wrung my hair, stamped them feet

I painted a portrait, and named it Dejection;
My aims were to mirror on canvas the river
That drained assorted tales from a section
Of forest. On broad boats of leaves
Fallen in its current it speeded down
The whispers of trees once green, sent them down
To dusky, dying, soundless seas.

It fell that in the middle of the river I composed this picture.

Things weren't as I imagined them.
Yea, the woods were not gorgeous,
And the stream's bends were imperfect,
And the trailing leaves uncrisp, and rotted, and stale.
I wandered more, and noted that scores on scores
Of brown skulls of spring clogged the scene,
Where aged ribs of flowers stuck fast, collected,
Then slowly congealed the ebb and swirl,
Coercing the current into pools, where, coagulate,
Sorrowful made the fair waters stagnate,
Froze their motion, decayed the river's resolve,
Its impeccable keening for grander shores forgot,
Destroyed in slow measure the life, the hope,
The pure liquid pulsate of its soul.

More evil the wood, then, that imprisoned the river there,
and in chains of Autumn fallen forbid it drain!
How earth sullied that clear crystalline stream,
Until languorous and weepy, overgrown with algae
So sickly green the stopped-up river seemed
That I, absorbed in morose rapture,
thinking this spot a grazen pasture,
Stepped; I sunk, and in the mud was bound.

And I had my brush, but had no pigment;
So drawing from the wounds of the river
In muddy pustule I painted my picture.

we painted, or took pictures,

When once that Fall, which was a while ago, it rained,

All the airs whispering and cool on our faces,

And the colors falling hotly, and our sky drowning;

And the empty climate of the wood around our house

Would remind you and I we had only cornbread to eat, and each other;

Where we lived I would go, and

Pluck flowers out of coffins,

And bring them back to you. They sat,

And drank up their black spines from pewter vases

the water drawn from pools

on the train tracks behind our house where our children trod, safe and secure

that never a train would run, that these places always freightless were.

There was a time which, if you measured it on a wristwatch,
was the emptiness of a yawning mouth.

You see, seized up in cotton is a tough place to be,
or whatever paper is made of nowadays,
Materials of all varieties: mostly wood pulp,
sometimes fishing lines, or even more rarely
big gray bridges, open bays, hay lofts,
autumntime bales and wide indistinct fields.

My father has been irresolvable,
very had to figure. I used to think he did not emit,
but he emits well, only in a curious fashion, like to
a nitpicking butterfly, or a giraffe.
I did not think my father emits, until in an old cardboard box
he showed me his emissions, like confessions, under
a professor who could only have been incredibly fat;
I shrank in the chair and beheld lists of things.

Fallow acres
upon acres
upon acres fallow.

Fern Hill

Maintenant comme j'etais jeune et libre sous les branches des pommes
pres de la maison penchee et content comme les herbes etaient verts,
et le soir au-dessus le grenier etait etoile,
les Temps m'ont permis...

fuck.

The muse, the tongue, the pen,
love diffused, sullen and silent, stiff
is the glance, the jazz-band, the marching, the hands
that play and graft ribbon, skin, dreams on the bent wood,
sleep the contortion forests yellow and red as a circus tent.

dissolved.

blasphemous or empty

Ring out the bells, make the air heavy with them!
Send out fog of myrrh, heady spice! Earthly delight!
Choke on that, the fervor, you may sing your battle cry;
you may,
you may,
you may lift it to the raven wind,
you may,
or tune your voice to smaller hymns you may,
to thank the hearth, next the bread, last the LORD;
that is your song.

You may sing the trees, make them greener in note and phrase
than ever they were in golden summer light;
sing that light,
sing the Song! Use your voice,
warble like a thrush,
a hen at creaking day, a creek--
sing the creek! Sing it colder and faster,
sing it down to sea-green shores, misted wharves,
sing it past the lonesome tottering hermit--
sing the sands, sing their distraction.

Sing the large hymns, not the small.
Sing first the LORD;
that is to sing the world.

can't wrinkle a webpage

so much fuck the world; so much.

rocks and literal rocks,
What is it that is not children playing?
When the radio-dial in grimmest tones informs me of the funeral I have missed,
because of oversleeping again? Second time this week.
Loaded barges gray with age who lug impossible cargo
'gainst the current sage and surge--time surges too, with haphazard sickle and scythe--
while the unthinking green children make sweet indentation in the hilly grass,
watch them barges wheels about in the sky and seem OH GREAT TUNEFUL WORK,
Huck and berrybush all fused in such delight in swarming Mississippi jungle.

Where is the creeks that go? Where is the creeks that run to, parched, phantom?
My address to you is simile; is like them pyramid cloister, cloister dry rot,
cloistered sandstorm brown, like them sandstone slavehands, penhand rather.
Writ, tossed with the afterbirth in the bin; binned, rubbish, that's writ a shade,
a stream a shade to a-c-compose.
Rotted faithless and a hull pitiless for none, to who none spread when eyed.
Whores eyed. great great humdrum, great turning unending space association
too cold for wolves , dipping , boughs drip , or smell of olive , baking ,
too cold and deep for mothers and any love at all.

The night is the worst sort of neighbor, forever perturbed
and ill at ease with his own sightless company,
insists on pressing between my curtains until slipped inside
I have to share with him his nighttime woes.

When singing low on the night I encountered the brightness of a metal lamp
whose leverage gripped on my mind, so uncomfortably lifted, the longer I stared,
it grew, pressed up; then with a sudden violent leap, it uphove! unhinged
my thought, with such snapping dislocation that myself snapped, thundered back, foundered and failed,
my surroundings reduced to plain senseless arithmetic of black street,
black lamp,
black pole,
ones and ones
and colorless bleak things;
until on my back lying I saw me, stricken gazing still into the light that shone out,
round and radiant-- and that light transformed:
the night gone, that light racing itself across a hundred thousand multitudes,
that bent and waved as the field of clouds piled in bright sky
over which I flew, beaming, and saw the bands of light as avenues indefinite, clear,
yet as water, then warm air, trumpeting fresh and fair as daybreak, gold,
and crisper, more light and easy and lucid and free, harmonious,
remaining constant above those clouds to their very ends which were beyond me sent into the forever blue,
making cleanly visible each and every corner of dusk and gloom beneath, and them instantly removed
-- thus by light only transformed.

I was approached by an extinct thing. Appearing in my wintry yard, and ambling forward with a gait that was jealous to its left, in its eyes I recognized an envious zeal, the same common to all things dispossessed of the life we love to hate. When me it finally reached, its shoulders slouched, and in meek obscenity slowly its mouth it unfurled. It spoke to me in grating tones:
1 "I was born beneath a huge, black rock, that heedless intruded on the air that swam around it. My den was cold, damp, and dripped with the echo like to the sea floor. When it rained, the black rock wept. Despondency fell in cords off its face."
2 "I was born of a woman and have been consumed as one."
3 "I moved to a cottage by the seaside, where I kept warm by my iron hearth and wrote copiously. I drank tea, and enjoyed watching the sun set on France far over the whitecapped waves. In the winter I would cork my walls and wrap myself in heaps of blankets, the patchworked quilts of my grandmothers, and odd flannels. My nose I would stick in a glove."
4 "I once wanted to buy an ermine coat, but when I felt it jockey for position around my neck, I screamed. It fell to the floor, where it wriggled, and I fled."
5 "Your religion is untrue."
6 "Where the dunes wash into the sky is where I buried my mother after she died. The tint of red red rubies was in the sand and the sky was pink. Descending I looked up to where the dune crested its wave, and where I had marked the grave. The wind, catching the sand, flung it off in wisps into the evening sky, and as I turned at last to go, I saw the geese, flying in skeletal bands, stretched out, heading far, far north."

Your head is definitely a warm hill,

full of spaghetti and no sauce.

     How tuneful it is to tap on tin cups;

     supper tonight is a warm string and a

     thin

     tapering

     wick.

What the well behaved vein disdains to pump
I will spill; my hands washed in the pulse with which I plan to wash you.

Popping mints, one, two, three in my mouth
(so that I avoid building more insidious habits)
but no savor, crunch, no chew; look across the room at you,
sentimental-faced clutching a blanket you're swaddled up in,
tucked in that wicker rocking chair pretending the rainy pane
can catch your interest while you run rivets in the rug
ignoring me seeing you.

You assume I've always got my nose to the ground
and eyes on a rose, hand around a pen, and it's for this I think your eyes
shine black and wet like a villa in a valley touched by winter rain.

black and gray and yellow

It started at a bad time; it started late, when I stuck a piece of gum into my mouth and I headed out the already open door.

Hoping that there’d be by now a fire in my belly, which I have by now quite filled with

thick peasant bread

in preparation for starry nights that are always colder in their clarity, and more beautiful, and so much meaner to ungloved hands, my hands, that guide me down a page foolish blind; that page I cannot see. Numbed hands, bumbling touch, touch numbed by the rising air off the glacier melted where I stand.

Crossing the street to get to this night place, belly girdled with plain, dark peasant bread

(that is so good, too good soaked in cheap stew)

a dog rustled behind a fence, and I heard him, rustling, and I heard in my mind, “it is a dog rustling and he will come out”

but this did not stop the shock of his ghost white face looming at me, and did not muffle his machine bark.

BUT NONSENSE! My ears have been numbed and plugged with cold, and I cannot hear anything.

Nothing—like when I imagine the trees that rattle in the wind and shaking the clear cold comes running down them like rain—walked into the woods, and now can’t see. The moon is hid by the showering cold and the leaves. I drip with a shiver. Wanted to, would have told all about the water, and the city lights on it, the oil spills, and how so vivid they were I expected ducks to crawl out coated in light and sticky golden threads. But they were clean and all very sleepy.

the light from the fires never reaches me, rubbery and stopping at land and never reaching my feet

BUT the tide got up and left and trailed out like a slug, while all around my bench the mud flats rose thickly with a thousand trapped and dying things and smelling of sulfur. If I enjoyed disgusting scenes, I would enjoy these.

We are all soluble little bits draining into Donne’s oceans.

1,000 miles away a car aims its headlights at me from the summit of a mountain across the muddy gorge.

there’s a pirate plank pushed out into the flats, but all across them echo the hoots of gulls and the sights of black forest walls like fence posts with dogs behind them.

a landscape too medieval, washed in gray dyes. Gray browns?

My eyes are numbed and cannot see. Like I am, and into the woods again.

Where did I go?

i hardly remember

i remember city lights telling me where the earth spun,

so i followed them meekly, less courageous than the dog behind any of those black rising fences.

i moved, and thought of where i was, and began to think; and the more i thought, the more i missed and regretted the gum in my mouth and the door that was open

And I became sullen and moody.

Traveling and roaming I am silly and slight in this life, running to jump, but never leap;

Success in Circuit does NOT lie.

succes in Circuit does NOT lie.

succe in Circuit does NOT lie.

succ in Circuit does NOT lie.

Succor in Circuit does NOT lie.

I don’t see people, I can’t see faces. A familiar girl taps me on the shoulder and I push past her. Dreams and filth. I cannot see, cannot see

the world is a stranger

I am draining to a place—I am seeing one, a long watery line broken in ripples—from here to home.

Home finally?

What is home? But I am not there wrapped in linens.

if home were Burma I would be wrapped in linens. or Siberia. Lenin’s linens; but I am not THERE. A street up a hill and a sign and a street still declining is not home and that I why I went there, so why obsess over what I fled? Why even after I have run out?

I cannot press Home out of my eyes and ears and numbed fingers.

I reach into my pocket too cold to feel my pen leaking

A bus driver

has seen me two, three, four times.

I can’t care. Shameless.

A bus driver

has seen me three, four, five times.

I’m so disgusting.

Is this it? I fled to a jaundiced world! Jaundiced night world, full of repulsive night men, night women, unclean and NONE of them in LINEN SOFT. Night men night women did I flee to YOU?

really? a boy who is not home is on the bus seat in front of me and is sick. he is sick, he is he.

Stop coughing! stop coughing! stop coughing! stop!

Black and gray and yellow, i am walking in these.

distortion beats are bringing the branches alive, every leaf a bent note, about every tree; and me, rolling up a hill where each step brings me closer to heaven, while I sink down to hell.

things blocking light are changing yellow streets into some kaleidoscope fantasy. transparent wonders that could be shadows.

It’s not real. These must be the scenes people write about.

such as, roadside lettuces at midnight.

such as, another dog, a pearl in the night, his legs trotting cartoon slideshows.

flick, whip, forward midnight motion.

Rounding the corner home has never felt so sane, and so stupid.

The family is back. I do not read, no think, no do the things I should do. I head for the linens; I get to bed, get to bed, get to bed.

the gentle and the rough;

a den of lions, fiends, and the summer coated doe,

swaying between golden birch trees.

i will take you to see the summer coated doe

swaying gently between golden birch trees,

watching her fawn playing on summer's old leaves

that cover the forest floor

the summer coated doe watching with big brown eyes

her fawn rolling all between the golden birch trees

the summer coated doe is easily found when she wanders around

through the snow stretching out and alone beneath the old gold birch trees.

A dog opened against the night
like the tender mouth of a clam,  white.