Lascaux no more than a splintering matchstick (Pisgah popped by a fan of the Cleveland Guardians, shitting on Sitting Bull’s wriggling gelatin silver print, proud as a house cat buffed in the musk of a garter)
FIRST of the trumpeting smokescreens
playing shibari with tarp-smocked,
knock-kneed cinderblocks
just on the edge of the pond
they’d whilom tilled to furnish a ball field,
cigarette
number three remembering
Haymarket fires and Zenith’s young Elmer Gantry
and everything gay and gray and vaguely
grim as deciduous misery—
wan reek of some somebody prodding
a friable pile of smoldering diapers,
blasphemous plastic picked
to a licorice snakeskin
echoing crepitant bends
of the treacly Fremont sucked
to a spluttering smudge,
like tar slung salving and suturing
bruised macadam,
the gangrenous ache of congealing
asphalt
scored with a viper’s tongue,
these scowling staves
that grass seed
violently
elbows, throbbing
a torpid heart
against
glowering paddocks of
tantalum packed like
cackling pallets
exhumed from a ruinous Walmart’s spleen,
left stacked
like snickering sedges dissembling
cityscapes, sulkily
greige as a sand flea
cramped in a surf-licked keep—
some sucked-in skull and its teething
crenellate laurels slopped down a
shrunken scowl—left reading
for rent.
Millie saw blood on the concrete,
called it a rorschach,
took it for lunch at Christie’s,
told old Rum Tum Thomathon Hoving,
pale as the Washington Obelisk
cocked above bickersome bog scum,
Say, it looks a bit like Plato, now, doesn’t it?
Plato cringed on the fringe of the finicky Lethe,
wormed beneath Rose and Vine St.,
shouldered the carcass of Donald Judd
as a whale as stale and pale as drug-smuggled horse cum,
dragged him up-over Mulberry Hill and the
gutters of Elm Tree, muttering
then and again
and again,
Is this what you meant by
‘The winter is bleak.’
‘If somebody says it’s art, it’s art.’
‘Most art is fragile
and some should be placed
and never moved
away.’—
To think of it…,
froze before a disparaged lawn
and the bones of a cankerous yew tree,
shuddering shotguns slopped all
pyrrole orange and
phthalo green and
quinacridone rose,
each sold for a Swiss-cheesed shipping container
some huckster’d stuffed with but butter-soft shillings
grown greener than gorse-eaten horse shit
clabbering oat milk
set out to pasture,
squeezed— and
then,
possessed with the devil’s mischief,
sowed sole-first this soulless hull of a shaper
to preen as an emulous stand of rebar,
mocking the knock-kneed trees and eaves,
and screamed,
through whistling teeth,
I claim this land for Ancient Greece!
and though it recoiled and swelled against
canted brick
at the cantering clip of an Arabic
palfrey whipped with a chortling surge of obsidian
frothed to pahoehoe,
nobody seems to recall having heard it—
Plato discovered a squealing Expo.
Studio Apartment,
$900, (water, gas, and sewage incl.)
Donald uncaps his pen
and tries to remember,
with bleating brow,
the soul of a circle,
the shape of the Nao Victoria’s
prow impressed against curdling maps;
and somebody, elsewhere,
alien, scrapes an illumining
dollop of char they’d chipped
from a split and glistening joist
across wrinkling concrete, echoing
ginkgo leaves and the skirts of those
Balinese dancers prancing, tracing
a wild bequest of steps
and gestures churned
from an ancient trance.
