29. FOREVER
The innocence of the tornado
Of the universe torridly
Twists the universe, the way a clay pot turns
On a potter’s wheel languidly
Gaining form, the funnel and the rapturous
Waist swaying slowly
Like a belly dancer at ten million
Miles an hour, sways like an elephant’s trunk
Of clots of rough and gray indigestible
That will be stars
And galaxies and strum and strums
The invisible cold dark matter,
Earsplitting odorless suction coming
Through time that stands
On its tail and the other force,
And is everything
Filling space,
And is space and everything,
Spacetime, everything.
What are we?
The everything looks
Out without eyes.
What are we?
Between everything and no.
The cobra sways
To the music
The belly dancer sways
To and the urge.
Gravity sings to the other force
And the other force sings back.
The hypnotized body floats in the air.
Love is God.
30. FOREVER
The surge of energy death can’t
Protect itself against
Imagines everything
At once.
The surge protector
That a spike of energy
Can’t avoid,
And that the spike of energy
Destroyed,
Fires its last distress flare forever,
Which is the aftermath
Till now, and is this place.
There is the tendency
Not to be
Which required
A singularity
To overcome
It, which made a blast which
Imaged everything
Just once,
The flash forever
That the flare flashes
Forever.
One consequence of the disappearance
Of nothingness
Is all the bandages eerily
Unwind and soon
The pharaoh finds the energy inside
The mummy case to lift
The lid. The flash of the universe
Goes out
To the eyes of time.
31. FOREVER
I travel further than
I can to reach the place
I can. I reach
The place.
Stars testify.
The black is
Satisfied with that.
The black of space is old cold.
How cold it feels
When you remember warm.
I swim with winter wings
Beneath the royal palms.
Birth put a message
In a bottle and floated it away.
My DNA washed up on a shore, facelift smiling,
My plump green grape maturity flash-frozen.
I drank so much.
So many women
I touched.
The voyage to outer space parties forever.
The reading material is
Incinerated and
The mind gets so old cold
I ache but
Yes, those are stars.
Yes, in the vicinity of zero, the grape’s now
Nearly fleshless face lifts
A trumpet to its lips.
American eternity
Swooningly crooning ballads on the red vinyl LP
From the 1950s on earth
Turns away wrath, swords into songs, undying rebirth.
32. THE LAST REMAINING ANGEL
Thinner than a fingerprint
And smaller than a postage stamp,
It looks like brains
Or softly scrambled eggs.
It moves in waves,
The latest Stealth technology.
It gets there fast.
The galaxies do the parallel processing.
Another miracle, the stars.
They give their lives when they fall.
The others pick up after them.
The implant keeps the bad things out.
It shocks the heart, restores the rhythm.
The operating system loves it.
The stars become so meek and mighty.
Sometimes things don’t always crash.
A woman is a wingless angel flying.
The last remaining angel joined her.
The entire known universe
Is their high-wire act.
Everything there is is the trapeze, no net.
And now abideth faith, hope, gravity,
These three, but the greatest of these
Is the ground.
The universe is taking off
Its clothes and taking
Off in a hailstorm. The runway
Looks like brains. It looks like love
Is everything there is.
Things in boots
Are murdering the Jews on Mars
And other galaxies don’t know.
33. IN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS
Into the emptiness that weighs
More than the universe
Another universe is born
Smaller than the last.
Good tidings of great joy.
Adonai.
Glory be to God in the highest and likewise
To those of us who don’t believe.
For Buddha
Is the advice
Of the stand-up comic
Hooded cobra god of the young, serene.
Unleashing the nourishing rain,
My lord Monsoon lashes the delta.
They sing from the Torah
The beginning of the universe
At the young woman’s bat mitzvah. Behold.
I bring you good
Tidings of great joy.
Adonai.
My friend, the darkness
Into which the seed
Of all eleven dimensions
Is planted is small.
That she is shy,
Which means it must be May,
Turns into green and June
And the seedling synagogue in Bennington.
And the small birds singing,
And the sudden silence,
And the curtains of the Ark billow open,
And the Tibetan tubas in the echoing Green Mountains roar.
Life on Earth (2001)
34. BALI
Is there intelligent life in the universe?
No glass
In the windows of the bus
In from the airport, only air and perfume.
Every porch in the darkness was lighted
With twinkling oil lamps
And there was music
At 2 a.m., the gamelan.
I hear the cosmos
And smell the Asian flowers
And there were candles
Mental as wind chimes in the soft night.
Translucency the flames showed through,
The heavy makeup the little dancers wore,
The scented sudden and the nubile slow
Lava flow of the temple troupe performing for the hotel guests.
Her middle finger touches her thumb in the vitarkamudra,
While her heavily made-up eyes shift wildly,
Facial contortions silently acting out the drama,
And the thin neck yin-yangs back and forth to the music.
Announcing the gods,
The room jerked and the shower curtain swayed.
All the water in the swimming pool
Trampolined out, and in the mountains hundreds died.
The generals wanted to replace Sukarno.
Because of his syphilis he was losing touch
With th
e Communist threat and getting rather crazy.
So they slaughtered the Communists and the rich Chinese.
Gentle Balinese murdered gentle Balinese,
And, in the usual pogrom, killed
The smart hardworking Chinese,
Merchants to the poor, Jews in paradise.
35. FRENCH POLYNESIA
Drinking and incest and endless ease
Is paradise and child abuse
And battered wives.
There are no other jobs.
Everything else is either
Food or bulimia.
The melon drips with this.
It opens and hisses happiness.
A riderless horse sticks out,
Pink as an earthworm, standing on the beach.
Fish, fish, fish,
I feel fishish.
I develop
When I get below my depth.
I splinter into jewels, Cadillac-finned balls,
Chromed mercury no one can grab.
I care below the surface.
Veils in
Colors I haven’t seen in fifty years nibble
Coral.
Easter Sunday in Papeete.
Launched and dined at L’Acajou.
The Polynesians set off for outer space
In order to be born, steering by the stars.
Specialists in the canoes chant
The navigation vectors.
Across the universe,
A thousand candles are lighted
In the spaceships and the light roars
And the choir soars. A profusion
Of fruit and flowers in tubs being offered
Forms foam and stars.
36. THE OPPOSITE OF A DARK DUNGEON
Three hundred steps down
From the top
Pilgrims are
Looking up.
The temple is above
In a cave.
The stairs to it start next
To the standard frantic street.
Monkeys beg on
The stairs
All the way
Up to the entrance.
Vendors sell treats
To the pilgrims to feed to them.
Some people are afraid of monkeys
Because they think they might get bitten.
When you finally reach the top, somewhat
Out of breath, you enter
The heavy cold darkness
And buy a ticket.
The twenty-foot gilded figures recline.
There are trinkets you can buy to lay at their smiling feet.
They use up the universe with their size.
Their energy is balm and complete.
Everything in the cosmos
Is in the cave, including the monkeys
Outside. Everything is
The opposite of a dark dungeon. And so
A messenger from light arrived.
Of course they never know that they’re a messenger.
Don’t know they carry a message.
And then they stay awhile and then they leave.
37. STAR BRIGHT
The story goes one day
A messenger from light arrived.
Of course they never know that they’re a messenger.
Don’t know they carry a message.
The submarine stayed just
Below the surface with its engines off near the shore observing.
One day the world took off its shoes and disappeared
Inside the central mosque
And never came back out. Outside the periscope the rain
Had stopped, the fires on shore were
Out. Outside the mosque
The vast empty plaza was the city’s outdoor market till
The satellite observed the changing
Colors of the planet
And reported to the submarine that
No one was alive.
A messenger from light arrived.
Of course they never know that they’re a messenger.
Don’t know they carry a message.
And then they stay awhile and then they leave.
Arrived, was ushered in,
Got in a waiting car and drove away.
Was ushered in,
Kowtowed to the Sacred Presence the required ten times
And backed away from the Sacred Presence blind,
And turned back into light.
Good night,
Blind light.
Far star, star bright.
And though they never know that they’re a messenger,
Never know they carry a message,
At least they stay awhile before they leave.
38. GOODNESS
In paradise on earth each angel has to work.
Jean-Louis de Gourcuff and his wife spend hours
Spreading new gravel in the courtyard and the drive.
The château swan keeps approaching its friend Jean-Louis to help.
Monsieur le Comte et Madame la Comtesse
Have faith, give hope, show charity.
This is the Château of Fontenay.
And this is the Gourcuffs’ ancient yellow Lab, Ralph.
It’s de rigueur for French aristocrats to name their dogs in English.
Something about happiness is expressed
By the swan’s leaving the safety of its pond,
Given the number of English names around.
Ralph smiles and says woof and the swan smiles and says hiss
In a sort of Christian bliss.
What is more Christian than this?
You have entered the kingdom of the kind.
Old Count de Gourcuff lives in another wing, the father,
Tall big-boned splendor of an English gentleman, but French.
His small wife is even more grand and more France.
One has a whisky with him in the library.
Something about goodness is being expressed
At a neighbor’s château nearby.
In the marble reception hall, ghosts are drinking champagne.
The host will be shot right afterward by the Nazis for something.
Blind Ralph barks at the hissing swan he waddles behind and adores.
It is left to the childlike to lead the sick and the poor.
Jean-Louis de Gourcuff, the saintly mayor of Fontenay,
Dons his sash of office, white, blue, and red.
Dominique de Gourcuff makes regular
Pilgrimages with the infirm, to refresh her heart, to Lourdes.
Dinosaurs on their way to being birds
Are the angels down here in heaven.
39. JOAN OF ARC
Even her friends don’t like her.
Tears roll out of
Her tear ducts,
Boulders meant to crush.
She feels
Her own emptiness but oddly
It feels like love
When you have no insight at all
Except that you are good.
The tears crush even
That thought out and she is left happily
Undressed with her stupidity.
Nobody wants her
On their side in games at school
So the retard
Is wired to explode.
She smokes, gets drunk,
Gets caught, gets thrown out
As the ringleader when she was not since
She has no followers, this most innocent
Who is completely
Emptiness,
Who is a thrill no one wants and
Whom the cowed will kill.
The “Goddamns” (as the invading English are
Called) get in her France.
It made the Maid of Orleans a man and God
Hears her crewcut rapture screaming at the stake in pants.
For God’s sake, the food is burning
On the stove!
You are the only one in the world.
> You are my good girl.
40. DOCTOR LOVE
It was a treatment called
Doctor Love, after the main character.
One of the producers discovered
To our horror a real
Dr. Love who, eerily, by
Pure coincidence, was also a woman
Oncologist trying to identify the gene that causes
Breast cancer. My
Fiction trampolined
Herself right off the treatment page,
Landing not on a movie set or a screen at the multiplex,
But at a teaching hospital in Los Angeles directing
Her lab. If you could identify the gene
That turns the cancer on,
Then maybe you could find a way to turn it off—
And make somebody rich.
She found a gene.
The villain needed to learn which.
He sets the innocent doctor up to
Commit a murder. The story was in such bad taste.
It never made sense.
I was doing rounds in a long white coat
To write the screenplay—playing doctor, doctor love.
Till death us do part, Dr. Catharine Hart,
I will remember you
On the street kissing me hello.
The cherry blossom petals blow—
White coats on rounds
In a soft East River breeze—like glowing fireflies of snow.
Dear Hart, it is spring.
Cutting a person open
Is possible without pain.
41. FEVER
Your pillow is pouring
You like a waterfall
You sleep through
In the middle of.
You shiver sweat
In the middle of
The rain forest chattering in
Darkness at midday.
You like heat because
It makes a reptile warm.
On the raft with you
Is your life.
You have everything
You have.
The crocodiles choo-chooing around
And around are the snouts
Of your ancestors
Which split and jaggedly yawn
Because it is time to
Read aloud
The story
Of the African slaves walking on water
In chains all the way to the United States
In 1776.
Two hundred–plus years later,
Islam overthrows the Shah.
NO MENSTRUATION WOMEN ALLOW,
A temple sign had said on Bali.
The temple monkeys had not been friendly.
The president of the rubber-stamp Iranian senate,
Sharif-Imami, the loathed Shah
Poems 1959-2009 Page 12