To The Reader
Sorry, how can I avoid being influenced by the copy of this I read before the fisherman pulling in his line
Or occupying all of France again with a forthright bouquet? Our spirits have worked or our noses have worked and travelled and our bodies, dead in the kitchen
Eating, hanging from a noose or finally getting over a cold. Do you like record stores do you sneeze
When your typewriter puts up a comma and not a period or when the nurse feeds you porridge because your own arms are immobile you’re immobilized by tetanus, rabies and you’re waiting for the vaccine.
Our fishermen or sharp-tongued songbirds or our house painters back again to paint over painted walls. They paint over the locks
So every effort we make to fit the key in We hang up the noose on the sprinkler pipe but it’s freshly painted and we have to go to the hardware store and pay for our new rope with greasy hands. Haven’t we met?
And we were both walking in the same door in a general sense we both attended the ball in honor of the factory and drank bourbon with the chemist
I never thought Helen of Troy an ape-man would cry for a devil-man or bathe our paperclips.
Over, wasn’t it, the ear-horn of evil or isn’t it Satan in his third trimester
Who pays for our drinks with whale bone, a long tongue our notepaper in pastels already half sung.
Do we eat the thin gold foil too? Do we vote? are we voters and each picks a letter out
All is steaming and parsed, split and the chemist knew
How to say all the new fancy double-talk that tied the ropes up the many fingers we remember on the cash register
All the little squished things we’ve turned over the earth we’ve turned over the small grapes and meals
That each day sing to us from the wood-stove. Each day we go down the teeth of a mastodon stomping loudly
But you’re not afraid. The sandman O the beach the green wheat my arms celebrate who can spit between their teeth.
Aint she dainty crowning setting foot out of the bathtub and her poor skin tells the truth or the turkey was good to eat
It had a wound. It had seen the virgin mother coming up out of an antique litter box
And we wanted to see it grow old in a monastery with swings out back
Then we pressed too hard on the comma key and along came They unveiled the pulled back the orange curtain
And angels had burned it. Four million on the march to comment briefly on a million or controlling the boat in the
Danube. I feed the cows rubberized Somebody Nobody from a family of demons
And when we breathe, lumbering into the mustard closet
Down into it, into snow or soft or not seen with sourdough instead of shoes
If the violin leaps up onto us or leaps onto the yardstick our lawn catching fire
And Aunt Nonie moves her hurt from here to you and her brocading and the cards come across the table smoothly as adultery or false gods
Sneakers plain sneakers subtly underscore where the animals fall into the earth Our intention for tuna
Is discovered by a friend. “¡Mira!” booms over the moors but it’s not Thomas Hardy’s accountant.
Permit me, if you will, to mention these few small charcoals of the Little Rascals gang each posed mounted on the back of a lice-ridden panther,
With burned fingertips and no eyebrows, with a corporation dedicated to lifting their trousers well over the towers. Unless snakes
Or a lemon-tree monster claps his hands and throws a sheepskin full of egg nog
Into the manager’s house of famous german nose-vices
There will always be more people who are sledding, more people packed into the machinist’s office, more times that I am maudlin
And coughing up the seagull feathers you’ve pushed effortlessly into my silent
Furnace. Who’s cokeing iron pigs with free labor? Who’s small potatoes are grown in a trash heap?
Irishmen in the battlements have and level their lemondine avalanche.
So I guess this is the end for us. We’re splitting up. The oil the battery is full but leaking involuntarily.
She dreams of already warm hunting dogs smoking in the hookah.
You know all this stuff already, reader, sea monster in the delicatessen
—Needle-phobic reader—my seeming mirror babbler—monster with a lisp and a fluffernutter sandwich.