THE MAP (IMBECILES)
began as our little secret but something happened
because we wanted something to rescue us
from our contacts
that night happened into the plot
a guy named so and so
keeping abreast of the fountains
the man with icicles for teeth speaking rather pleasantly of
the need for better public transit
and you rode the bus earlier
were you at a rally or just making things up?
Yes I was there
Rather, do you need consolation?
Where there is no map, there is no journey?
Where there is no journey, there is no earth?
Where there is no earth, there is no technology?
They were always asking for it
To not feel like anything? if it's at all possible? someone
asked
Anything is possible right? Still?
That they were from somewhere else was only one suspicion
Among the many we had had. Sometimes? Evening came a little
early?
It was natural to see appearance. Did you need
It more after a light supper or like later
Like right before getting into bed? What woman did I hear
Committed to the birth of a child? Often times they did
The only natural thing. Subtly kept speaking.
The little secret. Over and over. Into machines that night
happened into the plot via some very special rigging, wires
and string.
Something had happened well above us
An event
Always having to say how you want it cooked
And none of that is really important. You run out of breath
Talking all night in your pajamas? Often times you did
When everywhere you would find its excuse.
Do not go
As though you had let it get away, and what now
You go anyway, and what now
Incites expenditures, but may not have precedence
And they’d be at the table, picking their nails
Acting all bored and shit while you sit there
Acting like they're idiots
But burning inside and someone and anyone else can see this
As though you had let it get away under your skin
Become your skin?
THE Subcommittee on
Rules
One begins certain to finish but in support
Of other, farther waves
Waves close. An article
Of definite surrender percolates within secret proceeding
waves
Or something else we ought to manage in our legislature
sends
A bright stare into a black hole.
It’s possible they'll begin paying attention the very minute
the blinds go up
On its shrewd bedroom scene. The self-misunderstanding you
are
Expected to have at the beginning dissolves, as thin as the wafer
Passing by. Yet there are mothers fanning an old heat to
their boys
Trembling in the ghostly livery of photographed afternoons.
Below is something in me like sheets hanging out to dry. We seem
to believe
Having said in no certain way that we are not certain it is
possible.
DENIED
They told everyone. They needed discovery, insight.
When we came home from work underwater,
More often, they sold anesthetics. They were asking for it
We told them. You can't have it. They persisted
What idiocy.
Why keep going?
There is nothing good anymore. This is all foolishness. When
the sun rose it rose and rose and it kept rising until it was a flower and then
it was nothing but itself but itself but itself but by itself it is nothing but
itself And they told everyone
They needed this discovery that they were nothing but
themselves.
He stayed out of it, of course. He didn't want to GET
INVOLVED.
AN ANTHOLOGY OF FICTIONS
It was a house with many rooms, just like this one.
As I came back, crossing the lawn,
Where we went with one another
To think and twist the matter, the house
Sticking out here and there from the usual plastering
Of doors windows shutters bricks and what not,
I usually thought, incongruously, of ducks
An idiot's swarm of ducks
On small brown rivers, these on fire
These issuing somehow from the pockets of an overweight god.
Why have you come back?
To torment me?
FATE
Around the coming corner was a man waiting.
Here, for the last few days, he waited
Ignoring a view of trolleys and modern buildings.
We will have been deceived with a new vigor
For the hundredth time
After the confetti has shaken itself loose
And the drinks emptied and the old feelings wash.
Regardless, the idea of being anywhere remotely like it
Grows over the season. The ducks settle on frozen ponds
Near the trees breaking the view of modern buildings.
Until we feel ready to abscond, a still-perfect possibility
We might not make it in time, for all we know, somewhere
else
WINTER
With it our sense of making
What we knew could not really love us back
Had us coming back
To the window. It is a nice touch.
Snow. Presence. Accumulation.
It feels like an emptying out
Full of things. The children flop and flail into angels
With enthusiastic gestures of laughter.
Still, it was not with irony we called this composition
winter
But it has always seemed like it was the least thing worth
saying
And now it's come out again
Sorrowing and estranged, but requiring our handling, our
care
Though long we've been tired of the sequence, out and in,
out and in
Suppose one might get away
But would it be dangerous
Going, the roads ahead? It really does seem like it. Suppose
Something else happens.
Something cold, something instilled
Very much like an expectation
Or the security officer who has detained you
Is impersonating a security officer
With the intent to induce you to submit
To his pretended authority
This could be like a new poem, quite unlike its subject
Or this could be like any poem
And this is not like lying in ambush.
The first spectacle was falling from beams.
There they say
You’d be happy here
I’d like a word with you
To be felt among them
Lights inside of cars
Music inside of cars
It has happened before
And the oldness of our lives
Sometime numerous details
Accumulates, is washed out, brightened
By presence, from deeper cause
PREAMBLE
The mules are whining forever.
It is replaced, or rather, forever
Shadows the hand's rabbit, someone’s
Whose face is by turns built
Of inadmissible satisfactions. It says
Nothing. One suspects there are glass
Flocks and shepherds on the mellow hills,
Moving freely, but not in the right way.
The anxious birds suggestive of
Ominous feelings, fly into its place
The handsome electric advertising
You are constantly asked to explain
A difference for, of which there is no kind
Extant. Bedding material and oddities
Wrapped and stashed, and the slight
Of a once disregarded sweetness
Returned, except of the parade that across
It makes discontent explicit. Its detectives
Interrupt one another. Occupied vocabularies
Are gone, the spaces light up
The monument, the way the public
Conceives monuments for vistas,
The curious way. A young boy and girl
Feed each other slowly boiled peanuts
ON ARUBA
There is joy in proceeding impatiently through evidence.
Perhaps I don't know what it is that enraptures me when you
Relax. The distance that's been removed from all the
pictures?
There is something else delicate in the way children
Surround one another? And the light? Though there isn't any left
This is its expunging? Yet hadn’t the thought of it not
being
Eternal been theirs? It had to have been lost because they found
it
In the aquarium they stood near? And all of this was pressing
The receive button in instant message? Paradise is bad
For children unable to image search zinnias? For sure, though
Those who knew the language of the island refused? Even if
Beating at the edge of things an unrelieved drum triumphed?
THE MAP
The necessity goes first, then there is a whole heap else
To do badly. Or is it quickly?
Say you look around and that’s it
Or much of it, or so much of it.
About these buildings you wish to include concrete.
But how? The necessity for concrete goes first.
Then the necessity for men in hard hats, with tools, goes
the way the buildings
Or much of what you talk about is of little necessity?
The plane you arrive on nods in the air. Like arranged lines
People take pauses. No Imputing, they say. You are given the
good stuff
Here is your luggage, and, and then, of course the first
step of going, it all bothers you.
You prance and lisp and say nice things.
Around the tawdry buildings women sit and listen
To guitars in the city. The city gangs up while then the
first note
Is all that has bothered you. It must be a note of magnificence
Or is it its difference, its being not magnificent, where a
reassuring
Gesture is having a slip of the tongue. The chord changes to
dusk
Holding over everyone like a dark umbrella. And to be
recovered
Of everything the sun gathered in to listen around you, you
sing
The praises no one had not asked for. For you, they
believed, they were all waiting
And then something else happened. Say you get around to
naming it
Or much of what you talk about is getting lost in your
trying to name it
It seems our duty to bestow squarely on our targets certain
designations
Recover what does not want for returning
And what do we want for return? Misfortunes
Growing up? Precautions? A spoiled life
Viciously miniscule? The feet plant
Themselves yet do not find measure, or context, for the
first step
With which to be angry is also the last, yet
They appear okay getting going like the kids are going
I mean, the necessity in the severe sense of living like a
child
Forgetting among slabs of concrete, carriages, and the Platz
Where the clues, the strange genital markings discourage the
innocent
Glass buildings of their reflection. I mean the mood is
still returning
I mean I am from an urban environment I mean the necessity
goes first
Much there is that can and for that I am a little grateful
Much there is that can't and for that I am a little grateful
Much there is that will and for that I am a little grateful
Much there is that won't and for that I am a little grateful
Much there is that shouldn't and for that I am a little
grateful
Much there is that can't not and for that I am a little
grateful
THE KIDS
but in order the first is always audible, the second, a
wrecked whisper
a clot, dust and smothering. They are preparing the podium
for a glass of water
to give their parents the clearest path to understanding,
the presentation includes
the heat of the moment, in which they will weep again
over the marvelous images the light makes on the wall, they
salute
a pennant of light, the hues of dusk falling, they read and
crouch
under gold haloes, the children of the past wear bangles,
steal pink and white impatiens
from old photo albums, in which they will run again
like this family at hand, in predictable attire, in their
backyard, bathed in a dim light
the clouds come over their roofs expanding, faces lifted toward
the grandeur
breaking light about the place a whiff of defection, where huge
rotating platforms and sails
cut across the water viewed from the patio
PRIESTLY
though the river is but one example
with its small polished stones
in its bed, its ripples, and philosophical examples
I mean here at beach scenes more polished, ivory-eyed
tigers stalk and discover lovers in the saw grass
fugitives who kept morning in closets, New York
horrible for sea-breezes and the blood-soaked sand
who cloistered here to gather waves with names for
difficulty
they starved themselves wild with great difficulty
not for the occasional burst of fireworks but something
pale, like an empty champagne bottle, the hushed
tide through the window quelled, how awful
sprawled across all this light the while
has come to appear in the glass inappropriate
but in an order the first is always audible
blankness, light, the second light mellowing as hues lengthening
in the coming dusk, stranded on your eyelids, you blink
you blink, you must go among the stranded cups
your greatness demanded
what was really his, that you could show her him
