rehabilitating crow and other activities

Gaga Oh là là

or men’s wars

c’est comme ça

maybe

maybe

GOTAN

The woman was like the word never,
a special charm rose up from her neck,
a kind of forgetfulness where her eyes were safe,
the woman settled in my left side.

Watch out watch out I'd scream watch out
but she possessed me like love, like the night,
and the last signals I made that autumn
settled down quietly under the surf of her hands.

I Should be Dead

Fortunately I should be dead
by the time there is no longer
any ice at all on the Alps.
 
As a girl, in the desert of the Angels,
Heidi was a book of pure magic—
chalets, cows, fresh cream, and snowy peaks.
 
It’s all gone now—a whole civilization melting.
I can see a piece of paper with these words
floating downstream into the Ocean.

       EVIL DWELLS IN THE SOUL OF AMBITION
    THE BEAST KNOWS THE HOPELESSNESS OF GRANDEUR
      TO MATE AND GRAZE AND SLEEP WITHOUT FEAR
     

VISITORS

The Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square,
I said, and then change for the Northern Line,
But make sure it is the Edgware Branch,
Get off in Hampstead, I’ll be waiting outside,
Old, bald, worn, your classmate from grade school,
Our old parochial school on Long Island,
Many lives ago, when we still believed
In the transubstantiation, and thought ourselves
Quite cool souls migrating through the universe.

My flung careful few, steady bells at the pleat ends of the operating skirt our carburettori have draped over the planet, napkin framed around the unformed fontanelle of now, the soon-to-be-cicatricose present, for which, as the price goes up, many will be sacrificed: now, as the willow is in first bud like a giant whip of green pearls in a chthonic fist, and in the wind the metasequoia roars as if on fire, now they approach with scalpel and spoon, our polity lies on the metal tray in a pool of noxious black liquor, the semen of men fed on anthracite.

Fifty years ago
Leroi Jones
Wrote a poem

working with the forceps of time

May 2010