* * *

Epic endangerment of the heart
which is broken, of the soul
which is broken, of the cracked
indistinguishable persona
which is cracked and broken,
everyone wanting, everyone falling asleep
and to everyone who is cracked,
no sneakers can help you,
not their rubber, not their rubber,
not a knowledge of smallness or
wish to be covered. It is
callous to say there are a thousand
spotted owls and only one of me.
Maybe it's stupid to say such things
about extinction. Birds were falling
from the sky and this pornographer
I know was running around talking
about an angle I don't feel comfortable
mentioning. Maybe in a way I'm a
prude, and he says you know people
they're people. A Polish couple precise
with their memory and a junkie
with a tiny bit of etiquette. I fell
asleep on the pasalla. I was weak
taking off. Someone put my loafers
to the side, and the waves, only the wealthy
can afford such waves. Cuban cigars. You know,
some of the greatest men never had vacations.
I wrote PASCAL IN CANCUN. A boring book,
I admit, but that part where the girls
start rocking their heads back and forth.
That part where the sun just washes
over her forehead, and then a cheek
and then another and then the first again, etc.
That's all I cared about, but explain that
to a publisher. One rocky sea and the water
just splashes out of its glass. "Fantastic."
"Fantastic." Do it again cry the children.
I'm cracked. I'm done. I'm as a bell. I'm
aboard these rubber sneakers bound for destruction.
So, my little ones, next time you see me
coming by, scream out "die" "die" "die"
then you'll have fantastic.



by Joshua Beckman (b. 1971)

Go and Catch a Falling Star

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

by John Donne (1572 - 1631)

Spermal Chimney

Haunch under the whip of douches in the slime—
no, no behind the curtain in the women's convent.
The body's symbolic golden cerams
dribble a cross atop their buttocks.
O Jesus my kingpin of astronomy,
his heart is chiseled in over his tit
like a ruby in the public pawn shop,
gobbles his bloodred-orange down.
Fantastic priests like sexual desserts
your wellheeled clientele laces its human boots.
My penis in the shape of my own heart
rests on the pillows.
to fondle it 's some kind of sickness
but you'll be lining up for more soon, won't you?
a naked man is never poor—
all the more so if he sweetly loses sleep.
You've got to bounce, my honey, give your son a bang
onanism is pure semiotics
O Joan of Arc my murky inkbottle.
I really want to tease you reader
but not too much.
I never saw a bunch of women underneath a bed
could tuck their legs between their breasts.
I'm begging you to let it be
I want you to ungird your literarily
pathetically cockteasing loins
so I can whip some feeling into them.
I'm panting underneath the covers
I'm snuffing out the cat that's wrapped around my hand
I really don't know why this scenery's like garbage.
I kiss your mouth while vomiting.
Death ought to be exquisite.
I only drag it out.



by Francis Picabia (1879-1953)
Translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Hen Woman

The noon heat in the yard
smelled of stillness and coming thunder.
A hen scratched and picked at the shore.
It stopped, its body crouched and puffed out.
The brooding silence seemed to say “Hush. . .”

The cottage door opened,
a black hole
in a whitewashed wall so bright
the eyes narrowed.
Inside, a clock murmured 'Gong...' (what a line!)

(I had felt all this before.)

She hurried out in her slippers
muttering, her face dark with anger,
and gathered the hen up jerking
languidly. Her hand fumbled.
Too late. Too late.

It fixed me with its pebble eyes
(seeing what mad blur).
A white egg showed in the sphincter;
mouth and beak opened together;
and time stood still.

Nothing moved: bird or woman,
fumbled or fumbling - locked there
(as I must have been) gaping.

*


There was a tiny movement at my feet,
tiny and mechanical; I looked down.
A beetle like a bronze leaf
was inching across the cement,
clasping with small tarsi
a ball of dung bigger than its body.

The serrated brow pressed the ground humbly,
lifted in a short stare, bowed again;
the dung-ball advanced minutely,
losing a few fragments,
specks of staleness and freshness.

*

A mutter of thunder far off
- time not quite stopped.
I saw the egg had moved a fraction:
a tender blank brain
under torsion, a clean new world.

As I watched, the mystery completed.
The black zero of the orifice
closed to a point
and the white zero of the egg hung free,
flecked with greenish brown oils.

It fell and turned over slowly.
Dreamlike, fussed by her splayed fingers,
it floated outward, moon-white,
leaving no trace in the air,
and began its drop to the shore.

*

I feed upon it still, as you see;
there is no end to that which,
not understood, may yet be noted
and hoarded in the imagination,
in the yolk of one’s being, so to speak,
there to undergo its (quite animal) growth,

dividing blindly,
twitching, packed with will,
searching in its own tissue
for the structure
in which it may wake.
Something that had – clenched
in its cave – not been
now was: an egg of being.

Through what seemed a whole year it fell
– as it still falls, for me,
solid and light, the red gold beating
in its silvery womb,
alive as the yolk and white
of my eye; as it will continue
to fall, probably, until I die,
through the vast indifferent spaces
with which I am empty.

*

It smashed against the grating
and slipped down quickly out of sight.
It was over in a comical flash.
The soft mucous shell clung a little longer,
then drained down.

She stood staring, in blank anger.
Then her eyes came to life, and she laughed
and let the bird flap away.

"It's all the one.
There's plenty more where that came from!"

by Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928)

My Interior

One bordello, three suites in the ass.
One two-bit nightery with chessboard in the back.
A snare drum, a pump, the rubble pile of a palace.
Siamese traps, and pink cocktail umbrellas
for the little blowsy ones who tramp the boulevards
and blue byways of my interior, tapping the asphalt


with their parasol tips, unfurling their wings
to fly the Queen, tipping their fedoras to show their holes.
All day they pull cotton from inhalers that come down my conveyor.
But in my night, they bolt home and lock it tight, and move inward,
and begin to sniff by their basins, and whimper
We feel a first liquid now coming down the fuchsia


We hear Opal, we feel the bloodpump slow
Our lice awaken and slide to the wings
We nurse them with our holes, we love in his marrow
We snake out pipes, make rounds with caulk guns
Before dawn, debauched,
they try to stroke me to sleep in the bath . . .


High noontide in my interior: the red deer
wends out of my ravine when I wave, the gilled goat.
The shadows of my Frenchmen annihilate my little night-womps.
In my back-of-the-eyelid cinema: arabesques.
My best records are each hiss or moan or tremolo.
Your shadow annihilates my little day-womps.


Languor keeps my body from the desk.
Languor keeps the stockings on your legs.
Glare keeps the little ones at the conveyor
and out of the head . . . but then, from way off, with cranking
comes my night, and when it arrives
I go to it like a callboy to a C-note.



by Jeff Clark (b. 1971)

The Absent

They are not here. And we, we are the Others
Who walk by ourselves unquestioned in the sun
Which shines for us and only for us.
For They are not here.
And are made known to us in this great absence
That lies upon us and is between us
Since They are not here.
Now, in this kingdom of summer idleness
Where slowly we the sun-tranced multitudes dream and wander
In deep oblivion of brightness
And breathe ourselves out, out into the air –
It is absence that receives us;
We do not touch, our souls go out in the absence
That lies between us and is about us.
For we are the Others,
And so we sorrow for These that are not with us,
Not knowing we sorrow or that this is our sorrow,
Sorrow for loss of that which we never possessed,
The unknown, the nameless,
The ever-present that in their absence are with us
(With us the inheritors, the usurpers claiming
The sun and the kingdom of the sun) that sorrow
And loneliness might bring a blessing upon us.

by Edwin Muir (1887 - 1959)

Meditations in an Emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."—Mrs. Thrale.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

by Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)