Jane Miller

 

Jade River

I can walk to it from this rented house.
I have swum across it.
Anyone can borrow a boat and fish there.
Just today, a pudgy old man fell in.
Broke the surface with his backside, trolling for carp. A bare ass like a bald head

disappeared out of its floating shorts.
His rolling belly below a shrunk shirt,
how cool it must have felt,
after the shock. Nearly naked like Buddha and absent awhile. He surfaced and did not look around,

except for his skiff. Still there,
lucky for him. He spoke to himself while he rubbed his face like a little boy. From this I infer everything about life because of course
life is a simple matter of failure.
Simply part of a flow,
I know now. Until it happens to me. Then I forget, thinking it important. Attracted by a fleeting glance of a fairy in a chandelier the size of France,
no, of China, one is not really sure existed. But for a minute.
Then I am bereft again.
As to the river, I understand
jade is a famous Feng Shui mineral. Confucius wrote that it is like virtue

and its brightness represents heaven.
You see the mass-produced gem shaped
into turtles, dragons and fish too,
when you are in your home country.
Because you are loud and young
in a lithe body with a splashing energy
of a puppy, a stray,
I never thought I could love you.
I sought peace at seventy.
A jade river inside me. Green. Slow.
Long life, I said to friends,
and inside said, Poetry, over.
Money, spent. Parents, buried. Brother,
lost. Childless. And my beloved disappears
inventing day and night in her studio.
As busy as a bee, as the fake poets used to say.
Now they say, busy as a walrus hanging
upside down in the stately tree of death, to be creative and funny, because of the tragic world.
Must you stand on a bare branch, and why
should I care? None of it matters
a hoot, as is said in imitation
of the great owl, rarely seen
but more important than ever.
More important, rarely seen, great owl,
some things I would never say
before, because they sound
imitative, common. Except now
I get perfectly what is “important.”
What is “bare” and “more.”
One never knows which words
get one imprisoned
tortured and murdered

so every one is exemplary
and depends on whomever designates their meaning.
The words skinned alive.
The words sexual freedom.
It’s the same in America and China, the world over. I wake

with a dread of you in a jail
for ten subversions or a hundred
against an emperor or mother.
I blow by every somnambulist
in the dream and fly to you.
Why can’t you simply
fear and admire,
rather than wander as smoke,
smoking, rolling bourbon around
your mouth, sucking men’s nipples
and more in the ether streets
of your country, only recently a child.
As Rimbaud would say, so much the worse for the wood that discovers it’s a violin. One of your many instruments,
no doubt, another gift I don’t know about. If your poems survive the age,
if the earth survives us,
may mercy find you
in the mouth of a river
in the lap of an emperor
made of palladium leaf,
steel pins, walnut ink,
and thousands of green glass marbles.
You were born to mutilate the old rules. The rest is heroic and belongs to you.

Jane Miller

Stephen Rodefer

 

excerpt from Four Lectures

My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation. To read it and in reading, order it to read itself. Not a doctrine, but a public notice.
    The city, which even before Baudelaire had been a ready-made collage or cutup of history, constantly remaking itself-a work of art, founded on an anthill. And every art grows out of the same collective desire which informs and compels the idea and reality of a city (Latin colligere, to tie together.) A district, or a ghetto, is a segmentation, an alternative version which both resists and embodies in a different fashion, that is with an opposing ideology, the original model. Hence, dialect and civil strife are alternating codes of the same phenomenon: the city does not hold together. Language, which also binds together and extends, including as it isolates, is a city also. 
    In such a metropolitan of history, in which the city is literally the mother, the greatest art is painting, if only by the sheer weight of the temporal. Without a city and its structures there would be no painting. The only thing precedent to painting is caves-the Gilgamesh is not as old as Lascaux.
    The Greeks had painted sculpture and from the start all cultures have painted their deities. Today we have painted cities, painted conveyances, painted apartments, painted roads, painted people, even painted food. Is it not time for painted poetry as well?
    A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation, every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of the parts, necessary to express the world.
    Even the words and way of language itself will suffer the consequent deformity and reformation. The color beneath, which has been covered over, will begin to show through later, when what overcame it is questioned and scraped on, if not away.

Stephen Rodefer

from For More Lectures

Farewell to Innsbruck I say. I say leave me loathesome night and I

might lay down awhile beside the babbling brook. Death is the absence
of cloud on glass. Breath is the original dope. Then it all starts to complicate
with the introduction of the breast. It was something. Mother’s milk was addictive.
The things she had. It killed the pain. I felt home. It was the land of the bull.
I wish I hadn’t travelled that canal. I didn’t want to leave there. Now look where I am,
worn, marred, unmarried and still warm. And warned continually of the peril of still
drinking born spirits that make the number days to count their milky calendar.
Develop some indifference to pain. Better self love than neglect. And we should fear
the native might in art’s bosom, while not forgetting dear Falstaff died for Agincourt.
Me, I’m from Overlook Court, Bellaire Ohio. You can still write me there while I
court the A before the B before the C before the D. And A is an arduous angel
in the Shakespearean morn, through which I walk enveloped in this cloak to ruminate
the coming siege and try the spirits of my jannisaries. Camped with nervous dread we become as though jealous of contesseration, then make a little touch/to harry in the night.

Unmatchable mastiffs the color of nutmeg inkly thought as hot as ginger berries.
Happier men than she hold their manhood cheap. Sadder women than he value honest sex.
Vivienne Walker takes a fellow where he lives, Earnest Hare for instance.
Cramps. Generation. A county with a migraine problem, unemployed, editing the sciatica.
Put some water on. Listen to the noise. Who could know what was in the crates
Brahms just chucked in the Rhine? Well, you could always guess like a scholar,
preparing for his autopsy. Publish and Perish, in the magazine Reputations.
Or better exercise. Cut some kindling, make some kin and put the author thing down
to authorship. The authorities are at the door, we’ve got the context turned up too loud.
Our readers are the plaintiffs. Accomodation for a night. A person united will never be divided,
until they meet their autopsy. Self consciousness is always one of parts as well.
The jaw bone is the first to leave the skeleton. Libido leaves the veldt.
A word is the last thing any woman can say to a particular other. Rife gate
to the ruin run by the sun. Slow chapters. Sweet ball. My hat in your pocket.
Blind surrealist love is windowdust/ but do not change too fast the registration of the pelt nor of the pelting.

SR 10/22/90

Stephen Rodefer

from For More Lectures

Dilatory hair, sweetest flesh, dilapidated rose, another recherche mystagogue intent on silks and socks. Money talks, love walks, children long to go out

and play. It is necessary to remain able, to distinguish the difference between prolific and verbose. Verbs serve humans. Step into her bed and demand an index of last lines, or you won’t sign. Sweet tulips odorless, wild civility,

snow white hairs on me. As a child Picabia replaced the old masters in his house
with copies of his own, and sold the “originals” to finance his stamp collection.
Unadorned by a hardon, spindrift is all. Nice nieces, Writhing writing. Sick glory.
Rabid transit. We arrive in several canoes and have nothing but scorn for those
who do not allow things to be as complicated as they are. She looked gorgeous
in the latest synecdoche, but I was Helen’s man. The suicides will be he’s and she’s
who cannot love life doubtfully. Beards and sleeves, cows and poppies, my mind
is one with Caesar V, not to stray a meter from my poem. But I was kind of humping
that you would lie in these sheets. If I had not been born, another could be drinking this cup. On the hem of the lawn the babies are weaving their clearest saliva on looms of ivy and scum.

In the Alameda a woman walks over to a rose bush and picks a thorn. On her stone bench, sitting on an arm, she proceeds to clean her teeth. Dilapidated pose.
The Picts depicted themselves blue. Smart move. I will break your waves if you will watch my night. The night Kid Ory kicked the bucket, they wailed. I need a protege. Adorable whore, can you butle? I want my responsibility. I miss cacoons and gingermen, and when I handle them elsewhere, it is not the same. It’s a different kettle now of screams, drinking powder, slipping pants, mouthing off. But I see similarities I throw myself into an image. Art links letters. The pile-up figures. Conception

is not as wide as the world, nor deep as well, but Twill suffices. You fill it out.
Mens agitation. Used up preludes. Anemic double bills. Cat shit and dog puke.
God knows we love, but who? Before the stand-in is finished with one thing, you’re asking for another. Be your wax. His weltanschauung was beatup, but his syntax
was in intacking. Who is interested in the eventuality that little J A would come
to dominate the century the way big Ten did last. Now that the new B C was (a) P G. The general were fond of eating women. But that which exists through itself calls M E.

Mary Ruefle

Mimosa

for James Schuyler

Pink dandruff of some tree
afloat on the swimming pool.
What’s that bird?
I’m not from around here.
My mail will probably be forwarded
as quietly as this pink fluff
or a question or morphine
or impatience or a mistake
or the infinite method
established by experience
but never in this world.
I’ve always wanted to use
malarkey and henna in a poem
and now I have.
Oh Jimmy, all you ever wanted
was to see the new century
but no such luck.
You never saw a century plant
either, or you would have
taken another drink.
They grow for one hundred years,
bloom in their centenary spring
then die forevermore.
The stalk is ten feet tall
(you’d be jealous) rising
out of a clump of cactus leaves
(think yucca) then busting into
creamy ovoids flaming
on the candelabrum.
I was in an air-conditioned car
when I saw it but still felt
the heat of its beauty,
I wanted to stop and talk to it
but we sped on, so tonight
I’ll xanax myself to sleep
with the sweet thought that
today and every day is a
century plant of its own
seeded awful long beginning
blooming in drive-by yelps
of love and helplessness
and you saw plenty of them,
spectacular and sad as
a head of hennaed hair,
a lot of malarkey
if you ask anybody
other than us.

Ron Padgett

Detach, Invading

Oh humming all and
Then a something from above came rooting
and tooting onto the sprayers

profaning in the consul morning

of the pointing afternoon

back to dawn by police word to sprinkle it 

over the lotions that ever change

on locks

of German, room and perforate

To sprinkle I say

On the slotsasw they excude their gas

And the rabbit that pushes it

To blot the lumber

Like a gradually hard mode

All bring and forehead in the starry grab

That pulverizes

And its slivers

Off bending down the thrown gulp

In funny threes

So the old fat flies toward the brain

And a dent on brillance

The large pig at which the intense comes best

Wishes O you and O me

O cough release a rosy bar

Whose mist rarifies even the strokers

Where to go

Strapping, apricot

Tommy Pico

 

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

 

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

 

and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature

poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts

 

I say to my audience. There is something smaller I say to myself:

 

I don't hate nature at all. Places have thoughts — hills have backs that love

being stroked by our eyes. The river gobbles down its tract as a metaphor

but also abt its day. The bluffs purr when we put down blankets at the

downturn of the sun and laugh at a couple on a obvi OkCupid date

 

and even more stellar, the jellybean moon sugars at me. She flies and

beams and I breathe.

 

Fuck that. I recant. I slap myself.

 

Let's say I live in NYC. Let's say I was the first person in my family to

graduate college. Let's say UGH I like watching New Girl on Hulu.

 

This is the difference:

 

Some see objects in the Earth, where I see lungs. Sky mother falls thru

a hole, lands on a turtle.

 

Hole is my favorite band.