Lowghost

1

A big black bird walked me all the way

from the cooling apartments

to the bus-stand. It said, the archipelagoes

are bleeding sulfur roses

in those crime stories by the widow Mandelstam

and there is no moon. There’s a blind pond,

and if you believe,

and if you believe in such things: it reflects

the moon.

I’m selling nylons on the street

so to buy coal. Of course, Jack

Spicer thinks this is a deception

with an open can of stewed tomatoes . . .

Of course, Jack wrote that

there is never an ocean

in all grail legend.

There is a boat.

God, too, eats spam sandwiches

with both hands. It is going

to rain by afternoon. The fountains

spilling . . .

Peace to you old man. And soon.

2

Our sun is dust and grease

congealing in a flattened metal sieve

fitted to an angry fan

in the night’s soup-kitchen, exhausted

privileges in the wilderness can be

mistaken for a blonde woman

who knows how to type— 700 words

a minute, juicy fruit and blue

balls of gum

with a chipped emerald barrette.

It’s amateur night at THE CLOUD

and if you bring a brown bag

with deer inside grazing on the brains

of pumpkins, they will dispense with the cover.

A storm approaches. The handbills

are fading on the phone poles. The sun

is setting into the green sea. A millennium

of turtles grunting away on the beach. Jack,

in the tree. That guy’s

3

a thief, isn’t he?

4

There’s the bright bone-metal stipples

of trout, drowning in air.

The pope eats a lettuce and tomato sandwich

with a warm jar of beer. Jack,

I admire all the absurdity

of Jacob biting the black ankle

of the blonde angel, serial

hosannas drifting like sick white birds

down and over the greening winter desert. He lived

for those matchbook courses

in life studies

where a brown pear sat on its azure scarf

and coughed

while air from the open window

freshens the room with lost studs of aria

over a city, not twentieth-century Los Angeles.

The oculus writhing

with blue smoke in eight staves

of thracian glass—

the streets smell of asparagus and cold macaroni, it attracts

the Jackal who is awake now

with our old junctions of time,

having climbed in pink pajamas

out of a wall, up

from the dry well— a broken clay

pot, half-smiling on the cobbled walk. Jack,

if we name this bastard

the white narcissus

will wilt under the hot piss of fawns

and we recognize him crossing the lawns

where at his feet children are coloring

in the red and orange of kites

that once fluttered

over Tehran:

the old sin-eaters

I said, stippled like trout

in the dead monk’s stew pond:

Jack is asleep in the long silver

sleeper-car. Dreaming of new metals

in Afghanistan, even before the several czars

faxed it all to their cigars.

Or Light’n Hopkins, the corpse

6

of dear mrs. sim neeer, hot shrimp rolls, and drought

in the Alps . . .

the wild hosannas along the poured stone pikes. Living stone

KINGFISHER. EXCALIBUR. BADGER

dying in the pine-barren’s grout . . .

the thick forest with a river of milk

for its natural moat. Or coitus . . .

the alphabet, amour,

fisher, le sud, the mouth.

Oh, Jack, never that, never the delta,

never the mouths.

7 ( . . . the end)

The way the island is not all exaggerations

in an empty space, all lichen and avocados

with thin and vertical red clarinets— birds lifting off

the silhouette of a sunken ship, screaming

in the noon

at the redundant living fish

who telegraph the squid

of 40 million yrs. of white trees and sunlight

admonishing the (leafs) and rust . . .

to die in an alcoholic storm with rain making

dark nipples on the window, the wind

singing to the lambs, and Jack

we’ve forgotten the omens of the old masters’

magic lanterns—

all that smoke in the dark rooms, handbills

fading on the green and black totem pole,

its foremost bird with wings spread,

the wide black sails behind him. All of it

rinsed in cold vodka—

let’s just get past it,

the matchbook’s instructions on dying

and foreshortening in snow. Jack, shit,

the horses in the corral aren’t just being eaten

by frenchmen anymore . . . man, the pigeons too

are holding punched tickets with the cows.

You did good, sir, surely

very dead and misunderstood. But

I read your poems aloud this morning

to the lowghost cat. She chased

her tail like a kitten

and soon was hiding under the bed.

Behind me

some asshole on the radio, in a new opera,

stabbed another in the neck;

all this taking place, of course,

in a bedroom . . . wingset, wingset.

Then, more alien spacecraft honking horns, with you,

Jack, giggling,

the sun rising in the West.