Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Meditation on a Bottle of Mediterranean Red

My feet touch down on warm, golden sand.
I walk over to a table and sit down.
A mustachioed, aproned waiter takes my order
for a glass of Mediterranean Red.
A breeze ripples my papers.
A tall woman in white linen passes,
followed by two children
and a black dog.
I finish the wine and this poem
and walk down the beach to my villa.


Monday, May 30, 2011

Out of Time

He points to his watch.
I ask him if it's broken.
He shakes his head,
and points to it again.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Paging (Through) Dr. Williams

Red-faced
balding
in faded scrubs,
he walks
his hound
and waits
while she pees
nonchalantly
on the red
wheelbarrow,
sending
the white
chickens
scurrying
in a flurry
of feathers.
I pass
noisily
in my rusted-
out sub-
compact,
munching
on the sweet
cold plums
I took
from the fridge
when no one
was looking.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

The Other Place

          after Charles Simic

But then there's the other place
the place of soliloquies
forgotten lines

broken links
lost articles of clothing
threadbare stuffed animals,

the place of amputations
mangled tricycles
crutches

spent shell casings.
To visit this place
is to search the corridors

of REM sleep,
looking for a clue
among the rubble

looking for a friend
who vanished.
The menus here are blank

the newspapers' words missing
but with a trace of a message
that tricks us

into thinking
it can be pieced together
and understood.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Psych 101 : Adrift in Theory

Wolfgang Kohler's ape, Sultan, snaps together two sticks and snags a banana from the ceiling of his cage. The whole in Wolfgang's theory is greater than the sum of its parts. Pavlov's dogs drool to the tintinnabulation of bells, happy they won't be rocketed into space for at least forty years. Fred Skinner's pigeons play ping pong for food pellets during the day, launder money at night in the school's photography lab. John B. Watson, behaviorism's father, beds down his lab assistant and is given his walking papers. He stumbles into advertising and rises to VP, writing copy for cigarette ads. One of his grad students, Mary Cover Jones, counterconditions four-year-old Peter's fear of animals using scoops of ice cream. She sells her idea to Ben and Jerry. Sigmund Freud smokes cigars, collects Egyptian artifacts, wears out 306 couches, bifurcates humans into those who wish for a penis and those who fear for their penis. He sees no happy medium. Clifford Beers jumps out of a fourth floor window into a mud puddle, foiling his suicide and priming his pen for a A Mind That Found Itself, while Gustav Theodor Fechner's opus The Mental Life Of Flowers is too much too soon. Harry Harlow tricks rhesus monkeys into falling in love with stuffed animals. They hide his booze, sending him over the edge of a visual cliff. Alfred Binet puts together a test to measure intelligence. He should have stuck to law. Hermann Rorschach spills a bottle of ink and markets his accident for countless James Joyce wannabes. A stick of dynamite drives a crowbar through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe. He becomes a sideshow sensation, and prefrontal lobotomies become the therapy of choice for society's square pegs. Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini compare notes with Mary Shelley, use an electric current to induce epileptic seizures in patients with mental illness. Erik Erikson studies art, comes to America as an art therapist, and promptly loses his identity. Philippe Pinel unchains the insane in La Salpetriere; they join SAG, and get bit parts in J. L. Moreno's psychodrama, King Of Hearts. R. D. Laing maintains that the world, not people, is mad, drops acid with patients, dies of a heart attack while playing tennis in Saint Tropez. Tommy Szasz argues that mental illness is a destructive social construct, a myth and nothing more (or less) than “problems in living.” Carl Jung has a midlife crisis and explores the occult; Alfred Adler strives for superiority; Abraham Maslow actualizes himself in full view; Tom Harris assures us we're OK. The sixty-minute hour turns out to be fifty-minutes long.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Just Out of Reach

What you realize after all
is that there is no catching up
no beating the odds
no shortcut through the woods.
What you realize
is that it is a slippery slope
a blind alley
a dead end
however you spin it
waiting for you
in aisle 7 at the supermarket for instance
or at the 19th hole
or at the slots in the casino
or on your well-worn walking path
along the river
or on a beach even
during summer’s dog days.
The shadows behind the blackened windows
now out of earshot
suck the life out of your collected works
your interim reports
your bargaining chips
your plans.
Red, green, white, blue.
No different.
No options.
Prep chefs and blackjack dealers among others know this.
Why else do salads border on wilt
or tires on 24-speeds flatten
just as one is about to crest a hill
ring up a sale
return the library books
sail off into the sunset
swim to a distant shore
look in a mirror to find home?

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Hard Left

Your free run wooden horse has run away.
Forget the conductor with his chorus of auditions!
He meant well but his baton misled the strings,
losing them in a rat’s nest of high rises,
overdue library books, and time-lapse phonography.
Jot down the criteria for your new avatar.
Don’t be intimidated by fledglings.
They’re harmless, as harmless as fuzz
trailing single speeds and eviction notices.
Directions? Of course! Take a hard left
out of the parking lot, then another, and another.


Tuesday, May 24, 2011

And So?

Graffitied boxcars lumber through storage bins.
What? No ticker-tape?
You do remember ticker-tape parades, yes?
Quizzically, of course.
There was enough runoff for another diatribe
by the third impartial visitor
who for some logistical reason refused to use the sidebar.
How many homes have been held hostage by soaps?
I wanted to do the right thing
cartwheeling across the front lawn
spigots discharging venom in hot pursuit.
We all wanted to do the right thing.
Cabbies rubbernecking something fierce.
It was her heels - neon yellow spikes
clickety-clacking though the intersection
charging gawkers a fee for a free ride -
a free ride that would take them to the palisades
of their dreams, leaving them winded
with enough pocket change for the meter maid.

Monday, May 23, 2011

On Listening to John Cage's 4' 33"









Sunday, May 22, 2011

And Then Some

After the crowd thinned, we crowded into an omnibus
no larger than a hallmark and rode around town
as the credits tumbled out of control. With the exchange rate
plummeting, we looked to each other for clues
to the Chinese puzzle box purring in the middle of the road.
I'd never thought it possible
but there I was floating on a sea of flotsam
without a care in the sky
while you busied yourself skipping around
from I to he to you with oafish abandon
laying down the beat for a distant bassoonist
with the determination of a rickety metronome.
It was time to call it quits.
This of course was out of the question
so instead we saddled up and rode off into a billboard
with others charged with passing out soffits.
We must have done the scene nine and a half times or so
when in the last half hour the director
seemingly inside himself shouted Taglio!
Everyone scattered.
Teamsters rushed in and released the pigeons on cue
which was closely monitored by a local animal rights group
led by a middle-aged assistant college professor
who kept announcing off-camera that she had nothing to wear.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Perp Walk

I want a chord to resonate with the media hounds at the door.
An A minor perhaps
accentuating the trials and trepidations
of the parties of the first part
busily blogging their bowel movements.
I want to wade through their webs of wire, hands held high.
I want to be transported to an earlier time
filled with jawbreakers
stamped with phrases of affection.
I suppose I too want it all.
There’s no disguising the fact:
the LP in the atelier scratching to be set straight
trumps all self-deprecating patter
echoing between the two-families.
Maybe it’s the vegans
proselytizing in the nosebleed section at the double-header.
Let’s just say it grows tiresome.
The replay of this shackled white collar on parade
will likely invade the dreamscapes of many.
As it should, I guess.
Not to be tampered with, though, would also be
an acceptable cornerstone in this revitalization project
aimed at making downtown
a safer place for the moms and pops and kids
carpooling in to experience The Pirate Ride of a Lifetime.
They’ll have plenty of time later
to return to sorting their recyclables.
That mindset would indeed be a step up.



Friday, May 20, 2011

The Last Time

I’ve forgotten the last time
so I’ll write about a different time.


It was warm.
Stemmed glasses chased each other around the table.
The wine breathed in the season.
Something simmered on the stove.
Someone waited for a cab.
You called in for takeout.
We selected items from two columns.
Finely tuned impediments carved the moment out of time.

Whoa!
Strike that line!


Your Russian friend – that’s what we all called her –
your Russian friend stepped out of a magazine
and stopped by
on her way to a restaurant
where her lover and meal waited.
She again spoke of the Old Country
the cycles of tumbling granite
the many shiny rings
and the artist who painted her portrait
in the nude.
My cell failed.

Sorry, but that's all I remember.

Anna Akhmatova

Thursday, May 19, 2011

But I Do!

That’s when I decided it was time to refill
the rapidograph with red ink
and begin a series of one-liners in red -
the red saturating the eye with disbelief.
Around noon, with the aha moment on break
I began color-coding departures
just to keep track of who went where and why.
The love letters in the sand had washed away
with the rest of the whites.
This was probably a good thing
though I was hard pressed to convince myself
as well as passersby
who  looked at me as if I had two heads.
But I do, I told a news anchor
who had taken the wrong right turn
and ended up in our neighborhood.
But I do have the answer, I repeated,
though, by then, she couldn’t have cared less.


Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Garden of Unearthly Delights

You stroll … into some version of the present.
          - John Koethe

You audition for the part of Iago
thinking this would be a great way
to spend the summer -
a summer of unrequited doubles
only with a deeper resonance
a summer traversing the seven levels
the early-birds-getting-the-worms
sitting up on all four-wheelers
and taking notice - a shot in the arm
revitalizing your steps following
the dotted line to that little hideaway
where under the covers
or rather under cover of darkness
you explore the outer reaches of Pilates
loosening the Cartesian duality:
I thank therefore I am.
The unaccustomed glance of interested parties
the simplicity of elusive gestures
await your entrance in Scene Two
leading you away and astray
a garden of unearthly delights
a pay-as-you-go travelogue into now.

Lily Cole

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Account Suspended

Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting.
          - Karl Wallenda

They went ahead with the auction
despite minor setbacks.
The overflow unloosed itself
and spread through the room.
All 210 lots sold
exceeding the market’s projection
displayed as PowerPoint
on the southwest wall.
The bidding affected a certain aplomb.
Blushes appeared randomly on guests
who in desperation
phoned home for legal counsel.
Reassured, the crowd spilled out
into curbside bistros,
maitre d’s making the most
of the moment, ignoring
the fray mired in streams
of pre-owned vehicles and landfills.
I tried to access a public Wi-Fi
but was left hanging, in mid-air.

Monday, May 16, 2011

No, That’s Not It

But since I have not forgotten my former inability to swim, my
ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all.
          - Franz Kafka

As if from within a camera obscura
as if through a damp lens
the image sliding down
threatening to disappear
to become something else
something unrecognizable
Kafka looks across an intersection
from a basement apartment.
A woman is leaving an emergency room.
She carries a basket.
The basket is filled with linens.
No, not linens, letters.
Yes, letters.
The basket is filled with letters.
She crosses the intersection
and gets into a car.

Franz Kafka has been engaged to Felice Bauer for five years.
Their relationship is carried out almost entirely by letters.
In the autumn of 1912, Kafka writes to Felice: "Lately I have
found to my amazement how intimately you have now become
associated with my writing, although until recently I believe
that the only time I did not think about you at all was while I
was writing.”

The woman drives to a lakeside cottage.
She enters the cottage.
A dock stretches out into the water.
The woman appears wearing a black
one-piece bathing suit.
A dog (hers?) runs onto the dock
and jumps into the water.
The dog paddles to a raft.
The woman jumps in
and joins the dog on the raft.
She dangles her feet.

“Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on
Sunday - for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable
of enduring them.”

Kafka forgets, for the moment,
his fear of water.
The dog’s ears perk
at the sound of a loon.
The woman looks in the direction
of the loon.
Kafka gathers up the woman’s clothes
and places them in a basket.

“What have I done that makes you torment me so? No letter
again today, neither by the first mail nor the second. You
do make me suffer! While one written word from you could
make me happy! . . .”

There is food and drink on a picnic table.
And several copies of a script.
One has Kafka’s name on it.
It contains only his lines, these lines:

It is not able.
The trees are some of them.
The white ones.
No, I don’t remember.
It wasn’t that.
I do know someone with that name.
It will rain.
Of course not.
Nothing like that.
I am talking.
No, I disagree.
What I said was this.
No, I will not agree to that.
I’ve told you already.
Please, let me explain.
Differences? Of course.
Yes, but doesn’t everyone?
This is ridiculous.
Of course not.
No, I will not agree.
But I will not wait indefinitely.
Somehow?
What is somehow?


“If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for
news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days. . . .”

Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka

Sunday, May 15, 2011

The Here of There

It was a throwaway,
I had to admit, that
unsettling feeling you get
as the bath water departs,
counterclockwise,
leaving you, toweled,
thinking about the final
scene in that film
whose title is slipping
away. Not only
the last segment
with its redemption,
but the full catastrophe,
highlighted
and underlined
for all to see.
I checked the backups
just to be sure.
There was little sense
in phoning ahead -
this has never worked,
at least for me.
So I reconfigured the setup
and began recoding
the moment,
flagging incidentals
which for whatever reason
over the years
had proved instructive
or at least instrumental
in some fairly innocuous way.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Next Best Thing

The bull in the pasture contemplates Kierkegaard's dilemma
worries life's truncations
pockets few regrets.
He too deserves to bring home the bacon.
He too deserves to be happy.
As happy as fledglings with water wings
testing the shallows
hoping for the next best thing.
An all expense-paid trip to anywhere awaits us,
Faure's gestures coloring the runway
giving runaways, buckling beneath carry-ons,
another chance.
How many times have we heard this story -
this tale told out of school by dropouts young and old
misled by home and hearth
yearning to work their way through blue Mondays
to express themselves in the express line?
There's enough distance here to turn the tide
to give us something to look forward to
with enough left over to feed the thousand redundancies
waiting patiently at the back door.
Another day trundles into view, sprinkling its inconsistencies
as we walk quickly past whistling Dixie
exchanging metaphors with a reasonably dressed anyone
hands tucked safely in trousers.
Surely you can think otherwise
but the next time you see a turnip at a farmer's market
examine it closely.
It could hold the answer to your world.


Friday, May 13, 2011

Melville's Sister

I'm talking with Melville's kid sister
a scrappy toehead
with eyes like deep water
who signed on for a tour of the high seas
with her brother
but ended up here
in New Bedford
pierced, inked, in mauve coveralls,
slathering mustard and meat sauce
on footlongs for hard hats
from a shiny aluminum vending cart.

She communicates with great whites in trees
tends a small garden of hooded flowers
whose petals hold charts of whale migrations
collects harpoons she uses as pokers.

She talks about her brother
writing a novel about a mad hunt
for a fearsome whale
in a room on the second floor
overlooking distant mountains
in a farmhouse
on 160 acres in the Berkshires
that he named Arrowhead
after the relics he dug up
with his plow.

Her eyes grow dark
as she mentions his demons
the locks on his writing-room
his pacing to escape the mind’s maelstrom
the ungodly boredom
his endless digressions
his obsession with privacy
that led him to destroy nearly all his letters
his dislike of photographers
(“to the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!”)
the so-called “failed” scribbling -
“The Whale” - too ambitious, too long, a leviathan
despite its marks of “unquestionable genius”
the accusation of madness
prompting his postscript “I ain't crazy.”

She chuckles as she tells me
how much her brother likes to watch
the farm animals eat,
especially taken by what he calls the “sanctity”
of the way the cow moves her jaws.

I too am taken, with this strange woman
whose costumes mimic the South Seas,
whose toenails match the color of noctilucent clouds
whose hands are music.

Off hours, she fulfills fantasies

her voice like billowing sails
guiding Ishmaels through narrow canals
spellbinding them
with the sounds of humpbacks
note for note
measure upon measure
before releasing them
drained yet sated
into the morning commute.


Thursday, May 12, 2011

The Liquidity of Precision

As elusive as rutabaga is the position
of locking the steering wheel
into the arc of a roundabout
and spending the day
going 'round and 'round
without care, without regret -
a potentially merry merry-go-round,
a spin cycle of spinners,
spinsters, spin doctors,
all spinning toward something or other
with the circularity
of a Shaker spinning wheel
or otherworldly enso
where the liquidity of precision
takes off the top of the head
like a line from Emily Dickinson,
transporting one
to a land whose inhabitants,
white-haired, bearded,
possibly bespectacled,
clothed in loose-fitting garments,
wax philosophic
on language's imprecision
with voices echoing the words
in the brown first philosophy text
sitting on the bottom shelf
where it was placed
a day or two after classes ended
some 40-odd years ago.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Searching for Bobby Fischer

Day 1

My friend's cat, Bobby Fischer, is missing.
He took off without leaving a note
without taking his food dish.
We're worried about the food dish.
It sits in the corner all day
twiddling its thumbs
thinking about Bobby Fischer.

Day 2

My friend and I hail a cab.
The cabbie misunderstands us.
He takes us to a Rotary meeting.
The final vote is being tallied
on whether or not to airlift a causeway.
The causeway is cause for concern.
Some Rotarians feel it's water under the bridge.
One Rotarian recalls seeing Bobby Fischer
walking along the causeway earlier in the week
seemingly preoccupied.

Day 3

The man at Kinko's has crooked teeth.
My guess is he knows something about Bobby Fischer.
He scans a recent photo of Bobby Fischer.
We attach it to a sheet of white paper.
We consider captioning it Desperately Seeking Bobby Fischer
but settle instead on Searching for Bobby Fischer.
The man with crooked teeth says he likes it.
He makes 110 copies but only charges us for 100.
He says he knows how we feel.
I don't trust him.

Day 4

We divide up the posters and plaster the neighborhood.
Several passersby comment on Bobby Fischer's good looks.
A few pocket posters as souvenirs.
One old man draws a mustache on Bobby Fischer.
We call the police.

Day 5

The message on my friend's answering machine is garbled.
Something about a round robin.

Day 6

Bobby Fischer has done this before
only to return a few days later
reeking of catnip and stale mates.

Day 7

Bobby Fischer calls.
He says he's been thinking about making a move.
He says he has enrolled in a method acting class.
He wants to throw himself wholeheartedly into something.
He wants to bring real life to the boards.
To forget himself.
To give his mind and body to a fictitious character.
My friend and I nod knowingly.
We hand the phone to Bobby Fischer's food dish.

Day 8

We bump into Bobby Fischer's acting coach in the library.
He's taking out a book on gambits.
He tells us that Bobby Fischer will be using
a little known gambit on opening night.
He's rather defensive for a Sicilian.
He gives us two tickets.
I don't trust him.

Day 9

Opening night.
We're packed in like sardines.
Bobby Fischer is loaded with greasepaint.
He plays a bishop who's sacrificed.
The klieg lights make him blink.

Day 10

The play receives rave reviews in the Post.

Day 11

Bobby Fischer calls.
He wants us to pick up extra copies of the Post.
He says the play is being made into a television miniseries
which will air during ratings week.
He says he has to go.
Oprah's limo is waiting.

Day 12

Bobby Fischer calls.
His voice is shaking.
He says the television producer, Boris Spassky,
decided to cut his part
in view of the current crisis in the Catholic Church.
He says Boris Spassky told him the Church
has enough problems right now.

Day 13

The doorbell rings.
It's Bobby Fischer.
He's back.
He smells of catnip.
His fur is matted with dried greasepaint.
His backpack is stuffed with dog-eared copies of the Post.
His food dish brims.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Eating an Elephant

You blink, and the rules change.
Or the game.
Or something.
And you find yourself in the middle of a field.
Or an alley.
Or a strange town.
Somewhere.
Anywhere.
And these tin soldiers appear
and begin marching through.
Single file.
As far back as you can see.
Wielding muskets with bayonets.
Metal on metal.
Loud.
In unison.
Quite impressive.
But they don't see you
because you're hiding behind a tree.
Or a dumpster.
Or whatever.
Then the sound changes
to rushing water.
And you're white-water rafting.
Flying along.
Waving to the people on shore.
A rush.
Your life jacket is riding up.
It's hard to open your mouth.
You're trying to say something to the people.
But you can't.
You can't open your mouth.
The guide is shouting to hang on.
You're soaking wet.
You look around at the others.
They've become cardboard cutouts.
The scene shifts.
You're in a front row.
A ballet.
A fidgety ballet.
Young ballerinas.
Gawky.
Sweet.
You try to read the program
but it's too dark.
Blackness.
The ballerinas appear overhead
suspended by wires.
Hundreds of them
in different colored tutus -
white
yellow
purple
red
black
even multi-colored
even tie-dyed
in different positions
arabesques
elevés
pliés
jetés
relevés.
A Frenchman is up there too.
The guy who walked
between the two towers
of the World Trade Center.
And Yo-Yo Ma
with his cello
and music stand
playing Bach's Sarabande
the same piece he played
while the names
of the victims of 9/11
were read aloud.
And then you're back in a lecture hall.
Stadium seating.
A PowerPoint.
Cyber Security.
And the expert is trotting out
that overused analogy
about eating an elephant
though his is a tad more palatable
because of the animation
which takes you back
to the hours
the days
you spent playing Pac-Man
in your quest
for some sort of digital grail.
Frighteningly informative.
At least that's what you penned
on the evaluation sheet
figuring What the hell,
I'll throw him a bone.

But it was.
Frighteningly informative.
Knowing that they're out there.
Armies of hackers
and crackers
pale-skinned
t-shirted
fueled on power drinks
wielding keyboards
instead of bayonets
breaking and entering
accessing your passwords
your letters
your numbers
your bank accounts
your credit cards
your secrets
your most hidden thoughts
your most hidden desires
with the ferocity of Vader
spurred
in many instances
by nothing more
than the knowledge
that it's there
out there
waiting to be plundered.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Mayonnaise Sandwiches

Patti ate tape. She carried around one of those red-and-green Scotch tape dispensers - the metal kind with the serrated edge - and every now and then would pop a piece into her mouth. I attributed her pale skin to that delicacy, and wondered how the tape was able to traverse the miles of intestine we had read about in Scholastic Science, the weekly newsheet Sister Edward made us subscribe to and read from every Thursday afternoon to break up the archaic lab experiments we, or rather she, demonstrated, flanked by Bunsen burners, pipettes, and crotchety nine-volt batteries, in a vain, nationwide knee-jerk to supplant Sputnik; the same Sister Edward, or Stir Edward, the truncation used when, leaning forward in the wood-and-wrought-iron desks bolted in tandem to the floor, we vied for our fifteen minutes of fame as we arced our propped-up hands 130 degrees in front of her great stone face to signify our readiness to regurgitate some trivium if called upon; the same Sister Edward, ornamented with half a dozen rubber bands on each wrist, who held a marksmanship medal for knuckle accuracy at three yards with a twelve-inch ruler, and who, like Merlin, kept, among other trinkets, a handkerchief up her sleeve. Patti may have been partial to tape, but my pièce de résistance was mayonnaise sandwiches, ideally accompanied on their journey to the center of the torso by a slug of Ovaltine, which, decades before the cyanide-laced Tylenol scare sent American companies scrambling for ingenious devices to outwit disgruntled, axe-grinding, former employees as well as garden-variety sick tickets, used a waxed paper seal that had to be broken to get to the brown crystals, and which, if sent with a fifty-cent piece taped to a square of cardboard to some storefront address in Battlecreek, Michigan, displayed at the end of Captain Midnight's Sunday morning black-and-white half hour, entitled the sender to one plastic decoder ring.

Captain Midnight

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Postcard from Giza

Recording the experience in our audio diary
reminds me of Kant -
head stuck in cloud

walking his puppy dog in the park every afternoon like clockwork:
too much time spent burning Tana leaves
playing board games with mysoginists

sipping lemonade from street vendors
whose labyrinthine robes promised hypnotic delights
from the second of seven levels at blowout prices.

Little wonder we were told our eyes would play tricks!
You recognize the brother I never had.
A street urchin panhandles a dog then a cat.

The afternoons peter out
despite repeated attempts by email to revitalize things:
bills interspersed with postcards

including one from Giza with pop-up pyramids
which resembles in some strange way
Dürer's Perspective Study of Recumbent Nude Woman.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Calling the Shots

The table-read went as well as expected
despite the second movement
which, I later learned, was what everyone had slogged
through the rainstorm to hear

especially the Johnnies-come-lately
who had taken up residence poolside
with coupons to the Lone Star Bistro
where buy-ones get-ones rule.

My testimony was based on pages 396 through 550.
I committed everything to memory
despite the standoffishness of the font
and became quite smug in my readiness.

The demands of the party of the first part
were submitted by a recent graduate of the School for Clowns
who had the judge and jurors in stitches
leaving me to call the nine-ball into the corner pocket.


Friday, May 6, 2011

You're Kidding, Right?

The whole of it of course
is cobbled together from memory -
yours and mine -
its place settings bronzed
and listed on eBay
with a blowout Buy It Now
prompting an EMT
to weigh in, followed
by a herd of multi-linguists
who in another life
were born-again bookmakers.
Most of us, however,
continue to live off the land,
feigning interest,
bellying up to the bar
in the final quarter
trying to second guess the meaning
of the hand-printed sign
hanging in the restroom
above the rightmost urinal.

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp

Thursday, May 5, 2011

I Can’t Imagine Why

Have you studied the online ads for getaways lately?
The welcome mats at neighborhood kiosks
impish in their cuffed-trouser weariness?

The snowshoed arbiters at the door, delusional yet endearing?
Think of their kids, their worrisome spouses,
their elderly mothers shortlisted for nursing homes.

The garbage scow wending its way slowly out to sea
blurts an ultimatum to landlubbers
whose wallets are hacked daily by newfangled come-alongs.

Yes, the laundry’s been folded
the library books have a day or two left
the cable continues to cajole.

Yet, there is little jollity here
she heard him say as he drove out of sight
reminding her of seventh period Latin class

and the togas hidden away, mothballed and shrink-wrapped.
A suffragette’s stem-winder is tossed into the ring for six figures.
Nostalgia of that ilk does little for the wobbly tram

does nothing for the bolts of lightning stacked in warehouses
awaiting the green light from the comic-strippers
tooling around town in monster trucks with a picnic lunch to boot.



Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Unlike the Biplane

You've built memorials to broadcast your credentials
laying the corners of obelisks with plumb lines
that mimic the sun's rays and the innocence of clouds.
But in other more fabled cities

the townspeople speak of miracles -
silent films with subtitled clues to headstone rubbings.
These have been collected in a book
with line drawings and brilliant endpapers -

the book that is now being auctioned off
in a red room filled with empty seats.
You've waited here in the wings with your bid
and now the endgame approaches.

It has several stops to make before it arrives
to take on more passengers
unlike the biplane that made an emergency landing
here in your cornfield a few days ago.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

With Apparent Theatricality

Keep your eyes on the specials, our waitress warned
reducing us to watercress, leaving us wet and wilted

eager to commiserate with culverts in one-horse towns up-river,
Guernseys supplanting gumshoes deployed to quell the babblers

who had thrown caution to the wind,
threatening to bury the village in an avalanche of aphorisms.

The close call mid-flight left everyone tight-lipped,
even the reformed ventriloquist whose lines atrophied.

Perhaps it's time to re-examine the scaffolding for loopholes?
Didn't the Times report a shortage of Hollandaise sauce

in its profile of that fortune-teller-cum-salad-chef
blurbing her unwritten memoir with balsamic insouciance?

The old nag gave up the ghost in the final furlong,
said Susan, that tiny twit, in the next-to-the-last-episode

which landed at her feet in a snowstorm
prompting her to spill her guts

to a rather plain-looking counterman dressed to the nines in plaid.
They reportedly retired to Sin City.

Monday, May 2, 2011

The Consolation of Slanted Rays

My workaday blog morphs unceremoniously
ejaculating delight-speak with blurbs
stripped from grains of rice
by interns who happen along.
Newhires arrive on the heels of spring.
They peek behind the curtain
despite admonitions
and find me borrowing a rototiller
from my neighbor
a former munchies poster child
who now moonlights as an FBI informant.
He wears a flowered codpiece.
His standard poodle jerks me around the block
leaving me stranded mid-sentence.
Someone will surely stumble upon
the brevity of my short story
releasing the codex of my dreams.
I worry unannounced departures.
Letters of rejection lie unopened on my table.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

To a Locomotive on the March

It's like a locomotive on the march.
          - Frank O'Hara

Sometimes in the middle of the night
its whistle awakens me
and for whatever reason I scramble to check my bearings
arm wrestling with an uncooperative compass.

In those moments, the roundhouse looms:
my father in blue workshirt
chatting with the engineer and fireman
faces blackened from the road.

At four, I stood in the cab near the firebox
waiting for the conductor's lantern
sparks flying from the smokestack
steam spewing from heaving pistons.

I've made notes of those memories
which stretch out for miles
scribbling them late at night
after the others have retired

pensioned and peaceful.
But somehow I've misplaced my marble composition tablet
along with other wash-and-wear items
mail-ordered in anticipation.

O. Winston Link