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After Paul Chan Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum? You in heaven, na, be happy. You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink snuggly over your Bluto belly, & this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji. Like a short-order cook slinging hash browns, you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die, now faput. Dead. Why so chee? Ayaya, you in heaven for white people. Wrong ear-sucking heaven. Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit, you smell wet dog? Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble: “No Hennessy just seltzer, please,” before they sing your hits a capella. Shataa, Baagad Bullya, very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi. Silly as a cricket in pubes. Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar. A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun and swatting away chweetie pie cupids, looms Fatmouth God, frowning like rotten turbot. But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens, so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky melts to Op Art swirls of Cherry Coke red, burning upup white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt & black cell phone towers. This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh & video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis. But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis? Where is 2Packi?

I We aren't serious when we're seventeen. —One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade, Noisy cafés with their shining lamps! We walk under the green linden trees of the park The lindens smell good in the good June evenings! At times the air is so scented that we close our eyes. The wind laden with sounds—the town isn't far— Has the smell of grapevines and beer . . . II —There you can see a very small patch Of dark blue, framed by a little branch, Pinned up by a naughty star, that melts In gentle quivers, small and very white . . . Night in June! Seventeen years old! —We are overcome by it all The sap is champagne and goes to our head . . . We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips Trembling there like a small insect . . . III Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe, —When, in the light of a pale street lamp, A girl goes by attractive and charming Under the shadow of her father's terrible collar . . . And as she finds you incredibly naïve, While clicking her little boots, She turns abruptly and in a lively way . . . —Then cavatinas die on your lips . . . IV You are in love. Occupied until the month of August. You are in love. —Your sonnets make Her laugh. All your friends go off, you are ridiculous. —Then one evening the girl you worship deigned to write to you . . . ! —That evening, . . . —you return to the bright cafés, You ask for beer or lemonade . . . —We're not serious when we are seventeen And when we have green linden trees in the park.

With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird watched my grandfather during the Great Depression use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields knowing this world is just one pig after another in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose, shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer- blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly until he died more naturally of cancer too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters, masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus, the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart, I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.

something there is that loves an arrow, or flattery like when the current or blaming mouths in mirrors to private discernment and alarms engorge every room's crease. you can't hear how you sound and the voice in your head plus the ones that surge. nothing can muffle it, but everything shows up instead. Notice first, groove in couch or tore up face. house no food and he show up on the third day, shut in and announcing. He shuffle some promise which is just enough to stave off an evening out taking cell pics of yourself and all those who meant so much, who you can no longer detect save for screen reflections and the outpost toilet scene because you agree with yourself that it must be a case of November.

nun meets me at the station,    first month with carol and dick reynolds.set the table.clean the kitchen.vacuum. thank god she didn't ask me to take care of the children. i dry  dishes in the afternoon.   watch her can apples from the backyard, put them in the cellar dark to save for winter. why is everything so quiet?   why does the man come home from school everyday at 3:30 and read the paper?   why a different casserole on the table every night and everyone eats one portion and one portion only?  why is there always enough, but never too much. . .

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon. Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees. Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage, While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage And gone to shiver in their winter clusters. Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin, Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters. Even the swarms of kids have given in To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure: TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains. The days throw up a closed sign around four. The hapless customer who'd wanted something Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

Another year!—another deadly blow! Another mighty Empire overthrown! And We are left, or shall be left, alone; The last that dare to struggle with the Foe. 'Tis well! from this day forward we shall know That in ourselves our safety must be sought; That by our own right hands it must be wrought; That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low. O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer! We shall exult, if they who rule the land Be men who hold its many blessings dear, Wise, upright, valiant; not a servile band, Who are to judge of danger which they fear, And honour which they do not understand.

I am standing outside in Minnesota ghost wind recalling names in winter mist The road smells of dogs two days dead White photographers talk in the house of mainstream media I can’t articulate the agony of Eagle Singer’s children to them. We celebrate the old man while another generation shoots crushed and heated prescriptions sells baskets, machinery, the fixtures yet to be installed in the house, yet to be heated by the tribal government, for another night stolen by the stupors and the wondrous pleasure of forget everything medicines. Back inside Uncle Two Dogs rolls me a smoke out of organic American Spirit I look to a last cup of coffee. The way home fills with snow our tracks human and machine.

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold, Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old, And cotton, scarce as any southern snow, Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow, Failed in its function as the autumn rake; Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take All water from the streams; dead birds were found In wells a hundred feet below the ground— Such was the season when the flower bloomed. Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed Significance. Superstition saw Something it had never seen before: Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield. No dice. We stack twigs for burning in glistening patches but the rain won’t give. So we wait, breeding mood, making music of decline. We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving. We ache in secret, memorizing a gloomy line or two of German. When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, wind, with your cargo of zithers! November 1981