India lies! and again
Avulsed my gaze to protect this miracle un-repeated
So far, so luck could stay raw in its flavor.
GLOSSIP
Attagirl, Tricia,
Thanks for the plugs. When
You passed on those arse poetica
I was sweating gold bugs.
Your lamb wears
Architect’s specs like Isaac Babel,
Who I think I resemble, an imp
Of Odessa, a giant brillionaire.
Did you see in Sunday’s Times
How someone has choreographed
Diana’s revenge on Actaeon
For Pierre Klossowski?
Mischief is fun if space is saved
For freedom and dignity.
SLOW LORIS
It takes two days for the loris
To consummate, or fuck, period. After
She gives her Okay, an amazing
Courtship ensues, forty-eight hours
Of foreplay. So forget your astrology,
Planets and stars, women from Venus,
Men Mars, heuristics, myths. The loris
Teaches us that Homo sapiens, two
Species sexually distinct, descend
From different kinds of monkeys,
One mute as the eyes, deaf
As the mouth, all ears, a sort of lemur
Nibbling, exploring her fragile branch
In nocturnal wonder, but suffering
Anger-at-daylight paralysis. What else
To be at night, unsafe, unsure,
By day among so much which vision
Makes so bright, a cross of fur
Part squirrel, part sloth, half human,
Loving love, yet can not trust
A touch because it’s never
Touched enough by that gorilla.
I run the risk of driving you away, anon, but I wonder if you have ever considered departing from the High Modernist idiom, as much as you were born for it? You possess in good proportion erudition, wit, ear, an instinct for image, a talent for the purposeful non sequitur, and a sense of the line as both a discrete and continuous unit. On the basis of these strengths, I encourage you to join my new movement, ABORTION SAYS MEOW. It is an honor not to be surpassed.
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