Struggle Itself

for Diane di Prima

                          Just that piece
     of the poem you could hear

     the groundswell,
     and written in such a way, numbered

            left in-tact 
            on the back 
            of a flat-bed truck

                                           amplified
                                  taking up
                   space 
                   in offering out

                   strategy with every form
                                       of art 

                   stacking the trucks
                   and sending them out…

new music/new poetry

                    Survival—courting the elements
(Divination) to be reliably great, what is clearly my job
the impulsive unending twist
in hell, groundswells

            sounds of film spinning on an old reel
sweeping up,
                     glyph like tracks
                     on a white page (reproduced)

                     Phones held close
                                  against the light
                                  deranged pleas
                                  hopeful songs
                                  gospel noble truths

Poems that we hold
                               beyond our bodies, a joy
                               we can keep ringing at eternities fold
 melted in the hot brick

                                     or crucible
                                     as Audre Lorde would have it

   that longest arc in the edges
          before they join

Speedway

I cut out the "Heart with Snowflake"
Myself but it is not mine, Forget
This bloody coat bloody shirt, I
Think it is the writing that makes
Me sick, The scores and scores of
Incidental music, this nosebleed all
Spring all wet, I'm positively angry
with the Impertinence of it! I'm
Sewing up the kinks in this film, I'm
Trying to! I'm trying to burn a light
Between, There's a light and I cable
my voice on it but it rips when I trace
Anything! WORKS ON PAPER, THE SHIP
OF DEATH "Oh build it!" Sings the 
Heart, "My coat would be so bloodied
I could wiggle out of my coat!"


                         – for John Wieners 

Panels for the Walls

Leave the long fall between us (peak after peak)
Here were my paints and there were my powders
And then I was drunk and we lost each other
My shadow tumbled after
Soaking cinnamon leaves in the lake of the moon
The roll of the damned drum calls me to duty
The dice in the light of the lamp
I hear a stone gong
I lean full weight on my slender staff
Yellow leaves shaken and petals confused to my garden
The hard road is written to music
How lovely locks, in bright mirrors, in high chambers
The moon shows further a gold and silver terrace
The northern grass is blue as jade
(A dream) venting in the pit of heaven

 

About this poem:
"In 2012 I was invited by the artist Chris Duncan to take part in a reading to celebrate the opening of an exhibition entitled Horizon. I decided to write a poem on that theme using shades of Chinese poetry from the T'ang Dynasty (618-906). The title is an homage to Kenneth Patchen after his 1946 volume, Panels for the Walls of Heaven."

Cedar Sigo

Green Rainbow Song

Hung up on
my hearing
and deep in whose
playbook
one too many
nights and never
a black-out
Doing the best
I can, only a man
It hurts me too
Blues in the night
Verlaine Blues
sitting here thinking
a blues for Anne
(all nerves)
and mine
the most dirty
unhurried
afternoon jags
A freshly penned
lyric for sinking
to autumnal
atlantean shade
I wish us more luck
I wish my little
tiger lily sheltered
in a clear crystal
box (being carried)
Green pearl-handled
mallets edging
the annunciation
toward a new burn
The chamber of maiden
thought is metered
Big fields
villagers, stars
on the back-lot blues
it’s the smoke spot
I shade softest
a curve so tight
its really blind
the chamber gives
way to the word
in this case (mine)

Related Poems

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [When James Baldwin & Audre Lorde each lend]

When James Baldwin & Audre Lorde each lend
Stevie Wonder an eyeball, he immediately contends
With gravity, falling either to his knees or flat on
His luminous face. I’ve heard several versions
Of the story. In this one Audre Lorde dons
Immaculate French loafers, turtlenecked ballgown,
And afro halo. An eye-sized ruby glimmers on
A pinky ring that’s a hair too big for Jimmy Baldwin’s
Pinky. He’s blue with beauty. They’re accustomed
To being followed, but now, the eye-patch twins
Will be especially scary to white people. Looking upon
Them, Wonder’s head purples with plural visions
Of blackness, gavels, grapples, purrs, pens. Ten to one
Odds God also prefers to be referred to as They & Them.

Ode to the Whitman Line “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd”

I cannot consider scent without you, I cannot
think that color so gay, so Japanese, so vernal 
without you; not assassination or any death in any spring. I think of you
and I am man-and-woman, flawed as a Lincoln,
welcoming as a window-box, and so tenderly alliterative as to draw one near—
at times, perhaps, to withdraw from all—yes,
without you I am without pulse in that dooryard, that blooming unfurling

so tell me finally, is last as in the last time or to make something last
—to hold, to hold you, to memorize fast—

Thinking of Frost

I thought by now my reverence would have waned,
matured to the tempered silence of the bookish or revealed
how blasé I’ve grown with age, but the unrestrained
joy I feel when a black skein of geese voyages like a dropped
string from God, slowly shifting and soaring, when the decayed
apples of an orchard amass beneath its trees like Eve’s
first party, when driving and the road Vanna-Whites its crops
of corn whose stalks will soon give way to a harvester’s blade
and turn the land to a man’s unruly face, makes me believe
I will never soothe the pagan in me, nor exhibit the propriety
of the polite. After a few moons, I’m loud this time of year,
unseemly as a chevron of honking. I’m fire in the leaves,
obstreperous as a New England farmer. I see fear
in the eyes of his children. They walk home from school,
as evening falls like an advancing trickle of bats, the sky
pungent as bounty in chimney smoke. I read the scowl
below the smiles of parents at my son’s soccer game, their agitation,
the figure of wind yellow leaves make of quaking aspens.