THE BREAKDOWN
"... there will be time
to prepare a face..."
T. S. Eliot
from "The Love Song of J. Alfred P."
Breasts beat
velvet the elk makes
into whose unrhythmic musics eyes look in to see
that the most reversible trend
in History IS the irreversible...
a frightful lack of life the medicine
William Tell can't beat the camel's most casual spit
& the verse... What is there left?
if all the meanings were Revealed
peacocks putting on beauty pageants, bees
investing their whole community on a single industry
What'd be left? sadness th'sandals
(sifting to) softly over the sands
of the desert where there had been blooms,
a million years ago: Springs full of fawns,
the hermit crabs puttin' on new clothes,
wild wolves staging whole operas with their calls!
breath in the sun-bleached bones
stretching out to the wind-broke
hills of th'bleak (It-Might-Have-Been)
--How to define your being, O Man!
now lots of hollowness sprawling
out of the lips of youth: Fate
like some flirt upon the threshold
of each single Destiny like some residence
complex--Madness dotting the desert,
poisons the snake makes, the magpie mocks
as much, the chicken can be as brave...
frogs by the thousands make Love!
in moccasins dancing th'dance of closeness
& closeness, in the candle-corn
mornings of hopeful coolness, O
th'birds of Paradise can yet curse, dogs can pray
with their looks, the tomcat can be as late
eyes again renewed upon those dawns
of Nature the all-evolving,
seemingly so capable of solving
the dying & dying of days
those adamant daisies that Time can't abide
for ecstasy! is the tragedy of Man
in his moving trance
of Motion the mosaic high & dry, raccoons
can be as scrupulous & the elephant can work
for wages as miserable
... (as Man's), trying
th'freshest crystal wells he digs on The Self (new-
gathered from his new Time-crafted shell)
th'Lizard spins his long, fanciful tails
singing the musics of the impossible
& marbles the moderns cracked
What are we? What are we ( under the Flesh
endlessly dreaming of Paradise
's green valleys)?... Is the Answer
in what we were?... out sneaks: The Past!
The Past! is it our mold (and do we know it?
[that flies can think--far enough to
flea: Who hasn't been tackled by a tick?]
... have we known it all along)?
while the termites make formic acid
& beavers graduate from earth's oldest
architectural universities...
We are mad with all The Past
ever-unfolding from image to image
goats mow the lawn all day
& ducks dance the hot plate
demeaning The Future--because
of no better notion
than that we have seen many things
The Same over & over
done many things, over & over,
been many things, ever again:
known many things, the same,
things with the same sounds,
colors & signs, many things
with the same shape, purpose or plan,
many things with the same mass, value,
weight, contour, voice
--And it's not even that we've really
turned up many things different
anew under th'ancient desert
our marginal main,
th'croc treats its children with as much care
& th'sea otter spreads out tables for its fare
but only that in order to maintain
our diminishing Sanity at Same:
we have been going back many times over
many things the fevers of Chance
shivering its any least change
the pig knows all about Pain, the lark
can whistle at his mate with as much flair
in Life the list with one single item
that is constantly being renamed
from Evil to Goodness & back again
endlessly like a ghost fading in & out
of its firmament--Where Fate the footless
stalks the foolish, the unthinking
squirrels have many-branching banks, ants
join the army, cicadas can wait
into that black hole:
all Man's makeshift Moralities
there's always bound to be (as yet unmakable al-
though still unmade) some PREFACE
TO FACE, hungering so quietly,
almost amber in the thirst
of Sun dunking for degradations the hours
while circus bears ride bicycles
& parrots prate as mindlessly
their tumult distilled a timeless hush,
mules hang on to their own immutable
Principles, & jackasses to their dumb rules,
the Wind mumbling meaning the meagerest remains
yet hairy with finalities:
eyes marveling over the Dust
What is Man? (but some fleeting
gesture captured momentarily
from his own inner-space?
Cruelty the cat can play, & monkeys
laugh at the shocked apes
in some brief outer moisture
condensed upon
whose window-pane crashing down
what aimless highway of air
faster than the allowed pace)
the human FACE gets its every-morning face-lift
in the art of hands which know what they're doing
about as much as a face
knows what it wants them to do
next ... PREFACE 2: a face
yours & mine
like a bizarre mathematics
(th'too-brimming beautiful,
neither bone nor flesh ),
and dirty in the disputes of The Dust,
nameless & unimportant, blatant, blameless?
but always shaped to some outrage
against Th'Correctness
that's constantly reassuring us:
we are but innocent passengers,
we are traveling straight,
in some sort of justifiable direction,
well within the laws
of God & Nature, if not Man's,
we mean something
to (time?)... in order to maintain the stress
between Th'Living & the rapidly-getting dead,
Soul the eyesockets poised to fall
emptily to the enormous hence
... that Grave (some indeterminable Future
instead, the open ditch inviting us
to quit the race: FACE
suffering through th'plastic surgeries
of the everyday world
of hands inexperienced in their All-Promising,
wielding a savage Justice in the heart
of human shadows against the sacred
Sunlight, although only Surprise!
like a sword cuts through the opinions
harvested from their embosomed words,
humanity managing its sympathy
like a watercourse through th'nagging dry
eternities, distance like an intellectual hawk
high above Confusion like a quintessence
of Sense, sitting atop the grinding,
self-assuring gyrations
--Doom all its generations: Mankind
endlessly searches for the peaceful shade
under the surly Sun--that's where the World is stranded
(in the predicament of hands
which are skilled at Doing 2
(face) or doing IN The Face, 4 FACE...
but which keep doing: Something, or with
the face... as long as FACE remains
( incapable of knowing what it wants )
HANDS 2 4
do
IT: "Hands must DO something!"
PREFACE TO
FACE it: whose hands are THERE?
... mine attempting to impose on Reality
a face? or, its own (trying to strike a bargain
between Will and Fate?) ...
Pride in its portrait
& hiding (from the sunbeams of Shame)
its delicate complex-
ion: we kneel our unfolding Will
perfumes the muskrat makes
before that terrible manifestation
like a shrine: The Sun-
shine's revelations (skin-cancers)
in this duality of dawn we sing
Wrong the whirling to which we dance
emergence with our marvelous tolerance,
arrogance, temperance, irrelevance,
ignorance, elegance, exuberance
& high finance... but quickly running to hide
if there's a crash of too much radiance
(the invisible bright) if we spot
too many bleached skeletons
--though we be blind as a blessing
and always feeling so safe & comfy
(almost Sun-proof) within our enameled moods,
yet struck with th'most flinching terror
whenever we think it's still possible
for the latest to become th'timeless
(or the reverse)
& drown us in its boundless
instant: like rats abandoned
to an endless ocean by the sinking of our
where-it's-ats
& other this & that notions of Now
(sacred cow: a pile now of busted bones
desiccating under that so unforgiving Sun)
our human passions
those magnificent maggots that suck out
all the juices from our grisly good intentions
& Truth the disarmed, Kindness the equivalent clause,
and Loneliness the intellectual (vultures all,
pretending to be sweet artists winging it above
or those bitter connoisseurs of the last drop
all lost in their cauldron of watching
the suffering
& then) Fate! like a final touch
when we can no longer bear the broach
and rise up from the forehead
(of some foolish God, believing faithfully
--always! that we are the rightful heirs
of everything foolish about Him, naturally):
PREFACE II
Hands not holding up The Good
are holding Evil above us
face it: maybe we DO cringe up
from The Primordial Mud-Puddle
surging with filthy urges PRE
FAZEd? The matter rests with what now settles
here ... to the dusts... but building up
between our stuffed-up ears, our
bursting hearts, choked minds: DO! ( At least
it'll keep you on your toes )
... Love like a landlord
and the soul: an interval
between The Silence and the Hush
--laughs the lunatic his tears,
the silence, the hush
& th'stuffing of ears like a luxury!
th'wisemen always cry out "That's enough!
... We have achieved Enlightenment!
... We are at the pinnacle of Mankind!
... We are at The Most Crucial Instant
in Time!... Behold now our Ultimate Wisdom!
... Accept then our Judgment For All Time!"
And, after we had banged at the door
without any results, no answers
(more questions only, more questions),
blood & more blood, pain and more pain,
suddenly noticing it was some dried-up desert
so unfeeling, although so brutally felt!...
after we had exhausted our hands,
really messed up our fists,
then we tried our heads-- O What a mistake!
(I can hardly remember any further
... I cannot forget any less,
for all my trying) and yet
how fractured by the passing clouds
now seems the field of green once th'desert
where stands, inviolable, that bulkhead
Hope!
against our frazzled feelings,
our twisted moods,
our murderous prejudices
looking like some lush, green logic
full of sweet, moist shade
... startling! startling ...
silk makes the worm!
in the prodigious Pause:
hands not being held together in prayer
are working to hold Mankind apart
the shadows (always under the Sun,
scared to death of the shade)
race across th'soul of us all
chased by a child of Flesh,
who forging forwards the chains
of change
( Past without purpose,
Future without faith)
over the dales the rain never left,
th'comforting darkness never abandoned
to Perception's unbearable
laments as liquid to the deepest
oceans ... collect the centuries of Man:
there prevails the darkness of the moving Night
through the stilled bells of ripeness
which trick that moth --Man!
... our maturity (only longevity
going by a better pseudonym)
like stark bones dried out
out there in some God-forsaken, unnameable
desert comforting its bleached-out alone
with a well-dressed delusion
learning the prairie chicken's dance steps
or, how the sea gulls make planes
futilely here & there fluttering
The Impending over Man
deeply down there groping over everything
(the surging & subsiding mystery of mass
that's Reality)... There
little Modern Man
with all the sum of his insufficient
human steps: runs faceless
about the world like some Preface:
bubbles oval of blackness wambling off his senses
enveloping him in effortless sinking,
murmuring, "O, how the Darkness moves me!
Yet she herself ever unmoved by me"
... trying to self-form to a shape
(if not permanent, then memorably made)
... to anything that can hold:
his agitated destiny
sculpturing his Fate of clouds
in the lazy translucent, the im-
politely tolerated Beyond It All
--Man the irrepressible
luminary, the appalling Light
that discovers the Darkest,
the unsteadfast overcast
that lasts longer than
the whatever latest
light of brightness
off that instantaneous
Sun--Opinion his enterprise,
dressed in his dreadful inwardness,
in his uncontrollable numberlessness:
soldiers of the sullen O,
his scintillant tombstones travelling endlessly
through the unclouding moonlight
the spider makes webs, but gestures
--gestures are all we make!
like groveling gods before the twinkling stars
gestures are all we make, we men
whose most self-defining behavior
(the one talent we share
with none of the other beasts)
is tap-dancing... against all
the other feats of Nature
beat--Again, we try for laughter
when everything else fails
& every poet in every tree
the blue Night hails
this way:
The head's thrown back
as if to cry
A MIGHTY LAUGHTER
to the sky so black!
but backwards falls
crystalled with starlight
& breaks on the grass:
a gasp of glass!