In a Spanish Garden

 

Verregneter Sommer - Rainy Summer 50 x 60 cm acryl -verkauft/sold

SOME PLACES

Some places seem to have more beauty

than the natives know what to do with. So we

have come here to manage their surplus. But all I

can do is think about the past, a useless non-

beautiful activity, producing emotional re-runs

featuring Regret, Humiliation, Eternal Embarrassment.

I go on an uphill speed march through an olive grove

to sweat it all out, and test my muscles, breathe a little

and think about the lamb I’m going to have for dinner

at a restaurant with turn of the last century Majorcan

Art-Nouveau atmosphere, a fanciful, curvaceous staircase

of exquisitely carved woodwork and turquoise tiles on the walls.

And there’s an actual dumb waiter lifting delicious food  

from a subterranean kitchen. We are going to eat in the garden

amid moonlight, palm trees, Spanish architecture, the air warm

and sweet with jasmine and pines. Returning from my forced march

I find Karin working in the back yard that we are renting

along with a bungalow—formerly a storage shed for oranges  

and wine, where we sleep and watch soccer on television. She’s trimming

and primping the flowers, and before I go in she looks at me, squints

and says, “You look gruesome.” Something to think about in the shower. 

Round Top Festival Institute, Saturday June 9, 2012, Texas Festival Orchestra

So what?

 

Der Duft des Sommers - The Scent of Summer 3 x 10 x 10 cm - acryl/shellack ink on canvas - available!

AN UNATURAL HISTORY OF PROGRESS

There’s jazz in the courtyard, moonlight espresso, grandma

issuing dire warnings in archaic dialect, grandpa

sneaking off to the boiler room, to conspire with tobacco.

The streets are without porn.

Bump and grind if you can find it, yes, but no porn.

A manhole hissing fiercely nearby. Kids playing stickball, but gingerly,

for it is Sunday, and they are wearing their best.

Plague germinating on rotting hulks in Sythian ports,

sailing on to Naples and Palermo, devastating Rome,

depopulating Florence, shutting down theatres in London.

Peasant and lord scarfing raw garlic and, as if longing

for their bacterial beginnings, washing neither bodies nor garments,

a mad flurry of Ostrogoths or Visigoths

spilling over city walls, smashing monasteries, no one bathing

for hundreds of years, Donald Trump always

coming back to take more, castor oil, chemo therapy

which just kills you more slowly than cancer, it seems,

public executions family reunions Hitler and his Huns

Bush #2 and his version thereof, chronology a side issue at best—

   shit just keeps happening—

until: a shriveled, oily hot dog in a soft bun at Woolworth’s

on a Saturday afternoon, circa 1968, Concord, California

one hundred degrees outside, not much cooler inside,

the air salty and dark, an odor of rancid butter

coming from the pop corn maker, add to that a

purloined copy of “Ring” magazine,

George Chuvalo and Buster Mathis

pounding each other on its front cover,

snug and damp beneath t-shirt and jeans, and I feel

well-fed, with half my “dog” in hand, and as cunning as a gangster:

thus progress makes its belated appearance in human affairs.

The Dude Abides in a Globalized World

Verstrickt - Entangled 22 x 32 cm - watercolor on Yupo

THE DUDE ABIDES IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

The heat’s rising appareled in odors

of fabric softener, hamburger smoke, stagnant creek

water wafting up to us through the leaves   

as we pass the bong and sip White Russians    

all day long. Thus without benefit of lucid transition   

we’re curled up near a dovecote on a Greek island

or leaning against the Tower of Pisa. You see, Dude,

we could be anywhere and still think we’re somewhere else,

Globalization not merely a “chaotic drift of technologies”  

but a series of artifacts and flavors meeting up

in one distinctly otherish location, each object 

   roughly positioned in its own

immaculate strangeness. There’s a corn dog stand

nearby, and twenty yards away a van

   from which Tex-Mex is dispensed

to Swedish tourists. It’s jazz made in Algeria,

Dude, a Wagner festival in Seattle. I’ve been working on this poem,

gentle reader, since landfall and have no idea if it’s good enough

for you nor am I sure what it “means” half the time

thoughts like seedlings  

scattered over white paper, struggling to take root

and go crazy, yet we’re happy here, the Dude and I, including

a modest contingent of groupies down on the beach,

partly because it smells like jasmine and warm nutmeg

   and partly because there’s a bowling alley adjacent to

a shattered amphitheater its broken statue

   of Marlon Brando wearing sunglasses. 

Blue Rondo A La Turk

 

Lichtblick - Beacon 100 x 80 cm (39 1/4 x 31 1/2'') Acryl/Oilpastel/Ink on canvas

PAGAN EPISTLE

Do you remember when our knees touched

beneath that faded sundress you always used to wear?

I think it had belonged to your mother

or possibly to an older sister who, curiously enough,

became born again, gave up pleasure, gave the dress to you.

Funny how some people court rejection while others,

namely you, reject courtship.

Okay, I’ll stop.

Anyway, there were midges, and a golden light

dripping down manicured hedges onto warm grass,

the boxwood maze with its structured pauses, sweat drying 

in the spicy breeze, a man in motley playing Shakespeare on a lute.

I woke up to the noise of a coffee bean grinder, the scent of frying bacon.

Nobody should live

merely to be overwhelmed by contingent

fluids or barbecued flesh which of course

we love to eat

or the pressure of the perfect curve

or the tanned skin

both of which we love to touch, given half a chance—

is there anything else we can do?—

ask the sun, you might have said, had you ever

   answered a question with an answer.

Okay, I’ll stop. 

Watch Out

 

Vorbereitung auf den Angriff- Preparing for Attack 50 x 70 cm acryl/ink on canvas

SPRING CHICKEN

                                              What is more precise than precision? Illusion.

                                                                                       Marianne Moore

The way hesitation gets

worked into the ageing process,

as if all the wheels and levers of decision

were rusted up. Yes, it does suck, said

the little man with big cigar and handful  

of firecrackers—it being the Fourth and all—a little more  

certainty might help. Just a touch. When you were young      

life was all hurry up and wait for that Big Break  

to come sauntering up the front steps, say something    

interesting, assorted head hunters dropping by     

with languid sexually enhanced females  

filling your hot tub and talking, like, real slow. Then you wake up

in a thin-skinned bungalow, at the back of

an old friend’s property, amid the weeds, and you’re 35, then 45, then

and your flip-flops are worn down uneven, and you limp for some reason.   

To fiddle for a while with Rimbaud’s definition of self: “I”  

is every role you have ever played plus that certain something

unique: its due date, if you will, its shelf life. Okay, fair enough. Then what?

“Watch out,” slurs the lead singer just before

the guitar break: the gods are jealous of their privileges:

at the end of the nightshift don’t expect any overtime.