Aquilone

In his way is a difficult poet to pin down.  Certainly

He works within a distinctly American idiom, Though

To ignore his debt to Rilke would be rash.  Also,

He possesses the same intellectual acuity

Of say the French poets and all the wit of the English

Eighteenth century satirists

But propelling most of the work no doubt is classic

Whitmanesque free verse full of cataloguing and all sorts

Of democratic asides.  Hear too the Beat syncopations

And their frankness as well, particularly as he turns to

Matters of the body and its carnal applications. 

All this is not to say he is a poet unlike Emily Dickinson,

Or the authors of the King James Bible nor even an exemplar

Of dada or Situationist accidental bricolage. 

He is a romantic, if an analytical one and one

Senses a highly devotional and elegiac quality to the oeuvre. 

There are confessions, of course, but they are neither indulgent nor icky.

On the whole the poems tend to be short, some comprised

Even of but one line

Or less, but there is always a certain grasping at the universal at work -

A profundity found in simplicity, as in haiku

Or good coffee.  Other times they are like confetti,

And explode with fun on the page.  In matters of sadness,

The question of which of course has been raised before,

There is perhaps a certain melancholic optimism threaded

Throughout.  Aquilone believes in the sorrows of the world,

But the joys too he knows are as

Substantial and fleeting.

Fat girl

When your hair is undone

And it spreads beyond your shoulders

And it catches the sun

You are a goddess.

Cliché? No, eternal truth.

Even here on coffee’s mezzanine

Where as big lips sip from

Your tall cup of whatever it is

You are really

Slipping me the liquids of Lethe

And into dreaming I tumble your giving amplitude.

Familiar

I have stoned your patrician sculpting on Fifth Avenue

Marbles hard and incomparably downy

Delicate hands

But what would they feel like

Wrapped around my swollen labors

Nauseas with meter and meaning

Accidental in jeans on Sunday

The day of our late lord now

The plus plus Devi cream

Whole-milker of Montague Street

Whose satin thong I know by faith

Strains to soar like any other bird of joy?

My mouth is the sky

And if I tasted your womb

I know you would bless me with eternity.

Brother,

I saw you on the train last night

(Or was it Monday on the way back from the folks?)

Doesn’t matter because you are dead either way.

Aw, it’s not you at all.

Just another reason to write a poem.

Another reason to make something up.

There! With a screech and a holler

You be gone again towards over the bridge.

A Phantom deformed in a stranger

Attached by suggestion to memory

And for that moment

Confused by love.

To 1.

It’s not that I don’t love you

It’s that I am pointed in a direction

It’s not that you don’t inspire me or make me laugh

It’s that I am distracted by the scent of

It’s not that we are not close

To 2.

I do, the world cannot be saved by a single bee and a single bloom

No self-determination in magnets, fate alone

I laugh all the time

Hair, humid urgency, the sensation of being taken away as I am being held

Breaking things open,

Concentration to a point calamitous

My heart drawn out as through the eye of a needle

The ecstasy of the process of hollowing

Then a shell filled with scented air

The curdle of your breath

All your unpleasantries delicacies

I will push out what must be freed from you

Push in what must be from me

We are not mortar and stone. We are two stones.

In August salt and rain showered down barren passages in Coney’s desert of padlocks, the real deal not nostalgic fetish clogs of websites and turnpike tattoo parlors making noir not peace. In the early part of the day the emptiness proves itself master over love, the place nakedly nothing, stale fizz awaiting another vain shaking. How surprised are you to come here and then discover how gone it really is. It is a place for wind to travel through. It is a place to commemorate collapsible rot and matter overcome by time underwhelmingly desperate in suspension. It is hunger momentarily sated with dyed fat and vulgar shavings in a cup. It is minor league rage and regret and mostly mockery canned smell it asscracked in cocoa butter and mentholatum armpit smotherfuckers. It is pocked pickets and handy jaybirds under the boardwalk humptastic. It is Hector and hectored, Blanquita and hipster banal-y-wood irony. The bearded lady is just a jew in a lawn chair. Somewhere there are photographic Germans with lunch in their backpacks because must always, right? And uniformly doomed children squeal in delight liberated from books and shoes if ever there were either to pollute their nude aspirations of nothing. Chickenbone says hello too because she is everywhere either in styro or just there. The cola laps like the afterthought Atlantic and I’ve seen cleaner men’s rooms but it is evolution calling, sleeper cell water droplets activate insulin insurgencies and demand on grainy videola that we worship wave-halations, prostrations, face the sun and choke ourselves to death, even here in wretched teeming shores, decrepit with yesterday’s sustainability that only applies to that which we’ve already lost and cheered for. The world is so much more than colored lights and nothing else exactly what the calliope says it is, wounding down groan too old to ever be sun borned again.

In August I brought my Cousins to la playa vieja. Coney Island whasamatter? No mind.

Everywhere there is unlimited space

Except here where space is limited

The world is lost in the whooshing void

Up close a cluttered ball of noise

I can listen to two different noises

The empty hum of massive being

Or the clattery bustle of our puny selves

Either is what can propel me

Or serve as accompaniment

To the slow graceful arc

Of my dying.

1.

I should have broken you when I had the chance

Instead of just rattling you on the stick

(But you liked it on the stick, didn’t you?)

I should have left none of your original skin

Showing, I should have bruised you

Because, like an apple, yes, at the end

Of summer, you deserved it.

And I really wanted to give it to you

Because you really wanted it.

Heat rose from you -

Your breath stank of an empty

Inside dying for love

So I tracked you like a dog

And just a little, I roughed you up.

You took me in places we had

To wash afterwards, places –

Nothing but unfinished business.

2.

You know, if I wanted, I could

Feel you on me any time I wanted

Just by thinking of it

But I couldn’t hurt you just by thinking of it.

I had to leave you to do that

And I only thought of that afterwards.

Funny, I’m not young anymore -

Young young I mean, little and small,

Yet still I recall little conversations,

Funny things we all said

That we all remember

From when we were small and

Funny and close and alive and

A family created by memories and

Built after time by

Funny recollections

We only recall when we’re no longer young.

I drove through fog in the Wet Green Mountains,

America unspooling itself from the ether,

Silos and steeples and such, such as it were.

(Who knew it was so close to home? That is to say, nearby?)

And at the top of the mountain, cleared fields.

A cloud had touched down, no other way to describe it –

(“The wet thumbprint of God the Almighty Motherfucker”)

And threatened to asphyxiate the whole picturesque shebang

With its still and violent breath.

But the whiteness! There is the beauty

And the inevitability of death -

Restores my faith. I will vote again in November!

Past silo and porch I sail into America’s very heart,

Opaque and inexhaustible – the two of us dying,

Leadfoot Daydreamer versus the Gossamer Speed Demon.

So much is waiting

And emptiness

Before the thing comes

As if to prove itself

It must first be disproven, negated

Obliterated even – Impossible odds

A shot in the dark but then from the dark

It comes.

Sun over the mountains – God

Saying there you go.

Then it is here

And it is everything.

It is every reason for being whatever it is

And it is all you will ever need.

Feels good

While it lasts

But its gotta go you know

Because you can’t,

Despite how successful you think you have been

In overcoming the cruel duality of the human condition,

Hold your breath forever.

Now to write because I can’t read.

The minds I have,

One attracts one repels,

Yet each seems a real response to a situation.

Keeping up the pace, that’s where the skill lies

Or the luck maybe or maybe both.

Sometimes in writing there is so much waiting

And sometimes reading is work.

Everyday I ask for only one thing.

To be left alone with my two minds

And my many others

And to let them find the goat’s path home.

There is a wall. Thin perhaps, clear even

Between any one person and another.

Sometimes it is very sexy.

You go through that wall

It dissolves around you and you are inside

Then there is the other person

Surprised like you are

And everything is funny, tastes funny smells funny

But it is so sexy

And you are surprised to be so turned on,

Your tastes, or perhaps your immediate attentions

As always are too easily believed -

And the dark, sharp, flinty form

At the far end of the car

Is exuberantly separated

The humid wood broached

The roots wetted

And the union!

Powerful because it is

A lust beyond an I. No self of ours

Can absorb all that bliss.

It is Making that rings in you

It is time demanding to be played out

Through you and anything that comes out of you.