His sister was shot
while driving. She bled
to death, the bullet
a bright flame
in the darkening
space of her heart.
Her car was found
twenty miles north
from where she lived.
It was August,
telephone poles bled
short and narrow shadows.
The station clerk’s eyes
were hard
behind thick glass.
She said you’d
better get that car
it costs you money.
The counter-clock face
above her head reflected
the dying rose on her desk.
Later the sky
lost all expression,
the sun kept going down.
Absence came home late,
slowly walked around the kitchen table.
Never sitting down, it kept scribbling
unrhymed second rate verses
on the walls, pale as ghosts
in all his rooms.
Tune out the meaning
they don’t matter.
Just listen, listen to the music,
to the concert
given by the words.
Soprano words, tenor words
timeless words, won’t you
just listen to the music?
Sailing on the sea of power
they only saw
the green flame of money.
The thunder of their voices
muted the ticking of the clocks.
Hearts beating,
they waited
at revolving doors
for fortune and bliss
to step into their empty spaces.
Riding over the hard
turns of their gray roads
was the spark igniting
fires in their hearts.
One more time now!
Their power went down,
a large sail of flames
over the green sea of money.
They stand mute in the ticking
thunder of the clocks.
Hearts pounding,
they morn
behind closed doors
fortune and bliss stepping out,
their spaces now empty.
Riding over the hard
turns of their gray lives
is a storm leaving
ashes in their hearts.
Soprano words, tenor words
timeless words, won’t you
just listen to the music?
Beat– I remember maps of new countries
sliding across the dark windows of a bus,
old beaten cars towed, they stood
in wrong places and times,
metaphysics arrested for disorderly conduct
by misinformed professors working
hard for tenure and higher rank.
My father boarding the train crossing
the one- way bridge of Demerol river
and IRS agents dreaming ashes
piling up on Wall Street.
Beat– I remember a blue hat dreamer
handcuffed by Soho policemen
and the midnight sun bouncing off
adult bookstores and nostalgia rising
through ventilators of empty restaurants,
stadium men swimming in toxic rivers
and Bonaparte’s galaxy hat floating
across my dreams of Chinatown.
Beat– I remember war time weekends
with their displays of tin politicians
covered with confetti, the color of blood,
the orange-haired general, a single eye
lighting up his wooden face,
river boats departing to yesterday
and military music lingering in schoolyards
long after the troops were gone.
Beat–living room clock chimes Guilty!
its dial stares into space,
luminous, like a girl’s face, as time
stands still after her first kiss.
Street lights come marching in
with night still wrapped around their necks
and Berlin walls float by with their moons
paler than aspirin pills, their myopic moons
staring deep but unable to see far.
Wherever stanzas take me, mirages
slowly settles like a blanket.
I wait for the future
to come marching in.
I wait for a parade of events so astonishing,
every grain of sand will be night.
I wait for a parade of hours so monumental,
that sinks in every gas station
will be filled with more butterflies than
all of Nabokov’s novels.
The desert born in this poem followed me
from stanza to stanza
and got lost in this parade
and planet earth won’t be headed
wherever we all thought it went.
The known universe will be expanding
across many universes of stanzas
so we shall inadvertently inhale poems like smoke
my father inhaled from his Gauloise Bleue.
My eyes all focused, not on distance but on depth,
on the smoke of Gauloise Bleue, curling
as if it was trying to put ??
at the end of words, words of departure
hanging over the meaning of things, so many words
the cyclical devaluation of dreams deports them
to places where pale horses graze lists of the missing
and sometimes, when we remember deep,
new words assemble in our private cities.
Walking in the rain we cling
to torn umbrellas showing
broken skies over our heads and
a harsh alien wind tries hard
to say in its own words: a violin sleeps
in the aching heart of every rose.
My heart sings low,
heartbeats sometimes bringing
a different grammar
to the language of flowers
and mute things.
G.O.P. skies,
is it going to rain?
If it does, I’ll marry
all the stained windows of my church
and write a poem to that magnolia tree
whose branches swing so right
in the summer wind.
And if it doesn’t, I’ll hide that poem
in the deep pocket of my coat
and walk bare footed on highway 59.
There won’t be any cars,
so the police chief’s face
will be sadder than a small potato
dropped in some rusted garbage can.
G.O.P. skies
is it going to rain?
If it does, I’ll wait for evening
to come by and I’ll deep breathe
the nearest loitering sun beam
and then get lost in that sunset
so my body won’t be found on any map.
And if it doesn’t, the village idiot
will smile and write
beautiful poems about letters
knitting themselves into angel wings
right behind his back.
He will dream 1000 publications but
his 1000 publications = 1000 broken dreams.
G.O.P. skies
is it going to rain?
If it does, prisons will grow wheels
and roll into a special location
hovering 6 feet over everyone’s head.
Then prison bars will hold their first
worldwide convention and sing.
And if it doesn’t, that song
is going to be Happy
Birthday to you, to me
and offended telephone poles
will angrily charge
all these lazy cows
grazing in their fields.