Content migration and file formatting
The elusive logic of the algorithm,
Women speaking the words they speak
In the time they need to speak them.
What do they do when the silence comes,
When the night comes,
When they are alone with the silence and the night,
Having spoken the words they spoke
In the dynamic of the day?Picture a man in the presence of these speaking women,
A man in the harness of his quiet routine.
Picture the brief itinerary of his words,
His lachrymose descent,
Once again with the short end of the stick
Tapping on an adjoining cubicle to confess
His love of Dire Straits.See him out of touch with the anger that would billow,
That would incinerate.Hear him remember the solarium, the sky-blue pool
Filled with mountain water. Hear him say the words
Beautiful losers of the family whose daughter he loved
And how, with D. H. Lawrence on his mind,
He traced the effects of classical and rock
Upon his being, resolving for one and not
The other so he could have a life of peace
Beyond the grip of bass-driven narcissism.Go with him to the summer a blond boy
In seersucker jumps from a cliff taking
White teeth and Fresh Cream with him,
A summer in the euphoric spaces
Of a Dexedrine high eating Marty Ballin
Sounds and driving a car with his ass
To the wheel saying white line continue
Sarah liked to pee in an open field
With apple trees looking on…
In a panic leaving for dead the deer he had struck.Ask him where he has been that the young
Now vote Republican and invest for life
And women show the protective instinct
Of their own immaculate incorporation.See him leave the computer screen for the public library
Across the street, carrying Robert Lowell’s Selected Poems
While recalling the agent saying last night about the novel
In her hands, “We’re running a little behind.
Happens sometimes.” Sensing there’s something
In the sound of his voice that says he’s not her type,
Not any of their types. Four years of morning exhilaration
Producing ecstatic prose. That voice on the other end of the line
Was just a voice, nothing more, he says now,
The rooms in his mansion have multiplying dimensions.Yes, tired of Robert Lowell. Tired of his oppressive weight,
His pedigree, his IQ points and quadrangle casualness,
The tyranny of his name, the colossus dead in the back
Of a New York City cab.Run out from under him, America, run out.
Then hear America laugh and say it already has
In the century past and witness a Teutonic woman
With helmet hair down by the river and his reaction
To her orange bike, saying, “Long ago and far away
Did I pee the bed in a house to which I had been dispatched,
A house with an apple that had to last for days and where,
With a child’s love did I embrace such a bike,
Riding round and round a dirt path all for me. Tell me
That time has come again and I am back with
Those girls who deceived me with bedtime stories
Of kidnap by the railroad men. Tell me, please tell me.”Then hear her as she says, “Live before your bones
Grow brittle and break. Leave this land of unreality,
Your Dwight David Eisenhower and your Richard
Milhous Nixon and your sweet Sandy Koufax.
Leave Elgin Baylor and Don Drysdale and flee to where
The fire cannot cease your breath and lick your soul to death.”Then hear him roar his answer back:
“I am New York City born and bred and will die where
I need to be, local upon the ground of my own constituency,
Offering appellations for things that have no names
And stores of ignorance where none were known to exist.
More than this I cannot say with darkness finally come
And the apparel for my bedtime so strongly calling me.”August 2003