The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

  doesn’t melt as wax does at the sight of a kitten.

  Place a kitten near a candle when bored.

  In a dream I saw Spicer’s body hanging from a hundred feet

  of clothesline rope under the Golden Gate. Ask Weldon Kees

  and Lew Welch to make contact, if alive or not. Crane’s jump

  in all things, a raincoat, borrowed. When I fish the Marquesas

  every year I say to the passing fish, have you seen Crane’s bones?

  How deep and where do they lie and are they drawn together or

  spread and are they peaceful on the bottom?

  Are these horses less wonderful for my daughter having to shovel

  horseshit an hour a day? The teacher would say someone has

  to do it and go on to the social contract before a lunch of

  cheese sandwiches, tomato soup and chalk dust à la mode.

  But we are thinking of horses not teachers. And of the shovel

  and the dreaded weight at the end that is less useful than

  the much ruminated cow manure. Throw it out the door.

  Sally, Nancy, Belle, Saud & Tramp watch with soft curious

  horse eyes.

  Oooooooo, he said to himself. That night of wonderment.

  The head might explode from it. Certainly the heart beats

  in circles like a Masarati cam. The insistence of physical

  love and she didn’t know her head was in an ashtray and

  afterward didn’t seem to care.

  More mad dogs and fewer streetlights, Mr. Nixon. That advice

  will cost you a hundred bucks, has been billed for that amount.

  Date check after the first for tax reasons. The mad

  dogs can be gotten from Spain, cheap. And everyone loves

  to throw stones at streetlights.

  And my puppy is over her kidney infection, diagnosed

  as chronic & fatal. Saved from the gas chamber. I salute

  the technology of antibiotics. All dogs are in particular

  as was Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry. He said drunkenly

  near dawn O let her sleep with us during her last days and

  let her wounds become my own.

  First sighting:

  She was up in the apple tree with one leg hanging

  and the other drawn under her, sidesaddle on the branch.

  Her face was bare of features and being an artist of sorts

  I filled them in. It was deadly serious and I wanted

  to ask someone what she was doing so nudely up in the apple

  tree behind the barn, but had no one to ask and the mouth

  I’d designed was too fresh on her face to open; so I stared

  up and noticed she didn’t lack the truly important features of

  her sex but any desire was constrained by fear. So I sat

  in the grass and dozed from what I’d been drinking that afternoon

  waking to hear her sing no mantra but some ancient lute song,

  and seeing her again as she dropped from the tree to my side

  I thought her bare feet were cloven a bit too obviously.

  At four in the morning my body bumped against the ceiling.

  Thank Jesus for ceilings or I would have been lost to earth,

  rather, earth lost to me as she doesn’t know me well.

  Remember her cheers? How you loved the cheerleader far beyond

  desperation. How you nearly threw yourself into Niagara Falls

  unprotected by a rubber barrel on your high-school senior trip.

  Now you have a permanent rubber barrel around you but you

  no longer love the cheerleader.

  He sang I’m talking through a hat that isn’t mine. It’s

  Jackson Pollock’s, given him by Pollock’s brother, Charles,

  and there is blood on the rim, his own not Pollock’s. This talisman

  was lost in a bar somewhere, anywhere in America, and is

  worn now by a dump-picker who found it among the garbage.

  Appropriate! As both of them, one so great and the other so

  small, treated themselves like garbage. sanctus detritus redivivus

  I felt myself floating toward the shadow of the dreamer I once

  was. I said that I had become too old to dream and the androgynous

  dreamer said let’s marry anyway and be unhappy but joyous

  in our dreams. There were poems before books on earth.

  The stewardess said You’re a poet?

  When I think of a poet I think of someone sitting

  around all day humming Got a date with a daydream.

  This fat & sexless life.

  I mourned Portia’s unfair operation. Then the horse

  ate her garden to ground level. The horse’s name

  happened to be Rex.

  We must not think of our country as a ten-trillion-dollar

  blowjob no matter how the idea tempts us.

  Overheard story in Montana bar: She thought when she lost

  her teeth we’d divorce and she cried a lot; so I said

  to her we won’t divorce but we’ll marry someone else. The vaunted

  simplicity of cowboys who are really cossacks – the horse

  rhythms obviously affecting the brain chemistry. A slavic tribe

  with ambivalent affection for guns & ewes, mares & drudgery.

  He became humbler with his journalism, bought a porkpie hat

  at Kresge’s and wore an inoperable malachite pencil over

  his left ear as his only visible rebellion.

  The green green grass of home is owned by another now

  and I’m not allowed on the property for my ounce of sentiment.

  In the Montana whorehouse the madam yells “Burma”

  through the door to the girl and her customer

  when the time is up, circa twenty minutes for twenty

  dollars, the value being established by Nixon’s Price

  Commission on infolding nightflowers, petaled creatures.

  So the customer who is a language buff looks down

  at his shoes, all that he’s wearing, and thinks:

  How did I get my pants off over my shoes? Has a genuine

  miracle happened? Why do they use Burma as a signal

  rather than Peking or Topeka or French fries? On the dresser

  is a photo of the girl with a child, her son in a sailor

  suit. Does he cry Burma in the night to get his mother

  home? A tape cassette playing Wilson Pickett. Can my

  future be traced on those stretch marks and if she were

  wet would they form small rivers, minnows and all?

  That twenty was hard-earned by art to be printed in New York

  at $5.95 net. Will she buy him another sailor suit?

  The room is hot. Perhaps during the C-minus transport

  the house has been moved to Burma and outside is a green

  hell with lianas masquerading as vipers and vice versa.

  On a tray there is some dental floss, Moon Drop lotion

  and a cordless vibrator, an aerosol can of Cupid’s Quiver.

  I really didn’t want to go to Burma this afternoon, ma’am,

  he thinks. I’ll miss supper and fishing the evening hatch.

  Second sighting:

  She was up on the roof when I went up to check

  the texture of the night and to generally be an ordinary

  poet who muses about the Boston skyline from an Alston roof.

  She was leaning in the shadows against the none-too-solid

  cornice but had no fears of being aerial. Her sex was soft

  as a small mound of coal dust, the material

  of spiderwebs, a dove’s head.

  Start with seven for luck:

  homo erectus, erect of course,

  a compass, viper, wand or club,

  gun, usual knife with any her or she

  in
repose for imagined punishment.

  See him shudder, “throb” the books say,

  quake, his flanks with a doggish bend.

  Her eyes stare past his ear, they are

  a green not found in nature and three

  feet deep. Nothing need be forgiven.

  Awake. A dab of numero uno in the smoking

  pipe. The whole table in Montana loves

  each other. They are relaxing from a long

  day’s sleep. The women are beautiful

  and clean, the men young and ambitious.

  They verge on taking over something not quite

  comprehensible. The dance begins. Libidinous.

  A horse’s nose is pressed against the kitchen

  window. It seems the very room wants to rise

  up and screw but these are the sons and daughters

  of an entre act, of Calvin, pre-Korean, middle Nam.

  And their eyes are pink with hopeless energy.

  He throws a fifty-lire piece in the fountain

  and wants to tell his outrageous wish but they

  won’t listen. The wish won’t count if you tell it

  she says. He broods. The air is full of these god-

  damn wops and their filthy pigeons. What good

  is a wish that can’t be told, that was wished

  to anger those who won’t hear it. Give me the single

  raindrop that fell through the hole in the pagan

  temple as my bride. Wishes must be phrased in old-time

  languages, a sort of fatigued Episcopalian; here

  and there it wasn’t: that pinochle become the national

  sport of the U.S.A.; that dysentery disappear straightaway

  from earth; that the girl hidden in New York change

  her silly predilection for her sisters, fall like

  rain through the roof of a pagan temple on this gentle soul.

  Grease density

  Moon tup

  Pink eye

  Yellow book

  Muddy horse (he fell in the pond)

  Great big stomach from reading cookbooks

  The child fell

  The fly drank then backstroked on the skin of wine then perished

  It is a true suntan because her ass is white

  Red rock with green lichen

  Green ground with red lichen

  Since Bob jogs he snores less says his wife

  Yes the hoopless barrel will break when filled

  We fear the vicious Brazilian honeybee

  Her eroticism is fungoid as in fungus

  Some of us are aliens from god knows where

  The midwest barren without good shellfish

  The announcement said get to the high ground

  but we were unable to move while the waters

  crept up to the window, peeked in, then receded.

  There was a fish near the mailbox, a lake trout

  with two immature lamprey eels dangling from

  their teethhold on the stomach.

  For five days the moon was red from the dust storm.

  It lost its novelty. Then on the sixth the moon

  was pink and regained its novelty. On the seventh

  it disappeared though reports from Perth, Australia,

  established a white bladder-shaped object in the sky.

  Third sighting:

  Is she the black-crowned night heron

  our lady of the marshes

  hidden at the far end of the lake

  the verge of an enormous swamp

  hearing her call amid stippled shadow ten thousand tree frogs

  the vision of eros as water bird

  emerging from the green brush near midnight

  stately wading legs

  RETURNING TO EARTH

  for Guy & Anna

  What forgotten reverie, what initiation,

  it may be, separated wisdom from the

  monastery and, creating Merlin,

  joined it to passion?

  –W.B. Yeats, A Vision

  1977

  RETURNING TO EARTH

  She

  pulls the sheet of this dance

  across me

  then runs, staking

  the corners far out at sea.

  So curious in the middle of America, the only “locus”

  I know, to live and love at great distance. (Growing

  up, everyone is willing to drive seventy miles to see

  a really big grain elevator, ninety miles for a dance,

  two hundred to look over a pair of Belgian mares

  returning the next day for the purchase, three hundred

  miles to see Hal Newhouser pitch in Detroit, eight

  hundred miles to see the Grand Ole Opry, a thousand

  miles to take the mongoloid kid to a Georgia faith healer.)

  I hitched two thousand for my first glimpse of the Pacific.

  When she first saw the Atlantic she said near Key Largo,

  “I thought it would be bigger.”

  I widowed my small

  collection of magic

  until it poisoned itself with longing.

  I have learned nothing.

  I give orders to the rain.

  I tried to catch the tempest in a gill net.

  The stars seem a little closer lately.

  I’m no longer afraid to die

  but is this a guidepost of lunacy?

  I intend to see the ten hundred million worlds Mañjushri

  passed through before he failed to awaken the maiden.

  Taking off and landing are the dangerous times.

  I was commanded in a dream to dance.

  O Faustus talks to himself,

  talks to himself, talks to himself,

  talks to himself, talks to himself,

  Faustus talks to himself,

  talks to himself.

  Ikkyū’s ten years near the whorehouses

  shortens distances, is truly palpable;

  and in ten years you will surely

  get over your itch. Or not.

  Don’t waste yourself staring at the moon.

  All of those moon-staring-rear-view-mirror deaths!

  Study the shadow of the horse turd in the grass.

  There must be a difference between looking at a picture

  of a bird and the actual bird (barn swallow)

  fifteen feet from my nose on the shed eaves.

  That cloud SSW looks like the underside

  of a river in the sky.

  O I’m lucky

  got a car that starts almost every day

  tho’ I want a new yellow Chevy pickup

  got two letters today

  and I’d rather have three

  have a lovely wife

  but want all the pretty ones

  got three white hawks in the barn

  but want a Himalayan eagle

  have a planet in the basement

  but would prefer the moon in the granary

  have the northern lights

  but want the Southern Cross.

  The stillness of this earth

  which we pass through

  with the precise speed of our dreams.

  I’m getting very old. If I were a mutt

  in dog years I’d be seven, not stray so far.

  I am large. Tarpon my age are often large

  but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise

  my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343.

  Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses,

  but I have dropped any notion of explaining

  to them why I read so much. To be mysterious

  is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered

  lately that my subjects do not live a life,

  but are life itself. They do not recognize

  the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship.

  To them I am pretty much a fellow creature.

  So distances: yearns for Guayaquil and Petersb
urg,

  the obvious Paris and Rome,

  restraint in the Cotswolds, perfumes of Arusha,

  Entebbe bristling with machine guns,

  also Ecuadorian & Ethiopian airports,

  border guards always whistling in boredom

  and playing with machine guns;

  all to count the flies on the lion’s eyelids

  and the lioness hobbling in deep grass

  lacking one paw, to scan the marlin’s caudal fin

  cutting the Humboldt swell, an impossible scissors.

  There must be a cricket named Zagreus

  in the granary tucked under a roof beam,

  under which my three-year-old daughter

  boogies madly,

  her first taste of the Grateful Dead;

  she is well out of her mind.

  Rain on the tin roof which covers a temple,

  rain on my walking head which covers a temple,

  rain covering my laugh shooting

  toward the woods for no reason,

  rain splattering in pasture’s heat

  raising cones of dust,

  and off the horses’ backs,

  on oriole’s nest in ash tree,

  on my feet poking out the door,

  testing the endurance of our actual pains,

  biting hard against the sore tooth.

  She’s rolling in the bear fat

  She’s rolling in the sand

  She’s climbing a vine

  She’s boarding a jet

  She flies into the distance wearing blue shoes