When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed (rtf) (3 page)

IN THE DOGGED HOUSE

The heart is a graveyard of crigas,
hid far from the hunter’s eye,
where love wears death like enamel
and dogs crawl in to die . . .

WRIGGLE UNDER GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE

One who saw the striped underbelly
and light dotted fins swim,
like a creature's from depths of the sea,
above the moon,
may have glimpsed the face that is beauty
in its late orbiting moment
of most skinless dexterity.

FAUST BEFORE TWELVE

Every bone is trumpet;
night’s counterpane muffles breaking brass:

the rest is silence and not rest;
chaos improvised orchestrations
of minute
dash downbeat
the closings of fiery valve.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERFECT LIE

The doctrine of the perfect lie
is a thing I most delight in,
smoother than life,
planed to fit the times,
sandpapered to join with expectation,
polished to suit the discriminating.

But it is not that way, you say?
Of course. The delight lies
in the lie’s
telling: times, hopes, tastes
to fit, with a little disjoint
here and there,
for appearance's fair sake.
Ask any Cretan you meet on the street:
The carpentry is all.

I USED TO THINK IN LINES
THAT WERE IRREGULAR TO THE RIGHT

I used to think in lines that were irregular to the right,
but the straight-ruled dexter margin’s claimed its own.
Too many pages where lines advance like infantry,
too much continuity,
too many harried characters in far too big a rush
to descend the humps, the hills,
to stub their toes on weighted words .
.
.

Potential energy lurks at the rough line's end.
A kick here, a bump there,
reality topples,
things slide,
The talus of improbability grows.

Prose is clean and smooth and slick,
advancing fully to the right,
building walls like rows of brick,
caging wild metaphors,
sealing their cells dead tight.

What is left
when fancy's eye is trapped
and dragged along to such a place?

The bottom of the page is cruel.

LP ME THEE

Claims of music
shackle souls
or free them.
I’ve never been clear
on the matter.
Shall we dance,
here on the hardwood floor?
Or shall we soar,
wraithlike,
to some Platonic hall
in the sky,
where a ball
of mirrors
reflects geodesic
whatever it is that we are
to the eye
in the air,
to the measures of time,
hiccup of heart,
note in the brain,
the consummate colors
we bare?

We circulate,
the arm descends,
the diamond finger writes.

THE BURNIN

No animal should be as bright as Blake’s Tiger
and I never want to see one.
Forests at night are disturbing enough,
but while mean kids sometimes douse a cat with petrol
and set it alight
for small, cruel laughs at its meteor runs,
its howls,
who has eye, hand or stomach
(let’s just call it “guts”)
enough to try it with Thee?

More than simple cruelty would have to be involved.
An existential temper, most likely.
As in, “No other is responsible for this act.
Free, spontaneous and unpremeditated,
I have decided to set fire
to this sleeping Tiger I have just now noticed
and burn it away to a grin.”

Or perhaps the matter lies
in the hands and the eves,
not mortal, but im-.
—A grotesque concept is involved:
There is this being
with immortal hands and eyes.
Shoot it, stab it, gas it—
It dies.
But the eyes accuse,
the fingers twitch,
as if they’d like to twine your heartstrings
and have all the time in the world to do it,
you son of a bitch.

Considering it every which way,
it is the sort of thing a primate
would contemplate.
I can’t see Thee
doing it to me, Tiger.

A cosmic SPCA seems the answer.
It is too late to do much but admonish
after the act has occurred.
Primates with immortal parts bear watching, anyhow.
And I can do without fearful, striped incendiaries
rushing by me in the night,
God knows. Write your Representative.

Preserve symmetry. Save the Tiger.

I, THE CROOKED ROSE’S DREAM,
DUMB-SUNG ANATOMIE

That I am the pain in the matter is the case,
though that I am the case in the pain is the matter;

and that I am the matter in the case is the pain
and the cross—a shade of passed-in substance
screaming for a name under the driven agonies of hours,
as the slashed apart circle of the sun by telephone lines,

not unlike that final grating of hearts, cut from
where wires begin beyond the bounds of seeing,

ends
shelving bright brooks on flows of black snaking parallel.

So still beneath me lies the world in faint and jettison sleep,
as oftener than nights are whirled the rabbits of my feet
through dreaming jungle. While I revolve
under that star-pimpled sky bust, the quick-gouged intaglio moon
seems somehow a thumbprint bruising its breast
concave under tree topped curves jag-collaring throat;

and aches in later membrane of unclothed day make
hot streams from its bleeding navel an unimprovised,
non-sacrificial way of being, while not saying,
some perpetually unmeant
missa in dominica resurrectionis
,
repeating in Gregorian spasms of dyed wing
the only in head felt tidal tom thing without.

As all blind thoughts mole that dirt-dreaming jumble,
feels the father rock of the world, torn untimely from its sun,
through sole unhealed tunnel, running synapses of sea and dendrite delta
down this made man mud. Where bums the blue Pacific
mumble ever the unborn, unconceived floats of dream
that flow artesian the shafts of ivory, oxidized to petals
that flame the nervous gray stalactites’ roof.

Then down
that ever evanescent way and back flare films of rockslid dust
to the volcano that thumps heartbeat only for the ear,
the mountain that backbones solely to the eye,
and the ocean that mothers but to the last sucking mouth,

as the name that is my own calls out itself
to be, sonning after ear its storming father fanned,—
“Lie down and come,” is nailed onto me. “Spread out thy arms
like sy
llables, and reascend the land.
”

This first printing of “When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed” is limited to an edition of 1000 copies of which 200 are cloth-bound, signed by the author and numbered 1-200.
The remaining 800 copies are numbered 201-1000.

This is copy 465