New, Tender, Quick

Rot-Orange II (Red-Orange II) ink/oil pastel on paper 20 x 20 cm

NEW, TENDER, QUICK

The rich complain about cooking odors/ dysfunctional

         mothers looking like gothic statues  

in an East German church/ hay rick, manure

        ditches, skin head revelry/ where the rich

                    would never go/ destined to concern

ourselves with issues trivial at best/ we read

          Elizabeth Bishop anyway, “my outlook

is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians/ barbarians

             who commit a hundred indecencies everyday of our lives…”/

trying to stay positive, still it seems you

      are not only watching TV/ you’re on it/ handcuffed and walking

into the county courthouse/ some deputy’s wind breaker

thrown over your head/ cooking odors from a food stand/

            life tastes pretty good as you raise taco to mouth/ smells,

well, interesting as you rise past the doorways of drinking associates

   and mere neighbors, radio noise, animal habits, fugitive states of mind

no one will ever capture, cowering in the manure ditch,

hay rick/ utterly trivial/ stubbornly ourselves/ “…but I think we should

be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable

    and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick,” (George Herbert).”/ whiff

of hot dogs from the river’s edge, black lab rolling in the sand/

                                     two boys and three girls emerge

        from brown water/ giddy yet watchful/ light in their hair.

G - L - O - R - I - A

Rot-Orange I - Red-Orange I 20 x 20 cm ink on paper

WINTERMÄRCHEN

Imagine a broken-backed long-haul

truck driver or scab-fisted brick layer,

drunk, a sneer of bottomless contempt

all over his bristly face, grabbing his crotch

while quoting Pound, Eliot, even Patti Smith.

Which has nothing to do

with winter, the year ending

as it always does with every garment

feeling like a shroud. Where doth the worm sit, and why?

I think you can spare us your “thees” & “thous.”

But truck drivers and brick layers

are people too and they think about

the cold of winter and of death

flags of disenchantment

drooping from their friggin’ toothpicks.

Not everyone can afford to visit Italy,

so what is the correct distraction? Baseball

halted in its tracks just as

September slid safely into October

and football is little more than a fist fight

in a snow storm on a profoundly unwashed

Sunday in Cleveland. The costliest diversion

at the moment is our hedge fund pimp’s

collapse into insolvency—the fund is without funds,

and he’s basking in some atoll sipping Brazilian cocktails

while a native girl fiddles with his loin cloth—

only the turkey looks fulfilled, complete,

all skin and bones, even its bread-crumb stuffing—

hanging from a local poet’s sensitive

lower lip—a promise of non-stop nudity.

The Kiss

View from the hotel balcony 56 x 42 cm mixed media on paper

WANDERVÖGEL

A green alpine

river slipping slowly past

a poetry slam with panama hats, so many things

plunging: cigar smoke, palm shadows, the

highest of necklines, dancing

followed by a banquet with all the “trimmings,”

something allegedly Austrian

done to veal—a great flattening out

of meat, bread crumbs

its skin—dumplings dumped on plates

the size of man hole covers,

boats of sauce steaming on oceans of white cloth.

After the climb we reach a hut

where an iodine-stained chamber

maid blows on our blisters

with the delicate hesitation of an April wind.

In the higher altitudes cows are still fed

thick salads of purest lucerne. It’s an economic

thing and magical properties and protein

says the guide, or History’s pain (plan), or something

because travel is educational. It might be obscure,

it might be incomprehensible, but you get a suntan

& free cocktail once a day. If you change that channel

who will ever fathom

the hay stack and the panama hat leaning

against it or soft trumpet call of tropical  

nights under clusters of alpine stars, the disbelieving river

as seen from these equatorial heights?