COMEDIA
Leopard, lion, and bitch-wolf
hunger for my soul. Virgil
saves me and takes me to Hell.
lovers, poets, craps players,
roisterers, and blasphemers
are assigned vicious circles.
Many of my friends are there.
They greet me with tears and prayers
and swear to elect me mayor
when I move to their precinct.
And we huddle over drinks
and brag about past high jinks.
And Virgil grows quite distraught.
He regrets what he has wrought,
and he checks his sundial watch.
“Come,” he says, “it’s time to go!”
I agree to leave, just so
I’ll be back some tomorrow.
SUN RA, NIGHT
The passion becomes precision,
silent organs suddenly articulate,
our jazz exact,
universe complete.
An ingenious engine,
gladly self-winding,
perpetrator of Being–
sex is that loving violence
that screws time’s ingedients
(wasiswillbe)
into a Reality
that’s the matheme of poetry:
the science of intimacy with
the alchemy of Romance-myth.
And of existence–
we are the masterpieces!
The electric youandme
moves together gloriously,
excalibur-in-stone machinery
that’s the index of our style,
the evidence of our skill.
Amply blest,
an amethyst,
we are the levee
against the tsunami’s
approaching closing fists–
isn’t there enough madness left?
The solution is more sex!
BODIES WE LOVE
Is that thumbsup we hold in trust
actually just a making-the-fig?
Which vistas shall we later see
as caricatures,
which oaths are mere gestures?
The withinness of the present
obscures tomorrow’s withoutnesses.
The hidden shall be open then
and the bodies we love, no longers
(and no longer even memories).
Yesterdays are the only forevers.
RELOCATING?
Della Street’s behind me,
need a new address.
Lois Lane? Is it Etta Place?
No service road can be an I-.
I KNOW MY PLACE
The metropolis and the ghost town,
the ecosystem and the city:
My world is a paradox of orthodox and strange,
an environment of blend
that reconciles divides.
The academy and the stockyard,
The industrial plant and the garden
share their universe
with quarks and galaxies.
They bridge chaos and constitution,
balance ocean mountain desert plain
glacier volcano,
combine/contain actions and emotions,
reconcile all us doubters and cowards.
The legislature and the prison,
the gymnasium and the ashram
have equal weight and heft.
They refine and define,
blur boundaries,
apportion my lot in space.
ON RETURNING HOME ANEW AFTER HALF A CENTURY
where ghosts and memories forever reign
everything/nothing is still the same
strange faces on familiar names
changed functions for famous frames
remembering unremembered chimes
but the sky! the sky remains