American Poetry Read online

  the men in long grass with machetes

  waiting to advance, to move in (or out?)

  all good nothing, the track star

  losing interest in the bakery

  dreamer losing interest in

  the most two hundred of our time

  1.

  Still small battles of will Despite unseasonal meanness In a set-up

  like that Where the main dynamic is not even Knowing what’s

  missing or that it’s Missing an edge and moving along as if Missing

  a sense, like sight or Touch or hearing the Evidence or a piece of it

  comes to Light by accident or deliberate Positioned in relation to

  a given Moment and so it is perhaps all an Accident with a

  magnifying glass or an Electrified fence to Separate the fictions:

  showing Her and trying to speak or Are they singing? she’s

  listening and Looking but is she smiling? A visible device

  represents Them as things that don’t add up

  Men in the back of a truck behind a wire Grating singing

  2.

  habit of the tongue, that piece of bread on the wood in the shot

  right after the teapot, the lamp and the table

  Pretend a thing is a

  Thing like us

  To imagine a stick

  When you see

  Flowers shaped like a dove

  Or anything else

  Cairo, named for Mars. Mars and England were the same to us, she said. She saw in her palm,

  musical matter has

  filled up the cavity

  originally occupied by

  the organism itself

  The crowd seems too apologetic.

  3.

  Clouds composed of sharps and flats, structure but the room is

  locked. That is to say, the visit can be obstructed, withheld by

  chance at either end. A model of action (compassion) within the

  inexorability (irregularity, unpredictability) of the frame.

  Notations of space in terms of measure of weather or breath

  moving in the shape of a billowing figure in front of the mouth,

  position read as motion, exiting, invisible magnetic tongue.

  The clown like an undertaker in red and white striped gloves pulls

  the coat up over your head from behind: let the circus begin!

  dots teeming with organic matter, out of statistical into the fire

  a shadow under the number

  4.

  Image or not? Exactly if the shadow is underneath

  hyacinth culture, the wasps

  and the bees—rook mates, a bird

  called bee-eater in he House of

  the Faun

  But rather, to enter and be concealed. Manet’s “Mocking of Christ”

  making of christ a kind of dark space around the figures, light

  bottom quarter foreground floor syntax of light and dark

  5.

  this time is free

  contagious dialogue

  body of music

  blood in mouth

  hair in shoe

  Boxing Captions

  Jena Osman

  I wanted to respond to the simple gesture of the figures … without pathos, without dramatic movement, without telling stories! For the painter or sculptor, simple acts of the human figure, such as inclining the head, raising an arm, gesturing with the hand, moving a leg, provide such an expressive richness that themes such as standing, coming, going, turning, and the like would suffice to occupy an artist’s lifetime.

  —Oskar Schlemmer

  Simple acts: the theater is ranging across the boundaries of its materials. I find myself through a device, a synthesizer of discrete emblems, disconnected on summation and realized in the limits of time zone and national sphere. I’m a figure mechanized by its last potentials and careful of new hypotheses. Emblems run their course through me, serve to engender fantasies, the image conditioned to promise change, to approach us but not too closely.

  FIGURE ONE

  Force the opponent’s left and lead to the right with the left glove.

  FIGURE TWO

  Step forward and left, at the same time drive a straight right to the chin.

  FIGURE THREE

  The left hand, after executing the parry, is in a position of block ready for opponent’s right.

  Stage realm is ranging through these gestures. What popular thing directing their geography, realized in the limits of a romantic confrontation, animated as the antique need for today and the loss of self one feels in the marketplace. The term mummery appears like a light: a moral variety, a diagram in the vaudeville.

  FIGURE FOUR

  noh hearing, noh voting, my soldier will know

  men leer strands of century

  then linger on woe

  FIGURE FIVE

  on top of the right gun

  a layer of guy

  a stance over madder

  victorious in light

  FIGURE SIX

  Race on and tongue tie on sounds in a bay

  Get a word clean and dry

  History from materials wades cautiously into a contentious debate. The history of reflection: “I am the votes.” An actor of naturalness, then helicopters churn overhead. The government blinked. This sculptor crafts a spiritual artifice while thousands cheer wildly in the arena built for the role. We will examine the changes caused by the longest war.

  FIGURE SEVEN

  Abhorrence

  FIGURE EIGHT

  Self Abasement

  FIGURE NINE

  Utter Abandonment

  Emblems disconnect making dozens of arrests. The absurd hand broke up a drug ring, the result of new mechanization. They also seized 18 firearms, our sphere of life aided by corrupt employees. A suspicious package was reported, our recognition is loaded, is mechanized. It would be met by another vehicle, our time to create. Workers count ballots, technology and fantasies, then succeed in ousting one sign.

  FIGURE TEN

  National Election commission workers count ballots for the National Assembly.

  FIGURE ELEVEN

  A former intelligence officer is being held in a prison.

  FIGURE TWELVE

  Life goes on at a café while protesters march by.

  Taken between things, we clear the final state hurdle. It is really natural to approve a compromise bill that runs through me. What popular thing is suspended from school, passive at its scaffold. No charges are likely to be filed; they are animate as the marketplace. We discuss shooting and stabbing—the mummery, seen as a lie. After taking her to the woods, diagrams step up their assault, that is, shape the world. No sound as we try to decide whether to sign a physical—an optical—event and hold direct talks with its composer (who fails to defeat the rebels). Sounds out of the body are the form of two who approve a plan to place you under house arrest, complete with distribution and precision and fear that you might try to escape.

  FIGURE THIRTEEN

  Every object is naturally drawn to the earth’s center.

  FIGURE FOURTEEN

  Another was given credit for that, which prevented the former from saying such a thing out loud.

  FIGURE FIFTEEN

  Then he decided to measure humidity with a ball of cotton.

  Independence and time threatened to freeze his assets. His material, however—the words for which he was arrested—an improvised existence as they unfurled banners of protest. Alone they’re free in circumstance, renouncing his ties. He is material for higher potential and the conflict ends. Reproduction for the latter brings a halt to spring, detached limitations decked out in new riot gear. Humans are certain to be listening, opening markets to competition. Depth extensions can wipe out linear form, leaving workers without jobs. Rigid geometry of space enjoys expanded export, runs right through me, driving unions to lock arms.

  FIGURE SIXTEEN

&
nbsp; Smith was freed on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.

  FIGURE SEVENTEEN

  Eleanor Reese shows damage to the trunk of the car that was removed from behind her house.

  FIGURE EIGHTEEN

  Ivory V. Nelson has tackled difficult problems at universities.

  Manifestations of nothingness hold meetings willing to listen to values they fulfilled. Simple acts. The living means of representation help people in poor countries, their flesh and measure integrating into the world emblem economy. They are not equilibrium under siege. The stability of a deficiency is mechanized, scheduled to culminate through borrowed tactics. Transient stage action derails a new round in mobile fluctuating, holds up a national map: space at once spotlighting. The sight of dozens range across this strict switchboard to show my generation cares.

  FIGURE NINETEEN

  Because some things reflect rays, and are bright; but others absorb them.

  FIGURE TWENTY

  Because each grain of sand reflects the rays of the sun like a mirror.

  FIGURE TWENTY-ONE

  Because the body of vapor is thinnest at the edges of the clouds.

  The goal is an image which avoids mistakes and he stands in different laws tightening security in advance. Realism in the abstract: stationing officers on bridges. Cubical relationships. Mathematics of spending millions on riot gear. Nature of calisthenics, together and in conscious next page, directing this geography through myself into the vaudeville.

  FIGURE TWENTY-TWO

  Drop the left arm perpendicular to the floor, and step across to a position outside the opponent’s left foot, with either the left or right foot.

  FIGURE TWENTY-THREE

  Shift the weight to the front leg and then drive a hard left uppercut to the solar plexus.

  FIGURE TWENTY-FOUR

  Carry the right hand high, ready to cross to opponent’s chin.

  Reside in respiration fueled by a new heartbeat system. Human space argues about trade whose opposite framework and mimetics have shaken employees. They face, under attack, invisible psychical expression and obey the law of himself who failed to act as watchdog and to police all these corrupt regimes as sense and range of space. Whether bare, they receive loans and curb their own environment in the great branch offered to attain their goal. Theater urged them to avoid confrontation.

  FIGURE TWENTY-FIVE

  Thousands of janitors in Los Angeles are on strike for higher pay after rejecting a wage plan offered by building maintenance companies.

  FIGURE TWENTY-SIX

  For Gulf Coast residents in Texas, spring break memories, like those of the traffic on Padre Island, linger.

  FIGURE TWENTY-SEVEN

  The left glove should be placed over the opponent’s right in order to prevent a counter blow.

  Transformation costume, they change it so as to provide new safety. Human costume risks conformity and six children die. The misleading laws consist of a waist belt and a native is confused. The tray comes off, produced from the has-been, can slip down, yet costumes of standardized Columbine strangle or fall. Authentic can be the body falling from the swing.

  FIGURE TWENTY-EIGHT

  from torso into

  architecture

  human space

  FIGURE TWENTY-NINE

  laws of the club

  the egg of the arm

  the joints

  FIGURE THIRTY

  the we of rotation

  spinning result

  spiral disk

  Simple acts. Possibilities move in limitations that double as infants. The longer abandoned essentially soar which fastens acrobatics as the only living geometry sold nationwide. The pyramid bondage results in automaton stop-spending, beyond human, extolled, he keeps up his courting demands: a phonograph unshaken by the hour-long session, indeed mind is configuration portraying himself as a different kind of technological glass. He painted himself as a new breed: artificial divers generally support a surgery soldier, criticize one idea as an artificial device, pick somebody to speak for long periods and it can be abstract. Why don’t you pick someone peculiar to pathos to deliver anything? Sublime actors and stilts of this most exquisite faith succumb to publicity. This reverse, the man wants to run, develop appropriate stills, he declines to meet and awaits the static. The acrobat opposes the atmosphere.

  FIGURE THIRTY-ONE

  Remember the sign of this shape

  the folded backbone

  suppresses the world.

  FIGURE THIRTY-TWO

  Drive a hard right to opponent’s heart

  inside his left lead.

  FIGURE THIRTY-THREE

  Suppression, Depression, Dejection,

  and kindred ideas.

  The genuine action emerges untouched in its own materials. I play amazed at being its creation unchanged in my core beliefs. My form without purpose decays to listen to people’s real life stories, kills while teaching eighth grade history and today I continue by recounting my own wrenching. With the service of an optical author I ask him why he left us after his intentions divided the class in half. Favorites jump at the chance to lead a visual theater of colors and in this case we’ll be the hawks! Isolate out into the sea. The idea is dropped because of rising emotion. The question of tomorrow: if tomorrow is not a straight line—rather, a hidden forwardness—how will we stand and turn?

  FIGURE THIRTY-FOUR

  The safety clinch

  FIGURE THIRTY-FIVE

  The emblematic duck

  FIGURE THIRTY-SIX

  The return right hook

  Fubar Clus

  Ron Silliman

  “That much drinking

  does not come free”

  A ride

  in a cheap rent-a-car

  after an hour of tea

  in the sun

  Large screen TV

  playing basketball

  with the sound off

  Movement

  quick & muscular

  though seeming

  curiously slow

  Rodman’s hair

  an impossible yellow-white

  Talking of death, of

  cancer, this one’s

  prostate, that one’s breast

  a woman described as

  “a poet of the seventies”

  who is in fact

  a friend to many here

  wind-up kangaroo flips

  but fails to land

  standing up

  “Thinking of getting married again—

  a beautiful French woman—

  so I ask him

  what does he think he’s doing

  and he admits

  he doesn’t know”

  2.

  form festers restless void

  —Charles Borkhuis

  “Behind these pictures

  I have other pictures”

  Haze blurs the margin

  far up Suisun Bay

  though to the east, Diablo

  etched in summer heat

  (though it is only Spring

  Little blue butterflies

  the underside of whose wings

  prove gray as rock

  alight atop

  wild chamomile

  To the west

  out beyond the Gate

  the great white cloud bank

  sits low over the water

  a blur to Tamalpais

  while between

  lays what I conceive of

  as the past

  The burden

  of time

  old men

  in the gas station shadows

  sitting on overturned drums

  spitting into the grease

  A woman

  beautiful thin face a little more etched

  after a year’s absence

  brings out a tray

  on which sits a pitcher and several glasses

  out into the brilliant sunlight

  of the deck

/>   high over the terraced garden

  Masks & kites

  hanging from a line

  paint drying

  Great Wall of Duplos

  children’s chairs

  tables, easels

  webbed together in yarn

  Choir

  of the nearly inaudible

  hum in the walls

  crackling constant in every light bulb

  deep breath of the furnace

  ice maker’s rattle

  in the empty kitchen

  overheard

  Up the block

  an engine turns over

  Report of a blue bunting

  where none should be

  3.

  The cat stalks slow

  across the cut grass

  bird barely visible

  in the last light

  that might still be called

  predawn

  casts

  a narrative

  over the whole yard

  mealy bugs impervious

  in the damp soil

  The brief season of tulips has passed

  So that

  an image is layered

  out of the visible

  through extraction

  of characteristic

  detail

  She rose up

  after the act

  straightening the camisole

  she still wore,

  picking

  the rest of her clothes

  up from the floor

  and looked back at him

  alien now that he slept

  wondering

  had he even seen her

  during the fact of it

  Cars abruptly

  leaving the freeway

  climbing the dirt path

  up to the off ramp

  or the road north

  to Germantown Pike

  ahead

  (then below)

  long sea of red lights

  the Schuykill transformed

  into a parking lot

  headed East

  Three Movie Poems

  John Yau

  PETER LORRE REMINISCES ABOUT BEING A SIDEKICK

  Iron cloud, bronzed sunset, stolen dream.

  I wasn’t always a feverish lepidopterist

  chasing whistling chariots in a stadium.

  My wax lacked coherence, my human hairs glistened