I Will Go On Eating Oranges, I Said

I will go on eating oranges, I said,
I will collect shards of tires on the highways,
I will stanch running noses,
I will collect desolate socks,
I will survey the vistas of littered floors
And hills,
Comprehensively, as though I had forgotten the flute,
The gaming parlor, the ululations,
The sharp sparkle of the pre-dawn wind.

I Wondered Why You Were Breaking My Flowerpots

I wondered why you were breaking my flowerpots.
But then you knew, didn’t you
(Even if you didn’t know that you knew),
That I hid my soul there,
That our family had stored its gold and silver there,
That there the constellations hid during the day,
That God Himself hid there.
It wasn’t just me you came to destroy,
For if you destroyed these flowerpots
You could crow naked on the top of the burly hills
And watch mountains of cities slip into the sea,
And your spirit would be freed
To march down the boulevards with squadrons of soldiers,
To requisition mansions without pay,
To dance with the Swiss ambassador’s wife,
To throw back your head and hoot at the moon.
But first you must break the city of stone,
First you must seed these hills with blood,
First you must fill the coastal towns with the winding smoke
Of weariness and decay,
So that the eyes of its pedestrians will not rise from the sidewalk
As your motorcade speeds resplendently by
Taking you to dance naked in your hotel room
And sleep with the corrugated idol
Whose thin loins sing
The odor of the grave.

Suddenly It is Like That

Suddenly it is like that.
You are pulling your feet out of the long, sticky brown mud,
And you will no longer compromise.
But it is only you against a bulldozer,
And the wind and the stars are thin.

Go to the caves in the valley, shake the elders in their casques.
You need more than echoes in the dark.
You need more than youths spilling across valley floors.
You need the strength of mountains,
The bulldozers must stand with gaping mouths.
You must overwhelm them utterly,
Not with your spirit but with your flesh.

You must make your home in the streets,
You must love the mortar and the asphalt,
Or you will be praying in the corner of your home
When you are carted out with the rubble
And the winding smoke of powdered stone blinds your eyes white.

I Will Stop at Nothing

I will stop at Nothing.
You stop at Nothing too
(Robert Frost’s horse did.)
And there in the shapes of darkness,
The huge bent back of the silent slouching beast
Obscures the sight of the stars.
The air rushes up in a trice
Like a paper dancer in the flame,
And you stand like the tin soldier on one leg.

And manifold chambers open like a bright and airy origami.
At your feet the scrub whispers and murmurs,
Small nocturnal creatures.
Your nictitating membrane pops up, and
The dove of your spirit flies up on a gust of words
That are daylight,
That are a fountain of sparks,
That are a clapping of hands,
That are the night sky and its stone stars
And the marvelous humped silent huge back
Of the leviathan.

The Day Rose

The day rose.
The night flowered.
Bakeries were open till dawn,
Pregnant women glided through the streets,
Ships upon the horizon glinted blue, yellow,
At small café tables women pecked at keyboards,
Sleek seals breached the freezing seas,
Eyes gazed upon the beach.
They were incandescent bulbs,
They were tulips,
They were ancient countenances,
They were beyond number.
Mountains floated in their field of vision,
Mountains and declamations.

There is a Messiah Without God

There is a messiah without a God.
We have seen him visiting our beaches,
He commanded the waves and tar infested the sand.
He commanded the heavens
And missiles rained like stars.
He thundered at the mountain
But his voice rattled like the crinkling of a newspaper.
We turned the page, we snoozed,
Our chin bobbed upon our chest
And the air turned red and sullen.

The Rain Falls

The rain falls.
Its pebbles skate along the street.
Its white horses rear up,
Its red petals stream along the curb,
We are all in its cold, wet throat,
Lugging our book bags
In a newly painted morning.

Wrinkled clothes
Lie across the living room floor,
Also playing cards,
Also a camel stands at the window,
Watch out, he’s got a nasty temper.

Once, in heaven, I sat down on the park bench to rest,
The boats sailed across the pond,
That sailed upon the clouds,
That twisted into vertiginous distances,
Twisted strands of the Milky Way,

The wet nose of the wind
Vibrated, then, the larynx
Of the air,
The staircase rose
And the orange blossoms.

A Diadem of Mountains

I gave you silken rivers, rivulets of stars,
But you need a diadem of mountains.
You demand rocky terrain,
Brambles, peaks and horizons.

You seek a vertiginous dirt path,
A swinging rope bridge,
You need to hear the snow tiger
Growling outside your cabin upon the vast snow plains.

You require a troupe of men
Who will carry your bier into thick, uncharted jungles,
Where you will snap your fingers and bark out orders
In a strange, uncouth tongue
And dance your songs of triumph.

You must master the wisdom of the sailing ship
And set out into bronze mornings.
You must call out new islands and discover distant planets
From an uncharted tropical sea,
Where your loveliness is legendary amidst the island peoples.

Fierce, celebrated, all-powerful,
You must arrange great ceremonies
To which even giants will stride, from across the long, shadowed hills,
To pay you homage.

Rivulets of Stars

I threw out the baby with the bath water.
I was tired of drinking bath water.
And who needs babies anyway?

Move over.
We both need to sleep,
To snore away our lives.
Of course it gets quite crowded in this bed.
I keep having to kick away guitars, old sandwiches.
I find that friend’s doorbells are digging into my back.
I curl around bassoons and double basses
So that in the morning, in the warm, body-scented sheets
I have an enormous crick in my neck.

There is so much to discover in the world—
Everywhere I have dropped crumbs of meaning.
I have left drops of my soul with so many people
And barged into the house wielding an empty wheel barrow.

I came home one evening with a packet of stars
But they all melted into a puddle when I opened the sack.

Really, when stones are rolled onto the mouths of wells,
What good are stars?
What good is light when there is no water?
And water, water shines like rivulets of stars.

Listen! Cries the Ocean

Listen! cries the ocean.
So listen.
The whole night it roars like a freight train,
It rises up and sizzles against the seawall.
For an hour you can be the ocean,
And contain within yourself swift color-shifting squid
And long trees of frond-waving kelp
Amidst which the fish wind their swift glissando bodies.
In the north your waves can rise and fall like mountains.
You can lie beneath the black night sky, covered by the sheet of ice and sleep
And at the same time glaze beneath a sun hot as yellow pepper,
You can swing back and forth drawn by your desire for the moon,
The fog can cover you for hundreds of miles
And conceal your cold thoughts.
You can have no thoughts,
You can be a shapeless god who does not live
But moves with the majesty of life.

Inside Your Blood Cells

Inside your blood cells children are talking to each other.
They race through the tunnels of your limbs.
They are so busy chatting that they do not notice
Whether they are in your toes or in your aorta.
That is as it should be.

I blanked out this morning
And found myself in a dream.
And it wasn’t about the past
But it wasn’t about the future either.
I had fallen into a computer
And was watching as it chatted to itself
And I woke up with a sense of wonder.

I woke up to find
Playing-cards arrayed in rows
Across the chairs and the floor,
And they marched across my eyes,
And everyone else was sleeping.

The Little Highways

The little highways of anger riddle your heart,
Mercury globules spill through the tunnels.
In a crowded restaurant you find it difficult to swallow,
You are eating your children alive.
The calendar on the wall is tattered,
The things you have to do
You should have done long ago.
Solid as iron are the molecules of oxygen
That spin before your eyes.
The road you walk upon
Of soft dark red
Extends darkly forward,
And the walls of the corridor pulse solemnly
As you walk to a small bright room
Where you will be allowed to meet your children
Again.

Frothy Mold

Frothy mold was growing along the inside of my scalp.
It was used to going where it didn’t belong—
On worn stairs or tables where elbows had rested without fail
Or in the wrinkles in long-used books.
How do you know, for instance, right now,
That mold has not engulfed your car,
Your children, or your wife?
I ran wildly through the health food store,
Wildly leaving marks of my choppers
In the organic fruits, the raw oats, the flasks of goat milk.

Brass Tacks

There were brass tacks all over the floor
And brass words whizzing through the air
And the rush of the wind, or rocks, or what-have-you.
There was yesterday and there was tomorrow.
There was the rain that had been swallowed into the night
And left behind puddles in the street
Like the streaks of a giant snail.
There was love and there was breakfast.

Random House

I was arranging my words
So that I could send them to Random House.
What a mistake!
There secretaries were flying out of the walls,
Abandoned IBM Selectric typewriters occasionally belched up
From the industrial carpet on the floor,
Colored salmon, charcoal gray, chartreuse,
The view outside the window shook, took off its clothes,
Put on some hard-edged skyscrapers, wiggled its sun,
Threw up a screen of clouds, of confused flamingos,
Of executives with hard-pack Pall Malls in their breast pockets.
It was all pell mell,
It was all going to hell,
Downstairs a bell cracked,
Freedom spilled out like shiny foil wrapped candies,
The hard kind with the soft taffy at the center.
My manila envelope spilled open, my words snaked across the corridor,
Past the water cooler,
Where a rhinoceros stood, shaking his heavy jaw.
I walked into the boardroom,
Where cab drivers, housewives, fast food deliverers, architectural students
And a variety of idealists
Were gazing into crooked mirrors, baring their teeth at each other.
Words were ejaculated, and small, misshapen moles scurried across the offices,
Blindly seeking the elevators, where they might descend to the basement
And find the cool tranquility of darkness.
Everyone was there in Random House,
And so I pressed into a crowded, noisy room
And held my manila envelope close to my breast
And watched the small black letters clamber out
And hurry to the morris dance.