Making a poem

            for Chris

Consider a crafter
& a necklace she imagines

each bead or stone
a line, beautiful

ungainly, tiny, outsized
awkwardly or elegantly shaped

a line, strong
in strand &

how they bump shine
compliment or insult

each other &
the beholder

& after all that
having the wits

about her still
to do it.

Dirt Farmer

And here I am
by the ineffable protocols

of all these systems
replying to my

own message.
I only have

one message.
Listen to

the new
Levon Helm

recording, Dirt Farmer.
It is extraordinary.

Three from the past

Her Highness

The fact
that she
is moving is
not always

apparent. Certain of
her motions,
that from circle
to smile to

nothing, for
example . . . But
you understand
that is no motion, it

is reflection.
You win, this time, wise guy,
but when she grins
you ought not

mess with her
or hers. She moves
oceans, and they
are no small things.

(ca 1983)


Concerning the Recent Laramie Crime Wave

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude?
It’s the abominable snowman smoking a joint.
A seed pops coals to his breast, he burns and exudes
a hairy muskrat smell. His beard points
down Grand Avenue to the liquor store,
where two cowboys watch him and don’t scare.
“A man’s a man for all that,” says one toward
the other who just says, “Yep.” They stare
through the window. The trembling salesgirl
sells him a quart of gin, he drinks it
& she faints. He rifles the cash drawer,
has another quart of gin and splits.
In the morning the Boomerang reports
“Stoned, Naked Hippy Holds Up Snorts’.”

(ca 1974)

Verbal Assassination, a quibble

Lacking the guts for “real” battle
the sentient being strikes with words.
The urge to kill and the point-
lessness of “real” death are both admitted;
that death may form release, if not reward.

The death of mind and spirit
are another matter.
The undead appear
to govern and make us
like themselves. How now,

Old Zombie? What has been made
the schedule for this gunpowder day?
How many words to process?
How many tanks to be filled?
How many coyotes shall we poison?

It is easy to want none of it, these 80s in this America
but a program proves hard to come by.
Verbal Assassination may not work
on the undead much as sense cannot
be made where none exists to begin with.

(ca 1980)

Solstice 2007

I. Nature reacts to Us

TV sz Dead Sea elevation down
300 feet over next century:

Sinkholes 30 foot wide
open without warning.

Breathless, a dispassionate observer observes:
--Here’s a new one, absolutely new, on a line of sinkholes, you can see the line, you can see the bell shape, you can see, not so wide, not so wide, yea, quite new, not older than two weeks.

Big underground spaces . . .
suddenly and without warning . . .
the surface does not hold.
Last year a woman was killed.

In this geography of cataclysm it is
not unnatural that natural history
would give birth to fear
of a vengeful god

II. The Story of Lot

This is pretty much where
HE WHO HAS NO NAME
laid it on Sodom.

But the fire came not
from the heavens,
but from below,
from Babette Draw.

There’s all that gas there, all
it takes is a spark. The flames are
not the natural orange of natural fire.

III. Lot’s Revenge

200 centimeters (depth, not cubic) of water
pumped into ponds for salt

All fresh water pumped out for salt
(no one could drink it anyway).

There is a new theory:
“Nature” reacts to “Us.”

IV. Ancient Civilization, Revisited

Petra, ancestral home of the Nebatines. While
they were allies of the Romans
they flourished a bit, power
extending along the Red Sea to Yemen.

For then. While their
City remained a marketplace
until the commerce got
diminished by an Eastern trade-route
from Myoshormus to Coptos on the Nile.

Under Pax Romana they lost
their warlike nomadic habits
became sober, acquisitive, orderly
wholly intent on trade and agriculture
and did OK for a while. Made it
for that while as the bulwark separating
The Romans from the wild desert
and its wild inhabitants.

Might have done it longer except Trajan reduced the City, broke up Nebatine nationality
made the territory a short-lived
Roman province they called Arabia Petraea.

In 300 CE the Nebatines stopped
writing Aramaic & switched
to Greek & in 400 CE
converted to Christianity.

Arabs pressed the Nebatine’s sense
of place & turned them
into peasants. The City lay hidden
to The West until discovered
in 1812 by a guy named Burckhardt.

V. Passages

Try to imagine Nebatine civilization, ca. O CE.
Narrow winding passages prefigure
cinematic bazaars in the Tangier or Casablanca.

Heat absorbed in chasmed shadow,
current-carved stone cooling
the angry desert sun, heat further

moderated by prevalent breezes wafting
off the not quite dead yet sea. Breezes that
waft through shaded columnar passages

conditioning air as a mechanist
could only hope to dream. A plausible
place anyone with hope might
think of for a way of life.

VI. The TV sz, again,

Without that awesome landscape of
the Dead Sea and the religions it inspired
history would not be the same.

VII. Medicinal Purposes

A cure lives in a dead sea
salt and mud marketed at least
as therapy for Psoriasis
and its heartbreak.

A certain number of feet
below sea level (and water), sunlight
neither burns nor corrupts, but
gawd almighty (not his real name) heals.

VIII.

The TV sz, to repeat . . .

In this geography of cataclysm it is
not unnatural that natural history
would give birth to fear
of a vengeful god.

And what the TV, and the analysts, and the Christians
and all their related desert religionists
don’t quite yet have a handle on
in thought and deed is
an imagination
of a merciful god

making them more acute observers
of the way things are than they let on,

Oh Well.

IX. Analysts Predict

The war in the Middle Zone
after this one ends
will be about water, not oil.

X. You Can See

The Dead Sea vanishing. Udi sz
--Y’hope everyone might be able to live without the urge to destroy it. Oh, my God, y’can see this wood is part of a coffin, Oh, my God, cigarette packets from last night . . .

Tomb robbers trade human bones . . . for what? TV does not make
that WHAT particularly clear . . . Someone else sz

“Their arid country was their best safeguard, for the bottle-shaped cisterns for rain-water which they excavated in the rocky or clay rich soil were carefully concealed from invaders.”


Solstice (both of them actually in) 2007, San Francisco

On first peering into the collected poems of Philip Whalen

Astonishing that voice all
but 50 years distant (backward)
not much thought of
less even recognized
in some long time.

                Although another sense that
                it’s been there all along
                conscious thought of a mind
                itself unconscious

Hits true on BART
in the tunnel right THERE.
Brain & Heart.
Primer for a Poet.

Snake River Blues

                    for Chris

Anyone trying to jump
that chasm on anything

but Icarus wings
should have died right then

let alone hereafter. I
think sometimes about the kitten

you heard in the sage
wanted to take home, no

matter what.
And I, sensibly,

said no. Said it
emphatically, so emphatically

the other pilgrims on the bridge
took your side as I routinely

oblivious marveled at the sight
of a golf course

on a spit of land
Way Down There.

Kitten no doubt dead by now too
let alone hereafter.

Dead like the marriage
of the friends we’d just

left somewhere back in
Idaho, dead like

that old Evel, who turns
out to be mighty dead

tonite, just now. So It Goes.
In the next life

I hope to see you again
even if as grievous angel &

that kitten as scorpion,
but high lifted high

high in her constellation, &
our friends in the scabbard

of The Hunter’s sheath, nebula
burning desiring something that

can’t be quantified
contained and in certain

religious traditions
even spoken of.

All that Said.
I love you.

Someday, maybe
baby, another cat from a universe

other than mine
will whisper

in yr skeptical ear
and tell you it’s true.

Why I am Glad

I am a poet
not a football player.

Commentators who talk about football
almost always sound

stupid. And nobody covers poetry
on television anyway.

They test football players
for marijuana use.

They don’t know enough
poets to test us

for much of anything and
since they don’t pay us anyway

there’s no point to our
extraordinary rendition

unless we pose a severe
threat to the state. Which

is what we wish we
really could do.

We have nothing to lose.
. . . freedom’s just another word . . .

Poetry is much less
hard on the human body

than football, although it does
untold damage to the human brain.

Keeps it alive, & so,
ready to see,

although no more than any
other consciousness

able to survive, the
upcoming indiscriminate

holocaust. In unrequited
resistance, we will speak

about how it happens for as long as
we can & until it is done.

Found Poem

                   for my brother Tom De Vries

One of the best pass receivers on the team
was a black track star named Willis Ward.
He and I were close friends –

we roomed together on trips out of town –
and our friendship grew
even closer during our senior year.

Our next game was against Georgia Tech
an all-white school whose coach threatened to
forfeit the contest if Willis played.

Michigan tried to work out a compromise
whereby both Willis and some Georgia Tech star
would stay on the bench.

Because I felt this was morally wrong,
I called my stepfather
and asked what I should do.

“I think you ought to do whatever
the coaching staff
decides is right,” he said.

Still unsatisfied, I went
to Willis himself. He urged
me to play. “Look,” he said,

“the team’s having a bad year. We’ve
lost two games already and
we probably won’t win

any more. You’ve got
to play Saturday. You owe
it to the team.”

I decided he was right.
That Saturday afternoon we
hit like never before . . .

                   (From the memoirs of Gerald R. Ford,
                   complicit in the Warren Whitewash
                   of the JFK assassination.)

Reading Smoke

                   for Bubba Michel

This is your brain on music
The reviews are pretty good but the future uncertain
Altitude sickness mild, alcohol enhances

Some of the best lines come falling asleep
Be still my beating brain
The earth yields to its own its own

I. Tractive effort – as it relates to Adult Attention Deficit Disorder

Steam’s a lot stronger than diesel
Passengers are lading trailing tons

Adhesion is the rail & wheel joined without slipping
“In most cases especially for steam locomotives
this figure is a calculated not measured one.”

When adhesion is insufficient
power through pistons and rods
will slip the wheels

No useful effect will result
Cohesion another matter entirely
although critical to brain function

Weight needing to be
five or six times piston power
so the brain can do its work with

less annoyance from slipping
than would be
the case with less weight

II. The brake test has three categories:

1. terminal, 100% brakes in opposition
2. road test, count of cars, put ‘em together, do it from the rear
3. running test, engineer feels the weight

Look at your smoke, tells you how all the rest is doing.
Black, you’re adding some coal, heading uphill, looking for power.
Grey, on cruise control, got it right, for now.
White, need more, fuel, juice, power . . .

The wheel is the handbrake

Guys running on top of the cars
make sure the engineer has his air
lose yr air yr shit out’a’luck

III. Each aspen grove is a single plant

Some scientists believe they may
be the largest living organisms on the planet
Each has its own DNA, lives and dies as one

Others argue for all the redwood trees
in North America, say they are
a single plant, who knows, not me, but
I do keep listening

Leaves come tumbling down & through the car
Max Pacheco sure put his name on a lot of trees
or maybe only one or two

At some point, don’t even want to know
what the name is, just want
to be in it, “the moment”

the moment of the country
the moment of the country

IV. The White People

in the restaurant object to
the too enthusiastic rendition
of “Let’s get drunk and screw”

Lightning cracks and thunder booms &
Washboard Hank sz
“I’m going there” & does

in his steel hat, rain pouring from the sky
& channeling through some freeway
architect’s escape mechanism, leads

the way to New Mexican Cantina where
water covers the floor & plastic buckets get only some,
We all sing Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road &

Don’t let the rain come down.
What do you expect from someone who
hits himself in the head for a living?

V. Mesa Verde

People lived on this planet
lived on this earth, this
place: 1st village, 2nd village,
3rd village, now under aluminum shed

Majestic long house, great palace,
balcony house, house of blue spruce
cut deep and sacred into
mesa cliff, which to see

these days you gotta
get out and walk, cut
a footprint or two into
that mesa-top clay, scramble

time to time on scree and granite
confront the real! Deal
with it, hombre, gringo, rhinestone
cowboy & the horse you

could never ride in on. All
things to be pondered in the sky
high bar, watching the playoffs,

talking to other fans there & the
Jamaican bartender just
doing his job. Pretty
well, all considered.

VII. A Film About the Napoleon of the Woods

Pop! Bang! The machine blew
a hole in your film. What else
can go wrong or you do, get back to

ground level, watch the Jaguars
get beat by the Patriots. The Patriots
win more times than not, even

in Jacksonville, FL, named
after the $20 a throw Yankee President
the French in those days called
Napoleon of the Woods.

VIII. Author’s note

In the late 1990s
& early 2000s a series
of serious fires swept Mesa Verde National Park
revealing architectural treasures hitherto unknown.

In Oct ’07 a similar series
of fires engulfed
San Diego County & northern Baja CA.
Revelation not expected anytime real soon.

On the Pere Marquette

When you
talk to
God do
you think

of it as
an idea to pay
attention to, as
a conversation

with a being
with some other
self, selfless unlike you
are not, but wish to

be? Like that Marine
marched us ‘round
the Seymour Square
Christian Reformed Church

parking lot, bunch’a Cadets
we were, we were
in His charge too
on a canoe

trip where the
Great Racoon first
told me why
the convertible did

not crack up when the other
guy in charge charged
passing on that narrow
2 lane Michigan blue

road. He gave me
a vanilla milkshake in Big
Rapids as some form
of reward, told

us all not to
tell our parents or
his sergeant about that
raccoon or the river while

Ed Sanders sang
Olsen with the Fugs:
“We drink & break open our veins
Only to know. Only to know.”

Prayer

         (To Athena, in Tigertown)

“Lions, and Tigers, and Bears oh my!”

The Tigers don’t exist
in a future without Great Cats.

Athena, beautiful goddess
of the Edsel Ford Freeway,

we pray to you
that they will, & that

you who live in a big old
house built in 1880, with Sarah,

the greatest teenager in the world
may heed our entreaty.

Near Greektown, Casinos, what was once
J. L. Hudsons. Attended by avatars

once known as Negroes who
can’t cross the visible bridge to

the People’s Republic of CANADA.
Who stay in town on a gamble.

May you go to Tiger games where
The Green Man awaits you,

ivy bat poised to challenge Kaline,
Cash, Horton, Cobb, Gehringer, & Greenburg.

May American Gods of Jewish, Christianic & Islamist persuasion
join devotees in immense celebration

of spirit, mind, and midst there. May we
together sing

“Bless our house, our Tigers caged
or not, & remember the child

in the Green Cathedral
at Michigan & Trumbull,

where the immortals play
the great game forever.”

We bow, beseech the
Rev. Mr. Harwell to lead our prayer:

Essential deity, we worship thee
in fervent stripe & fang

& razor-sharp
talon of dream.

Material Matters
       after Townes (sort of)

I.

The Doctor said no
ideas but in things, but

then when there
are no things

it gets dicier. Loretta.
She’s my . . .

II.

Where was
I, was she &

whose 7s are those
on her sleeve?

III.

Loretta told me a lie
never told to anyone

but me &
that is why

I love her even
more than

the good Doctor did
or might.

Material matters, is
all there is.

Song, for Chris

O Dan, sz she
did you see?

Another wrestler died.
They think it was steroids.

O Death, where is thy sting?
Right where it

always has been.
At the end.

Nine Inning Game

All World Lucky Day 7-7-07


First.

Following a TV conversation between Giants Broadcasters Duane Kuiper and color fill-in Bip Roberts after St. Louis utility player Aaron Miles makes three errors at shortstop in an inning, unintentionally providing the last place Giants a 7-3 lead against the World Champion, but 8½ game back, St. Louis Cardinals.

Second. Vizquel gets rid of his hat.

Going straight back
damned thing gets

in the way. Omar
has a flip leaves a hat

way behind on his
way into short left.

Third.

Joe Morgan once made
three errors in a game.

It pissed him off.
It pissed him off even

more when Tito Fuentes
made three errors too

and pulled himself. Big
Leaguers are supposed

to be
better than that.

Fourth.

Miles grounds into a
bang-bang 3-1 with

the based loaded and
the score 7-6
in the Cardinal 8th.


Fifth.

Omar starts a double play
off Pujols grounder in the 9th.


Sixth.

Hennessey faces Chris Duncan
who has homered off him
twice in two at bats, so far,

in history. Gets to
3-2. Walks him. Brings up Rolen.

Seventh.

Scott Rolen once
got into my friend Terry Little’s

cab when he was a
Phillie Rookie and said

“Show me the Haight.
Show me the House

where the Dead and Janis
lived. “ Terry did. Sd that

Scott Rolen was the nicest baseball player,
and quite possibly the nicest civilian,
he ever met.

Eighth.

With one on and two out in the 9th
Rolen grounds out to Vizquel.
Giants win 7-6.

Ninth. Also Happened, same game . . .

Vizquel passed Aparicio for
for most hits by a shortstop . . .

ever . . .
at least that what they’re saying . . .

2353, or sumfin
like that.

Dream, heading North

In a caravan of sorts
I am sleeping

with a beautiful woman who
is cheating on her Mexican husband.

I, strangely unaligned, am
cheating on no one, besides

we are not “technically speaking”
“fucking.” Not even

technically speaking
to each other, just

sleeping together. It is
pretty & pleasurable.

Just as it is. We stop
in a coastal town

for supplies, particularly
beer. Brief scene

of debt reckoning &
borrowing unresolved ‘til

one of us realizes I have
lots of Canadian dollars.

My lady needs drugs
from the drugstore &

there isn’t one until
someone explains it’s’round

the bend, by
the Castle.

A terrible racket is
taking place in

The Castle Dungeon.
The landlady is screaming

at the Lord of the Land.
Some of this is captured, or,

perhaps, already has been,
by the Sunday Magazine.

There is a feast with
comings & goings &

special guests & photographs of
reputed Visigoths.

Many are known to me,
or others, although, some

are not, at all, there. There are
huge portions of beef &

it falls to the floor in joints
to join the cheese.

Ancient History (some of which, I missed)
for Voop


I. What would Hayes Carll do?

Orpheus plays to a remarkable collection
of snakes and other creatures of the underworld
in a remarkable woodcut from a Century somewhere
between his and the present.

In the court of Charles II
the guitar enjoyed a period
of nearly manic enthusiasm, sometimes
there were

5 strings, sometimes 6, sometimes
8, 12, or 6, again.

Send a check to KLFU in Los Angeles
if you still watch television.
Make it out to the LA School District.
That’ll learn ‘em.

II. Somewhere

There exists a youthful artist
from East of the East. Her
12,000 works since she was four show
the imprint of genius.

Her name means luck. Her other name
means to fly. She is their answer
to a luminous Yankee painter of shit
& Tiger Woods.

III. Little Monkey Falling Sick from Eating Rotten Fruit

In her eyes, monkeys are human. China Post
used her design when she was four. She paints
spontaneously & she’s really good

at monkeys. And at unique composition, as in
We have dinner here. Now.
She has 2 monkey friends beside
her numerous imaginary others who

show us their great joy with
her and are her
ideal human beings. She often
takes walks with her father.

She likes dolls. She often
talks with little friends who come from Peking,
Shanghai, Vancouver, & Odessa Texas.
Once, she took great pains to paint

over her father’s immortal
Marxist Realist output. He didn’t like that
too much although he respected her
work & said “Yani, you should show

more respect for your partners.” He painted
flowers while she nailed an orchid & said
she liked the chickens being
taken good care of by her parents. Then
she started throwing brushes

with dripping ink at the chickens, and a
new form, Chix a la Pollack was born. Yani
is always happy when she is painting. Tube
after tube of the young artist’s product

Awakening Lion
Ghost of the Last Catch
Fairy of the Cone Within Us
Let’s Go Cherry Picking
11 Eagles Looking for Game
& so many more
get on airplanes to who knows where .

IV. Critical Comment:

“The thing is
it is beautiful painting.”

Similar Disturbances

Home, beat up
by Lincoln &

the garden, legs not
only sore but

weak with work
& play. Chris

& Nancy in Santa Cruz
digging the Blues.

I am not
a rock,

but today I
am on an island.

I. So There

So what are
my brother

& his first daughter & wife doing ?
In San Francisco?

At the Giants game? Him
in the chef’s toque they gave

away today? Ella Grace
making sure it suits

him perfectly?
Without telling me? There are

images stored somewhere
in the cerebral cortex.

II. One is

A brother’s face that
sometimes appears

in hallucination. If that
isn’t him then he is

mixed up with some
other stranger on TV that

looks like him. Frightening
but hardly lethal.

Similar disturbances
have happened before.

He’s talking on a cell phone.
(Ain’t me calling.) Or maybe

it is, a reverse, an alternate me
& an other, him.

III. The Universe & the Mind

The Universe &
the mind

it spawned remain
personal & mysterious.

God’s Dog during Rivalry Week

Baseball is going to
get more interesting &

entirely less of
the matter.

More games will be
suspended postponed subject

to arcane postmortems
about what

might be. In-
fielders will have

the harder
time gauging

structure & wind.
Drift will

confuse more than
it used to.

Once real as well as all
the contrived rivalries will

continue to be
old confused &

not of the moment
or matter.

Voices will natter.
Gophers will continue

to eat my onions, the Lincoln Park
coyotes will continue to threaten,

I say threaten, boy, Pepper.
Stormy will continue to shout

at them. We will
play. We will win,

we will lose, we will
survive. Longer than

Pepper. This
would be no

big deal if
it didn’t

threaten the Great
Game. The only truly

American thing worth
a damn is

baseball. (Well, exceptin’
coyotes, who

too are American, so
that makes two

things. Long as
they don’t eat

Pepper.) God’s Dog
6th hole. Lincoln Park.

Hawks circling. Why
San Francisco is

a refuge, for
some creatures.

Three Sonnets with Bernie Van’t Hul

I.

Green ideas sleep furiously in the lees
and squirrels dream about the autumn rains.
We did too. Laramie’s late-night trains
knew our desire and gave us little peace.
It never has been easy deliberately to cease
believing in true love exiled on Main
Street, longing for a tenderness to sustain,
although (a poet might say) it’s better than disease.
And still, I am reminded, awfully
of her and that last incredible night
in the Silver Spur Motel. She took
my side, and I loved her and the three
things she said. The desperate fight
was over. All we had to do was cook.


II.

The Flying Squirrels often seem to sleep
while their leader’s frightful monologs strain
even a customer’s patience. They keep
right with the beat, though, when the refrain
comes back around. Scenery turns green
as lime icing on citrus cheesecake.
Fred would say that’s better than obscene
allusions to Vancouver fleshpots staked
out by rookie cops of the sort Hank might
bring up if we let HIM in. But it still comes
at me, angry, & close to that night.
I have no choice about my brain. It thrums
like squirrels flying close to ground.
Radar screens bleep furiously when she’s around.

III.

Though furiously they sleep, all green ideas
are known to fuck like squirrels when it rains.
They do their fucking underneath the trains.
It isn’t us they fear, for they’re at peace
believing true love is desolate, a stain.
I long for love that green thoughts may sustain.
XJ would say it’s better than disease.
I am reminded that a lethal breeze
wiped out the Duke and Duchess who complained
that God was being fickle yet again.
That someone somewhere would hear him, and reprise
devising plagues of frogs and pesky flies
to vex the angels flying close to ground.
Radar screens don’t bleep when God comes round . . . .

Give me back my name

That word does not exists in any language
It will never be uttered by human mouth

Give me back my name
Give me back my name
Something has been changed in my life
Something has been changed in my life
Something must be returned to us
Something must be returned to us

lines from Name
David Byrne for Talking Heads on the enduring classic 1985 LP Little Creatures
. . . if you haven’t ever listened to it, there is no better time than the present . . .

Prose Elegy for LE
(week of May 28th, 2007)

Laura Ellen Hopper, veteran of KFAT Gilroy in the 70s, and presiding genius at KPIG Santa Cruz died after a brief but catastrophic illness on Memorial Day 2007

Striking, to say the least, is the insistence among all the emails read on the air earlier this week, to say nothing of the phone calls from people like Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider, and Antsy McClain, to name only three I actually heard, that Laura changed people’s lives.

I hear this so clearly because she certainly changed mine. Not in an earthshaking religious conversion sort of way, more like a chiropractor is supposed to adjust your spine, except in Laura’s case, it was my mind.

Sometime late in the 90’s my friend Tom “Stormy” Weathered played Joe Ely in his car while we were traveling. I had settled into a comfortable musical middle age, listening again and again to my favorite Dylan, Dead, Springsteen, and, oh yes, Warren Zevon albums.

Joe Ely was a bolt out of an unimagined blue, in the same way Zevon was when someone played him for me 20 years before that. But there was, in my universe, no known way to connect with everybody else, either artist or listener, who was drawing energy off those basic texts. I had pretty much given up on radio, sometimes listening to that San Francisco station that plays the artists mentioned above, while I worked in the garden, but that was about it.

A few weeks after first hearing Joe Ely, I was on my own (on Sabbatical!) and on the road, celebrating my 50th year and the new millineum. Among my customary tapes I had added some Joe. (Live from Antoine’s, by the way.) Crossing back across the awful continent I picked up Wyoming Public Radio, which not only played Joe, but some music that sounded like it came from the same place. A week later back in the Bay Area, there was something on television about KPIG. Eventually, I figured out that I could listen to it on the net at work.

My first exchange with Laura was when she played Ely’s cover of “When Kindness Fails.” I emailed her breathlessly that that was my favorite Joe Ely song. Included was my signature identifying me as Development Director for a national child advocacy organization. Laura replied, “What? In your line of work?” Only after I replied that I fully understood the irony of the lyrics, which someone with an ear for that kind of thing who had lived in Wyoming might be able to, did she inform me that it wasn’t Joe’s song at all, but one of REK’s.

That began a correspondence that went on until the last week or so she was on the air. Me commenting from time to time on whatever she had played last, and her salty and always gratifying replies.

The immediate upshot of Laura's programming at KPIG was that I started listening to, and then finding the shows of, a whole host of singer-songwriters who opened my ears and mind. Most of them are Texans, with one notable exception . . . A Canadian rebel-poet subjected to an upbringing related to my own, in a part of the world near to mine, who created a way to get way past it.

That of course was Fred Eaglesmith, nee Elgersma, whose family is actually connected to family or friends of my family and friends, among them a former wife. My now wife and I have been on a couple of Charlie Hunter’s Fredtrains, and the extended family of Fredheads is a major life reward of a sort I had no idea was even available.

And that doesn’t begin to take into account the artists I never would have heard of without Laura’s direction. Joe Ely’s compadres Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Paul Thorn, Mary Gauthier, Todd Snider, of course, Tom Russell, and one of my very favorites who just threw a great small festival in Texas (my first time in Texas), Hayes Carll. Mainly, they are too many to name. And those artists and their festivals introduced me to a whole ‘nuther tier of singer/song-writers Laura never played, but to whom I listen now with enormous pleasure.

The poet Charles Olson, in one of the works people who read him remember best, wrote

But the known?
This I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world.

The one man was Robert Creeley, whom Olson barely knew at the time in vivid life, but with whom he was engaged (in writing) in an intense writers’ conversation.

That’s where Laura lines up for me. She gave me a world.

Being

Being stoned on marijuana alot
when you are young is good

preparation for being old. You
feel all the time, or at least

often, like you are on
some precipice, ready to fall.

You know the feeling, it ain’t
necessarily comforting, but you’ve
been there before.

By the same
if not entirely similar
token, an active

if at times
dysfunctional sex life
prepares one for

communion with an affectionate
if overly aggresive kitten who
wants to cuddle

all the time. You can’t
do it
all the time

but when you
are ready for it it
can be very good.

Climate Change

For Jim Heynen
. . . say it soft and it’s almost like praying . . .

I.

Starts as a baseball game
& then there is a sudden
blizzard. Trapped at first
mother-in-law’s house on

Union Street in
Wyoming, Michigan utterly
snowed in. Still

there is rice & kale & a
pheasant the cat caught in
the refrigerator &

She’s Not There.


II. The Zombies are, though . . .

The Zombies know all
about one’s cover as a fundraiser.

They prove
relentless. We play
Let’s Make a Deal &

The deal is, I will
put up with
what they tell me to.

III.

Hard to make a move
except at one point
I need to pee & the toilet

is full of vegetation that
should be in the
Earth Machine.

IV.

The people are lined up
to eat the earth.

The women are in business
suits. So are the men, but

they smell like compost &
their foulard ties have
earthworms where there

should be Kells or
at least Stingaree. They have
they tell me a mission.

IV. For Me

I descend to the pit.
It is nothing
Dante or Pynchon prepared
me or anyone else for.

It is enormous &
full of sand. Small figure
in that landscape, I can’t
ski on sand.

Above, big, tipping over,
an enormous granite monolith.

The ski lift operator
tells me it is a big old

rock, but I know
a monolith when I see one.

V. The Monolith

Closely guarded . . . troopers with guns
Black Copters . . .
Ski Patrol . . .

The Monolith
looms miles above, still,
tipping overhead.

VI.

A mumbling gnome
prophecies a brilliant future
& shows me the ladder, not
up the monolith, up the wall
(of the pit) not quite
miles high, but nearly.


VII. Back to the house.

They are still here, with
the same offer, although not quite at
such good pay. There is
only one last question . . . “Do

you still believe
in global warming?”

Bush Meat

1. A few facts

You live in the lush arboreal forest where your species evolved.
You live in the canopy inside a single bend in a great river
nursing at the breast until five years old
& with nothing but a lifetime of naps, casual sex, and lifelong
friendship to which to look forward.

Unless your more warlike cousins the Chimps show up.
Then you duck the nuts rocks & fruit they throw, but they
seem to have the sense not to try
to take your tree or eat you.

And then again, there are, of course, your more distant cousins, the humans, who
have no sense whatsoever.
They respect your territory no more than anyone else’s.
And they will eat you. In fact do.

All is not entirely, always, well, even in your own world, even
without the Chimps and the humans.
If your influential mother dies, yr in for tough times, the other
kids will pick on you, bite your hand, but
then some other kids will come
‘round & check it out, lick it,
show you sympathy.

In that regard, you are more like a human than a Chimp.
(Humans being known for their profound sympathy for the suffering of other creatures.)
(Chimps being obvious natural born killers, which distinguishes them from humans.)

The bonobos seem to have learned things from the gorillas, who, in earlier days
shook food freely down at them from trees.
After the humans killed the gorillas this stopped happening.

But the bonobos had learned to do it their way, and
occasionally, when the humans weren’t killing each other & eating Chimps
a little food still fell like manna.

When it hit the ground the humans took it. Fortunately,
Bonobo culture had by then developed other food gathering mechanisms.

2. A few quotes

“Bonobos call loudly to each other when they bed down for the night and this makes them easy targets.”

(It should be pointed out that Bonobos don’t make those noises during sex,they
have casual sex all day, they make those noises when they want a little rest.)

“In a starving country forest animals are destined for the pot.”

Humans have a thing called war, a highly ritualized form of Chimp quarrel.

“A new bonobo study will bring badly needed cash to the community.”

When they are shooting and eating you you better learn your country, where
to run and hide, hide your mate young & community how
to steer clear of Chimps & humans. Gorillas would
probably be OK. If there were any.

“It would be hard to be a Bonobo in an urban environment.”

One-third got killed in their own country during the war, when
they had it a little worse than the humans in Baghdad . . .
(at this writing, stay tuned . . .)

The 19th, the Century
For John Huizinga

Century of sage mountebanks.
Wordsworth who wandered lonely as a cloud
Whitman who lounged on the grass
Sweet John Clare who sang of
love’s frenzied stifled throes.

Melville whose Brit publisher forgot
to include the epilogue to Moby Dick
visiting trouble and scorn on our Herman
and thus unwittingly setting up
an eventual revival that would
do our troubled author naught
but good after he was long dead.
And yet, his enduring spirit would be delighted
to have left vague seafaring memories of white whales
& abandoned hopes some treasure beyond measure.

Not to disregard the politicians.
Bonaparte who at least got a good retreat named for him
Lincoln who saved the Union
(to his credit) and still is patron saint
Of the Republicans (to what would be his
Grave deformed genetic dismay)

Tom Jefferson whose vision
Would not let him rest
between bouts of intestinal disease
And good relations with Sally Hemmings

Longfellow and the shores of Gitchegumee
Bowie & his knives
Davy Crockett & the wild frontier (of which he was king)
Twain and his pilgrimages to the Old West
GA Custer & schemes of American conquest
Sitting Bull & his appropriate answer to the Yankee Peril

Go to the Little Big Horn O questing pilgrim
& see with your own eyes
The innocent ridge on that high prairie plain
Where the last Sioux masses camped
Somewhere only the imperial blind might not see them

Meanwhile, in Africa . . . Burton
and his hashish habit and the memoirs
his wife burned in their Victorian fireplace.

Verlaine & Rimbaud, who stopped writing
and became an arms dealer in Africa.

And while we’re in Africa . . .
Dr. Livingston & Mr. Stanley
and shouldn’t white Europeans
be proud of their legacy?
Victoria Falls. What better name
for a spectacle that was there then
but won’t be much longer?

It was a time of great dreams.
All come elegantly true in disastrous ways.

There were never any Neanderthal in Africa
They were the first white people.
Whatever of their genetic trace lingers
in our blood, you have to think, will soon
be just as extinct as they are.

The Blues
for Chris

She brings home these
vinyl records, knowing what
prizes they are.

$1 each, on one
Tuesday each month. Never
been to that store

before, probly never
will be again. Prizes
include . . . Guy Clark

Old Friend
I never heard
before, has “Immigrant Eyes”

on it, & much great
Townes too, to
say nothing of
“Indian Cowboy.”

Some of the rest dis-
concerting & dis-
appointing &

in fact . . .
(not very good).
Linda in that

weird polka dot
thing, although
with great cover of

“Tell Him.”
Rodney Crowell sounding
like he’s trying

to play disco. Disco also
through & through
some damn Dan

Fogelberg thing one
of my brothers,
I hope, used to
like. But . . . on the other hand

two too hot Hot Tunas. One
already in the rack, unheard
in years & the other
never even seen

so good y’d like to die
listening to it.
& the best Leon, ever.

She didn’t give me
the blues, but once.
Or maybe twice. She just

learned me
about them.

Superbowl 2007, purely personal note

What Augustine and I have in common over the centuries:
logorrhea & a dynamic cocktail of puritan-and-hedon-ism.

And then, by god, there on television
a notable Arizona fascist flips a special coin.
Afterward the buy-now robot beats up the buy-now Dodge.

Young Carl Byker once remarked at the television
in a Grand Rapids golf course bar
"I can't believe I live on this planet!"

Ashton Ave 1/4/2007

I.

First night waning moon
of the New Year
rises from hood of

dark cumulous hovering
over East Bay Hills . . .

last remnant of today’s early rain
still hanging there
against the nights demanding wind.

II.

First night in what seems like months
without narcotic football

and all the accompanyingly
vile America it reflects.

III.

How Long
O Lord How Long

must I be forced to press
the mute button to avoid

the awful sound of an angry
robot beating up a horned Dodge.

Or watch lymphmaniac Bill Walsh
lipsynch to a Coors Light commercial?

Guy Clark would never
do something like that. I devoutly hope.

IV.

Last year’s new Dylan (Modern Times)
on the turntable in

heavy vinyl . . . and Moriah
. . . the cat not the wind . . .

climbing all over the turntable
as threat to scratch hell out of
the best record I have.

V.

It would be a great record
if Bob Dylan had never existed.

Or at least a revenant
suggesting that

if Bob Dylan didn’t exist
we would have to invent him.

CODA “The cat thrown”

Moriah thrown from the appurtenance of stereo
goes hard at work on a golf pencil instead.

The Rouge

I.

Watching Canadian Football
in SF, because
I like it. These days, I like it
better than Amerikan.

Maybe because I like Canada
better than Amerika.

Realize THAT THOUGHTCRIME
now qualifies me
as enemy combatant
eligible for
AMERIKAN GITMO.

II.

Think about Riverbend, silent
several days until 10/18/06
. . . not heard from since
. . . maybe never coming back
after last brutally articulate post.

Think about buried reports
of Iraqui girls going for
sex slavery to get out’a there . . .
(Why is this story not surprising let alone new?)

III.

Canadian Football
in SF on premium cable for
an extra $5-10 USD, $5.25-10.50 CDN.

(Anyone notice how $CDN has kept
getting closer to $USD
since you know when?)

And commercial sponsors are
US ARMY (you will also
get a free US ARMY hat)

& real estate deals of the sort
Fred Elgersma railed against
in his fabled recordings

of the 80s. And!
Canadian Football Fathead
thug commentators no

better than Amerikan Fatheads,
thus, etc . . .
And the game is indoors, yea, right,

& halftime show a
salute to Canadian Forces
in Afghanistan where
the poppies are blooming.

The Forces & their Great Sacrifices
mentioned Sentimentally
whenever the Fatheads shut the

**** up. Marching, they
look older than me. Then
a commercial for

jerky and sausage making
of the essential you-kill-it
we-cure-it sort no Canadian

would believe
for as many as 28 seconds

and then a a bit of
preternaturally repellent
advice from Dick Vitale for

people who want to get
NCAA scholarships in 2006
or 2007. And I am reminded

that wherever this football is
being played, indoors or out,
I am watching Amerikan TV.

IV.

Sometimes I like to pretend
I am as protected from
Amerika here in San Francisco as
I would be in Vancouver.

(And my Yankee Dollars won’t soon be
worth any more good goddamn Euros
than $CDS are anyway)

So . . . what’s the point of trying
to move back there
where I had an unfortunate emotional experience
while I was planting trees, anyway?

V.

In Canadian Football
the penalty flag is bright red and
a single point is called a rouge.

Fly Rod

The Wildebeeste’s widow
sends the fly rod
I know well.

I do not, at first,
even understand the
note covering it.

A better reader explains . . .
The Beeste was telling me
about Jesus and how we

would meet again
in Glory. Not
my memory

of the conversation
but who in heaven
knows how

those things actually
go. I heard him
tell me a story

I had already heard
about a preacher who
helped him prepare

for his inevitable
death. The Beeste
called it reprehensible.

I had to agree.
His widow heard
a different story

and bless whatever
God or Jesus told her
what to do, because

I haven’t fished in
some long time & who knows, I might.

The Wildebeeste on the Conviction of Saddam

My fatuous brother told me
he would never be convicted
because he would never come
to trial, and if he did

they’d kill him before
it ended. Instead
they killed his lawyers.

Saddam’s that is. My brother
doesn’t have a lawyer
just a weird bunch

of lawyer friends who
smoke dope when they should
be keeping their fee accounts.

But no, they took my fatuous brother’s
$50 bet instead, and that will get
them to the next one
eighth of an ounce

. . . if he ever pays. Good
for all of them. They
had it coming.

My Dentist
for Jabes

Wasn’t it Pynchon, in V, who
floated the notion that dentistry
was the mid-century answer

to Psychiatry? (See the chapter
in which Rachel Owlglass
Gets a Nose Job. Or is it the one

where Stencil simply gets Dentistry?)
Go read V again, lazy citizen!
Do your own research!

And my dentist was talking
and one of the great things
about my dentist is he

steps back and lets me talk
too, whatever he or I
have in my mouth.

My dentist was, not
that long ago, a
San Francisco Fireman

of Assyrian decent.
He is a Christian
(of an Assyrian sort).

The other firemen called
him a Sand Nigger.
(Check out the SFFD’s record

on tolerance, sometime.) And now
he’s telling me all
about how great the Bill

Moyers series on the
right wing has been, & how it
reminds him of what it means

to be an American. I
agree, although I’ve seen
none of it, explain

I only watch baseball
& the occasional movie on TV if
there aren’t any commercials, that

I don’t even listen to
the emerging liberal radio
because I get better

information from the Texas
& Canadian songwriters
they play on KPIG. People

talking about the decisions that
will kill us all depress me
enormously. I’d rather

hear it in a song. Preferably
with a baseball game

on TV in the background,
and those nattering “commentators”
fully muted.

Dear Abbey
(w/ apologies both
to Ed, and John Prine)

My TV tells me I
can grow hair by smearing
this shit that they

sell as foam
on my dome &
hair just like I

used to have
will grow. My email
tells me it can

cure my penile
woes, make me hard
again. I wonder

what they got for
my belly. Fuck
all, turns out,

eating & drinking less
not being a a viable option.
So, Ed, apologies

reiterated, what can
we smear on our
global dome to make

life itself grow
back, even as
global hair, something

anything on which
a revenant might live?
Your silence, sir, is

illuminating, you got all
you had to say
said & right now it

doesn’t seem to have
done a damn bit
of good. Nice try,

though, fella, nobody’s
best shot seems
good enough in these

evil days. But that is
not to say we
should not keep fighting them,

it, whatever that demonic
energy is that seems
determined to kill us all.

One Last One Night Stand

with Bernie Van’t Hul & David Schaafsma

Some woodsmen curse as virgin forests fall
while others see a dawning of fine light
that blinds the moles and bleaches owls' bones
and sears the saplings, fries the infant buds.
Then cones pop open so their seed will spill
and soil receives this seed, again begin.

Hell's tintinnabulating bells begin
to ring and monkeys in the trees fall
hard on hand-picked coconuts and spill
their milk on heads of thirsty sylphs as light
as pingpong balls. And there stand the buds
guilty, perplexed, waiting for Mr. Bones.

They feel it now, and deep in trembling bones
the ever lurking dread will soon begin
when no bland opiates like labatts or buds
will cushion twice born guzzlers as they fall
into the stupor that no ordinary light
beer can effect. However, a thought spill

is another matter entirely. You spill
the beans for leering priests who make no bones
about the mortal sin that comes to light
when omnivores crepuscular begin
to stalk as adam did before the fall
the fair and nubile eve whose lovely buds

were not unlike the virgin fern's whose buds
would be enough, airbrushed, for me to spill
seed, coffee, beer, whatever, and then fall
ass over teakettle jumpin' them bones
until keenings of the valkyrie begin
to dissipate the gloom of dying light

that undulates through virgin forests. Light
another match and brew rich coffee buds.
Redeploy its fire and then begin
to smoke, like many another spill
liquescent lava over hallowed bones
concealed by sin-stained acorns in the fall.

Turn out the light, prepare at last to spill
spent seed from anxious buds. Mr. Bones
saw life begin. He watches empires fall.

Requiem for a Pitcher

--He wasn’t scared of nothin’, Boys
He was pretty sure he could fly

--Guy and Susanna Clark, lines from “The Cape”

And it is a leap of faith
to pitch for George Shipbuilder.

Sz George to St. Joseph –

“I expect a great deal from you . . .
Yes I am deeply disappointed . . .
We have to do better . . .
I deeply want a championship . . .

I have high expectations . . .
I want to see enthusiasm . . .
Responsibility is yours, Joe . . .”

Instruction like that from the top
doesn’t necessarily cause
airplanes to fly into buildings
in the borough of Manhattan

but doesn’t there seem to be a
certain structural similarity to
all suicide missions?

RIP Cory. And your flight instuctor.
And the horse he rode in on.
Jealousy and stupidity
Don't equal harmony

as John Prine once said.
In the next world you are
on your own, although there will
probably be shipbuilders there, too.

The Wildebeeste at Little Pine Island Lake

I don’t like cats,
they play with their food
said I as I filleted

the bluegills we had
harvested. Hah! replied
my newly acquired

sister-in-law, and what
do you think
you are doing?

Such lovely ingratitude!
I had to remind
myself that her cat

was dying, and had
the grace not to point out
that it was I

who had given her
and her mate my brother,
pilgrim though he may be,

the poles they caught
those bluegills with
as a wedding present and was

preparing them sumptious repast
including the hippy’s corn roasting
in husk over coals

from birch and pine harvested
on my own land.
I loved her and forgot

all my resentments against
him and embraced
both her and a preternatural

sense of our destinies, and
bowed gratefully as
his new sister-in-law

pronounced a heartfelt blessing
on our repast and I hoped that we all
might live forever.

(San Francisco, 9/19/06)

The Wildebeeste on the Thornapple II

Had I known what pain
it would cause my family
I never would have rolled

my great body
in that great patch
of poison ivy

on that island, in that river.
Guilt, though, I do understand
fully, to be an illusion.

That said, I resist
the teachings of the Buddha. Life
is anything but illusion.

I spit on and snort at
all who suggest otherwise.
Great pain

is no illusion, it adheres to
and in the bones. I
would not cause it

to any living creature
unless I intended
to eat it.

(San Francisco, 9/19/06)

Last Softball Game in A2

for Van Hull, B

This old guy was on the mound.
I was playing center field, I
remember this.

In left was a tall
redhaired dude whose name
I do not remember.

It was also my first
softball game in Ann Arbor.
They never asked me to be

on the team, and I never asked
them either. I don’t remember
any of the rest of this,

it was all
told to me.
I had a wife.

I had a fellowship to a great
university in Amsterdam, a place
of which I still haven’t heard

except in their stories.
And that there are canals there.
The pitcher, what was his name

again, they tell me he used
to be a catcher? He was
wearing the most gawdawful plaid

bermuda shorts.
I went after that softball
because it started from him.

They tell me he recommended
me for that fellowship. I
have no doubt that that is

true. I just can’t remember
his name. The other guy,
the left fielder with the red hair

I don’t remember him either although
they tell me he had something
to do with a fellowship I got later
in Houston. I hear

he is chair of a department
somewhere on the Red River
in the heart of middle Amerika.

(San Francisco, 9/22/06)

The Wildebeeste on the Thornapple

The Thornapple flows through Alaska,
Michigan. There are rapids in the park

off 68th St. On Sundays the heathen
(of which I am content to be one)

ride innertubes to the dam
under the bridge

there in the southeast corner
of County Kent.

My brothers cross it betimes
on their way to Saskatoon to play golf.

Golf is not the game for me,
one who seeks

more elemental play.
Smallmouth bass lurk beneath that bridge.

And I will have one, maybe two
on a fine Michigan autumn afternoon.

And I will be master, of not only the fishes
but of all I see and feel.

Diatribe

For Chris, in real life
Frank, in imagination, and
Ted, in memory

I.

Something I always feel
at a baseball game.
How much I love the scene
& how little I love “America.”

If only they played ball
in England
where they play cricket.
In its own way

nearly as good. And Canada
where they play ball.
Jackie Robinson auditioned
in Montreal, where they

don’t anymore, at least not
in that silly indoor place
by the great botanic garden
. . .

Think about it. Art Turf
across the busy street
from nature’s own art
where it gets a little help

from hardworking locals
(docents & presumably legal
gardeners) a great place
honestly & the best

North American beer grows
there too.
Check it out at www.unibroue.com
strong lager, Raftman,

With a coral sheen that is slightly robust
and combines the character of whisky malt.
Brewed to commemorate the legendary courage
of the forest workers and share their

Joie de vivre with a beer and a whisky.
Very cool, although it doesn’t have to be
served that way. Big tough redhead
French Canadian logroller piking river-borne timber

on the label. You want
myth and legend, well, I tried
to write a poem about Tiger Stadium.
Got two four line stanzas

into the thing & it turned into
a diatribe about Nixon.
The professor hated it
even though I meant

every word, and turned out to be
right. Maybe that’s why
when I think about writing about
baseball, now,

I think of George W. Bush.
The best thing I saw
in Montreal’s botanic garden was
the First Nation recreation

of what that place
may have been, then,
In those days . . .


II.

I played sick the day
JFK threw out the first pitch
in the stadium now named
after his brother where

the Nats play, for now,
so I could watch my beloved
Tigers on opening day in 1962.
In the same new house later

That year I was baking
for the first time . . .
Angelfood cake . . . Angel
Bo Belinsky

Threw his 1st start no-
hitter. That same year
I heard the news that
Marilyn Monroe died.

(“I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
Monroe died”) while I baked that cake
Angel Angel Angel & it wasn’t that long
afterward that JFK was dead too.

God Bless America
land that I love.
Irving Berlin wrote
something like that

Moloch Moloch Moloch
Alan Ginsberg wrote
exactly that. Those aren’t the teachings
of a man of god, Eliza G. sang that

in Golden Gate Park, & elsewhere.
I sit here in North America, a place
I love for 3 reasons.
1. Itself, the look of the place;

2. Baseball, for all the obvious reasons;
& there is a third, but
I forget it now, I suppose it
must have been

The promise of the place
furiously betrayed by lies.
So I don’t stand for the blood-spattered banner,
wish to sing O Canada

With pure patriot love
in all my heart commanded.
Fuck Jesus! said Ted (albeit in jest)
but Ted is dead (July 4, 1983).

True patriot he, true
son of Whitman
that “incredible queer”
(per Ted).

Almost wish there were
a GOD who
would dispense richly
deserved damnation

As though that weren’t
aught but a richly
merited fantasy . . .
America . . .

When will you cease
your never-ending
war with the flesh
& my soul?

& when will you finally,
as the good Doc.
Williams said, realize there are
no ideas but in things?

III.

The trip begins
with a Beefeater
at Jack’s Bistro.
The security level

is Marsec 1
(whatever that means).
The Peralta approacheth
the dock. The cormorant

on the buoy by the Potomoac
fleeth not. Departing
passengers look
anything but terrified.

Boy Scouts go by.
Language is spoken.
There is the possibility
of rough water says the Speaker.

Particularly for the Giants
who have lost 7 in a row.
Pelicans to Starboard
entering the Bay.

Big old ugly barge
straight ahead
although not THAT straight ahead
& then THE Bay Bridge

easily got under & then the Capital
of Ecotopia & the ballpark (on its third phone company name
nameless here, for obvious reasons
of good taste) at Port.

The ferry approacheth its
target wharf, framed
by one tower named
either after a carpet company

or 19th Century criminal &
the other named after
a TRUE corporate criminal
(i.e. COIT & Transamerica).

No City
without its verily awful bloodlines,
as Dr. Thompson might insinuate.
Hit the dock, walk between

two great pop artifacts
Oldenberg’s bow & arrow
(I left my heart, get it?) & the
Hills Bros Arab & on to the Embarcadero.

Commencing a stately stroll, even
for one spiritually stateless
except perhaps in state of mind.
O Canada, O Canada

Which won’t get sung tonite.
Past godawful statuary
“Passage” courtesy of
Black Rock Art Foundation.

Talk about black art!
Well, after all, it is
Organ Donor Night at the “old” ballpark
& one is stupidly tempted

To make wishlists:
For Bush a healthy mind.
For Cheney a soul.
For Leezy a conscience, but

fantasy is fruitless.
They ain’t got ‘em
& they ain’t going to.
Bill Clinton an organ

to go with his sax? Aw c’mon
Cheap Cheap Cheap
Cheep Cheep Cheep, and the anthem
is actually beautifully

sung, but who
can stand for it
or the republic
for which it pretends to stand?

(O Canada. O Canada.)
Followed by recorded Bowie
doing Young Americans.
As Carl once said

I can’t believe I live
on this planet!
but according to various solipsists I
sort of have to accept that I do.

I do. I do. Three pressing
questions at 7:25 PM.
Can the Cubs hold a 9-3 lead
in the 9th at Wrigley.

Can the Tigers hold a 10-4 lead
in the 9th at St. Pete?
Can the Giants ever win again.
Probably yes, to all 3

Not that any of it will do any
good for the planet’s sufferers
aside from Cub, Tiger, & Giant fans
who can’t be suffering all

that much because they still
have time for baseball
and don’t even have to dodge bombs
between innings. Tiger fans

being the least easily pardoned because
if they don’t enjoy
this season their suffering
be self-inflicted.

At the phone park, bluebirds sweep
the view deck. Sadly,
they are not bluebirds
of happiness.

IV.

(Interesting, but unpoetic sidebar:
On the day Fidel’s provisional
stepaside becomes public in the USA
Washington pitcher is

Cuban fink and ex-Giant
Livian Hernandez & the most-hated
Person in the USA -- besides Fidel – also nameless here,
is NOT in the lineup.)

Through 3 & ½ innings none of this has helped the Giants
much. They play old, old, old
old as Fidel, who should have died
hereafter, but hasn’t, weird JFK-

linked schemes notwithstanding.
Foul balls still go foul.
Bad baserunning turns into outs, &
“our” lads do plenty of it.

Baseball being as merciless as
the American Way
which must be why it remains
the National Game.

So here I am, watching
the Washington Nationals, no relation
to Senators of either stripe, & managed
by Frank Robinson, the best player I ever saw.

I couldn’t say enough good things
about him, wearing my ImpeachBush.org baseball cap,
except this, to quote Ted one last time.
“He will always be perfectly Frank.”

Leave game at 9:25
presence as
insignificant as it is
in the real world &

Besides, taping it at home
where warm bed &
bedfellow & whisky whisky
my old friend

await. Good night Mrs. De Vries
all of you (save one who knows who she is
& that isn’t her name anyway)
wherever you are, I just want

to make it clear I’m not
one of yours
whatever they or you say
& have not been
for a long time.

Line Score Pitchers HR
WA 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 2 0 4 6 0 L Hernandez 7 (W 9-8), Bowie .2, Rauch .1, Cordero 1 (S 19) none

SF 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 6 0 Cain 7 (L 7-8), Chulk .2, Stanton .1, Benitez 1 none

San Francisco, Cobmoosa Shores, MI, 5/18 – 8/9, 2006

Ethics & Blades

Although not a blade freak
I do subscribe to the gospel
according to Corb.

“Always keep an edge
on your knife, son.”
(I’m not Corb’s son.)

I’m not his father either.
His father was a bullrider.
His mother was

a goatroper
and Corb’s the best country-punk
rocker in North America

I don’t ride bulls. Occasionally I eat goat.
About as often, I ride bullshit.
It stinks. There are

ethical issues, like when
you put a Gerber Famous Blade
in your dop kit in the Super 8

out by O’Hare
at the end of
a very hot trip

and then can’t find it
for two weeks and send
United Air a very polite email

about how they lost your
favorite knife and they (equally politely)
send you a $100 discount on your next trip

in the friendly skies,
and so you go and
search the ENTIRE internet

for the knife you lost
and it’s not made
anymore, but it’s really the one you want

and so you spend some more
time and money online
and because you don’t know

exactly how long an inch is
you do find something that
looks like the knife you lost

and you buy it, and it’s beautiful
except about one third the size
of the one you had in mind.

AND THEN, the lost is found.
But the edge is dull, and
you get to work with that stone

and although you should be listening to Corb sing
about keeping a sharp edge,
being one of very stoney brain

you are instead
searching Wikipedia and all manner
of blade-related sites

for the knife you really want
(except with a blade you
will this time keep

an edge on) and watch
the White Sox beating
the Tigers, on ESPN2,

all the while pondering
whether it would be righteous
to use that $100 certificate

on your next trip
to Chicago, or perhaps
to Michigan, for the American League
Division Series.

For . . .

I should consider our cat Gus
while I watch a tape of the ESPN
telecast of the Tigers
who are after all cats
against the Yankees
who are after all mercenaries
of a most ugly sort.

But I don’t. I consider instead
baseball. And then Chris calls
and I am reminded that we saved
this cat from destruction
and that I am in some sense responsible
for his wellbeing, and I pray for his salvation

because I haven’t seen him since I got home
but there he is when I step outside
flirting on the sidewalk four doors down
with Odette. Gus is indeed the servant of nature,
duly and daily living according to it.
And catting in both senses with Odette
who is deaf but not mute, and very white

where she’s not dirty. He leaps up to catch the scent
of her musk and wreathes his body seven times
around all the tires that she has haunted. When he
meets Odette he kisses her in kindness. Because
she is deaf she doesn’t hear him coming
but that is just how those
who cat around do their business.

For Gus is a Manx cat, and although
he’s never been to Man I have and
his very presence reminds me
of that brilliant afternoon
when Chris and Stella were out on the loose
in Peel looking for a cat to call
the sighting of their own while

I sat in the White House on Tynwald Road
the greatest of funky pubs
watching cricket on the telly
while old timers argued forcefully
and completely pointlessly over pints of Okells
about something of which I had no concept.

Seemingly neither did they,
although for sure it wasn’t cricket,
but the habitues seemed to know
them and what they were arguing about
and then the rains came. Hard.

So Chris and Stella didn’t find any cats
not even in the antique shop where the
proprietress treated them rudely as though they
might have been Yankees and
after enduring her kind inattention

they found me in the White House and
we found the narrow lane where I
had parked the rented Brit Ford and we
hit the road, the same road
the TT races on, back past the Tynwald

and turned right in the by-now seriously driving
rain, toward Foxdale and the Manx SPCA
where there are more Manx than you could
shake your tail at if you had one
(which some of them do)
and met Trevor, all 25 copper-coloured pounds
of him and the nice people there
made clear we couldn’t take him

back to North America. John Perry Barlow,
our Manx at the time, survived
that absence, but took sick in
a foreign place (Sunnyvale)
and died at home in San Francisco. For
Manx cats although the best in the world
are subject to malady.

Gus hopes to take prey among the gophers
who feed upon my onions and cabbage but
they have a chance because he has not yet
learned to go underground like they
and six gophers in seven so escape
although hardly by his dallying . . .

For though he is quick to his mark of any creature
be it gopher or insect, he seems to have his
best success with insects, tenacious
of his point even as to the gophers but
they generally burrow too far down
for there’s only so far down a cat can dig.
(They are not dogs.)

Throughout their native island
(and the two on either side of it) they
are no longer bred for style, or at all,
in honor of their inbred genes which need
be left to their own devices.
Yankees should be so advanced,
but far too many believe in intelligent design.

If you get on the net you can find one
in California for humane and domestic purposes
and a nice cat lady from Sacramento
will deliver him or her to your door
even on the hottest day of the summer

if you pass the eligibility test, and
she will be pleased if you make
a donation greater than asked
and will refuse your offer of
additional funds for her trouble and gasoline.

She travels with a Dane
of the human sort. Which is how
our cat Gus became ours. He was
utterly faithful until Odette
flashed her witchy blue right and
witchy brown left eye at him
and now it seems he’s taken over
several households up and down Ashton Avenue.

“Y’gotta watch them Manx,” is all I can say.
A certain spirit comes about their bodies
to sustain them as compleat cats.
They do not seem to know
any Diety, let alone personal saviour,

But I know not what goes on in the
mind of those cats, particularly not those Manx
and maybe neither do they. For
they are cats of estimable heritage.

And I long to return to that place
from whence they came to see
if we can’t find many more such
remarkable creatures
for nothing is sweeter than their
mixture of gravity and waggery.

When we do return we will be
the politest of tourists
as they pursue their delirious pranks.

No Gnus is not Good Gnus

--in memory of my brother Bob, aka the Wildebeeste--

And then there were
how many? It is
difficult to say. Difficulty
ever having been

A specialty of the house, &
a constant of
existence. This house exists, that’s
for sure. How many What?

Deaths in Republican Iraq? Very Very
Many. Deaths of USA deadend
folk who got there at the mercy,
the tender mercy, of their operators . . .

Very Very Very Many. Deaths of
the poor dumb fucks who
were going to welcome the
USA with flowers?

A magnificent series of VERIES.
(Welcome to the Real World, as Butch sz.)
They line up like horn-ed
Apocalyptic Beestes.

No Matter.
Gnu Criticism is dead.
As a doornail, or God.
But the shock of the Gnu

Can’t possibly be heavier
than the shock & awe falling
on yr average highly
evolved immortal Iraqui soul.

America, a Prophecy:

The whirlwind will assuredly
be reaped & all the girls
& guys
who don’t know hay from straw

Will fuck like rabbits
on the threshing floor.
Sadly, no pleasure will be had
in the breeding
& the offspring of it

Will greet the next advent
with bitter tears
spilling hideously over misshapen
noses and mouths

Where all the teeth left
are gnashing, and there will be
no more gnus, let alone any of us
to criticize them.

Cooties

In Pat & Diane’s garage
there’s a painting of a Willys
in a dry ditch outside
Flagstaff, peak in the background,
and a game of Cootie.

Hadn’t thought of Cootie
since, say, 1962. Wouldn’t
have, probly, not seeing it there.
(Athough hadn’t necessarily
thought of Willys either.)

Aunt Fenna & Uncle Bert
had Cootie. So did we.
May have been my introduction
to dice, or in that case
a single die.

In the sixth grade it was a game
Conservative Christian Right Wing Republican
Straight White American Male 6th graders
played at the expense of a homely girl.

She had ‘em & if she
brushed you, you passed ‘em on
to the next Conservative Christian male 6th grader.
We boys, of course were all so handsome
in a cute teutonic sort of way.

Have to wonder how straight
we all were even then, though.
Memory, bad memory, so you go looking
to Wikepedia. And learn
that Cooties do have gender content,

that they are a form of
“ repression of child sexuality,”
of which no one sure wanted
there to be any of
at Seymour Christian School.

Etymology interesting, if obscure.
At the turn of the 20th century U.S. soldiers
occupying the Phillipines were afflicted
with festering lice and referred to them
by their Tagalog term, "kuto."

Eventually, these soldiers returned
carrying their own version.
In time, the name stuck,
and the Scharper Company
marketed the game around 1949.

That’s the game in Pat & Diane’s garage,
classic lines on the little buggers
and a week ago you could have bid for
a similar set on eBay where it went for
a little less than $7.

Or, you could get the modern version
marketed by Hasbro® (of course)
which is really pretty ugly.
See for yourself at the company site.

There are Cooties in the Simpsons,
and lots of them in Calvin & Hobbes
& the MTV series Blowin Up.
In the UK they call them lugi
& they were in The Goons.

From 1912 to 1918, Willys
was the second biggest car company
in these United States. While Mr. Ford
who owned the biggest was against that war
Willys only survived because of

the next, in which it was
a damned fine little war machine
(although known by its pseudonym,
Jeep, also the name of a character in
Popeye, though no relation).

No doubt one of the big
reasons the USA rules the world
today, albeit badly. The name now owned
by Chrysler Daimler, reminding one of what

Blicero’s protégé Katje realizes on page
105 in Gravity’s Rainbow, that
“the real business of the war
is buying and selling.”

Highway Blues

The guy
although handsome
is a fathead.

The girl
although pretty
and pretty clever
is a stupid cow
just because she saw
her parents having group sex.

The chapters
although fast
don’t go anywhere
beyond cliffs
for which there are no notes
yet.

The church
although totally to blame
turns out not to be
the one true church

The pyramid the light gets through
although accurately described
turns out to be a thing
anyone can photograph
and will always look the same.

The creep directing the plot
although learned and mysterious
turns out to be Mel Gibson
in his dotage.

The heavy
although easily persuaded
turns out not to be able
to taste the poison
that kills him.

The author who pretends to be learned
although innocent
turns out to only want to be
a millionaire
& is only too happy
to put his wife
although a coconspirator
on the stand.

The funny little box
although meant for mushrooms
(psilocybin)
is empty.

The chapel
although in Scotland
is placed where other gods so much
before that time
ate the hearts of
imperfect devotees.

Robert Graves
although long deceased
issued a curse
that will get anyone who believes
this nonsense
eventually.

In August 2006 (CE)
Mona Lisa appeared mysteriously
on a cliff beside a highway
singing the blues
in Oregon. The mystery of her
creation is unsolved to this day.

Complaint

You don’t show me
your poems
She complains
with a sigh.

I don’t have any poems
you cautiously reply
& she looks you right
in your teeth & cries
You lie! You lie!

Caustic Solution

Yes, that
will cost you.