-a serious problem resolved, somewhat-

I think most of my poems

are better served when

recited in the monotone.

I think the sound they make belongs

on the plane of the Earth.

no highs nor lows just flat as the planet.

poets I listen to online

reciting their work to an audience, tend to

accentuate syllables more often.

Billy Collins for example, recites from his podcast

employing a tone-scale intonation sympathetic

to the piece at hand, near pleading in some sense

at various moments of consequence

and when the reading is done, he slowly

looks up at us for a moment of silent resolution.

his face rises from the spine like a Sun

we can look at with our naked eyes.

maybe I feel this way because I listen to these poets

reading into my ear in their own voices.

but when it’s just me in the room, my poems

tumble through my head like hallucinations.

funny, though.

because I don't read my stuff out loud,

I hear them through the mind's throat springing

from the plane.–– but

occasionally a few stand at the mic

with the breathless sound of Marilyn's voice

when she sang: "Happy Birthday Mr. President" to J.F.K.

and man,..talk about poetry.

dead Jack, the guy in the back / requiem for Jack Kickabuck

for those who go down to the snow

at the helm of fierce machinery,

there echo's a distant romance in falling

to endlessness from behind the hand-

powered scoop, I know.

but old Jack Kickabuck layered his clothes

from skin to the outermost cloth, trudging out there

without fear, forging a pathway to an open road

guiding the rattling gas-burner with its auger's blades,

his crawling machinery altering the timeline of his life.

good old Jack would not be spared the frozen hand of god.

the undertaker has changed his socks, but his attitude

remains the same as it ever was; to collect the fallen

like old Jack Kickabuck laid bare upon his fatal snow,

and move the dear departed to deposit him to another

frozen space, and so it goes from time to time.

Jack Kickabuck, the guy in the back fell dead of heart failure upon a soft

bed of snow during a fierce winter day in 2017.

 

                  -At the grave of Albert Pinkham Ryder / Lot 4 / Section V-

So I went along to visit the grave of Albert Pinkham Ryder

which was marked by a heavy looking, but standard-issue stone,

a stone you might pass unnoticed when visiting a cemetery near you;

a non-monumental monument.

––I might have expected a stone of darker granite,

its face blackened, smeared by overcoats of home-cooked varnish,––

riven,–– marked by erratic webs of otherworldly fissures,

all to mirror the surfaces of his pictures.

But in the end it was what it was; a headstone.

––The experience took place years ago at the "Rural Cemetery"

in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Daylight had faded and October supplied an early moonlight,

graced with sweeping Ryder skies in honor of our company.

 ––An art school upperclassman had asked one of us to attend,

and two others tagged along for the viewing.

I was one of two.

At the gravesite I was one of four;

one of five if Ryder is included in the column of attendees.

date of the experience: 1964

                 “life is too short to learn the names of weeds”

you’ll likely see a thousand poem titles

like the title above popping-up in the next few weeks.

consider this my entry into the fray.

but the line is attributed to a fan of Billy Collins

who sent it to his nightly podcast because recently

Billy had mentioned that he has a friend who

identified the nomenclature of every weed

they came across as they walked along a pleasant

country road somewhere on the outskirts of.. Paris, I think.

the fan, call her Naomi, seemed to be marginally pissed-off,

implying that Collins was taking-up valuable podcast time

simply because his buddy had the doggedness to identify weeds,

intruding on an otherwise pleasant stroll.

as for me, I didn't find the interlude disruptive, and

it was only a small part of a broader discussion, but

Mister Collins liked the metrics of Naomi's line and said so,

further giving his blessing to the world's home-shackled poets

to use the line freely if they were so inclined, opening a pathway

to Naomi's potential litigation against the Collins estate.

 

but that’s all I have on the subject of weeds, except to say

I’ve spoken of them before, limited to their intrusion of

the vegetable garden, their indispensable cover behind the billboards,

and their routinely invasive attitudes,–– all without gracing them with

a proper noun to cozy up to.

                  -the hovering flying saucer from Mars-

and why not Mars?

why finger another planet for the invading

flying saucer from another world, but Mars?

Mars it's always been, so, Mars it is now.

this time the invader is seen from my kitchen window, and

setting the scene, I’ll say it’s early evening, but moonless,

and a soupy fog has settled in.

I can barely make-out the incandescence.

the windows of neighboring houses, once sharply delineated

are now fuzzy little rectangles in amber, glowing with a rarer kind of light.

the streetlight high above them emits a blue, hazy oval shape,

heavily atomized, and I see it as a flying saucer filled with slimy,

big-eyed, green-skinned Martians. how frightening.

I should simply wish it away 

like the kid in the Twilight Zone sending naughty

neighbors into the cornfield,–– forget this nonsense

and return to dishwashing like the other poets on the block.

but I expand the sighting.

the fog is thickens.

the invader's ship is calculated to be hovering very,

very, very far away and the farther away I imagine it,

the bigger the saucer from Mars gets, especially when seen up close.

It's unimaginable.

no stars. no moon. no fuzzy-coated streetlight anymore.

just doom hovering there above the sink between dirty dishes and eternity.

  

                  -end it now and everything’s alright-

my dear

perpetually brick-

headed republican

bloviators,

perpetually lost in the fog

democratic commentators and

perpetually inept

political pollsters;

gather, have lunch,

digest in your own

stale company,

sleep together

in separate beds in

separate states on

separate planets;

synchronize 

the sound machines to

power-on mode,

kick out the jams

and groove to some smooth

Michel Petrucciani licks.

                  -progressive waits-

the tendons of the muscle tighten,

snap to place straight as a plumb-line.

It's a fragile chalk.

earlier in the month I voted by mail-in ballot.

the postoffice is close to the apartment

but not so close for a leisurely walk.

there’s a steep hill to climb, the crazy

virus is dancing in the air clinging to droplets

of anything worth the definition of droplet.

I own more than one mask.

one hangs on a doorknob.

one hangs on the gearshift lever.

one drapes across "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson".

I wrap another around my ears, press

the nose-fitting to cling and drive to the postoffice.

once inside I hand my ballot to the woman, exhausted

behind the counter who drops it into a large,

canvas container standing by her side, ballot-filled.

when I arrive back home I de-mask,

brew a pot and check my online standing.

one friend has a birthday.

another has lost something somewhere near

the supermarket on the boulevard.

the people take notice.

three friends tapped to "like" my latest poem.

fifty six others didn't responded.

the tendons of the muscle tighten.

returns slowly drip into consciousness

as a form of torture drips upon a forehead in a darkening room,

agonizing the badly flawed process I freely choose to participate in.

 

November 3, 2020

 

  

From the top

At the initial hospital

the angel of odds-making came unto me foretelling:

"Even money:

 Jackie will pick-up on Marilyn's scent."

Later, I'd place my bet as to whether or not

my father drank on the side

the side of the road

on the road to his house.

Meanwhile, the angel of death

has yet to appear at the foot of my bed,

and anyway, my preference

has never been to stay put. 

The atmosphere here

has wiped-out just about everything else.

 

                  -10/09/20 the New York Times-

from the Arts pages: “Young Black Poets”

reading their poems, standing their ground,

pleading their cases steadfastly,–– but quite simply

from my frame of reference, impossibly young.

all of them revisited.

all of them rising with each visit.

one sticks with me this morning;

is heard over and over again

with the click of the keyboard’s mouse.

her name is Akilah Toney.

her poem is titled: “Insecure Words”

written and spoken in her language and with an attitude.

my biggest fear at her age was being called out on strikes,

standing flatfooted at the plate, the inquisition

of baseball pressed upon my youthful shoulders.

but Toney’s poem is born of an inexhaustible blood.

Teacher redlines her sentence for the sake of gramma. then another

and another; redlined; dismissing her like he knows her address.

I hear her over coffee. the sunlight steps through the drawn

venetian blinds; the horizontals follow the planet's rotation.

Toney's young, but her voice strengthens her age. empowers the atmosphere.

maybe I’m too old to keep up, too white to get it, but maybe with enough

life in me to realize what it is I don't know.

I turned to the home plate umpire who in my eyes made the right call wrong.

Akilah Toney's fierce glance into her world is redlined simply for being.

 

 

                  -considering the timeline of Antoine Dupré-

there’s a place on the Huron where

decades ago Antoine Dupré resided

for the better part of five years;

closer to the better part of six, he'd say,

but I'm not so sure.

another way to arrange Antoine's timeline is to say:

Five years to accommodate Four remarkable young women

set into spaces along the timeline,–– the spaces provided by

One remarkable young woman.

he'd say: take away the inevitable distress in discourse  

and we'd all confess to having a good time.

another might say: factor-in the inevitable distress in discourse 

and Antoine Dupré's opinion of events is done for.

                   -the opinion page-

I listened to “Women” last night.

I missed the reciter's name which

is a shame because he was very good,

sounding, probably, like Bukowski in a state of sobriety.

I guess I can think-up a pretty good poem if it’s mine.

in my brain it sounds like my voice, I think, but

when poets read their own stuff in recital it’s

nearly annoying to hear responses from the audience.

the sounds from the stands at the ballpark with the score

knotted at.. let’s say, six a-side in.. let’s say, the top of the 8th

is pretty good, better than audience responses from

the gathered at a live poet's recital.

even low-key’d William Carlos Williams seemed awkwardly surprised

when years ago a small gathering gave him a standing ovation

after a reading of “the red wheelbarrow”.

"The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.”

don’t get me wrong.

I like the little poem, but christ!

a standing ovation?–– and sure

there are things to consider if

you take the time to realize a red wheelbarrow, rainwater glazed

and white chickens nodding around with nowhere to go but where

Carlos Williams places them, together in a moment of time;

 

if you, let's say, look upon those elements of the poem

as if each participant is not a singularity but are forever linked

as if they're the only physical properties which exist on the planet and..

wait a minute. by god!

I love that little poem.