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- Sailing Down the Potomac
- AMERICA
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- Such stories I
have heard! You wouldn’t believe:
- people who own
clear minds containing this one girl
- whose name they
publish against her wishes.
- A girl whose
conscious head is daisy-laden & distributed
- easily as a
pamphlet made of gold leaf.
- Then she clears
the dishes.
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- She is the planet
malingering in the gravity well of his ceiling fan.
- Make a wish upon
her: only her memories dead set against convulsions
- (as debutantes
memories are apt to be). She is effusive
- about a few good
men
- which she forgot
to have regretted by someone else.
- She has resigned
herself
- to a coarse and
intermittent socialism
- of interpretive
and dyspeptic apple-sellers,
- and her
intermedia family—
- although it is a
family of nuclear engineers on volleyball scholarships
- with mothers
gaunt and giddy—
- hate the New
Porous Novel,
- Pyro-Poetics,
- and having
survived a Depression they cannot recall;
- their cobalt
battery bones dream
- of purchasing
bread with eyes as coins,
- and a bar of soap
to scrub the electric beehive,
- and so on:
- the following
year her body changes thoughts like an old car
- while her
sophisticated fellow-travelers form a Weekly Tragedy Club,
- a union which
takes pains to point to its free pink glasses,
- and the ignorant
prettiness of its peasant children.
- This is (of
course and once more) Anarchy!
- Or Malarkey.
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- There remains her
nervous novenae in July:
- the sacred roads
lit by candles from army supply,
- counting the
stars’ pores,
- and that western
grin
- across which coal
light fell scorching the wagons;
- every plight
lights my mind’s small wildrose window,
- a tree surrounded
- by the clattering
robotics
- of her August
Revolution.
-
- Oh, the blossoms
of Revolution frost
- upon the
pocketbooks
- carried to the
teashops and parking lots and ruined crops
- full of perfumed
and later perforated brides
- with their stone
lace, their capes and white anchors
- made from the
recast plate of WWII statuary
- (broken in an
earthquake washed down by a Gibson)
- and
- upon the little
blue coffee cups
- of her
sub-aqueous culture spots up and down Broadway
- where I once
feared personal experience but now am protected
- and
- upon the threshed
May darkness
- punctuated by
elite violences
- in which her
mutated delicacy speaks
- in conference
rooms
- and rhythmically
- upon the
umbrellas in Honduras
- which bop along
the yellow roads toward a shed
- reminding us that
the Renaissance
- has become (of
late) moody,
- sickly and apt to
tinkle upon us—
- suddenly it’s
as if we had called the wrong number
- at the wrong time
late night in winter,
- and as if filling
stations and casinos
- took care of the
poor
- so we don’t
have to see them in our delicate condition?
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- And why is
Rimbaud so newly listless in his job
- as a
semi-literate necktie salesboy?
- And why those
dungheap hotels in debt housings along the Pacific?
- And why security
cameras disguised as roses
- in the Alhambra
- where children
wear typewriter ribbons in their hair
- to celebrate
Customer Day
- and then the
cocaine lawyer forgets to phone the Mayor,
- because the
profit margin has been fixed (subrosa) at infinity.
- And why the
laundry full of stains from shrimp boats, cod cakes,
- heated egg-white
flings, frosted olive squeezies,
- tomato massacree,
black matter shoegloss,
- diamond oil,
ashtrays full of warm flesh,
- and sausages
small as a woman’s cigarette
- and just as
white.
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- Oh Sunday
- at the propaganda
kiosks
- bedecked in red
leatherette,
- cracked but so
fetching at first glance
- you do not notice
the food & wine
- dumped in the
shady terrarium
- for the Pope’s
pet panthers,
- and the kerosene
stove burning
- in the ancient
Carmelite convent
- as a hundred
blessed hands picking at the berries
- (or are they
sores).
- But
- her friends
assure her the streets are charming
- even in darkness,
- and that the
lovebirds are only being hanged
- because it is
washday in Eden,
- and that the
muddy rivulets now full of tiny mullet tugs & gun boats
- are also filling
with sugared oranges & comedic orangutans
- for the gray
babies coming into their majority
- in this Blue
Decade of vented sensation,
- the Decade of the
gold chrome deities
- and their
stalwart companions,
- the prudish
conversationalists. Who giggle.
- And upon the
flesh waving at the crossroads like a rag.
- And on and on.
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- And I am sure the
driveways have come to accept their own phenomenon,
- at least they
seem indefatigable and ultimate,
- like a youthful
Stalin filling his dance card,
- and (if we only
remember to register)
- the Party will
blossom beside the outdoor pool,
- a lotus
surrounded by tall cool drinks and light jazz
- and buzzing
intellectuals preening.
- Her Sunday is
always a sweet embolism about to happen,
- another miracle
always ahead, or a refreshment billboard
- advertising mice
swimming in hi-ball glasses,
- and this is
perfectly logical
- and we pay.
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- And (finally) it
is her depressing blue eyes
- (sub-aqueous
culture up and down Broadway),
- her
mother-of-pearl soul, lithe and spike-haired,
- dreaming of a
baby smoking a cigarette,
- dreaming of the
raven trace of our scruples
- finger-worked
deep into the dimpled and deckled slipcovers,
- voraciously
- dreaming of the
sun’s genital scarring,
- the immortality
of labor and value
- whose youth was
trivial
- and whose
senility is irrelevant.
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- And then she
clears the dishes.
GO BACK TO THE COUNTRY YOU CAME FROM!