A WEEKEND IN GRAND HAVEN


They put a trout on the cover, and peppermint grass

He sprinkled cocaine so so softly

Right there, in a little line along her cheekbone

If there were a camera in the oven
one could watch the bread swelling

What planet is that? Will Robinson asks Dr. Smith

That's who I feel like sometimes, running
around with my unkempt hair and jeans with ink spots

Dr. Smith with his anxiety
and delusions the world's simply not cooperating

I could see the green in her iris as I snorted the coke

It reminded me of Jupiter

COMPROMISE


Brilliantly shining despite our lengthy concurrence . . .

The poor man has a head like a peanut and tonight's
His big night

In the grass plants, nearby, lubrication . . .

We call what comes out of the anus waste
And yet this feeds the whole world

Okay, okay . . .

The concert's beginning

Which is why I'm just fine with these plastic utensils

CANVAS AT ROOM TEMPERATURE


I came to in the middle of the sermon. The house flashed
in shadow. Rain fell in the street. Every lawn in the city
soaked up the sounds from the working buildings, the churches
funneling water, the hymn now I was camping under.

I fell another day to waking, where lines and fire seemed
an essence of the rain, falling before compassion,
soaking up the trees and cities. I put my work aside and stepped
into the rich, cool grass, somewhere a radio still dreaming.

The preacher wearing furs and rags stopped speaking. I felt
my heart in sleep, glassine. The animals and kids were eating.
She covered my mouth, the rain had never been, the buildings shone
as light through window, the bed now damp but cool by evening.

AIR TRAVEL


I hold up three fingers

They're what the hand should empty--dirty gestures

The cow flops home on Monday

Wringing a neck for the sweat that's dripping through the empty eye

That got their desks in a neat little row

The cleanest toenails you ever did see--palm trees up to His ankles

The man moans decked out with wood

Another looks right out of his head
But with no eardrums the chaos means

Police parked outside the school of no chances

Ostrich with his dead itinerary waiting at the bankslashairport

Three fingers in space means "W"

SLEEP

It wasn't snowing, and we sat under a heat lamp
watching it rain on TV. The constant metric of living
in pairs is an almost irredeemable human
phenomenon--fire trucks blaze past at two a.m . . .

*

You can tell the men had grown weary, no bridge is worth this . . .

*

In the sunlight, by day, we read pamphlets designed
to ameliorate mental disease implementation.

Sensible as farm, was one. Liable to be hypnotized was another.

The smaller of these animals, heavy of incisor,
sat in a harbor of lamplight reading individual sentences.

Ouch, she said. Or Oh my God.

*

The glass of seltzer left burning on the mantel released a few
fissures of crystallized vapor--very much like taking a breath
or waking in a stranger's bed and opening your eyes to two glowing
sky lights.

*

After that, after your own face, and the faces behind you, have
ooobecome
more obvious than is a pleasure to oversee, you reach for the switch
that makes it start snowing inside.

DON'T TALK ANYMORE


Pomade is--it's the future of these cupboards

The quiet in an empty island house

The middle of a series of very long tunnels
All circling a massive cranium w/skin attached

A giant drain

The comforter is thrown against the window shades

The wedge of a man's beard

Are you going to lead with that schooner?

If it's all the same to you, an Atlantic blues on pearls as
ooowedding night

The sticks are made of vessels, dry docked

I remember you as baby, in reverse, your face
growing colder and colder in the Great Lakes sunshine

UTILITY


It was there, wrecked cars, hunting for a thermostat

The stripe down the horse's huge head

The pump station had room for a chair, a paint-splattered window

You couldn't not want to get all Bonnie and Clyde in that place

Miles away from hospital records

At night there, between washers, a screaming pope

or Sitting Bull

I was drinking the western for varnish . . .

Ten year old girls dressed as Indians, mothers leaning over hood
Ornaments with arrows sticking out of their backs

"Record your experience"

I couldn't believe the first dollar was so wrinkly

It was the way she said Limited Resources

Like a claw-footed tub, but with forests in-between

The cowboy boots were red and the horizon, waterless, begged

It was like ripping open a loaf of bread

MARIANNE MOORE

ooooooooooooo("it is a privilege to see so much confusion")


He popped one-million balloons in under a week

It's called--writing your autobiography

In an alley in New York the dumpsters clang at 1 a.m.

A light fixture, a fish gasping on a plate,

Spider webs so old they drift over plosives between mouthfuls . . .

She reminds one student of his grandmother, "The zookeeper . . ."

A real Menippean satire . . .

The bulldog snorts cocaine and farts up some Yeats

You don't need to cut a wedge in your heart--can't you just garden?

Queen is not Pink Floyd?

(What would we have done without you?)

The infant rabbits are there, under the soft fleece of tan grass,
like a bowlful of evolving peach pits, breathing . . .

Thank God the cat is indoors, asleep, dreaming of slitting
ooosome young bird's throat

THE BOATS COME BY


Pain, my idea

The Rape of the Sabine People

she lifted her guitar like a club as the shadows crossed
ooothe mother-face

Coyote Raccoon Fruit Bat Howler Monkey

I admire the dog--

Struck by an air-cooled BMW hog
he sought comfort under the tinkling
of pine needles

Sometimes waking the wind chimes form a pearly exit

But then I see my own hands

or face in the mirror and I forget that floating mausoleum

I know where we're going it's all lightweight--
like leaves, or feathers; like stars sprinkled on lake water

at night.

The grief I felt for that dog was of this earth.

PURPOSEFULNESS


for example: tastelessness

it heightens the tension

attend to the space around the cradle-board

(don’t feed the cradle)

we call these experiments peripheral attendance

the baby's not an anteater

(at least not yet)

you can open the stars and find a wall falling like hail into
ooothe Rocky Mountains

(from Indiana!)

Let the customer wait in a closet or deli case

the conditions are perfect for cruelty

don't get out your wallet at all

Today marks the end of all storytelling

IDEA OF ORDER


It's drizzling out, no bacon and eggs

The Mary Tyler Moore Show hums into an electronic dot

Perhaps landscape architecture should have been your metier

A rhododendron placed
Between
Two hollies, cross pollinating

Desire and its grandmother, waiting for the first snowflake

Or somewhere hot

Frank Stella earrings

I still go behind what used to be called Frank's (Nursery and Craft)
For garden stones

Capsized with outmoded grief, angst-ridden masonry

These sleeping members of the universe make tears

Hello! we say, although it's dark

And lonely

EARTH ART


No kids, the dark splashes another Pollock

That writhing, the pillar of maggots

The problem of it: the litter of shoplifting, sunlight, and awnings

*

You're confusing Barnett Newman with the Monopoly logo again

*

They reenact a rape scene--it's part of the script

Ana Mendieta is throwing darts in her grave

Carl Andre starts spitting on his index finger

A tiny prop plane cuts a corner of the sky off Manhattan

*

First there were crickets, dining on a pile of toenails

And the moth projects a face--it doesn't know

It's tied by its dick to the moon

The words start forming in my mouth but never leave

GANNET


What if the wheels sucked up the rubber

owls lining the runway with
their blue heads turning

Each bird stands on an overturned bottle of wine, or blood

Metaphysical ennui

As fast as the synapses burn down--

your mother goes rolling down the staircase in her chariot of glee

And all night long
the briefcase snaps open--

lemons floating on the sea at night

ice cubes melting in a bright blue furnace

roar of a jet engine suddenly stopping

IN ABSENTIA


Posoda, dramata . . .

The articulation of the need to explain

I pitched inside to Mike Damison--

It was a strategy:

The photograph showed some sky to ground lightning

Second base is an ascetic experience

Reflex and meditation

Right field is for zoologists

In the back, way back, behind the discarded bleechers

Somebody reading a newspaper--

His daughter shaving her legs at the artesian well

Fish rise in the forgotten pond

11:20'S BIG HEMISPHERE


Peptic, lachrymose, you make a right turn,
close bank accounts

follow clouds to end of everything

I mean, the philosophy of righteousness

Wayne Thiebaud's got a romance with luscious veneers

a landscape leading deeper, deeply
into the middle of the body

four hundred thousand four hundred and thirty three seconds
oooinside it

like when you're squeezed

by the thing you hold and observe--death orbs

a a tiny road map of blood in these sunny-side eggs

palpitation of Unicorn . . .

We looked up from our breakfast plates at the steel shingles
ooorippling

I AM ALL OUT OF TUNE


You awake in your sundry amplitudes, alive
to the sense you slept through another magnanimous opera

with all the bending floor lamps

and strangers passing on through

Your headlights come in through the window,
one insinuated feline growling like a compass that has lost all purpose

So how is it now that you are capsizing
through another new compress with mouthwash and Dial soap

(your passport stamped dissident)

Where is the steam upon the streets of London

It's replaced with hand sanitizer wall hangings

Enter: scribe with headache but proper travel documentation

I think I'd better live home

I STILL WANT THE CHEESCAKE


All over my back lawn, settlers

People kissing backpacks

In my bathroom, a new secretary

(I'll take over now, Melissa, thank you)

And this lovely childhood full of birds
Threading ripe intestines right on through each grant proposal

It's a rather flat harbor

Death with it's silencer, the way God used to be enough

What I hate most are the red cups
And the way they commiserate with the flocks of dandelions

The antlers broken and leaning in a pellucid paddywagon

Hamlet's running away with his brain-stem half gone

The rest of the habitat's not quite at piece in this country

TO LIVE IS ALSO TO READ


Power went out here in Gotham last night--I know
because I heard it--my fifty-four wind tunnel
fans--because I must shut out the outside world
if I am to sleep at all--just stopped roaring.
I awoke as if in the mind of a mummified live bird,
thinking in twenty directions, and still not flying
(and I, still not sleeping). It was a short term
emergency type thing. Although the circuit breakers
were tripped--Uh oh, what's wrong with the toaster
oven?--and leaves plastered the windows like
something trying to suck up light, a giant many-tentacled
beast of some kind. Dark, even in the daylight--especially
in the daylight. Gallaher is having a good week,
having discovered Ron Padgett, who I will here
thank again for giving me "The bean of understanding,"
which I stole and put in some poem.

Four Graham Foust poems.

I can't recommend enough Kenneth Fearing's
The Big Clock. It is a great read. A small novel.
While I'm here I'll plug Gabe Gudding's Rhode
Island Notebook--a book-length poem full of
shredded particulars and heartache, and Nancy
Reagan as a dive bombing, nickel-nippled
bird . . .

AMBIDEXTROUS


Oh, he's happy, working busily with his glue-stick

I put love on the snow out there yesterday

right inside her fur coat

the amplitude of bracketed, two balloons skidding

recycled fake grass
was like a buffer for the teeth in that ocean

the clutter
and come-ons

an old Oasis CD frothed and spun in the fading salt water

and the oranges were warmer than toast

Please take me with you

and with a hair dryer you seal those sockets until the
oootight plastic pops


***
aided here by Paul Foster Johnson's Refrains/Unworkings