TEN POEMS FOR CHRISTOPHER SMART AND HIS CAT

1.

A riot, tabled it
and fought sunset
into submission (dark
hills) endless xeroxes
where we fidgeted;
pressing new buttons
for answers, orgasms,
whatever-we-needed
asleep in its cave:
lethargic beast, onus
longer than children
hang around the house,
eat everything in sight,
leave skin downstairs.

2.

Bright skim of light,
dragonfly intellect
pursuing small meal
through scrim-nets.
Is that you standing
under the eaves, opting
for optics that drag
the world, without
clean existence? It's
clearly medieval, maybe
home-spun, the way
everyone feared it.
Who dropped the subject
with aplomb, leaden?

3.

Who leapt the world,
night-cursor, cloven
stone of the tomb
where waves (sounds)
beat back the night.
A mantis poses, its
clean-cut shadow cools
(beetle below). Ego
whims drifting clouds
paint lakes. Engines
stall and sleep enters
tiny skulls, like rootlets.
We should look "under"
if we want wound bodies.

4.

Compressed details, ear
spiral hearkens to space's
unseen lean. Talons rip
talents. Mice scuttle.
Blue openings are cool.
Rose springs are labial,
blown creams. Walls fall
into sweeping silence. No
check is best. Eat dirt
glints. Toward town,
echoes increase, factories
exploding calmly. Worms
undermine earth, not
heaven. Heaving chest
of all. Awful.

5.

Forms seductive, eaten
erosion. I-Ching beater
clicking along a cursor,
wind. And yellow-lit
screens. Trauma bends
to suit your schedule
when Moon is self-inflicted,
shivering on pewter shoals.
Agonies, innumerable hum
of windows. City blesses
engines, take-offs every
fifteen minutes. Forests
fall into lines. Paper
hoards white, ammonite energy.

6.

Didn't you clasp dawn
with its pearl anomie once,
blush blue in old cellars?
Another autumn burnishes
gilt over autos, spills
light over horizons, away.
Nothing comes. Should we
scrape artificial bones
or sound alarms? Matter
is full of holes like
Swiss cheese. Could we
drive through? Yogis
smile on the plane's wings.
We're going down. Mute.

7.

Well-meaning words sift
reality, just ore. Alchemy
of poetry, but the divine
(as gold) can't be made cheaply.
Only found. Forests of
holes we walk through,
telling stories. Static
of leaves. Quick runners
walk across the water on stilts
they've only borrowed.
We float on luminous sea
of kilobytes (light swans).
Better to leave each page
with a lasting bow. Glass.

8.

Revisions fool. No such
animal to tame. Disappear
into the next room. It's
(nice) chameleons on ice,
very polite. Trammeled in
neural nets of device,
backpedaling bikes to
turn time against itself.
Sound's urns. Frost leaves,
a few crystals in the bottom,
glint-dead dragonfly. Sun's
bollixed. Fish swim below
panes. Everything will
disappear in a flash.

9.

Words are dominoes.
The truth flew out,
large as a cormorant.
You ate sorbet, blushed
like a guard flashed tits
in the Louvre. Spoon
some more meaning out
this cracked window.
"I couldn't eat one more
syllable!" Caloric ex-
cess to brain's heat.
Don't like leaving poems
alone like that...they
cluster like dinosaurs.

10.

Wavy surface to this water
distorted it. What then
is "it?" The reflex to
cover a hole (or fill
earth. Meaning troublous
absence festered there.
It should be wound as
a conch or brain, not
wound that never heals,
heels. Let it be (un-
fill-in-the-blank) forever.
Your head needn't be split
because Chaucer merely wants
to "ax you something."

 

 

3 LINKED RENGA FOR IZUBUCHI

Carnassial face hidden in intersecting lines
of point of human pigment

Milling cutters in the Malevich

Bellona holding an optical illusion

The fugal brain equates with mental health
here where the osprey is emptied
of Aeschylus

There is nothing akin to skin, it skews

how you broke a knuckle rapping
on the ancient door.

We gave a name. The ocean

The wire grids in a child's toy
awakening without your lover

Or Aeschylus trying to get away from literature
his epitaph alluded only to a soldier.

*

The body's promiscuity will never match the mind's
Source of much spiritual ruin

Burroughs rhapsodic on Genet's name
continually being born

To nest but where?

O the data-transfer-rate of a dragonfly
that somehow found its way into the Uffizi

Pronouns for maintenance

"In evolutionary terms, this is called the Mullerian..."

*

This is the 1950s
presided over by a leaning image

The golden skewering of the atom

Wallace Stevens holding Descartes' mind
in the palm of his thick hand

We are moved by the dead's avarice

O, My Husband the Elegist
you are not here to see the nothingness crawl fluorescent as nightsurf

Benetton ad featuring Fayyum mummies
Beautiful adolescents below glass

Veneer, Conchoidal

Franz Kline, Frank O'Hara

Snow falls through the branches of Hartford
"like eyesight fallen brightly to earth"

through the carnassial faces of dogs running

Jackson Pollock turns toward the barn in a blizzard

Lee Krasner yells out a grocery list
with a corkscrew twang

Of Hokusai's favorite brush.

 

JAPANESE CINEMA

The obscure "with" or width
of the atmosphere--the social
confusion or bewilderment
may be trick photography, mind embraces.

A coastal light seen in fog
is the more urgent problem
in that its sleeplessness will soon be general
throughout nature. Highway becomes cliff.
Where two sounds converge
as the lovers' insomnia, streetlights
in a Japanese movie--driving
is filmed this sinuous,
following the flight from concentration
into the lower ground
blurred or obscured, called "story"
for want of a feeble end-point
you rejected. You think the fog
may be deflecting the mountain,
unglimpsed.