The Medium

Over gutters and over parking lots,
over rooftops, fountains, cloudbanks and the bay,
beyond the sun, beyond the medium that fills
unoccupied space, beyond the confines of the known

universe, ghost, you slip out of me
with the ease of a swimmer
at one with the waves, furrowing the deep
with a pleasure we can’t articulate

Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere
(Horace, Epistles II.i.267)
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;

I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them. I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them. I knew to them. If they tear a hunter through, if they tear through a hunter, if they tear through a hunt and a hunter, if they tear through different sizes of the six, the different sizes of the six which are these, a woman with a white package under one arm and a black package under the other arm and dressed in brown with a white blouse, the second Saint Joseph the third a hunter in a blue coat and black garters and a plaid cap, a fourth a knife grinder who is full faced and a very little woman with black hair and a yellow hat and an excellently smiling appropriate soldier. All these as you please. In the meantime examples of the same lily. In this way please have you rung.
WHAT DO I SEE? A very little snail. A medium sized turkey.

A longish poem about wallpaper.
A short lyric about discouragement in white.
A medium-length thesis of uncertain importance.
Another sonnet, about scholarship.
A couplet of olives.

A long narrative about the exaggeration of your absence.
Several quatrains about candle stubs.
That old sestina on Isaiah.
Palindromes about Scots presbyters of the 18th century.
Some rock lyrics from Benares.

A nature poem about committees.
Seven heroic couplets about Art Murphy.
Several more heroic couplets on Murphy’s Law.

1920 (Mauberley)
I

Turned from the“eau-forte

Weep for the country in its present state,
And of the gloom which still the future waits;
The proud confederate eagle heard the sound,
And with her flight fell prostrate to the ground!

Weep for the loss the country has sustained,
By which her now dependent is in jail;
The grief of him who now the war survived,
The conscript husbands and the weeping wives!

Weep for the seas of blood the battle cost,
And souls that ever hope forever lost!
The ravage of the field with no recruit,
Trees by the vengeance blasted to the root!

(for Phil Garrison and Peter Lamborn Wilson)
As ashes are the shadow of smoke,

a commingling sky

a semi-tropic night
that cast the blackest shadow
of the easily torn, untrembling banana leaf

or Quebec! what a horrible city
so Steubenville is better?
the sinking sensation
when someone drowns thinking, “This can’t be happening to me!”

let elizur rejoice with the partridge Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his keepers.
For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the name of the Lord.

II.iv

I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians

which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with

a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since

“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card”
and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration
of the Enemy Aggressor.
No news medium troubled to put it in quotes.

And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen.
In your office you were informed.

I

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
quick adulterous tread at the heart.
Who is it that goes there?
Where I see your quick face
notes of an old music pace the air,
torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.

In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light
falling upon the brown boy’s slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing