Lines on Eliot

Stand betwixt the ocean split from Massachusetts to England
Hear the self-sustaining symphony of sea walls and know
By the warmth of the stationary wave, the tempature of blood
The brine mist in the air, the exact salinity of amniotic fluid.

Your primrose path laid in muck unseen by sun or man
Sometime before you drown in the collapse and suspension
Along the fossils and relics coursing happily
Parting a weak rivulet, and here and there, walking on a pudlle.

Untitled

A pink-bellied lisp
Leaks from elderberry lips
In viscous drips
Like syrupy nipples.

Echelons of geese dart
And honk against clouds
Of fleece gravitating
In self-fulfilling triangles,
Gliding in sleep on wings
Of telepathy and pillows
Of cumuli.

Baghdad Tomorrow Morning

The sky is changing color over Baghdad tomorrow morning, tonight in New York.
It’s not the Berlin Wall but loquacious anchors and quieter ex-generals
Sit around the live feed chewing each others’ asses just the same.
The people, their hopes long oppressed and off-camera, throw a noose
Around the bronze neck and take turns hacking the dado with a single sledgehammer.
It took the Soviets seventeen hours to bring down Lenin, someone non sequiturs.
Then an American soldier wipes the face of Saddam with an American Flag,
Cleaning mustard from the corner of his mouth, but then thinks better of it
As if he can hear the commentator’s disapproval from the shoulder of the dictator
Who the Lebanese press purports has taken refuge in the Russian Embassy.
The tank with a crane-like winch apparatus seemingly designed for statue dismantling
Hugely symbolic. I don’t want anyone talking when it happens in real time on the screen.
So that’s what they mean by regime targets? I put in a tape of women’s wrestling.
Good strong Eastern European chicks.

First Sunday of Advent

Angels dance about the altar
In robes of purple gauze.
They soften haunted gazes
With the better, best intentions of saints.
They caress to bless their music
Less our lesser-hewn prayers
Rounding harsh, harshest sounds
Like the neat seams of sails
Smoothed, smothered with their airs.

They calm the frantic eye,
Balm the burning ear.

Freezing in the silence
Icy impatient dark, we rest
Lulled warmly in their home.
Our nausea made taut, electric
Anxiety slicing like razors
Grounded by the antidote of perfect
Knowledge. At last we go in peace
Grateful of such a liberal parish.

Farewell Melville

There has died and been buried in this city,
During the current week and at an advanced age,
A man who is so little known, even by name,
To the generation now in the vigour of life
That only one newspaper contained his obituary,
And this was but of three or four lines.

Introduction

Faithful like thick curtains
Nurturing ancient moths
Lethargic in the dark, not dead.
These slime pamphlets sneak
Into me as easily as the smoke
Of a venomous halo, the fog
Which clogs dreams choking
On explosive pollen. Surely
Shaking out this fine filth,
Waking the sleepy wings
Arousing toxic galaxies
Of wasted dust hovering
As if between wind and wind
Machines, is playing with fire
Spilt from the blazes of gold
Flowers lining the way in flaming
Geysers erupting in the dark nesses
Where the ashes of these poems
Envelop the clean parks of sleep.