Today It Seemed

 

Today it seemed like somebody
was riding on your head.
It felt that way the livelong day
until you went to bed.

Then he seemed to get back on

when you got up to pee.
By now you rather like the sense
of camaraderie.











.

Writing Interruptus

 

Being interrupted

while you’re writing can be salutary.
Values vary when they suffer a surprise –

frequently resulting in the opening of eyes. You may

forget, without regret, what you were just about to say –
and think of things in some outrageously new way –

unexpectedly molested by unexpurgated rashness –

lingually tongue-kissed. Though sometimes
you’re just pissed.










.

Fête Intime

 

He disrobes for his hosts.
He finds they can take it.
His hosts, who are ghosts,
don’t mind if he’s naked.











.

Smarties Giving Parties

 

Smarties giving parties are a chore.

Poets walking smack into the door.
Philosophe-atrocities galore.
“Martin Amis is a crashing bore!”
Everybody thinking they want more.













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My Book of Genesis

 

To conjure up depictions of

an object
for the magic
and to honor it as if it were
the special thing,
the sacred thing,
The Thing Itself --

and worship it or else –

is understandable.

Our mandibles
require stuff
to chew: But you – oh you! --
are quite enough
for me. I need no
holy trope for thee.

Not that I won’t

invoke a crystal sphere
to have you peer into
as if it were the final
specificity.

But everything is that:

You are my Book of Genesis,

my Noah’s ark,
Mount Ararat.








.

Sans a Front Tooth

 

Über-
mensch sans a front
tooth.

Erupt-

ive, corrupted, un-
couth.

Wit is

voluptuous
truth.











.

Debussy’s Music

 

Full of un-deciphered crimes,

Debussy’s music makes you sad sometimes,
with all its poignant dreams of chimes

and body scents, chromatic climbs

and schemes and indigent emotion.
We don’t know how anyone can stand

his notion

of polyphony
all nakedly

exposed

and played.
He should have stayed

to tell us how to parse its mist,

or how to clear it.
In his absence, all that we can do is hear it.










.

Beyond the Untoward Public Humping From Behind

 

Beyond the untoward public humping from behind,
the lutenist you dreamed about last night seemed
an indifferent kind of inexplicability. To what in it had
it been needful to adhere? Consciousness is queer.













.

Fiddling on My Forearm

 

As soon as I developed a vibrato on the violin

I started fiddling on my forearm – I couldn’t
bear to lose the feeling of the charm of what
it felt like to press rhythmic trembling into notes

squeezed from the strings that spanned curved

ebony on this voluptuously varnished thing
which I had lately learned to test and hold,
and coax the bow to hex. It felt like sex.












.

Blanketed By You

 

Blanketed
by you,
my friend,

as I will be through

Space-Time’s every
strange last bend,

our conversations

never have
to end.












.

A Bet

 

What is
going
on?

Am I

supposed to
like this?

I don’t

know what
to think.

Nobody’s

reacting
yet.

Connect,
suspect,
reject?

Somebody

place
a bet.










.

Transfixed

 

Today we picked the sticks up

of ourself and we decided
that we didn’t mind the mix.

We’ve nixed our old dismissals.

Now that we’re together,
we’re transfixed.












.

Now We Think

Expecting it to exit

in inexorable execution
of extenuating exigency –

exercising exorcism of its

execrable existential state –
extravagantly glad that it,

at last, would break

the gate and skate away –
suddenly we’re sad.

Now we think

we would have liked
the thing to stay.













.

Preternaturally Patiently

 

Preternaturally

patiently,
you let me talk.
You wish I’d look
you in the eye.

But I stalk my

internal planet
whereon only
I can see
the sky.












.

Witch-Women

Witch-Women shimmer

in the warming wind –
you see them in the dawning
evenings – weaving through
abating shafts of sun.

You are the one they crave,

and they will get you.
Be brave. At first you’ll be
their slave, but when
you want to go, they’ll let you.










.

Sans Espoir, Sans Désespoir

 

Heavy humid human mass –

inviolately violet –
purporting to be comfort.
Why does it help you cope?

You give up hope.
You put no weight on care.
Before you know it,
you’re abandoning despair.











.

The Thing That

The thing that

couldn’t be,
occurred today.

It’s now

the only
thing that is.

We don’t

know
what to say.












.

Cardiac Anatomy

 

Where form
seduces
color

and educes

sentience
from an art.

That would be

my beating 
heart.










.

Valediction

Don’t squander it,
she said.
Then she was dead.

Leaving me

behind, beyond
to ponder it.

What else

can you do with life
but squander it?











.

The Problem with Imaginary Creatures

The problem with imaginary creatures
is translucence: always coming in
and out so incrementally

and incidentally

from here to there
to barely anywhere

they can’t be totted up as fact:

they aren’t long enough intact
or rather too long not becoming what

they seem to want to be,

at least as long as their inconstancy
remains a constant,

to achieve the work of re-construing

what you’ve clearly misconstrued –
until the only flick

of anything

you can imagine doing
to them would be rude.

Which might

be shrewd.
Stick 'em where it’s lewd.








.

On Being Beautifully Shot

 

for Rick Shupper

John Singer Sargent’s
subjects must have felt
the way I felt today
when I saw what

the artist Richard

Shupper did with
my beleaguered face.
Photography is alchemy

and Maestro Shupper

ships its magic out  
with all the sweet
exactitude of grace.










.

When August is Beautiful

 

Summer,

sensing its own end,
sends spirits out and up –

to flout, erupt

and consummate
an essence:

phosphorescence

meant to stab the heart,
remind it of the part

this season plays in it.

The final days in it
have just begun.

Soon they'll

dwindle down
to one.










.

Fantasies Have Worries, Too

 

Fantasies have worries, too.

Collectively they scurry through
too many impulses, repulsing few.

This tends intensively to skew

what they desire to do
to you.











.

Like Half-Hidden Faces

 

Psychic locomotions,
like half-hidden faces,
take emotions through

so many internecine byways

that we can’t see sideways
half the time. But what

we can see turns out not to be

exactly unlike what the visual
equivalent must be of rhyme.

Things chime and jibe and jive

and fascinate
with assonance

and we

emerge from sleep
to wakefulness

to sleep as if we hadn’t

clawed up all the steep
strange range of cliffs

we’ve climbed. Like

I said, it as if we’ve
rhymed.







.

Henry's Back (F.W. Dupee on Henry James - gorgeous prose on gorgeous prose)

 

 

F.W. Dupee, Henry James, 1951 (Wm Sloan Assoc.), “The Awkward Period”, pp 193 - 196

    His prose is likewise changing in these years, and changing considerably, although the process is gradual. In his effort to make the story self-sufficient, his sentences have always carried an abundance of suggestive detail; they now simply carry more. The urbane and relatively impersonal rhythms of his earlier style become more nervously responsive to the currents of feeling. There are bizarre shifts of pace, unexpected brevities. "Her little world was phantasmagoric -- strange shadows dancing on a sheet." At the same time, as the entire medium becomes denser and tauter, it risks parallelisms of sound and cadence which would formerly have been rejected as too poetic. "There was a general shade in all the lower reaches -- a fine clear dusk in garden and grove." Increasingly the language rejoices in sudden colloquialism, raffish jargon, and a habit of turning abruptly and alarmingly concrete. "Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened or the start even of one who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce." Above all, the medium begins to put forth remarkable metaphors without fear of violating its prose character. The following, from 'The Portrait of a Lady,' is an easily predictable image, formally introduced and logically developed. "It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated manoeuvres, at the word of command." Compare this with the following from 'The Sacred Fount:' "The last calls of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again." These self-doomed divers, like Mrs. Wix's whizzing bullet, are entirely original and perfectly irrelevant to the surface facts of the story. Rather, it is by such eruptions, as Stephen Spender has said, that "there arise, as from the depths, the dream images of the unconscious." They also connect James's refined-appearing world with the realm of the physical and the elemental, of latent horror, of "the thing hideously behind."

    There was danger that the verbal abundance of the later style might become an end in itself, overwhelming the story and the characters. This James at his best averted, partly by making the characters themselves more articulate. They have always been eloquent about their concerns; they now talk, besides, about the language itself, evidencing its richness in nuance at the same time that they are furthering the action. The internal structure of dialogue, as well as its relation to the enveloping narrative, undergoes an intense stylization. The theater's influence is felt in monolithic scenes and resounding curtains. Patches of talk are set off from the rest like parks from their adjacent streets, except that the business of the story is mainly done in them. Of business, moreover, there is a definite sum to be accomplished in each area of dialogue, some item of revelation or decision to be added to the whole account. And although the talkers are as a rule vividly individual, they eagerly subordinate themselves to this larger enterprise like the participants in a relay race or a morris dance. However much at variance in other respects, they all "pull together," as James would say, in the interests of a common style. Extremely sociable, they pause in mid-sentence to allow a friend the pleasure of finishing it; or they offer him an irresistible come-on in the form of an equivocation or a floating pronoun.

       "Mrs. Beale furthermore only gave her more to think about in saying that their disappointment was the result of his having got into his head a kind of idea.

        'What kind of idea?'

        'Oh goodness knows!' She spoke with an approach to asperity. 'He's so awfully delicate.'

        'Delicate?' -- that was ambiguous.

        'About what he does, don't you know?' said Mrs. Beale. She fumbled. 'Well, about what we do.'

        Maisie wondered. 'You and me?'

        'Me and him, silly!' cried Mrs. Beale with, this time a real giggle."

    This habit of leading with a doubtful pronoun certainly grew on James's later characters, and like other of his devices for securing internal unity it became customary, part of a large body of conventional usage which, of course, is felt as a strength or an infirmity of his style depending on whether the emotion is itself forceful or weak in the given case. On the whole, for richness, for subtlety, for attention to concords of sense and sound, James later style was the most remarkable style in English since the 17th century. With all its artifices, there is something elemental about it. Unlike the virtuoso styles, admirable though they are, of a Stevenson or a Swinburne, that of James refers us back, not to the eloquence of the author, but to the resources of the language.

http://guykettelhack.blogspot.com/2011/11/henrys-back.html

In the Pine-Green Dutch-Blue Night

 

In the middle of the pine-green
Dutch-blue night --
beyond
our inward sight --

warm random coalescences

of August come
in steep humidity:
add up the sum

of all their contributions

to the Summer,
fluent scents
and insect hum – whirr --

now grown deep and dark

and hot and late --
inevitable as their
steaming fate –

all

intimately
intimating
Fall.







.

Sweet Dysmorphia!

 

Ah,
sweet
dysmorphia
of Art!

Intentionally

fencing with -- 
romancing -- 
disbelief!

The blest

relief
of your
displacement

of the Heart --

and your
relation
to the Fresh!

You make me

hunger
after untoward
flesh.







.

Vanilla Pudding Heads

 

Today we are vanilla pudding heads
with just a trace of lemon zest
and something else whoever made
the mess of us put in to test

our mustard: see if custard was

the right dessert for us to be.
They keep on taking tastes of us.
We rather wish we weren’t we.












.

The Quality of Thoughtful Conversation Between Gods

 

The quality of thoughtful

conversation between gods
is rarely strained –
except when exigencies

of their games depend upon

pretending they are not
omniscient. They then become
proficient at the acting out

of roles we’d not find strange:

misunderstandings
that comprise the sighs
in our attempts to talk.

They’re good at seeming
like they ought to balk

at the perversities of angry
envy and obsessed excesses

in the other: none

of which of course obtains.
There’s the rub: they lack
our mortal brains.

Such games

are ponderous, soon come
undone.  Since they’re
not us, it isn't fun.







.

Sometimes It Seems Like This

Affection pulls like gravity –

it can’t do more.
We were whatever we could be
before.












.

x-factored

 

can groins be hungry?

yes they can.
they join the bungling
dick to hand.



















.

Familial and Affectionate Relations

 

Awakenings do not come all at once.

Sometimes you go to bed with one
and wake up with another.
Familial and affectionate relations:
like a brother and a lover and a mother.













.

Ghosts - The Truth

 

Ghosts are far more troubled by us
than we ever are by them.
The gem they are
is so far distant from our constitutive
dust that to be even in a slight degree

reminded of our blunderousness

threatens their
sweet equanimity:
even dashes, for a timeless moment,
hope. To be summoned, groped

and caught a glimpse of

when you are a ghost --
absorbed in your remotely painted
realms, whose helms are pointed
toward fleet reaches unimaginable

by the least or most of us –

is briefly to be tainted.
When they howl,  
they do not want to scare:
they wish we weren’t there.










.

It Isn’t Easy Welcoming an Alien

 

It isn’t easy welcoming an alien
without appearing to inspect it –
one hazards rudeness in the act.

Coelenterate, sorbet, Episcopalian?

Hard not to stare, and stay collected
while asking it its facts, with tact.










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