 BENJAMIN BALTHASER • MARK BIBBINS • CATHERINE DALY • A.C. EVANS • GRAHAM FOUST • DAVID H.W. GRUBB • KEVIN HART • PAUL KLOPPENBORG • DREW MILNE • JOHN MINGAY • SHEILA MURPHY • MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
 back to topBENJAMIN BALTHASER's poetry currently appears in Quarterly West. NOSTALGIA PRINCIPLE, MODESTO, CA There's a nostalgia principle deep at work here with these clovers stuck in a fence in the residential tract of Modesto. They look like parachutes awakening over a field in France, part of some dream, some war made innocent. Consider the scene: a thousand parachutes opening like bluets or African violets, violet-blue, dizzy as eyelids while shrapnel blooms with its metal proficiency - for a moment the world magnifies on some hedge - rowed field where death opens like the hoop-skirt on a poppy - and there the talk is all flowers. Now here, in Modesto, there's something with houses that doesn't belong, with this flower, with crows bursting like inkstains from the shrubbery, with lawns trimmed as a new soldier's head: one metaphor begins to inform the other: I have seen yard sales where refugees pick over dressers like bodies of friends. Light drains from the streets like oil. Houses are white and bloated as corpses. Nothing shines with the same sun as new fear. ON ERASING THE NOTES INSIDE A LIBRARY COPY OF MERWIN'S THE LICE As in the way we travel: remembering doorknobs, Victorian shutters, the regional poet who combed over the bald spot he made with a straight razor, all things to be re-invented as we upset flagstones and begin the journey all over again.There are sentences, explications of poems, translations from the Greek, indexes of references; in an hour, I erase everything, leaving onlythe tick-marks beside favorite poems as Merwin might have preferred winterfor its purity of gesture: a single twig bent toward the Big Dipper; the way it waits a yearto grow an inch closer toward what isn't infinite, however unreachable, however muchwhite space remains: Between words, between stanzasas if nothing is wrong with starsbut that they drift - drift, and turn invisible with morning.
back to topMARK BIBBINS lives in New York City and teaches poetry workshops at the New School. His first collection, Swerve, is part of Take Three: 3 (Graywolf) and other poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review and The Yale Review. He is founding poetry editor of LIT magazine. POUNCE He's the prettiest thing I've ever seen/ synthetic boy/imploding star. You can't swing a dead fish and expect to split the dissonance/ an ego unhinged by chemicals/ the prettiest thing we've ever seen. The nanoseconds commiserate and pounce/ oh I am but a simple tramp/I know/ in underground rivers forgotten fish glow. You've seen the future too/ in the skittish projections/in his eyes/ the prettiest eyes you've ever seen. High above empty skyscrapers/ auroras billow/in lunar winds/ a brilliant haze draws us up like fish from the gunmetal chasm/our home. We would ask no more of the world/ the prettiest thing we've ever seen/ make our hearts lie flat like scales of fish. ETHICS The three-year-old girl clings to the back of a car. Do it again do it again the reporters chant. It's a hot day for April. A membrane coats the lens. What part of _____ do you not understand? How about learning-disabled-can we say that? And can we get someone to re- enact the bit with the hot spoons? In one commercial the legatees were dapper and kissed like madmen. Will we hence blame them for our sorrows? And what of the slack- jawed confessor waiting in the screenwriter's arms to learn which ocean would be most receptive to their advances? - Apparently the psychic hotline gals have all gone on strike, which would explain our recent fortune. TINGLING IN THE EXTREMITIES Here is a misplaced forecast from the spring: a big Sorry in the al fresco restaurant, your whole posse gathered to see what you've become. Nothing worth repeating over the tin-can telephone - the one you love fills your water glass and is gone. You cut your finger on the lobster and glide down the walk. Swift now. A summer of traffic, the stereo works and the sun cooperates. We are forever going down for the sand, the quivering air holding the bodies aloft. The music blurs and everyone involved is in on it. You'll love our m-m-malts. "I love a promise," you confide. We have forgotten the need for transitions, or haven't learned it yet beside the clam shacks where we act alluring and young.
back to topCATHERINE DALY's poetry has been published in American Letters & Commentary, Pivot, The Hollins Critic and Aught. She teaches poetry at the University of California-Los Angeles Extension. SIX SUITES The man sat in the overdetermined chair. Notes pierced the window, drifted down lit by a too-bright camera flash. Ice coated his windows with thin opaque sheets. Opening his door he saw icy rocks in the street, like days so cold nothing moves. I want to say these days make strange music, glassine, roaring, shocked. These days are difficult to access and easy to forget. Water vapor against his flat sky suffocates like oil cloth, clears horizons of opportunity. How could one possibly compose wearing clothes? Heaven's suite is gawky and fails, can no longer wait, by definition, is now. The blue sky with clouds is a garment. Staring at the open land, suffused, orange staves and plastic net a false cane break, frozen clods a ploughed-under crop, flat sky, dusted land, scoured, also flat. The most complex or simple music suits the writer's suite. Paper marks chime: print, gesture, habit - symphonies of difficulty, blended words aloud, blurred notes, movements. This is the idea of heaven not heaven. This is a paradisical carpet, not a garden. This is a coordinated suite of bedroom furniture, $999, heaven's contents. FROM THE CRADLE 1. An asp presses its head against its leathery egg and breaks free of Cleopatra's grasp. For years it coils and coils without clasping its tail in its jaws, escaping eternity as she doesn't. Dogs seek their narratives. We learn plague rhymes in the nursery. Ashes, ashes, we all fall. 2. The hula hoop craze sweeps the nation. The shoop, shoop of BBs in their loops replace the figure eight motion, eternity's shape, of hula in the 50th state. 3. I've got wheels. 4. I can do anything better than you. Bake a pie? And break pi into pages of places, given time.
back to topA.C. EVANS lives in Great Britain. COMPLAINT OF PIANOS OVERHEARD IN POSH SUBURBS after Jules Laforgue Guide my spirit besotted by literature Pianos, pianos in posh suburbs First evenings without a coat, innocent stroll Nerves shot to bits and misunderstood What are they dreaming about, these girls Tediously tinkling their ritornellos? " - evenings on the campus Christ in the hall of residence "You go away and you leave us You leave us as you go Letting down and putting up our hair Doodling endless sketches." Cute or uncertain? Sad or wise? Still inexperienced O days, so what? Or I want the world and I wannit now? And so virginal at least of the goodly wound Knowing how the reddest sunsets make the whitest weddings? Gosh, what are they dreaming of? Johnny Depp? Someone reeeealy spesh? " - hearts in prison, Slow seasons! "You go away and you leave us You leave us as you go! Grey convents, choirs of Shulamites Over tiny bosoms we cross our arms." Being's fatal keys appeared one fine day Psssst! To the curse so punctual But we're always out bopping in strange clubs Ah! Boarding schools, movies, tabloids, TV! Bog off, sterile refrains Real life's a bummer and no joke "- Curtains drawn Can I come in? "You go away and you leave us You leave us as you go The source of fresh roses is drying up Really! That Toxic Boy never calls. . ." He'll call! Your planet-sized crush is the problem Chained by remorse and endless chat-ups And self-satisfied middle-class hearts; nothing to do But hang out, done up to the nines in trendy togs. Dying? Perhaps paint your toe nails For a dishy 'uncle' with oodles of dosh? "- Jamais! Jamais! If only. . .if only! "You go away and you leave us You leave us as you go But you'll call me sometime Soothe my sweet angst, won't you?" And it's true! The Toxic Boys send 'em mad Even in these up-marche suburbs All human life is there; bottled spring water Will be, as is convenient, the proper baptism. They'll be at it soon enough Never mind the ritournelles " - well placed pillow! Familiar wall! "You go away and you leave us You leave us as you go I could have died the other night! O months, O knickers, O nosh-ups!" A LONG KISS ON BITCH ISLAND Aren't you tired yet of throwing dice? Propertius : Cynthia at a Party. Cynthia, I think you live life as though you were in a film. Today, as always, you shimmer in beautiful colour-negative images; You embody the darker side of iconography, and For you, everything is like a Felliniesque entertainment. Not for you, Cynthia, the degeneration of the soul, Even though you look eerily atmospheric tonight. You look like a real twilight-zone chiller: Intriguing, striking. . .mysterious. Cynthia, your life is like a haunting soundtrack. You were the inspirational source for The Long Kiss When you became a specialist in ruthless military flesh-piercing, Tormenting captive zombies, inflicting needlepoints of stars. Not for you, Cynthia, the poetic metaphor, because You have subverted all stereotypes and cultural identity. You stole the twenty-four books (and cut them up!). Sing back the symbols, you say, from the far-out fringes. Cynthia, you are my dark companion, a potential suspect. Your elaborately montaged portraits inspire sinister metamorphoses, As you seem to embody a celluloid vision with distorted dialogue. You gave solo performances (until the police showed up) and, Spaced-out like a toothpaste commercial You made it here, to Bitch Island. Your liquid dreams Falling so silent in black and white, delighting Anguished young men who look like Pasolini. Self-portrait with razor-blades? Cynthia, aren't you tired yet? Has your spiritual journey Become hell on earth? But, yes, this is the longest kiss On Bitch Island, ever. Too late you quote Rimbaud. His language of verbal colour cannot illuminate this wasteland. And no, you cannot abolish chance.
back to topGRAHAM FOUST co-edits Lagniappe. His poems have recently appeared in Verse, Queen Street Quarterly, Talisman and Slope. duet: why i love country music for they gather the funeral we all these various observe some headless kind of funeral a sudden a native incision space accretes across fields will stagnate in the gape and later, still and later, still the possibility the possibility of faces of faces will end my window will end my window in no single sound in no single sound plot endures and is anything everything - shatter that way my only every move what is called thinking worry my hand - the wind is out the sea wants so badly to spill a heaviness not to be held What the world holds together is called to come apart, is nothing in return again for everything we know. Your eyes all but rise now to meet this deep breaking. Love me like skin, like prison.
back to topDAVID H.W. GRUBB has written more than 20 books of poetry, and recently edited An Idea of Bosnia. He lives in Oxfordshire, U.K. BORDER COUNTRY, FORMER YUGOSLAVIA Returning after the experience of war they enter the house that has been in their minds for three years. They walk the path, arrive at the door, enter a ruin. They cross rubble seeking a place. They approach the door that was hacked and burnt. They enter rooms that had been on fire. Look: there is the small library, there is the table where they gather to eat, there is the mirror. All the pages flew loose in flames. The old man was crucified on the table. They all ran through the mirror and passed across to another planet. Listen: here is a cupboard of screams, here is a drawer of curses; can you hear the corner sobbing? When they have been back a few days they begin to notice the neighbour again. He is staring across. He can never forget that they were all dead. Meanwhile, water, food, possibly words. DAYS OF THE PIG I In the photograph taken in the summer of '56 you can see this pig. Between Aunt Zoe and Uncle Edward the pig has put on its Sunday-best expression and looks rather like Hilda who is not in the photograph because she is dead. "She is dead. She was dead. We are all not dead," says Sara to her dolls thinking of Hilda in snowy Romania. Carpathian ladies had skin as soft as white asparagus. Most of their days were filled with bells. "If you have a maid from Romania," one of the adults once said, "you will have to remember she is used to ruins." II The pig is coming into a room where four ladies are arranging flowers as if their hands were on fire. The pig is entering a silence where a priest is gathering a sermon from a sunbeam. The pig is watching three men in a field; they are each carrying a goose home to a friendly wife. The pig is also observing one rat guiding another rat with a piece of straw in its mouth; the second rat is totally blind. The pig is aware of the children who dance in the garden unaware of time. The pig is waiting for the old woman to die so that it can jump onto her dressing table and eat the Easter eggs. The pig is hiding in the deep green silence waiting for the stinking uncle. The pig is used to the slowly disappearing daylight when the tractor grows cold. The pig is used to funerals in snow when the church bell says.
back to topKEVIN HART's expanded Selected Poems is forthcoming from Bloodaxe. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. MADONNA 1 Some rich black hair hangs idly over her left breast And as her head lolls back A wild old blues begins to slip between the little bones inside her neck And work its slow way down o down her spine And when she turns Onto her side, beside the open window, her longest tress plays lightly on the small Of her long back. Her eyes are softly closed (the music may be wine My sweet words singing in their nest of breath A sobbing that she keeps deep down inside where I can never go). Dear Lord, these are the lips that taste of moonlight, salt and oil And just behind them a tongue that feels around In the zucchini flower 2 'Death and desire': I saw the exhibition years ago, In Brisbane, deep in January's honey heat: I walked into the gallery With a young girl I loved, and wished I loved a whole lot more, And looked at things I thought I knew Like summer nights and kissing pretty girls Or when the mind goes limp and lets death rise And flood your house with kennel bones and clay. I looked at that 'Self-Portrait' with the long skeletal arm And thought about my soul while she was looking somewhere else, Then sat before 'Madonna' And knew the mouth and lids I longed to kiss But knew no woman like her, not at all, No woman given to the dark And then I felt an arm around my shoulders And so we kissed And then walked out And let the heat rise up and carry us away 3 There was a girl I loved when I was seventeen And every summer night that year I'd shower, put on icy jeans, Walk Oxley Station Road, then turn Down Blunder, and Soon spend an aeon cruising California: A water glass and flask beside a bedroom window, Mosquito coils all smouldering in hot, dark rooms. Perhaps I'd spy her once a week When she was at her desk, in lamplight, writing History, Or else, for all I knew, a note to him, the school beach boy With yellow hair who played guitar in clubs; And then one night she was out front Just hosing pink geraniums, Barefoot, in a short cotton dress. And I remember something rising in her eyes That I could almost taste And how she cast her long dark hair way back: Something about her voice when talking of that new LP Or how she spent the whole day down the coast Where little fish flicked right between her legs. The sound of people talking low nearby, after a beer or two, The smell of cigarettes on a long, humid summer night, Her brown feet in the thick crab grass 4 'In the beginning was sex,' A friend of Munch's declared in print, with him in mind, Over a century ago, in 1893, two years before 'Madonna,' hanging on my wall, Had been conceived. Some see that bold half-truth In sperm that fly around the frame, while other folk Point to the embyro kept by itself down left Where there's no edge, where darkness is let out Or in, depending how you understand its gaze. And other men, like me, don't point at all But simply say it is the way her mouth relaxes there, The way a shadow lives inside her curves, the way her eyes, even half-closed, Halve any room she's in: So when you walk into that loudly crowded ball Of cream and gold and filligree, And when your fingertips must leave the door, and your gaze settles down, You're at her side, No matter where you are no matter who you are No matter who she is 5 A year after I saw that retrospective, just by chance, With her, The one I thought I'd marry before long, The one I'd taken home that summer, The one of whom my mother said, 'She's nice' While lighting up a cigarette And looking out the window That showed a jacaranda tree that made the breeze so sweet, My mother was quite firmly put to bed With a bad cancer. When I flew home to see her It turned out she was sleeping on the couch, where it was cool, And so I slept with father In their big double bed: we whispered late into the night Until she'd scream And he'd get up and go to her. So no one got much sleep, Though sometimes I would slip Into the sewing room where we were billeted the year before With a black Singer for straight stitching, Electric scissors, pinned-up wedding dresses hanging from a wall, And stretch out on the camp bed that we used And try to cancel myself out. The first night we were there, in bed, just talking in the lamplight, About cicadas, sweat, And spending all tomorrow idling on a riverboat, My mother pushed the door ajar, Looked hard And said, 'I wouldn't get up to anything on that old canvas thing' 6 When I was twenty two I came back home To spend a summer doing nothing much: So I read Schelling, badly, once or twice While lying on my bed where years before I had read Shelley well, And then, one afternoon, I stomped, barefoot, down to the shops to hang around And met her walking out the bakery: One of the girls I'd known at school, had kissed one night At some dark party where I'd gone With cheap wine and another girl who spoke a smokey French And studied art at some weird place in town. Her favourite painter of all time Was a Norwegian, Edvard Munch, who said things like 'I was born dying,' And made his pictures up by scraping them away: She drank neat gin and ice, then passed out very cold Before the dancing and the smoking and the rest . . . 7 'Feel it, it's warm,' she said, And so it was, and while we talked I licked flour off my hand Then wrote her number there: For three long days the world looked back at me With her green eyes, then three days later on I drove us both To a motel way down the Ipswich Road And wrote 'Mr and Mrs Bakerman' in my old Queensland hand Then somehow walked into a room That might have been gift-wrapped in cellophane. What I remember best Is standing just inside the door and holding her, my head deep in her hair, No word between us: gently swaying back and forth As traffic rumbled by, my fingers joining at the small of her long back, The coolness of her lips upon my neck: The two of us just rocking in each other's arms, O back and forth there, back and forth.
back to topPAUL KLOPPENBORG works at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. He is currently producing CD-ROM and print versions of a concrete/minimalist piece, Less than 12. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS ATTENDS A POETRY WORKSHOP Bill, What depends upon? - Poetry, Vision, or Dream Upon What is made, Words that pour light, Yes. . . Remember, images are seen Wheels, or pitch ground, Earth on a rim - Life, Bill, Held within, or Besides... Less said is This time so - More comments in the text below The Red Wheel Barrow [Red? Birth as blood? Nature lifts child? Strong beginning, Interesting start] so much depends upon [Delete "so"?, apart from rhyme, one's shape or line, The world's growth in what we know. . .] a red wheel barrow ["the" for "a"] glazed with rain water [rain is water, Bill. . . Like rust or tears Turn the poem upon verbal spokes or nouns - now glazed is a must] beside the white chickens [chickens! chickens? Hmmm, soil, nature, The fragility of things Suggest metaphor becomes meaning, besides this and within.]
back to topDREW MILNE's books of poetry include Songbook (Akros), Bench Marks (Alfred David Editions) and As It Were (Equipage). He has been writer in residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and is currently the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry at the University of Cambridge as well as guest editor of Salt. from THE GATES OF GAZA but how could you stomach does bar a silver moon from charred marrow to odd hack daimon, engram show-trials storming the van Neumann bottleneck angelic spanners racing the jeunesse dorée on surgical spirit, barbarous mitres to kiss the pontifical neuron on bonce swaddling: who dares sulks, chough voice for the sump so strung to torture any moody or pouting tyke bidding swift remission off the much touted itinerary of Uncle Sam's claw * * * crypt so cute, as for eighteen holes in this heat, get real, ears glued to the set, heavenly in the flaming chariot that drags witty flesh through the tented field to bombard the local come what darkest succour vespertinal may turn a remnant of noon splendour to hear a smile through blocked rays would the pix were defaced, a sense of laughter quenching rood lights in there behind its words ready to break out in peals under some colour stooge * * * jury-rigs squeeze in their stochastic cooling and Turing architecture, huge bangs bent to narrow-bands of the nude lending a big raspberry contra idols as if hard to identify seem blurry to settled fuzz, entranced beyond repair to baud beads or seem blurry at a far remove from old soul's cosmic drizzle the harder to blend in subordinates, its ethical flora so vain, blunt who do at least drop simple propositions like flannels for a brow's even heat * * * out of vast tinted frames, burly pods survey the field who cannot weep for fresh death off some hollow jaw gone to tear the mire of huddled trailers light on diplomatic fallout so tender in pandemonium, scaled blows who beat stark melodies to rational, irascible, concupiscible parts, and do but look up to morning stars, nous enhanced, lark of famine sunk on impress control and rifled charm where the putto with raking paw doth hale and pull its arrow
back to topJOHN MINGAY lives in Scotland, where he is editor of Lung Gom Press and Raunchland Publications. from FIVE RIGHTS WRONGED (Parts I-III) One. The vastness of humanity, on the point of intimate devotion, calls for fleeting oneness to reveal the inherent progression this utterance already answers: the common flesh acts as the impetus, with the truths and yearnings of all respected; and, upon unadorned ideals, the sustenance of tranquillity nourishes and affirms the way of being. * Angles are fundamental to the ambiguous cancer of all affinity, of the artless and immune, of the succession that does not move on. * No-one else, so the discipline of unconstrained ration has no end Which other relic from the same inception can solely be sound judgement? * Nothing is forbidden and no-one is the voice of the limitless pleasure each one has within; through its tradition it conceals the vision of all to all, without distinction. * Someone will be absent in the midst of events and be deserving of hesitation, while only inasmuch as certain of the subsequence of the passion they will have reckoned indispensable: each will be bound by his convictions, his reasons brought to life by thought; and one of the most precious of words will be this liberty. * The asylum of age obliges timeless purpose of those for whom a shared end is the cost of time; each open to interpretation. * Intact, the sane presume, either blindly or of necessity, to understand what it is to define the symmetry, the way of wisdom and diversity, the monolith of reflection. Culture has the right to ask of all an explanation of life. * The ritual of the shaky course of life, of angles, has no written word; ever. Momentarily, belonging is an immaculate and hallowed spontaneity no-one should be deprived of. Though where it and silence merely calm, the paradigm will have been but once and fairly rewarded. * Two. Now the tribe, all the while believing that nothingness fills the wholeness with knowing, plagues the course of life in a brooding ultimatum of chaos. Their sweat embodies the intensity of the soul while all unwritten thoughts exist, rooted in naked rectitude and turning away the bounty of being. * Men are born to endure the limitless truth of absolute remembrance: from the freedom to make all remain in the shade, any liberty does not spring straight from life's blood; anything other than this moment has no end; the fruition of these rites can only be silent. * Faith can only delay the end - consumed by dogma. * Integrity is the poetry of each ancient truth, complete in the eyes of all and all according to plan: their aspirations and their virtue no more than inheritance. * And, consistently, endless footsteps will lead to absolution: no-one will hunger; the sin will have been assumed inevitable - the soul disquieted by trust conceived in the name of principle; the cloudless conviction of every word answerable for this liberty. * These souls are, accordingly, assured of the wisdom they dream of and hope for. That, in their passionless lives, time still retreats is the illusion of future, of joy. * Fraternity has to seek every naked breath of time in which perception is the leaving of life, as an innocent confession never fettered, yet to have been, until now, silently cherished. * Three. A vision of the unfolding fortunes of being lays out, in each ending, the momentary allusion to chaos - the instant all traditions twist the life from every word: the eye pursuing symmetry. * Words are imperfect, but loiter to be gathered by the dawn: each shared phrase is the altar of truth; and, beginning with these, rights are wronged. * The origin of every breath remains faithful to the tribe, never abandoning the continuity between the whole and the singular, preserving the forgotten sorrow of these voices severed at the lip. So much of nothing is prophesy, anything is the narrative of time - a drama, from beginning to end, in its biting intuition and utter conviction, though embraced without embracing fear. * No sign will be divulged, even though the circumstances belong to the wisdom of honesty. Any words, any journey, any oneness will constitute sin. * Only for the reason that bitter emptiness and solitary trust are held to be the language of fidelity is permanence possible, as intimacy found. * The asylum overflows with the potential for recompense for the loss of abundance scattered no further than amongst the barren recollections it exacts from every witness. When kinship is not assured, neither is insight fate will have been redressed. (Parts IV-V will appear in Slope Issue 4)
back to topSHEILA MURPHY's Letters to Unfinished J. (Sun & Moon Press) and The Indelible Occasion (Potes & Poets Press) are forthcoming. For the past twelve years, she has coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series. Her poetry appeared in Slope #2. (INVEST IN STRESS BROWN) Invest in stress brown Camisoles, divest yourself Of smear campaigns, Alleviate undue arrangements Of near misses and deflect The sodden flowers with The wheat germ and Hypocrisy, a game Is going on au naturel Are you unfounded Is your pedigree a cost- Efficient, doe-eyed Varietal indulgence If yes, why, if no, Why not, piecemeal Estrangements try to flower why as well (SATIS - SLOW OR DRY) Satis - slow or dry Be my tradee long, bray and weave high Into the card reach where the words go Mantra-ly toward snow-safe pique to wit The leather drape and cheese riled Small foray into a damage prep - and slow glide into Worthiness, if you imagine I imagine How we speed along the path for bicyclettes I'm on, you're on, we coast after the rise And very many in the audience apprise us Of the stains about to veer toward water And give in to water, thus be taken into confidence By water and the yard bake and the breeze pomp Lowly little lamp and harness for the shoulder Needing still the blankness of across The pearl-toned water
back to topMATTHEW ZAPRUDER's poems have recently appeared in Verse, Quarterly West, Overland, Slope and Fence. GRAMERCY Spring has come, banging its calliope of whistles, bright colors, breezes and fear, dragging the children it so cruelly lent us through the black bars of the park. Out of our arms one by one they are floating behind its mechanical symphony. Outside mothers circle like particles, watching their offspring obeying at last the law of harmless collisions. The benches are forever immaculate and green. For the park is locked, and two golden lions have swallowed the keys. They are ready to pounce on the first signs of contamination or affection. No pigeon born would dare cross their claws into such a untimely sorrow. Blue flowers are already starting to tumble down from a cloud, picking up colors that sort them by time. And the squirrels panic and chatter as if it were not too late to forgive them. I'm so sorry I'm unconcerned. Behind me the Gramercy Park Hotel contains the holiest bar in the hemisphere. My friends go there often to worship silver beer in a thousand mirrors that eradicate distinction. Among goldfish swimming through chandeliers and negligent show tunes afternoon loafs there all morning drinking tea beneath the piano. And head cradled in its folded arms, morning sleeps at the table with me while I'm writing letters to paintings. Manhattan please do not ever forget you are dragging the coast by your bridges towards a port that will buy your desire. Slovenian sculptors with conceptual eyes and long fingers you want to hold like cigarettes made you a ship before anyone knew that behind ten thousand masks of steel our admiration commands us. There's a monument to them in the clouds. Quick, look up - it's floating by. |