"Presumptive Elegy," "A Spell to Fecundate the Page, & in Imitation of Vallejo," and "Routing Token Removal"

Presumptive Elegy

The handlers strode, fervently
Outside the beer. The air was delicate,
Its smelly nooks & joists visibly on edge.
Vetch had been perforated all along the clerestory.
It was midnight, & Young Hans wailed (the junior officer on duty)
At disconsolate mumbo jumbo, something
About tea cozies in the rain.
Meanwhile, Marge, perched on a night stick, sang. Wisteria
Was suspected. But just then,
Aunt Herman gravely warbled
“The Starred Banner Spangled,” & all eyes wept
While immigrants curated a semblance of fishing boats.
We waited, then, infuriated at all lost towns—
Forests of champagne bells, the cold
Summer echoes. Nerves went vibrantly on display.
Only then, lissome handymen got in the way.
“Where is Kennedy,” they snorted, though it turned out that
The call was for you, Mildred…
Hard bullets… classical ballet…
Of straw, fiend! & In buckets of lint, nonetheless, although
Hans is an aberration, a guard of neither.
O how I’d hoped we could make the time jig!
Cold, cold… to put root to my bullet pants
In loony arrangement, just right for your future
As seen in limited rerelease; send pictures
Of grass scattering. When pleasure’s not notarized
With full piano bar.
These are the borderlands;
The order’s not the same.
Economies of choked grass & fuzzy intuition—
Holiday’s scratched-up reprisals—
Think, buttercup, at noon’s lost jig
Where the wind never knows how to be.

A Spell to Fecundate the Page, & in Imitation of Vallejo

When the page is verdant with words
I’ll go in sand without number or place
& Jerk the emblems of toadies
That the page & I cough up in null surprise
 
When the page has letters four feet high
Then I’ll really want to go into my skull
& Find the ancillary weight of zero
In a bargain of cursed words
 
When the page is greater than the weight of the stars
I’ll go to a cheap hacienda
À Montmartre & pine away
In mammalian ink, with quivering bones
 
When the page is the sum total of my nerve
Only then, I’ll feel great in my bones
By night’s arrival, which would eavesdrop on starlings
If I let it count to zero

Routing Token Removal

                                                having to be
                                                totally concentrating
                                                which wears one out
                                                                    —Leslie Scalapino

The poem won’t tell me its plans
Its hunger or its music
 
Starting with the word now
Less awkward than silence breaking
 
Poetry happens interstitially
At a place between necessities
 
The poem’s object is pleasure
Seen from above
 
I swerve
In loco mobility
 
The poem is an artifact of such pressure, such love
Places in time where the world seems
 
•
 
If you excite a poem, when will it burn?
An auto-da-fé of contiguous, barren trees
In the speech of dead forms
 
        Do forms die?
        & Where are they
        Buried? Does speech
        Wither? & Where is its
        Mouth?
 
In the place beyond deformed winter’s trees, I lurch, in captivity, binding the air to its forest, my garden to its standstills. The weight of clouds to handheld suffering. The body to its limit. It’s messy. It explodes, graciously, sometimes in winter— a desolation. To those who’ve studied or are scalded, but nonetheless, to those who continue. To emerge, by damaged rain. A desolation peak, a songfest— a stud further, & its limit, to your next question’s echo.
 
•
 
To grow tired of boundless evening in the sky’s adoration
To be moot as a plumber in contorted becoming
 
The thrill is now— a horizon line evacuated of all scope
[Night bled softly]— [the resemblance trees]—  [for the cameras
Eagerly downwind]—
                An elision of tender nomenclature—
All styles misrouted
 
In the boredom trees—
    A nap, an imposition, a heartbeat—
Studying tangles
    In the dead of living
                    That rapacious day
            Flies through—
 
•
 
You, or an omnibus
            Recourse, riding the bus & such—
    An image or distraction.
        A null heap. A penny
For your ambush clad in ordinary
    Wool. The inter-
                               ruptions are cold, immobile parks
 
            Where space is limited, & silence rare
    Weighing your fingers
Down (constrained breadth
    Of this notebook, its seeming
Is inimical
                    To starry            night (rumors
Louder Then Bombs
            Is the tongue
                                    I have made
 
    Like a migrant, a vagrant
    Of recreation
    Studying redaction
    Where one syllable changes the meaning
    Of another
    Or Desnos at the speedway
    At any hour
    When lounging is slim
    A tickertape readiness
    If you feel it too, like meanings
    Of salt, a tender
    Geography on display
 
                        With evening comes
                                        A transient peace