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Cadre (to ASCAP)
It’s hardly a noble science, para- science: lunar nodes and portents of events, when the crackpots and charlatans count sidereal time and turn lead into gold. It’s a traditional know-how like art, acquired by habit or traditional rules, of which composers compose the nomenclature of the planets in any order: saturnine, lunatic, martial, jovial: small […]
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The world does not stop for flowers
By itself it moves itself. When it rains it rains. The dead air of my officed brain’s a space too small for joy.
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All the Dead Pat Their Glands When We Fall Down
The boy who towed fishing boat to campsite through waist-deep water studied astronomy but became a teacher at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Harlem. One morning he found a rat dead a few feet from the school’s front steps. He continues to lack the company of sympathetic chess partners. Tonight I have the dream where […]
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Gnomon
A bone style, sharp-pointed, incises letters on a wax tablet. A bone style flat, broad smoothes what is written. A graver can bend a legend, settle or balk, in such a manner legal & slow like time kept with shadow or signed with a stylus on straw paper. With style the drummer whisks and wipes […]
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Interpretation
The spirit is in the box, and then it is in him. Then they are on risers, rising. This is called daemon- ization, but the first one says no, it’s sounds, not words. The first one sings, and it’s words, sounds and words together. Then it falls apart. The second one sits and talks, or […]
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Craftsmith or Counterpoise
The center-pinion pivot of a clock can be beveled a hundredth slow or fast, by the best, but whether a hickory stick spins on a lathe spun by his foot from a treadle and flywheel, everything is a bit too still for torque or froth on a colt at the track after a race, when […]
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Winter (1946)
Just over this hill, my father was killed When a train hit his car at a crossing. There, many years later, One could still find a sign – Rusted, beaten, broken – Instructing one to stop, look and listen. As a boy, I used to run tumbling Down this hill, across a strong winter light, […]
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Prairie du Chien (for Chris Glomski)
Nictitating slice Corgis gentle on the hunt I took a cat muzzle to the picnic. The partial terror of windows Italics mine slant the latter war.
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Manifest Destinies, Black Rains
With the broadest principles of freedom for the foundation of our government — with a magnificent country, whose shores are washed by the great oceans, whose lakes are seas, whose rivers are the most majestic that water the earth, whose commerce whitens every sea, whose railroads and canals, like great arteries, intersect its whole surface, […]