Definitely Not Fluffy

HOW ANIMALS MATE
Long and hard this morning I looked 
at a kind of god, actually.  The two
I watched outside Fulton Street Station,
how their featires disappeared
into one great open jawed
kiss that threatened
to continue despite
the janitor's strike
throughout Manhattan,
despite the commutting
crowds of demons
and prophets
who, for now, needed 
to scrub their own toilets.
Dear father, I haven't allowed
the money to spoil me yet.
I'm only anxious.  Need
I say how edgy I have
grown these years.


SALTING THE SNOW ANGELS
If it's a winter with teeth, the kind
that closed Historic Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for three
days and had the locals staggering down
West Market on rubber and kitty litter, then
and only then will I wear my long, black coat,
the secret dress of New York Communists,
and speculate wind and burn ratios
from the Wishnick Atrium window.  Burke will
watch the open jawed drift with me, his
paints in place, his blueblacks and olivegreens,
his yellowreds and Dali horizons.  He will pull
from his coat pocket three types of brushes
and a crumpled Newsweek feautre that claimed
64% of all Americans believed in angels.
The oak on the corner directly outside will be
frantic, burning in ice, screaming for a blank-
et, crying over its withered shoots, and Burke
will begin to sketch snow angels with distorted
faces of the last three American presidents:
Ronald with his wife's mouth and a Fuck-Me-Jodie stare,
Hitler's cracked tongue hanging from George's mouth,
Dizzy's bloated cheeks stamped to Bill's face,
all three leaders with a Susan B. around their left
and their bleeding penises in their right,
behind them, the entire Court
of Heaven, waiting single file
each carrying a blue-wrapped Trojan:
Michael on deck practicing his swings,
Gabriel hawking wads of tobacco,
Raphael scratching his balls,
and Uriel, poor, poor Uriel,
stuck at line's end
wiping the sweat off his glasses.


ORCHARD
There went the nuns again,
all thirteen values of euclidean
geometry in their black satchels
that matched their shoes,
across the lot,
looking as if they too
had been laid out
in straight lines,
their habits waving frantic
in the measurable wind
as only a vertical column
of Japanese maples would
a minute before they are
taught root-cutting by example.


BREAKFEAST, ITS PROXIMITY
Albert, with a pitcher of milk and a cereal bowl,
        found the explicit for-
mula for the amount of stretching at any given latitude.
His dog came through a flap at the bottom of the door,
a dead crow in his jaw.  It was an azimuthal equidistant
bowl of oat bran, the milk relative to its central point.
There were soggy flakes and profound consequences,
the spoon being too small for the sliced bananas for starters,
the coffee's steam without a fixed direction for north,
not to mention the antpodal point of the crow's blood
        pooling on the linoleum tile.


THE CITIZEN AS CHORISTER
This woman has forgotten how to love moss.
Romeo's you-know-who has reduced
her orgasms to zeros and ones, checking yet
again that her tits are firmly in place
before the driver comes to take
her bags, what the French call "folie de doute,"
what David Hume believed to be an utterly
changing universe.
                  It's a two hour drive, maybe three
pending on traffic to Kingston, the sad, sad royalty
of upstate New York, where the William Appling
Singers slammed bloody marys for brunch at the Golden
Ginza before performing Robert Schumann at the Olin
Auditorium, and I will be hers alone for that long, maybe longer
pending on the traffic.  It will take that long to learn
her English, the acquisitions she will toss; I will have
the same flannel wrapped around my waist
as I do now.  It is white with angel green squares.
There is a notebook on my lap, a cigarette in the right.
There is the taste of salt on my tongue.


REMEMBERING THE TONGUE
As for the cardboard cutouts
of Bucks County pigs off the 96st Street
exit, a day is coming when this sort
of thing will be memory and all
the pretty reasons to think back at 
the drop of a changing traffic light
will be neglected, or even worse, mauled.
Amerrrican na-names dddon't memean th-that much,
yet whose for that matter was the mouth I kissed?
The apartment was robbed in a dream
and I can't tell the difference
between the two living rooms.
There's an angel with twelve wings
taking a census of past lives:
I was a fiddle, I was a watt,
I was a middle-class conversationalist,
I was a butcher who tore and garnished
the tongues of Romanian whores,
I was a salesman, no, I was a Jew
on a soapbox with white hair,
calling every frog from the fur
to spread their articulate vocabulary to 
the first born of every farmer and grocer
in Easton, Pennsylvania.  I dipped
bread in salt water to pay respect 
for the dead, I kept rocks to remember.


REMEMBERING THE TONGUE AGAIN
All his dreams, small pigs
with sharp heels, ran over
the driver's left shoulder
to describe the distance
between one hasty episode
and another.  The map charted
only so much:  here was the bread
and here was the kiss, here was 
the space he touched from hip
to sunken crease and here was
the degree of distortion the further he
mapped from the tiny
red welts on the writs.
There were maps like this
in every Japanese glove
compartment; all angels
and devils were exact replicas 
of each other when taken 
in full scale of the map.


CHARLOTTE DANGLED FROM THE HICKORY
A spider dangled
from the hickory.
The pig in Lucy's
grandfather's barn
didn't mind.

She hated spiders.
I loved the sex,
a secret hand-
shake on a rainy
Thursday,

but it was Sunday,
when her glass-eyed
grandfather picked
dead skin off his index
with a spork.


HEARING THE TRAINS AT 1.43 IN THE MORNING
Last night I leaned against the green kitchen chair and counted
the number of dirty forks and unmailed letters on the table
and started to think Eighty two degrees and cloudy and she's
stranded by a dairy farm with a flat tire or she took
the wrong exit off the Pennsylvania turn-
pike or she knows exactly where she's going and she's gone
and I thought the Blue Mountain Railroad shouldn't be
running this late but I heard the trains howling through the screen
window, bawling over the crickets' chatter about the cool
blue light on the front porch a few houses down.


BECAUSE SOME COUNTRIES KILL COWS FOR FOOD
whatever touching we do is impotent.
The day doesn't notice.
The dry sun never sets,
its rusted room
furnished wrong,
and I sing psalms over the pile
of books and the punctured
pillows in the paper house
where we cooked red meat.


VANILLA ICE CREAM CONE WITH CHOCOLATE SPRINKLES
Dropped by a school boy
running from the bully.

My brother saw this from the window:
three crows circling low
and a militia of ants clambering out
from a rift in a moldy log.


LAURIE TOLD ME HER SECRET
was to lick the open
wound in Christ's side
and talk dirty
to the Roman centurian
who stabbed him.


HORSE AND RIBBON
"The sort of steam that vanishes now above one
Last cup of tea—though I could sit here forever
Passing the life and times back and forth
Across the table with you, my ideal friend."
— J. D. McClatchy

The kitchen window had its first frost;
the spider orchid had little time left,
its arching leaves started to crust
        along the edges—
Ruth could have saved that plant.
She knew how to till the soil,
how much fir bark, how much peat
moss.  She knew to distribute
a high-nitrogen formula rather
than tap water for waxy blooms,
for flower spikes fifteen inches long
bearing twelve flowers each,
for yellow petals with brown marks
and angel green leaves with reddish spots.
She knew to speak to the orchid as if it
was her first born daughter about
cole slaw picnics in September, how her
brother hated slaw and how her father
just hated, how Ruth danced to champagne music
on her mother's ten tired toes while her
three sisters tossed rocks into the Hudson
that never brought much to the surface,
and rather than attempt to describe
the Hallmark Christmas carousel
for Ruth's birthday to the plant,
the one with a pine base and four gold
horses, each tied to the center with a red
silk ribbon, rather than explain why 
I didn't write, why I didn't phone, 
why I didn't mail the letter on the counter
weeks ago, I considered how cold it was
outside, if I had to wear my long, black coat.