BELLES LESTRANGE

It's a pale shield that stabs and shakes out of the dark moment of a tree. All the shrubs and armaments open in the rain and shudder. Little kings in the dull monotony of the rain. Limelight on the Glass. The moon is green. From what other galaxy.

I don't know why the rain brings me here. I love the bruised sky. The hysterical vanishing, and from the black streets a kind of dawn. The constellations in the grass are made of broken brittle glasslike mercury.

Listening to songs that sound like the names of flowers: Sweet Louise, Princess of China, The Sun Will Rise. Folksy fingered guitar-strummed stereo-licks. Loud. Roughly Petaled.

Norman Dubie's latest book The Volcano from Copper Canyon. I haven't yet read a review of his recent work that says anything I care to repeat--no one knows how to talk about his work. They talk up his intelligence, his historical gravitas, his visionary detail. What I love about his new book is his sense of fucking humor! The human being lit up by a bit of starlight is monstrously funny. He's intense and playful, and like a monk of something sublime, he knows the instant is to flash and perish, and we flash and perish to know it.

. . . . . . . .

It's November but it feels like Spring.

Poetry is a funny king.

. . . . . . .


"The Song of the Strangelet"

The sailors are proper envoys
to a picnic table, hard-
boiled eggs
rotating in a field of salt--
chrysanthemum petals
like a discharge in the trees
and the abduction in the evening,
whole stadia of magnets
showing teeth. Two swiss
playing basketball
with rifles and cigarettes.
The algorithm in an open field
abducted by a romance of wheelbarrows--
science like all superstition
fondles the grim ignorance
that is chance, chance
of course is the teakettle
waking father by the fire
that could be a particle accelerator
liberating its first ghost,
a machinist extrovert
standing at the end
of a lensing
twelve thousand galaxies in width--
he waves at the youngest of sailors
who shows
him the middling digit of proverb's three,
our very ether
ruptured by it. Who could
eat at Joe's
                  after this?


. . . . . . . .

I stole it, and I liked it

and I liked the secret hold of it

. . . . . . . .

The ragged white roses
grinning wet

and faceless in the growing darkness
have skeletal poses

on the corner of Olive and Fountain Boulevards

. . . . . . .