Tiffany's Song
Once you've been chided often enough
For letting your mind stray far from home,
The sun rises on
Durable moorings.
Squirrel and owl cavort
At the loosened collar of the nasty wood.
The trees grow straight and tall
Around the bend, scribbling rent checks
To absurd obeisance. At the sight of a mouse,
The seasons revert to blended gridlock.
Weird mouse,
Local authorities have found our ship.
For Theremin
Come dusk, the unwary knight steers his swan boat towards a lone spectral
damsel despairing grievously on the opposite shore. French horns talk, then
cease abruptly. Freeze-dried pathos mounts as evening assumes its
calamitous dragon shape. Those scales make explicit an iridescent splurge of
spiritual sighting. Slender willows exchange pensées, arriving
apace at the shared understanding that self-help is as useless and
impenetrable as the blanket arbitrariness of class determinations.
"I thought they were beautiful but they're really glamorous."
(Bruce Conner on Nathaniel Dorsky's films)
Philip Whalen directs failed eyes toward the whirring Bolex.
Between thumb and forefinger the perceptual moment clicks:
"The camera is the world. I love the world."
Glass Hoist
The dictates of history are not of this world.
Plentitude and transcendent artifice
Unhinge the gates.
Overlooked commonalities remain negotiable
Upheld by those whose sense of touch
Runs counter to the claim of vision altogether.
But Then
for Anselm Hollo
Nobody knows
the trouble -- the wasted
whistles, catcalls, oceanic blitz,
diehard
push-button
fashion-conscious
expressivity.
Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently
You hope the Earth is equitable,
Because why else are you here,
Fraught with the extra time
And surefire energy, clear
And in the same breath, not.
Garbage, detritus, commandeers
Much of each day,
But materiality doesn't look that way to a peanut
Nor yet at us, prey as we seem to be
To the intimate void granted to assuage the even bigger abyss without.
Beams keep solvent if unpolished in
Amassed yearly vaultings.
Crumbs and contouring in an antique frame
Compound the sands they shift and bear the foot
Traffic along its jagged route.
Old Walkway, you who are traditionally mistaken about
Your portion of this well-whittled master plan,
How phenomena lodge
In every filter and grander
Conceptions dance the Life-form Jack.
Sorry about what passes as fact
In emboldened dot patterns, extended fingerings
Like Norway's prettiest tree
Against clouds' residual entertainment brought home
To meet our obligations as pockets fail.
For Per Henrik Wallin
Intentionality, can't hear you for the din
no sound in sight, inheritance
if listening is endearment, but impervious
a liberty positioned tight
in the still of the night
a handful of stars
Art Diary
for David Meltzer
Estes looks good here
Celmins exquisite,
and everything about that Brillo Box
achieves its lucent quiddity in time.
A New-Age showboat
of vinyl and kapok,
lithe bodies and retroactive fruit
film a sense of being at the event.
All are "expressions," each a ritual trick
with multiple crotch marks, lineaments,
cultural signage like metaphoric cleft chins
and precepts beyond
their facial contours. In a dark map,
Government Dog bites Everyman's butt,
and the worry lines on Mother's
brow deepen.
Remember when cognition could walk and talk
and copyright desire?
True, art today won't work like that –
funny-peculiar, not ha-ha.
Compass Points
All over herself
Thing said to my face
Blank of luster
To which ledges speak
Thing said
Correct objective
With slight bias
You or your dog
Oh disturb
The kettle to Edvard Munch
Assembly of ditches
Horizon asserts
You or the dog year
Dumped by the seaside
Pudding the sun never soaks
Beggars events
How quickly absorb, spoken cabal
Over moist mist recital
Slips ultimately left vertical of her being
Blistering, sea starts, brought, you tease
Cuban Fives
for Kit Robinson
Time the sound of what is more
Look sharp allow this clunk
Heady malice
Odd items situational is affect, loan
Just as "lusts" make clear mimetic physics
One question is traditional
What did the lady forget? or did you leave behind?
If anything, mature clowns stare
Create for press shots
Tidy inertia astounding remains he builds
Please acknowledge
There is music there too
Especially in some of Mahler's 7th
The viewer's headgear and little teeth
Rolling down on Salsa Sue
Wait for nature's tsk
Take the bait for lunar task
Last flowers doom nowadays arctic mull
Kiss-off kiss closet language leagues
And the horrid roll remains
States listings classes principles codes
Lumbar classics of a blue tin enameled bucket lakeside
But at maneuvers you stayed
Soft under the pout fumes
Events outer to mind beckoned
Militant male member
Pound of the ocean kit
I tell my friends
That's the end
Gifted female elements knocking
Just a phase at midday
Like money in the bank
Enormous portion ruined
Thirty seconds in love
Carved in animal court
And attendant crypts
An Alp's reunion here, but there
Rides negative ecstasy
User perfect,
Creep
A clitoris stuck to the tongue
Expenditure's private
Smatter of taste
For beans and sub clauses
Accommodating the spectral nozzle
Spelling integral pecks on the cheek
A straw person I once had
Occasion to observe
All-out attack on a one-of-a-kind
One of those on a heave
Tuna shoes
Suction the nonce
Everything on a windy day
Hooting through the brush
It is spring in the desert
As married people do
With mangled saints
Call of white heart
Loss
Once the remedial shelf
It is Easter in the phenomena
Each wandering soul
Open to suggestion
And the night sky less confounded afterwards
New grass with old
Which is why a soul kiss
Beetle Bailey pounds the mess hall counter
With Sarge's head
Insubordination
Azalea, either way a time-worn mesh
Phosphanes dabble in a field guide
For dead elephants
Tangents pour afoot
With hemoglobin on the way
Engender feats of caution
How operative
A doorstep on a star
High-definition clouds
One lung two tongue
Each thread a cluster into package slant
Without Penalty
As Traffic School becomes
The ruling paradigm of higher learning
And the citizenry pays dearly
For the right to witness ex-CHP officers engaged
In fitfully polishing
Their monologues, hopeful, at best,
Of high-end careers
On late-night Cable,
It's not so much the shame inflicted
As the concomitant displays
Of the eternal drunken car chase divided
By Infinity's irradiated speed bumps,
Careening en route
To regime change, permanent and without end.
In Costume
The endangered energy guys are coming on a Monday
And the steamed-up picture window (time being what it is, its prolonged
Disconnect elaborately personified) wavers blue-ishly spotlit,
Affecting a slight concussion to face the styptic deer.
In the parlance of permanence many bulbs need replacing.
I heard the woods speaking but they went about it the wrong way around,
Panting like mutts in the leafy strata.
Unlikely lunch: Dark toast soaked in soup du jour.
Agnes Morehead, Goddess of Nimbly Erected Spite, tell us,
What is it that will make life palatable when so it is?
And lunch absorbs from light executive privilege
At the high end of the cerebral cortex afloat on my fiery palatial plank.
She flies! The saucer can't not act.
The clock is whole, its animations invariably tingling,
Recruited to receive pronouncement of the final
Anagram hastily received dark nights long before graduation.
A Recording Device
Well, back to my ablutions then.
You never walk in the same movie
twice or feel the traction between
experience's proprietary sleepless
light pervading the girder's
unclouded eye.
You will want to lap the sheen off anyone's personal orifice
to imagine vapors crossing the grid's white string
wrapped
around a rusty nail, sweet denim moon swallowed up,
coercing landscape lovers
articulated.
Between action-packed earth
and acquisitive skies
there's a job to be done:
spatial distances
simply minding parked cars
in suspicious places -- the shrine of matter, perhaps
ephemeral yet.
Poem Beginning with a Remark by Richard Tuttle
One remarkable phenomenon of my work is its love for being hung at
a height of fifty-four inches from the floor . . . This height brings me in
contact with anything that's ever existed in human life.
– R.T. 2001/2004
Sudden outbursts may be key
So Fred Rain quipped to Henry Rust
As the diamantes fell from her veil
In Part Two of Les Enfants du Paradis:
Dear Waste for Good,
As far as time and tide may go
This far have I admired
The penis-fashioned clouds
Pressing on her jugular
Schlepp the multiple joule sessions of
In ripened snow
Drip nymph case spun
Such is life's felicity
Within foulard accompaniments
Superhuman venues (e.g., "sites")
Things will keep, keep them
At rest, environmentally
Speaking of catwalks
Suspension of plumb line
Compatible pocket auras
Stacked exegesis
Something an anemone can relate
The wanderer in you
Little Lulu
Eye
Hath remained intact
Among dried-out figs
The miniature minister is reproved
In the funnel, funnily enough, you fuck
In sneer quotes
For what is never to be clear in any case
Sexuality gorgeous to a fault
Wiping up
Because just stepping out into sunlight
October, first of several arbitrary dates
The tiger in its nimble meekness is no less light than I
I'm . . .
Sanity's surface work
Live column of water
And everything in it alive, as well
But beware, stumped starling, khaki saint
Or get you darkening beyond your ken
"Ziggernaut" orbiting Sartor Restartus
Aestheticism detachment parallel to shock
Stepping water
That softens the heart
You could photograph something, anything, instead
You could be empty or dead
And get away or by -- a by-product of light
And mud
Don't forget to alternate
Besides, how have we done this?
Hand by foot
A miracle
Not to mention air
A crush went forth
Sounds furthered the thought
What it might stay for
Because to work is surface
Things will be here, then back
With luminosity appended
The rest is ditto
Sight unseen, admit it
