Exercises for Ear III in this same parc I saw, broad as day, two sailors take turns in the eighth geodetic year of getting to know earth-mother while two chapters bodily lifted themselves from the King James version of thou shalt nots Exercises for Ear LXIII tho'' my songs not deckd out in baroque trimmings of adjective baubles they, nonetheless, stand lean & cleanly de- fined against a gray de- cember sky as against the on-coming of a spring when all shall be too gaudily dis- playd w/ too much of ev'' rything to be clearly outlined Love, the Poem, the Sea & Other Pieces Examined by Me . not so much for receiving stolen goods as for placing the junk dead as the world before the senses In such times one is put upon within You know how we squeeze today for meaning the few words we have left to us Here in a word is the sea before me but the sea cannot be squeezed So I sit as close to it as close as safe The sea speaks if speech be sound but speech is not sound so turns for meaning to the Poem If the sea is anything it is deep in silence below and beyond a few pebbles chatter thrown against sand Thalassa the Greek reminds us but the Greeks are profound and too elude us and no one likes to be found out. In a dead world as matter of course California becomes a sun symbol I supposed you born there So in thought I leap thinking to rush up gladly to greet you just as would any another creeping thing. Along Washington St., the stores will close in an hour --the sparrows are hopping about the grass by to say its green I suppose and alive with parasites I do not see being birds these things do interest or they do not they are still birds --Saint Francis, indeed you were a fool for had/not you we would all of us go screaming mad down the street so serious we are come to take ourselves. Love, we say but the flower we see A Rose edges by degrees the secret locked tight within the unfold of bud the hedge that is the sea defines its limits. In life Love that switch/blade belly thrust be quick say what you will death is slowly withdrawing the blade of life also Love if in life I am ever in Love I am consumed. Choice? I shall with doubt bloom in my season and bloomed be blown out to sea or up where the other gas, Heaven? that is to come in the Hollywood of the end! But we have before tasted those ecstasies of extreme unction so let''s you and me keep it clean and simple complexity not to be involved.
Poem is the child''s ear and love is naked and unashamed to cry that it is not fondled. This reminds me that is the sea crys its cry is merely a surface noise. Its secret is much deeper but men are no longer interested In the sea of their minds they have visions of other worlds accurately numbered they visit them daily in papers and in the meantime plan within a decade to shoot The Moon. Good as it is a dead issue in this they at least show foresight Let them get out of the world whatever means they may not by any long shot is the sea dismissed from the mind For a time the sea defines the mind''s periphery but after a time the sea is all around you and over their worlds. When you speak of B. Donahue I think always the Irish Sea his horses are also the sea''s ''tho we do bet our hard to come by resources of life the sea takes us horse and rider In every race It must be thus and so Tragedy enters our lives not so much B. Donahue as the Greek who also had notions of other worlds but continued to live by the sea as their language (which I have had of records) attest. Today science fiction yes but the real sea throwing hints as pieces of driftwood the twisted gray remains burn or preserve as what-nots they give warmth or they give chill.
Mike, I have seen pieces of driftwood two so twisted together you and I would be hard put to extricate. How can I so subject our two lives to so trivial a thing a twisted freak thrown together in the sea of unconcern to be dis- carded on some obscure beachhead of our world? It is fat summer here and the ducks quack because of it. The birds will no longer come to investigate the grass. They work by signals as we poor things pour over our signs for some parasite of meaning. It has been a lean season for you and me. I did not intend a serious poem but the Poem has a will all its own I am a poor vehicle a transport in summer were I to be discarded also in the season of decline. Love O self willed love though unworthy remember me kindly at the hour of decline know that I sacrificed all to say nothing. Hereafter it will be stark winter every sign indicates it In the long night there will be time enuf To think what pigs we have made of ourselves.
An Ode for Garcia Lorca In New Orleans Walt Whitman was married. An Anglican priest duly performed the dark rite. sub rosa. The Mint paid. So did the Butterflies and Lesbian Sparrows. (coined from old metal) The Ceremony took place- slowly-in the shade! Creole ladies avoided the sun like the plague. ''cadjuns'', being the only pure stock, farmed their boys out like studs. These are Walt Whitman''s children.
And here, to convince you, is a photograph. A dirty photograph. Beneath huey long''s bridge, the which consumed ten hershey bars; The Pair stripped to the waist, standing in drains: The Sun upon their belly buttons. Outsized, (these pictures always exaggerate) low hanging cloud for adjective. The bride''s maid, with a bunch of pansies, (fades) were graciously received. There are no differences here! There are also his children and, in case I didnt warn you, this is a poem. The background is a blurr about the horizon. NOTE: In a photograph the foreground is by that time background, (adding "not really" to it).
It''s five o''clock. It gets dark early. I cant see to finish this. One of Three Musicians The first time I heard Ornette Coleman I thought about Picasso''s Three Musicians w/ their neo- classical in- struments: cigarboxes w/ soft line strains drawn across barrel staves, tin cans thrown (or kicked) in Congo Square these "fakers" with jaw bone percussions out of dead horses & instruments from the child''s hand They reproduce the spears, the screams the outbursts of dark religious ex- orcisms. these are not the shoed peasant feet out of Brueghel''s paintingThe Kermess, these are bare black feet pounding delta clay the wire & steal singing over broken barrel staves, saying a theatre is any place free associates come in to play.