Pass the Butter                                               

after Dorsky’s ‘Hours for Jerome’


A mat of cuts from ankle to knee
The angry tics of time-lapsed grass


Clouds as tender           heads of broccoli
Planes land        in San Francisco


Cherry blossoms, taxidermy
Complete the parallel edit


People keep trying and failing
People keep trying & trying

& trying

sticks a Twinkie into gathering jowls


In silent film, you don’t know what people are saying


Ships move, buildings don’t
The cranes don’t sway, but seem to


Celluloid turns stateside in my creeping cornucopia


Blackbirds rise and settle in cornrows
And rise and settle in blackbirds


Dogtags whose ambling janitors
pump pixilated grids of aerosol


Tight in fist, the haft snaps
One and one make eleven


This blank rage grasps after the whiteness of Williams’s chickens


Ski masks at the Pick & Pay: cigars, lines and the deliberate shifting of tense


People fight silence with their bodies


When the rain starts, so do the wipers                  the wipers              the wipers
White paper in filthy gutter


Trash in the ashcan, digging with finger


The IBM Selectric
As futuristic
In an ad for the twentieth century


Froth over sand
As the sea retreats


The image fucks your eyes


Allow yourself to stare


It tastes different with the sound turned down.


“Noblesse Oblige.”



A Sight Unseen, An Annotation of     

A big star in a small sky is the sun we turn
around to read
and other metaphors you’ll forget
until later
in the estuary, the moored vessels nod silently
as priests into their collars, the wind confessing
that it’s not getting anywhere fast. Like the Monday
after a holiday, there is a pleasant hangover
(cut to Hitler sucking on a pacifier as he studies
a map of Poland)–return—Pacific rimming
tectonic shift, with vodka with, twist, pause
pregnant and anapestic, foot bone connected to “the

THING ITSELF” is not (like) reading Sanskrit while standing
on your head or two tart batteries on the sill. The clock tells us
something we don’t want to know.
It’s okay to fuck up less important things
(unless you fuck up a lot of them).

Bob Dylan on a bus placard. Forty years after his wad,
he can no longer signify. (Which way the wind blows
is back in his face; he’ll say nothing further
that anyone will hear withal). There’s nothing sadder than that
and yet: there was something poetic in the way the
poser prosed. We admired him more
when he had a flaw that would kill him.

I’m being observed as I write—is it me
or the activity?—and what does this observation
and its notice portend? An extraction of action
which is itself (an action). I try to clear
a mockingbird from my throat. It’s all about
“making up the difference,” and the hand is the slave
of something we’re not talking about. A funny walk
and a runnier fun. Always behind (your schedule) an
idyllic chronology for those whose money
is your time. This the monstrous errand of the open
hoodwink. When in doubt (as ever), comma,
pause: gather yourself, the pieces of,
and let’s see how fast you can matter.