The Emergent Infrastructure Reconsiders Its Assignment

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A Man Awakening In The Open Air

 

 

 

 

 

Winter, slightly egg-shaped

rolls itself  through the brain’s underbrush,

in the folds of liberated tea, and in the cemeteries where we laugh

as  we swim between  the dreamer’s thrashing rushes

and December’s Russian trenches

where the gillyflowers grow.

And there stands the violence of father’s diamonds

more fascinated and not sea-borne

like my narrowing  magpie eye

as the missus nightly prepares the gazelles

juicy and crisp in our memory

of the ideal thought

of the final coordination

of some old inebriation

of a Trotsky

on a pony

doing math.

 

His massive head full of sentimental morning songs

formed of dog skeleton wit  & the willow of Mexican dresses

that cry out for butter as he is smoothing out his diary pages

attempting to pry loose agitating odes from his new Constitution

and evening out the blossoms

upon the withering blouses

of all those local girls

we will come to call

the Lamps of Cortez.

 

.

 

       Leon’s photograph of the Moscow snow was frightening

and the little visiting boy-child (as the wayward girls tear bones from cutlets

and cart the remainder to their fathers) dreams

of smug Surrey goddesses who turn silver handles clockwise

to open New York’s pewter cages

with pies or coffee slumbering behind

waiting for the mobilization (as the wayward girls tear bones from the cutlets

and cart the remainder to their fathers)

behind the barracks of his gaze, a philosopher’s cage

barricaded against the advent

of their sodden milky ways.

And we come to call them

the Lights of Broadway.

 

.

       “ A sausage is a sausage is a sausage is a sausage…” He theorizes,

then erases “but we are assuaged and suave,” he writes. Then defaces.

And while no one is waiting for the white tourist

to step out of the drawing room

and into that night’s flaky mille-feuille

to whisper a boiled “Christmas thought,”,

unsteady diagonal stairs skip down to the water stars

and to their blue Spanish corner,

and to the Byzantine umbrella carried by an artist

and to the toy guillotine of the mayor’s rising son

and to the Gideon Bibles being burnt by the rebels

and to the people fainting in their front lawns

grumbling about Marilyn Monroe, her proud distance kept,

and to the cow-bells – affixed with red nooses –

that ring acuminate in palmetto wilds and pine fellets

thousands of miles away, several careful pages away

and then erased. And erased once more to make certain.

To summon some ideal Woman who can breathe in roses

and breathe out gas-stations

like blue stars (as opposed to dumbbells and anchors

which are the twin subjects of his newest barrage).

 

       But now like St. Francis feeding the spring-driven birds

upon his own vanishing cream and wounds that burn,

quaint and perfectly specific and completely comprehensive,

his cotton voice soft white    white        white calls to his little dog

« Perdita Hercules! Perdita Hercules! »

and the swarm

of gadabout ghosts

of the vindictive commissars

of the soldiers in a drugstore buying Old Golds

of daylight quarantines

of some abashed waiter in Trieste

of several reductive club singers in New York

of a precise moment in an imprecise evening

continues to play bad balalaika

by the apple tree, singing.

And then erased. Then erased once more

To make certain.

 

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GO BACK TO SLEEP IN THE BOSOM OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON