The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades

Citation preview

KS OR

EW H T

poems selected from five decades

GEORGE STARBUCK

THE WORKS

foreword by ANTHONY HECHT edited by KATHRYN STARBUCK AND ELIZABETH MEESE THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS • TUSCALOOSA

KS OR

EW H T

poems selected from five decades

GEORGE STARBUCK

Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn Typeface: Courier and Syntax ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Starbuck, George, 1931–1996 [Selections. 2003] The works : poems selected from five decades / George Starbuck ; foreword by Anthony Hecht ; edited by Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese. p. cm. ISBN 0-8173-1378-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8173-5053-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Starbuck, Kathryn, 1939– II. Meese, Elizabeth A., 1943– III. Title. PS3569.T3356A6 2003 811'.54—dc21 2003008342 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available

Acknowledgments The editors are grateful for permission to reprint from Yale University Press and Pym-Randall Press. In the course of our work, we received generous assistance from many people. We especially wish to thank the staff of The University of Alabama Press for their patience and perseverance, Braden Phillips-Welborn for her untiring industry, and Sandy Huss for her graphic ingenuity that made it possible for the project to go forward. K.S. and E.M.

ALSO BY GEORGE STARBUCK Bone Thoughts 1960 White Paper 1966 Elegy in a Country Church Yard 1975 Desperate Measures 1978 Talkin’ B. A. Blues 1980 The Argot Merchant Disaster 1982 Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second 1986 Space Saver Sonnets 1986 Visible Ink 2002

CONTENTS

Foreword Anthony Hecht

xiii

PA R T O N E Poems from the 1950s to the 1970s selections from Bone Thoughts, White Paper, and Desperate Measures

Bone Thoughts on a Dry Day

2

New Strain

4

Fable for Blackboard

5

Technologies

6

Communication to the City Fathers of Boston

7

A Tapestry for Bayeux

10

1958: Poems from a First Year in Boston

15

Named Individual

20

On First Looking in on Blodgett’s Keats’s “Chapman’s Homer” (Summer. 1/2 credit. Monday 9–11)

22

Ghosts of the Missionaries

23

Cold-War Bulletin from the Cultural Front

24

War Story

26

Of Late

27

For an American Burial

28

From Baudelaire: Le Rebelle

29

Making It

30

Translations from the English

31

Late Late

34

Elegy for an Industrial Domestic Object

35

Out in the Cold

37

The Well-Trained English Critic Surveys the American Scene

38

Sonnet on the Recognition of China

39

Dear Fellow Teacher

40

Poem Issued by Me to Congressmen . . .

42

Tuolomne

52

High Renaissance

59

Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line

60

The Passion of G. Gordon Giddy

61

Said (“Agatha Christie”)

69

Said (“J. Alfred Prufrock”)

69

Working Habits

70

On the Antiquity of Warfare

71

Said (“Dame Edith Evans”)

73

Said (“J. Edgar Hoover”)

73

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are no rhymes)”

74

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are no rhymes)” Part Two

76

Verses to Exhaust My Stock of Four-Letter Words

77

Falling Asleep Over Scott

78

Desperate Measures

83

The Visit

88

PA R T T W O Shapes from the 1970s to the 1990s Three Crosses on Three Pages

92

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second

96

Space-Saver Sonnets

99

The Game of Giza

102

SLABS for George Herbert

103

Eliot Runs On

104

Up to Here with the Pied Pipers of Gotham

105

Poem to be Typed on a Donor Card

106

Spin Control

107

Nineteenfifties Vogue Rorshach

108

Magnificat. Brave Cat at Snifter Fishbowl.

109

Quatrain for Kathy

110

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

112

Films Trip Comicstrip Column Vs. Krazy Kael

113

Cargo Cult of the Solstice at Hadrian’s Wall (December 1988)

116

Elegy in a Country Church Yard

118

PA R T T H R E E Poems from the 1980s to the 1990s selections from Talkin’ B. A. Blues, The Argot Merchant Disaster and Visible Ink

Three Chapters From Talkin’ B. A. Blues 1 This is the Place All Right

141

2 Grand March

142

7 Honorary Doctorate of Laws

144

Commencement Address

148

Magnificat in Transit from the Toledo Airport

149

Sign

154

Incident of the Blizzard of ’81

155

On Gozzoli’s Painted Room in the Medici Palace

157

The Spell Against Spelling

159

The Great Dam Disaster a Ballad

162

The Universe is Closed and Has REMs

165

The Staunch Maid and the Extraterrestrial Trekkie

172

Sunday Brunch in the Boston Restoration

176

On an Urban Battlefield

179

S.D.I.

180

To a Real Standup Piece of Painted Crockery

181

The Enchanted Glade

182

Amazing Gracious Living on I-93

187

Errand at the Lone Tree Mall

189

Reading the Facts About Frost in The Norton Anthology

195

Gastarbeiter

196

Like Dotted Swiss (From a Book of Unretouched Photographs of the Patternedness of Things)

197

Catalogue Raisonné of My Refrigerator Door

198

Washington International

200

Pleasures of the Voyageurs

201

About the Author

203

FOREWORD Anthony Hecht

As I have with each successive publication of a book of poems by George Starbuck throughout his long career, I come to this posthumous collection with serene and justified confidence in finding enormous pleasure, astonishment, admiration, and genuine satisfaction. The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades, is a generous sampling of a profound poetic legacy, one for which readers ought to be deeply grateful. Starbuck, unquestionably one of the most brilliant poets of his day, is unmatched in technical bravura, powerful in his expression of indignation at the daily atrocities of our time, immensely witty, and often simply dazzling. Together, these poems highlight and enrich Starbuck’s life’s work, stunning this reader with the technical agility that always has been his, but that here rises to something more than fireworks. This collection is the work of a man who has no equal for his own brand of virtuosity; a Starbuck poem has about it a quality as identifiable, as unique, as singular, as any of the major modern poets. Starbuck once said of his path in making poems: “For me, the long way round, through formalisms, word-games, outrageous conceits (the worst of what we mean by ‘wit’) is the only road to truth. No other road takes me. Put another way: I have

a conscious slavery to the language. The only alternatives are unconscious slavery, or the sainthood of the wholly silent.” And his is not a display of wit or intelligence for its own sake, though the intelligence is always there. The poems exhibit a style of mind that is supremely alert to all the inflections of vernacular parlance, regional speech, and idiomatic and demotic melting-pot American. They are richly embellished with learned allusions to literary sources, popular culture, topical events, and the shopping-mall-collage of impressions, details, and ideas that assail our consciousness at every point of our existence. His effortless technique in such forms as the ballade, the clerihew, and the double-dactyl, and in the form he called Standard Length and Breadth Sonnets, or SLABS for short, astounds. His general cheerfulness and lively intelligence give us a poet to be read and remembered. Moreover, Starbuck has always been a poet engaged: as riotous and as witty as many of his poems are, they are equally devastating in the frank and frightening highlights they throw on contemporary cultural, personal, and political life. At their most powerful, his poems do both at once—entertain and appall with their honesty. His poem “Of Late,” is not merely the best “protest poem” about the Vietnam War that I know—it is the only one of any merit whatever. In this collection, the editors have assembled a rich display of Starbuck’s versatility including “A Tapestry for Bayeux,” a poem about intricate naval operations during World War II. Composed, dauntingly, in dactylic monometer (three syllables to a line, with the accent always on the first), the poem consists of a dozen 13-line stanzas. It has a needlework complexity even at first or second reading. The poem slyly reveals an acrostic, with the initial letters of the first 78 of its 156 lines spelling out a playfully scatological sentence about the anthologist Oscar Williams—the editor who had included the poem in one of his anthologies. The Works also features a remarkable doubledactylic poem 124 lines long. Starbuck’s slim volume, Essential Shakespeare, is here represented in “Richard the Third in a

xiv

Fourth of a Second” and “Space Saver Sonnets.” The editors also include three chapters from his comedy-in-verse Talkin’ B. A. Blues, as well as the entirety of his 65-inch wide landscape poem, (presented here in single-page form) Elegy in a Country Church Yard which, when originally published, surely made the French Ouliepian masters, who like Starbuck were trained in mathematics, quiver. Almost everywhere today, courses in verse writing are offered at the leading universities and colleges. Sometimes even at high schools. Many teachers find it useful to set before their students the challenge of a superior example to imitate. Such formal exercises are not concerned with the expression of deep feeling, but the journeyman mastery of Czerny fingerwork. Not only is this good discipline in its own right, but it richly develops student respect for the abilities of their betters, and thereby encourages emulation. George Starbuck’s work is of this pedagogically useful sort, and there are not as many in the world as one might hope. Here is the kind of poet from whom virtually anyone can learn a lot, while having a lot of fun and acquiring great respect for verbal wizardry and richness of mental life. The gifted young English poet Glyn Maxwell wrote a thoughtful assessment of Starbuck’s career as a poet that appears in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (edited by Ian Hamilton). Maxwell writes, “He is equipped . . . with a veritable arsenal of strategies against the darkness, and the very qualities that make his work seem at first willfully odd—ceaseless formal exploration, Byronic ingenuity of rhyme, and playful linguistic whimsy—proclaim his strength and sanity, while at the same time dramatizing the idiocy of what he opposes. . . . That he has continued . . . to experiment at the edges of formal possibility, while delighting in America’s absurd, demonstrates his intelligence about what truly constitutes poetic ‘seriousness’: knowledge of the powers and limits of words themselves, and awareness that to don a joker’s mask is merely one of the oldest and swiftest ways into the palace.”

xv

THE WORKS

PA R T O N E

poems from the 1950s to the 1970s

BONE THOUGHTS ON A DRY DAY Walking to the museum over the Outer Drive, I think, before I see them dead, of the bones alive. I think of how the snake smoothed over the fact, but hung sharp beads around its charmer’s neck. The jawbone of my cat. So easily held shut. Breakable as ice. Mice.

The mouse of course is a berry, his bones mere seeds. Step on him once and see. You mustn’t think that the fish choke on those bones, or that chickens wish. Chickens pedaling like the dickens, getting away on a five-man tandem bike, unlike that legless headstrong showoff on crutches, the ostrich. Only the skull of a man makes much of an ashtray.

Whereas the wise old bat dumps his bones in a bag

2

and hangs it on a hook, the elephant says look how I can put this on top of that. Here’s a conundrum. Tug of a toe, blunt-bowed barge of a thighbone, gondola-squadron of ribs, and the jaw scow.

Carried along somehow, keeping our eyes peeled for what we were just yesterday, we surge into the Field Museum of Natural History with busloads full of kids. Whole-hog hominids.

3

NEW STRAIN You should see these musical mice. When we start the device they rise on their haunches and sniff the air as if they remembered all about dancing. Soon they are chancing a step or two, and a turn. How quickly they learn the rest, and with leaps and spins master the ins and outs of it, round and round and round. We found the loudest music best and now we test with a kind of electric bell which works as well. In two to two-and-a-quarter minutes, a shorter rhythm captures the front legs, and they stunt in somersaults until they become still and seem to have lost their breath. But the sign of death is later: the ears, which have been flat, like a skin skullcap, relax and flare as if the air might hold some further thing for the listening.

4

FABLE FOR BLACKBOARD Here is the grackle, people. Here is the fox, folks. The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox hopes. Here are the fronds, friends, that cover the fox. The fronds get in a frenzy. The grackle looks. Here are the ticks, tykes, that live in the leaves, loves. The fox is confounded, and God is above.

5

TECHNOLOGIES On Commonwealth, on Marlborough, the gull beaks of magnolia were straining upward like the flocks harnessed by kings in storybooks who lusted for the moon. Six days we mooned into each other’s eyes mythologies of dune and dawn. They do the trick with rockets now. With methodologies of steel. With industry or not at all. What does it come to? Ask the trees carrying out their lunacies for all they are, for all they know on Commonwealth, on Marlborough.

6

COMMUNICATION TO THE CITY FATHERS OF BOSTON Dear Sirs: Is it not time we formed a Boston Committee to Enact a Dirge for Boston? When the twelve-minute countdown comes, when Boston’s people convened in unaccustomed basements feel on their necks the spiderwebs of bombsights, when subway stations clot and fill like beesnests making a honey-heavy moan, whose business will it be then to mourn, to take a busman’s holiday from his death, to weep for Boston’s? Though dust is scattered to her bones, though grieving thunderheads add hot tears, though copper grapevines clickety-clack their telegraphic ragtime tongues at the pity of it, how in God’s name will Boston in the thick of Armageddon summon composure to compose a grave-song grand and austere enough for such a grieving? Move we commit some song, now, to the HOLD files of papers in exotic places. Helpful of course to cram some young ones with hogs’ headfuls of Lowells, khaki-cap them, ship them wholesale out. There’s a chance, in one of them the hairsbreadth imminence of the thing may speak. But Hell’s fire, what’ll they have on us in all those HOLD files? You want some rewrite man to wrap up Boston like garbage in old newsprint for the dustbin? The Statehouse men convivial at Blinstrub’s, the textile men, the men of subtler substance

7

squiring Ledaean daughters to the swan-boats, the dockers, truckers, teenage hotrod-bandits— what could he make of them, to make them Boston? Or even make of me, perched in these Park Street offices playing Jonah like an upstart pipsqueak in raven’s clothing—First Mate Starbuck who thinks too much? Thinking of kids in bookstores digging for dirty footnotes to their Shakespeares, while by my window the Archbishop’s upstairs loudspeaker booms redemption over Park Street. Thinking of up the hill the gilded Statehouse where just last night the plaster-of-paris faces of Sacco and Vanzetti craned on flannel arms at the conscientiously empaneled pain of a state’s relentlessly belated questioning of itself. (Last year the Salem Witches; next year, if next year finds a Statehouse . . . ?) Thinking of Thor, Zeus, Atlas. Thinking Boston. Thinking there must be words her weathered brownstone could still re-whisper—words to blast the brassbound brandishers on their pads—words John Jay Chapman scored on her singlehanded—words Sam Adams, Garrison, Mott, Thoreau blazed in this has-been Braintree-Jamaica-Concord-Cambridge-Boston. There were such men. Or why remember Boston? All of them dead of course. Or else old Boston wouldn’t be acting like a perfect Boston, counting its thumbs and counting up the Boston dividend-factors in this made-in-Boston guidance-umbrella heisted over Boston leaking the gods’ own laughter in on Boston

8

while the apprentice ironists of Boston target the obvious. But then that’s Boston.

9

A TAPESTRY FOR BAYEUX I Recto Over the seaworthy cavalry arches a rocketry wickerwork: involute laceries lacerate indigo altitudes, making a skywritten filigree into which, lazily, LCTs sinuate, adjutants next to them eversharpeyed, among delicate battleship umbrages twinkling an anger as measured as organdy.

10

Normandy knitted the eyelets and yarn of these warriors’ armoring— ringbolt and dungaree, cable and axletree, tanktrack and ammobelt linking and opening garlands and islands of seafoam and sergeantry. Opulent fretwork: on turquoise and emerald, red instants accenting neatly a dearth of red. Gunstations issue it; vaportrails ease into smoke from it— yellow and ochre and umber and

11

sable and out. Or that man at the edge of the tapestry holding his inches of niggardly ground and his trumpery order of red and his equipage angled and dated. He.

II Verso Wasting no energy, Time, the old registrar, evenly adds to his scrolls, rolling up in them rampage and echo and hush—in each influx of surf, in each tumble of raincloud at

12

evening, action of seaswell and undertow rounding an introvert edge to the surge until, manhandled over, all surfaces, tapestries, entities veer from the eye like those rings of lost yesteryears pooled in the oak of your memory. Item: one Normandy Exercise. Muscle it over, an underside rises: a raggedy elegant mess of an abstract: a rip-out of kidstuff and switchboards, where

13

amputee radio elements, unattached nervefibre conduits, openmouthed ureters, tag ends of hamstring and outrigging ripped from their unions and nexuses jumble with undeterred speakingtubes twittering orders as random and angry as ddt’d hornets. Step over a moment: peer in through this nutshell of eyeball and man your gun.

14

1958: POEMS FROM A FIRST YEAR IN BOSTON 1 Hospital Visits. Visits to Beacon Hill. Boston. Lord God the ocean never to windward, never the sweet snootful of death a West Coast wind on its seven-league sea-legs winds its wing-ding landfalling up by upheaving over you. Winedark hunger for some washboard music to this one-way maze. Hunger for the stink of kelp winrowed on beaches. Hunger for the hills, hills somewhere anchoring the dizzy sky. No wonder it groans, groans. It’s the wind’s own girl I waylaid through deserts who sours here, a sick wife. With land-wind. Nothing but land-wind hot with steel, but lint-white bundles of daily breath hung out over textile towns, but the sweat sucked from mines, white smokestacks soaring from hospital workyards over grassplots of pottering dotards. Take it, the dead wind whispers, crouch to its weight: three thousand miles, three hundredsof-years of life rolled up in a wind, rolled backwards onto this city’s back, Jonathan Edwards. Funny old crank of social history lectures, firm believer in hell and witches, who knows whether you of all witnesses wouldn’t watch this wayward city with most love? And the busy winter bustle of steam and batting. And the white-wound handiwork of the nurses, the spattered internes sober as bloody judges, culling the downtown haul of the mercy fleet, while rearing and sounding

15

through panicked traffic the sacred scows come horns-down heaping the hecatomb. The pretty hundreds of bells nod off to sleep like practiced husbands propped in high corners of their lady Boston’s white-laid and darkened room. And yachtsmen, footloose legatees fitting reefers into faultless features with febrile wrists, protest: some leftist restlessness threatens them in brittle leaflets; some angry boy, some undiscovered artist has put soot whiskers on their public statues. They wring their strange left hands that every-whichways scatter the khakied corpses onto elsewhere’s turbulent waters to save oil. Peer westward plotting the last-ditch sally of The West. Peer from the Free World’s keep. Old pioneer, Jonathan Edwards, did you stop off here where marsh-birds skittered, and a longboat put its weed-grown bones to pasture at the foot of Beacon, close on Charles Street? And see then, already sick with glut, this hill of men? And even there, see God? And in this marsh, and in the wood beyond, grace of a harsh God? And in these crabbed streets, unto the midmire of them, God? Old Soul, you said you did.

2 Jack Spicer Says There Is No Witchcraft in Boston What’s with the shrub rubbish? I’d say it’s witchcraft. Brats in the belfries, catboats in the outskirts, junk maples at the dump sites waving kerchiefs, something there is, it sure ain’t Spring yet, itches to kick this customary blacktop dragster into a new gear. In a quick-march mischief

16

her prim white picture-postcard patchwork slithers on down the Charles. The crisscrossed Mystic twitches in snazzy sequins though the calls of her small tugs entice no geese. All’s up; all’s on us; a life raft wakens the waters of Walden like a butt-slap. And yet she loiters. Where’s for-keeps while the lark in winter quarters lolls? What’s to solace Scollay’s hashhouse floaters and sing them to their dolls? and yet— strange musics, migrant melodies of exotic ozarks, twitter and throb where the bubble-throated jukebox lurks iridescent by these lurid newsracks. Browser leafing here, withhold your wisecracks: tonight, in public, straight from overseas, her garish chiaroscuro turned to please you and her other newsstand devotees, the quarter-lit Diana takes her ease. So watch your pockets, cats, hang on to your hearts, for when you’ve drunk her glitter till it hurts— Curtain. Winds frisk you to the bone. Full-feasted Spring, like an ill bird, settles to the masthead of here and there an elm. The streets are misted. A Boston rain, archaic and monastic, cobbles the blacktop waters, brings mosaic to dusty windshields; to the waking, music.

3 Surfeit and Hot Sleep Heavy on branch, on tight green knuckles heaves the Spring. Cumulus, thick as broodhens, thieves

17

green from the earthy bark like worms, like leaves, like dollars from up sleeves. Outbreak of billfolds, bellbottoms, burleycue babes. Musical billboards join the parade. And deep in bars the railbirds listen: “They selling something?” “Can’t tell, traffic.” On corners cats bounce once or twice: “Hey frantic.” “Yeah.” and they stop. Flared forward like an intake the lips lurch on. DISASTER OUTLET, NATICK BEHEMOTH BARGAINS MONSTER DEALS TITANIC the soundtruck reads; but what it says is “Mine. You’re my obsession. No I can’t resign possession. I’m confessin’ that you’re mine mine mine mine mine click.” Da Capo. Move on. Slowly the moon, that shifty chaperone, performs her preconcerted wink. Green, green upon green, hips the store windows—I mean it’s summer now, that lolloping large mother, comes puttering about some spell or other among her brats the beasts. And milky mutter of pigeons, splash of children, scissoring shadows weave us asleep as if there were no goddess other than this of love, as if old Venus, sprawled on the Common grass, her honeyed wonder’s hernia’d ruiner snoozing against her shoulder, had found a better nature with an older. There’s something still goes on on Beacon’s backstairs, there’s something gets discovered in the drugstores, but it’s not hers, not Cupid’s, not the Dog Star’s. The prank still plays, but it’s a colder jokester’s. If spring and fall and all, the hapless hustler does her impersonation of the picture-

18

palace posture on an Elvis poster, if spring and fall and all, her helter-skelter sisters go squealing to the marriage-smelter, the tin-pan Moon, the Moon’s to blame! Throngs follow the bouncing ball and sing along, singing about the Moon in every song, singing about the Moonbeam scoobie-doo, Using the Moon to slouch allegiance to— A pox! Powder with stardust. While the bride’s the broad’s the broodmare’s Moon at a cloud’s side poses and slowly the light is hers. She glides, golden, an apple of eyes, and so cold, only heart at its heaviest can join the lonely circle in emptiness that is her dance. Yet she is Love, our Love, that frantic cadence. Gasp at the flash fadeaway into the dot that swallows the bright stridency of the sign-off shot. Shuddering just to think it, think with what aplomb the proud haunch of the Moon hangs through, while far back in the dark she truckles to, stoppling her champagne giggles, what rough crew

19

NAMED INDIVIDUAL They hold the committee today. Today they get to me. I wasn’t invited. They say the public gets in free. The man I have this from wouldn’t divulge his face. I heard, in the dead hum that took his voice’s place, something I almost hear in you. (You purse your eyes, look from ear to ear and back again.) Surmise a room, the table set with fists, the fists with sheaves of evidence as yet safe in manila sleeves. Suppose commercials done, cameras, papers, fists set moving, everyone plunged in light to the wrists. Say, when those hands aghast, those thumbs awag with woe, jig like the naked cast of a Punch and Judy show, that pretty comedy draws millions. Say they gawk

20

too openmouthed for glee, too tranquilized for shock. Say every well-fed gut unshaken at that jape eases or freezes shut one stronghold of escape and every head that smiles in torpor or assent nods me the empty miles of its imprisonment . . . But say I came to you, waiting for you to speak? Would I be such a jew? Am I so damned unique? Surely there are a few— well— friends that I could seek?

21

ON FIRST LOOKING IN ON BLODGETT’S KEATS’S “CHAPMAN’S HOMER” (Summer. 1/2 credit. Monday 9–11)

Mellifluous as bees, these brittle men droning of Honeyed Homer give me hives. I scratch, yawn like a bear, my arm arrives at yours—oh, Honey, and we’re back again, me the Balboa, you the Darien, lording the loud Pacific sands, our lives as hazarded as when a petrel dives to yank the dull sea’s coverlet, or when, breaking from me across the sand that’s rink and record of our weekend boning up on The Romantic Agony, you sink John Keats a good surf-fisher’s cast out—plump in the sun’s wake—and the parched pages drink that great whales’ blanket party hump and hump.

22

GHOSTS OF THE MISSIONARIES This is a quiet country. Chinamen caress the fields with cultivators, groom the streams with weirs. Mulberry bushes bloom ultraconservatively. Now and then the gang of blacks building a bridge say when, and the weight falls ker-pockk. You can assume the straw-thatch cottages, the paths. There’s room to do things in this land, there’s room for men. And as we walk, the barley fields comb to behind us. Caucuses of crows take up our cries. Gusts from a pasture pond renew the early-morning vapors we drift through, while cherry trees annunciate, chirrup, the unsubstantiating dawn whereto.

23

COLD-WAR BULLETIN FROM THE CULTURAL FRONT

The proposed new U.S. Consulate at Algiers will be an ultra-modern structure . . . described by the architects as “a feast of great low glass domes.”

We’re building a building in functional glass at Algiers in Algeria: no gargoyles, no gilding, none of your crass classic criteria: one functional mass of glass— glass fibre, glass block, glass fenestration, with cut-glass tears on the chandeliers and pier-glass piers clear to bedrock (not far at Algiers) for foundation. But if domes of glass of critical area tend to let pass units of mass, heat, or hysteria, we can gild with gilding our functional building in Algeria: sun will not pierce

24

a glare so fierce, and we’ll station stations of heads-of-legation all round the block with anti-rock rocks (and anti-jeer jeers) at Algiers.

25

WAR STORY The 4th of July he stormed a nest. He won a ribbon but lost his chest. We threw his arms across the rest And kneed him in the chin. (You knee them in the chin To drive the dog-tag in.) The 5th of July the Chaplain wrote. It wasn’t much; I needn’t quote. The widow lay on her davenport Letting the news sink in. (Since April she had been Letting the news sink in.) The 6th of July the Captain stank. They had us pinned from either flank. With all respect to the dead and rank We wished he was dug in. (I mean to save your skin It says to get dug in.) The word when it came was nine days old. Lieutenant Jones brought marigolds. The widow got out the Captain’s Olds And took him for a spin. (A faster-than-ever spin: Down to the Lake, and in.)

26

OF LATE “Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card” and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the Enemy Aggressor. No news medium troubled to put it in quotes. And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen. In your office you were informed. Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle. So far nothing turns up. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed. No tip-off. No release. Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes. Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists. Pity the press photographers, not called. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said all that there is to say in that language. Twice what is said in yours. It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.

27

FOR AN AMERICAN BURIAL

for Doris, for John

Slowly out of the dust-bedeviled air, and off the passing blades of the gang plow, and suddenly in state, as here and now, the earth gathers the earth. The earth is fair; all that the earth demands is the earth’s share; all we embrace and revel in and vow never to lose, always to hold somehow, we hold of earth, in temporary care. Baby the sun goes up the sun goes down, the roads turn into rivers under your wheels, houses go spinning by, the lights of town scatter and close, a galaxy unreels, this endlessness, this readiness to drown, this is the death he stood off, how it feels.

28

FROM BAUDELAIRE: LE REBELLE An angel swoops from his into the fool’s Paradise, snatches up the sinner and Shakes him, saying, “You’re gonna know the rules Or else. I’m your Good Angel, understand? Get this: you gotta love (no faces, mind you) The featherbrained, the half-assed, the off-key, So Jesus when he comes in state will find you Spread like a carpet of sweet charity. That’s Love, if you want Love: no pat orgasm Letting you off the hook: it’s pure, it’s hot, It’s God’s own fire: you burn for all you got!” Exemplifying his enthusiasm, He loves the sinner more the more he flays him— The more, the more he answers, “I cannot!”

29

MAKING IT There is nothing at all pretty about death. One does what one can to make a pretty poem. One writes, in fact, of death—the grace of the poem does one the greater credit. Why waste breath in neoaeolian yodelings for love of the lark’s rising? Give us the dead bird. Or if death gets too easy, take my word, there is nothing all that pretty about love. (Not that you less than levitate me, Love, or that your saltiness has lost its savor: you are the killings I could carol of if I were someone more than merely clever who dared own up to his good luck and leave the Love-and-Death boys to their heavy labor.)

30

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ENGLISH

for Arthur Freeman

Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes The heat’s on the hooker. Drop’s on the lam. Cops got Booker. Who give a damn? The Kid’s been had But not me yet. Dad’s in his pad. No sweat.

Margaret Are You Drug Cool it Mag. Sure it’s a drag With all that green flaked out. Next thing you know they’ll be changing the color of bread. But look, Chick, Why panic? Sevennyeighty years, we’ll all be dead. Roll with it, Kid. I did. Give it the old benefit of the doubt. I mean leaves Schmeaves. You sure you aint just feeling sorry for yourself?

31

Lamb Lamb, what makes you tick? You got a wind-up, a Battery-Powered, A flywheel, a plug-in, or what? You made out of real Reelfur? You fall out the window you bust? You shrink? Turn into a No-No? Zip open and have pups? I bet you better than that. I bet you put out by some other outfit. I bet you don’t do nothin. I bet you somethin to eat.

Daddy Gander’s New Found Runes Rain, rain, grow the hay. Grow the weeds another day. If I die before I wake, Skip it. Little Boy Blue come blow. Can’t Man; learning a new instrument. What’s with the old one? Where’d you get the new one? Found it in a haystack Man. Old Mother Hubbard, Decently covered, Went to her final reward. She had to laugh. Manger was half Empty and half kennel.

32

Ol’ Shep. At it Again. Livin’ on Principal. I fired a missile up. It came down maybe. Maybe it stayed up. Things aint much like they used to be.

33

LATE LATE Where tomahawks flash in the powwow and tommyguns deepen the hubbub and panzers patrol, is the horror I live without sleep for the love of, whose A-bombs respond to the tom-tom, whose halberds react to the ack-ack, while I, as if slugged with a dumdum, sit back and sit back and sit back until the last gunman is drawn on, last murderous rustler druv loco, last prisoncamp commandant spat at, and somehow, and poco a poco, the bottles are gone from the sixpack, sensation is gone from the buttocks, Old Glory dissolves into static, the box is a box is a box.

34

ELEGY FOR AN INDUSTRIAL DOMESTIC OBJECT I Cradling herself asleep, it is a lady hugging her knees beneath her, heavy-headed and heavy-hipped; it is a licorice hassock she couches on, and she a licorice lady whose maker, as if to footnote his abstraction of drowsing womanhead, has carved a clockface into the hassock side, the counterclockwise eyes of its ten hours widened to abstraction, the odd pair closed. The silver hand or paring at half-past-Z-for-zero cannot orbit on that gapped zodiac, nor the alarmbell stop stopping, blaring, stopping, blaring, blaring, nor she herself, for all the sultriness and heavy hand-to-hand and thick sweet nothing of the mad waltz she waltzes dreaming, summon the Prince’s nor the enamored sculptor’s kiss. II Hunchback, head in your chest, all mouth, all circle of gap teeth, and those stub arms, like fleshy epaulets, and no hands and no feet, can it; you are too many freaks: you are as crass as forty parakeets whose only trick is to screech, screech. Black ganglion, absurd exaction, half-abortion, turd, last night I dreamt I dreamed I yanked you aloft and cut your cord and slapped you until you screamed.

35

III They were afraid I would not like you black. They were afraid I wanted princesses instead. Still they connive; they want to take you back and send me something pastel with pink buttons. Oh Love, it is not Princesses Instead, nor Tuesday Welds, nor glittering Barbara Huttons, on which the soul’s deep appetites are fed. It is the voice that comforts though it crack, the known dark shape at night beside my bed.

36

OUT IN THE COLD All day today the seagulls cried. All day they cried, if not because of you, then not at least because I asked them to. I’ve got enough poor bastards on my side; I’m not a Greek, I can be satisfied to share a chorus with the shrill sea mew without pretending it’s an interview with souls plucked from the shipwrecked as they died. I’ve got enough cold company: the guys you used to tell me how you used to see before I came along and you got wise. Where are they now, in what capacity— those dear, well-meant, unsatisfactory approximations of the eventual me?

37

THE WELL-TRAINED ENGLISH CRITIC SURVEYS THE AMERICAN SCENE

“Poetic theory in America is at present in an extremely curious state, resembling that of England during the Barons’ Wars rather than that of a healthy democracy or well-run autocracy. It is not even a decent civil war . . .” —THOM GUNN in Yale Review

Sometimes I feel like a fodderless cannon On one of those midwestern courthouse lawns Fiercely contested for by boys of ten and Topped by a brevet general in bronze. Hallucination, naturally: no Era without its war, and this has its, Roundabout somewhere, some imbroglio, Even if only run by starts and fits. Limber me up again, somebody. In with the charges! To the touch-hole! Wham! Elevate me, ignite me, let one ruddy Side or the other taste the thing I am! This pale palaver, this mish-mash of factions: How can you find employment in a war Of private sorties and guerrilla actions? Maddening! Maddening! It chokes the bore! Great God why was I tempered of pure sheffield Unless to belch and fulminate and reek? Never in England would I be so stifled. Name me the nearest caitiff: let me speak!

38

SONNET ON THE RECOGNITION OF CHINA

for Clark Foreman

Columbus sailed the ocean (misdirected by a self-styled geographer’s conjecture of the Earth’s girth) blue, with a crew selected from the cons, creeps and crums of Palos Prefecture. Behind him lay the graying recollection of Isabel. Oh well. If she could hector Ferdinand into giving him protection, he guessed the jewel business hadn’t wrecked her. Before him, as it said in his prospectus, lay nothing new—at most a more direct way to the old. And though you can’t expect us to swallow that about the egg, he checked a mutiny, found China (a correctable error), and almost made himself respectable.

39

DEAR FELLOW TEACHER I must confess I’m tired of these demonstrations. Surely there must be better demonstrations against brute force than brute force demonstrations. Come now and let us reason together like the Old Man says. What kind of a demonstration is this from academically trained minds? Is a stalled freight our cogent demonstration? Is a blocked highway where some unwashed mob panics at a mere word like “napalm” our idea of perspicacious demonstration? Would Aristotle, master of demonstration, have dignified with the proud name “demonstration” this massing of dumb bodies under flags? Would Euclid have admired such demonstration? What are we after with these demonstrations? Accommodation? Compromise? Then let that spirit permeate our demonstrations. Was it not Secretary Rusk who said We have already made our demonstration of readiness to negotiate unquote? What could be more amenable than that? And had we not in fact for five whole days called off, forsworn, and utterly regrouped (for that is how we made said demonstration) our prior and like-minded demonstration of readiness to negotiate unquote? Were we discouraged? Did we not resume what McNamara calls our demonstration that we shall not be bluffed or made to yield until, in Bundy’s words, some demonstration of comparable etcetera unquote?

40

Lyndon, I’m sick and tired of demonstrations. There is a demon in these demonstrations. I’m fed up with the mere word “demonstration.” Furthermore, I accept your demonstration that this or that or any demonstration’s about as much use as a plugged piastre. Like alibis, like sides of beef on spits, like children in thatch villages of huts, if you don’t watch them they get overdone. That’s the damn thing about these demonstrations. Let’s everybody go out and stop one.

41

POEM ISSUED BY ME TO CONGRESSMEN ABBITT ABERNETHY ADAIR ADDABBO ALBERT ANDERSON ANDERSON ANDREWS ANDREWS ANDREWS ANNUNZIO ARENDS ASHBROOK ASHLEY ASHMORE ASPINALL AYRES BALDWIN BANDSTRA BARING BARRETT BATES BATTIN BECKWORTH BELCHER BELL BENNETT BERRY BETTS BINGHAM BLATNIK BOGGS BOLAND BOLLING BOLTON BOW BRAY BROCK BROOKS BROOMFIELD BROWN BROYHILL BROYHILL BUCHANAN BURKE BURLESON BURTON BURTON BYRNE BYRNES CABELL CALLAN CALLAWAY CAREY CASEY CEDERBERG CELLER CHAMBERLAIN CHELF CLANCY CLARK CLAUSEN CLAWSON CLEVELAND CLEVENGER COHELAN COLLIER CONTE COOLEY CORBETT CORMAN CRALEY CRAMER CULVER CURTIN CURTIS DADDARIO DAGUE DANIELS DAVIS DAVIS DAWSON DE LA GARZA DELANEY DENT DENTON DERWINSKI DEVINE DICKINSON DINGELL DOLE DONOHUE DORN DOW DOWDY DOWNING DULSKI DUNCAN DUNCAN DWYER DYAL EDMONDSON EDWARDS EDWARDS ELLSWORTH ERLENBORN EVANS EVERETT FALLON FARBSTEIN FARNSLEY FARNUM FASCELL FEIGHAN FINDLEY FINO FISHER FLOOD FLYNT FOGARTY FOLEY FORD FORD FOUNTAIN FRASER FRELINGHUYSEN FRIEDEL FULTON FULTON FUQUA GALLAGHER GARMATZ GATHINGS GETTYS GIAIMO GIBBONS GILBERT GILLIGAN GONZALEZ GOODELL GRABOWSKI GRAY GREEN GREIGG GRIDER GRIFFIN GRIFFITHS GROSS GROVER

42

GUBSER GURNEY HAGAN HAGEN HALEY HALL HALLECK HALPERN HAMILTON HANLEY HANNA HANSEN HANSEN HANSEN HARDY HARRIS HARSHA HARVEY HARVEY HATHAWAY HEBERT HECHLER HELSTOSKI HENDERSON HERLONG HICKS HOLIFIELD HOLLAND HORTON HOWARD HULL HUNGATE HUOT HUTCHINSON ICHORD JACOBS JARMAN JENNINGS JOELSON JOHNSON JOHNSON JOHNSON JONAS JONES JONES KARSTEN KARTH KASTENMETER KEE KEITH KELLY KING KIRWAN KLUCZYNSKI KORNEGAY KREBS KUNKEL LAIRD LANDRUM LANCEN LATTA LEGGETT LENNON LIPSCOMB LONG LONG LOVE MACDONALD MACGREGOR MACHEN MACKAY MACKIE MADDEN MAHON MAILLIARD MARSH MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MATHIAS MATSUNAGA MATTHEWS MAY MCCLORY MCCULLOCH MCDADE MCDOWELL MCEWEN MCFALL MCGRATH MCMILLAN MCVICKER MEEDS MICHEL MILLER MILLS MINISH MINK MINSHALL MIZE MOELLER MONAGAN MOORE MOORHEAD MORGAN MORRIS MORSE MORTON MOSHER MOSS MULTER MURPHY MURPHY MURRAY NATCHER NEDZI NELSEN NIX O’BRIEN O’HARA O’HARA O’KONSKI OLSEN OLSON O’NEAL O’NEILL OTTINGER PASSMAN PATMAN PATTEN PEPPER PERKINS PHILBIN PICKLE PIKE POAGE POFF POWELL PRICE PUCINSKI PURCELL QUIE QUILLEN RACE RANDALL REDLIN REID REID REIFEL REINECKE RESNICK REUSS RHODES RHODES RIVERS RIVERS ROBERTS ROBISON RODINO ROGERS ROGERS ROGERS

43

RONAN ROONEY ROONEY ROOSEVELT ROSENTHAL ROSTENKOWSKI ROUDEBUSH ROUSH RUMSFELD ST. GERMAIN ST. ONGE SATTERFIELD SAYLOR SCHEUER SCHISLER SCHMIDHAUSER SCHNEEBELI SCHWEIKER SECREST SELDEN SENNER SHIPLEY SHRIVER SICKLES SIKES SISK SKUBITZ SLACK SMITH SMITH SPRINGER STAFFORD STAGGERS STALBAUM STANTON STEED STEPHENS STRATTON STUBBLEFIELD SWEENEY TALCOTT TAYLOR TEAGUE TEAGUE TENZER THOMPSON THOMPSON THOMSON TODD TRIMBLE TUNNEY TUTEN UDALL ULLMAN UTT VAN DEERLIN VANIK VIGORITO VIVIAN WAGGONNER WALKER WALKER WATKINS WATSON WATTS WELTNER WHALLEY WHITE WHITE WHITENER WHITTEN WIDNALL WILLIAMS WILSON WILSON WOLFF WRIGHT WYATT WYDLER YATES YOUNG YOUNGER AND ZABLOCKI (Y) IN HONOR OF SMITH OF NEW YORK (N)

Your poem is issued to you so you may burn it and so it may cost you burning and so it is issued to you. Burn it. Perhaps no more than a draft will have as yet been issued. There have been critical shortages. Honor the draft and burn it. Perhaps in your case only a symbol is issued pending

44

the draft, pending completion of the true poem. Burn it. The issue is not in the poem but in the burning. The poem is not in the symbol but in the burning issue. The poem is not in the flesh, even, but in what issues burning after the flesh and after action, the sonnet of tension, the absolute sonnet of quiet guard. Your hands are full with the plain hardware of it. Interval. Dress. Alignment. This is it. What’s it to you what some junk sculptor later makes of its wasted workbreath? This is it. Uses are what you drill from this hard center. Meanings are what you burn off into slag. Cause is the bright and accidental spiral you plane from it to leave it what it is. Whatever sudden emptiness may send you whining like shrapnel through the bars back home, whatever you drag home to disremember bloodily and obscenely and at length, this will be something else. Head down, knees high, weapon at high port, MOVE. Your hands are full. Quiet. A calyx closes. Heavy leaves foreign to you in their simplicity of outline and arrangement slowly lose outline and then arrangement. Their red green and the transparent oranges and blues of a fragmented distance gone to black, a darkness is composed. Its black-on-black reciprocating engine of gun barrels cranks over once, fires once, and lashes back. Nothing is here the night so much imperils as loneliness. Nothing the breathing dark

45

so much dispels. Your fix upon the known is on point flashes answering to your own the way no pulse or persuasion has or shall. Poem? You want a poem we got poems, Baby. Bow Bray Brock Brooks We’re the gunners got the gooks. Pickle Pike Poage Poff Charlie seen us an took off. Rhodes Rhodes Rivers Rivers Give us the job an we delivers. White White Whitener Whitten Nobody sets back the hard-bitten Special Detachment Ran-gers! Peace, Wanderer. Patience at your hard labor. Later, almost in silence, and by surprise must come to you if at all the at night now wept for, the halfway-around-the-world-awaited rising as out of a grayed horizon Objective. This. Slow outcrop of bone faces. Baring of teeth In the brief space of a doorway in ashes. This. Cathay? Santo Domingo? Some such name. The whole West waits to award you, you need only (But a figure out of your own squad bumps past you, rigorous, heavyladen and unimpeachable upon the work of confiscation. Others fan into the near distance, smoke-obscured. Smoke falls

46

back on itself around you, leaves you somewhere a light truck motor labors, lone sound of a dark March morning in some St. Paul the exhaustclouds lifting neighbor and stranger lifting as out of its own breath rising) Objective. This. Blackface. Implacable. Death his be-all and end-all. Death his intense meditation. Death his design. Your poem when issued to you will be Enemy and Response. It will be crabbed, wrought, strained and in fact poetical. It will be your Ballad of Roger Young, explaining how at impossible odds and with what grace. It will be your Song of Songs Which Is Solomon’s, saying other than what it says because what it says it cannot be saying, just as when the deathshead in the doorway who is, Yes, a Conspirator (he has spilled his guts) and who would,

47

Yes, have maintained his insidious cover until the leaves were taken off, says to you I am dead. I do not move. Not happy not unhappy I am dead. I do not move. Not feeling not unfeeling I And you, because you will have your Moment, you with your flag and book, you, because there can be no such Elsewhere indolent in the laps of unfurrowed seas, hammer the words like gold and unfold them I am soulless relentless remorseless insatiable I shall not be moved. Trophies. In the displaycase of Post Ten Thousand and Something, Algeciras Georgia, your own eyes, half-hungover but all there, in a disturbed reflection over brass nameplates on walnut: Trudo, Rountree, Green, and with the names the years, and with the years half of a banner head: VOICES ALARM, an arm upraised and pumping and cut off at the white edge of a bowling roster, eight wide-open-mouthed men straining their neck tendons in a curled brownstained photograph with whores (captioned SAIGON, containing someone’s brave tablecloth manifesto GET EM REBS and one small face worthy of Lippo Lippi) deserve, sweet Hell deserve, what your sick blood vibrates as these things vibrate to hear told: Didn’t we get em? Didn’t we take arms

48

an slog halfway around the world to get them before they got us? (white shirtbacks rising) An won’t we get em? Let em show up now callin themselves Americans, oh yes, sellin us up the creek with their half-measures— (Dead men around a table: their dead friends. Pin-ups of yellowed championship clippings. Their National Commander with the same vigilant, just, and just about fed up glare, as the glare behind you, as the glare of your awaited turn, your firm stride forward.) Your poem when issued to you, bearing symbols, bearing a date, will be neat, sweet, proper and terminal. Need it be said this late that these which you read are verses—verses to celebrate me and my righteous posture, my facts and brains? Light them, they will at once incinerate. Burn as you will your poem, the burning remains. (Here ends the document as issued and read into the record. But the gentlemen from Arizona, California, Indiana and Louisiana among others having remarked upon the lack, strange in a document of this nature, of due acknowledgment to the Supreme Authority Above Us All; and, the gentleman from Iowa having at hand a suitable Hymn and Recessional; we here insert in the record the following Expansion of Remarks.) Mine eyes have seen the glory of hard work at least. I have kept the bore unpitted and the action greased. Even when it aint a fit night out for man or beast. What’s your story, Mister? Brandenburg Louisiana!

49

New Vienna Minnesota! Venezuela West Virginia! Get outa my back yard. I have seen at least the star shell and the muzzle flash. I have sabotaged for glory and a little cash. I have fought my jammed controls right up until the crash. What’s your story, Mister? Macedonia Nevada! Himalaya Oklahoma! Okinawa Indiana! Get outa my back yard. I have walked my twenty-thousand-mile perimeter. I have cruised at eighty fathoms and a thousand per. If I didn’t they would get my wife and ravish her. What’s your story, Mister? South Kamchatka North Dakota! Lebanon South Carolina! Dutch Guiana Arizona! Get outa my back yard. In the beauty of a moment of camaraderie With a godforsaken bunch of gooks across the sea, I shall die to make men safe in my society. What’s your story, Mister? Guatemala California! Anatolia Nebraska! Hispaniola Pennsylvania! Get outa my back yard. (You take off your insignia. You seek cover. Maybe they still come sniping at you.

50

Maybe the outline of a bloused fatigue uniform is a recognition pattern. You take off your insignia. Through white wildernesses of rock to where white water spins from the snows, still climbing in a white silence they cut to ribbons with their chatter, You take off your insignia. The crest holds you a moment, meeting, of no color other than that of sunset, their distressed and automatic redface compulsive stutter. You take off your insignia. Escape is a simple melting into the landscape.)

November-December 1965

51

TUOLOMNE

(Tu • ol´ • omn • e. 1. a river in California, north of the Yosemite. 2. a meadowland on the river, above Hetch-Hetchy. 3. a tribe, now vanished.) for Meg Nye

Lord, look at the grass. Globs, glebes, gallopings, a whole ocean and blade after blade after blade of promiscuous grass. It could make a man feel called. Called on the carpet. Yes, Lord, yes, I let my seed fall on the rocky ground. I never laid my talents out to found The many-mansioned condominium. I stop off to camp on the way home From a trip west to see my married daughter And look at me. Big woodsman. I’m so dumb. I build my nylon dreamhouse on the sand. You read me well enough. Mornings, chilled to the marrow, when I stand And squint out over the pebble-brightening water, Something there is that shakes me by the scruff. I forage off. I climb a little bluff And kick my morning cat-hole in the dirt. My knees are cold. They hurt.

52

I get down close to what my heel turned over. All made of leaves! Oh look: So many profligacies brought to book. Look at the way the crumbs and fragments glisten. Tell me again thy teachings, Lord, I’ll listen. Happy the man who hunkers down and mulls A second reading of the parables. It hungers up the blood and whets the air. The things that are entrusted to my care! Where there is soil, plant seed. Where there is boulder, Cover the same with buildings. Neither build Nor scatter seed along the highway shoulder, But if you are an ethnic, scavenge there For someone newly robbed, or damn near killed, Or both, whom it behooves you to befriend. If you are merely indigent, perpend: The hedges and the ditches are the place To stand forth and be feculent in case Some parvenu who planned a banquet gets A mailboxful of monogrammed regrets And throws himself a little social tantrum. If someone slips you money, don’t succumb To modesty or misplaced moral scruple. Throw it around! Invest! It might quadruple. Weeds, you weed out. Collect the weed seed, though. Your enemy may sink his pot of gold In millet-fields and leave them unpatrolled. Salt, you are meant to savor, not to sow, Unless there is a grievance to avenge. On sand, thou shalt not build nor plant nor scavenge, But meditate. The sand shall be a standard Of competition and comparison In counting up the offspring of the dutiful. The lily too shall function. It is beautiful.

53

Lastly, at unpredicted interval, A sparrow shall conveniently fall To test the quickness of the Cosmic Eyeball. I have committed whimsy. There. So be it. I have not followed wisdom as I see it. You avalanche me sermons and I make Jokes. Break Me of it. It’s a trial to my folks. Show me the grass. The kingdom brought to birth. Convulsion in the ferns. The very earth Rising above itself in ecstasies. Haven’t I gone glass-eyed onto my knees To pry into the busyness of these Green legions, every microscopic blob A roller-palace with a milling mob Of chloroplasts careening around in it A dozen or two dozen times a minute? How furious they are as they compete At drawing water up a hundred feet To let a picturebook blue spruce complete Its simulacrum of a waterfall. A man’d have to think exceeding small To get no hustle from that plasmic jazz. Quadrillions! Every cell as frenzied as A Circus Maximus beside a Tiber. Whole generations toughen into fiber And turn into the body of the mother While I scratch out one verbal razzmatazz And heavy up my notebook with another. They have their conquests to consolidate. And I? I guess I’m here to celebrate Myself, your works, man’s passions, or the State, Depending on which school I emulate.

54

And do I mock? I mock. And grieve? I grieve. There’s nothing I would gladlier achieve Than Poetry. I mean the serious thing. Not this Pop-Popean ring-a-ding-dinging. The Pure Organic Form, Where not one word malingers from the norm Of grateful dedication to a purpose Higher than its own accidental likings. As self-effacing as a bunch of Sherpas, As drab as doughboys and as dour as Vikings, Ready to take the universe by storm And die in the attempt, my Words would swarm Over the dazzled reader like a . . . swarm. Of bees perhaps. Or how are wasps at swarming? O hell, the whole conception was just forming. I know that poem. I can almost hear it, So sure am I of it, and of the spirit In which I have heard (so often) it described. I’d swear I struck the rock once and imbibed Something that wasn’t used-up and hock-and-soda. Move like the wind upon these waters, Lord; Make me a spectacle of devastations; Break, blow, batter me, leave me floored And at the mercy of the Great Inflation That launched Jack Keats. Or was it Carol Doda? Hopeless, abysmal, my transgression is. You are, by your own double-barreled Testament, An agribusiness tipster and a whiz At principles of capital investment,

55

And here, instead of pyramiding shares, I’m scattering my corn among the tares, As bad as any of those silly gooses Who put the right thing to the wrong thing’s uses And made an utter hash of their affairs. I’d better just sit down. I’d better get my coffee boiled, and brown An egg or two around the spitting edges, And sop them with that canned brown bread I love. I’d better take a walk into the scenery And on the willows in the midst thereof Philosophize without so much machinery. Great big lumberless weeds, What are you good for? Holding sand together? Huddling in bunches under heavy weather Like immigrants on shipboard? That would fit. The cabin-class contingent lathers it Off to the high horizon hell-for-leather And there you stay, all sombre on the decks Of something big and frightening and just About to give in to an underthrust And go down in the folklore of great wrecks. I’ve seen you walk the waters, willow trees. Somewhere in all their dappled botanies I think the English Bards ran out of gas. They left you lorn, and pretty much unheeded, Except when one of their fair damsels needed A semiotic shorthand for Alas. No skin off you. Who needs us and our tricks, Our amateur hysterics and theatrics? I’ve seen you skating with an easy stroke

56

On waters that would petrify an oak. I’ve seen you lean, and brake, and send a slash Of icy whiteness up against a trash Of aspen-bones and ponderosa rubble The snow-melt-water flood had swept aside Like scaffolding. I’ve seen your streamers ride The wind as if to whip it on the double And laugh at it for getting out of breath. I’ve seen you scare a camper half to death You stood so calm, so silent and serene. He thought he almost knew what it would mean To cease upon the midnight without cavil. He tossed his beans aside, and panned some gravel, And whistled “Oh My Darling Clementine” To put his thoughts back into proper channels. And when he’d pulled up stakes, and itched his flannels, He still felt shivers up and down his spine. Some master of the high Miltonic line Owes you a Great Ode, willows, sure as hell. I think I’ll speak about it to Kinnell. I hate to see so versatile a tree gypped Out of a rightful place in the Anthology. But this is not some Ode, it’s an Apology. And if it needs a moral, there’s the grass. Look at it. Grass grass grass. Who sent these indolent armies out of Egypt? They pillow the plains and valleys wall-to-wall. I do, Lord, oh I do wait for a call. But also, I enjoy my avocations. I scribble side-notes to the fall of nations. I play with spacings, and with indentations. And generally, I sit here like a dope, As obviated as the spheres of Ptolemy,

57

And keep my crafts and hobbies up, and hope That when the big wind comes, it speaks Tuolomne. I mean why not? I know the wind I seek To flee from seven days an average week. If everything it says to me is Greek, And everything it means to me is All, And all I care about is the unknown, Who is to say I’m loco if I fall Into a little singsong of my own, And while the twigs fly, and the tent-ropes moan, I make a joyful noise: “You speak TuolOmne. You speak Tuolomne. You speak Tuolomne.”

58

HIGH RENAISSANCE “Nomine Domini Theotocopoulos, None of these prelates can Manage your name. Change it. Appeal to their Hellenophilia. Sign it ‘El Greco.’ I’ll Slap on a frame.”

59

SONNET WITH A DIFFERENT LETTER AT THE END OF EVERY LINE

for Helen Vendler

O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough, Or both! O promissory notes of woe! One time in Santa Fe N.M. Ol’ Winfield Townley Scott and I . . . But whoa. One can exert oneself, ff, Or architect a heaven like Rimbaud, Or if that seems, how shall I say, de trop, One can at least write sonnets, a propos Of nothing save the do-re-mi-fa-sol Of poetry itself. Is not the row Of perfect rhymes, the terminal bon mot, Obeisance enough to the Great O? “Observe,” said Chairman Mao to Premier Chou, “On voyage à Parnasse pour prendre les eaux. On voyage comme poisson, incog.”

60

THE PASSION OF G. GORDON GIDDY ten arias in search of an operetta

(HH ANNOUNCES THE ARRIVAL OF GG) A pipsqueak. Pitiful. Thinks he’s a Dan Duryea. Acts tough. Talks rough. And if it was his idea, We’d blow the whole mission over some Bogside Boadicea. This is an ops specialist? It’s a grade-A Twit if you ask me. Tell them up at Area I know him, I know his price-tag. 5¢ ea. What am I supposed to do? Stamp him per via aerea? Ticket him to Belfast on BEA With a box lunch wired for the Irish Sea? He looks all right. A neck trim, some Nivea, He wouldn’t frighten the regulars out at Shea. But when he comes at me in that chintzy suit from Chelsea With his giveadamn button flashing like an azalea, Baby, a damn is just what I don’t givea.

(GG SETS CC STRAIGHT ABOUT HH) Where do you hire these creeps? In the Tonga Is.? I mean for the Bond fans in the Cinema Is He’ll do just great. Whole townhouse full of bonsais. Him and his bon-ton Siamese Thaïs Prattling about the Paris caravanserais. Babbling about the boat train down from CalaisTo-rhyme-with-phallus en façon Anglais The way they taught him in the AIS. Flashing a little Négritude (MaraisAnd-Miranda records, a couple of assegais).

61

Trotting out the grass mats from Minas Gerais And one of your more exorbitant beaujolais And there they sit, happy as Adonais (A little patois-de-foie to go with it? Mais Wee) and hold hands. I’d sooner Gilles de Rais. I’d sooner the Boy Scouts on Mt. Tamalpais. He’s a case, Cece. Terminal. Thais or no Thais.

(MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE AMERICAS) Don’t touch that shade. Christ Jesus. Los Saguaches Again. You been there. Giant plastic spinaches Coming out of the woodwork? Machetes, gouaches Of gauchos, devil-dancer papier-mâchés? You been there. Pimps in Pancho Villa mustaches. Tinsel-titted Folies-Bergeres apaches Ki-yi-yipping like a bunch of Andromaches While some caped crusader plays chercher-les-vaches In a bullring dickey slathered all over with caches Of tin doubloons, and the old crock bellyaches How there ain’t no action in this spic dive. Teaches The multitude a sing-along about cockroaches, Stomps all over his hat with his huaraches, And har-hars with all of us cultural attaches About the ass we used to get on the Hauptwaches In Forty-Five. No wonder Helms has headaches. Six billion in funding-arrangements attaches To this putz getting planked at Mama-Ché’s.

(GG COMES IN FROM THE HEAT) This outfit. If it isn’t prop up Haile

62

Selassie, it’s go count poppies in Zile. Guess what they did while you guys pulled off Chile? Ran me for Rep. Yep, cranked up the old Langley crapmobile, And to listen to them tell it Honey-Chile I was the Flag I was God’s own guided missile The Liberty Bell or a reasonable cracked facsimile Mario Lanza doing La Donna é Mobile And the first shot at the Battle of Mobile. I mean I been run up the old campanile And I been tolled I been X-tolled I been mobilePodiumed around from San Pedro to Presque Ile Hey Baby I bled for that seat: moi: mutilé De la guerre. Fun you say? Fun?? Baby, if Gigi-leMoko does that again, he’s ten-tenths senile. Of all the idiot, tedious, infantile . . .

(THE GIDDY TAPES WILL CONTINUE AFTER THIS WORD) Some day—there’ll be a playback system so sensitive, with an on-line signal-retrieval computer so advanced, that no conspiratorial skullduggery will escape detection. No matter if malefactors have erased the tape-recordings of their malefactions. Mixing the erased tape with an electronic negative of itself, scanning the resultant “white noise” for vocal traces, audiotechnicians will assemble and decode the exact actual voiceprint of the perpetration. That “some day” is—today!—at Honeywell.

(GG WITH A SUREFIRE PLAN TO SWEEP ALL FIFTY) Gigi, you son-of-an-Andy-Warhol-heroine, They’ve bought it. The whole schlemozzle. Project Jasmine. The Wienerschnitzel himself. Pfft. Terminé.

63

Look at him down there browsing along the Seine Pipedreaming about Metternich and the Ciné Bleu, well Gigi he’s up the old Assiniboine Without a paddle and he don’t know it. In nomine Bob Hope and Pat Boone and Spiro T. Agnew thine Is the contract, Buddyboy, and the place in the sunshine And the seventy-six-trombone Concerto-in-EAs-in-EOB you bastard: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for gelignite and flying machine. So. Sunday. Him and his Amazon wahine. We do him a Dag or a Hale Boggs or an Antoine De St. X. and by Dag by Dhiem by Jacqueline In the pink original if there’s Palestine Written all over it all the more goldmine. Tragedy! villainy! martyrdom! heartbreak! Procaine For the masses, to ease that great big needle of morphine In. Oh Gigi you weasel you minx you ermine You Painless Parker you Bonaparte you Tom Paine!

(COUNTERMAND FROM CC) Scenarios? Hang scenarios. Gimme the misesEn-scene. You got an Oswald on the premises? well whaddaya use for meat, some gang of Cochises? Yeah? . . . Yeah? . . . Well OK: say he demises. That make us Hertz? ’Cause there ain’t gonna be no Avises. Just Wyatt Earp and a streetful of rigor mortises. You take your soundings in the Chicagos and the St. Louises, Run em through your computerized hoozy-whatsises, And listen to all the pretty little noises. Know what it is? He plays. He plays in the Boises, The Baton Collapsible Rouges, the Lake Louises— How do you spell Peoria? He cruises. Slicker than twenty Special Forces porpoises.

64

He carries us. Stay limber. Sing his praises. Say after me: I kiss the dust of his daises. I kiss the way the mother hisses his ises. I kiss the exquisite remedies he advises For the seven deadly societal malaises. I blow the Rockefellers and the Onassises Kisses to each of their island paradises. I kiss the little ka-votes from My Six Crises. That’s a good boy. Now tell your asshole Aramises To take the shirts back out of their valises And get back down to their USISes And use their breath to cool their vichyssoises. Read a good book. You’re fluent. Mes Six Crises.

(GG’S AFRICAN INITIATIVE) Howie, we got the wrong damn clientele. They shunt me to some quiz-kid name of Schaufele. Stupidest open pit this side of Tooele. But precise? Prettier footwork than Pele. I told him. “Give em some instant Passchendaele. Lay a little downbeat on them jungle teleGraph artists courtesy of Curtis E. Le May. Voice of a new E-pock is it, Bubbele? Well it ain’t strumming its goddam ukulele On a batik under an Egon Schiele And it ain’t singing ‘D’ye ken John Peele’ For the assembled friends of Goeran Gentele. It’s marching down the banks of the Matabele Under the flag Ché made for Pierre Mulele: ¡Patria o muerte! ¡Venceremos! ¡Andele!” You’d think the junks had landed at Eleele. He froze. Right there in the Gents on Level E.

65

(GG FINALLY PUTS IT ALL TOGETHER) Hit him? Not on your life, Mon. Let him rotate. You think I’d work up something this elaborate just to get in one jump ahead of Atë? Let the poor bastard moulder in the Senate. We’ve got those cables. We’ve got that girl Renate. Tony’s developing something up in Scituate. Relax, Baby. Jiu-jitsu, not karate. If you need meat for your M-Five and his concateNation of spaced-out bren-gun bunnies, by Hecate Meat they shall have. A nice fat Nixon surrogate. Admired. Adored. Expendable. The Late Great Reverend G. Cracker. Jubilate Agnew you bet, and from what I hear in private, High time. The good Rev’s revved up. He doth remonstrate. No effing finesse. Plastique. We make a paté Out of him. Whip up a nice big chocolate Mousse for dessert. And the Chief? Vengeance incarnate. Götterdämmerung at the old Gaststäte. Something juicy on everybody’s plate. Tomorrow then. Chores tonight. Naa, nothing delicate. That bug. You know, Larry’s other penate, The boys put in last month over at Watergate? Well I don’t know what’s up at Ye Olde Sweate Shoppe. They keep hiring kids straight out of Choate And they don’t know circuitry. Talk about third-rate . . .

(EPILOGUE: SPANDAU) Are you guys lawyers, or a bunch of titmice? You got it made. I’d have those goons from Justice

66

Chasing their schnozzles up their twots and vice Versa. You’re golden. So what’s this with the CiceRonian smokescreens and the tinhorn artifice? They got some questions? Let em take their choice. Tell em if it’s irrelevant, no dice, And if it ain’t, tough luck: sub judice. Catch-22. Their case goes down the sluice. You’d have that wop from Jersey chasing scalplice Out of his wig and saying “Cosa dice?” And looking like the guy that lost Eurydice. What is all this? My Lai? Or maybe Lidice? It’s five kids stealing ten cents worth of licorice. Grist for the goddam juvenile Police.

(EPILOGUE: CHATEAU D’IF) Loth? You bet. And I’m getting a damn sight lother. The Beard sang like a bird. So what’s it got her? I don’t think I could play it that much smoother And I don’t find confession psychotherApeutic and I don’t want Bozo-the-R CMP signing me any pardons. Other Than that, I’ll gab. I’ll be the glibbest frotherAt-the-mouth since Mary Stuart came to FotherIngale. Listen, you Rotarian Rehobother, This game plays. Can I say it any soother? For kicks, clout. Both, or I wouldn’t bother. The rich get rich. The mammoth’re getting mammother Name of the game. Behemother and behemother. Last man into the pool’s an American-10th-er. Maybe we go the way of the archaeotherIum and the sabre-tooth, but we’re Big Brother And hog-butcher and feeder and houser and clother And general all-around scout-camp housemother

67

To the World, Pal, and it’s headed out to sea. S.S. Leviathan. Someone’s gonna pilot her. Put it all together it spells moi.

(CHORUS OF EXPERTS) Heraclitus: All is flux. Holmes: History is particulars. Horatio: You might have rhym’d.

68

SAID Agatha Christie to E. Phillips Oppenheim, “Who is this Hemingway, Who is this Proust? Who is this Vladimir Whatchamacallum, this Neopostrealist Rabble?” she groused.

SAID J. Alfred Prufrock to Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, “What ever happened to Senlin, ought-nine?” “One with the passion for Orientalia?” “Rather.” “Lost track of him.” “Pity.” “Design.”

69

WORKING HABITS Federico García Lorca used to uncork a bottle or two of wine whenever the duende dwindled for a line. James Joyce would have preferred a choice of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany’s, but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies. The Later Henry James bet shots of rum against himself in games of how much can we pyramid upon a given donné. Little Dylan Thomas didn’t keep his promise to stay out of Milk Wood. He tried to drown the fact as best he could. Anna Akhmatova Eyed the last shot of a Pre-war cognac de champagne. “So much for you, little brandy. Do svidanya.” T. S. Eliot used to belly it up to the nearest bar, then make for a correlative objective in his car. Proust used to too.

70

ON THE ANTIQUITY OF WARFARE

(For my son John, while he is thinking about the ROTC)

The celebrated Missing Link made mincemeat of a few of us I think. Therefore I am, I think congenitally, cagey. Sink or swim! Troy gate or Tartarus! The Celebrated Missing link arms. Are you with us, boys? And wink. Is not the night sky glorious? I think therefore I am. I think I like it that way. Rinky-dink escadrilles, shine on. Make a fuss. The celebrated missing Link Trainer patrol that hit the drink south of El Paso lives. And thus cogito ergo sum I think lives, where they lined up in the clink to forge the bright, the clangorous, the celebrated missing link “I Think Therefore I Am I Think” one more time: I think therefore I am I think The celebrated Missing Link. My socks don’t match, my shit don’t stink, My landing brakes are on the blink, But I could fly to Hell through ink In a coal-fired kitchen sink. So buck up, Tooey you dumb gink. When the great game-plan hits a kink

71

And I am needed at the brink I’ll be there, feisty as a mink With Memphis Rose and Lil the Chink At Mama Juana’s Roller Rink one more time. I will stand tall. I will not shrink. I’ll sing until my scalp turns pink: Rink a dink dink, rink a dink dink, Last man in is a raaaaat fink. And then if you don’t mind I’ll slink Out a back door and hop a bus. I’ll hump and brawl and steal and cuss And by the year two-thousand-plus I’ll be the most obstreperous Old AWOL since Odysseus.

72

SAID Dame Edith Evans to Margaret Rutherford, “Seance? Oh really, my Dear, if there be Nonhypothetical Extraterrestrial Parapsychologists, They can call me.”

SAID J. Edgar Hoover to Constable Dogberry, “We are the Law. When they Call us a pig, We must impugn them for Creditability. After them! After them! Jiggety-jig!”

73

ON READING JOHN HOLLANDER’S POEM “BREADTH. CIRCLE. DESERT. MONARCH. MONTH. WISDOM. (for which there are no rhymes)” “Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are No rhymes)” was just the title, and I only read that far. That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions, And I was scared this hothead would start hedging his assertions Before I had him dead-to-rights. (A Chekan’s or a SMERSHian’s Lot, you know, is not an happy one.) He might retract. A liar is a liar is a liar. That’s his act. But six distinct demonstrable defiances-of-fact Before he hits line one? That’s taking aim at the World’s Record. I wanted this quark-colored tangerine-flake double-deckered Omnibus of absurdities to make it to the checkered Flag. He had started fast, but could he forge on? Was he serious? He had the Grand Prix style all right. Intense. Composed. Imperious. And lies to burn. Poor lies, in no wise deep or deleterious. He drove them home like thumb (or rather tooth nail fist and chin) tacks. He planted Cosmic Glints to make you whimper for a glint-axe. “Unconstellated words rain down . . . inexorable syntax” Etcetera etcetera. It’s not that I’d set up, Like Carrie Nation beating back the drunkard from his cup, To scourge the world of liars. I’d as soon be Offissa Pup.

74

I’d sooner hassle fetishists and call myself a bra-narc. If I were Lord of All (or even constitutional monarch) I’d send a Deluge down, with one-way tickets on the Non-ark For lying priests and pedagogues. They make a feller’s fez hurt. But whom does Keats’s whopper about corpulent Cortez hurt? Or any poet’s whopper? If he wants to say the Desert Is made of pea-green Camembert, hell, welcome to the circle. We listen to a Bard the way a certain kind of jerk’ll Listen to leaves or listen to a percolator perkle. As long as he can grind em out, a dozen-or-so a month, We’ll praise him to the nth degree, and to the n-plus-Ith. He could have called the thing “Fifth. Sixth. Eighth. Ninth. Twelfth. Baker’s dozenth” For all we care. We’ll cheer him to the w-x-y-zedth As long as his flimflammeries have brio and have breadth And don’t come on like nursery-nannies pushing early-tobedth To three-year-olds with jingles about Health and Wealth and Wisdom. He should look out, though. He might take himself in, and that is dumb. Do that, and sure as malheur is the better part of Msdom, Sententiousness will sidle in with snapshots in his wallet To lay a little something on us camels: some small strawlet Of Wisdom, say, or Beauty. Take this poem now. I call it “Width. Rhombus. (see Lozenge.) Glacier. Despot. Fortnight. Bilge.” I told myself: “No overkill. Go easy on the bilge.” But then. Tueur is human. And what rhymes with bilge is bilge.

75

ON READING JOHN HOLLANDER’S POEM “BREADTH. CIRCLE. DESERT. MONARCH. MONTH. WISDOM. (for which there are no rhymes)” Part Two

I liked that when I wrote it. By the time it got to bilge, It even had a moral. All of that! And out of bilge! It made me so blamed proud I bought some i-beams from the store And welded me a Sculpture to bestride my study door: A five-piece ten-foot Sculpture spelling out forevermore B-I-L-G-E BILGE, to match the Late-Pop-Art decor. I stood back to admire the thing. I beamed, but not before I started to detect a tapping at my study door— A featheriest tapping, tapping, at my study door. Imagine my surprise. It was John Hollander. He wore The quizzical expression of the vanquished, but he bore No malice. Quite the contrary. He said, “What perfect bilge! Something of yours?” “You know,” he said, “it’s curious, but bilge Once struck me as unrhymable. A lead-pipe cinch like bilge.” “You killjoy!” I exploded. I snatched up* the B in BILGE And went for him. He countered with a well-aimed I from ILGE, But his next words were his last words: “No don’t! I’m not a killj—”

*Literalists may question this. Not even a Mad Turk could “snatch” four hundred pounds of monumental ironwork. Snatch is poetic license. It was more a clean-and-jerk.

76

VERSES TO EXHAUST MY STOCK OF FOUR-LETTER WORDS From the ocean floors, where the necrovores Of the zoöoögenous mud Fight for their share, to the Andes where Bullllamas thunder and thud, And even thence to the heavens, whence Archchurchmen appear to receive The shortwave stations of rival nations Of angels: “Believe! Believe!” They battle, they battle—poor put-upon cattle, Each waging, reluctantly, That punitive war on the disagreeor Which falls to the disagreeee.

77

FALLING ASLEEP OVER SCOTT

for Anthony Hecht

Drowsing one day in The Heart of Midlothian, Finding no pillow to Cushion my head, Reaching for Kenilworth, Happening onto an Earlier Waverly Novel instead, Why was I suddenly Bound, on the battlements, Helpless to rescue my Self from the dread Castle of Torquilstone’s Phantasmagoria, While a bull voice from the Parapet said “Runagate ruffian, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, Whom dost thou sally at? Whom dost thou seek? Brian de Bois-Guilbert? Reginald Front-de-Boeuf? Lucas de Beaumanoir? Rabbi Ben Samuel?

78

Stephen de Martival? William de Mareschal? Oldhelm of Malmsbury? Jacob Ben Tudela? Richard Plantagenet, Alias Lion-Heart, Latterly Knight of the Fetterlock? Eke Herman of Goodalricke? Cedric of Rotherwood? Dennis the Cellarer? Giles de Mauleverer? Richard de Malvoisin? Philip de Malvoisin? Albert de Malvoisin, Master of Templestowe? Locksley of Nottingham, Formerly Huntingdon, Alias Robin Hood? Gaultier of Middleton? Ulfgar of Middleham? Hilda of Middleham? Athelstane Adelingson, Franklin of Coningsburgh? Whom wouldst thou duel or Diplodactylify? Scarify? Vilify? Pole-axe or pique? Call the man out! Be he Anglonormanophobe Churl from our charnel or Cock of our clique,

79

Spit him you shall! give his Skippety-hoppity Madrigal-monicker Back in his cheek! Skewer them, scatter them, Hyperpersnickety Gaggle of gluttonous Gabblemouth geeks! ‘Top o’ the morning, Miss Ulrica Wolfganger.’ ‘Thankee, good Nathan Ben Israel.’ –Breeks’ Bones! The bare minimum Breakfast amenities Drive a man mad in a Matter of weeks! Who in the name of the Quasihistorical Sent me this houseful of Metrical freaks?” Long rang the echoes from Breastworks to bulwark to Outwork to catwalk through Dungeon and hall. Longer still, silence, till TrumanCapotean Vocables rose from the Base of the wall:

80

“Crotchety-crotchety, Fictional Spokesperson: Dactylophobiac Tantrums like these Scarcely bespeak the comPosure demanded of One who would wrestle a Folk to its knees. As for my challenge, you Blankety-blankety Bounder, convey my reSpects to that NonU, that non-ullulant Monosyllabical Name of a name, the uSurper King John!” Noises of battle rolled In and rolled over me. Cauldrons of pitch were upEnded in flame. Stones were hurled earthward, then Garbage, then carcasses, Timbers, bound prisoners, Me! Was my name Saved from the wreck of that Keep in some chronicle? Saved for some reader years Hence? As for me,

81

I like to think it a Nonprobability EpiphenomenoLogically. I like to think that the Waverly Novelist Nodded and wavered and Vanished in smoke Like a closed book, like a Saudi Arabian Djinn, like a higgledy Pig in a poke.

82

DESPERATE MEASURES Oh Momma, Momma, I haven’t slept for weeks. This secretary and I are being blackmailed by a bunch of sheiks. I thank my stars it’s Henry they’ve been to see. I don’t know how I could stand it if they came straight to me With their oily insinuations and their bedroom millinery Henry, Momma. What do you mean “What Henry?” Henry the Secretary I’ve been talking about That the Sheiks are after because of the way that we’ve all made out And now we gotta get money so we can pay them and keep them quiet And he’s a lovely warm human person and a real laff riot But what if silence is like happiness and you can buy it And buy it and buy it and it just won’t stay bought? Bad enough with the pot fiends rioting in the streets. But blackmail! Trading on another person’s dirty secrets. It’s worse than being a classified-documents-leaker, it’s Diabolicaller it’s slimier it’s sneakier it’s Blackmail! Oh Momma I just don’t care anymore. They can drag our impetuous ardor in all its sordor Into the glare of the lawcourts and the even horrider Glint in the eye of the would-be boudoir toreador The Suck-of-the-Month subscriber the PlayboyPortfolioreader The plain-brown-wrapper Scenes-from-the-Life-of-AnnCorioorderer— Blackmail! Plastered in tabloid all over the porno shops. I shall stand there shattered, defenseless, hopeless, topless And throw myself on the generosity of the American populace. It worked all right for the Pinochets and the PapaDocs

83

and the Papadopouloses. It works for the nattering-kneejerk internationalist applepolishers And their eastern establishment limousine lib-lab scuttlebuttpublishers, And if I can just get a little groundswell started among the Winnetkans and the Tuhungans, Gee: I can hear me now: Gentlepersons of the Petit jury, What’s the big rap here? Mayhem? Kickbacks? Jobbery? Some scheme of evil rivaling in its obduracy The Crédit Mobilier and the Teapot Dome? Why hang it all, we just puttin’ a little down-home Jalapeno chilipepper into the implementation of Nation-to-nation nonstop marathon stratamatic love-sweetlove. World I could love you to death. The Kid from Nazareth Said that. And the World best listen. Hell to pay. Love you to death, said Dennis and Doris Day. And Martha and Johnny and Sanjit and James Earl Ray. World I could love you to death The great Hernan Cortez Sang as he jangled down to Tenochtitlan, And Sammy and ldris and Herman and Genghis Khan And the Madames Lafarge, Chiang, Bovary, Cho-Cho-San Jostle along. And Alvin Dark. And Jeanne. It’s the universal background music, Mon. World I could love you to death. Give in to it. So saith Good old Elizabeth I, II, Berrigan, Bagaya, Borden-and-I-don’t-mean-cow. You better believe it, Wayne Babe. Dr. Lao

84

Said it, Mao Said it, the entire cast of the festival at Oberammergau Said it and durned if there isn’t this kind of a massed ancestral row That builds up into my bloodstream like a thunderhead over the Jungfrau Or a tidal wave or a Ghost with a notion to say it and say it now: Evvvvvrybody go kidnap Henry Kissinger. Evvvvvrybody go kid— Aw come on. Oh wow, You must have had goofy-juice with your evening chow. That went out with Spock. With the Rome Plow. Might as well tell me huelga. Tell me Dow. Might as well tell me giftshop Handy Wrappinger. How? Just everybody go kidnap Henry Kissinger. Fill skin of head with sand. Place out in sun. Just everybody go kidnap Henry Kissinger. Fill skin of head with ashdust. Place by stream. Just everybody go kissify Henry Kidnap. Fill skin of head with cool. Place in high place. Whaddaya trine? Whaddaya make me? Play the fool? I got no time. Gotta nab me a bullshit heiress. Nab me a Yanqui plantboss. Nab some yids. Kidnap the didn’ts. Kidnap the diddly dids. Whoa there, Cha-Cha, line up and place your bids.

85

Them penny-ante contracts is for kids. Goddamit, this is crime. Have I been getting through to you? This time It’s everybody kidnap everybody. Hold for extravagant ransom. Keep secure. It’s everybody in bad hands. Everybody Off to fantabulous hideouts. Gone to earth. That’s everybody. You got that? Everybody. No bystanders. No stragglers. No fifth wheels. Now everybody glare at everybody. Listen, you’re my investment. You get sick, Then everybody loses. Everybody Finish his goddam oatmeal. Nice and thick. Now everybody snarl. Give everybody Beautiful hardboiled reasons. Companions. Eggs. Now everybody count off. Everybody? Single exception, Captain. Heavens! Who? Henry? Out there alone with Man-withSuitcase? Ooh. Nobody out there now but Man-with-Suitcase.

86

Black Samsonite suitcase. All that loot. Practicing to himself: “Put down that suitcase!” Practicing to himself: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

87

THE VISIT The gingerbread house in the gingerbread forest, That’s where it took place. The gin, the St. Vitus, the gingivitis, Whatever it was, her face Was radiant. The kids were zonked. Even the mice were deMolished on an overdose Of stone patisserie. Grandmama in her thermal formal, Grandpapa in his cape, Had just settled down for a paranormal Nightcap at the nape. When out in the clutter of Forest Lawn Stone furniture there landed A wee little ship, from whose wee little hatch There strode forth, openhanded, A wee little man with his little ol’ eyes So shifty and lightning-quick That we knew right away—oh what a surprise— That it must be TrickyDick. He was chuckling all over and licking and grinning and Ooh, this was getting fun! He was checking the house for chimneys. Nope. And for doors. There was just the one . . . . Oh goodie he found it. Around he bounded, Casing the joint for green.

88

Casing the joint for red. Confounded Snooper he was, and mean. He knew what a stocking was used for: to hang! And goodies for kiddies: to hide! To hide from the sniveling beggars! We sprang For the door. In the nick! Outside! We twisted the key in the gingerbread lock In the patented blast-proof door, And that’s why no one’s terrified At Christmas anymore. But Christmas Eve, or Halloween, Or any susceptible season, I wouldn’t go down to the gingerbread wood If I didn’t have terrible reason. I think I would rather sit down on a thistle Than listen to that. And to hear him excite A yet clammier gaggle of slimier creatures To wail and to wallow? Good night.

89

90

PA R T T W O

shapes from the 1970s to the 1990s

THREE CROSSES ON THREE PAGES

This work, printed in purple ink, originally appeared as a three-page foldout in The Ohio Review, Spring/Summer 1979.

92

93

94

95

The Essential Shakespeare, Volume I Rapid-retrieval editions in rhymed hemimeter

RICHARD THE THIRD IN A FOURTH OF A SECOND G. Starbuck, general textual editor

Act I

Act II

Clop.

woo’d,

Clopclop.

took

But look what Hoptoad did. Widow’d,

96

this lewd and stinking thing this England.

Act III

Act IV

Cloppity clop he swap it fer some horse.

Flummery of course. Cover story for the hoi polloi.

97

Act V

Act VI

Good;

thinking which nerd murdered Richard Third.

we wouldn’t want the slubbered herd

98

The Essential Shakespeare, Volume XII

SPACE-SAVER SONNETS purged of accretions & newly published in the corrected hemimeter version prepared under the general folgership of G. Starbuck

Poor Soul

Not Marble

Fly, thief; thy fiefdom ’s torched.

This word, whispered, shall stand, and

Come, Cur. Fetch! Get your scorched earth worth.

the Carrara marble fall.

99

My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing

Like the Sun

Yes, Perfesser,

She’s

snow no doubt outdoes her etceteras.

100

not some flotsam similes from Lyly’s Euphues.

Th’ Expense

‘Notes on the Life, By the Late B. D. Browse.’

Lust is just mis-

“Bill? Lil? ’sme! ’s Will!

ery, worry

Key? Natch.

and blame. Brandname dreck. Ecch.

Latchrope? Nope. Ope nup! Yup. You too.”

101

THE GAME OF GIZA

DIRECTIONS FOR HOME ASSEMBLY: Cut out along outside margin. Place on table other side up. Fold each face over carefully so that its apex meets center of base of the face opposite. Lift faces until apices meet. HOW TO PLAY THE GAME OF GIZA: Scale face I to entry tunnel. Pose for last known snapshot. Scale face o to entry tunnel. Calibrate torsion gravimeter. Scale face b to entry tunnel. Proceed upon official signal. p o l y p r o c r e a t i v e p r o t o p a t r i a r c h w h i t h e r s o e v e r t h o u s i f t s t t h i t h e r w a r d g a l u m p h e t h g a l l a n t r y w a t c h i n g K a n s a n s n a r r o w t h e i r e y e s a n d g o o

102

b i s f o r b u l l p u c k y e f e n d i n e i t h e r g o d n o r g e o d e s i s t i n h e r i t e t h d o w n t r o d d e n a n k h s t r i d d e n s t r a i g h t f a c e d i n d e c i p h e r a b l e W e l f a r e M o u n t a i n

o n o y o u a i n t y o u r e A r c h y s f u l c r u m b u d d y b o y l e a s t w i s e A r c h i m e d e s E n t e r p r i s e s I n c o r p o r a t e d p a t e n t e d t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n a l i n f r a s t r u c t u r e s

I a m t h e l a t e g r e a t C h e o p s p h a r a o h e m e r i t u s c e l e s t i a l r i v e r p i l o t p r o b a t i o n e r g o d i m p i o u s a r c h e o l o g i c a l i n v e s t i g a t i o n s n o t w i t h s t a n d i n g

SLABS FOR GEORGE HERBERT

AtLeastItsNotA Synchrostrobic GizmoWithDials OnItIKnowIKnow IvePutYouInIt& SomeFolksFindA StandardLength &BreadthSonnet Claustrophobic SoTryAnAerobic ExerciseOrTwoI MeanBreatheAah BreatheSeeIsnt ThatSomeRelief

103

ELIOT RUNS ON

DiscoingLately Disconsolately InAnAbandonedA FrameByTheSeaI DidNotThinkThe GoGosSpokeToMe Discouragingly CrassAndJingly &TheHyannisMTV Inconstant&The WindsPhilately Discomfitingly TinglyLikeAWan Discountoutlet Counterpersons DiscontinuousT GroupTalkathon

104

UP TO HERE WITH THE PIED PIPERS OF GOTHAM

IDontLikeMimeI DontLikeSleaze IDontLikeSteel BandSymphonies Psalterypawing SlobsLikeThese Discountenance Philanthropies NorAmIAvidToBe EyeballedOddly ByAnIdleRibald OboistWhoFlaps APiebaldMotley WhilstHeTweets

105

POEM TO BE TYPED ON A DONOR CARD

GentlesWhereas TheDoublebreas tedItemICameAs HasNoSandfleas LesionsOrIdeas ForEvasiveMeas uresDoYourBeas tly&SeemlyBest ItemMyPancreas ItemTwoCorneas Demounted&Reas sortedCool&Eas yAsDinos&Rheas IntoTheLaBreas MiniSanAndreas &TheVastUnrest

106

SPIN CONTROL

OhHeDidDidHeOK UseItLetHimSay CrossMyHeartHe DontKnowDiddly InHisOwnYouMay FireWhenYouAre ReadyGridleyDo ItOrScrewItWay ThenWeCanPlead TheIneptnessOf HisIntrepidity TaintTheNathan HalenessItsThe GGordonLiddity

107

NINETEENFIFTIES VOGUE RORSCHACH

BecauseAWriter ChancedToOffer APhotographerA HintNamelyHand MarianneMooreA TrulyHumongous HatICanConnect JohnJacobAstor DiegoVelazquez TheBeaverTrade DeNirosBravura DietrichFedora &APoetPictured InMyDictionary

108

MAGNIFICAT. BRAVE CAT AT SNIFTER FISHBOWL.

for May Swenson

Mmm, just might. Minnow a moment now here now nowhere tower a moment enlarged, like a heretic cataract plunging unchanging, like a cat’s-eye scatter, like a deco herence, a re fracting flaw. There’s half the attraction: eye, the ethereal, shot unscathed into lithosphere, swims! has a Kitt Peak vision, is a dislocation, like the starfish maw catapultable out. Palomar! the proffered paw widens and the sum of hungers beggars Gargantua’s and you arrive up to your ears in a handstand on one claw.

109

QUATRAIN FOR KATHY

Triune Transport

Subscribe

(Shakespeare sonnet 105)

(Shakespeare sonnet 107)

Rare find.

Shock, Apocalypse, Conscription, Doom,

Fair, kind, and true. Undulant, buoyant, poignant. You.

110

Shakespeare ’s here; make room.

Necessary Wrinkles (Shakespeare sonnet 108)

Spring plowing. Thou mine, I thine. Thy stony lonely face my place.

Time Exposure Sonnet 116

Scar light. Scar bright. One star unsmeared all night long. Weird. Tall. Strong.

111

SONNET IN THE SHAPE OF A POTTED CHRISTMAS TREE * O furybedecked! O glitter-torn! Let the wild wind erect bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn! It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect; bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born now now while ox and ass and infant lie together as poor creatures will and tears of her exertion still cling in the spent girl’s eye and a great firework in the sky drifts to the western hill.

112

FILMS TRIP COMICSTRIP COLUMN VS. KRAZY KAEL

1

SheTellsMeComedyHasMadeAComebackSheSezCome Look ImASitcomEclecticSoICome LopingLikeSome Shnook&Yup ComedianPlanksComedienneBopsComediansGetsAComeuppanceAndComedownOh OW ZOK MMM ItsaRockmSockm ItsTitCity ComedyByScriptCommitteeWhereCome sTheMotto&Come TheOutcomeCome RainOrComeComets&Bombs

113

2

Come, Powell&Loy ComedyGotBroke Come DoItAgain OComehitheriestComestible&SlyComedienne ONarcomethodicalIncompoopHerSot AComeonToGetWelcome In&Not ANewcomenEngineOrEcomechanicalVacuum PistonPump Come Gleam

3

&LocoMe NoLocosIfISeem Aleak&Overcome

114

Yes Comma Cccome SdHeIsAnEECummingsClassicOMe OMyEvenTheCommédiaAndTheComédieHumaineCome OnAllRosy&Comely&Sexmad&ComedicLikeTheComedalistsInAComefest&Maybe ComedyKnowsHowCome GismIsOakum Cum Ça ItsAComicOmelet VivaQueCome

Note: Rhyme is, of course, an impurity—one of the grossest. Hell, all “prosodic form” is an impurity. We’re lucky to have the whole history of Western literatures to remind us of that, while reveling in our fringe lit and fringe lingo and taking our guilty incurable delight in rap, sonnet, Clerihew, all that impedimenta. So, what I’ve tossed in your hopper is the most egregiously overrhymed (and overnonrhymed) thing I had. It’s bedizened toad. But heartfelt.

115

CARGO CULT OF THE SOLSTICE AT HADRIAN’S WALL (DECEMBER 1988)

OTinyBombOTiny BombWhatGangOf MadmenMadeThee OMiddleeastern MasterpieceNoT NTBetrayedThee OEensieWeensie IndyCarOCreamy HalvahCandyBar SeeEvenMrMovie StarMakesFaces ToDissuadeThee IfEldAcquaints TheElderlyWith Frailty&Terror ThePresidentOf MegabucksFinds Payable2Bearer LiningsInLifes Overcoats&Anti DagoAnecdotes& SummersBunchOf HadjiiotesJust HaddaBeAnError

116

OCheerfulnessO WholesomenessO AmityONiceness OInfoInHisGrip AttainingRegal Impreciseness* HeTakesTheCake ForKindnessYet 290PersiansGet NotOneSpasmNot OneWetTremorOf Thinktwiceness

*This form is recommended for beginners. It is as simple as it looks. Fourteen characters to a line. Difficulty arises only when a footnote is required. Then the poet must contrive a thirteen-character line in place of the canonical fourteener, so as to leave room for the asterisk. Most poems in the form evade the difficulty by doing without footnotes, save for poems like this which are designed to be put in textbooks.

117

ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCH YARD

118

“Elegy in a Country Church Yard” was composed for display as one continuous panorama. Originally published by Pyn-Randall Press, it was printed on 3 separate sheets of creamy Mohawk Superfine, each 7.725 inches high by 22 inches long, with slim margins for overlapping and dexterous gluing. It came packaged in a thin cardboard box, 11.5 inches wide by 8.725 inches tall and .5 inches deep. In addition to the three sheets that comprise the visual poem, a sheeet of the same size, with the “Elegy Written” was contained therein.

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

ELEGY WRITTEN

Rubbings

Directory

Restroom

Crafts

South Slope Soft! here lies Bill Bunn, His labor at last undone: He sought and nearly won Decent poetic oblivion By writing no poems. None. I’ve foxed the son of a gun And fixed his name to one. Drag him out into the sun. Eternity, meet Bill Bunn.

The Pylon Nellie Belamy, 1923–1970

No no no no no no NO, Nell, Don’t pass that snowplow, I’ve told you and told you and told you. (But Nell—Well, Hell, You know Nell when she’s told.)

The Tempietto A. Jarry Git ici. Par Ubu Roi Il n’nie pas

132

Souvenirs

Ces “Pssst” que dit La Tante Pispis A ses commeres les doigts.

East Slope Yams grubs nuts materia medica bulbs bulbs BULBS O Bulbul Bull Williams I am still tilling gingerly your field of focus your field of force! Psychic chinchbug! ou work in the earth so fast it’s a gas of a pas seul the two of you do Dr. W. finch chicks skitter in clusters to jump or perch in churchyard urchin chorus!

The Twin Mausoleums I dig for the I I was, but the I I dig up’s not I. I get mad. “Hey I,” I cry—but the I I cry to’s one I I may not dub “I,” I may not, not I. “I get you.” sez I, “I dig. You old I,” I sez, “old Ego-I, I can eye any I I can eye, can I?” “Epiphenomenologically no but you’ll never know,” goes echo an ego ago, “though aye-for-an-aye is no mean motto.” I ask Are the I I dig and the I I dig out any I I can say was I? I say Yes: any I I dug was the I I did, and the I I did was the I I was, and the I I was was all I! “I see,” sez the I I ax’d, “but was I I? he heh heh” I stand back. This here’s one excavation slated for industrioenvironmentalistical uplift and ecological dozing in.

133

The Mysterious Monument Oh me oh my, I’m an Is no extravagantheartedness raises, Oh me oh my, I’m an Is no Plutonic dreamhoard sequesters, Ye Gods! Here lies lies done, Duns Scot, Scot free: free-load on me, monomaniacal miniaturized philossifers: be my transsubstantiationalist disseminarians. Dog-eat-dog has had its day. Now the cur few has his say. “Shhh,” says poet Thos. Gray

extemporaneously.

Headstones of the Northeast Addition Stranger in God’s name who gave you Carte blanche or passing fancy to Weep for the late Leota Pettigrew? Away, you parvenu A drier eye is due. This Leota, who

134

Sought strength, joy, & decent few Disciplinarian thrills through The Wye, Iowa W. C. T. U.

Earth, receive and honored Guest, To be exact an Edgar. Take his old hat & hang it up; Do him a laurel headgear To loll among the revelers At your Polonian supper By Mr. W. B. Yeats And Dr. Martin Tupper, And by and by by me & Bly, When he & I decide to get fed up here.

Hold your water a minute hold your cover & hold your fire! I said, Next p-head starts in on the old geronimo bit’s bucking for Unkonwn Soldier! So the next thing I know the stupid motherfucker is up waltzing into the old AK47 like he was Ray Bolger.

Starched uppercrust Straforders mill About nonplused And acting chill. They’ve taken ill Your final trust,

135

Madbabblingest Rebellious Will. You stand robust And bitchy still, Trumpeting just You watch my dust; And watch we will, Since dig we must.

You’ve scrounged up your last snooze, Charles Grolmes. You’ve breezed in twelve twelfths schnappsed once too damned often. Stretched ther filth-splotched like some sludge-wreathed slough, Look at yourself: ploughed fields got an edge on you.

Mute inglorious Milton Schwartz Blushed red when the news reports Spoke of quashed or mooted probes. Words were volts! and at the Globe’s Scrumptious and refractory Word impeachability, Something in him had to give. He was hypersensitive.

O there’s no truth like an old truth: Sincerest words I ever heard wordsmith say Was the last words of old George Starbuck, Ninety-one years old if he was a day: “Ed,” he says, “I got it now, Gonna do that dad-blamed novel, All I gotta do’s to get squared away.”

136

Notice:

Rubbings of the Angel out of stock. Inquire about our layaway plan. Military Annex not uner Parish maintenance. Ring for Sexton.

137

138

PA R T T H R E E

poems from the 1980s to the 1990s

Three Chapters from TALKIN’ B. A. BLUES; THE LIFE AND A COUPLE OF DEATHS OF ED TEASHACK; OR, HOW I DISCOVERED B.U., MET GOD, AND BECAME AN INTERNATIONAL FIGURE; A RHYMING FICTION IN SEVEN CHAPTERS 1 This is the Place All Right More one-arm chairs. More pi-r-squares to stare at. Ain’t it awful. The same old chalk-eraser rack. It oughta be unlawful. Playin’ pretend in some upended glass-and-concrete waffle. A whole new triumph-of-the-mind. Another edifice designed To look like someone’s scoresheet full of boxes-for-the-answer. A few lights broke. A few NO SMOKING signs in case of cancer. I been on this widebody flight from Reveille to Recess Since good king Og was knockin’ the Neanderthals to pieces. Same brass-protected non-connected wallplugs from forgotten Technological breakthroughs in the art of stuffin’ cotton Into the minds of nine-year-olds. Same chalkdust. Ain’t it rich?

141

Same nameless passkey-activated demolition switch. These academic ambiences really do get to me. They’re always done in some new unfamiliar shade of gloomy. An’ someone’s always found a way of jazzin’ up the blackboards. Like green! Or shuffle ’em up between the pull-down maps and tackboards. It always puts me into synch, kinda simmers down my mixture, To sight my toe on the little glow from the lectern lighting fixture An’ nod off, to the distant soft erosion of the Velamints. I shoulda been a Periodic Table of the Elements. I shoulda been a paratactic clause, or some o’that. I shoulda been a junior high school lunch room vend-o-mat. I shoulda been a tome. A text. A t-square. Ain’t it awful. I shoulda been a folding chair chained in a four-man coffle At Carver High. . . But maybe I should introduce myself.

2 Grand March I’m the Universal Educational Veteran and Victim.

142

You can name your budgetary dodge or pedagogical dictum, Some schoolboard’s tried it out on me an’ got themself a buzz. If they made a raid on the second grade (escorted by the Fuzz) With a new technique for remedial Greek, there by gum I was An’ I waved my hands like a brass band’s traffic officer, because I’m the irreversible ideational overload conniption. If a stone-cold ding-a-ling taught the course, I signed up for conscription. I’m all your fault, I’m the thang that crawlt out of the nucular gestalt With its teeth absurdly manicured and half o’ that twelve-letter word Sufficin’ it for sustenance and backtalk baby I am the Nerd Outa Nursery School I’m the First Grade Fool I’m the Kindergargoyle Gallopin’ Ghoul Gone gaga over the ink-remover an’ Magic Marker an’ Herbert Hoover Memorial twelve-foot window-hooks an’ squiggledy-diddled attendance books With individual lines and rows for Went Weewee an’ Picked Nose An’ Demonstrated Propensities an’ Stood Up Screaming Attention Please I’m the Universal Educational Veteran an’ Victim. If a dog showed up to teach, they pointed

143

my way an’ they sic’d him. I’m a textbook case, I’m the zero-base communicational interface Between Yestermaybe an’ Hey-Sweet-Babyyou-trekkin’-inna-my-soulspace, I’m the promised land for the whole damn pandemonium of fixers With their polygraph-combo feedback module videotapedeck mixers I’ve done more rolls at the flight controls of more damn learning-lab con-souls Than IBM has memorychips an’ Kellogg-brand has cornflakes, I’m the living death, I’m the shibboleth to your ethnographical conflicts I’m the thanks you get for the en-tire wetback transAtlantical influx . . . But there I go: showboatin’. Jus’like all of us was kinfolks. I start to run, I plumb jump the gun, vrumvrum, vrumvrum, vrumvrumvrum. So let’s jus’ take it easy here, while I tell you where I come from.

7 Honorary Doctorate of Laws Now that was frightening: no white tile. No geezer-gallery. No five-mile 2001 space-corridors With jetstream stratocumulus for floors. The Lord stood shinin’, plain as day. But the campus hadn’t gone away.

144

The dozers hadn’t budged an inch. The Chapel hung where a power winch Had left it twistin’ slowly slowly. Same cityscape. But Holy Moley, The look on everybody’s mugs. Students, professors, teamsters, thugs— Whole legions of the conscience-stricken Saggin’ backwards an’ lookin’ chicken, Half the landscape a-sayin’ prayers But the only sound is the Man Upstairs: “Now get this straight, ’cause I’ll say it once. I been receivin’ evidence You’ve took my work an’ got it foozled An’ let yourselves get all bamboozled By scalawags that claim to be (If you’ll pardon the expression) Me. Well if life has one prerequisite It sure ain’t bosses bossin’ it Down to the last least five-cent-retail Who-puts-what-on-his-Grapenuts details Au contrairy. You’d be surprised The wonders an unsupervised Gene-bank think-tank and floatin’ zoo Cast loose in outer space can do When the man upstairs just takes off elsewhere. You get these bosses talkin’, they’ll swear Everything depends on breathless Experts following the deathless Principles of pyramidal Bureaucratic taradiddle And ideational oversight But they don’t speak for me. Good night, If half they thought was halfway true There’d never been a Boston U For them to futz with in the first place.

145

But let that go. It ain’t the worst place I coulda picked to place my trust In the gumption of the scruffiest To scratch their way to grace an’ glory. So take down this here cover-story: Way way back in the nineteen-eighties God saw everything gone to Hades. He nose-dived into the degradation And spent a moment on re-creation. The darkness parted, the shit flew, God stood back an’ said: Boston U! He said Rise an’ shine! He said Multiply! He said Work out e to the i pi As a tripole moment in n dimensions An’ climb aboard! ’cause my intention’s To save Creation (except New York) By incarnatin’ an antiquark An’ dressin’ him up in cast-off jeans As God’s own ever-lovin’ means To shake this place. But for now by thunder You get his ass up out from under That piece o’ GMC equipment An’ stop hog-tyin’ his classrooms up for shipment. You make a space for this here boy. He’s the cosmological counterploy To all that jive an’ all that jargon You jokers throw into the bargain When some poor yokel who don’t know better Comes wavin’ his admission letter. He’s Grunge City, he’s God’s love An’ he’s this week’s incarnation of The universal educational Veteran an’ Victim.

146

You’ve talked him black an’ blue but you might notice you ain’t licked him. He’s the inaccessible irrepressible classroom volunteer. He’s fake he’s lazy he drives you crazy he shows up every year With a dead guitar an’ a bridge too far bit into by the strings An’ some stuff he wrote himself, unquote, somewhere, among his things, An’ a kind o’ Cisco Houston look, at least until he sings. He’s the nonstop flip-top liaison with the Land That Nivver Was; An’ this is your Creator speakin’, signin’ off . . .” because Talkin’ B.A.’s about talked out I guess. Next to come is an eight-hour fancy-dress World premiere of my Talkin’ B.S. Oh yes. Meanwhile Lord deliver us, There must be more commodious Places of refreshment than this here.

147

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS You are the retribution we invoke. You are the sudden daybreak we proclaim. We flock to the unburdening: our shame Is History: pale alibi: bad joke. A mud of Nothing labored and awoke. A spawn of cities crumbled into flame. A galloping of paladins became Nightmare and died screaming when it foaled you. The nebulae come running to behold you. If it were not so I would have told you. Surely goodness and mercy are the name The darkness and the starry legions spoke When they took up the anthem and enscrolled you In the sparse tangled banners of the dawn.

148

MAGNIFICAT IN TRANSIT FROM THE TOLEDO AIRPORT The world has a glass center. I saw the sign for it. TOLEDO, GLASS CENTER OF THE WORLD

That’s what surprised me. I mean that it was Toledo. I knew the center was glass. That’s why we’ve got this cleaning-and-polishing operation going. There were bulldozers outside of Toledo, working away. It’s a beginning. Move this junk, we’ll be able to see in. When the Chinamen at the other end gear up, we’ll be able to see through. It’s like the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. It’s like what the Egyptians had in mind when they invented the pyramids. It’s like what God would have opted for if he had been an optician. There it’ll be. This really tremendous lens. Think of the excitement when they put the ceremonial white handkerchief into the outstretched hand of the Final Polisher. What if he suddenly thinks he’s Sonja Henie? What if he just gets awestruck and sits down? Actually there’ll be an airtight operating procedure. Polish it off. Take measurements. Melt in.

149

You can do that, when it’s glass. Goes into what they call a “solid solution.” “Doping the mix,” they call it. Vary the additive and the whole ball of glass comes out in a wonderful color: rose. ultramarine. turquoise. maroon. It’s enough to make you lose your marbles. It is a marble. I know all about marbles, I said, this is my bag! Will it be a milkie? Will it be a purie? Will it be a swirl? “Oh get more bulldozers, Ohio,” I said to myself in a fit of eloquence. “Toledo is the glass center of the world.” I felt like the Boy’s Life monthly good luck stories. “Cabin Boy with Columbus.” “Young Hank Ford.” I always liked the one where the safari saves me (I’ve just been orphaned by the Zulu) and lets me tag along with them up country into the wild unknown Witwatersrand. You know the story: how the thieving porter filches the beads, and fills the bags with stones. Toledo Toledo, I warbled, even though this Red Yellow Cab Company taxicab is bearing me away from you at maximum achievable velocity, even though my appointment is in Bowling Green, I shall push in the press for deployment of Project Ploughshare. I shall lobby. I shall make mailings. I shall crusade. Instant redistribution of silage among the developed peoples! Riverbanks full of afterburgers! Boom! Is there a high-gain, high-risk, maximum-impact slot in there somewhere for a creative projects person with hands-on imagemanagement experience and a desire to position himself on the

150

forefront of America’s growth industry for the 1990s? Toledo, I have arrived! I have arrived in Bowling Green. Bowling Green State, the Athens of the Midwest. Emptiness. Houses. Emptiness-houses. Shrublets. Grass. What am I doing here? This trike. Here, from his door, to my rescue, comes my host. He is Ray DiPalma. He is a poet. He is from Pittsburgh, Steel Center of the World. Oh damn. Wouldn’t you know? He is. It’s true. He is from Pittsburgh Steel Center of the World And I knew that. I used to have a steelie. Too heavy, they said, that’s cheating, you go home. You ever look down deep into a steelie? Really strange reflections. Whole horizon. You! bigger than everybody’s houses. Big-nose. Steely little eyes. You know what’s wrong with American free enterprise? It’s two-bit people in two-bit little places doin’ a two-bit number on theirselves. Myself I know the world has a glass center. Myself I know it’s Toledo, built on sand. And soon now, in the place of the bulldozer, soon now, under the battlements and banners,

151

rose, ultramarine, turquoise, maroon, this scraggy ol’, scruffy ol’, vermin-infested slagpile, this rubble-in-arms, gonna sing out loud an’ clear, like a great bell, like the choir of all the angles. I’ll get more dope on it as soon as I get home to Iowa City. Iowa City—the Athens of the Midwest. I have a friend there in the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Damned if it isn’t true—Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Not Pittsburgh Paint now, mind you. Pittsburgh Paint sells glass put out by Owens Illinois. At least that’s what it does in Iowa. Or did, when I last had a broken window. To tell the truth, that was a while ago. Recently I’ve been living in New Hampshire. They make a claim there about maple syrup but I say let’s pretend they never said it. I mean I’m all for backwoods boosterism but when you start to ask folks to believe this mighty item all wrapped up in blue, this whopping gobbet of long-lasting goodness, this great big hunk, this Earth, this greater Mars, is something with a novelty interior— a sort of oversized designer chocolate— well that’s beyond preposterous. That’s dumb. Sometimes when I consider how this world is given to outright exaggeration, I think I should’ve stood put in Columbus. Columbus Ohio, the Athens of the Midwest. Home of the mighty Buckeyes. I was born there and moved away when I was four days old

152

and always like to tell it that way, acting as if I’d sized the place up and skedaddled. The Buckeyes are Ohio State of course. Ohio State is not Ohio U. Ohio U’s a college, and a good one, off in a little mill town name of Athens. God knows what Athens is the Athens of. Actual buckeyes—just in case you wondered— Actual buckeyes are the kind of nut you’d pick up off the sidewalks in October and ram a toothpick into for a spindle to hold a set of cut-out paper sails and join Miss Dean’s Columbus-Day flotilla across the blue construction-paper ocean to prove the world was chock-a-block with marvels to make things out of, Right Beneath Your Feet. I think she made me a Discoverer, Miss Dean did. And Miss Whitman. And Miss Ide. I got the real good news about creation. Merciful Muchness, Principle of Redundance, Light of the World converted at every turn, the world is too much for us, wait and see!

153

SIGN Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice. And the first rows, shaken with an afterslice That’s bowled them into their seats like a big wet ciao. O daffy panoply O rare device O flashing leg-iron at a whopping price Whipping us into ecstasies and how, The whole galumphing Garden swung and swung, A rescue helicopter’s bottom rung Glinting and spinning off, a scud of fluff, A slash of petals up against the bough, A juggler’s avalanche of silken stuff Gushing in white-hot verticals among Camels and axels and pyramids, oh wow, Bewilderment is parachute enough. We jolt. A sidewise stutterstep in chorus. The other billboards flicker by before us. Gone! with a budded petulance that stung. So talented! So targeted! So young! Such concentration on the bottom line! We vanish down the IRT. A shine. A glimmer. Something. Nothing. To think twice Was to have lost the trick of paradise.

154

INCIDENT OF THE BLIZZARD OF ’81

Note: Three incidents of the “vanishing hitchhiker” made the national newswires in 1980, and in the fall of 1981 a book appeared, devoted to him and his reappearances. Always, the hiker talks earnestly of religion. Always, at highway speed, the car door opens, it must have opened, and the hiker is gone.

I left Fat City, toolin’ my Coupe de Gras. I’m givin’ them high-hatters the ha ha Like J. Paul Getty if Getty had been the Shah. Man with the map of neon in his eyeballs. Wigwaggin’ with a backpack full of Bibles Next to the scorched blue chassis of a Ford. Levels a sixpack at me. Swings aboard And ballyhoos the good news of the Lord From Cedar Rapids halfway to Grand Island. Singin’ his checkered pastureland is my land. Settin’ the Miller cans up single file and Mowin’ em down like Midianites. Nebraska Vanished without a trace. No road, no landscape, Just Kellogg’s famous featherweight white breakfast Shot from the snub-nose silos of the plains. Seventy per and a prayer in place of chains, Opens the door and gets out. Shit for brains. Stunt like that he could pass for Lyndon Baines. Before he left he spouted some damn doggerel And handed me six tickets to the Inaugural. Balls and all. That’s how I met Carl Sagan

155

And got to shake the hand of Nancy Reagan And heard that stuff about Menachim Begin I told you back there west of Wichita?

156

ON GOZZOLI’S PAINTED ROOM IN THE MEDICI PALACE Lorenzo da Credi Honored the Lord, St. Joseph, and Our Lady, But not so hotsy-totsily As did Benozzo Gozzoli. What a parade. The sun Bejewels everyone. A barebones countryside Stiffens to take magnificence in stride. No wonder yokels gawk And pieces of livestock Go gallivanting gauchely while their lazy Husbandmen (bunch of no-count Abruzzesi) Loaf in a far-off byre Where there might be a fire (It’s hard to make the glow out at this distance) And mummers dance assistance To someone in disguise. He seems to be preparing a surprise Tableau-vivant with Potentates and Peasants And far-fetched birthday presents. Never was sweeter, swifter, swanker, sportier Caravan of the noble genus courtier Visited on the sticks in one fell swoop. It’s every bit as special as the troop Of lallygagging five-year-olds intuit. How does Benozzo do it?

157

The whole old Christmas story, The stagecraft, the accoutrements of glory Huddled into a space about the size Of that abstracted foreground horseman’s eyes. The one who watches us. Alert, not curious. Reserved, not bored. This is the fit companion for a Lord. A Lord himself, if destined. None of your bullyragging, lead-intestined Ravagers of the Apennines, but boss. The man a man of judgment does not cross, Ever. Do not expect Benozzo to play clever. His game is not distortion. There is no disproportion In anything he chooses, tells, or shows. The facts are not Benozzo’s to dispose. A landscape has been blest. The primacy of gentleness expressed. And to a lady’s credit she Has been called on by a Medici.

158

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy. I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place. I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam. Another student gave me a diagragm. “The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth.” Those, though, were instances of the sublime. The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time. Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth? If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can’t? I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento Always gets looked up. But never momento. Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant. It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary: Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods: Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-againstcultural-odds. You won’t get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary. I’d sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal. I’m on their side. I better be, after my brush with “infinitessimal.” There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

159

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look, And he held the look for a little while and said, “George . . .” I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge. I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care. “Their their,” I needed to hear them say, “their their.” You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too. They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu So they can pop in at the windows saying “tsk tsk.” I know they’re there. I know where the beggars are, With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh And their mnemnmonics, blast ’em. They go too farrh. I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn; But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm. For a long time, I keep mumb. I let ’em wait, while a preternatural calmn Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb. Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn, Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn, And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn, And I say one word, and the word that I say is “Oslgmbnh.” “Om?” they inquire. “No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh. Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you’ve only got two more guesses And you only get one more hint: there’s an odd number of esses, And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers’ bracket And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket

160

And that’s all the time extension you’re going to gebt So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt And don’t be surprised if it’s the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys.” Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham Like something out of the last days of Fellini’s Rougham And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other “Ougham! O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!” and tearing their hair. Intricate are the compoundments of despair. Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other. Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan. But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

161

THE GREAT DAM DISASTER A BALLAD to Kathy

Have you heard of the great dam disaster When the flood control project gave way? They were searchin’ for seven days after. Then the search party called it a day. Then the Sheriff drove up in his flivver. Then the widow collapsed and despaired, While a couple of miles down the river An attractive young neighbor declared: “There’s a somethin’ keeps bumpin’ them willers. There’s a somethin’ humped up in the brush. You be brave an’ hang on to your pillers. Sleep along little darlins an’ hush. I’ll be back when I’ve doubled the jinglers On the stakes by the stormcellar door. When them dead men feel that in their fingers They jes’ whimper an’ head for the shore.” Light she ran with her housecoat a-flappin’, Where the waters was roilin’ an’ high. There was somethin’ a-waitin’ to happen, By the strobe-lighted look of the sky. If you drift like a mist through the meadow, If you curl to the edge of the draw, You could nudge yourself up to a knothole, But you might not believe what you saw. On the bank where the crib and the shed ran

162

Hard aground in a Red River fling, She is sprawled on the arm of a dead man, And the dead man is startin’ to sing: “Roll me over my lovely my precious. My migration has scarcely begun. I can feel myself growing flotatious To the wandering beams of the sun. I can feel the old tug of the Delta Where I drunk myself sick in my teens. Roll me over. I suddenly felt a Gnawful lot like a kid full of beans. When the barns take a turn at the barn dance, When the sheds start to thread through the trees, I succumb to a superabundance Of the Red River drifter’s disease. Give a kick to my side if you love me. Cast me loose from this willowy slough. There’s a damn sight less dam site above me And a damn sight less fuss and to-do. They can bury a crate full of keepsakes From my notable farming career. They can plead for some feed from them cheapskates At the Farmers Supply in Grenier. They can tell my twelve sons and my daughter How I tended to take things too far, Like the night I went down for some water And ran off with the whole reservoir. It’s a sorrowful name I’m a-leaving. It’s a sorrowful sadness I feel. If you get tuckered out with the grieving

163

You can try this address in Mobile.” Now the neighbor is gone from the valley. Now the flivver is out on display In the Bonnie-and-Clyde grand finale At the Wild-West Pavilion Café. Now the widow reclines at the window By the banks of the new reservoir. On some shirts that the Sheriff come into She embroiders a five-pointed star.

164

THE UNIVERSE IS CLOSED AND HAS REMs

to Celia and Wally, to Milly and Gene

1 One. one. one. one. That’s what God said. Singular, singular, singular, singular, Infinitely outspread. Nothing under the nothing not even the sun. No weight, no breadth, no negative, no north, No three dimensions beckoning a fourth forth With monumental pantomime, no buzz Of energy-exchange, no instances. It might have happened. Who knows which comes first, The point flash, or some perfectly dispersed Extrapolation into time-reversed Of this explosion, this diaspora? You like the God that freaks out and goes “Unh!” I like the opposite extreme. How dull, How uncollected, how bare-minimal The necessary element might be. One. one. one. Eternity. Dead rudiments. None veer. None coalesce. A pretty perpetuity unless— Once one wants one twice two twice two the formalities take place.

165

Sub-elemental sarabandes objectify a space Extravagantly sparse, and stilled, and stirless, but perhaps Complicit. Something happening. Collapse.

2 Absolute bash, and then Sub-elemental smithereens again But suddenly and picturesquely clotted At every scale, down to the not-ness knotted Into the nothing where a quark sleeps furious And nags the smarmy noggins of the curious With pointy-headed notions of the sphere A quantum mass might shrink to, to cohere Into its own black hole, Inviolably sole And satisfying to the theorist Who likes his distillations with a twist Of irreducibility at bottom. Welcome to basic. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. That does it for the first few trillion years. Now then. If all you spacetime pioneers ’ll dig into your briefing kits, behind The replicative check sheet you should find A rose-red pair of actuary googols In case the credit mechanism boggles, One windfall apple softened up with slug holes To sniff at, and a parts list for these fogballs. Mumble it to yourself if you get dizzy. And hold tight. The next wiggle is a doozy. Get used to it, ’cause you’ll be getting lots o’ these

166

Interchangeable pre-big-bang hypotheses. And if the rose-red googols are a dud, You bring it up at . . .

3 Question Period Are we the first bounce, or the eightieth? These dead immensities inventing death Inventing difference inventing brilliance. How many of them? Ten? A dozen? Trillions? But if Xerxes Had had Xeroxes . . . If the aurochs Got anthrax . . . If the Mingel-Wurm Returns . . . No seriously. Look, I mean I’ve read the book. If having a trick thumb can tip the odds, Why us-the-klutz? Why not cephalopods? Put brain behind those graspings and completions, Tune up those fine calcareous secretions To gestate little lock-picks and escapements, A quick squid’d run rings around these apemen’s Lathes and beams and hieroglyph prostheses For busting big things down to byte-size pieces. A thought could be the father to a stack Of nacreous holography, played back Instantly anywhere a clammy grip Fondled the iridescent microchip.

167

And when it came to synthesizing sheer Spectacle, to outface Poseidon’s mere Opulence and fecundity and scenery With monuments of unaided Balanchinery— Well—what I mean—why us? Why not an offshoot of the octopus? (If you knotted a cosmos. If you twisted its wristwatch. If you skidded it parsecs In a picosec.) But The Ik . . . The euglena . . . The ozone . . .

4 Nap Time Hush. Everything in a minute. What’s the rush? It may work out. The big Let-there-be-light May keep receding barely-out-of-sight. Us prospectors can pan among the vestiges With bright eyes and big dishes, nabbing hostages But never quite contriving to decode A backstairs access to the mother lode That heaved up unimaginably once And left this avalanche of evidence. Awake, asleep, it streams right through our fingers. Once in a blue moon, a neutrino lingers. It drives these needle-in-the-haystack trackers Crackers.

168

I like the latest inklings. Just this year A theorist has posited a sheer Propensity of Zilch to self-destruct. That’s what he says began it. That’s what sucked Somethingness out of Nothingness. Shazam. ZILCH + ZILCH + NIL + NIL = NAUGHT Cryptarithm in a puzzle book I bought. I like the sense of consequence. Hot damn. All this consequent middle. All this muddle. Me the unlikely frog in so big a puddle It puts the perfervid fancies of the priests Back at about the level of a beast’s Diffuse imaginings of huger mangers Where ever more companionable strangers Scratch him behind the ears and pitch down food. If only I could see how to preclude Acting on every triggerable spin-off. I can’t. It’s going to kill us, sure as gonif And gizmo gravitate and groove. The mills will grind; the merchandise will move. I’m sorry Lennon died, but Lennon did. What got him wasn’t Belial-the-Kid. Simple Possession loitered, and it pondered, And found, until its concentration wandered, a momentary sense of Rationale. Recess time at the Okey-Doke Corral. One possible response of the biota

169

observable in front of the Dakota Became the probable, since there was time. Possession was nine-tenths of it, and I’m Possessed. I have these Titans that I’ve paid for. Polarises, Poseidons, Mark 12s made for Me, and I haven’t found a way to ditch ‘em. If I could tough it out like Robert Mitchum And take the beating, confident the script Would have me up, goof-balled and pistol-whipped But standing, to choke back humiliation And pick up the routine of my vocation After the big-time baddies have their ball. Not in the cards. We won’t be here at all. State-of-the-art has got way out ahead of us. Dumb, then, for the merely not-yet-dead of us To love the thing that kills us. But I do. So beautiful, so various, so new. Some times I want to bang their heads on the Universe and scream “It’s beautiful, you balmy bastards! THIS IS NOT A DREAM.” But no. I take my task as to record At close hand, for the glory of no Lord, Delight of no posterity, some part Of what it was to take the world to heart When all of it and more came flooding at us, Absolutely positively gratis And ravishing and perfectly disposed To pal around with us an undisclosed Number of million human generations Until the Sun god goes on iron rations

170

And zaps us with a real survival crisis. Wonderful: we just graduate from Isis And Kali and Jehovah and all that And start to see how hugely where-we’re-at Exceeds the psychedelic pipedreams of it, And whammo. Tell the whole shebang I love it, And buck the odds, and hope, and give it my Borrowed scratched-up happy hello-goodbye.

171

THE STAUNCH MAID AND THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL TREKKIE

hommages à Julia Child

Stand back, stand back, Thou blob of jelly. Do not attack A maid so true. I didn’t pack My Schiaparelli To hit the sack With a thang like you. You maniac! Go raid a deli. Pick on a snack Of barbecue. A nice Cal-Jack? Some Buoncastelli. Here, have a daiqUiri. Have two. Like a Big-Mac Machiavelli She tossed him crackErs and ragout. She fed him rack Of lamb, sowbelly, Absinthe and cackLeberry stew. And while she crackEd the eggs and velly

172

Adroitly hackEd the lamb in two, Like that weird acTress on the telly, Kept up a wackY parlez-vous. You shall not lack For mortadelle. You shall not lack For pâte-à-choux. You shall have aqUavit quenelle Mit sukiyakI au fondue. Not yet you stack Of parallelly Pulsating vacUoles of goo, You sloshing brackIsh stracciatelli Of dental plaque And doggy doo! I still must fracTure the patellae And baste the backSides of a few Agneaux-de-PâquesAvec-Mint-Jelly Before I acQuiesce to you. I said back back! Have Mrs. Shelley

173

Or Countess DracUla re-do You you great hackWork by Fuseli. I’m not the quack To unscramble you. She threw him macKerel en gelée, Mulled Armagnac, Ripe Danish blue. She staggered back. He swore by Hell he Had come to shack And not soft-shoe Just at the acMe of IndeliCacy and acRimony too, While she distracTed him pellmelly, The massed attack Came in on cue: Her Uncle Zack From Pocatelly, The whole GalacTica and crew On a KawasakI-GranatelliFord-Lotus tracTor cab crashed through. They had a tac Nuke from New Delhi.

174

They had a blackSnake from the zoo. A few KojakEries from Telly. Biff Bam Fppplt Thwack. Poop poop a doo. They hacked that fracTious vermicelli Till the tentacUlations flew. A rather tackY, rather smelly Business, but chacUn à son gout. Without a knack For belly-belly, Without the acUmen to do Celeriac Farcie Duxelle, What would a crackEr damsel do?

175

SUNDAY BRUNCH IN THE BOSTON RESTORATION

for George and Bab

I’m coming, I’m coming, only a few small purchases. But look at these little gizmos with the ceramic crankhandles. Find me the cheeses! Get me a melon! Buy me a lime! Get me in ten-man tandem with them poets of the olden time pillaging the quotidian, parceling it up into rhyme and trucking it off the doorstep of posterity to deliver it squalling righteous and barefaced like an Edward Everett. Get thee a heftier tote bag O my soul we can open it wide and throw everything in we can call it an Ode to the Boston of Zinn White Wojtyla Douglass Douglas Tubman and Martineau we can open it wider and call down inside of it Rise up as one and be vocative O baskets O briskets O bouquets O gourmet dishes O rarebits and rice-boats, tikia-kebobs and shishes. O microwave chicken Kiev O cashew quiches, I am getting the hang of it, righthand-to-lefthand-lettered gefiltefishes, weird little items for opening oysters. O knishes O gjetost oh foozle it shouldn’t be quiches it’s quiches. As in Gimme your Klimts, your Toulouses, your scenic Helvetias and where is the waiter and where are our rock-cornishes flambées Grand-Corniches and what do they do for an encore, these fabulous groomedto-the-eyeballs geishas steering their highstrung miniatures on scissoring leashes from the Parker House to Felicia’s I mean Feli-, uh, Felicia’s

176

by way of the two-buck prawns and the 3-lb. peaches of Quincy Market and Haymarket market O sakes O pulques O chichas oh foozle again I keep running aground on these rhapsodological beaches where as soon as you say geishas you wish you could take it back and say geishas but too late! too late! they go vanishing under the feathery glassed-in acacias looking as ravishingly underdeveloped as Sam Jaffe’s or J. Carroll Naish’s MittelShangrilavian accent when they used to come on after the Ars Gratias but look! handpainted Haitian creches I mean creches but look! ravaging tandems of pitilessly nubile Arapeshes closing on us like a full-court press-gang for the La Leches I’m sorry La Leches, their Chés, turquoise-on-pink, vivid against giant four-color display Chés and the vocables won’t sit still it’s like one of the W.H.A.’s amateur-nights-on-ice it’s like maybe it’s something I ate chez O’Dea’s maybe it’s pardon me lady that cafe chaise pardon me cafe chaise longue I am fainting a little don’t tell me I know it it shouldn’t be J. Carroll Naish’s pitheco-Indo-European it shoulda been J. Carroll plain old Naish’s as in On second thought we’ll settle for two corned beef hashes and a cup of joe and a quick ticket to Nantasket or Squibnocket or Ilot-au-Haut because as a Nash from the great days of the Nashes might’ve lamented, O it isn’t the cuisinart it’s the cuisine argot

177

and I don’t care if it’s the argot as in the argot merchant disaster or the argot as in What kindsa colada makings the bar got or all three simultaneously as in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language which is about as much help on the point as a set of chopsticks with a hero sandwich but at least lends the entire weight of its authority to the inherent confusion while the ode goes marching along without me to its conclusion twirling its objects methodically while the rhymes keep ranks in spite of an occasional brownbagger or Pomeranian nipping at its flanks and holy Ned. Like Nantucket said to the Argo’s hapless master Good-bye, Captain Papadopoulos, and thanks.

178

ON AN URBAN BATTLEFIELD Shopper and shopper, grocer and grocer. Sidewalk delicatessen. Crouch and eat. Party-of-God? So be it. Posher-but-kosherbut-consecrated? You got it. In pieces? Neat. There is no death but death. Hear, worshipers. Same lockstep with a hesitation wrinkle to the beat. I take the pollster’s tack and the upholsterer’s. You need a pricetag and a tally sheet? When I said battlefield when I said shoppers, what did your fury seize upon as meat? Which snapshot leapt up first? Which flitch which swatch? Did you envision Kitcheners complete with self-inflicted quirt-strokes to their jodhpurs? I am your troubadour. I am discreet. A jolly Russky ribboned up for openers? Hush; you shall have him. Harvested like wheat.

179

S.D.I. It’s nice up here in Air Force One. I get to wear my gold-braid baseball cap and stand before the map of New El Salvador and point out which came first our game of chicken or the other guy’s and burst into a sob because I have this reverence about the selfless dead and when the audience gets rolling something does this curtsy with my head.

180

TO A REAL STANDUP PIECE OF PAINTED CROCKERY I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters. Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano. Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once. Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist’s powders and unguents. And when John Keats looked at you in a collection of pots it was poetry at first sight: quotable beautiful teleological concatenations of thoughts. It’s the proverbial dog of a poem, though: slobbering panting and bright-eyed like a loquacious thug or a spokesperson embattled on behalf of a sociopolitical thesis* to which he has not had access owing to the need-to-know basis. And he never says which pot. Just an oasis of tease in a sea of tilth, kind of a concrete catachresis bopping along with timbrels, irrepressible as Count Basie, fabulous I mean classic I mean vout, keeping the buckwheat in and the weevils out while the rest of us get and spend and ache and earn and go to the Bruce Springsteen concert and take our turn lining up at the Metropolitan to look at the Macedonian gold krater and promising ourselves to read up seriously.

*(Beauty : Truth = Ignorance : Bliss). Consult Précis.

181

THE ENCHANTED GLADE The old days. What a life. Bards barded. Rhyme was rife. A farthing for a vocal, And each and every yokel Became a singing bird. The yeoman plied his yerd. The rhymster chimed concordance. The druid at his war dance, The monk at his devotions, The suitor, his emotions Deliciously deranged, Got with it and exchanged The contents of their purses For made-to-measure verses To terrify the Huns with, Debauch a bunch of nuns with, Or both at one fell swoop. It was a jolly troupe, The customers of rhyme. Love-sonnets were a dime A dozen. So were steaks. The dead get all the breaks. The big consumer craze Was ribald roundelays In Hudibrastic couplets. It sure beats printing up LET’S BOOGIE bumper stickers. The hangdog banjo-pickers Of Albion could choose From half a hundred hues And ten degrees of luster From out-and-out gut-buster

182

To whispered spectral wail. But thereby hangs a cautionary tale. It fell upon a day In Lammastide, the way So many episodes Keep falling in the odes Surviving from the period. A maker of a myriad Of madrigals, the Barry Manilow and Gary Snyder of his age (Preceded by a page And jugglers in procession) Was plying his profession The best way he knew how. Some think he had been hexed because a cow Had bleated in his path. At any rate the wrath Of something must have struck, Or he just had phenomenal bad luck. He was, as was his wont, Extemporizing. Don’t Imagine something scuzzy Or slapdash just because he Didn’t have a script. The couplets fairly dripped With lyric ornament. Whole bestiaries went Bananas to provide A moment’s versified Illustrative material. Whole glittering aethereal Kathismata, replete With deities in sweet

183

Olympian repose, Came tumbling when he chose To hustle things along By calling down the gods to do the song. The faster he proceeded, The featlier he speeded. This cat was in the pink. Unstoppable. You’d think With all the thee-and-thouing, Ywissing and I-trowing, Thou-dosting and he-dothing, A poet would get nothing But megrims for his pains. You’d think an olden English minstrel’s brains With all that extra grammar Would have took up the hammer And chisel and cried “Out!” You’d think he would have turned into a lout With porridge in his beard. Yet here he was, a weird Coherence to his ravings. And here they came, their savings Ajingle in their fists, His abject gang of groupie-lutanists. He reveled in his prowess. To show the yokels how esPecially delicious A flat and inauspicious Subject could become, He launched, ad libitum, One last improvisation: A rhyme in celebration Of Rhyme. It went like this: “Good countrymen, ywis

184

We take great things for granted. We know God never scanted Us wind and wold and wave. We thank Him, that He gave The bog, the holt, the heather, To heap, against the weather, A crofter’s good hearth fire. All vitals we require— Space, Power, Substance, Time— He lavishes. But best of all is Rhyme. “For what if rhyme got scant? Would gallants gallivant Through battlefield and boudoir? A vexed hex would hoodoo our Impassionedest pursuits And leave us lallygagging like galoots. “And if rhyme got still scanter? The palliative banter Young duchesses require Might stumble, flutter, crepitate, expire. “If rhyme got really scarce, “If rhyme got really scarce,” (A whole-line repetition Is right in the tradition Of mainstream Dirty Blues And proper for a troubadour to use. But this long breath he draws? This second Pregnant Pause? A horrid thought was dawning.) His retinue, nine fawning

185

Bards’ Guild apprentices, Were suddenly abuzz. Their master, posed as though To mouth one mighty mot, Whirled, with a Hellish look, And in the nonce it took To send a laser burn Through each of them in turn, Hissed out, “Okay, you guys, I don’t want alibis, I want a rhyme for scarce.” Somebody thought up vers Libre and on they went, But it had been a sobering event.

186

AMAZING GRACIOUS LIVING ON I-93 I’ve read the propaganda, and I believe it now. I shoulda bought a van designed to squush a cow. Small cars are “unforgiving.” They crumple up like foam. It takes a heap o’ mortgage to have a heap o’ home, and if a heap o’ heap’ll satisfy some people, then who am I to holler? They musta paid top dollar to furnish a machine for live-in demolition derby competition with stained-glass picture windshield and Playboy Magazine entablature. I mean my little thirteen-inch-wheeled Rabbit must feel queer to find me stopping here to contemplate the roadside without a HoJo’s near. I mean I’ve got some odes I’d like to finish yet before I make another bunny silhouette along the fuselage of someone’s ten-ton Taj Mahalmobile. Good brother,

187

that comes a little steep. I like this highway shoulder. Just sittin’. Gittin’ older. I like it a whole heap.

188

ERRAND AT THE LONE TREE MALL This gizmo to spin spinaches aches to be mine. It’s a high-speed disco-discovery, very expensive, very fine. I want it, and I want a set of ten-pound cast-iron bundts. I want to have a kitchen with some stuff in it for once. Great rough-hewn rivetty skillets. Badge Oak cheeseboard and steak-knife sets. Blowing a wad but who cares, caressing (sing twiddle kadiddle kachoong) its digital widgets its rotary gadgets for slivering almonds and slurrying celery Diggety dog I got doodads here. Make room.

Miss Checkout, with her loom gone suddenly berserk as if it were Penelope’s and data tapes were tapestries tries bonking it but bonking it won’t work. Smiles. Shrugs. Geez. à la lavender-vendor only wants to tease out and then bestow

189

a beautiful empurpled pale memento. Poor damsel of romance. She needs a champion and here’s my chance to be her pal her paladin her hero O make it a cash transaction what’s the dif.

She can’t believe I said that. What a dimwit. What a stiff. She shrugs, looks heavenward for her directions, a Tex-Mex Joan-of-Arc in milkwhite buckskins, alamode Alamodelivery livery chased and ornate beyond posses’ possessing, sing jingle sing jangle a she-sheriff riff. Bonks it again. Mirabile. Good news. My charge slip: eggplant purple on pale blues. My loading platform call slips in coördinated hues. Whole psychedelic spectrum of delicious IOUs. I scoop up and skedaddle. No I don’t. Now I got to pass the X-and-O hunt. Worse than assessment days at nursery school. The competition, paragons of cool, stopped and slapped with a Star Wars scorecard only a droid could read readjust just marvelously. No sweat. Scan for the squiggle. Set Bic to ballot and trust in MCI.

190

A dollyful of mannequins whips by. Watch it, if they make contact with an eye. The new Club-Med Medusa USA. The smoldering, deep-shadowed, cloisonné look of a lady-of-Endor endorsing (sing poke it and pack it, punk) the autosuggestive the autopsychic the seamy the dreamy the demisedated the drunk. Askance and askancer (don’t ask and don’t answer) teleportated, they teeter through, bound for another department. And vanished. Phew.

No mayhem in the Mall. Just quick, subliminal riffles and feeding-frenzies everywhere. One smurf one Junior Miss one striding rare Saturday doll with an odalisque air and the lacquerwork of an Ingres ingressing (sing singlefile Injunstyle whisperless quick) straight for the tables where superfantastic hawser-humongous cableknit cardigans, Labradorean lobstermen’s pullovers, ultradimensional Gordian oodles of made-in-Jamaica macramé-mimicry cry to be hefted and sported and bunched and hugged. Amazons half-diaphanous, half-shagrugged.

191

I look up and I’m there. I’m at my errand. Blackness where a Krugerrand snuggles on its little mouselike pouch. And in the place of honor? Gone. Spent. Token of Incan incandescent descent. Not Atahualpa’s. Not Pizarro’s either. Some bad hidalgo gives the guards a breather and swirls his cape, and takes a token fix, and owns a demon rescued from the mix of demons in King Carlos’ melting pot. I’d like to have been there. The fiendish glee. I think the look of him looks back at me, complicit. Every crammed-in ingot got cartage to Cartagena, naval escort to Cadiz. And God is mighty, and the worm got his. And if the sea rose up, miraculous . . . Primitive Prospero. Prosperous us. Whose voice this is that hustles me from twenty videoscreens at once, I think I know. He comes into my home when I get lonely and I don’t mind the line of bull. It’s only natural natural gas gassing Sing hey for the loyal few drilling out here in the channel bringing you beautiful oceans of bloo-bloobloobloob-loobloob, beautiful introductions to the crew, beautiful loyal few a loyal fuel oil. Phew

192

now it is him in a close-up, now the Tube pipes him aboard in ventuplicate—Hey, Rube!— as if there came rising to meet you, out of the depths of time, out of the La Brea tar pits, this pained, voracious, brea-breathing Thing. Can it be just Bob Hope, surfacing like a jolly periscope?

O Canada O Greylag O Great Blue heron or whale or goose or caribou O lords and angels of migration, you slumber among the Lagunaware unaware. My opposites across the concourse hold Brobdignagian snifters up, deliberately, soberly. Ayup Depth, body, bouquet. A better terrarium. A plutocrat among them. Tweeds and jeans. Diversified portfolio of gardening machines. Chard-cherisher, cos-cossetter, setter of mole’s molestable table of greens. The Garden Center clerk deployed to fill daffodil-dogs and majolica-croc crocuses uses white, violet, strawberry-colored rock. Great vats of cobblestone and amaryllis. And there’s a sideshow. There’s a Living Craftsman. He does Huck Finns. He does Huck’s fellow raftsman. He wears an eyeshade like a gangster’s draughtsman and holds a dental drill, and in his hand

193

vanilla-colored scrimshaw minstrels stand banjoing. Do you like them? Cougars leap and jacktars dance, and wagonmasters whip triplescoop conestogawagons up. A spindle with a butterfly motif sits cheek-by-jowl with Ahab Come To Grief. He shows the agony in fiendish detail. This is the way the whaleroad and the whale, four oarsmen and a peg-leg legend end. Take notice. Price an item. Be a friend.

Curio-user and curio-user drift outside to the indoor street. Demonstrators demonstrate devices. Ekco! The last of the Beat Beatrices rices rutabagas erasers and raw meat. What an amazing feat. Gimmicks and fripperies. It’s downright canny. Our turn to play trinketer and nanny and kowtow, and keep quipus, and climb ropes. Our turn to do deep-dyed horoscopes. No more Golconda. No more pouring pigs and flooding caissons and upending rigs into the deep sea floor. Now it’s Manaus burrowing to pour huge footings for the skylines of desire. Now it’s the Indus’ industrial trial by fire.

194

READING THE FACTS ABOUT FROST IN THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY “Lover’s quarrel” hah. Little domestic Eichmann in puttees claiming he simply had a taste for spats. This was a real Scrooge. His son killed himself. Wait till you hear what Mr. Thompson told Mr. Ellmann. That’s all I know and all I need to know. Frost was a pig to his wife, children, colleagues and biographer. So don’t get suckered, Undergraduates. Like by the poems. Like by sycophants or apologists. We can instruct you also about the Galapagos: “an island group in the Caribbean.”

195

GASTARBEITER There was an old woman from Szechwan Who worked in the suitably Brechtian Town of Stettin Where she ran a canteen. Or was it a woman from Szczecin? No, this was a woman from Szechwan. She went around kvetching in Quechuan. Philologists think a Lost tribe of the Inca Reside as high lamas in Szechwan. They came to the mountains of Szechwan To study Du Côté de Chez Swann And Melchior’s question: What time is the next one? And Leda’s: why don’t we go chase one? Should Yeats have attempted to hatch one? Should Christ have turned left at Saskatchewan? The track of Big Bird Is erose and absurd. The trackers morose and Masaccioan.

196

LIKE DOTTED SWISS (FROM A BOOK OF UNRETOUCHED PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE PATTERNEDNESS OF THINGS)

for Amy Clampitt

White on green. If a microphotographer froze this lipid at that angle. In those throes. Or it’s a satellite image. Something Castro’s hidden in sheds. Or it’s Mies van der Rohe’s planet at last, and the highrise greenbelt boroughs teem. But it’s a caterpillar I almost grabbed. We were ersatz braceros. Headachy drenched green Chula Vista bean-rows Taller than us for miles. This wasn’t Thoreau’s greens patch. This was America’s preteen heroes’ “war effort.” And there were wasps like Zeros buzzing the weird-shaped immigrant pomodoros. And the beleaguered Alien Property Bureau’s Duce gave us a pep talk. We were pros. The wasps were our ichneumon banderilleros. Pretty white beads on green. Pretty as pharaohs’ viscera-boxes. Or a Mikado’s inros. Poor catafalque of would-be butterfly. Better to be blobs and squiggles, chis and rhos, white buff apricot cadmium mauve rose, dotting the air in a weedscape of Corot’s. All flak and rapture. Beauty that must die. Not this trompe l’oeil. Arlington. Book of rows.

197

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF MY REFRIGERATOR DOOR

for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage

A Caledonian megalith. A tinted bather from Cape Ann. The 1937 kith and kin of a Kentuckian beside their Model T sedan. The Celts. Who set me this arithmetic of icons? Who began by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zitherpicking rhinestone charlatan. He tries to be American. Who tries to be American as hard as him? Not Aly Khan. Not George F. Babbitt the Zenithophiliac Zenithian. As sure as God made Granny Smith a pricier-sounding product than the Winesap or the Jonathan, there is a mystery and myth to being an American, and being an American compounds it. Kurosawa-san, steady my Nikon while I pan across the porches of forsythiabedizened Mattapan in search of . . . dot dot dot . . . the plan, the weltanschauung, the ethnithifying principle a pith

198

helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan could pounce on like a fiend from Ran and authenticate forthwith. The cromlech beetles o’er the frith. The ultimate American possession rattles his Kal-Kan, Prince, you’re a prince. A dog a man can talk to. What this caravan of adumbrations and antithesises panteth for is Dith Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran: Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan tabulously American.

199

WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL You notice them at check-in. Power. Dough. Securing the cachet of their dispatches With miniature touch-tone satchel latches. Riding the tiger, going with the flow. A naked envy flares in me and catches Who manicures, who burnishes, who thatches These bronzed embodiments? I know, I know— Too dumb to trust with Momma’s kitchen matches, Let alone World War III. But there attaches To them and their assumption such a haloed Ritziness . . . And to find one in my row . . . The stewardess has catered me my trayload. I buddy up with dumbshow down-the-hatches. A conversation bumps along in snatches. The Plexiglas is bright with microscratches. We monitor the murmur of the payload As if our slice of Fortress U.S.A. lowed Homeward the way the herds of Thomas Gray lowed Homeward, and there were centuries to go.

200

PLEASURES OF THE VOYAGEURS Into the limitless nowhere. Lightly canoeing. Day sultry. Me desultory. Toing and froing testing the bottom for bass, or in fact just yoyoing aimless assortments of ornament up and down. Very encouraging soundtrack, once you get into it. Whole Canadian laid-back percussion section. Woodpecker, marshhen, dittybug, loon, frog. Sidemen, all of them, happy to just hit-it-when-indicated. Like spending the afternoon with one of those riff-it-yourself records. Bunny Berrigan Band on a golden oldie. Only the lead madman is absent, or sits obstinate. He won’t stand up to get “I Can’t Get Started” started. Why should he? Why should I? Why perpetrate a Paderewski-at-the-outboard ruckus?

Cryptic and infinitesimal gunnel-thunks like a dim rockbass bass to the ongoing bongoing. What am I doing going boing boing? Am I a mad baboon? I was suddenly pogoing hugely over the lake I was flap-flap-flapping like eohoopoes afire, like a red-eyed screecher out of an early-sixties Fright-Nite feature hitting itself and croaking “Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!” It was, you might say, galvanizing, this demonstration of what the container meant about “reapplications” of repellent. I was the Living Dead on moonlight excursion

201

I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the Laughton version with the canaille following and the bells echoing I was the mass of scab velcroing and unvelcroing slugwise forth I was everything (sproing sproing) evildoing a nickelodeongoing urchin ever befouled himself boohooing home from the slobbering Roxy not to see. Wouldn’a missed it for the world, not me. It scared the Missus, damn near totally. Wiser than Queequeg (and with fiercer tattooing) is brave Nokomis home from his mosquitoing.

202

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Starbuck was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1931, to a migrant academic family. In his mid-teens, he studied mathematics for two years at the California Institute of Technology. He also attended the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. He took no degrees. He was an agricultural worker, a military policeman, and a fiction editor at Houghton Mifflin. He directed two of America’s finest graduate programs in Creative Writing—at the University of Iowa and Boston University. He taught English and poetry for twenty-five years—one year at the State University of New York at Buffalo, then at the University of Iowa and Boston University. He gave poetry readings in nearly every state as well as abroad. Due to illness, he took an early retirement in 1988. He was the distinguished chairholder in poetry in 1990 at The University of Alabama. While at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in 1963, he was fired for refusing to sign the required loyalty oath. He initiated a challenge to New York’s Fineberg loyalty oath law and was successful when the Supreme Court of the United States overturned that law. Also in the 1960s, he was an antiVietnam War organizer and activist. His first book, Bone Thoughts, 1960, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. He subsequently received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship in

203

Literature by the American Academy in Rome, in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards. He was a fellow in residence at the American Academy in Rome for two years and later at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy. White Paper, his second book, set a standard for charged, edgy American political poetry. His next, Elegy in a Country Church Yard, is the world’s widest concrete poem. Desperate Measures tackled, with fine Byronic insouciance, everything. Talkin’ B. A. Blues is a book-length rhyming picaresque in rhinestone-sourdough style. In 1982, Atlantic Monthly Press and Secker and Warburg (London) published his new-and-selected poems, The Argot Merchant Disaster. That book won The Nation’s Lenore Marshall prize, among others, for best book of poetry. He published two small books with Bits Press: Space Saver Sonnets and Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second. Visible Ink, the collection of his final poems, was published in 2002. The book features numerous examples of his final formal invention—something he called Standard Length and Breadth Sonnets, or SLABS for short. He was honored with the Aiken-Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1993. He died at home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, August 15, 1996, after a twenty-one-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

204