Poetry

I. Happy we when our footnote tells us “Hercules was a legendary hero of ancient Greece.” I had supposed him Lord of the Admiralty President of IBM the Man Who Made the Bomb latest sensation in the rock constellation a Dior creation a Mafia bum. II. Happy the college kid who can read clonked on…

The quest for winter sunshine washes The gasping survivor up on the shore Much that’s done isn’t meant Much that’s meant isn’t done I take it up & at the beck & call Of some remote agency I stick it in & when it’s over I pull it out again Like the bloody assegai of…

     she came. i went. i walked. i saw. she sang. she spat. i came.      she ran. she spoke. i climbed. she left. i bloomed.      i walked. she ran. i laughed. she cried. she played. i woke. she      groaned. i sang. she gasped. i shrieked. she yelped. i barked. she growled.      i moved. she sat. she…

There’s nothing gentle where Aphrodite was. Empty mountain and grasshoppers banging into me. Maybe there never was. But I go up again and again to search under thorn bushes and rocks. Am grateful for the marble upper arm big as my thumb. A shard with a man’s feet and a shard with the feet of…

a rat swam toward me in my hot tub I shut my eyes and took my b.p. by bio-feedback & outside I heard the random snarling of the packs

June 1976      I had an argument five summers ago, with Mary Kisataose. We argued in her village, which was a day’s walk. This argument . . . it was about a bee. What happened was this. We were sitting with children, at a table of hers. She had a jar of jam from the Hudson…

It is cold this evening. One of the first cold evenings of autumn. I have your shirt over my own. I am not hungry. I am starving. And I look for the laws of all this. I write down a new name, Cyrene, beloved of Apollo. To look up. To learn about it before spring….

This part of the country is definitely a corner pocket when it comes to word music. For instance although he’s got a tin ear over there under the palm trees and Nazi architecture of Cal Tech the only poet/editor in SoCal who can fit an entire cantaloupe in his mouth without opening his lips is…

* 1.      First thing to know is, I’d never seen a cello until then, and haven’t since. I didn’t know what to call it. Someone named it cello for me. One day this man appears with it. It was Tiúk. He’d been known to live under rocks. Every so often he arrived with a wood…