George Starbuck

Federico Garcia Lorca used to uncork a bottle or two of wine whenever the duende dwindled for a line. James Joyce would have preferred a choice of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany’s, but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies. The Later Henry James bet shots of rum against himself in games of how much can we pyramid upon a given donné. Little Dylan Thomas didn’t keep his promise to stay out of Milk Wood. He tried to drown the fact as best he could. Anna Akhmatova Eyed the last shot of a Pre-war cognac de champagne. “So much for you, little brandy.Do svidanya.” T. S. Eliot used to belly it up to the nearest bar, then make for a correlative objective in his car. Proust used to too.

for Arthur Freeman Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes The heat’s on the hooker. Drop’s on the lam. Cops got Booker. Who give a damn? The Kid’s been had But not me yet. Dad’s in his pad. No sweat. Margaret Are You Drug Cool it Mag. Sure it’s a drag With all that green flaked out. Next thing you know they’ll be changing the color of bread. But look, Chick, Why panic? Sevennyeighty years, we’ll all be dead. Roll with it, Kid. I did. Give it the old benefit of the doubt. I mean leaves Schmeaves. You sure you aint just feeling sorry for yourself? Lamb Lamb, what makes you tick? You got a wind-up, a Battery-Powered, A flywheel, a plug-in, or what? You made out of real Reelfur? You fall out the window you bust? You shrink? Turn into a No-No? Zip open and have pups? I bet you better than that. I bet you put out by some other outfit. I bet you don’t do nothin. I bet you somethin to eat. Daddy Gander’s New Found Runes Rain, rain, grow the hay. Grow the weeds another day. If I die before I wake, Skip it. Little Boy Blue come blow. Can’t Man; learning a new instrument. What’s with the old one? Where’d you get the new one? Found it in a haystack Man. Old Mother Hubbard, Decently covered, Went to her final reward. She had to laugh. Manger was half Empty and half kennel. Ol’ Shep. At it Again. Livin’ on Principal. I fired a missile up. It came down maybe. Maybe it stayed up. Things aint much like they used to be.

I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters. Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano. Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once. Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist’s powders and unguents. And when John Keats looked at you in a collection of pots it was poetry at first sight: quotable beautiful teleological concatenations of thoughts. It’s the proverbial dog of a poem, though: slobbering panting and bright-eyed like a loquacious thug or a spokesperson embattled on behalf of a sociopolitical thesis * to which he has not had access owing to the need-to-know basis. And he never says which pot. Just an oasis of tease in a sea of tilth, kind of a concrete catachresis bopping along with timbrels, irrepressible as Count Basie, fabulous I mean classic I mean vout, keeping the buckwheat in and the weevils out while the rest of us get and spend and ache and earn and go to the Bruce Springsteen concert and take our turn lining up at the Metropolitan to look at the Macedonian gold krater and promising ourselves to read up seriously.

I   Recto Over the seaworthy cavalry arches a rocketry wickerwork: involute laceries lacerate indigo altitudes, making a skywritten filigree into which, lazily, LCTs sinuate, adjutants next to them eversharp- eyed, among delicate battleship umbrages twinkling an anger as measured as organdy. Normandy knitted the eyelets and yarn of these warriors’ armoring— ringbolt and dungaree, cable and axletree, tanktrack and ammobelt linking and opening garlands and islands of seafoam and sergeantry. Opulent fretwork: on turquoise and emerald, red instants accenting neatly a dearth of red. Gunstations issue it; vaportrails ease into smoke from it— yellow and ochre and umber and sable and out. Or that man at the edge of the tapestry holding his inches of niggardly ground and his trumpery order of red and his equipage angled and dated. He. II   Verso Wasting no energy, Time, the old registrar, evenly adds to his scrolls, rolling up in them rampage and echo and hush—in each influx of surf, in each tumble of raincloud at evening, action of seaswell and undertow rounding an introvert edge to the surge until, manhandled over, all surfaces, tapestries, entities veer from the eye like those rings of lost yesteryears pooled in the oak of your memory. Item: one Normandy Exercise. Muscle it over, an underside rises: a raggedy elegant mess of an abstract: a rip-out of kidstuff and switchboards, where amputee radio elements, unattached nervefibre conduits, openmouthed ureters, tag ends of hamstring and outrigging ripped from their unions and nexuses jumble with undeterred speakingtubes twittering orders as random and angry as ddt’d hornets. Step over a moment: peer in through this nutshell of eyeball and man your gun.

for Helen Vendler O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough, Or both! O promissory notes of woe! One time in Santa Fe N.M. Ol’ Winfield Townley Scott and I ... But whoa. One can exert oneself,ff, Or architect a heaven like Rimbaud, Or if that seems, how shall I say,de trop, One can at least write sonnets, a propos Of nothing save the do-re-mi-fa-sol Of poetry itself. Is not the row Of perfect rhymes, the terminal bon mot, Obeisance enough to the Great O? “Observe,” said Chairman Mao to Premier Chou, “On voyage à Parnasse pour prendre les eaux. On voyage comme poisson, incog.”

* O fury- bedecked! O glitter-torn! Let the wild wind erect bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn! It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect; bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born now now while ox and ass and infant lie together as poor creatures will and tears of her exertion still cling in the spent girl’s eye and a great firework in the sky drifts to the western hill.

Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice. And the first rows, shaken with an afterslice That’s bowled them into their seats like a big wet ciao. O daffy panoply O rare device O flashing leg-iron at a whopping price Whipping us into ecstasies and how, The whole galumphing Garden swung and swung, A rescue helicopter’s bottom rung Glinting and spinning off, a scud of fluff, A slash of petals up against the bough, A juggler’s avalanche of silken stuff Gushing in white-hot verticals among Camels and axels and pyramids, oh wow, Bewilderment is parachute enough. We jolt. A sidewise stutterstep in chorus. The other billboards flicker by before us. Gone! with a budded petulance that stung. So talented! So targeted! So young! Such concentration on the bottom line! We vanish down the IRT. A shine. A glimmer. Something. Nothing. To think twice Was to have lost the trick of paradise.

“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are No rhymes

“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card” and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the Enemy Aggressor. No news medium troubled to put it in quotes. And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen. In your office you were informed. Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle. So far nothing turns up. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed. No tip-off. No release. Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes. Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists. Pity the press photographers, not called. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said all that there is to say in that language. Twice what is said in yours. It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.

Here is the grackle, people. Here is the fox, folks. The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox hopes. Here are the fronds, friends, that cover the fox. The fronds get in a frenzy. The grackle looks. Here are the ticks, tykes, that live in the leaves, loves. The fox is confounded, and God is above.