2031

KITSCH

What’s wrong with it, exactly.
A bit like calling someone “fat,” isn’t it.
Or gay. Or a gypsy.
It is the inner life of adjectives.

It is the dark ground
Against which elegance shines.
The wrong zipcode.
The wrong skin.

People make it and people claim to like it.
“Life-giving vulgarity”
Said one who knew. Oh the ones who know.
They write essays on subjects like this and the rest of us nod.

2030

A DOCUMENT OF BARBARISM

"Every document of civilization is also..." -- Benjamin


At the museum Franklin asked how I read that line.
I averred that its staying power resides
In the vagueness that lets it be carried abroad
Among many flavors of righteousness.

I'll have a double scoop of Freudian judo;
Not, by the way, a good one to share with the wife.
The farther any art goes in its severity
The more completely it eventually becomes kitsch.

In the exhibition of gray paintings I kicked a penny
From room to room. Eventually I gave up
On it ever turning heads. As I picked it up,
Franklin explained the meaning of "The Dutch Wives."

2029

GHOST BABY

In our apartment between two parks
Some nights in the walls we hear
The gurgling of a large baby.
The sound comes from high and low,
We've heard it in every room.

Often it's followed by the closing of a door.
Sometimes not. There's a hairline crack
Where the ceiling meets the walls --
That's not it either.
We have been married a little over a year.

Nothing would make us happier.
Sometimes when we hear it, we sing to each other:
Hurry up and make me born,
When I think
I can hear the synapses singing, power lines.

2028

SUPERHERO CAMP

A couple of marines jogged by,
One of them swinging a lantern, a red head.
I crouched behind the station wagon
And watched as they decided

To see if anyone was here.
I stayed out of it. Then you came home
And didn't notice, and I had to swoop in
Just as their knives cleared their throats.

The papers made a fuss and suddenly
I'm at Superhero Camp. My thing
Stretching metal was hard to develop,
I was a bit of a klutz -- knocked over the DAT

Mr. Steam played Klaus Nomi from.
They were all so powerful, our contemporaries,
So curiously uninterested in using their powers,
Except breaking into the roof pool to watch water smoke.

2027

THE ROBOT NOVEL

I've been thinking about writing a novel.
Also, I've been thinking about building a robot.
I'm sweating like a superintendent --
We're baking a meatloaf at the moment.
This afternoon I scissored open a bag of bread mix.

There is a quantity of champagne -- prosecco I mean.
Translation -- really hauling it all over,
Not just freeloading like Bill Murray
On post-traumatic stress disorders I've avoided --
I will sit down and make my own English out of French.

What else do I like that's bad for me,
Besides this disappearing into my selves I mean.
I do collect eccentric alcohols, to be sure.
Clutter -- that's about it, and mild eccentricities.
I'll write a book about a robot baker who lives in squalor.

2026

THE GAMBLER

I love my wife, am in love with her.
I love going to sleep with her Friday night
And abhor getting up Monday morning.
I bring her French bread to exercise her wrist.

When she cries and points out everything wrong
Then I have an imagination. You could ask me
About any book or movie ever made. I have many.
When she cries I'm out on my ice floe again.

She and I, we're in the same business;
We have different ideas about it.
I love her prosody. I love it when we read in bed
And she curls up, turns on her side, dozes off.

2025

VACUUMING

The comforter, stable for most of the fall
And the new year, has found a new place to rupture.
The movie was peculiarly reluctant to satisfy --
Clever, for sure. But peevish, alienatingly so.

A reassuring stability I find myself surprised
To value second only to ecstatic involuntary shivers --
The comfort of the living room and the spacepod.
I don't mind the light but the noise all night's a bit much.

There are feathers all across the edge of the room.
In twenty minutes I'll preheat the oven for bread.
For ten dollars you can get five hours control
Of telescopes in Australia, Brazil, and the Canary Islands.

2024

KNOWINGNESS

That feeling of hunger may actually be
A wish to brush the teeth. Five days,
Two snowstorms, still but a single sparrow
Makes a single visit to the feeder on the escape.

The hillside is white, with obstructions.
People in coats from catalogs walk large dogs down it.
Here inside it's warm enough for dough to double.
We sit near each other and race through volumes,

Pinging each other's arms now and again for love.
The mind can be retrained but it takes time and work.
The Mamas and the Paps got that "Every other day" bit
From the Beatles' "She's gonna think twice, gonna do right."

2023

LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND

Why do children even have dreams,
Is it already all over by then?
Give me that. Now what. I'm bored.
Every integrated wish folded out
From the wall, the neon flashing in.

For a while I lived next door to myself,
Heard the coming and going
While I waited for news. Here,
The country lets us breathe (cow air).
We idolize the weather for its flair.

I don't invent new mechanisms -- I'm poor --
For elastic windows and rubber floors.
There are tribesman, sure, but
I am the chariot and the boner
Rushing out of the gangster's den, into the street.

2022

DOLLYWOOD

The cat's name means ghost in Chinese.
She disappears into the grass,
Jumps straight elevator up
And returns to her brood with a vole for lunch.

Her paws like the three skittish sets
Winking in the dark of the barn
Are white and with an extra toe, maybe three.
Yao-ling sounds to me a lot like Dolly Parton

Imploring the town slut, mercy.
Dolly Parton sends every baby born in Tennessee
A book a month until they're five.
She has my aunt's smile, and, I imagine, back pain.

2021

THEIR GOOD INTENTIONS AN ACT OF AGGRESSION
- Whalen

The specifics of this rosebush
Getting-up-in-the-morning
Have now made my fingers tingly,
I am a kinetic sculpture of a man
Sitting up straight,
In love with my wife my hands
Stroking her hair.

When I get home from the rising tide of paper
I have the strength to kiss her in the kitchen.

She is so alive, hungry,
And I am unshaven. It's nothing like I thought it'd be,

It's better. The antipodes of New York City
Is somewhere in the Indian Ocean --
I'd better stop digging
When I get to the molten core.

2020

WORLD HAPPINESS DANCE / SISTER THE JOISTS

The daylight is looking forward to getting away
From this question mark customer.

In the split-level beer and spice place
The characteristic feeling changes
Every couple of feet, here curry here fenugreek,
Dried lemons... I have power,
I am a powerful man. Where I ask for licorice,
Three weeks later licorice appears. Root.

I sit inside as the daylight
Hangs out with people playing music in the park.
I play music too: I have Ornette yodeling through my cortex,
Must I be bereft of radiation?

A billion people in Canada,
All of them eating Canadian food.

*

I put on the cd of a friend,
I have no cd of my own,
What would I put on it, Betty Barclay
Singing I'm a Big Girl Now probably.

It is Christmas in January,
In February, I like this put on
Of the universe singing
In the waves, the waves are the singing,

The plaster is cracked at the ceiling
And the joints of the walls,
It is time to sister the joists,
To spackle and repaint

And box up all the artillery
Of the finders burrowing
Deeper into the mud than the groove.
I am lucky to get to like you.



(This poem sponsored in part by a grant from Samuel Amadon.)