GRAVES
STONES
(DRAFT OF BOOK ONE)
SCOTT
ZIEHER
The writer must direct his sentence as carefully and leisurely as the marksman his rifle.
H.D. THOREAU
JOURNALS
Let us send our thoughts to God,
Tell them to inquire
How much longer it is fated
Hangmen rule this world!
TARAS SHEVCHENKO
THE DREAM
FOR
MIKE
MURPHY
War now, like before—
The room smells
Like sandalwood and vetiver
And amber wood and vetiver.
We’re contemplating a fire
Because it’s cold, it’s always cold.
The gloaming is gone—
It’s just plain night.
In honor, having cabbage.
Might we drive an ambulance
Like dishonest Ernest? No.
Faulkner faked it, too.
Both went to war poets
And came out not.
Both less
Than half this, our age—
Warped and harried
On the dirty page—
Neither
Saw fire.
Neither got stained across the face
With smoke and wax and mud.
We never went to war
And yet can’t remember a moment without.
*
Fellow I knew long ago, Jersey boy
Called his crew cut The Chicago Box.
His name was Phil but he went by Kevin
Like everybody in securities.
Kyiv is the size of Chicago.
The aggressor has overplayed
His hand— a hand
Like old, dirty propaganda ape’s
Covered with smoke
And wax and mud.
The dogs of my friends
In Texas don’t hurt—
Covered with smoke
And wax and mud.
Crime is alive and well in America
And war is well the world over.
*
Now, I’m no Ezra Pound
But call me Ezra Pound.
No direct penalty on the stock market
No direct penalty on the vers libre market.
In the church of my heart
The choir is on fire.
See also Osip Mandelstam’s beans.
See also Emil Cioran’s beets.
Go now, and get your gun
And if you haven’t any, we’ll give you one.
All the blackboards
Whitewashed—
Instead we light a meager fire
Kindled by LIFE magazines—
We’re not starving
Yet, we say, grayly.
But I know an army ranger.
And I know a green beret.
I remember Vietnam.
Beirut. Both storms—
I think I even
Remember Afghanistan—
Though it’s cloudy
With chance of torrents.
It makes a difference
How we’re innocent—
How we couch our horror of power.
How we dolphin our sonnets—
Widening our tablets
Sharpening our diamond chisels.
My arms are lean.
I might be a coward.
*
$100 barrel.
$5 gas in Oregon.
Save candle sallow.
Save glass jars and dirty rags.
Gasoline donations accepted.
The battle of wits at Bulgaria
The battle of snits at Mongolia.
Name your interstitial township—
Small men gambling
With greasy playing cards.
The big one drops a diamond
And the puny one’s knees buckle—
Dropping
A spade.
The little guy’s always in charge.
His big ape never cares.
Yea.
I said ape. Because he’s big and ugly.
Because
He is dumb as your average loose animal.
*
Troops in unison.
Boots shuffling slowly.
President unsanctioned—
Commercial free. All our red
Lights blinking in unison
Like the boots of troops slowly shuffling.
From here to New Zealand.
From here to the almighty ruble in free fall.
We talk in trillions, anyhow.
We smoke yet nervous more.
But there were no carpet bombs
On children’s schools.
Falsehood flies and the truth
Comes limping after (with a knife
In his grin—
And blood on his chin)
Root and terminus
At once.
Like we kill
For pork belly.
All ye hoarders
Expecting potted meat
And collective pots of chili
While the jet age revives— as the nyet age.
How we learn greed
Is always suspicious.
I deserve this—
The thief says
And the present owner
Does not.
Our press corpse
Just can’t get enough saying Molotov Cocktail.
Our man in Moscow
Joseph Brodsky learned English
In order to translate W.H. Auden.
See September 1939, which is easy enough—
Right in our faces. See Poland
Of all the unlucky neighbors.
Beer bottles full of gasoline.
Unto horses versus tanks.
No more beer.
Only bombs.
How many wars?
Cries the white dog
Chewing a paw off
To free it of shackle.
Let’s watch the white dog
Try to chew his neck off.
Them Russians
And them Russians.
What say you Bronson Alcott?
What say you Orestes Brownson?
Just as expected—
Sour notes on the bombardier’s dulcimer.
Tin cymbals.
Cellophane snare.
We clog rivers for unfree floating
Toward the ocean in transcendental ecstasy.
I’m attuned to the melting wax
Technique of hollowing sculpture.
An embarrassment of bitches—
My wrist hurts, my knife exposed.
Broke my tailbone
And drove to Chattanooga one Tuesday.
Was yesterday
Our 1939?
Is this trembling memory
My ten-year-old mother’s memory?
Or my twelve-year-old father’s? My own at ten—
People hanging off helicopters.
All three entirely flummoxed
Being first generation Germanospherics.
We are all here
In the exact same place.
I ate from a jar of purple cabbages
And two kinds of pickle for dinner.
I am ambassador
Of nothing.
Ask me for heavy breathing
And I’m out of my league.
No fly—
But my blade spins.
Sharpening an alarming
Ticonderoga Soft rate.
Right arm sore to the shoulder.
Wheat futures at Paris Euronext.
Official correction—
Two yellow-eyed dogs in the junkyard
Covered in mud
Covered in blood
Like polar bears
In the middle of a swamp.
Higher prices
At the unholy pulpit of the pump.
Still the road beckons
Still the road bellows
For the return of our four
Feet across the tarmac
The macadam, the paving
Stones from Plano’s pine cones
To the falling of Menomonee Falls—
What quietly, smugly apalls
Because we never even knew
About the water element.
Our bluebird’s perch—
A young mother could run to the hospital.
No soldier tells us what to do.
We’ll never flee to Poland.
Your editor is an idiot.
His digits are three years outdated.
I wanna
Ride my llama.
I’ve plumb run out
Of snake oil.
I could use a sharp object—
Help me lance this boil.
Please tell us pork futures
Are still secure.
And with them, dill pickles—
Pork rind futures? How fare these?
I can see the hospital
From here.
We are not armed
And never will be.
We’ll never see Poland now.
Retool your punch-list soldier.
It’s their war
But it’s still our bunker.
One bright light
Drowns out all the other light.
At least it finally stopped raining.
The palimpsesting of a soldier’s notebook
Requires humectant air
To be moist effective.
Exhausts the Fanta©
Brand can of red cream soda armaments.
Now back to our man in Gdansk.
Expecting orchards—
Put your children to sleep
Gently this night and all hence.
Rhyme for them.
Proceed with patience.
*
Let’s go find the dead man’s films.
Let go play High Castle, like clouds in trousers.
It should be fun.
No it shouldn’t.
Let’s to Beloit
And find farmers.
Let’s to mocking
Their mouthpieces.
It’s disturbingly quiet
Until the heavy mortar bursts.
Small arms.
Like Fanta© brand canned whimperings
Like our unsharp’d spikes
For the mile on gravel—
Kicking up cinders
Nearing four minutes—
Spilling beer in your lap
On the bus to march in Washington—
- What else was there to do
Having lived through George
Bloody
Orwell?
Bologna is just a very thick hot dog.
Give me a Braunschweig on pumper
Nickle, slab of Limberger, sharp mustard
And eleven vinegar pickles.
Give me a tall glass
Of Fanta© brand on balls of ice.
Here’s how! Paltry radio news from
Moscow, one big palimpsest.
Military poetry anymore!
It makes no sense!
All wagons and orbits—
This town has one red light
And no Dollar General.
It ain’t urban, mumbles
The Governor, chewing
His eraser—
Nobody listens.
Least of all soldiers.
Soldiers without wagons.
Soldiers without orbits.
Soldiers without ink.
Soldiers without onionskin.
Holy
Holy
Soldiers for Hesios.
Soldiers for smoke.
History professor
Eating hot nuts, one at a time.
Drama professor
Gobbling balls of golden cheese.
Chemistry professor
On their knees.
Chinese Jesus
Buddha HooDoo
Allah frees us
And the Communist sneezes.
Ham hollers.
Vodka comes from potato.
So they never freeze or starve—
Not slowly or otherwise.
Both bunks bulging in a kind
Of misnamed lime green industrial.
Trojan route
Through town.
Trojan rout—
The sound of calm confusion
In sixteen hour segments
Chopped like chives.
Every helmsman’s helmet
Bent from nape to pate.
Like Muslim pickle cans
From Old Milwaukee.
Half darkness
Quarter darkness
Sixteen darkness
Such is dawn.
Everybody has a table
To blame, else
A handful of wax, protecting
The graves, protecting the stones.
*
They ripped the general down
In January—
Yanked from the heels
Of his horse—
Most civic architecture
Is poorly made.
All civic sculpture
Is ugly.
This—
Was both.
Your deliverables
In half a hollow bottle
With notes on knife sharpening.
Sleep like a chariot.
Monty Hall got nothing
On Door #2.
*
Docket Gold Tops Yellow Legal Pads—
For the court stenographer in all of us.
*
Play the piano
Or we’ll cut your hands off.
*
I found a handmade boomerang
In Venice on the ground.
Nobody
Was around.
That’s a lonely
Shirt, if ever.
*
Latter Day Saints sounds
From the radio—
Sing-along
With the Utah Bee Gees—
All the way
From Minnesota.
It’s all
Minnesota’s fault.
Strike while the rotten
Iron’s hot.
It’s always cold
As hell.
Sharp, sharp
Fragment wonk of schrapnel.
I’d have made a lousy medic
But give me a clipboard!
The drum
Is our blood.
Notes on short pencils.
Notes on hobo snow.
*
Dented helmet
Bent helmet
In headlands?
Head inland.
*
All soldier poets hereby
Requested memorize
Late William Bronk
And the short verse
Of Louis Zukofsky. 1000
Word sentence on both.
Next week— corn
Cob pipes and their carving—
Like scrimshaw
Last semester.
Other topics—
Arthritis and the soldier poet—
A cautionary fail.
Federal Supply Service poets
Now teaching survivalism—
For 200 years and running.
So it goes—
The state flows
And your February
Is not frozen.
Your nub is sharp
But it’s still a nub.
*
Forth we trod
Hopping headstones
In our bent
And dented helmets
Gov’t issue
Unlike these $40 boots.
So warm, so
Soft we laugh.
How fast can they
Get you there should
Be the motto
Of every foot soldier’s boot choice.
I’m proud not to be born a Wineapple
Or Lightfoot—
A Sackville or Berghandler
A Bixby or Degrandgagnage.
How regal—
To be running their fingers through the dirt
Slapping the back
Of someone else’s plowman.
Instead, our fingers
Are soft as breakfast biscuits.
Drawers full
Of orphaned items
Three dollars
And a dirty baseball—
All five passports
Up to date.
Jesus is an ocean.
Let’s go swimming.
You can’t practice wrestling
All alone.
Goodness is a wall
Of words.
Some of them are Aramaic.
Even if my name was Duyckink—
The old man at the pulpit and his others
Named Wineapple and Lightfoot
Sackville, Berghandler, Bixby
And good old Degrandgagnage—
They don’t talk Aramaic either.
Don’t even talk Spanish
Like their servants
Or their neighbors
And wouldn’t bother
Even if they were panlingual.
If my name was Duykinck
I’d change it.
*
The gray sky sags
As it grays ever more.
That’s a $75 sunset
Motherfucker.
That’s a Transcendental
Crepescule Extraordinaire.
That’s a tortoise
And you’re the hare.
A winter hare—
Skinny and demure.
Easy for the big birds to spot
Even without any snow.
Peace!
To the wet hares of February.
Wet hares
On the eastern flank.
Cold middle Europe—
You soldiers
Drinking hot milk
With a heaping spoonful of salt
By mistake.
Three inches of rain a day—
Here’s salt
In your milk.
Here, we call it
The Buffalo River.
In old Urkaina all the rivers
Are named Bug River.
Even the Danube.
No gas for you filthy pinkos!
(They call across
The Bug River.)
Our real problem
Is everybody else’s problems.
*
Strobes across the harbor.
Blinking fluorescents all over
Overnight American
Strip mall interstices.
Your generous donations support
Bigger Bulgarian guns.
Bulgaria trembles not.
Bulgaria whimpers not.
The mountains are cold—
Let’s drink them.
In fact, tonight
We drink not unindustriously
But for all
The flags on coffins.
Consider a further
Contribution by way of envelope
In the pew
In front of you
And if you’re not in a church
Check the seat pouch in your face.
Every river
In the wide, wide world—
Bug
River.
*
And smells like old man
Eating onion
In honor
Of our hungrier brothers
All we who smell
Like relish and anchovies.
Some days
A fellow just melts
In the old
Cold.
*
Large world growing smaller
By the millisecond.
Taller mountain, won’t even
Try to drink it.
*
Eastern flank.
Green candle burning bright.
Ungirdle your unholy holster—
Draw instead your pusillanimous blue stencils
And yellow pencils.
No red here.
On this day
You lost your lousy memory.
Ten minutes of early
Onset? War trauma?
Snap the fuck
Out of it.
Could these new pickled memories
Be held against recent forty years of transgressions?
Yes. No.
Maybe so?
It feels
Like war
In Toledo
In Minsk
Broken jaw
Radio wave
Two big, white dogs
Rolling in the muddy winter yard—
Full
Of candles
Emphasizing the machine
If you know what we mean.
*
Haunted, jaundiced
Just like the dying day.
Cincinnati is the sister city.
Hundreds have been gray—
Begin a poem for a soldier
And the godforsaken world goes to war.
1912 wax cylinders of Fisk University
Found. World on the verge of war then, too.
History doesn’t repeat
It rhymes. Like a squirrel.
Radio feed foretelling
All these couplet weeks.
Forty-five million new Russians?
Not a chance.
Dry goods and little jars
Of chipped beef.
Bone Jesus
Carved in a nut house.
Bone Buddha
Carved in a canoe.
Bone Allah
Carved in smoke.
Candles brightly
In each fist.
Minced onions
On the menu.
Luscious purple cabbage
From the jar.
Other pickling
Other creams.
A recalcitrant truth
Against the public brick.
*
If my fingers ache
Am I having a heart attack?
Themself—
Themself—
Molotov cocktail
On the library shelf.
Dusk mounts day
Like a rapist.
*
Helpless as a pile
Of rotten pumpkins.
*
Old, bald Vlad
Puts James Dean to shame—
Blood all down
His pristine, medium-starched shirt front.
Such is propaganda.
Such is soldier poetry.
*
Stop yourself
If you’ve heard this one before—
Everybody smoking
Around a pile of potato soup—
Young people don’t watch
Television—
I teach a class
On this.
*
These muscles are tensile.
These arms are children.
Calumny Calumny Calumny
Calling Jews Nazis.
How stupid the world
Keeps proving itself!
Capitol in the cross hairs—
Our man in Kryvy Rih—
Reporting from Zaporizhhya—
Minute by Rachmaninoff minute—
Babies dreaming—
Each one a Black Sea.
*
Red ink
And sharper swords.
Mustard seed
In the pudding.
*
Glory unto Brovary.
Glory unto Stayki by the River.
It is dawn
And their eggs are bloody.
Wonderful peace
Unto you on the green canals of cream.
The war we love.
Press corpse in your sneeze pocket.
All handkerchiefs—
Welcome to hell.
We are burning, staring
At our safety—
Unto puddles of sorrow—
Unstable as ever—
Our flinty resolve
Undaunted.
Stupid American cows.
Stupid Russian sheep.
We’re here to mumble Liberty.
She’s here to turn on the fan.
Air out
This shit storm—
This pursuit
Of happiness—
Greed, for when power
Is not quite enough.
War is subtractive.
Devoted to undoing.
Nowhere does it win.
Nativism and extremism
Never win.
Tip your hat to the enemy like days gone.
Or maybe
Never
Or probably
Never
Ach most certainly
Never.
We hate
As humans
As well
As we fear—
Our co-morbidities
Pure as the driven shrapnel shit storm.
Here we are fierce
Even at rest.
Still we are stunned
Now Ukraine feels as close as Newfoundland
Compared to the axis
Of devils.
All the Discoteque Magazines
Raving about Poland.
Electronica loves
An Eastern beat.
It’s minimalism—
That drum noise—
Sustained small arms
Tin cups full of potted meat.
Cans of conservas.
Crates of Blue Bird pears.
All around us flood.
All around us blizzard.
We are romantics.
Our weather is war.
Such is the weakness
Of this unsoldiered soul.
Odessa under siege.
Sea of Azov floats with inky dead—
Floats dark like frozen squid.
Air. Land. Sea. No more mantic rants
Like romantic wars of old.
The placid sky absorbs you.
There was never
Romantic war.
Only Romantic
Poetry. Romantic pants.
Horizons waft scorches of hair.
The burning is determined—
A slum of sun
Before the storm.
Ukraine is the second
Largest country in Europe.
(After
Her aggressor.)
Covered in bomb horns
And angry confetti.
Even in black and white
Roars Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi—
Our grisaille of the homeland
A Winterreise all of woe.
Zwiek we drank
In Brooklyn, close enough—
For a dollar a bottle.
Big bottles to boot.
We loved that food
Which will never go away.
*
Measuring time to target
Final attack heading
Helicopter drops another
Liver on the hospital roof—
Never boring, a window—
Not even in the rain.
*
Spastic
Haptics
The isthmus sending smoke signals
From a crooked candle all out of wax.
Poesis
Interruptus.
Get me to the train
On time, we dream—
And the dream
Is a very long line
And we play
The congas with rapid indignity—
Bang ‘em
If you got ‘em
Says the man
In the dark blue uniform of death.
Still
We smile
Because it’s a dream
For once.
And bombs you
Back to 1939.
*
Glory unto Minsk Massif—
A silent jet plane’s slow ascent
Hot black
Against a neutral gray.
Trembling like an elephant
Pumping gas.
*
Attic
Smells of cigar
Though never
Was one blown here—
And evening bleeds
Into the sea
As the church bells
Peel and battle rages at the zoo.
The actual comedian a better leader
Than the lifelong logo for despotism.
Strobes flow.
Put the cart before the dog.
Even the clouds
Are skittish.
*
We remind ourselves—
This is not (actually) our war yet.
How long it took 83 years ago?
24 months to join.
291,557 USA dead then.
27,000,000 Russians dead then (conservatively)—
(They apparently
Never tell the truth).
Flabbergasting numbers melting ice.
600 billions in funds.
The union flinches—
Helmet necessary.
This, too, a radio war.
Your heap, soon asleep.
20 hours to Hungary.
There are no men.
Smithereens
Dithering.
First thought
Only thought.
*
Our man in Smiloa—
Tweeds and balaclava.
Purple pliers
And a blood-red wrench.
Certain hours
Are longer than their mothers.
Another stubbing
In the ashcan-tray of our man in Ribnita.
Only gods
Know this darkness.
Gods, what smote
This puny little snot.
Another homeland
You’ll never know for war.
Effacement of war.
Helicopter from the long, cold north.
Across blue hands—
A yellow thread.
Dog drips
Onto his dinner.
The mud is dust.
The dust is ash.
The ash is burning
Bodies obliterated.
Our man in Demidovo
Outlined in chalk.
What happens in Demidovo
Could never leave
Because nobody
Could possibly know.
*
The bend in a river
Unrendered. Our cartographer is dead.
His crooked hut
Stark against the brittle sky.
Possibly bathers
Eating grapes in warmer times.
Times more nude
And less rude.
*
Clam diggers of Odessa!
Plumbers at Chornomorsk!
Take arms!
Unite on porches
Form on platforms
Aim upon porches
Scorch them back
All ye men 18-60
Hell bent
And leather necked
We hear you here
In your angriest hour!
We grow bones
And heaven groans—
Four pillows bent
To make a body.
I don’t know
What you men mean.
Just like pitch drop—
Only slower.
Even still—
Never will—
How certain gas is natural
And other isn’t.
Science is what we forget
Right after history.
The kind of focus
Fear needs.
Have you bundled?
How’s your cyber?
Jesus murder me instead.
Brain matter hanging from the rafters.
The sun gives us vitamins
Like a bend in the unrendered river
Without bathers
Eating naked grapes—
Just the musicology
Of theology
Without 600 year old songs.
Our man in Pomona, 1928.
Three smokes on a match
Kills three Russian sailors.
Land. Sea. Air.
Full of smoke.
The morals of war?
No the morsels of war.
Big crumb they call it
Else long pig.
It is 5:01AM in Kyiv.
Dnieper covered in bright red stars.
Not everybody dead—
Just almost.
Four Greeks dead.
Four Koreans freed.
Try to describe the smell of welding
Without the words of metal.
Try to describe the smell of smoke
Without the words of death.
Turn the spigot
Hot and high.
Some thoughts aren’t
Worth forgetting.
The membrane of memory.
The tensile strength of memory.
Cincinnati weeping into chili cheese dogs.
Weeping into golden Hudepohls.
Well done, please—
Extra gravy—
Like a good Depression era
Norwegian immigrant.
Only way to eat
That hockey puck.
Extra
Gravy
The luxury
In our laps.
Get your chew
Screwed on.
5340 miles away
As the crow sways.
How I would know
I don’t.
Draped like a flag
On a coffin.
Ukranian conflict.
Hungarian coffin.
Lobe of bones
Something humming—
The rarified form of a fog
Horn on a clear, cold night.
Like eating toffee
With a toothache.
The heat smells
Like taco meat.
Here’s a pile of paper.
Make a thousand drawings.
Make every one
Matter.
The stamina of the comedian.
He sleeps in his sweater
Says our man in Klin—
Crossroads to nowhere.
So far away you couldn’t know.
Hospital’s dark against the sharp dark city.
We find ellipses cumbersome eyesores.
Preferring closure
(Waiting
To be reactivated)—
Other governments
Are also stupid—
Just a bunch of ugly goats
Eating out of the gutter
As the gray sky breaks
Like a rancid egg.
Weapons for diplomacy—
Statecraft is warcraft
Which has far bigger profit
Margins than chickens.
Let’s turn the barn
Into a think tank.
*
What we see now unfolding here
Is no Paduan one-horse-hair brush
Or painting gilded with whiskers
On a prince in platinum armor—
Not even a wilting lily
Wincing through the rockpile.
No brace of lances
Poised for disemboweling.
Nothing shines, save
The explosions.
Salvations, they call
The sporadic salvos—
They inch into the second largest city.
The footage is shaken and gritty.
Hey dead man—
You’re lucky.
*
After urgency
A quietude.
Languishing alone
At last, sun prince
Piercing the milk
Of a cloud in trousers.
Local color.
Local poet.
Leftover breakfast—
At play in the fields of the word.
Borage oil and willow bark
Rub it on your fallow face.
What have we
To fear?
*
Now 360,000
Refugees in four days.
Eighteen chorister’s bosoms heave
In unison.
Finland? Sweden?
Tectonic quakes.
Who learns (none)?
What lesson (none)?
Now sirens howling, heading
Downtown from the university.
We will rub them out
In the crapper.
My daughter sleeps well
Under Chinese cotton.
Toes warmed by Chinese booties.
Lamp offering Chinese light—
I can hear
Her soft and happy snoring.
We lose our marbles—
Filling big, green bottles with gasoline.
Gay Ukranian cartoonist
Can’t go to war. Temperamentally unmilitary.
Doesn’t
Know
How
To kill.
Hanker for the first cold war
When the impossible remained impossible.
*
Can’t stop digging.
As we dig, we bury.
We offer this bowl of fruit—
Oblate for our prayer to prevent misfortune
To a tiger.
Our robes are red.
It is cold in the middle of the night
In Timphu, in talks, on hold
Through a tower
At Yakutsk.
But still
The tiger dies.
Where once
Were snow lions—
Now only in books
And prayer anymore.
Hard to happen upon.
Harden to stumble after.
How long we knew this tiger
Was hungry!
How hard it is—
To kill a tiger!
So then he got his sliver of tiger brain
Back to the laboratory
And this tyger
Wasn’t even dead.
It was alive
And kicking
In the crevasse
Of a mule hoof
Slowly pulling a fertilizer buggy
Full, not of grain, but of green bottles.
Zwiek full of gasoline.
Lvivske full of gasoline.
Obolon Oksamytove deep velvet
Full of gasoline corked by dirty rags.
Clink Clank Clunk
Goes the wheel of our old fangled wagon.
It’s a long road
To Uzhhrod.
Even the birds
Are tired.
Even the trees
Mired in worry.
Lugubrious
As a can of tuba.
In the wind.
In the winter.
At night.
In the rain.
*
(Princeton’s EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT.
Surprised it’s only 392 pages.)
(I’m in contact with Destiny.
She’s calling me back.)
Keep upright!
These times are fiberglass.
Cries the big box
Of durable good.
We prefer our drones
In music from Spain
Sung in French
By Africans.
Bright and oily.
Like a Refusenik—
I haven’t changed
My sweater in a month.
Like a can of High Power
Tamales in sauce.
Always ask for chili
With beans or chili
With no beans—
It’s matchless—
Delicious spicy taste
Out of Memphis
Most naturally
On a pack of matches.
I like a good laugh on the beach
Like your average Eastern European.
Gaunt over gravy
Sausages like stones
Over biscuits hard
As rock without gravy.
We don’t wonder why.
We’re not French.
*
Russian and Ukrainian arguments—
What can’t be won.
Much has changed in the last twenty-five
Minutes.
Real
Times
No
Rhymes.
He speaks
Only to his bodyguards.
Gas was 27¢ a gallon in 1949.
$5.25 in Los Angeles today.
Now there is a time tax on the poor—
Filling out paperwork!
Smoking menthols.
Eating tater tots.
*
Iron and steel near 8 billions.
Animal fats near 6 billions.
Ore, slag and ash near 4 ½ billions.
Other stuffs at 30 billions.
Throats cut and bleeding out
At Black Sea. We are not sanguine.
We sample the hammer’s appetite.
Hungry hammer. Thirsty sickle.
The barge bullying through
The landscape at large.
Long bone sticking a candle.
Gas can lacking a handle.
Shake this confetti—
Booty for freedom.
This roller goes coast to coast
Like your local incinerator—
Books burn just like
Bloodless bodies.
We tally the tarmac with tears
Like patriots before that was filthy.
We called menthol cigarettes Larries in the day.
Larry’d played chess with Bobby Fischer.
Killed a man.
Suffered many fools.
Always had
Two packs.
Live free or die.
Don’t tread on me.
Two things we thought
We understood—
We never did
And never could.
Power, like a totem, stood
And we took it, dumb as wood
To the hand
Of its retarded carver.
Rocks like solids.
Rolls like fluid.
Yes, I said retarded
Because his carving was backward-thinking.
Smoking in the airy corridors
Disbelieving war is the eternal
Infernal fact—
Now as always is and was.
Peace is a freak of nature.
She feeds on fear.
Even before
Jesus was war.
Even before
Grief and greed
Was war—
What never languished.
Whose stamp was never not wet.
Whose marker was never not sharp.
If this was prison
We’d be singing—
News of war bringing
News of famine
News of small arms
New in billions.
News of refugees
Who cannot flee.
Friend not far from Plovdiv—
How he fares?
What beers he drinks
And from what bottles?
How can Mina Minov edit his films
In this climate? Exploring northern reaches—
What grim hell?
What shoulder against what boulder?
*
Train station
Full of cans
Buda— never been.
Pest— all awash.
Remember the love
Of that neck of the woods.
Give them rootsy noodles.
Give them plenty pilsner.
Give them cabbage and coffee.
Give them cream.
Give them smells from the center of the soul—
An empty earth we hope not to erase.
We dance like dogs
On bobsleds.
We scratch
Without fathoming our skulls.
We can still breathe.
We can still scream.
We can still seethe.
We can still dream.
Might we awake
Uncle halo?
(Like the sad sea
Gives a shit about our stupidity.)
Woe unto these of extra sauce
On their too-much Jesus for lunch.
Too much molasses
Weighing down their carcasses.
Dnipro on fire.
Kyiv a final pyre.
Ears are strange machines.
Uncork one, let’s have a snort.
Pasternak backflipping, immolated.
Mayakovsky in a puddle of his own weeping.
His tears tamp these fires.
His tall ears note the shrieking
Big onion boulders of Moscow.
You should be in smolders
Your ghosts here saunter—
Gaunter hosts
Of the disease
Of political belief.
We’re all either
Chinese or African.
Hermitage lachrymose— balling
Its fool head off in actual fact—
Withersoever we gargle
Our badgering alarums—
How in hell
Does this doldrum end?
Our festal pennons flapping
Cyril and Methodius, doubly wobbly
Just 1000 versts to the capitol—
Mayhap lacking the requisite cobalt
Needed for the strong knees needed
To crawl to death.
Zaphorshian Sich in shock.
Zvenihorod shrinks not.
Szlachte in tatters.
Why did not the wind remove you
To the steppe as dust
As dust, as dust?
Tombs upon the meadows.
Once there was evil dancing.
Are they ashes?
The sun they censure.
Life’s no cabin.
Keep on waiting.
Get away, you blockheads.
You have never been in fetters!
Beggars
Featherless!
What a noble peahen you are!
You are only a pickled cabbage!
Sinop is spasms.
Trapezont ablaze.
Tis hard to bear the yoke— though
Freedom, truth be told, was never there.
Orsk foetal, curled.
Kos-Aral still ashamed.
Nizhni Novgorod rings in the hard tin.
Nizhni Novgorod dirty fingernailed.
Tiberias full of tears.
While the wise grandsir is dreaming
We’ll stop
And write a mighty epic
And stream it well above the earth
And weave hexameters for it
And take it to the attic
As breakfast for the mice!
Pochinky on one knee, bleeding.
Arzamas with a faraway look.
Lukoyanov sick as a beaver
With a fever.
Khabarovsk, Saratov, Leningrad, Gorky
Yautorovsk covered in blood!
Sad river Rudnya’s yellow waters
Run with poison iron, flushing.
It’s blushing—
Turning orange.
Old Yassy!
Dead Rzhev!
Recognizing all lack of national
Identity, saluting anyhow.
Not worth bleeding for—
Much less dying (somewhere worse).
Bialystok, the butt.
Bor’bists never forget!
Still only half dead.
We find these knees our own way.
Tumbling thrum of thunder—
At Mariupol in turgid rage.
Dark old density, the mall
In rubble, girders like limbs
Splayed.
Flayed.
This is not war.
This is salvation.
You are not even
A nation.
*
Body count on Ukrainian civilians— 638.
Helpless as a pile of wheat to the plumber.
Or a mess of bolts
To the farm boy sowing seed.
Worker means nothing anymore.
Make money and you matter.
More money?
More money.
Two candles balance the dead
Dog’s wooden ash box.
Have a can of Spanish fish.
Have some pickles, guilty.
It’s nowhere safe.
Of this theme seems a dizzying dream
Such, they say to me
Is how war, why war, what war
Unfolds—
Untold. So tell—
Five generals dead in first three weeks.
Unconfirmed, each three-star Russians.
Impatient— hell.
We want nothing but liberty.
Take a deep, a Capella breath
(Or maybe you mean falsetto?)—
Is there a delta
In Eurasia?
How do their older (Bug) rivers flow?
Slow as chanson mule carts
Over mountains?
Big wood logs well-carved over sea
And unto sand—
The sand of discovery?
The sand
Of Empire.
For we do so love to pretend to remember
A place before the wrong money got wind of it.
Soviet jazz—
Simple, tinny, and mostly wrong.
Ah cripes. Drink your beer, comrade. Drink.
We are here to stay, don’t you think?
We’re banning all the wrong books.
Plundering plucky, earthy songs
Undotted by the flame of war.
Some of our favorite poets are Russian—
Though we know now (in short order)
How we don’t know what Russia even means.
Our pencils arthritic stubs—
Our trombones soaking in salty tubs—
Our weary joints.
Our widowed speeches, without drills
Or filters—
We smoke it straight.
Like the old days
Whenever everybody was more stupider.
Before they changed the date again
We dreamt of a universal day—
When everybody on earth
Is silent and still for ten minutes—
The wrought iron wings
Screech-owling to a halt.
Kansas butterfly my ass—
The globe would explode—
At last
And fast.
*
We don’t know nothing.
We know everything.
Each fist a cola, bait and switch
The flick of a wrist (the world over)—
Everybody loves a good potboiler in wartime
So pour us a snifter of soupy liqueur
Give us our chippy of trumpet—
A coal mine full of dead canaries.
Ludwig’s ink all over
The Urals in snow.
Which one pulls the plow
And which one lolls in clover?
*
Can of fish, egg, another coffee.
Radio from under the high sky, crisply
And the children are safe—
Holy Holy Holy.
Strong doesn’t mean big.
The skies bring death.
Bad news for the rock bottom—
Harder to borrow.
So bends the barrel-head’s meniscus—
Bulging all the swampy day.
Bulges all the thousand spears
The thousand more horses.
Thank you for the horses—
But we need napalm.
Spike in prices, obviate.
Spike in crime, obviate.
Lithuania and Latvia
In the ice-cold rain.
Obviate, waiting.
Obviate, hating.
No delicacy. All fire.
How quench the tallow’s taper?
No poet ever knows.
Goes down to the river alone.
The China river.
The Persia river.
The muddy river.
The tonic river.
The Delaware river.
The Dnieper River.
Dizzy rivers—
Full of helmets—
Bullish with bayonets
Roaring with poison.
The desert river.
The mountain river.
Every river
Ever—
Old bridges made of trees and rope.
Old churches of wrought-iron full of straw and hay.
Wheat mating
With chaff.
Bold of brain.
Shorn of dignity.
Have we left no shred?
Indeed.
*
Hell’s dented receptacle—
Corridors open.
Dog licks face
Of dead man.
Gray skies
Offer their deadpan
Like a wound on the small of the back—
The only place a body can’t see—
A wound, in fact
You will never examine.
Tiny pebble in the big
Sea, thrown.
*
Our water
Is the matter—
Violins made of horse.
Who’s mining all that wheat?
Who’s deveining the core
And all that ore
For more bandwidth
In the band-shell bomb shelter?
Homeland is a barking dog
In the freezing rain
Shivering and all alone
Right before the sun goes down.
Watching the miracle melt
Despite all this cold water.
Strop your sharps
I tell myself, having neither.
Be still or many
Pulmonary dreams
Like the one where you wander
The old, familiar, unknown corridors
Of childhood—
Choking on smoke.
But dream schematics
Have no bearing on war tactics.
Nothing matters.
That’s nothing new.
Like stirrups or spats.
Like foreheads for pates.
Like immigrants
When we mean ex-pats.
Like double-breasted pinstripes
Or tardy for late.
Special meatballs with nutmeg sauce.
Carrots will keep a body swell.
And we slowly drift away
From the smoke.
Sickly blue and green
In the near mist and middle distance.
We practice by copying the masters
Into our skin. The candle gutters again.
Urine-soaked rag against the mouth
Is antidote for chlorine gas.
But it’s always too late
To react. Smell it and you’re dead.
*
Clay tablet.
Play tablet.
Randy as a coil of colts.
Four posts painted the color of pine wood.
Mother Nature is a misnomer—
Just like Father Time.
Mother Nature is a nuisance—
Just like Father Time.
Motherland.
Fatherland.
Darker, we grow.
These pedants!
Daughter of the wrong revolution.
Sons of the stricken dumb.
Donate your leftie news-rags
To the local arkiv.
Let them sort
The seeds from the bud.
We’ll have a frankfurter with the girls
Down around Dead Horse Bay
Like the good old days
When it wasn’t raining.
Chest compressed—
It’s always raining.
Seeks music
Without vocals.
Seeks a lighter lung way—
The bassoon of certain birds.
Life’s no zoo.
Life’s not even a cabin.
It’s a broom closet in plague time—
Bookended by beaches—
Like Nabokov’s thin shaft of velvet light
Betwixt two impenetrable blocks of darkness.
Coins made of porphyry.
Coins made of gun metal.
Coins made of walrus bone.
Coins made of helicopter blades.
Coins made from the quarter milligram
Of gold off 305 trillion mother boards.
Only so many brilliant decisions
Can be made around the board room
Table.
(Fable.)
*
Daubs the palette olive drab—
Green despite the mostly cement.
Fellow named Kevin could paint this war—
Good fellow, Kevin.
Most artists go by Kevin anymore.
Because he rhymes with heaven
And he’s a very good dancer
Once he finishes his brewery shift.
Just shaking.
Just shimmying
And the big clouds open up above the eastern
Front like a good old Florida gully washer—
Laving this heinous, old, pasty
Warhead.
And Kevin paints the birth of war babies
Without the color red.
*
Day 29’s correlation to Stalingrad.
Russians encircled, 10,000 dead.
We see
From afar—
China making back-up hay.
London counting the bales.
Old America, old flabby, empurpled
America— all the ways
We’ve been wrong—
North Atlantic Treaty Orck.
Eastern flank without lanthorns.
Nothingness is money in abstraction.
Abstractly delicious
To the greedy—
Or a dictionary for the poetic kleptomaniac—
The salvage yard pickers of history—
Every pile of garbage a manifesto—
Every lime green shirt a parade of tears.
We’re out of purple paint
And she needs more violet.
White is impossible—
We’ll never run out of black either.
British radio forecasts American forces
Taking Moscow.
Jackboots jackboots jackboots
Like the wind from a Texas tornado.
Another long report from London—
None watch the ram if both bears are bothered.
No diplomacy
For birds of prey.
No margins, all swim here.
Do not abide the Right belief.
Wise men fish.
Silly men share fish stories.
*
Ukraine is free and sure
Crystal clear amid the mud—
A barrel of wine
Long remembered—
Borscht hot
Borscht cold—
Sour cream
In dollops like golf balls
For pierogi
And a swell of beers.
And then the arteries
Of memory harden.
*
China buys Russia.
China eats Russia.
*
1943 Red Army aims at Kyiv—
Losing 700,000 soldiers.
Current count of Rus troops 900,000.
Conscripts don’t know how to conquer.
Can Rus nukes (1000) reach Canton, Ohio?
Cooperstown? Springfield by the cement sea?
Can their missiles reach
Any of our halls of fame?
Jesus—
Please us—
Tell us
No.
Protect the sky, hovering
Directly above America as always.
Protect the sky over Ukraine
While you’re at it, please.
Protect this wooden bridge
Bending at it’s hemp edges—
The town is important
For the Bug River.
You can see her whereabouts.
See here, her whereabouts.
See now—
Her death by breath
Accompanied
By guns.
*
Friendly as a kite.
Friendly as a Canadian.
Friendly as a helicopter
With the transplanted heart
Of a poisoned
Fishmonger.
His kinfolk simpering, simple
With half a can of dead grandparent.
Homely, hammered hours without sleep
Through the stomach of midnight.
Old tin lamps making lambent
The pinker inks, the sadder blues.
Halve the loaf—
Drink the milk and sleep.
We are stupid with death—
A braying horse
Under heavy duress—
God bless us
And let us not forget
The fear that got us here.
*
25 March 2022
Nashville