16

bygone masks of the night: dream, sentence, voices, air
undulating desire     but then what was there for lunch
"MOOTHWATERING HAMBURGUERS"?
do we take it the basic unit of "the new poem"
is the menu?   OK I'll take it
one flight down with a daffodilly
for my love
& if that's too silly
I'll hit myself over the head with my billy
club   o let the chemicals bubble
when this you see you see a PANEL
of edited accidents   "cumshaw"   cumshaw?
"small gift offered in thanks or as inducement, gratuity"
now isn't all this just too atrocious

"MOOTHWATERING HAMBURGUERS" - sign outside fast-food restaurant in Palma de Mallorca.
"cumshaw" - kam sia: Xiamen dialect, port in SE China: "grateful thanks." Entered English in early 1800's.

17

draped in defiance & bewildered hair
not up to the waves of the task
ready for the big mallet    yet still chanting
"what vast sky wagons?  what balloon yard?
what order to this?"
praying for door back to scale
begin the beguine may body begin
to turn the big barrel climb mountain
regain some sense of basic human
ever esurient for flash of meaning
our minds too orderly
in ways too predictable
so fill in the blank
between fedora and wingtip shoes


esurient - exhibiting hunger or greediness (Latin esurire = to be hungry) ,

18

as we glance out from our machine
time leaps ahead, slips away
into clumsy but sensitive entity's
invisible notebooks    but imagination
consists of desire    "professional desire —
it lit me, by god     from heavy top to toe"
who was that now was it my dear
irrational suspect, Perennially Dangerous
Adolescent? maybe however some'a dese young'uns
a bit too 'techno' for jaded old taste
(rolls back down, perplexed
by field of too much stuff)
ah short meander best meander
verbarium empty, once again

19

certainly privileged to have an
interior existence one likes
well . . . doesn't mind? sometimes even enjoys?
hard not to be bored by oneself
just another incoherent refugee
once radical high and true   oh long ago
in pow! pow! converse
been there    what's the rush    wipe the screen
sway deep shade, opaque     bleak lacunae for sure
wrinkly, repeatable     thought to rip up
the book of small odes but was again charmed
by its miniature world so couldn't do it no
couldn't do it     now back to think on
idealized historical conduct vs. tendresse


tendresse: tenderness (Fr.)

20

came down the old oaken stairs he must also have trod
who wrote "old and young, we are all on our last cruise"
and "to know what you like is the beginning of wisdom
and of old age" or up those stairs again, to read: "the old
appear in conversation in two characters:
the critically silent
and the garrulous anecdotic"    Cousin Louis
who first met his Fanny here     thanks to Cousin Bob
who was the more dashing     the model for Alan Breck
and perhaps the dark Master of Ballantrae
when first we came here in August the pigeons next door
said coo-COO coo-coo     coo-COO coo-coo
but now in November it's only coo-coo-COO
coo-coo-COO    so, time to go, soon

21

oft turning others' leaves
calm is the sea; the waves work less and less
oh that my heart could hit upon a strain
would strike the music of my soul's desire
what joy seems half so rich from rapture won
as the loud laugh of maidens in the sun
when selfish greed becomes a social sin
the world's regeneration may begin
now slides the silent meteor on
shake hands forever my silly ghost
desire! desire, I have too dearly bought
with price of mangled mind thy worthless ware
an endless wind doth tear the sail apace
it is some picture on the margin wrought


Composed out of lines by Philip Sidney, Henry Howard, Nicholas Breton, John Clare, Ada Cambridge,
Alfred Tennyson, Michael Drayton, Thomas More, WJliam Drummond, and Thomas Wyatt.

22

"that the ants seem to wobble
as the morning sun catches their shadows"
not with us "too much" at all
not with us very long at all     the sun the ants
the wobbling shadows   all too hung up we be
on a civilization devoted to the speechless stare
punctuated by mindless speech
(& WHO is likely to read
these headthrob grumblespeak lyrics?)
"because they do not understand that cacophony
is at least as intricate an art    as harmony"
& she cries out in her dream "where are you going?"
infinitesimal moods for milliseconds
kindly provide a theme for     these variations


"that the ants seem to wobble / as the morning sun catches their shadows"
– EP, Canto LXXX, p. 105 in The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1949).
"because they do not understand that cacophony is at least as intricate an art as harmony"
– Basil Bunting, "The Lion and the Lizard," p. 30 in Three Essays (Durham: Basil Bunting Poetry Centre, 1994).



23

"I wish that life were an opera
I should like to live in one"
said Stevenson, Robert Louis
& les Surréalistes du Mid-Ouest
showed up at a reading
by the Reverend Robt. Bly    in Chicago
to (at least momentarily) estop
his woodnotes wild
with a large, vigorously &
accurately propelled
cream ple
"beauty will be convulsive" et cetera yes chérie
we must needs beg to differ with rare Ben
& let the Lybian lion hunt them butterflies


"les Surrléalistes du Mid-Ouest" - "the Surrealists of the Midwest." They know who they are.
Last two lines refer to Ben Jonson's"the Libyan lion hunts no butterflies" (To a Friend, an Epigram of Him).