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Whirlpool: Imagine It
— advertising
slogan
I have come at last
To understand
The power
Of my dishwasher:
I use it
To bring back
The dead!
Don’t kid yourself
The dead
Live on
In proximity
To machines
And why shouldn’t
My dishwasher
Become
A Tibetan
Portal—
A “Bardo-matic”
Multi-cycle
Soul cleanser?
I set the dial
To “Advanced Patriotism”
Making sure
To add
The Orphic spot remover,
And
Let the falling
Inertia
Of the unreal dead
Wash backwards
Into history
With the fused stones
And magic gems
Of unfathomable
Becoming.
And how quietly
My dishwasher
Shifts
Into
The Pythagorean
Cycle!
The mathematic
Flesh and bone
Stirs
With
Leaf pattern,
Scarlet berries,
Until
My good
Dishwasher,
My Whirlpool
From RCA,
A corporation
Heavily invested
In weapons
Of mass destruction
Lo!
My death-ray
Dishwasher
Raises up
Out of the mineral earth
Those
Who once
Were buyer
And seller,
Master
And victim,
Foot soldiers,
Iraqi children,
Kurds,
Sandinistas,
Contras,
Maoists,
Integrationists,
Trotskyites,
Mensheviks,
You get the picture
And
My dishwasher,
Makes a sound
Like wings
And washes out
All the blood drenched,
“civilized”
Abstractions
Of the rascals
Who live
By killing
You and me.
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— after
Kenneth Rexroth
It’s easy when your parents are dead—I mean by now my father smells
of waterweeds, my good mother smells of mud, or they lean between
two hills like fused stones.
Of course I wrote about them when they were alive—that was courage
of a different kind,
Like stealing from your neighbor’s gardens in daylight, or singing
in an unfamiliar church. So in those days when they could read me I
wrote everything with blue ink—
Blue as the star, blue as the gull, blue as the heart, blue as the
air in the tree… And my mother who drank all night and my father who
lived in the center of a page could see mutual love in the blue
clouds of my diary.
Because I say
this is a poem
It will turn the birches earthward,
But it is also like the weather
So it will have no feeling.
Pegasus I think felt nothing
Circling Mt. Ida. This is sure.
Nature, hand,
Each is the edge of thought only,
The dream of gardens,
Not much will change this.
I swore when I was younger
Polity was in the will,
The moon rose
All a piece
With poems
And I thought of the poem
As being
Like the marks
Of hands,
The calligraphies
Of children
That might change us.
But the platonic horse
Wins finally--we slow a bit,
The moon is voiceless.
And the horse with wings
Without taking thought
Circles the mountain.
Mind by halves thinks “ethics”—
Erases ethics, writes “only”.
My uncle washed with gin
Thought “defensible” since
He was cross, he was tired…
He lost the book of ethics.
By halves we are ready.
By halves men storm a beach.
Don’t we whisper in halves?
I strive to be half a man.
I ache for half the moon,
Half of love, half the luck song
Sung by the cricket
Who sings with half his leg.
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