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Clark Coolidge
from American Ones
(Tomboctou, 1981)

 

   III.

"I am not a swan."
--Leon Bix Beiderbecke

But why do I have to want to have more. Dichotomy, with comfort. The grist caught him looking. All the heads too close for a mile, and repeat in their clogs. Why is the muscle raised in january, a prune for discussion, and lasted for in laps. The buttes of Utah a tin cup held up. Things only looked at first the first time well, then named, slipped under the stack. The base of Pulpit Rock half quarried away behind Silver Luck Lunch. The echo is seen in photographs, looking at what's still. Let's go only to movies on the moon. A rental park with tobacco placements, aluminum bounds. A slight lick of sun tween thin clanging intros, rust, bolt embers, knobs with no returns. He turned on the radio to a sun patch. Caught his own headache in slights of cliff, cured in the going bebop. What's turning in the sand of pencil flashes. The detective knocking on yet another door and somewhere what more can or will be said. All the stories lost behind the story the phone was hung on. The sun keeps him quiet, not even a desert, nor a tenement its walls. The cats all have read the book of so what. The lines of sight on coffee on the book of windows. Fleet, and worry down the valley brown irons. This then the cost of potato carves, a milling tube. The light's on the stick magnet. Obtain, and be round. Cirrus the auto fits, a pack house, the pump fails to loom. A shack behind the pen nib works, for to mull and stump on starlings. The flood shot the tarmac down basalt to weld in municipal carparks. The mothers all call for new crystals rather newsprint. And carbarns, all expose to bright bugs make a fist. The mainline doppler has come a cropper, Fresno vernal outlook. We all live behind windows and shake song from strain. Alluvial outwash to sink and grey matter glints. The lights of Albany, a hole in the thunder cover. Eggs over curbs under arc-vapor. I must turn this record to eyeless amalgamates. That this light has come on the zoo, the whistles there. Cauliflower ointments, the books on rodeo stand, and fall repeats. Go to the bark, mirror, and settle for Thoreau. The removes are in funny waves, like Creeley in Bolinas, missionary neons, cork as a saddle. The lines are drawn creaking, the muscling swans. The bellflower lands by its rope. We go off on Soda Surface Avenue, never to bend car eyes. Petaluma in light of allergy, railtrack, and sandwiches. Rimshot burns a warp and repeats, within a clever tacit. The postcards are arrayed, a Civil War mist of past hills. The detective files in his district, and amber compass of sockets are home. The light on the snow is a salt squeaking its flanges. If I could believe in Jackie & Roy I'd have less of a trip to Las Vegas. They hummed like bananas in the charred arms of the grotto portal. All that singing comes to, a pinch between the cheek and gum. And I'd rather a peak near to Boston basin for some tea. Uncrated, and signing the instructions. Typing some notes on a berry. A munch that caught in the shuttling radio. I would I read a book, but the highway. The tomes elastic out a bolas all the way from school, an appletree. Scowled down below in the darkening Everest. Mounties crying alarming over the pears, their trug boots, the notches in Olympia beerwall. I have managed to start the car before Edgar Allan Poe. The country all a kicky sump of speech, slats before sundown, a tunic, a Mars Bar. Caver visits watercloset, tooting in his membership pipes. One herringgull one roadrunner, all the parkingflats between. One sip of exploration, one of preparatory illusory parliamentary cooling sidewalk gumdrop. The tubes come on in Jack Benny. A hoopsnake rolls into an old wive. Beeves in pandemonium circuitry, a picture of your mother sitting on a whelk stammering. The laces come rooting out of the pigskin. On the attack, a band of mumps, smoke-hangers that Burlap Sam provides, Slim Pickens drying at sundown creekside. And back to the buttes, sans lights, lacking lunch, picking out a stack to end all durational chemistry. I have parked, and never found it straitening, pink down light on a birch side. Live in chickadee haunts and pick your words from snow snooze. Ketchup on the radio. If only voles, and then piano movers, and at last drawers to hide punk in. Signaled with honky marbles to the last man to pen marches in his teen streets. This the overture to Hula Bear, let's leave off all these roses. Keep boulders by your desk to whack when words trail off. Coming on, the night of the pumpkin pin. Take the dog waste from your shark skin and classify rootbeers. Pin up the cave link on your beaverboard watertable. Tatoo your knuckles to hold fast without music. Shy at a cardinal and knock off bark dust. Say thimble rattle, say water ouzel, say pedestrian darkness laughless and past auto. Let's say Thelonious Monk.

 

 

 

   IV.

"obtains from the creek"
Robert Grenier

It goes on in tubes, away in globes, comes back in bulbs. Snowstorm, clearing and fair but seasonably cold. Thaw, moderate to heavy rain, center and south. Snow, north. Mild, rain center and south. Snow, north. Clearing and colder. It rain and snow. It snow mountains. Generally sunny and cold. Cold snap, mostly sunny and dry, some flurries mountains. Partly cloudy and seasonably cold, some snow flurries. Sunny, cold center and south. Some snow north and mountains. Snow, north and mountains. A secret method for enduring mastery of life with pyramids. The top cake, the bottom chowder. How many things without witness, plain as noses, or crested away. The fire tower behind the candy bar. The bird strips to no applause. The century has handed the photos back, drypoint and rimless. Left stoking an orange and glaring. The pirate heads blinded for Hollywood, antique particulars (chairs for instance) with portfolio. Live as a Pontiac and just as sun-burnished purple. Now the parks have let out, where will all that stored math get one. The sign stated pickles, bricks to be examined. Novels full of pen points, slippery as a few hairs. And then the fluorites, with which such as Pound did not deal. Halogens coming public, issue of reservoirs. And yet, the word yet, pendulum of hope's reclasp. Black Holes in breakfast nooks. The state of the building starling requiring mappage. The high bush is sensible, such sense being verb, to inches to cut swinging, both to each. And the light goes out in the cab, under bolts. A city is vertical, list of itself. Spend some sun patching a darning needle and see. The bark canoe slides under the china turrets. The record spins the air of dust. The book once read, comes blank. As mesa river forks, can you hear them. If snow, can winter be far. Can plaster have. Just like the sting of a bee, turned the tables on me.

 

 


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