Twentieth Century Fire-Sale

PARTS:

Washington Square

Without black expressionists defying gravity and decor,

and chessplayers knotted over a parlor set of stone,

or overindulged babies capriciously wheeled about

among students treading obliquely from class to class,

nor beatniks, lunatics, levellers, bums, and levitants,

Washington Square on a cold, wet, windy night

shoots its street lights at the pavements,

magnifying their facets into a stream-bed,

washing off their pancake make-up,

and fakes a dancing skeleton of the dead fountain.

Stout buildings whose heads immerse in mists

join the antedeluvian elegant Federal Row to emit

bright-eyed students who skirting trunks of trees,

ready to trudge hunched cautiously across the Square.

Manhattan II

Moribund gods must

jealously twinge at

so many spires and pricks

lit for high-flying travellers

Baal and Babel,

Gold and glisten.

Half disgust themselves

Half are pleased with themselves

And they eat each other

And change places in a communion of

Babel and Baal,

Glisten and gold.

Electropolis.

Leptopolis.

So many burrowings for

trains wriggling and rats

Baal and Babel,

Glisten and gold.

Life strangulating

in sewage agonizes

to levitate

aiming miserably toward

Babel and Baal

Gold and glisten

Non-gods overpowered

deus otiosus;

by filth and filtration

suborn and crowd to

Babeling Baals

Gold glistening.

Minnesota Farmer

With all the memorabilia

of the old country

but singing lustily

"My Country 'Tis of Thee,"

for no one may leave

save in dreams

this barbarous country,

jailed in winter

by many brambles

shorn of their berries:

"Here we have come.

Here we stay."

Glug. "SkÖl!"

Vision of a Texas Spring

So tired was he,

without breath

of beauty,

hopeless of

more than

monotony,

all of a thousand

Texas miles behind him,

with a bug-spattered

window to correlate

with the odometer,

that his hand shook

when he reached

the Spring of Love,

"Stop Here!"

for love had spilled

clumsily into his cup,

and death had drunk it up

greedily before,

never letting it be filled again.

Fourth of July at Watch Hill

When I was young the Fourth was a boy's day

we are strangers to this world, Moe,

feeling a strangeness for each other,

three cheers for the red, white, and blue.

My ancestors settled Okinoke, boy,

but there's nothing there now,

we lived in a tepee where

the dawn swings across the valley

but there's nothing there now.

And we lived in Chicago after the Fire

on a street in a house

that are not there now.

First names to break the ice on the pitcher.

First names to show no care for was and will,

First names to equalize and hold off

coming to any real understanding,

I'm Mac, Bud, Jack, Moe, and Hairless Joe, Limpy,

don't call Pullman Porters George,

Don't call Irishmen Pat.

I drove a horse and sat on a porch

I pushed a cart and sat on a porch

I kept accounts and sit by the TV set

by the road on the porch playing checkers, talk

in time, depth, space, stretch,

beneath this change we remain the same

all the same, but there's not that much in us

to be unchangingly proud about.

What holds this country together are the

Jones, Johnsons, Jaspers, and Janowicz's

the sheep and the cattle,

the holes in the doughnuts

the sweet, the bland, and the simple.

the names of ordinary seamen,

the indentured Brits enslaved Blacks

O land of the six sexes:

frigioman, heteroman, homosexual,

lesbian, heterowoman, frigiodame.

and fireworks -- big healthy booms

twinkling showers, orange, green, white, gold,

yachts in the harbor glistening

eager on their rare day of use

where have you gone,

all ye puddles murky white

in the moonlight, and freshwater lakes.

Have they locked you in the cement high-rises, little sparrows,

for feeding on the horse polts of old Chicago streets.

Would you rather start all over again

Spirit of '76?

Would you make the same mistakes or avoid them?

the English celebrate being free from us,

how well they know ...

everything is back where we once began --

the creation, birth of gods, the sight of real Indians,

are there more Christians than before Jesus came?

Come again, Christ, we're still where we were.

The price of eats is higher, the trees are cut,

the butterflies have been gassed,

and the elders are in nursing homes

oh but the relief from the workaday week.

not too well relieved lest we not return.

a holiday is not for what once hppened,

it is something better than yesterday and

the day after tomorrow

we are crowded into its glassine bag.

we shat in the drinkwater and then drugged it

are we to be grateful for this and

it's so fast now to go nowhere

shall we guzzle together for

the Fourth of July one nation indivisible

never mind what it has for all,

o liberty, o justice, how you limp along

with the rest of us,

it's a poor mind that whiskey makes seem clear.

we ask so much of the young

how can a kid love a block of cement

how can he love the breathing feeding

lineup before the boob tube

traffic choking littered streets

-- love them they're yours

twas the day the sins came out

and everyone called one another by their first names

and were startled at what they knew about one another,

nothing, and many names were the same, all in fact,

but there were also many sins, too many to name,

so they started to name sins for names

until everybody had as many names as

the dukes of olden times

so everyone felt wiser with all their names

and needed a psychiatrist no longer.

The men who made this country great

are tossing beer cans overboard

or drinking in the fumes

of the cars in front bumper to bumper,

I say can you see the planes

stacked below us trying to get a thousand feet lower

so they can go another another thousand feet lower,

that's how its done before landing

and getting on the aforesaid highway.

Four kids lost fingers today already by the twelve o'clock news

so won't be able to get their heads blown off in war,

unfit for combat they are.

The blazing heat -- I tell you -- the country

would be in a hell of a state if it weren't for

the forty million coke bottles and

sixty million beer cans that

go down the drain twice today.

Ah but the family, the kid, the dog, the folks next door,

the barbecue, the hot dogs and the hamburgers,

that's the alpha and omega of the Fourth.

I've noticed that the holidays

don't mean much any more -- can I be right

or maybe I am into wishful thinking.

They're the tall weeds of a waste of weeds

and they might as well be lopped off

so the whole field can be turned and plowed

and the new seed can be planted.

Now don't ask me more about any of this.

The public opinion polls will tell you that

92% of the American people are downright happy

on the Fourth of July -- and Christmas and New Year

for that matter -- well maybe not

Martin Luther King Day and they're nonplussed

as to a holiday for Chester Arthur --

one of the better Presidents, whom they don’t know.

Anyhow a holiday has to be got to be must be is always

fun and games and "Oh say can you see..".

India Now and Then

Froth on the crest of the advancing wave

leads the world ocean in with the tide

at Golwad. The tidal crab, neat mason,

perfects the lips of his mud circle

hole and scrams swiftly somewhere

below away from the hand that

shovels to raise it in praise to the skies.

One day in the beginning of mind

a subcontinent of Africa detached itself

and rafted through many stormy seas

until it was confronted by the mass of Asia

coming down. Nature, speaking in rough

tones heard around the world,

ordered that the two be together and apart,

so India already home of logic, turned

and crashed its hypotenuse against

the greatest of continents and wrought there

a saddle of the tallest mountains.

with great rivers as reins and valleys as stirrups,

then supervised the bulldozing of deltas,

fashioning headquarters for brown people's

hospices of the sacred on Earth,

and mud flats for crabs at Golwad.

Bombay by the Sea

All of Bombay is not seen from the Taj,

nor from Sea Green Hotel,

nor passing through Victoria's Arch,

although from here stretch northerly

increasing hints of dark brown people

gathering along dusky alleys,

lit at night by occasional bulbs

that discharge fallible security, and

end by tidal flats of the Arabian Sea.

There, vendors of salivational "Pan" and pop

punctuate with their boxes the myriad huts corrugated

or bamboo, sticks of wood and sheets of plastic,

metal till thatch dirt stones broken bricks and cans,

with interspersions of ferns and blossoms,

kith of desiccation and jungle whence people came,

in all their beauty of form, their languid grace,

murmured sounds of India's thousand tongues,

outcastes, uncomprehended, extended families,

growing their clots along the veins of shacks,

polite noble men, mending trifles with patience,

mother and child, dressed in crimson,

blue, yellow, and green of purest tints,

golden rings, gold earrings on tiny fingers,

long, combed, set, black hair,

grooming one another the day away,

feeding well their affection-loving skin,

until bits of wood and coals are scrounged,

having passed from hand to hand in the great city around,

and now evolve a flame beneath a copper pot

and six hours later a curried soup

of what the day had finally brought,

after careful -- lest all be spent --

and anxious of colic -- bargaining.

Delicate pinches were exchanged,

seeds for spices, spice for seeds.

Come sun, come moon, whose gesticulate beams and rays

smooth over heavy stink of the great cesspool of sea,

where the morning toilet and ablution are made,

which the day's mild waves, salt, and tidal recession,

dissolve into food for fish of our Taj table.

Gothenburg

The street lamps of Gothenburg light in Chicago,

or, vice versa, what would it be?

the cut of the stone,

the shape of the frames,

the gait and pace,

glass, signs and face,

and the stores that look

and smell like their dry goods

as do the very people themselves

and so noted the small boy of Chicago.

But the Swedes would smile politely,

and allude to his mirage:

look there is Gothenburg,

see here are but ruin and empty lots,

with dusky people roaming and ambling,

for the Swedes are gone here,

like the Vikings of Vinland.

Insistent intensive prods of recall,

like a lost limb bothering me,

without hope of restoration,

no one to understand, nothing to see.

Early fall dark in Gothenburg

even brings the call of the first

drunk proclaiming his Vinland

to be the North Avenue bars.

Road to Piraeus

Trivias of ever-ebbing existence

infest the Athens-to-Piraeus Road,

a vandalism of petty demands

upon eyes, ears, nose and throat --

riding upon a sodden heart that is

peppered by a fusilade of annoyances from afar.

Stolen sandwiches of thick stale bread

and sliced processed cheese from the hotel

are digested by spittles of anger.

Every minute is a personal hot insult.

But would you rather march with the ancient hoplites,

spear upon shoulder, to meet the Spartans,

than with the cars of today, bumper to bumper?

Yes, indeed.

No. They are destined for the Sicilian mines.*

So, whenever you can, in the modern style,

step on the gas to the next frustration.

You can afford no wasted time

on the way to the ferryboat to Italy,

even though you are nothing going nowhere.

Côte d'Azur

Each blade of grass knows its place

where a sprouting weed trips an alarm.

No animals are allowed, only polite people.

The ruined castle is a bouquet

where you perch like a tiny doll

in a veil of clouds, a deep water well

brim full in a cup of cliffs.

Primitivity is underground in

hard rock, ice streams, and saprophytes.

Trains string like toys along precipices.

Churchbells ring on a sophisticated score.

The sun is sliced by angles of space

into ratios of well-managed lesiure-time.

The moon sweeps silver trails

off the hills and across the sea.

Dawn at Stylida

Shushing out of doors,

naked feet on cold marble,

direct petitioners

to their matin:

"Give us this day the Light."

Sweet dawn must be!

Eye-opening dawn.

Colors without edges,

glissandos of silent sound,

a gamut along the western sky

playing upon a meek sea,

abashed by the symphony above:

Okeanos down bowing to Okeanos up.

Wafting protochromal rafts

high across the Parian Strait,

films out of chemical baths

distill curve upon distinct curve,

white tucked away villages

assembled from strata of rock.

A differentiated world is painted

with celestial signs sighing

"So Be It." as

dawn resolves into day.

Pushing Off

Once more sensing the rising tide,

the bark is slipping from its cove.

Prickly ferns are brushed aside

as oars shove off against earth.

Disturbed waters grow gentle,

a swirl and ripple left behind.

Far beyond the banks of palms

while rocking upon the swells

of oceanic calm, we set our lines

for foolish fish that believe

in expanding realms of opportunity.