SNOWBOUND CIRCUS (East Europe)

Colored wagons
disappeared last night:
we wake to find the wagons white,
all hung by purple stove-smoke from the sky.
We wake to see the country circus snowbound
in distant mountains marching out of sight.

Village spires
and bells alone escaped the snow:
a single crow limps toward the sun;
the golden unicorn is driven to its knees by silence,
or sleeps, in the childless, snowdrift carousel.

Knelling dusk,
the distant bells swing slowly, solemn, black;
they drink the lucid air in silent gulps,
yet soon reverberate
beyond the frozen fountain in the square
to shake the hills
where goats are bunched
against the bite of winter.

Steeples
and stovesmoke alone
crease the cold dominion of the crow:
the golden horn sinks to the ground;
a slamming door, a child's call resound
and twist away inside the wind,
as sunlight rusts upon the snow.

-1955 (the editor)


IDES OF SPRING

God, what a day!
Makes you just want to sit around
and gloat.

Red cows in the pasture, sagging barns.

Girls in the city
with windy hems and ankles bare;
gazooms!--thank God the coats are off!

Peanuts in the park. And squirrels humping.  Sure.
And dandelions crowding sidewalk cracks.

God, what a day!
I start the engine
and click off the safety
as Fondella rounds the corner,
grinning over his last cigar like Sunday morning.

-1957


ZEN LESSON

i wait
learning to wait
to learn waiting;
practicing neophyte
watching my empty rice bowl
waiting for something to appear
in its sheltering emptiness

food forgotteen,
absence clings;
cricket-chirring shadows,
slipping silver chain
grinning ratchet sound

image does not form
no idea drifts into focus
answer remains
beyond

message seems:
no message
only waiting
learning to
until end
until
finally

-1953


TO MY FRIEND EISENTRAGER

Your calling card read: "Gone. Address Unknown".
Tongues wagged when you hit town again,
always slogging back from some fantastic travel,
staggering under your wanderer's pack and myth.

What kind of hunger drove you on and on?
We never knew.
Your image, slumped and sacked of stories,
wakened urges in us to be up with you, away and gone.
Those glittering bourbon eyes!
Those tin-cup coffee tales!
Our knotty old Scheherazade foaming after sequels.

My fingers buried in some duty book,
I saw your fleeing image, the dark-captured sack,
grow as it diminished into the night alone.
Envious Mette broke into a fit one night
and stabbed your picture in the face,
so much your absent eyes harassed her.

I marched in place, let's say, staying put
in smaller circles,
but I roamed with you, really:
I saw you loping the demon roads, old coyote,
driven on by the dark roadside borders;
I saw you pause where crones stewed limp iguana,
where farmers pulled damp cheeses from manure mounds
and clicked gold teeth and spat lime.

I saw you founder among hungry women
who pressed figs in your eyes,
festooned your dusty loins with flowers, chilies,
garnished up the prodigal feast, come home.
I saw you stagger at the city gates,
where wizened kids ate octane fire.

Queued up at the wicket, watching black-flies
crawl over marble toes of peons in a bloody sun,
I saw you wait too, patient as a lizard.

Hands turned up empty under a green eye-shade,
a civil servant smiles and shrugs:
A great sadness. Too bad, senor.
There is not enough hunger to go around.

Oh, it rains all the time here, my friend.

-1956 (Brunonia)


CITY STREETSWEEPER

He rises up to scrub her concrete spine,
a king at clucking sounds of breakfast:
His knife and fork pristinely crack
chaste kingdoms of his soft-boiled eggs.
He doffs, as courtiers do, a Daily News
at serving girls who pass to ponder him,
a hulk of drawing room and dungeon mix't.
His black cigar unfurls great wafts of blue:
He toasts the regal bean of Caribee,
and in one draught, takes down the cup.
One swipe of napkin and it's done:
Like two big hands, the city cracks
its knuckles.  His reign's begun.

-1959 ( St. Louis Post-Dispatch)


BUNNIES ACTUALLY

She asked me,
"Did you write anything
about us?"

And I had to say, "No,
I'm too busy living it, loving it."

But if you looked
deep inside me,
you'd have seen
a field of little rabbits,
bunnies actually,
gamboling together,
laughing, jumping,
falling all over each other
for joy.

-2005


FOR MARIA, 1946-1964

Your older sister called you artist,
the "talented" sister.

I met you only your last year, fading, wan,
your fine lines smudged with disbelief:
a girl with burning, dark-bruised eyes
drugged on an iceberg of hospital bed,
starved hands like Eskimo ivory,
frozen in continual question.

Now, I can only look at time-machines
of your chalk drawings as she,
years later, unsheafs your pastel dramas
of stormy, girlhood summer days.

This sunlit speck of naked child streaks
through a mountain pasture's gilded hay:
hands raised to heaven, she seems to race
a lowering storm that drives
a skirl of crows from seething, darkening gold.

And here's heaven's ripped bodice
spilling opalescent billows overhead
as lightening lashes a river's leaden spine--
and later, another sheet, an aftermath:
dark birds threading back through slanted rain
in single file, like black beads.

Behind these chalky passions,
ecstatic, church-lit skies,
the swollen thunderhead
that parts the sun-swept grain,
I feel a terrible image stab:

cancer cells raging in your womb,
carrion replication riot,
life-force gone wild,
the film of your life gone crazy,
spooling out in desperate, unsprung loops
on screaming sprockets,
a shrieking, flashback blur of grief,
and then
the final, anguished question's
final word:
crashing
white
ice-bound
silence.

-1965


LOVERS #1

We crouch low,
naked on all fours,
noses nearly touching,
chins nudging dirt...

still antagonists of the last kiss,
we blow desperately softly
on the last tiny ember--
incandescent, angry spark,
going
going
going.


LOVERS #2

You, anemone,
bright labial submarine sighs,
a daze of dreamy, jeweled fingers
reaching out
on the solid rock of your desire.

But, touched, a spasm,
the liquid grace of you clenched suddenly,
safe in your pursed citadel's
closed fist.

Me, shedder, moulter,
scuttling free of my cracked carapace
to mask my vincible, naked shame
and grow my hardening hide again.

Or maybe butterfly,
struggling from split chrysalis
to hang suspended, bushed but free,
wrinkled wings pumping life,
raised flags
drinking wind.

LOVERS # 3

Her time, her orbit, her formulae:
Moebius-strip emotions, signals
from deep space
harder to decipher
than the plush, elastic physics
of her heavenly body...

The iron gong of her will
still echoing in my head,
I wander an Escher belvedere,
upside-down, backwards,
ass over tea kettle.

But deep in the putty of my mind,
an idea forms, pulls free, spinning,
picking up speed,
like a new star
begins.

-1978

AGAINST THE WALL ON MOTT STREET

Against the wall on Mott Street (selling paper fans),
He sat upon a milk-crate:  an old persimmon face
Who squinted out a spiel from corners of his eyes.
A smile of Tong Wars and tart fruit,
Pockets full of lottery tickets, a headful of memories
Before years in a country once strange
Had etched his cheeks with wonder and old age:
He came from landing shed to brick and steel marvels,
Squared, no roof of delicate pagoda’s pitch,
A rain-trough where the red-winged blackbird bathed.

Here his people set up dark, mysterious markets,
Red geese roasted and hung, legs fixed taut,
Necks drooping in rigid crucifix and eyes, black,
Withered to an olive pit in the basted socket.
So here, I felt akin to cormorant;
A love-bird with a cord about my throat
So that I could not speak or swallow, gulp air
With the fish’s bulging eyes,
Laid out among the long green leaves and ice.

And there he sat surrounded by his fans,
Displaying this one open and now closed
With eyes as shy as a maiden’s against the flowered paper,
Beckoning:  A Sale!   A Sale!
Not any mandarin, silent, motionless,
With ornate fingernails in sheaths,
Could make me marvel more than this old face.
A wrinkled fruit the vine had nearly dropped,
Where bud and branch once grew together.

He coaxed me with his waving fans, a bird
That spreads its wings before it flies,
The talons wise and hesitant to uncurl,
And once turned back to wave at children, sadly,
As they shinnied through the shops and corridors.
gOld man, it is not pride I long to give you,
But a winding sheet of gold brocade
And new black slippers, silken,
For your hallowed feet.

--1961, Riverside Poetry 4/Twayne Publishers
    Young College Poets series              

ACCIDENTS

He screwed his high school sweetheart in her attic,
under sun-chinked eaves, above dreaded footsteps,
his hands straining on her shoulders,
her eyes swerving like a landscape
in the windshield in a wreck.

His thoughts race now as he shambles,
knee-weary, proud,
along amazed, white-fretted, frosty streets.
He's stunned: she bled.
Autumn leaves click dry confusion
under a baleful moon.


He wanders, digesting:
her hard prow (but butter-soft inside);
dented, bloodless lips;
bitten nails winning no welts
as he crashed through:
collision of caught breaths
like sudden brakes.

A cleft hoof stamps in his chest now:
stark, impatient spawning of starvation.
And under his scuffling blue sneakers,
dry leaves crunch
like metal tearing.

-1992


THE GREEN CHAIR

"So much depends..."
upon the green chair
in the white bathroom

conjuring me
chairs pastel as childrens' shouts
outside doorways in Burano;
black-shawled Portugal women
on bull's-blood chairs like mine
shelling beans pods in the sun
with swift rosary fingers.

I found my chair...
squarish stool, really,
with short back...
in a junk shop
on Wickenden,
leering out behind
dark-varnished dressers,
scaled small,
maybe for a kid or a dwarf.

Its shrieking, ripe-avacado green
blurts "Med"--Mediterranean:
transporting me on
warm, aquamarine breezes,
above scented rosemary hills,
schoolgirls shy as swallows
twittering along a whitewashed wall
against a bleached cerulean sky,
and clay-oven loaves ranged
like sunbrown breasts,
and peppery sardines in olive oil,
pressed under bricks in a barrel.

I sit on it,
this chartreuse dias,
and spank the monkey,
flogging my way
through solitary night;
I sail the middle sea south,
soar off steep Gibraltar thermals
into a hot African sirocco,
streak past a scimitar moon,
bank over the mud-maze cities,
my feathers falcon-tight now, diving
towards a teeming souk
and a dark-lidded, languid lady
with obsidian eyes
from whose grinning lips
I yank the veil.

 -1991


BEATNIK POEM

2 a.m. with its thin arias
and windows
full of darkness:               Funerals of
sleet faint
at the glass when Sinister Paper
crosses the street.
Stiffly.
                                         An empty tea-
cup is reduced
to tears where gaping
Hands
foul clean shrouds
and raise our voices
                                        with soprano
                                        scissors:
some spare Libretto
spun down a clean wire!

Pigeons tilt from the roof
gum-footed in
                                         bird-lime
                                         (and some
frozen in angles of Death,
of broken pastorals);
                                          in the East:
rumors of frost rant on panes
in fraudulent patterns
of saving stars.
                                         Nearly a shred
                                         of cloud
shoots like a roach across
the sky (where voices ram Slogans
over dim circuses).
                                          The Dawn!
Strikes with the fury of
a whirring window shade
whose lost echoes
flap the runt air,
blowing Dirges.
                                           While I
sit among the draped bombs
living on borrowed
                                           typewriters.
                                           At 2 a.m.

-1955 (Brunonia)