Pray, What is the Reason for That?

John J. Trause reads from Lewis Carroll’s “You are Old, Father William” (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter V) for Poetry at Tasty Coco on Tuesday.

Powow at the Jabberwocky

I will be co-featuring at the famous Powow monthly reading at Jabberwocky Book Store in Newburyport, MA on Saturday–(50 Water St., 3:00 p.m.) Reading with me will be Quincy Lehr. And on the open mic there could be as many as 15 Nemerov winners, so we’ll be sure to have our business straight. Thanks to Michael Cantor for the invite.

Magical Thinking

I, an odd boy and no fan of sport,
become obsessed. My team is hated, sort
of, but they’re loved at home. A code of dress
and facial hair. The bought and very best.

Confetti dreams, a shower of office paper
in the old part of Manhattan, is a staple
celebration—only once a vomiting
from hell. So whether it’s Matsui who’s committing
to the low outside or Derek Jeter firing
it to first, I find the game inspiring
and the bullying investment incidental.
Call me green. Hey, call me sentimental.

But if the Yankees take this in the sixth,
just think of all the things that can be fixed.
___
Photo–Aftermath of Yankees tickertape parade, 1999, from Fithy Mess.

The Parking Lot Apostasy

For Paul Weingarten

I

Unraveled in this Sunday morning parking lot
I fix upon a brilliant blue and orange shore
where Autumn maples break against the lighted sea
of Heaven’s space. St Aloysius’, set in stone
behind me, drops away, disolving in a world
of infinite velocity and timeless love.

A smiling priest—that conduit of Jesus’ love
and vessel of the sacraments—surveys his lot
of worshipers. He greets them in a netherworld
of cars and donut shops along the carbon shore
of Sunday in the suburbs. On this asphalt stone
we build our church, this outpost of the Holy See…

to which I turn my back in pure apostasy,
a gestural communion with a sea of love
and hurricanes. Behold! The gold Rosetta Stone
of landscape architecture zones this common lot
of rolling property, allotting force to shore
the forms of nature, to create a given world.

II

I saw a painting once. Passaic at Newark . Whirled
in muscle-colored strokes that cut into a sea
of lighted sky, an oil tank on either shore,
the railroad trestle frames a yellow sun. I love
this painting. There’s another one I love (…a lot)
of Jesus walking on the waves, a human stone

untroubled on the lines of the abyss where stone
was never laid, defying nature in a world
of air and water. Pendant to the wife of Lot,
a human form against and in. O fallacy
divine! The guy who painted both portrays the love
of God, the only love of which we can be sure.

III

October’s cracking air and colors reassure
me as I turn to face the mediocre stone,
the wall that calls to mind the opposite of love
where nuns release their donut eaters from the world
of Christian doctrine. Children run. I see
a crayon picture scud along the parking lot:

A scribble with a lot of flowers near the shore.
A sea of white and green that breaks across a stone
imagined in a Sunday world of perfect love.

Boy in the Restaurant

His face ground like a winding clock,
a timing chain his clicking teeth.
His stare lay heavy as a rock
and things turned slowly underneath.

He locked his eyes and took me in,
mechanical and unimpressed.
The contours of his clacking grin
and disengagement coalesced

to sketch a Buddha in the rain,
the quintessential human being.
He held the wrath of God in rein,
content in time, intent on seeing.

Madrid, October 11, 2009

The MC Throws Down at Tasty Coco, 10/20/09

It’s a Mean ol’ World

Got Flinched?

Here’s news that prompts me to plug my chapbook. Modern Metrics, the small press that published Aquinas Flinched last year, is now an imprint of Exot books. This is a good thing for various reasons. For example, now, when you click the link in the permanent plug at the upper right corner of Cassowary, it will not only work again, but it will take you to the new home page from which you can, with PayPal or a credit card, order my chapbook, or Mike Alexander’s brand new chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices, or any of the other fine chapbooks originally published by Modern Metrics. Exot explains itself and offers reviews of its publications on the home page. Why not go there now?!

Descansos Negras

Where Judith blushes and withdraws the knife,
where witches levitate and Saturn eats,
where rotting Peter drags his bleeding wife
across the black evacuation streets,

there is a song. A cudgel through the air
to which the felon strums and ancients spoon
their dusty porridge on the basement stair.
A broken dog laments the dying moon

as covered wagons veer from the Colossus,
decamping with the towns of the Plateau.
The toll road’s spiked with dirty little crosses
and wails of Las Canciones del Sordo.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Oct 11/13/16, 2009

Grant Park

Ontogeny. The feeling that I’ve come
awake. I want to paint again. To write.
I hear you on the telephone tonight

conversing with a voice that’s calling from
the television: Kenya Celebrates.
A grainy feed, some newscast lost in time

comes channeled to the eye as a sublime
phylogeny that crosses latent states.

A recapitulation of the dream—

America is born into the world

again. Democracy awakes at last.
A pixilated species comes uncurled
and scurries over borders in a stream

of colored light, familiar, wild and fast.

November 5, 2008