- •Unit one
- •I will teach you in my verse
- •I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
- •Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
- •Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
- •Is a paling stout and spiky?
- •It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
- •Islington and Isle of Wight,
- •I like them all!
- •Unit two
- •I'm Joe Linn, I come from San Francisco. I'm leaving for Peking.
- •I'm going to learn Chinese. I know some words already
- •I hope you like Peking.
- •Unit three
- •It’s cuz we're concentrating
- •Is reality’s accordion. Unexpectedly
- •I thought this was
- •I took drama
- •Into my own hands and alongside
- •I told you not to do it and you did it again!
- •Unit four
- •Violently engaged. But it was the artists
- •I looked left toward the little bridge,
- •Incredibly enough, being led
- •In servizio sulla Linea Mediterraneo - Nord America sailing 1968
- •Unit five
- •It was “about breeding.”. Breeding yes, I flashed the thought of all the deaths
- •In the birdcage
- •In the face of “what counts
- •It’s pennies”. In o-eight
- •Unit six
- •In the feminist fable
- •Into activist or choose to manifest
- •In smokey loops
- •Unit seven
- •Is That Why They Call Them Flower Children?
- •In a high school senior play, shouting
- •In broken English and rapid Greek about tanks
- •Into citizens, just now, in the streets of Prague.
- •I was running
- •In the gutters
- •I still see blue sky and sea under sun and wind
- •Is a little dock, still a black rock beach, footprints
- •Unit eight
- •In search of Athena and Apollo’s
- •In different, steaming jungles in Vietnam.
- •Unit nine
- •Voice spilling. He will not
- •Voices soften thick air and as they sing every
- •If you run after two hares you will catch neither.
- •Unit ten
- •In rural Turkey?
- •I feel sure that was the afternoon
- •Unit eleven
- •In Athens the Greek music
- •I squint myself into your eight and ten year old eyes to conger
- •Into a monster. Other answers are better buried.
- •Sideducking Your Question
- •Family Game
- •Irresistible
- •Is a room whose boundaries invite me to compose
- •Is a room
- •Answering Machine
- •Into the room where only
- •The Business of a Clean Sweep
- •The Night House
- •Into half truths. Simply an issue of light.
- •In her house in the middle
- •University Weather
- •Clinic Wait
- •Is in an exam.
- •The Baroness of Ballard
- •In hers. He says
- •Is dying but she is hanging-on.
- •Salzbergwerk Berchtesgaden in Germany
- •I forget where we were headed but it rained.
- •It was dark, a musty smell and the guide’s voice
- •Passages in the Bad-Hotel Zum Hirsh
- •Milltown Maltbay, Cookery School
- •Fourth Day at the Literary Seminar
- •In pink overstuffed
- •You Hated to Practice
- •Our Teacher Says Music is Her Mission
- •In a room that is the color of ice. First Rehearsal of the Opera, "Andrea Chénier"
- •Emanuel Ax, Hunger & Taste
- •Barometric Pressure
- •Its little ledges of blue slow motion
- •Inflaming the cheek after the slap.
- •The Question of the Color of the Walls
- •In splats of blistering gold & refresh ourselves in grapefruit.
- •Eau de California
- •The Perfumer
- •Afterimage of the Bird of Passage
- •The Most Important Thing to Save When the House is Burning Down
- •I needed that.
Is a room
surrounded by shifting walls of dark.
Answering Machine
Black leather chairs swivel
as your voice bursts
Into the room where only
the paintings smile back.
Lights are off
we are not at home--
Groggy, after midnight
we receive your gift--
affection translated
from the telephone tape turning
on the machine we
whirl and re-whirl to saturate
our senses, soak in
your sweet sound.
Your contralto lights
the air, palpitates
off the window
lilting along the
arm of the couch,
we fold our fingers
as if to touch
that familiar cadence--
Your favorite black dog
lifts his heavy ears looks to find you.
He will never
know how far
Far Eastern Russia is.
The Business of a Clean Sweep
Her address is the hollow house, innards
stacked unsteady against the far wall.
The white truck stops. Port opens. A tentacle
snakes its giant octopus arm across the lawn
humming,
up three steps into the living room It’s off to work...
to steam below the puddle of sunshine that washes
through the open door highlighting carpet
like a Sir Walter Raleigh cloak-of-light.
Revealing underfoot an Achilles’ Heel: yesterday
tromping tear stains of spilt milk.
She scans the house’s bones too late
to repair
even with this broom of moist breath.
Flicked off the tentacle crawls down three steps
across the lawn
humming a penny earned is ...
The port inhales the arm.
She closes her door
lock latch snaps
...a silk purse out of a sows ear.
The truck packs it up, cleans empty rooms
all across the city
every day. hi-ho hi-ho...
The Night House
A neighborhood mother was murdered
last month. Now it’s an issue of light.
A night light locates the budding and dying
potted plants on the kitchen bay window,
just enough illumination to assure no ogre
from my leftover childhood imagination
smolders in the corners or behind the door.
All night streetlamps glow from outside.
Drab light outside and dim inside press like page
against a page to create creepy shapes.
But sometimes the dark goes velvet. I come downstairs
barefoot and slowly, familiar but not familiar.
My nerve fumbles and I swallow.
Nothing in the dark except what is there
when it’s day. Damn dark! Hides behind,
over and under itself to twist what I believe
Into half truths. Simply an issue of light.
Hands tied behind her back, murdered
In her house in the middle
of a sun saturated morning and the police
still in the dark look for clues.
University Weather
for Sage
Thursday, the seventeenth of May.
A black and gray discomforter of clouds
and a sharp south wind threaten
raindrops hefty enough
to stomp the sweet-pea sprouts.
The storm like bursts of engine backfire
doesn’t alarm our freshman grand-
daughter until a dozen sirens shriek
below her dorm window. The window
between rock-red & roll posters,
the window of the room where
her stuffed bear, last survivor
of childhood sleeps
on a down-heaped bed.
Below the window
her music professor, crumples,
murdered, blood steaming the grass.
The shooter then shoots
himself. Rain
won’t revive them.
The weather-man explains it’s a random
storm, the temperature’s
not so hot this May.