And someone told me Samuel Beckett farmed
Very few poets are real farmers
If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too,
Why not a poet who was also a farmer
Of course there was Brook Farm
And Virgil raised bees
Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of farmers
I guess poets tend to live more momentarily
Than life on a farm would allow
You could never leave the farm to give a reading
Or go to a lecture by emerson in Concord
I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right
I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat
Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve
That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes
Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing
Or on as little as one needs to survive
Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars
Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly
Carlton Fisk Is My Ideal
He wears a beautiful necklace
next to the beautiful skin of his neck
unlike the Worthington butcher
Bradford T. Fisk (butchers always
have a crush on me), who cannot even order veal
except in whole legs of it.
Oh the legs of a catcher!
Catchers squat in a posture
that is of course inward denying orgasm
but Carlton Fisk, I could
model a whole attitude to spring
on him. And he is a leaper!
Like Walt Frazier or, better,
like the only white leaper,
I forget his name, in the ABA’s
All-Star game half-time slam-dunk contest
this year. I think about Carlton Fisk in his
modest home in New Hampshire
all the time, I love the sound of his name
denying orgasm. Carlton & I
look out the window at spring’s first
northeaster. He carries a big hero
across the porch of his home to me.
(He has no year-round Xmas tree
like Clifford Ray who handles the ball
like a banana). We eat & watch the storm
batter the buds balking on the trees
& cover the green of the grass
that my sister thinks is new grass.
It’s last year’s grass still!
And still there is no spring training
as I write this, March 16, 1976,
the year of the blizzard that sealed our love
up in a great mound of orgasmic earth.
The pitcher’s mound is the lightning mound.
Pudge will see fastballs in the wind,
his mescaline arm extends to the field.
He wears his necklace.
He catches the ball in his teeth!
Balls fall with a neat thunk
in the upholstery of the leather glove he puts on
to caress me, as told to, in the off-season.
All of a sudden he leaps from the couch,
a real ball has come thru the window
& is heading for the penguins on his sweater,
one of whom has lost his balloon
which is floating up into the sky!
The End of Human Reign
on Bashan Hill
They come down on their snowmobiles for the last time,
come down to meet the car.
They’re shouting, “Hoo Hey! The snow! Give them the snow!
Let them eat snow! Hey! The snow!”
Looking like wild men & women, two wild children & a
grandmother too, they’re taking turns riding the
snowmobile, they’re getting out.
Hoo! Hey! The snow! freaking out.
Everybody in town watches, standing in groups by the
“Road Closed” sign.
Shouting back, “Take it easy! The snow!”
On Bashan Hill they’d lived in a cloud, watched. They’d had
plenty of split peas, corn, Irish soda bread, fruitcake,
chocolate, pemmican. But the main thing was—NO PLOW!
Day before at the Corners Grocery, news got around. “They’re
coming down from Bashan Hill—never to return!”
The snow!
Hey, the snow, you forget. They’re coming to get a beer.
Have another beer, smoke, jerk off & be thankful.
They’re moving to a place above the store, where they can be
watched. The snowman’ll come & watch them, the pie man’ll
come & watch them, the UPS man’ll come & watch them, the
oil man, the gas man’ll watch them, the plow man’ll watch
them, the workers on the town roads
Sink their shovels deep into the winter’s accumulation right
before their very eyes, eyes turned blue in the
Arctic night.
The brown-eyed family from Bashan Hill in town for a
postage stamp.
The black-eyed family of deer, the open-eyed rabbits, the
circle-eyed raccoons, the white-eyed bear.
Where do the green frogs winter that look so old?
We watched so carefully our eyes became vacant, our minds
stirred from laughter all the memories of a chant.
Hoo! Hey! The snow!
They’ve come down the hill we watch in a cloud, night of the
full moon, icy crowd on the road watching them.
Have a piece of chocolate!
Open your eyes!
What Babies Really Do
Light like the life I’m in
Who said that did you say that did I
Eating doesnt go with prose
or poetry, spaghetti maybe
Out a window cool spring gray day
with only tips of trees in buds
The ground’s not wet yet
Something leaps & bounds
Mothers always too specific
Ounces of pounds, silver on silver
I wouldnt actually eat a clam with a spoon
It’s too rubbery
Often when I’m happy a fear comes over me—
not fear that the joy will end, but fear that circumstances
beyond my control and unexpected will arise to prevent me
from ever feeling joy again
We’ll get dresses from Boston
like the elation of a sealed fruit
pure banana with the elation
of the afternoon in its skin
Rheingold kasha scotch kooler
I let endless thoughts go by in between
like the rice that looks like a belly
I dont have my own voice
So I quickly end the pleasure
of the first gray day that was truly
brown in the air, many trees
have snapped in half this winter
One big maple threatens the house
with its leaking bark, a crack
right down the side of an arm of it
We agree it’ll fall but in what direction
Rice beads rutted road too many things
in my ideas, I like The New Yorker
where the poems have no ideas
I like the gray sappy maples losing their branches over me
The brown road’s ok, smell of bananas
Birds are good, you live inside them
We found your slip you should see my view
You forgot to remind me not to have another beer
It’s an endless afternoon, it refuses to rain
I fill up my mouth with Dashiell-Hammett-type smoke
It refuses to be consistent
As there are ingredients all over
& more branches, chair legs
& more flour, I sit with the
food
Tuna tempter kasha varnishkas
A hundred and one fillets
Not just brown bread
but brown bread with raisins
You order more than five lbs of oranges
I carry a crate in the back of my jeep or keep
Sunflower kernels to replace the sight of one
Life like it is
The gray branches wont move
unless wind blows them
She’s in motion as usual to the tune
It’s a luxury to stay inside
I havent finished
singing outloud
Listen, gaggle gaggle
broo ah ha ha
thoughts unravel
run after her
The sun won the edge of the wind is cold two three
Nothing much but poetry
Ah ha I hear
Instability (Weather)
I would eat a lilac if it were a violet
Forcing the unstable air which is swirling around us
In the northeast to thunder & lightning
This air clears itself of clouds at night
We get the lilacs but have to abandon the rhubarb
To the new tenants, a few donkies & a goat
We get the first few mustard plants & some apple blossoms
We get the coldest air of the last frost, the birds
arent even chirping properly
I must get back to the lilacs
So excited when I saw them first blooming in the back
next to the apple tree
I nearly jumped for joy my heart beats rapidly
Because they are late & we are moving
Blossoms for Lewis & Charlotte who’s here
The lilacs were so far away I didnt get to them
But I wont tell, I’ll go with a scissor tomorrow
The scissor I’ll hide in the woods tonight
For some strange reason I’ll never say
I’ll never have lived a more exciting day
Very Strong February
A man and a woman pretend to be white ice
Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm
With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines
One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch
The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain
Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know
You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February
A week or two left on distracting black trees
Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again.
Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman
Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the chair
Or part of the sum of what big white families think up
To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological company.
At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget
To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm anyway
Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory
In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can
Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce
Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow.
This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it
Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is actually
In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound
Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet
Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said something yesterday
To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and white tomorrow
Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses
Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall tonight.
from Midwinter Day, Part Four
The Three Little Pigs. Three pigs who have hair on their chins are too poor to continue to live with their mother, they must support themselves. Two of them get eaten by the wolf because they build their houses out of flimsy materials. The third pig who has a brick house which he got by posing as a cripple, winds up boiling the wolf alive and eating him. Admiral Byrd was the first person to spend the winter alone at the South Pole. For a while he did well and wrote a lot of speculations on the nature of the universe, then the stove in his hut began to poison him with fumes. He would collapse all the time and he had to force himself to eat, he kept the heat on only enough to survive and as the winter got colder, ice began to cover the walls, ceiling and even the floor. He told his men nothing was wrong but his messages in code reached them as indecipherable gibberish half the time, so they made a trip in the dark to rescue him.
Marie’s asleep. Sekhmet the wife of Ptah said, “When I slay men my heart rejoices.” Depicted with the head of a lioness, she was so brutal and unrelenting that to save the human race from extermination Ra spread across the bloody battlefield seven thousand jugs of a magic potion made of beer and pomegranate juice. Sekhmet who was thirsty mistook it for human blood and became too drunk to continue slaughtering men. The human race was saved but to appease Sekhmet, Ra decreed that on the twelfth day of the first month of winter, there should be brewed in her honor as many jugs of the philter as there were priestesses of the sun. “Hostile hostile is the 12th,” says the calendar of lucky and unlucky days, “avoid seeing a mouse on this day, for it is the day when Ra gave the order to Sekhmet.”
Popped-out-of-the-Fire: A girl lived there (with her brother and grandfather). Though the girl slept alone every night some person came to sleep with her. The person who came to sleep with her never spoke. He came to her there a long time. And then the girl became pregnant. She did not say anything of it, she was afraid to. Now this is what she thought. “I will paint my hand. That is the way I will find out who it may be.” Indeed that is what she did. And then (in the night) she hugged him, she put her hand on his back. Now the people (men) were going to come out of the sweat house where they were sleeping. And so she watched in secret, and then all those people (men) came out. Indeed now she learned it was her own older brother who was sleeping with her. Then the girl became sick (from shame and grief she no longer ate, and then she died), and he also died, he starved himself (in his shame and grief), and that is why he died too. When she died her father laid her upon the fire. And he held an Indian blanket and the old man spoke thus, “Pop out on to this here!” Sure enough the baby popped out (from her scorching corpse). Now its grandfather brought it up.
Septimius Felton was a character of Hawthorne’s who tried to create the elixir of life from some old Indian recipes of his aunt’s and the secret information given to him by a soldier he shot during the Revolutionary War. On the soldier’s grave a red flower grew, it was supposed to have been the last ingredient, sanguinaria sanguinaris, bloodroot, growing from the heart of a young man violently killed. But the flower was a hoax planted by the Englishman’s lover who seduced Septimius and helped him make the potion which was now a deadly poison, then she drank it, confessed all and died. Then Hawthorne intimates that Septimius who loved knowledge too much inherited the English soldier’s estate and became a boring landowner whose descendants had dull and lifeless eyes.
Joshua the son of Nun sent men to Jericho to spy for him. They went to the house of a harlot named Rahab. She hid them from the king because she said she knew the Lord had given them the land and had dried up the water of the Red Sea for them. In exchange for her help they agreed to spare her and her family from annihilation if she would hang a scarlet thread from her window.
I steal from the bed not to waken Marie. She’s happy to sleep but will wake up angry. Sophia will wake up feeling good unless she’s cold. In the morning if the sun shines which now it hardly ever does, Sophia gestures with
grace towards the eastern window in her room. I set fire to the end of a cigarette and look out the kitchen window at the mess of ice on the trees, streets and roofs. No geese flying south, it’s the awful solstice. This morning the axis of the earth began what the papers called its slow tilting return, the sun will last one minute longer and the nights will be shorter. Lately when the sun sets it breaks through the hat of cloud on the sky like a person on the street who only glances at you, and then it begins to snow. The sun catches your eye.
A calm sentence like a story. I used to know a man who had a dog and I followed their steps in the snow, I got into the habit of walking just as far as they did every day. At the same time I also knew a woman whose husband had seven guns. I used to know a woman who’s the woman who married Neil Simon. I like the woman who used to work in the Lenox market, she never wears boots, then she retired. In New England the women are often more exciting than the men, Lewis thinks so too, I don’t know why. There’s a tribe somewhere where people say about the men, look how he’s changed since he’s had children, he looks awful!
The soldiers came to relinquish and not fortify the wall and a meal was made of fish from the brazen sea and wine in vessels of brass and of every day that remained its work required that the day be a woman and that the woman be pretending to be another woman, that anger is the father and anger is the child, death is food to remember history to tell, a big fat man with a white beard in a red suit who eats what we eat and is never cold even though he flies around the world in only air, dear mother, the church is still cold.
* * *
The language into which we put the order of stories from this kind of memory is a mesmerization of sins like the ones I made up which were my first stories because when I still had reason to confess I was free of even the venality of my tales, though told with love, and I could imagine coming up with enough lack of perfection to commit them or even obsessively put them in writing like a letter to a judge when I’m in prison, rather than just to speak them to one man who was a story in himself of a kind of outfit of supposed love which could turn to enmity or even lechery out of love, another love, in a minute, a story of the moment of the mystical body and cannibalistic frenzy laced with fierce and beautiful singing of songs in loud strong weak guilty and innocent voices below the organ tagging along behind the desire for a fantastic transforming love of what is beauty or ritual’s idolatry of mystery among our historical family, all present in the church, though late, to tell us what to do next and how to have the pride to proceed.