BLUE MILLIONS, DEAD MILLIONS

-An Essay On Poetry-

Traveling
is an exercise in sense

is formless sky skies
'unger for a where

to settle ponderously
landing as midwinter

centers expectation
makes a convex awareness,

hope curved outward.

*

Tricks or masquerades
of attention.
Winter impulse
to make up new flowers,
To animate the tongue,
heal-all, love-in-idleness.
Dully along goes the sun
held aloft by the flower called
shadow-puppet-watcher
for its unique qualities
of devotion to the one
point in space that can
hold it's beautiful face
in place.

*

Concerning the products of visibility:

I love S.K.'s hat
and his first name.

Ahem, love is a by-product
of invisibility

Ahem, love is a cousin
to invisible forces,
threatening whales,

and true stories that begin
with the word "know.

*

I like statements.

Implicit persistence
makes poems.

Five unfinished masques
are the environs of poetry:

1) the wyrd sisters
2) Robinson Jeffers
3) Fingers
4) Seasons
5) political renunciations (and the death of A.D., poet)

How to challenge death
though it isn't the death of everything,
or even of the situation of everything:

"a mechanized generation to whom
Haphazard oracular grunts are profound wisdom"
Auden

You know what I want to hear.
We are in love with trying,
and have heard that some
can do, and do, and do,
when from their lives come
deathless grunts and
other to-die-fors:

fingering a deathless nose,
wild fennel
led us through the
marsh air into the
railroad right-of-way
behind the lumberyard
just to be in
smell's vicinity.

And the tusks of boars are polished,
shined with the sweat of beggars

*

Is there a difference between the nose
and the imagination?

No, both grow outward from the face.

the face a hermitage as evidenced by mirrors' grimaces.

Out
side

playing God's guitar
the little strings
rip holes in the universe's evasions,
perhaps there are eleven dimensions,
six of which are only perceived as smells.
That makes us so upset because it
isn't moral. Have you got a better idea?

Particular names are acceptance and
moral minstrelsy.

For instance, we call out to what Xrist meant
as much as we cry out to what
all good dead beings meant
Hope's dulcet expediency
a way of life if ever there is one,

but not a way of hope, which
is all about what will happen
when we're dead.
(forever, or to the particular moment here)

Pictures of alder saplings demand that we quiver.

*

Osric's phone is ringing.
I pick it up, and
my first impulse,
starting at the very
beginning of the other
noise of the voice,
(that is, before the word)
is to recall, like the
tail of an hideous erinye,
that most poetry sucks
and one should not say
so, because the older
poets made it so.


We are hysterically dead
and "go the fools among,"
flagellants of a fate
worse than censure:
casual disregard.

*
"Hysteron Proteron"

Will free
offenders sex up
plainly made
effects with cause ?

*

melisma

Quietude,
exercised like the twined reticence
of too much to know,

is a good protection
from despair,
a glib-sun-working-day
and conviction
which has no history.

How does the bell-like
clear-voiced
poet avoid mention

of a war?

Does his clarity avoid
genre in its purities

though the genres persist,
as we see,
in comedic human meat
still thrown to Thersites,

and his leprous misery
eats those poems of cafeteria
conversation

like proofs,
which pass,
in snickerdoodle time,
for a security badge
in fact, in fact.,

ending
in a marriage
of allegorical
figures

Suspicions Confirmed
and sweet Misanthropia

*
only the names remain.

*
"The Very Old Man Who
Knew Some Now Among
The Ranks of The Dead"

He just lived and lived,
and knew ones who died
who I wished I knew.
Knowing him
would not let me know
them better.
Their pages, which
I know to know (and also
to remain lost in my knowing
and grow old in it)
as one should, vast
places left to
undo forthwith.

What is the agenda of description?
Is the ground a floor
gone bad from too much
drinky drinky?
What is the agenda of metaphor?
To be caught out in the rain
and washed away gratefully;
old man, alluvial fan.