Horse Chestnut

A large chocolate tumor.

*

An irregular hemisphere with bumps and concave wrinkles 

like a miniature bald head—a phrenologist's dream—

with one side of the hemisphere slightly less rounded. 

     Four-fifths of it covered with a paper-thin 
            reddish-brown rind, made shiny with 
the oil secreted from the indentation 

behind your nostrils where the nose meets the face. 

(You can grease up your forefinger by rubbing the spot 
        and then rubbing the nut, or you can just rub 
the nut in the spot, as I do.)

*

The final fifth, a cutaway of the shell on the lower portion 

of the flattened side—a slightly blackened, 

dullish brown surface that can't be shined—perhaps, 
    on some evolutionary 

scale, if one thinks of the nut as a brain, 

which it resembles, the area where the cerebellum, 

the medulla oblongata, and the beginning (or end) 
        of the spinal cord meet.

*

Called a horse chestnut because it was used somehow 

in the treatment of horses' ailments. Nowadays, 
it is useless, like so many other things. 
             Or, rather, a new use 

for it has yet to be found. (Except in this case.)

*

It grows on a tree and is enclosed in a spiny burr—

a porcupine golf ball that seems impregnable if it is not ready 

to open. Protection from what? Is nature so concerned 

          about an inedible nut?

Murder Machine No. 41

Copper and seared bolts, garnishees brandishing
Coke bottles with simmering caps, molten
glass, you name it, what a dollar can buy,
and right off the set, the field, the dumb-dumb
bullet shattering in the lungs, goodness, how
the brain weeps, drains, captives or morons,
no need to know, not really, need
to simplify, that's all, be vigilant and armed.
Zeus would have escaped, turned nails into fudge,
chewed his way out, yum-yum, and knocked
off a piece for good measure. Steam up the flowers,
the windows, keep your eyes on ascensions, dangerous
buggers that can come back to haunt you. Marsh plants
don't suffer from excessive moisture, nor should you.

Dog in My Dog

The sun is distracting me this morning, so are

            the hydrangeas

and the bony peach tree with

                                              its four dangling

and dehydrated peaches.

The grass is burnt brown—there's been

            no rain here for a while, and just

as well, after all I'm

                                on vacation,

why, I'm not sure—I prefer dank cellars, cities,

      where rusted nails from a lost century

                 hold the edges aligned

and the entire contraption vibrates 

        like a steam engine blowing 

              off its organs. 

Nature is brutally deceptive, all surface, 

recessional

                decrepitude, can't tape the decay, 

       only the movement, and I'm 

                    prone to ask if a rock can have 

a soul, why can't a building?

       Perhaps it's my mental

and physical misalignments. 

                I see through 

         a fifty-percent black circle that fades 

                           a few seconds after

   I open my eyes, a dangling and dehydrated  

  

pathology through which my art becomes 

my art,  or should, 

                   because so many artists I know 

filter out their deformities. 

Oh, they overcome them,

       even make sure you appreciate their 

particularity, but they don't paint them. 

                   It seems to me your deformity 

is what you are, all else is replication. 

    For example, if

this human bacterium I know, whose secretions

             coagulate on the walls, 

    were to depict his DNA, he could 

perhaps create an indelible monument, 

        a twisted bronze with Gehenna-like 

squiggles that could shake

us out of our pinafores.

Ah, so caustic! 

But he strives to be digestible, only to stumble

                        like a satyr, 

               even when he shovels 

                  the old lady's snow next door—

such a good neighbor, wants to make you weep—

such decency, 

                      like the poet presenting 

his National Book Award prize money to 

an antiwar group  in a

a melodramatic flourish of

  rebellion but as an lit-mag editor 

mailing insulting rejection notes to 

fledgling poets—

       Lover of Mankind, Hater of People. 

Or Cartier-Bresson

talking about his friend Bonnard: 

                   "You know, Picasso didn't

                     like Bonnard, and I 

                     can imagine why, 

                     because Picasso

                     had no tenderness." 

In disease there is progression,

      or is there just disease? 

               You can doctor yourself up

          to a point and then you lash out 

                          or you fester,

but you don't produce, you stand still,

   which is what terrifies me because I'm so full of

                inaction, and

few can outwait me. 

When you hammer steel,

        it just gets harder, 

              and Kim Sun Myung ought to know,

                    spending 43 years in jail 

    because he refused 

to renounce Communism. 

And I refuse to renounce it, too—

       not because I believe in it, 

             but because others don't.

I'm going to pull the shade down 

              over this bright

      scene, neutralize it before it

              boozes me up.

This is what thinking is, not puking—

         you don't study the whiteness of a shade, 

                 you glance

at it and back off into yourself 

        where there are

             circuses performing, 

   clowns, high-wire acts,

         an old idiot who Guillaume observes 

                    wears "a blouse

          of a rose-violet that dances on the cheeks

              of certain young girls 

                      who are near death."

Disease, decrepitude, who

              knows the order of decline, 

          the exact moment you live through

 a thousand times but will not survive 

                a thousand and one?

        It's the blanching that gets me. If I

  could only go out in a blaze of 

                  comic-book color . . . 

             Big things get particularized,

                  too massive to live with

one chews, breathes, mourns, but one senses 

   the small things . . . only after . . . 

            tiny, insignificant, 

            destructive, they can dampen survival,

                       extinguish it . . .  

                    

     The minutia, the maggots, the remarks,

            scarier than enormities,  

                 unnoticeable, they compile, 

                   one cocks his head, 

        "Did he say that? Did I hear that?"  

                                                                        

Maggots in my life,  you're small, 

           insignificant, but you ignite 

my survival. Small things are scary, 

           scarier than big things. 

              They're unnoticeable and can be seen 

                    only when you squint. 

Some can be stepped on, sprayed, 

     but never eliminated, constantly driven 

                    into sockets from where 

                        they peek out like rodents,

            impersonal, infectiously, crazed.