23

WHAT DEPENDS ON WHAT

1

Grace does or doesn’t consist
Of following your own feet
Just as to be non-toxic, logic better refer
You to notes not needled on the coccyx
Of the city the movies make ambiguously real,
C.f. Walker Percy. Id est, the heart beats,
Coffee sluicing through the matrix, synapses
A-capped. Exemplum gratum, Jesus can’t be
The green beret with well-inked arms asking
(Minus larynx) to borrow the fountain pen
Out of my hand between 145 and 125
But still I feel disloyal to the cosmos
When I say no. I write the number for him.
The young girl in the white tank top gets off.
The paths though paved are wild to a new mind;
Fauna yet uncatalogued take the bar,
Clear the margins, etch and calcify narratives
Approximated neatly by passages in commonplaces
Predating IP standards by five or six centuries
Ayup. I’m in the street now with the details,
Dial me up. Map me out. Make me over.

2

OK I’m overcaffeinated
But I still believe in God
As a series of perceptions
Saccades
OK I mean attention
I believe in attention

At the bar
Every week is fleet week
Every shirt is top-hat skull
Every song is Jerry Mulligan

The secret is
Glowing in the dark
And taking years to develop
Like a story worth hearing
Or a thought worth following

All thoughts are worth following
As far as they’ll go
Once more around the block
Or a minute more before the tide comes in
And covers up this place with breathing whorls

And if I had all day
I’d cultivate the haze
But the actors are coming in half an hour
So I’d better wrap this up

Here you go, actors

3

So good at solving riddles,
Oedipus’s psychiatrist said,
And yet so puzzled.

Breakthroughs, though not cures,
Have a salutary effect.

Run the breakthrough up the flagpole,
Why don’tcha

I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha
Nobody needs this photorealist cigarette,
Everybody craves radio waves
Cresting over the opposition.

What happened to opposition, anyway,
Who absconded with my Chantal Mouffe?

Make me a brick
Of cheerful doubts,
Melancholy challenger;

I have a window
Of automatic loveliness
To etch with narratives.

Every path though paved is new to wild mind,
I have an urge to climb
To the tip from the frog,
And there see the chaconne on its,
On our, on every way.
In high seas everything leans on you half the time,

A package arrives, walks by,
From then on you’re right twice a day.
Isoceles dollar bills.
Cornets and field drums.

Stir the ashtrays! You’re right twice a day.
Silence, the therapist says.
Harumph. Vanilla.

4

The peonies stand in for compound interest.

In heaven Don Ameche yawns.
He has never been to Madras.
Satan, he a Met fan.

You can pull for an underdog all your life
And still have the character
Of a Korvettes parking lot –

It takes a beer or two
To catch Mary Cassatt’s idea of perspective –
A form of praise, in fact.

The phone rings my leg jumps
Hello? Star! Star! the boy says
In his sleep. I am coated in smoke.