American Poetry
Page 18
the men in long grass with machetes
waiting to advance, to move in (or out?)
all good nothing, the track star
losing interest in the bakery
dreamer losing interest in
the most two hundred of our time
1.
Still small battles of will Despite unseasonal meanness In a set-up
like that Where the main dynamic is not even Knowing what’s
missing or that it’s Missing an edge and moving along as if Missing
a sense, like sight or Touch or hearing the Evidence or a piece of it
comes to Light by accident or deliberate Positioned in relation to
a given Moment and so it is perhaps all an Accident with a
magnifying glass or an Electrified fence to Separate the fictions:
showing Her and trying to speak or Are they singing? she’s
listening and Looking but is she smiling? A visible device
represents Them as things that don’t add up
Men in the back of a truck behind a wire Grating singing
2.
habit of the tongue, that piece of bread on the wood in the shot
right after the teapot, the lamp and the table
Pretend a thing is a
Thing like us
To imagine a stick
When you see
Flowers shaped like a dove
Or anything else
Cairo, named for Mars. Mars and England were the same to us, she said. She saw in her palm,
musical matter has
filled up the cavity
originally occupied by
the organism itself
The crowd seems too apologetic.
3.
Clouds composed of sharps and flats, structure but the room is
locked. That is to say, the visit can be obstructed, withheld by
chance at either end. A model of action (compassion) within the
inexorability (irregularity, unpredictability) of the frame.
Notations of space in terms of measure of weather or breath
moving in the shape of a billowing figure in front of the mouth,
position read as motion, exiting, invisible magnetic tongue.
The clown like an undertaker in red and white striped gloves pulls
the coat up over your head from behind: let the circus begin!
dots teeming with organic matter, out of statistical into the fire
a shadow under the number
4.
Image or not? Exactly if the shadow is underneath
hyacinth culture, the wasps
and the bees—rook mates, a bird
called bee-eater in he House of
the Faun
But rather, to enter and be concealed. Manet’s “Mocking of Christ”
making of christ a kind of dark space around the figures, light
bottom quarter foreground floor syntax of light and dark
5.
this time is free
contagious dialogue
body of music
blood in mouth
hair in shoe
Boxing Captions
Jena Osman
I wanted to respond to the simple gesture of the figures … without pathos, without dramatic movement, without telling stories! For the painter or sculptor, simple acts of the human figure, such as inclining the head, raising an arm, gesturing with the hand, moving a leg, provide such an expressive richness that themes such as standing, coming, going, turning, and the like would suffice to occupy an artist’s lifetime.
—Oskar Schlemmer
Simple acts: the theater is ranging across the boundaries of its materials. I find myself through a device, a synthesizer of discrete emblems, disconnected on summation and realized in the limits of time zone and national sphere. I’m a figure mechanized by its last potentials and careful of new hypotheses. Emblems run their course through me, serve to engender fantasies, the image conditioned to promise change, to approach us but not too closely.
FIGURE ONE
Force the opponent’s left and lead to the right with the left glove.
FIGURE TWO
Step forward and left, at the same time drive a straight right to the chin.
FIGURE THREE
The left hand, after executing the parry, is in a position of block ready for opponent’s right.
Stage realm is ranging through these gestures. What popular thing directing their geography, realized in the limits of a romantic confrontation, animated as the antique need for today and the loss of self one feels in the marketplace. The term mummery appears like a light: a moral variety, a diagram in the vaudeville.
FIGURE FOUR
noh hearing, noh voting, my soldier will know
men leer strands of century
then linger on woe
FIGURE FIVE
on top of the right gun
a layer of guy
a stance over madder
victorious in light
FIGURE SIX
Race on and tongue tie on sounds in a bay
Get a word clean and dry
History from materials wades cautiously into a contentious debate. The history of reflection: “I am the votes.” An actor of naturalness, then helicopters churn overhead. The government blinked. This sculptor crafts a spiritual artifice while thousands cheer wildly in the arena built for the role. We will examine the changes caused by the longest war.
FIGURE SEVEN
Abhorrence
FIGURE EIGHT
Self Abasement
FIGURE NINE
Utter Abandonment
Emblems disconnect making dozens of arrests. The absurd hand broke up a drug ring, the result of new mechanization. They also seized 18 firearms, our sphere of life aided by corrupt employees. A suspicious package was reported, our recognition is loaded, is mechanized. It would be met by another vehicle, our time to create. Workers count ballots, technology and fantasies, then succeed in ousting one sign.
FIGURE TEN
National Election commission workers count ballots for the National Assembly.
FIGURE ELEVEN
A former intelligence officer is being held in a prison.
FIGURE TWELVE
Life goes on at a café while protesters march by.
Taken between things, we clear the final state hurdle. It is really natural to approve a compromise bill that runs through me. What popular thing is suspended from school, passive at its scaffold. No charges are likely to be filed; they are animate as the marketplace. We discuss shooting and stabbing—the mummery, seen as a lie. After taking her to the woods, diagrams step up their assault, that is, shape the world. No sound as we try to decide whether to sign a physical—an optical—event and hold direct talks with its composer (who fails to defeat the rebels). Sounds out of the body are the form of two who approve a plan to place you under house arrest, complete with distribution and precision and fear that you might try to escape.
FIGURE THIRTEEN
Every object is naturally drawn to the earth’s center.
FIGURE FOURTEEN
Another was given credit for that, which prevented the former from saying such a thing out loud.
FIGURE FIFTEEN
Then he decided to measure humidity with a ball of cotton.
Independence and time threatened to freeze his assets. His material, however—the words for which he was arrested—an improvised existence as they unfurled banners of protest. Alone they’re free in circumstance, renouncing his ties. He is material for higher potential and the conflict ends. Reproduction for the latter brings a halt to spring, detached limitations decked out in new riot gear. Humans are certain to be listening, opening markets to competition. Depth extensions can wipe out linear form, leaving workers without jobs. Rigid geometry of space enjoys expanded export, runs right through me, driving unions to lock arms.
FIGURE SIXTEEN
&
nbsp; Smith was freed on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.
FIGURE SEVENTEEN
Eleanor Reese shows damage to the trunk of the car that was removed from behind her house.
FIGURE EIGHTEEN
Ivory V. Nelson has tackled difficult problems at universities.
Manifestations of nothingness hold meetings willing to listen to values they fulfilled. Simple acts. The living means of representation help people in poor countries, their flesh and measure integrating into the world emblem economy. They are not equilibrium under siege. The stability of a deficiency is mechanized, scheduled to culminate through borrowed tactics. Transient stage action derails a new round in mobile fluctuating, holds up a national map: space at once spotlighting. The sight of dozens range across this strict switchboard to show my generation cares.
FIGURE NINETEEN
Because some things reflect rays, and are bright; but others absorb them.
FIGURE TWENTY
Because each grain of sand reflects the rays of the sun like a mirror.
FIGURE TWENTY-ONE
Because the body of vapor is thinnest at the edges of the clouds.
The goal is an image which avoids mistakes and he stands in different laws tightening security in advance. Realism in the abstract: stationing officers on bridges. Cubical relationships. Mathematics of spending millions on riot gear. Nature of calisthenics, together and in conscious next page, directing this geography through myself into the vaudeville.
FIGURE TWENTY-TWO
Drop the left arm perpendicular to the floor, and step across to a position outside the opponent’s left foot, with either the left or right foot.
FIGURE TWENTY-THREE
Shift the weight to the front leg and then drive a hard left uppercut to the solar plexus.
FIGURE TWENTY-FOUR
Carry the right hand high, ready to cross to opponent’s chin.
Reside in respiration fueled by a new heartbeat system. Human space argues about trade whose opposite framework and mimetics have shaken employees. They face, under attack, invisible psychical expression and obey the law of himself who failed to act as watchdog and to police all these corrupt regimes as sense and range of space. Whether bare, they receive loans and curb their own environment in the great branch offered to attain their goal. Theater urged them to avoid confrontation.
FIGURE TWENTY-FIVE
Thousands of janitors in Los Angeles are on strike for higher pay after rejecting a wage plan offered by building maintenance companies.
FIGURE TWENTY-SIX
For Gulf Coast residents in Texas, spring break memories, like those of the traffic on Padre Island, linger.
FIGURE TWENTY-SEVEN
The left glove should be placed over the opponent’s right in order to prevent a counter blow.
Transformation costume, they change it so as to provide new safety. Human costume risks conformity and six children die. The misleading laws consist of a waist belt and a native is confused. The tray comes off, produced from the has-been, can slip down, yet costumes of standardized Columbine strangle or fall. Authentic can be the body falling from the swing.
FIGURE TWENTY-EIGHT
from torso into
architecture
human space
FIGURE TWENTY-NINE
laws of the club
the egg of the arm
the joints
FIGURE THIRTY
the we of rotation
spinning result
spiral disk
Simple acts. Possibilities move in limitations that double as infants. The longer abandoned essentially soar which fastens acrobatics as the only living geometry sold nationwide. The pyramid bondage results in automaton stop-spending, beyond human, extolled, he keeps up his courting demands: a phonograph unshaken by the hour-long session, indeed mind is configuration portraying himself as a different kind of technological glass. He painted himself as a new breed: artificial divers generally support a surgery soldier, criticize one idea as an artificial device, pick somebody to speak for long periods and it can be abstract. Why don’t you pick someone peculiar to pathos to deliver anything? Sublime actors and stilts of this most exquisite faith succumb to publicity. This reverse, the man wants to run, develop appropriate stills, he declines to meet and awaits the static. The acrobat opposes the atmosphere.
FIGURE THIRTY-ONE
Remember the sign of this shape
the folded backbone
suppresses the world.
FIGURE THIRTY-TWO
Drive a hard right to opponent’s heart
inside his left lead.
FIGURE THIRTY-THREE
Suppression, Depression, Dejection,
and kindred ideas.
The genuine action emerges untouched in its own materials. I play amazed at being its creation unchanged in my core beliefs. My form without purpose decays to listen to people’s real life stories, kills while teaching eighth grade history and today I continue by recounting my own wrenching. With the service of an optical author I ask him why he left us after his intentions divided the class in half. Favorites jump at the chance to lead a visual theater of colors and in this case we’ll be the hawks! Isolate out into the sea. The idea is dropped because of rising emotion. The question of tomorrow: if tomorrow is not a straight line—rather, a hidden forwardness—how will we stand and turn?
FIGURE THIRTY-FOUR
The safety clinch
FIGURE THIRTY-FIVE
The emblematic duck
FIGURE THIRTY-SIX
The return right hook
Fubar Clus
Ron Silliman
“That much drinking
does not come free”
A ride
in a cheap rent-a-car
after an hour of tea
in the sun
Large screen TV
playing basketball
with the sound off
Movement
quick & muscular
though seeming
curiously slow
Rodman’s hair
an impossible yellow-white
Talking of death, of
cancer, this one’s
prostate, that one’s breast
a woman described as
“a poet of the seventies”
who is in fact
a friend to many here
wind-up kangaroo flips
but fails to land
standing up
“Thinking of getting married again—
a beautiful French woman—
so I ask him
what does he think he’s doing
and he admits
he doesn’t know”
2.
form festers restless void
—Charles Borkhuis
“Behind these pictures
I have other pictures”
Haze blurs the margin
far up Suisun Bay
though to the east, Diablo
etched in summer heat
(though it is only Spring
Little blue butterflies
the underside of whose wings
prove gray as rock
alight atop
wild chamomile
To the west
out beyond the Gate
the great white cloud bank
sits low over the water
a blur to Tamalpais
while between
lays what I conceive of
as the past
The burden
of time
old men
in the gas station shadows
sitting on overturned drums
spitting into the grease
A woman
beautiful thin face a little more etched
after a year’s absence
brings out a tray
on which sits a pitcher and several glasses
out into the brilliant sunlight
of the deck
/> high over the terraced garden
Masks & kites
hanging from a line
paint drying
Great Wall of Duplos
children’s chairs
tables, easels
webbed together in yarn
Choir
of the nearly inaudible
hum in the walls
crackling constant in every light bulb
deep breath of the furnace
ice maker’s rattle
in the empty kitchen
overheard
Up the block
an engine turns over
Report of a blue bunting
where none should be
3.
The cat stalks slow
across the cut grass
bird barely visible
in the last light
that might still be called
predawn
casts
a narrative
over the whole yard
mealy bugs impervious
in the damp soil
The brief season of tulips has passed
So that
an image is layered
out of the visible
through extraction
of characteristic
detail
She rose up
after the act
straightening the camisole
she still wore,
picking
the rest of her clothes
up from the floor
and looked back at him
alien now that he slept
wondering
had he even seen her
during the fact of it
Cars abruptly
leaving the freeway
climbing the dirt path
up to the off ramp
or the road north
to Germantown Pike
ahead
(then below)
long sea of red lights
the Schuykill transformed
into a parking lot
headed East
Three Movie Poems
John Yau
PETER LORRE REMINISCES ABOUT BEING A SIDEKICK
Iron cloud, bronzed sunset, stolen dream.
I wasn’t always a feverish lepidopterist
chasing whistling chariots in a stadium.
My wax lacked coherence, my human hairs glistened