-?$@&*#@!!-

I thank my good friend

for reminding me of a poet I shouldn't 

have forgotten or more accurately, overlooked.

so in guilt or penance or both––

but in that order, I purchased two

Jorie Graham volumes and placed the cost of them

on a bloated credit card. a real climber that one.

(I don't possess the good fortune of Felix the Cat

who gets blasted by the old farmer’s shotgun

then takes a drink of water and the water squirts

out of the holes in his body and Felix

walks away whistling in the wind, the notes

of the tune ballooned above his head while the old

farmer’s eyes strain outward from his withered skull,

vibrating in astonishment!)

in other words, there are consequences.

gotta pay-up at the end of the month.

did you know that the professorship's chair

Jorie Graham now occupies at Harvard, was Seamus Heaney's

before her, and is one of the oldest chairs at the university, and

it allows her, by contract, to tether her cow in Harvard Yard?

so I’m searching for closure, but nothing's working.

you’ll have to pull the plug.

go on. It deserves an honorable end, even though

the experience has become a sort-of cartoon of itself.

A travelogue:

Although penguins seem to like it, there's only

one insect species native to Antarctica.

And there are no Polar bears on Antarctica.

Not that it's too cold. It's a question of migration.

The requiem mass isn't meant to be cold.

But to the dead it is.

The high mass for the dead isn’t sung on Antarctica

because it’s too cold for the organ's pipes, and besides

it's a problem to manipulate fingers beneath such mittens.

For a brief moment she was cold as ice.

This was largely due to my awkwardness.

She was young and so was I.

This happened behind the billboards

next to the bocce lanes of the inebriated Marconi Club.

I remember her dress patterned with butterflies

and her black sneakers. We were bike riders.

We dressed for the occasion.

We went to mass on Sunday's because it was expected of us,

and although I entered the ranks of neighborhood altar-boys 

she was out. No girls allowed, and you'd be hard-pressed

to find a girl who had an interest,–– and besides, 

it wasn’t their time. It was the time for Priests and confessions

and rebellious explorations, and during an afternoon on a cloudless day

from behind the billboards among the stiff meadow grass,

we were amused by the old-timers betting in their Italian excesses

at the rails of the bocce lanes, and in the far distant future the backlit 

screens of the frantic machines would come to announced to the world:

"William is with Christina Bellaragazza".

                 -an advisory to the chronically unpublished poets-

stop trying so hard to stick the ending.

you figure skating?

you shootin’ at something in Texas?

don’t let them con you into "sticking the ending".

I know what I’m talking about.

I’ve stuck the endings to more poems

than Donald Trump has lunatics.

all it’s gotten me is a rotation of guilt and penance !

get off you knees at the feet of the kingshits of poetry.

let loose your word groups to shit their own ice cream !

fuck the fucking ending.

let’s get back to poetry's beginnings where the titles are.

you remember the titles, don't you?

remember how the titles gave you birth,

let you suckle the breast warmed with the sweet

milk of your own tongue?

we can't all be Emily of Amherst !

what's that? you think the way you end a poem

will get it published? Whassamatta U ?!

look. listen to me.

the snazzy ending kills the poem, murders it,

slices its throat !

and it's going to lay there like a plank

at the bottom of the column anyway, no matter

what you say, or how you say it, or how much

you agonize over it. so screw it !

fuck the ending ! just end the freakin' thing for chrissakes !

(however, please keep in mind

that I could be wrong about all of this.)

 

                  -from the lineup-

so this morning it's

Charles Simic.

c’mon out, mr. Simic from your slip

nestled between Robert Pinsky and Ross Gay

cloaked in your glazed winter jacket the color of –––

butterscotch mousse !

let’s see what you’re up to this Monday sunrise,

aromatized by a pot of dark, French Roast coffee from ––

Sweden ! ahhh..!  but wait.

your mother was a braid of black smoke, you say?

christ !–– and now I see you, a suckling child stolen by ––

gypsies? christ !

who'm I kidding?

I’ll never get to Sweden, let alone France.

but I've got my hands around the spine

of your zany run at the world, Charles.

and what’s this?

you’re in New Hampshire ?

why, that’s no more than a hop, skip, jump, and

three hour tram ride up the mountainside !

so let's get together next weekend, Charles,

and we can discuss the merits of all my poems,

which after this effort on my part on your behalf,

I'll presume, with assertiveness, you'll owe me.

                  -Pablo’s molar-

Examining its unearthed cavity,

the forensics may have detected trace elements of poison,

the science behind a finding of possible foul play!

How uneventful that the great Chilean poet

should succumb to the commonness of cancer.

Better to be romanticized for the drop of poison;

to have been murdered!  Assassinated! Remember,

this is the man who wrote:

“I left no one in peace

so they’ll grant me no peace.

That’s clear,

but it doesn’t matter––

they’ll be publishing my socks."

Now they'll be publishing his tooth.

                 

                  No!  For chrissakes listen!–– It’s..

Up  the first base line

Over  to second base

Into  third base

Down  the third base line to home.

Nomenclature, 101.

                 poem

the sound I’ve chosen in order to be alerted

to incoming calls above countless others available to me,

is that of a doorbell chime.

it’s the standard chime of the ages,

the chime recognized 'round the world,

and in situation comedy reruns,–– like

"The Donna Reed Show" when the whole family would

look to one another in bewilderment whenever the doorbell rang.

it's that ding-dong chime, with “ding” tolling in E,

and “dong” descending by a fifth in time to C,

with both repeating until I decide to respond.

it’s like opening the front door to happiness or despair,

to who knows who, or who knows what.

today is February 15th, the date of my birth,

accompanied by so many well wishers; artists, poets,

and retirees of all stations, the busily active, the vagabonds,

the brilliant and dim-witted, the lonely hearts, and tedious

hearts-full-of-joy crowd,–– and all,

(with the exception of the dead, who've appointed me

to represent their interests in whichever ways I see fit to do so.)

meanwhile, "The Office of Doctor Pedrotty" calls in greeting

with a “ding-dong” approach set to amphitheater mode,

wishing me a “Very Happy Birthday”––

which seems not to be recorded from the heart at all.

the year is 2022.

                  is Picasso still making art?

not new art administered by his immediate hand

but art you hadn't seen before nor known of,

something recently discovered in that glossy,

outrageously oversized book sitting unopened

on the coffee table next door or ripped-off

as on the cover flap of the Christmas card

sent last year by Auntie Emilia who didn’t know

Picasso from the guy who painted Elvis on velvet

or maybe while passing time on the downtown bus

a young woman climbed aboard from the stop

in front of the public library clutching a takeout

of carnage in Spain, and you thought:

“what in the name of all that’s holy is that?”

you see, not new art, but new to you.

so,–– that’s my question.

 

                    Had my early father been a poet / c. 1937

He speaks:–

"Time for a snapshot.

I’ll get the Brownie Instamatic Uncle Frank gave us for Christmas.

Out there, the morning's rain

has released a scent of the junkyard's metal."

He'd go on:––

"It lingers there still. Let's go.

There's not a moment to lose.

Wear that dress you bought at Cherry & Webb

last Saturday. Remember"?

He continues:––

"It's the one you grabbed

from the rack, and it looks great on you.

It fits you well, Annie. You’ve got an eye

for these things. I guess I have, too. haha."

He concludes:––

"Let's go. No kids, cats, friends or relations.

Annie, this will be one for the scrapbooks!

Just you, my love, out back against the house

standing at the drainpipe."

Had my early father been a poet.

Quequechan

             -The confessional and the young woman on the run-

             1.

             The steps to the church are forged of chiseled stone

             quarried from the city's ledge of granite.

             I've climbed them.

             Once inside, I looked things over;

             used the holy water to dab the trinity.

             I'm church legal.

             I'll choose a back row pew to better sample the fickle

             confessional line, (the mortal sinners make me wait)

             side-stepping into the pew, dropping to the kneeler.

             I kneel there. babble a prayer.

             Not a very good one.

             2.

             Someone’s whispering,

             one to another one.

             The sound's muted,

             a strange kind of resonance.

             Finishing, I'll use the required right hand.

             you know, the hand of God.

             

             (here, proximity is close enough)

         

             Father

             Son

             The Holy Ghost gets two.

             

             3.

             The preamble:

             During the un-enlightened ages on a Saturday afternoon,

             I lifted the kneeler to slip to its waiting position.

             I'm next to confess and then,––

             she draws back the curtain with a fury

             fleeing the box as she would the scene of a crime.

             (she's young and warm-looking, like a pane fresh from the bakery)

            

             I’m in.

             Blah my sins.

             So sorry. So sorry.

             

             It’s a penance of 5 “Our Father’s” and 5 "Hail Mary’s” for me,

             but I've learned to do the time in little more than a minute.

             An "Act of Contrition" more or less to tidy things up.

             The "Act of Contrition" is like a feather duster, clearing away

             the dead skin left behind by the absolutions. 

             Now homeward through the ballpark

             hopping the left field fence with time on my hands

             enough to covet my neighbor’s goods all over again and build

             erotic fantasies over what in hell it was she'd said she'd done.

             c.1952 / Quequechan

             

                 stories in a column with a death knell's accompaniment 

I call them poems.

they look like poems

and they act like poems.

their silhouettes

resemble my profile. 

now comes a funeral's

call as the day begins.

somebody croaked.

a stranger.

a man or woman.

young or old.

only a few can say.

Saint Michael’s bell

tolls in its measured cadence.

a soft breeze from the east,

and sound travels with it in the deep

density of permanence.

this is it.

I call them poems

because they look like poems

and they act like poems.

but outside my window

somebody's completely

removed from everything

past and present and future,

and the knell beckons: "next"?