Poem for the New Year

(permit me to step out of the character I have so consistently performed for these last couple of years to share a wish for the New Year- realizing that it risks what small, fragile sense of coherence the may be available in these pages- Happy New Year, everyone!)

A Poem for the New Year

This is the time
This is the time, there is no other
The strange weight we feel
Is the motion of meaning
And some notion of this darker breeze
Taking us into happy history.
Like the shape of fate
Time is the certainty of now
What we are
Who we are
This is the only time of joy.

These years are the dancing years
There are no other ones
These lips are lips for laughter
The ears forgive and forget the
Now now now of nature
Forever here, forever gone.

These days are the dreaming days
A thousand shiny ships like
Lives lived out in all these instants
This is the shape of love
This is the moment of hope
There is no other.

Sein und Nichts

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SIRENS 256-257

Eating laughter while watching sun music we tapped the tune sweating stroll spluttered and drooping. Pearl after pearl sighing from thrown back head and lips-eyes upturned in the golden light, the doctor of light arriving, the doctor is in, the doctor will see you now. In this weather, the sea sweeps all sin away with blended voices again crying forth to ears of men. Whatever you say, you say to yourself, in this weather. Wanting to go forward you retrace your splendid steps but find yourself at a bridge once more, a bridge draped with sacrifice, joy and no small amount of indignation. With the greatest care, we all cross, avoiding the shaking pinnacles breathless, exhausted, laid, breastless.
Imagining marriage shreds the fingers as life must go by. Forward, toward the doors of grace the temptation company must progress with the greatest alacrity. When we arrive we imagine (yet again) the sweetness of eating violets and the welcome of nothingness.

Sirens

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SIRENS 252-253

Chords bronze deepsounding the lure and smack of fluted horn and blown note picking broken morning from the floor. Love is what is left when the warbling becomes too lonely to bear- a rhapsody of sadness; a call of rocky blooms left silent. Pearls breaking jumping from pinnacles- the result of answerless prayers. Alas this sadness cannot last, it is full full full and deaf and bald and coinless with moonlit cock, however, a cock in breast- a moonlight hissing, leaving notes bringing forth and taking up sobs and leaving sails in her hair. Find all these waves and use them to lure us, lure us to fading stars where rocks await. Spike us with the cold and a neverending call; believe in us lost in this silent roar.
Somehow I am filled with the gout of contrast. Tiny men with furious batons come from afar to wrap my epitaph in gold and through it speak into the breath of the wind. Sweet silk kitelike it sails forth upward, to the middle ocean of air of earth, followed by wetlips laughing in the sun. I am done praying and my fingers fly over this hurried halo this fallen whispered steel this sad little amen.

SIRENS 254-255

No light in dark eyes, this laughter springs up just as it has always threatened to. Someone in brown, poured skin walks in-upturned and in sadness she has come for the ears of the all these frightful idiots. Then leaving unmannerly, leaving sake and crate on the shimmery reefs of battered forgetting, she wanders out into the night. Listen, listen, think and I will expire again and again twined in gold and looking for forgiveness as I fall toward that awful bright light. Listen, listen to this gilded tone, the one that reaches out across the water and bids little fingers rushing for plugged ears- ah, and me, here lashed to this blessed mast. For your shells I give you all my self, I give you footsteps and the invisible stain of mercy. (We spend the day, reading the names of the young into the ears of the sweet gods.) Your quivering shouts fill us with ringing- we will think of them not present and melt away, safely, in time.

Punk With the Stutter

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248

A queen of blame my mother was
A short confession which sums it all up
The walk of the river and
The vain corner where the other lies
We retrace their steps
Follow them out in their elderly air
Until you get there and in
Following, salute the standing, the landing and
the crying who fill the bridges; who
with crooked forefingers beckon
and tell of their dead fathers; who
pick their noses in the cold
termination in surprise then
they go about their business,blameless.

249

And all we could see was yellow
The buildings shaded and raised upon
Great wheels whispering
In tongues seeing eyes
And holding bent thumbs
We couldn’t know what we knew
But there are quick gentlemen who
Roll about in intentional smiles
Lieutenants of the sun straining and
Arranging things. Taking time
From each other and knowing them all by
Their style: their shoulders loaded with
Hunger and their pockets bulging
With common unhappiness.

Lazy Lines, Princesses, An Angel and Madmen

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244

Somewhere I remembered stairs
With feet hung down from horse side
Still ascending past saints
And bearded beheaded Johns
Grimacing in the blood red light
Shimmery air in a glossy mirror.
A cool remembered window now open, there
To choose peace to choose a shadow, somewhere.
A lord in the corner he our brother
Cool sounded
Opposite
Intently standing
Eyes leaping astride the clattering patterns
To ride out
And answer the morning

246

Blind smith you joking and all
Metropolitan the distant square twinkling I
Wonder if you thought of me at all,
You, light and bodyless at the archipelago Mall
Trawling an angle behind the years is
It ten? Already?
Onwards from the splendid center on the slender ferry-
An angel frowning in a light rain
The umbrellas buffeting along like a
Striding stream- an ever eastward sea of ships
The fierce word hiding hiding
In these blinder faces.

Stupendous Grace

242

To them who chucked the reins
They gave their names to
Second blooms to
Believing they were somewhere
Somewhere where love’s there and love is a word
So particular it has no meaning so
Spectacular it rests alone apart from
Blind grieving to them who thought
They had their whole life before them
And then astonished that they did (where did it go?)
I said to try to read before the street
The castle the car lagging linked
Lurches before the short crowd touching
A small, blue afternoon sky.
Are not the backward angels waiting, waiting in
Coats and glasses - reading lists of
Countries, kingdoms where the blind touch
Fingers feeling for polyphemus, the king?

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War Dead In December

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240

God came near to men
And was surprised.
With downward hand and word
to acquaintance and putting
On those metal glasses good
For something other than distraction
Brushed off and broken, lying in the entrance
All the time flying swearing and scratching
Toward perfection with bulging heart
And little time for resurrection
Waiting, waiting for some indication
That salt and soul came off the table
And lighted lightly in hope, coming forward.

241

Eternally falling
You silly, dusty chanter
Jewman in death you saw the beaming
The shopfronts laying in beauty
Clogged with fingers joyful
Streaming summer now forgotten
The clothes of winter made
Of cold and scorn,
Worn out but not yet paid for.
A frowned hand rests upon your trouser
Beyond the office a deep long night
Looked out on with various eyes.
Against these rocks blind we wander.

Primeval Wiseguy*

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* e.e. cummings

238

Stolen mud a fancy horde
Born as an oriental sham
Everlasting and sticks to everything (except sticks)
Damn! We missed burnishing our foul beards and instead
Exchanged them for fields
Of wheat-elemental to the dancing of our bellies.
We watched from a distance as they burned.
Now I say- see us shattered sniffing
Some fancy drug throbbing
While the butcher regards what’s left of the brain
And snout and root of all evil.
You snipe, you blade, you happy ape,
The earth awaits a whiff
A vision of a stunned and roaring sun
It flaps against the back of these mere words.
As windows fade the finger hands
Play with fallen sailors like rubies
And other darkened stones.
The famous toil rightly large
Bright and singing morning’s shoulder
Where Moses waves archangels, enslaved.

239

Father hours
Late of old shabby book
You are as dear to me as you
Can be, resting there in the flames.
Paris came too late and all the secrets
stolen, soft Helen now
Lies beneath the beekeeper and
My love is only a folding feeling
Waiting in the Shadows
Learning to live a life without fire.

Slipping Glimpser*, Again

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(*DeKooning used this term to describe himself.)

237

The violet horses go out with a puff
At midnight weary islands welcome poems of the street and such
To find the juice of their corpus
Run away with.
Touching how a father falls with ballad
And noble wrong hand nailed to table
With outsider dagger,
Refusing to hold office hours-
How fine a sham that gives a damn that
Led us through the dogs and hangings and
Licking of hands and spattered feet.
Look for the secret buried in the sing song
Arrangements of reminiscence
Approach and take your place upon the wheel.

We Long To Express Something

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236

What do you say to the saying of custom?
Do you take it to the bank?
A fact is a brutal keeping of promises
a few moments built on farewell
No lifeboats nor bridges will rise up
At the last possible moment
And make yesterday seem true.
The combustion of eyes
The explosion of wishes
All this does not make it so
Where going and floating
Then washing up on an American shore
Only yesterday seemed more than impossible.

Aging Lines, Wavering Lines

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235

We left the murmuring far behind
Left the cavalcade of smiles
And rang the bells of glass and headed out
Past those who stared then turned their backs on us.
We left the morning spent behind
Loudly in the dilly din
Greeted by marching men and yourself,
A little thing, then
Something lolling in the sun I think, I see
I shave myself and think of wonder and
Try to wish you home missing missing missing
You now grinning you now gone
I catch myself and now remember
I catch myself and now move on.

For Brownie

Carondelet

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234

The curve of the eye waits
Finds the mother girl standing straight
Standing against the long imitation of love
The lending answers and broken money
A little jaw given to a future
Where packs of dogs fight over the
Remains of a spine
It finds us all standing waiting what
Ridden care it did give, stretched
Out stiff
Stretched out upstairs as if
It didn’t care as if
It had eyes but wasn’t looking.

Our Job Is To Fill Up Space

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232

The slaughtered infants
Line of sin
Observed in dancing alone
The kind know now what was given
Somewhere in the skull
And what was taken in the burning
A voice that got the title: lovebitch
Spent on the grave
Voluptuous moment
Over the world
The reading finger opened
The costliest of curtains
The spoken eye
The still-born curve of art
The uselessness of this minute
The wondrous kiss.

234

Jesus stretches you little bitches
Sinking in your own sweet juices
Mother’s daughters nearest lovers
Stand up straight, you tiny droppers
Trying to forget the evening
Where lending dying is spurred by kisses
where wheelmen stinking head to knowing
Money worthless sudden melancholy
Where upstairs deadman now is laying.
Where would you get it even if you knew it?
Not in houses, long moustaches
Four and twenty new year’s players
This is where you thought you lost it.

Old Things Once Gone

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230

the dead moon is like
a broken plate.
Here the temple gate is locked and
The Mayor of the sun- an old laugher long
Watches hawker breeze the fine damn tale
The stars sing out a wheezy moment then go dark
While a horse draws tight beside the window
Of an unfurnished room where
Astronomy is spread to anyone who’s buying
Old things once gone now reappear
Along the annual path to fall.
These bridges crossed these walls and arches
The way to waiting goes through here.

Man in Tatters

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229

Good night, little Hero.
The path of the damned
Had you hauled up from
Your deal struck with the devil-
You took the gaspipe and chain to the end
You were lost in a soundless space
Stuck down there with your tiny teeth
And sewer air
The act of empire comes much later
And choking, waits for things to be put right
So you watch to see the
true meaning of your work.

Turning People Into Eaches*

* e.e. cummings

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227

You can take the light
But leave the gloom
As though you were never really here.
Before the air closed we
Stood at windows and on
Corners watching trespassers of
Pleasure whirl by. Perhaps kindness
Has allowed us something as we guests
Along for the voyage back to original time
Try to discover sainthood
But find only faceless days.
Here, on the floor, time comes flickering
Writing your history in shadows

The Wind Makes Dust

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224

Watch for the embarrassed flowers of spring,
Carnations I thought they were
Young between suddenness of arrival and departure
Trainless and with fingers of money,
New shoes and regardless happiness they
Make their way to the hatted city
Where happiness was the goal
Not realizing how temporary things really are.

Remember Where You Are

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222

I’ve seen the silent jets
The thanks and strapshift sash
Careworn coins slipped from
Old and aching hands
The chirping urchins who decide
Instead to go over the railing
Glanced through untold forward windows
Where women fall from grace
Along the path
How deeply home and beauty are
Given over to skirting flung
And arching forth
Generous shown anger and
Dropped into a cap
A visitor a minstrel
from the evening
Onelegged and mouthless
Growling as daedalus runs to the sea.