STANDARD SCHAEFER :
her zip broke down the back
Regression to Mean: An Elegy for New Orleans
After the mud-chokes and the cat-of-nine, after the cat-
marrying-the-gunner’s daughter
Keel-hauling, mastheading, ducking, and spread-eagle the
thanatocratic code—
There is work for the bailiff.
But cataclysmal as escape is a maligned science.
Sal si puedes,
but it was black, though not absolutely
And absolutely no smoke where there was hair.
Only asymptotes and uncertain disinfectants
Like consciousness and bones stuffed with wet met.
Give the heart where the hole blows
A gallon of aqua fortis
Another cup of Kills Grief
Through a hollow shaft infused with mint,
A Horse’s Ass Hallelujah
On the part of the horse dealer who couldn’t count
And an alibi for a lack of local knowledge
But senselessness rules cheerlessness
With a mercy no stadium could contain
It's a matter of hand-lung coordination
Even destiny
To halt the open heart
And demolish destiny
To abolish the whole idea of progress.
Where everything that’s accomplished
Is accomplished through negligence
Battery acid for illumination, barbed-wire for balm.
*
Mercury rules the calm funnel
Like islands a lifetime around the room
Or a couple of days in a city that is always pouring
But roused on acetate and a taste for exploit
Wind is a very cruel signature obliterating the fretwork.
*
Eyes ancillary to memory, and doing exactly as it pleases
A whole city who refused to park within the lines
Her zip broke down the back
And attached to a pasteboard rudder
Insomnia for a best friend
Wheaten loaf for dungeon floor
But obstinate as the t-shirt she lifts to her lips
Ten, thirteen, ninety-six
Nubs of flux and obscene glue
Mock the dialectique of wishes boiled off a wrathful schmaltz
Of hollow gray hellos and little steps back
Little shuffles forward, and worms on the lawn
Forced north, forms and deforms
Monads resurface as caviar and reformation
But in a rue and always in the vicinity
Bones and vows leave off
*
Memory the rifle left behind against no more memories.
Ineligible for the grant. It is opposed to night and money.
Insects, though prevalent, are unmentionables.
It was a cash flow problem. She bred mosquitoes but
strictly for export, usually to Texas Where they tumbled
down the mesa and into the mirror before waltzing with the
Dandelions behind the chain link, at which point
Perception becomes the flaw in the diamond ticks bounce off.
The point, Mr. Commissioner, is that death budgets nothing new
But its aura presupposes signals that actually signal.
And while it is true that leaves complicate trees,
That lactation consultants are legion and the only way out milky
As the commissioner’s teeth, there is nothing left to breathe
Beneath the walnuts and the blue cheese,
Through the magnolias and the apple martinis
Past cigarette machine where I saluted the badger from the peep show,
Making my way back to the cream of wild mushroom and imported bacon.
Because it is a tremendous burden to have hobbies
Because such as loneliness and deracinated genealogies are meant to amuse us
Because it is a terrible chore being captive to the pronoun of emptiness and
division
You who are sated in endless petting, you who break the pitcher
Or find her keys or cast about amid the senatorial movements
"In come the dividends, up with the lofty thoughts"
But innocence requires cultivation, experience circumference especially
patience
Reform requires patriotism ,so precious little is required
Amid the ultimate circumstances written persistence
Where cosmopolitanism is rendered as the idea of home
Perseverance is the depot and leaping through the roof
A red snapper or an olive in a marlin between the decoys and doubloons.
But with another pound of sisal, the whale bone is mine.
And you, sir, without it, will have all the grace of God.
That, I pray, is enough.
*
so much absence
emits hesitation
same window
crossed out in light
through the new panes
vector after vector
adapting
to the denseness
it continues to refuse
less or more or soon
or slow but strict
the interregnums
branch off
and step backwards
the invisible fades
into a precarious waste
henceforward the façade
approaches the nothing left
in the eyes
*
It was a threshold of a city, stopped short
And the howls leaked tendon
Through the forgotten chasms
Of equality and debt
Petroleum where the eye was
And just now opens.
*
Not much sludge to book-value
and steep is the virtue
bent on cleverness
Speech is the ace
Of the lazy
Who leave their sweat
On the chalk board
*
When opportunity knots
Risk dwindles
To a big hand
Around the warranty.
Moping notes the grainy tissue
Blunt as anonymity
It sops up resemblance.
*
which name your apart drifting
echoes straining the tape gesundheit
syllables no trombone would announce
down the pronouns' scatter held separate
where the light is caught in handfuls
syllables only saying your slow
punctuation decomposes
imponderable substances
irreducible to the
rigid limits of effect
or the set limits of
abuse and noise
the archaic
arrangements swollen with pheromones
where tubas and
pick-ups ape the bait
but armaments are not
instruments of civilization
though they may have
gone on loan
to simple upheaval
*
Density suffers from
tightness
one without
compartments
one without comportment
addresses the
designation
simple doors over
simple doors
amplify the argument
"and" or "or" the
position of the lamp
in the middle of the
music
the legendary
decimation
echoes muffled by
ledges in the elegy
versus the pigeon on a
wet bench
its shadows, clouds.
A ferocious modesty
hunkers in the sparks
and caramelized light.
*
It was in a time when
the image was a genre of hunger
egregious as speaking
as if through a cone
The eagles had long
since been egalitarians.
Yes folded no and
amputated opposition
Facts undertook
rhetoric and risked clarity
Ouch was hierarchical
so cuffed
To aberration
Subterranean as a tap
of the foot, the dust rises and resettles
Like lynching and
electrocution
Gone bleep.
A tap of the foot and
the dust reassembles
Three feet beyond the
other side of the wall
The bench still wet is
just around the corner
Where sitting naked and
straining to hear
Strained sounds of
moons out of breath
Verses or hairs
draining the vowels.
And just under the
door, the damp shadow
Aspires to almost
theological insight.
This passes for
adequate.
This passes for verse.
It is written in hairs.
For what's left of the
horses.
*
Sun at the door, but
I’ve given up on endings
Especially coming full
turn into doing your own thing
Or do what you like
That's the real tyranny
Something gestures
simplicity
And closes
Something else runs its
course
But if there was
destiny
Progress would abolish
it
Or foul out
And evacuate
All consciousness
And be worth all the
trouble in the world.
*
Never the first was
what
The names knew it
Never mattered what
Only the fact read want
Preparation involved
failure
Obliteration is a
fabrication
But too much was far
Though far returned was
Too much
Then too much returns
And leaves why
Why even to so few
The terse expectations
Marry hope to had none
And in their merry
survey
Cruel against the
crystal face
Reflections in the
sopping clock
*
The idea of a stone
Took two other names
One in place of the
dead
One diminished
additional
Rivulets around the
archipelago
In a meditative stance
Fluctuations in what
won't sink
A mild degree of
unpredictability
Preempts
Real and steadfast loss
*
Again around comes
which time
The program your
driveway a poem
The pulse in the
wisteria
Is vacuous because you
are
Adrift the music
In the harsh nettles
Bare blown, stopped out
The baritone your hand
let fall
Immanent as vacancy is
rationality fatigued
*
*
Now time and ruin
The edged out depth
traverses
What will disappear of
the scent
What is learned only by
listening.
What again comes around
at which time
The dim restlessness is
embodied as a castaway
Against what time and
where
Against when there is
only
When there is only
This time
*
disjunction of nothing
suspended evocations
proper to the genre
of hypothesis and guess
especially
authorization
and against the rituals
of autonomy, light or
dark
and for a long time no
one
could go near any of it
it came to us in sepia
music
muddled tones over the
only language
anyone could muster
through
all this gravel in the
mouth
*
Regarding re-openings,
there is only a recipe for a cave.
Music the only walls
quiver suddenly
and break
The idea of forgiveness
rubs its hands against the aisles.
But first the excuses
must go to bed slowly.
Like a rainbow in a
pan. Thwap.
Then captivated by the
minnow’s absence.
And with a vehemence bereft cleverness
The Upside Down Party
begins and at certain angle,
With the right lens,
fungal bodies absorb
a preference
For effervescence,
where the winners take a seat.
Then pronunciamentos
and a study of the bantam Rubicons
Versus the orphaned
phantoms
Who cross out the
movement of the count
Who came to America to
become the Tsar
Who acloud who tick
Who pick up the rod
that has come off the rose.
Then refinements of the
churn—
An
asymptote on the horizon
Blinks black, white
Invisible
As
the pockets where our hands twitch
The
Gaia reflex
Improvisation's carnal paradox.
Chalk.
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(c) 2005 Slope. Slope
is ISSN # 1536-0164.
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