American Poetry Read online

  this before bass drums calmed the beatifics

  he stripped the blue bead from his pen

  gallant of us to stand about wasn’t it?

  before the distances were Galatea

  A hum before the ship flagon wall scavenge

  this the color I thought bronze was

  turned out a fluvial wash or supersonic pan

  we all wheat up through the stove

  my manual said eat while a beam improves Benny or Andy

  makes as if a final ear to the level exits

  tweetmowers for saturday

  Hi-Fi still to be penciled in

  In which I discover the second war through

  powdery flowers in my vagueness

  following him on impulse nights to pinch

  everyone at the least of them

  the pleasantries of quietude to even construe a thing

  But would he hook a harm to me?

  I preferred Reg Butler and his batman sets

  later rock rimming by the soft quotient

  gone oval to the cemetery malinger

  so out of him in this ground

  pendant one less cigar or other

  I’ll make it hobbling on one lung

  and a Pepsi gentian

  A Za-Rex commotion in the attics of pebbled-glass

  jugs with finger grips you’ll toll a long time from

  he’d pasteboard up from plush vespers if held neatened to a priest

  but never a marmalade of such novel disparage

  the morning ran to batteries and a blockade manacle gun instead

  the marriage of games never to be lost

  or found either, he had cellars full of the strain

  misnamed railings, a couple of terrific beads

  his head like a warning collector

  mine a beaming limiter

  Were you my ace in the malefactory, no

  the casings came later, ocarina with armholes

  prices after farming’s forgotten

  and the fame of the old wood’s made out

  then I really rang it up, didn’t I?

  argued over the obstacle gun and baywindow switches to the carbarn east

  or skip the blimps to south, one

  it makes no odds that Yankee wisdoms make them on everything

  stop telling me things, then it would brighten

  Coughed the hose out from under the gulf of the whole house

  silence of a blind pew

  storm load sliding off gradually

  the pill rolls and Vaseline sundays

  coil of the codfish template

  the gray snow lateness on car tracks in Brilliantine

  I thought it was time nobody knew anything

  but a touch of the spear minted clear

  He sat by windows ate back to

  sundays repapered the mood

  rooms escaping to a spare

  I would rather have hollowed my own then

  open cabins by flush chain keep

  his nose to the empty box he faced

  a sharp or flat exemption

  so paid less to load his production

  I couldn’t stand the side of the house

  bordered by tickle of the manual families

  shoot down a load of bricks while dutying

  bring your strings into pall

  Beyond his bed door seemed

  like not much was being entered

  meanwhile I summered

  was there the journal to tell about it somewhere?

  certainly not Bogardus Waterfall Trail

  the portions brought from Paris

  the dawn chimes in his lower caste chest

  peeping from the case I made

  go home instead of dessert

  the silver briar substitutes

  Wish he’d got so far off I’d remember it

  hindered by fin & haddy pan dowdy

  and cans of limestone hedge pack solvent

  the soots turned wasps as they came

  he gave up smoking not minding

  really raising the family guard

  at early table as he thought to us

  didn’t I mind all your names?

  2.

  He was eager to see wood sawn beneath his nervous

  the house had moved over in the night

  left a felt marker where he left

  the plectrum of old stump continuous

  mirror lamped his own clothes till conscious

  the member of the desk set travesty

  loaner of the wide hips a corollary

  then gas escaping from a sound

  He was up but never till

  the sides of his housing came together in consideration

  desert he knew not

  not even west

  and then we waved him

  I keep thinking he was born in a knee-high cabin

  wasn’t everybody’s?

  and now all the placements are loose

  Needs learned from fire engine captains

  lolling on the south side

  there were women in those windows

  but pretending fronds a partnership

  near to drome havens and the gasometer

  down forever in indulgences and backbone

  had his limiters and so do I

  blink

  Stop sounding as if you, and others

  charming combiners and no notions of the loup garou

  an entablature of savior

  young mental wander home and strike

  the doctor coming out of Maidsville in a trance

  look down, these are the blackening onions

  he never, he would not

  Hornets a swing to the salacious

  pinhole barriers in every one after all

  the wall, the tubs, the sack of Truro

  and name you Marge and in the going bituminous

  a ribbon drips from the viol

  I’d have to frame you in the front window to apologize

  pacing it out in tiny lifetime gales

  Sumerian to the winners but in the losing Trojan

  won’t mention the imperious Perseus

  red cutlets of the Gaul

  then his wind let up, he was pressing

  and further blows of insect at the galleon wall

  seal with silicon

  the hole but not him

  Go to cufflink school and how

  this won’t be printing out from you

  no one to hoard those basement hours

  a perimeter to every scab

  you have to stop weathering to live

  chorus or no baton

  Dreamed of getting his own security goat

  but such too plain over with

  daydreamed the window was in liquid spillage

  coins out of plaster as you watch

  along the corridors or wrist release a special swatch

  velvet in intent, the purpose conspicuous

  the helmet on loan from a clown

  In the attic in a chest there

  is an alien predella

  place of worms as long as the Waste Land

  should anyone be of such a shag-cut intent

  my father watches

  telegraphs his pauses

  But he was never ready

  as if his doorways on loan

  rather a clubfoot treater comes to market

  watering cans and Studebaker rules

  was in his study

  he didn’t have, why not

  the burden too emeritus?

  Trotted in shorts through a garden of hornfels

  they don’t have them anymore

  now one arms doors and watches for creases

  his glory was in not being a whiner

  lollygagger, dreaming toad in a rile of the spurious

  those gleams and hastes

  these goal lickers each asserting the metal

  then a partial head leered out

  Group of young
undergrowth parting the waterfalls

  member of which he was never

  in the days the carnivals grew together

  and oldman slim dons

  dark threads to fiddle and crane

  comes to the pitch of twelve shoes

  spinster lab by ice cream socket

  new market new position whatever

  and elbows grown spent as they’re clad

  he knew the man well

  Feldspar chips in that cream anyway

  close to the alternate spelling of gong

  and nightwear

  and gracelessness

  and small things

  the father had to come home I guess sometime

  rounding the chain gate get shut of his day

  His hands have the look to care

  for one of the fractal acids

  locked to advantage that way

  spiral shoals under varnish rules

  a click of a meeter palming the governor

  treating his sound to the bad end

  the one his master dad said grease

  Two Poems

  Gustaf Sobin

  A SELF-PORTRAIT IN LATE AUTUMN

  … through that ever-

  expanding interval, were never more

  than these

  late bees you’d

  scribble: what hung, like sucklings, from the

  fat,

  dangling clusters; than these desolate, verb-

  studded landscapes you’d

  murmur, even

  hiss into

  some other, some ever else-

  where’s

  ear.

  TRANSPARENT ITINERARIES: 1999

  that interval, you wrote, between the inadequacies of the

  given and the imperatives of the inferred.

  (that additive without which isn’t).

  _______

  through that veil, that

  billowing gauze, that interface with face-

  lessness it-

  self.

  _______

  language: a density, you’d called it, in the service of its

  own evanescent releases.

  fabricating as it went the otherwise inaccessible.

  _______

  was always in the

  elsewhere, wasn’t it: in the

  rented rooms of those

  out-

  lying districts that you’d begun drafting the

  portrait; begun restituting—feature by feature—its

  oblit-

  erated mirrors.

  _______

  as if destiny weren’t the unravelling of some predetermined dictate but the patient reconstitution of the intended.

  the resuscitation of so many suppressed ur-words by the bias of a yet-to-be articulated grammar.

  (what lay secreted within the parched hollow of our each and every exhalation).

  was why you’d lowered yourself into those ruins, wasn’t it? why you’d tape-measured whatever vestiges remained in an attempt to interpolate—from their least sequential sections—the full thrust of such an obfuscated dynamic.

  _______

  … were roots, the white irises’, you’d

  discovered, that had

  gagged the

  idol’s

  eyes.

  _______

  far too late for anything, now, but those earliest ideations.

  the unearthing, therein, of the eventual.

  wasn’t this why the bodies grappled the way they did?

  cherished the incipient against their own ineluctable

  depletions?

  their teeth bared; their breath broken.

  why, too, you’d have uttered—just then—that word with-

  out words: that elision glittering in the very midst of so much spent syntax.

  and heard, so doing, the silence—thus solicited—sound.

  Four Poems

  Alice Notley

  AMID THESE WORDS I CAN KNOW

  canyon and spirit mountains peaceful spring with springs; not paying attention to

  glyphs. there are rabbits the springs are damp circles on the sand among greener

  bushes sunlight a lovely tone what can i do with it one says. musnt. try to know

  amid words which are deep and alive large as dolmens glyphs whose lines cut deeply

  into the past which is not a gone thing linear but a depth and a returning power

  also. know. in a clearing what i’m doing. not at all walking through my life as i often

  thing think but standing in place where i am been will be not using words not making

  them not being them but being among them as they are nature. past may be a gracious

  door always open skylike but in place a, wind in place or as a massive invisible process

  is both carven and calmly fluid the sky moves. i never move. chunk rock but not ice

  will never weep, when i cry its to break open to. you will not know if you dont suffer,

  why, a closed system cannot know but a knowing sky can be a mountain a knowing all

  can be carved as well and the words, the words part of all are like these.

  use me suddenly i might say, and the canyon of my youth goes mosaic, i’m in the

  basilica by rights. walk toward that mosaic, as far as the spirit mountains,

  flickering light, across the glass cubes of. precious stones have been used in places, the

  mountains themselves are partly made of.

  agate, jasper, quartz.

  and you have disliked me last night in a dark hall. meaningless or not? if

  i am a thing and you are, the forces between us those emotions are the small

  winds of the universe lines or forces between things but undiagrammable and

  being an aberration of the lines of like or a part of. no, you have disliked me disrupted

  me last night in a dark hall, is abstract and whats real is, that i am not a thing and so

  not dislikeable and cannot dislike on the real plane. where the glyphs are, and

  the dolmens, left to tell, of what is permanent, messages of, from the enduring

  “feelings,” such as existence itself.

  go on a little faster now in the wind the blank blue and theres a rabbit will he shoot it

  so we can eat it tonight jack rabbit cotton tail eat cotton tail. all these rocks

  pebbles in the mosaic from the past when i was a child one april in grapevine canyon.

  lines of motion and emotion telepathies and paths all intertwined like

  grapevines with leaves of and the purple globes of, the

  telepathic the sending of all the messages all the thoughts ever and going on all in

  those little lines scattered toward and blown away ever everywhere everything ever

  thought at all blown about

  in the canyon the glyphs

  are paradise as preserved in the mind thats why theres the past.

  i mean why theres no past

  THE ELONGATED HOLY MOTHER

  but in the next moneyless year there is a nearly fully grown snake of mine snake

  what is this snake, this principles nearly large enough to bite me has a head like a

  rattlers. you want some other symbol made out of modern fabric i dont have it no

  life principle in you if thats you modern fabric. this snake is nearly large enough

  to bite me, so i should turn it loose in the building to hide behind the furniture in

  the dark where it lives best now. sister life cuts hers truncates hers though, before

  she sets them loose, and she beats them, beats them into submission, i dont want to

  do that. the snakes hide behind the bookcases making slime and skin in the dark

  shedding and shedding

  making more and more new years. in this new year i can find the buried person

  the oldest person or year but the year the new year is
that old one, the pieces

  scattered throughout us and irretrievable, unless reamassed whole in a vision

  and so the dreams and so the peculiarities of them.

  the men who lived only with each other said to fear their room it was full of naked

  men, i said i was afraid but i wasnt. i was searching searching the house, what was I

  looking for? certainly not the department of gender

  what is

  a gender what on earth what is earth i was looking for what is earth in a world a

  modern fabric

  how is all this depicted in the church cant you see

  a serpent asleep in the dark protects the original nature,

  or vision. old mother python. there was a castle.

  on a shelf in it were heads, sculptures and one was of joan of arc, next to it under a

  sheet, was that of king she served, i peeked at him under the sheet and so

  he came as a ghostly wind, to terrify me in my sleep. the wind of the dead king

  plucked up my own sheet from the bed and tried to strangle me. the principle

  of the king tried to kill me, as my sister life keeps trying to bludgeon into submission

  the snake

  my sex is still involved.

  superficially as the fabric of this world lies, the lies by which we

  always why death is so important. the only life the

  second world entangled like coils of always in this very one. death is so

  important its freedom from us, the figures on the

  walls know this being dead

  snake piss behind everything can you like that as i do

  hes killing the snake again for the pure maiden? what is she, she is himself hates

  snake piss, the feel of old skins to the bare feet, have you ever walked through a yard

  full of sloughing layers and layers, with bare feet? and feared both pollution

  and that something live was there a real snake, amid the shed skins the real life the

  first nature, under everything. the naturally slithering mosaic as the light takes the

  walls of the church or as a candleflame takes them at night

  serpent of enclosure of our mystery, here I am inside and cant

  know it without the old symbols, like that, its like that through layers and layers, the

  skeleton of the person is there but is the principle still there beyond symbols and

  principles is it still i am i there?

  sheds us the universe will shed us without a “thought” we are dead in so many coiled

  faraway futures how many are there are there am i like them too? but i am not like,

  skimming gold toward. and what did you say,

  lib-by, in exile

  so skimming and inviting like night of the stars in a small garbage quartier