for Bernadette Mayer
im just a busy bum
slumming in some violets
and then my yellow home
falls off the receiver (hum)
what will I do now
how will I reinvent myself
for indestructible are the units of grammaticism
the trolley seacoast of my youth
but in New York the picaresque has its limit
and the day takes its pill with girth and gulp
yet beside the point is a lake (color of lake)
and I have been here before they said
putting a person in your whiskey of words
the immolation of a smooth flame
that is the troubling thing that the dilemma
the Italians in their Piazza have it all wrong
the drum of my dreaming is open
I can see the mesh of bent wires
the repressed dental mark of this one email
it says Read me the sky is blowing hard
green against exotic blue gums of Arabela
but what is a place anyway what sojourn
what bells what underwater coral walls
blipping along underneath my slumped slate pose
from unerect posture comes maybe some hum (again)
of what should I be reading it is a book
It is always a book—the permutation must change
the astonishment at the treatment of Fulda
an ordinary country blouse I remember limning
as it was and then in the purblue room a frock
sits there waiting for you to read its story
of slim contortion, crumpled cuff, its white stitch
behind it sits our red chair in a picture of musk
Instead of making can we not feel ashamed
here on the Long Island of our wooden daydream
the crows have feet for mannequins, twigs of promise
and am I not irate? I am the secluded one, the bridge
with proper noun, as in the tableau of a common lady
blue-fired bright in the drenched ice of What Have You
contented; burned; wishful; a remorse code shade—
It is all the same when you are a tinhouse shoe
And the whole statue of possibilities boils down to a rug
a thin puce rug where can be erected a tea-cup set
not from garden but from car cemetery or thereabouts
Let us not be ashamed of nakedness (quake & shiver)
Not the pipe in the shed that morphs into wood
Let us clamor for stiff and solemn expression the linnet
is watching the road has a dry tributary to be welcomed
if you will have it I will have it
slap thump leap the bodies always are lain out, honeycombed.
Childish thing, you are the numb impostor of a dream
and the Emperor has called for you. It’s 125th and Le Salle,
the dictaphone has worn itself out to the usual blather
the usual decay the usual usual, a casual sort of rustication
This star sits on my lap with its weepy medallion
and I wait for you in the drawing room (presently)
and you cannot come, you haven’t even found your name yet
but there is a bit of pause in the anteroom where an angel changes
the lemon has the minute lashes of a chemise torso
the composure of a stern petticoat but I will put away clothing
The sun has it now
The sun is all there is now
I will never write again
Not in this absurd denim, drunk on myself
in the camouflage of desire, always admitted to, never desired.
APRIL 2009