My Dear Udnie, Part One (of three)

 "My Dear Udnie" is one of what I call my "voices poems." Each stanza is a separate voice, though not necessarily a separate person. It was spurred by visits to great museums, including the Hirshorn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the National Gallery. I bought postcards of great paintings I'd seen at each museum and these stacked up on my writing desk. Eventually, I composed this poem with each stanza prompted by a single painting. (The title, My Dear Udnie, is the name of a painting by Francis Picabia (the third image in section II.)

I

Your face is energy beauty expends

in the gilded bust green in blue lamplight.

Molded by thumbs, the lumpish moon ascends

to fright the sky and hush the dream of night.

Steeple, cornice, dome, gable, pyramid—

today I must speak to you in flat roofs,

simple boxes, as to a crown amid

capitals, monumental and aloof.

Who did these paintings in my studio?

I’ve kissed that flesh, rubbed it raw as roses.

Who did these paintings?  Do you know?

You’ve sat for me in similar poses?

II

It’s one thirty.  We should go to our homes.

Maybe next time we won’t just walk these streets,

adding to the shadows.  We’ll talk in poems,

let them distinguish the truth from deceit.

Lovers stare at themselves through a window—

faces motionless behind glass and frame.

Blinking unseen, they’re bored by what they know.

Either might break a smile and nothing change.

You are my private demon in this hell,

my love.  A lady who carries a fan,

soothingly forever saying farewell.

Give the fan to me and wave your hand.

III

All thought of you is memory in abstract—

congeries of blades and thudding saps.

A nice nose, long-licking tongue: discrete facts

hold harmless stupid phrases, futile haps.

You are like to god as stones multiplying arcs.

I don’t say this to anger you, but explain

the hard singularity of your remarks,

which leave me faithless on a pebbled plain.

We all dreamt deserts in rainbow clothes,

wanderers following mirages of love.

A lioness breathed on me, whispering oaths—

the moon’s kiss a slap of a limp glove.

IV

You see a candle in the mirror, cry

tears of a skull couched in a maiden’s lap.

Her breasts grow white and rigid, calcify—

orgasms crack in the cranial gap.

The life inside my soul is a black crow

kissed and stroked by flesh I can’t control.

No old boy, no new man is not my foe.

I give myself to each to char his soul.

New crystal, blown white hot from inside—

cool simplicity, single purposes.

It changes when faceted, like a bride—

innerness revealed in spectral surfaces.

Haiku: Moon

The autumn moon glides

on its blade of light - leaving

no scratch on the night.

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), by Marcel Duchamp

 

Red lines pressed upon the large glass—

a clear field where small acts take place.

Her gaze lost in three tissues of cloud,

her waist in stays closing off the air,

she’s mad and will not greet her suitors.

Beyond the street—dust collecting in homes’

new windows, grit loosening from shingles.

She watches children teach birds to kneel.

Her priest instructs:  In prayer you whistle

because god grows old and only birds

can make a sound to pierce his tired ear.

Oaken wainscoting, parquet floors, the house

beneath a coat of white paint; white curtains

adorn the flat shoulders of the window seat,

where she sat as a child, her back to the street,

and memorized the rattle’s conversation.

The pad of flesh between her lips dances:

Tell us, Old Town, the color of your buildings,

like sawdust of the ancient windbreak blighted,

shown no pity by the time, taken at the fullness

of its usefulness, and what will bring it back?

Show us trees descending staircases.

Explain the wind.  Don’t show us what it blows.

One man will know the whiteness of her body.

It will cost money to fill her with his fluid.

Shirking his vigil duty, a drunk male

slips from his tin coat and runs away—

his scream knocks a cloud out of the sky.

The other eight, glazed by window sweat,

spin in place, fool with spoons, sip

from hot cups the taste of her nipples.

Beneath the floor hard earth holds back

the odor that aspires to ghosthood and hopes

one day to mount the basement steps.

Note: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),

by Marcel Duchamp, is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Rondeau for Ruth

He knew euphoria the day they met.

He’s often felt so between then and now.

Was it the shy smile or searching brown eyes

Or how her eyelashes would lower and rise,

Like glinting perfection taking a bow?

How could any-day simple chance allow

Strangers meeting to result in a vow

And forty years devoid of pain or lies?

He knew euphoria the day they met.

His eye is protected by her eyebrow.

Their two hearts beat with a whisper and wow,

Not felt, but heard, always in sweet surprise.

No thought between them arrives in disguise.

They will never fail to remember how

They knew euphoria the day they met.

Sestina: The Lake Michigan Shore

I stand knee deep in high waves

And wait for the darkening sky

To loose what it’s long held back,

A cataract of warm rain,

Like a proliferation of clear ideas

A mind no longer contained.

I read a book with no ideas,

A tangle of clouds in empty sky.

I couldn’t read it front to back

Or back to front. All it contained

Was words, single drops of rain

Or particles that were also waves.

The smallest moth is contained

In a cluster of dusty ideas

Within the vastness of the sky.

It clings to rotten wood, its back

As camouflaged as water in waves.

It is not moved by the fiercest rain.

The lake is high after endless rain,

An excess of lightning finally contained. 

The sun sweetly burns my back

Until it slips into a rift in the sky.

I find relief diving — the waves

Drown me with persistent ideas.

The sun slowly escapes the sky

Into the horizon, earth-shadow-contained.

Still air can’t raise a single wave

Or loose even one drop of rain.

All I see is the cessation of ideas.

For the night there’s no turning back.

I’ve known myself to talk to sky,

To write incessantly in rain,

And all I’ve said eschews ideas.

On my last day here I turned back

From the lake with waves

Of farewell, memory contained.

At home, the sky is bereft of ideas,

As the garden is of rain. It’s good to be back,

The lake contained but for dreaming waves.

Miro’s “The Farm”

 

Revenged in sleep, yes, a good omen:

volcano, eggplant, hawk feather

conditioning a moment of pure certainty,

instead of remorse. Birdsong dissolves

the hard black shell of their dream.

She breathes deeply, counts the number

of all those living and gives thanks.

Her skin moves over bone like sad music,

a lamentation of slow recognition.

She thinks, The next is tree across a gorge,

a trick of the eye, a drunk’s progress,

the balanced walk soon elbows and knees,

the hopeful ephemerality of creeping

going lower, the rigid belly at rest

on the gnarled limb tapering to a twig—

pointing finger arrested in emphasis.

Fear zero, the unimaginable destiny.

She twists her body like a swimmer turning

backstroke into butterfly, affirming

things still work beneath the bedclothes.

She stretches to call the nurses: sun

a push button set in pale blue sky;

water can, milk pail, red tile, hedgerow;

plowed and seeded earth pocked by rain;

rafters, stepladder, goat bleat, cockcrow;

the fox’s daily raiding of the hen house;

the baby’s naked footprints in dried mud;

snail, calendar, chain link fence;

stones everywhere, endless hard work;

how her back bent beneath wet laundry,

milk, hay, dung, branches, children;

how it arched aching when her sun-fired

husband’s body pierced her in the shade.

The holy triangle: husband, children, self,

grown geometrically into a power of itself.

She remembers the fruit silk and sap smell

of the tree that grew in the center of the yard,

its branches arms with a hundred umbrellas.

In autumn, its shapeless, colorless body

stood like Death attempting resurrection.

The Scream

 

I

Such a twilight
has no history,
nor would this nobody
rigid in the clutch
of his own two hands
in front of a sky
no longer his sky.
Two men walking away 
are too nonchalant
to have seen his face
and stopped; therefore,
it must have looked 
different than now.
Did he see fear
in their faces
or the fear
they saw in his?
The bridge rail
and the black river
connect all three
like testimony
and conspire
to convince them.

II

A red dusk
is sunlit pollution,
so it is not sick
churning colors
and nauseous chaos
of sand and sky
writhing in the same
two dimensions
that move,
because these
are all too real.
Not like that mouth,
that woeful oval.
As the vanishing point
is absent
from the painting,
from that mouth
no word flies,
nor any sound at all.