Sad Summer Eyes

For Robert


Another gesture is shunted.

Nothing here tonight will be totally redeemed.

JAZZ AT SUNSET

The blue notes come down when the sky deepens,
The intangible is lost at the stroke of night,
Vanishing all but the moon and our created things
Glowing, blurred, and bleary, our captive energy
Hissing against the empty increments of the moments,
The rest of the daily machinations,
The dimming of the acetylene.
A jagged shriek, a soughful, humid horn,
A quenchless cough and singing groan occupy
This unwound, ground-down lighted room
And escape like gas. Dissipation shimmers and shakes.
We stoke the fires of a sax solo,
We brush color into our faces.
The demons are now in the air,
By morning they will snake away.

FOR DAVID MURRAY

How quickly the sounds outside turn
From trance to threat:
A tap once too quickly, a gasp too plangent.
Every time I pick up my pen, I am up against
A palimpsest of cliché — natural expression.
I don't know what a good musician is
But I know good music
And hear it almost every time I play
With my ear.

Dance to the bitterness.
The sweet heat is
Sweeping
The moping prisoners
Squeeming to get away
Into a pleasurable trance.
The hollow wing ascending,
The croak billowing
Over the deknotted, labial lands
Shading them like a cloak one sees from below
And scarcely understands, yet yearns to know
Of this something promising reward,
This evidence for hope
Sends hope springing in hot pursuit of an object
It can outrace.
Only the eyes burn away
Like seed shells falling...
Chamomile grass, fuchsia, spath
Sassafras stalks in a flax field
Ripe with lobelia,
Calanchoe, colendura, catmint
In a mind that remembers
That the sunlight received is commuted to flower
(As ears of bone transfer inside, to the net,
What, once in, is engraved in stone)
Whose only purpose
To attract
Pecky nosy birds:
There are no prim vanities in the bush,
No crafted aesthetic pursuit.
Beauty is just a response to the threat of extinction.
We pick the stem,
Dismember it to show our love.
Love was required by the pining stamen and pistol.
Love is what is sought,
But it cannot be given, only received;
The thing does not reside in the beauty.

On either side,
Terms are laid out
As if in opposition.
Both lovers and enemies stalk you,
Both lovers and enemies listen.
Matted with all the arcane simulations
That preceded your introduction,
You heard them all as well as we,
Heard them so well, we listen to you
Because we don't want to hear them again.
Out of boredom, we are prepared for the insanity
Of your combinations.
You must keep on challenging us
Even when, after stoning you for so long
We are finally allowed to ignore you.
Keep on blowing history out of your pores
And sucking it back in with conscious, hesitant breaths
With the generous passion for hoping
We can, must go on again.

HEARING ALBERT COLLINS

Artful as they go down, cagey,
Mangy with contrivance,
The patterns fold out into spirits
Each with a rhythm
That dances around the whole
With salty plum lickings,
Shaking in the hot quicksand,
Rolling with the bells
Of breeze through the branches
And bellowing hollows —
Roaring voices
Climb the pounding floor
As sticks, insistent, hit, and blades, tickling, twitch
And cut the dullness of the skin that singes
And gasps for breath amidst smoke and alcohol.
Scoured metal tubs misdirect,
Mangle, and modulate
The proddings of nerves
Broken in the sweetness of their pulp;
As they are brushed in cadence, their pain bends and stiffens
In the back and forth dynamic to the divine:
Rhythm as logic,
As the massing of electrons around the empty space
Of which all matter chiefly consists,
Strokes of order:
Dancing becomes painting,
Painting becomes forests,
Forests become the heavens,
Which are precisely the sky, as the wind is the word
That in its whispers gives form to the prison,
The freedom that feeds on itself,
The whammy bar bent on the sunlight.

Out of the sounds of stellar shells
Grow imagined universes that light up the northern sky
And reveal the streams running through us.

THE IMMORTAL COFFEE URN

Quest,
The band,
Whose egos were too huge to co-exist
They didn't try, and agreed to cynically vie
To make each new song worst than the last,
And succeeded magnificently;
The band who wore boas, pink silk and mustaches,
Betty Davis hair,
And preened like California surf studs,
Never whining of their renown,
For they clothed in high school sentiments the subversions of high school poets,
Discovering and proclaiming loudly
That "love" means death
And "dreams" mean life itself,
As every prom band from Brownsville to Sault Saint Marie
Will agree, as long as the songs, in any key, can be
Bombastically stirring, beautifully pretentious;
The band that in a million posters summed us up:
The singing hair stylist, the gas station guitarist,
The house painter bass player, the disturbed church organist and
Fight manager drummer,
They toured towns in every exurb of Savage Plenty,
Holding businessmen hostage in elevators,
Moving cars, producing children
Who were born to seek this secret, for twenty-one futile years
Of radios too embarrassed to remember
Until the times, ever cruel, forgot,
And the wardrobe of the hip ones became the uncool threads of their parents,
And the birthsong plays again as if for the first time,
And decades dissolve into a stone that gracelessly holds the center.

We cannot escape, we who fled this madness years ago,
It comes back in all its lazy mendacity,
The symbol for what really is,
Not some Greek aspiration we call Art,
Just five guys powered by jellybeans in a studio for five hours
Producing sounds that still keep the Tsitsele crazy
Stamping and chanting its yeah yeah's for weeks.

SONG OF THE ARRANGER

Ghost music.
I used to listen more
And copy less.
I used to let it ruin me more than I
Ruined it.
It was itself before me
Now it submits
To my gentle stress against it,
A slight taint,
Not on it,
On me; I have not gained the friendship
Of the devil rhythm.
It hath gained mine.

RICHARD ESTES IN SEARCH OF THE RIGHT CUP OF COFFEE

Drugstore, 1970

Getting the white just right, he spends months
Thinking through the perfect lightening of blue,
Coaxing the sun out of pipes of blue aluminum,
With blue sky shining back out.
He peers through years of catalogues for that disturbed,
Elegant, sinister lettering, to spell "drugs" on rounded
Biomorphic steel in glowing red, rendered only after measuring
Neon signs against a thousand sunsets.
He has visited the Schraft's Ice Cream sign factory
And waited in countless Venetian blinded professional rooms
Too lonely, too shabby, too kept up by ghosts, and he soaked up
Too much of the stain and dust, retaining it in these yellow window
Shades and black gothic eaves.
He has waited through packs of Shiva Thin 100's
For the correct moment of sunlight,
When the atrium flashes with all its block glass shining,
In the autumn late afternoon when its force is equal to the sun's.
He looked, in that shadowed side of the building, at neon
Until it burned a hallucination that could persist;
On the sunny side, the neon barely subsists against the gleam
Of all the light Vermeer and Du Pont could infiltrate,
Like Hollywood with all its flood lamps.
The pharmacy window reflects everything, the glassy city and
Its shattered souls, alive in funhouse mirrors
Showcasing watches, scents, spirits, and the drooling consumer
So clearly all we see is the white of the sun
In the window that reflects all but itself
When that which is most real becomes illusion.

POLLOCK'S "BIRD"

Bird (Poured Composition II), 1943

The easy wave of bird wings as they glide
Betrays their tangled path, just as the slowness of the sky
Can often be confused with silence.
What the surface yields at a given moment
Advances through a higher, inconceivable order
While appearing to dissolve.

The bones protrude —
Hearts that form dumb arrows —
Brutal insects fight the trajectory
Of uncompromising gravity,
Working for the dark fin of the moon.
The sandy sky
Splinters into plates, it curves away
Like the wing of a beach receiving the sea,
While the clouds run in splatters,
Like feathers in a deathly flutter.
Armies of bird spread like pine needles, dancing for fish,
Knotty streams of motion,
They hang in the wind, turn downward
Before rising in circles, their vapor trails
Pouring plasma seines upon the horizon,
Ignorant detailings of the void,
Illustrations of the mind's seeking
Against what's seen and not known.

FOR CÉZANNE

In the darkness of eternal light, I sift through the shattered ore
Repentent saints have left behind and wonder, as they did
If anything of worth shows through — can these fragile coals
Be lifted up to the tumbling earth,
Or will their rigid forms continue to elude us
As we rise into heaven and descend into darkness?

Yet, as we're left with them, unignited, our love
Won't let us lose them
And that is enough residue of faith to console us
As our lives burn away in search of an ideal
That grows every day more elusive.

ART REMOVED FROM HISTORY

He paints only huge pink cartoon phalluses,
The most famous painter in New York.
He knows how to wheedle bond dealers.
He knows the right brand of Schnapps,
The right alienated talk, as if risen from a Marxian grave
To see Tiffany's for the first time as something
To which Art can only aspire.
He can talk directly, without pausing, without laughing,
Comfortably talking to them, talking about money,
He drinks bottle after bottle easily, but it doesn't
Diminish the force of his theories of art
He perfected at school before teachers far less
Forgiving and less susceptible to gracious smiles.
His work begins at sundown, prowling the clubs,
Buying the right drugs for the right people, relentlessly
Seeking them out, only to appear as a matter-of-fact dealer
Of chemicals and irony, not interested in leaving anything
But a crude, macho, sexual trace, his business card,
So when the critics and collectors ask them about him,
It's "he's brilliant, an irresistible force" — he's there at
All the parties, willing, compliant, uncommunicative,
A master of non-sequitors at opportune moments, talking
And spending and loosening, like a municipal trader
Overseeing the future of New York.
He is thoroughly worn out when he wakes in his East Village
Loft, scene of many violent nocturnal performance pieces,
And after a bowl of cereal, paints more pictures to fill the void
He had created in higher minds the night before.
Occasionally he must stop, in shame.

LANDSCAPE WITH PAINTER

Good morning! — The pale opalescent haze
Hangs like a second skin over the sealed roofs.
It cannot puncture the lay of the land,
So it sits and makes the land sweat
Until, nearly satisfied, it dissolves
As the tired, hating sun trivializes
The winking lights in the waiting windows
And closes finally their lids like fireflies hushed.
Birds vanish into the haze
And reappear unchanged.
The painter on his porch
Admires his flowers, though not enough to keep them from dying.
He gives himself a headache, receives congratulations
On the flower box, takes an aspirin,
And torches the whole thing
Because he didn't have the last word at the party last night,
Because they could not thank him enough.
Curse the flowers,
The sun would fry them and eat them for dinner anyway
Although they act as if they're doing the sun a favor.

BLAKEAN

The substance spoils.
The intangible stays fixed
In everlasting contradiction fresh
At the far end of the trombone plunging.

He leaps upon you like stain;
But no one cares about a second-hand man.
When man is nature and nature is man
Where is man who is man when nature is nature
To push it back
Into our sight, our hands?

HERE AND GONE

Death to all heroes
Who breathe the current out as if their own.
We dress them up to dress them down
And explain their loss of breath,
Then hide behind something else that covers the recess
And so forget...
There is always the chance to be the hero --
The tough guy, the agent, the priest.
If a mind is occupied
For a moment more
Than necessary for
Confident comfort,
For normal doubt,
Then one can inhabit the next Godsend,
Can link with the chains,
With metal,
A hero,
Flower that erupts
That power dissipates;
Hours that tick so steady by...
So another contracts the glazed eyes
And sudden impulse fury the role requires and summons.
Such brutal clearing of throats
And chafing of arms.
The heroes are lined up, and proceed blindly
Firmly under hand
And over heads that stare
And stare back.
They are stranded like rooks,
Settling like dust at the depot waiting for the train
To move them farther away and further short.

MISSING LINK BLUES

I've found it.
It's right there
Beyond the final star
Behind the wall.
Can't you feel it when there is no wind?
Can't you hear it when there is no sound?
It makes the decisions as you move along.
It is not secret, but obvious.
Every moment reflects its message.
And it's right there
Beyond the final star
Behind the wall.

TO SEE SO MUCH, AND BE SO LITTLE

Watch over us, Lord.
Watch us leap the highest fence.
Watch us walk from place to place.
Watch me.

Let our fight and its energies burst like a bloom
Before Your eyes.
Please may You favor me.

Let our efforts form a web to rest Your gaze.
Watch us as we come together
Through appointed elders speaking for us.
Watch me as I sit in peace
Spinning my secrets into space.

Watch out for us as we form a shell
To meet Your unity.
Beware the solitary onion
Boiling as it bleeds,
The bulbs moaning underneath the paper-thin sheath.

See only me
As we rise with all our hopes to meet You.

SIMPLICITY IS A VIRTUE

I want to write
But not of what
I want
To lay the feelings down
Still them as if soothed
enlarge them to sound
Reduce them to glyph
Until they move
Only when touched.

AFTER REALITY

Suspended on a string,
While the cries of cats and children sound the same thing,
The dogwood's always losing its bloom again
Fading purple as your prose
It's designed to contain.
We pluck immaculate sentences,
Finding inmates in the ruins
Of the swamp, the soup of nature, with its ineluctable virtues
Blowing blissfully beyond the page.
The paper shivers on the yellow sill.
We're trapped in our needing
Like chicklets, with moss for hair,
Run down the donnybrook to the pond,
The awkward out-of-time dance called following.

MOMENTARY ANXIETY

Where is the shimmy, where is the shake,
The icy cold goblin who lives in the lake,
The lady with the tarot enigmatically adding weights?
When I took this job, I had no idea
The results mean nothing, that the work is all,
And everything left over mere rationalization for the toil,
To be squandered in your free time, like mother's milk and pretzels.
The world inwardly exposed can be used to climb the stations of the cross
And to cast off commitments that would whittle away at your soul
If your mind was not occupied in impossible things
That whisper their existence, but disappear
In the seams between the world's life rattle and your mortal coil.
The bats that play in the rafters
And the wasps that escape to the light
To avoid our treacly desecrations
Have no hope of fame, for their world is too real,
But unless you can pass your demons on to the rest
They will remain your demons, and like parasites possess you,
To die when you can no longer hold them tight.
The angels don't want to listen to your stories, for to them
Dreams are all equal, they are what got you there.
For now, there are only invisible readers waiting while you are searching
For another reason to continue.

SONG FOR A FRIEND

Shine on, harvest switchblade,
The methadone clinic awaits
At the end of the sentence
Withholding judgment,
But the kewpie doll stares at you,
Sad keeper of flames
Boiling down
The suppressed that's madness
When expressed,
Holding the body's fort
Against the mind's
Backsliding.
You've stood in defiance
Of everything,
Like only a martyr would,
Lost like a tumor in the night's luminescence,
Groping at a question
Formed by longing,
While the words are on the lighted side
With the answer and other
Logical impossibilities
That guide your train through other fields,
Not these palm leaves,
Eucalyptus, cactus,
The jungle alive with deaths
That charm the jarring blur you see through
As you pace in your rotted
Rented room,
With the hardly any furniture you possess
Hardly moved,
Your thoughts are embroiled
But you can hardly touch,
You feel way too close
Yet estranged
At the same time,
Searching through emptied-out skies
For the clouds you thought you outgrew
When you thought they would not be
Thrown out
With the baby blue.
Oh my God, oh my God I did not think
You were in this needle too.

SILVER

Toreadors in vermilion capes,
The stench of pork chops and chuck steaks
Hankering on the grill, and they are waving
The dirty linen sheets of all those many sordid neighbors
That you scared all through the night
As you drank away their bourbons and danced clear of their haze
And put your second-hand notions on their electrical clothes lines
To dry away the tears.
After fifteen clear-eyed beers, the thought awakens
Like a train in the bruised tomato of your brain
That you are forsaken, shake and bake Jake,
Now the jets have overtaken
The crumble cake of city, the brute necessity
Of an ordered society, the saliva like the plot
Thickens, and spreads its silver slime in gamy pockets
Where the sun don't shine. It's all sublime or nothing at all, the savage said
Before he took the knife to his head
And made it all worthwhile for an instant —
The clairvoyant winced, but she couldn't disclose where she was last night,
When the bullshit vapor hit the fan
And solidified down the chain of command
To end up where they were, it was easy for her to forget
At that moment, and remember that it wasn't her dream,
The fire truck screams, all awake that's going awake,
It's nosebleed season, and the drivers are putting all they don't have aside
To say it's all in a day's work, every dog must have his day job
And bask in the afterglow as if it is all something
That someone could do or know, no,
This time no freight can stop here,
No paisley hankies, no edible underwear, no bottomless cups of underarm detergent,
No tug on my cape for a friendly copper,
No swaggering cowboys on some weasel's lasso
Payroll fetching me for a tug on my noggin,
A silver bullet on my heart strings,
Climbing some mountain I really can't see,
But I will pretend to go to in the oblivion of my stolen dreams
For lack of better, and nothing thereof,
The place is indifferent except for the gong
That hits when you forget where you are
And remember who you are,
When the silver thunder nabs you hole in one in a million
And you're speaking like ash from a flame.
There's a thunder somewhere off, and maybe you can hear it.