I always thought trees grew in the ground, but they
grow in the air. The rain falls from the sky or does
it? Weather grows in the oceans and the trees catch it.
We did not measure the caterpillar fur this year. The
wood pile that was being diminished fell down yesterday.
It seems like we are burning firewood 24/7, now that
it is colder, but not as cold as it was this time last-
year. It’s nice to see the roads wet but not frozen.
Nowadays more birds seem to winter over and might
appear under the porch roof sooner than later.
Maybe we can have xmas dinner
outdoors, it’s spooky, it’s midwinter
day soon but it’s raining & still green
We live now in a different place
& it didn’t cost money to move, unless you count
all the polluting things. Many parts of USA
are set up for cars, this is not good
no butcher, baker, candlestick maker
Time to start over, let’s pretend
we can only be where we can walk to
I think I’ll start a movie theater in my house
You make the tickets, I the snacks
How practical these proposals and in the summer
we can show films outdoors while smoking a
non-kosher chicken or beef brisket but
not pork or horse meat because this is the USA
where the hay is tall and the wild turkey roam
not to mention the two dogs that like to
play in the snow when the ground turns as white
as their coats.
It’s midwinter day mud season
I have post traumatic stress disorder
from all this global warning, I’m going to bed
where I dream of a white xmas just like
the ones we used to know but nothing’s merry
or bright today till I turn on
the blue xmas lights & dancing in them
is the aurora borealis & 20 hummingbirds a-mating
in NYC you can order a cooked goose dinner
for the holiday of the birth of the son of god
Welcome, those who worship war, to our happy home
today we have roast dinosaur with slithery lizard slaw
with black giraffe tongue pudding drizzled with
essence of newt & beef cheek foam for your pleasure
under the day-for-night blue skies of memory’s back-lot
As midwinter day draws forward a night time snow event
of a few inches & party goers will build bonfires
sparks will fly and unseen meteors will zoom across the horizon.
People will put charcoal briquettes
in the bathtub, douse them with lighter fluid
& all the Nazi racists will watch & be terrified
This might be how their hell will be made in a household
rife with nonbelievers, ho ho ho ho ho, merry metamorphosis
May the other earths be cheap at ocean state job lot
May foam mattresses rain down on us all
Giant mushrooms in the woods, crashed beer cans, a blanket
or two, bones of a deer, the wild asparagus and a
blue heron. Sometimes no matter what the season
we sense the sea. Yet, we are quite a distance from where
the dolphin swim. Never have we seen an octopus or humpback
whale in the field. Yes the horse corral has flooded
and bears have crossed over but no giant squid or sail fish
Under the bird feeder the remains of crayfish, oysters, scallops and
mussels can be found. But never do we see a parrot or
pelican fighting over food.
So we try to make up for it
by acting whale-ish when we can. On saturnalia
we hoop & holler & do hedonistic things all the time
We’ve even turned bill green into a hedonistic guy
It’s Christianity all the way with our lord’s births
dotting the snow like oysters on a map, virulent
mysterious & gargoyle-ish, the good thing about our house
is you can be heretical, smoke cigarettes & plan
nonviolent actions within earshot of alice’s owl
which eats bill’s rabbits & all the voles of the field
In the midst of this year of the mild winter, another
harsh oil spill spreads it’s evil poison into an
African delta. Pictures from space will prove the true
amount leaked into the ocean & will no doubt be
worse than what the company man tells us
If the 99 percent cause too much trouble, police
now have drones in their collection of weapons
against the public who often pay their salary
For maximum freshness crash all drones into vacant
resort towns & celebrate with a tablespoon of
German speaking angels riding the rails to Prague
Don’t worry about any ice, we can melt it and turn it
into frozen drinks to serve to our dogs who are trained
to pull our sled to the next heated swimming pool
surrounded by palm trees
Let me outta here!
As sentences slide relentlessly to endings
Thus having a middle, so I’ll slither out of here
You’ll never know where I am, I’ll
Be an incognito afficionada of melted drinks the world
Over & over ha, ha, ho ho ho a new year’s acumen
Let’s eat somebody’s crumbs from a vending machine
The earth will tilt the machine just enough
& then there will be free candy for the masses
Between moments of silly string sunlight
Sinking to the bottom of lake whatchamacallit
One language poet was worried about losing
A grip and another was worried about the grappa
The reflection against tree tops never stopped
A wonderful pasta dish from glowing or hovering
Over the table top next to those woven hikers
Taking notice of the amount of mushrooms growing
What kind of mushrooms were they?
My head hurts on the right side, now that you mention it
My head hurts on the right side
Now that you mention righting it
Whose, living & dead, animosity will we
Encounter on the frozen daiquiri steppes
On the way to where the corn grows?
Should we leave anglo-saxon shit there?
& proceed with multi-syllabic notions?
I think it would be peripatetic of us mignonettes, don’t you
Existentially, you re-begin willy-nilly
Without fear of machines or buzz by drones or
People who live in tents as the days get longer once
Again next to a river where once more fish could
Be found and what of the oysters?
The order of sections — cave
Put a foot in it, put a cave in it
A predominant mine of fields to come
Moving past midwinter day & wanting more
Daylight but not because the train is waiting
To take skiers up north to north creek &
When will we see the northern lights here
In the north many hours away to a crossing
Where they check passports & wonder
Why would anyone be going any further north
Tonight the northern star might be
Visible & we don’t hear them marching anymore
Across the sea, the sea
So we ain’t going to march anymore
Ok, ok leave me alone to write on my tabula rasa,
will you? It’s the first day, I walk in the spring fields
Who’s on first?
Into the new year of a year with two twos in it
And winter that only just might get into the
Single digits. And who’s on second? Let’s hope it
Stays above 2 degrees while the sun shines
Before we know it we will be at the middle point toward
The next solstice time
There’s two 1’s too. Oh no, one 1
Thought it was still last year plus this new one
There should be a period of time when it’s both
Like the overlapping circles that show there’s no place
For a sex offender to live, except maybe a boring swamp
& what’s to eat? I guess you could live on frogs’ legs.
If you throw a frog in boiling water it will jump out
If you put a frog in water and then start
To heat up the water, it will cook
For humans though, you have to rip their hearts out & eat them raw
I’m sure you could eat uncooked frogs too, but you risk
getting mad frog disease, just like queen anne’s lace.
At first not only did humans not know that babies were
The result of sexual activity, but they also didn’t know
If you planted a seed, the plant of which the
Seed is the seed will appear & grow. Maybe this was
Because there were no metaphors yet. Metaphors appeared
When people began to understand skunk cabbages,
But that took millions of years, if not more
When marie was born
in Worthington, mass in a hospital in Northampton
It was 60 degrees on December 16th. Now it’s 55 degrees on January 8th
The only difference is this now is not unusual & it’s
Not the January thaw. There’s nothing to thaw. We just
Sit here passively assuming the summer will be too hot.
Better get our air conditioners now like we live in
New Orleans. I think you should live where you can go out
All the time. Therefore we must move to the canary islands,
The fortunate isles where it’s always 60 degrees, but we can’t
Afford it. For me, cold is better than hot, but who cares?
Winter-overing are many plants & animals.
Yes, the weather is a strange with its patterns
highs & lows moving on streams that move
from where they once used to be
Weather history & weather predictions
What we need is a cartoon weather machine
Let’s turn off the hot air from those leaders
that believe the polar caps were meant to melt
Let’s keep writing until hell freezes over
The sad fact is that our friend from Pensacola could
not go ice fishing this season! Apple trees might be
confused and the cows & horses might be acting out
of order - as in the spring replaces winter &
autumn replaces summer & winter takes a holiday
to the canary islands on the oil companies expense
I’ll put that in my bank account
We’ll see how much interest it accrues
Meanwhile I’ll smoke it in my pipe
which I can do comfortably outdoors
while looking at the stumps of evergreens
that got a disease & got whacked like a mob
person who’s now floating in a swamp
or at the bottom, weighted with a tree stump
in a dark place full of recidivist scavengers
And heavy ignorance shall sing below as
other worthy fellows will grow feathers to
rise above those stinky persons dripping with
useless adornments of favors stolen at gun point
From defenseless swamp dwellers who write
poetry in the time not devoted to survival
& in both cases they use chance methods
saying “you send me” to all who attend
Meanwhile they say it’s the weather that causes
all this poetry. It was written about in
all the newspapers - online & off
Without explanation everyone demanded more
poetry about the weather and wondered where
to read it- online or off
The days sunlight remained the same but
the climate changed and with it all the poets
changed their names so more people would
think the world had twice as many
poets as it did before the weather changed
James Schuyler became an international hero
& Dave Brinks claimed Schuyler was really born
in New Orleans where he ate so many blackberries
it caused a climate change so everywhere
in the world became weather-wise
& everyone became a weather poet including you
Then everybody became someone else so all bets
were off & the metaphors got a contagious disease
so we could only safely do similes like:
My heart is like a winter scarf, or
The weather is like a teenager, or
The weather is like a broken toy
If only it were a tire in need of air
we could get free air at the ice cream shop
Problem solved and then we would not need
to write anymore poetry, we’d be free as
the birds of the air plus all the extinct ones
Extinct plummeting, but having sex during,
to the earth in a vertical migration of
grasping claws & toes till a veritable midden
of extinction becomes an unnamed constellation
Before the eyes of history, imagine that title!
So sometimes if you listen to the sunset
it sounds orange with a hint of pink
Sometimes a beautiful sunset is caused by
a very profitable industrial company just
doing its job to create more jobs so people
can take a day off and go fishing, but don’t
eat the fish or go in the water with a cut
It’s like love canal, purple & green sunsets
the cheap house, good for the economy of chemicals
The spoils of the spectrum, going beyond the primaries
to the colors nobody knew existed interstate
The colors that don’t pay taxes, the withheld
colors, the ones buried with the spent fuel rods
in places more secret than extraterrestrial cities
where you can begin your life again in a new way
And if weather told you to change it
It told you whether or not to change the weather
And before the weather changed you told it
Told it to change - whether or not
Not to change you would have told it
Told it not to change - weather or not
The weather did change and you told it
This is the way to begin again in a new way
Weather or not there’s any weather to speak of
I’d just like to say I sun-bathed on Jan. 11, 2012
on the stones by the meeting of the creeks of here
The price of wheat here is unchanged but buckwheat
is in great demand. You are my sunshine, my only
boring, stupid, asinine, decrepit message to the
bent & bowing children who’re not synaesthetic, you know
so we can’t use them for our sensual experiments plus
They sit in a cupola of diadems & wish for a peephole!
Or they wish to farm the land 12 months a
year here in the northeast where there is enough sunlight
Not always as bright as we might like, but the moon hasn’t changed
except for the trash those spacemen left behind for keeps
Maybe next time they will leave this long prose-like poem behind
What temperature is it on the moon today? It can be converted
The temperature of the temple is changing today as
new rocket ships are being designed in area 51
sympathetic to those who visited before climate change
But there’s always been climate change
this is just faster, today it rains, gets cold
snows, so far there’s no icicles yet this year
Watch out! You’ll get beaned by a cube & never
have a chance of observing this flower blossoming
Wait! It’s not a flower, it’s a fast-growing root
to imbibe the liquid the earth’s turned into
so we can start over
For every season there is a turn for every bird
there is a brain, for every customized calendar there
is a planting guide not in need of passports or
naturalization certificates made out of imported paper
that melts in water with or without acid
And the beauteous clouds paint a canvas for migration
along an index comprehended by unknown creatures
& mountain lions, we could start a zoo but
all I see are squirrels & rhinoceroses
I’ll never fall in love again, man
Over on deusenberry hill road there’s a lot of
rich dutch eating hasenfeffer on hilltops while
We plebeians are satisfied with visions of lions
& shadows that resemble dutch guards on white houses
intriguing us while we eat mere mire poix
Mire poixing it, we arrive at Orvieto’s well
To be in Italy and not worry about
getting a pitcher full while the ancient ruins
glisten in the sunshine. For now hold a space
Till we travel again across time zones faster than
the wind did blow today in New England.
What’s new about it? What’s England about it?
Who’s on first? Do you wanna tango in winter?
At regular temperatures, a molecule of air
moves at the speed of light, in quantum mechanics
a proton that’s watched moves differently
than it would, unwatched. Behind closed doors
nobody can see me. Don’t you wanna find out
everything I think, even in the most mundane
instances -- never use that word -- or nature
I am all natural - except for the results of fracking.
What are those company people thinking behind
closed doors? increasing their decadence and the misery
of everyone else? those being mundane moving to the rhythm
of those unseen neutrinos that maybe we could make
better use of during these days of border crossing
Let’s fly to Puerto Vallarta and watch whales jump into the air
Let’s all be decadent because it’s only human nature naturally.
Like a chicken or bad boy being thrust
up against a wall, nay thrown, this is bigotry
treatment of peregrine falcons who now sway, nay
swoop, to the ledges of tall buildings
in New York City where you can get kasha knishes
dance till dawn & take taxis to no destination
If you’re a rich peregrine dreaming of periwinkle
flowers that will knock your socks off perhaps
And in snow storms they cross country ski cross town
never getting into a town-car going to museums
of fine art that might depict the perfect storm.
Once in central park bright fabrics hung
across the path ways - now that must have confused
the birds and what not, what not being
The peregrine falcons, the hawks, the towhees
& the flying alligators not to speak of the bats
the few that survived the white-nose fungus
&/or the cold cardinals mistaken for finches
Once I had a gnostic dog who said all men are created equal
But the dog spoke French, it couldn’t have been
my dog, it gave great recitations of Rene Char
It’s raining dogs and Rene Char, he walks in
the puddles, he opens the window to smell the ozone
Today the fire could only produce smoke as we snore
It’s a good day to bake a banana bread or bread pudding
in the puddles that used to be snow that no longer seems
to exist except the artificial kind in the minds of some
middle aged professors who speak on the radio all
day long with and without long hair turning grey as
grey as the old coyotes hiding in the woods next to
the foothills of the Berkshires where many folk singers
are tuning their instruments in underground pubs next
to high end merchants trying to catch city foxes showing
off their sports cars and trophy wives and furs coats that
they only wear in dreams invented by poets wishing to
be better than any European bards being translated into English
& don’t forget those coyotes hang with
the famous mountain lion of East Nassau
thought not to exist in this part of the world
now on view at Kreutzinger’s East Nassau Zoo
easy to imagine; easier to get to for all of you
Just make a turn onto Bath Township road
It’ll be the only thing there before the greenhouse
Stop at the snack bar for some of Phil’s cajun knishes
Proceed to the rural cemetery & make a day of it
Nearby are the ruins of the famous Nassau shtetl
Stop at the place where the waters meet; change you life!
On your way back, look at the Cohoes falls, if it’s on.
How do you turn on a water fall?
Show me the way to hydro power everything
around here. We could watch the waterwheel spin
see the mills operate again. Create a better utopia than
the Shakers did back then. We could not only preserve
water for drinking & food, but take some stress off
the fossil fuel economy. We can change the grid, send
back electricity. Let’s remove the wires or bury them below
the wind zone. We could build more windmills to spin
in concert with the waterwheels. Let’s put on a show
as grand as the aurora borealis - dawn north wind
The windmills would turn colors as they spin
& mama & papa would be green with envy, red
with passion, yellow with liverishness & taupe
with apathy all at the same time, people would say,
“What is the meaning of this?” We’d answer,
“We’re using a chance method.” & then the sun
Would come out in a polite & colorful way
See? Everybody would rush to East Nassau
to see all the colors, there’d be rainbows
in the woods, we’d have a tourist mecca on our hands
& Phil would sell a million cajun knishes
mountain lion or not. Colors like to be watched
Elizabeth Willis would be the head of the tourist bureau
There’d be a visitor center at the old post office
A film would feature Alice’s locust trees as the stars
Colorful farm films with many crazy crops like
purple carrots & purple potatoes which grow next
to herbs hardly heard of anymore & cold weather green
leafy things. O, we must be dreaming, but not in black &
white. We campaign for all dreams to be in color & 3D - don’t
you see? If one’s eyes are green could they be made out of
trees? And if you eat too many beets we know what happens or
so we have heard sung before by one crazy poet/farmer type
toiling away in the garden to chase away the blues.
In my garden I raise green things
like multi-colored children to annihilate
beige apathy, my soul’s inherited gene
I watch the golden squirrels be acrobats
Occasionally our now-wintering-over chipmunk
comes by, running fast, to beat the spasm band
But this spasmodic stuff is secret knowledge
known only by the periwinkle poets around here
Icky ochre is the warning sign not to become
a begonia, god & all his choirs would disapprove
I’d rather be a sickly coleus weeping for it’s dovelike
lost leaves, stuck in a cold dark house its hooves
kicking the sturdier wild ginger with whom I gallop
off to the rainbow nobody knows is there, behind
closed doors, kibbutzing with Marie, Sophia & Max
Mine is to begin books, not finish them
The atmosphere’s to rain, snow, then rain again
Nothing’s left behind but momentary footprints
of some creatures, you have to take a picture
with your digital camera & date it:
1/28/12, East Nassau
Why not come hear a new musical about fog
Fog on a winter day & summer fog to walk out of
the light into the 5th dimension. We could call it Purple Haze.
How about mood fog that changes colors when sighing &
changes when laughing. The rolling fog & the fog that cast
shadows in three dimensions. East Nassau is not the foggiest
place on the planet. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem called
The Cloud, but never a poem called The Fog - that would
be by Carl Sandburg. It says something about cats feet.
I guess it depends on the cat. I don’t want any cats in our
fog musical thank you very much.
The cats’ feet in that poem are just a metaphor
for the silent way fog gets into your house
& assaults you! Burglarizes! Rapes us all
like a library full of titillating books
Books we could read -- all of a sudden we’re
the opposite, politically, of what we thought we were
Oh my god, property is robbery! But my bank account!
Oysters are great like rain becomes snow while we watch
passively as a dream about fog that becomes the aurora
Fogs are colorful, women are mad, politicians are doomed
But aren’t we all colorful, doomed & mad?
Let’s have a scientific study on that
Looking at the weather map we see all kinds of
colors and arrows, lines, cold fronts & warm fronts, highs
& lows. Satellite pictures are on the screen and the
occasional local picture from an amateur photographer.
On the colorful, doomed & mad map, what would we have?
Perhaps, this poem should be displayed as example #1
with all kinds of arrows, lines & colors drawn all over it!
For example, the words “scientific study”
would be yellow, “poem” would be a blue-black
white, green & brown word but altogether
the blue-blackness would predominate
“doomed” is a black & brown word, with a touch
of green. If you yell, it’s red-orange
If you feel compassionate, it’s I don’t know
But if you don’t know how to feel it’s blue
The beginning of the week is small & red
the middle, like a rainbow’s orange, the end’s
purple-final like a finch signifies evolution’s
haunch, carefully sliced slabs of pork from a pig
But this is only one man or woman’s view
of the complex complexion of reality’s substrata
Like having clouds in your coffee, or
having thousands of tiny tree frogs hopping
on a wet road under a full moon. A yearly world
news update from our little corner of the globe.
No snowshoeing poets found this winter, just
trackers looking for big cat paw prints. The modern
out of this world for the new millennium poet
trackers tracking without snowshoes dreaming
of new ways to speak about the weather, hooray!
The mountain lion has thrown a pebble
at the window before which I’m sitting
thinking about the revolutionary war
As if there was just one revolution
In the whole world, even in just one lifetime
of scrapping with the generals over lipitor
“I think it’s time for another revolution, ok?”
“Would a revolution be ok with you?”
“Whose side would you be on?” Does a side
belong to a person, the other side belonging
to a different person? Could both sides belong
to the same person? After all, the human mind
is vast as an occluded front, eh? Don’t
get any ideas from god or Walt Whitman now
But, wait a second, where do we begin? Begin what?
The weather is having a revolution. Which side
is going to win? The sun is going to win. This solar system
sees all wars and keeps moving through space like
seeds from plants that some call weeds. They even
wake us up from our dreams like explosions & late night
snoring roaring like cannon fire from the past on
fields now filled with monuments & dandelions, clover
& hawk weeds bursting with candy colored delightfulness.
They seem to address us better than any general could
speak to his troops before battle.
Didn’t your mother tell you the seeds
are weapons -- their plants turn into soldiers
who then fight wars & wolves -- the winners,
the better side to be on -- would be the wolves
&/or the american revolution, unless, of course
you’re british but if a british person fights
wolves, the wolves might still win if it’s freezing
because wolves have great fur coats but the brits
might have high-powered rifles to shoot them
one by one like un-poetic interlopers or the wolves
might be wearing sheep’s clothing but the brits
might be in a Trojan wolf, either way, it’s good
to be the president of a kindly country, you’d think
but that doesn’t work either—the CIA might shoot you
&/or put you in prison with the wolves, where you’d be
eaten alive & nobody would know if you believed in
Walt Whitman or a feeble blurry star, silent night, etc.
Zing ts ves ood think oot you’d be etc.
Now the field is empty of wolves and soldiers
where snow was last year this time there’s nothing but a shade
of brown. Leafless branches draw lines in the grayish sky.
No clicking of the mouse to change such a format that
surrounds us in these strange winter days of living in a new
growing zone without changing location. We can change cups
of coffee into wine and turkey into soup. Perhaps a Bach-like
character could write a new cantata to go along with this
scenario. Ah! How sweet that would be, sweeter than any
hobo wine. So what, so what is the scenario?
What will we grow? Will it ever snow? What’s the
scenario? Strange Bach-like turkeys drinking wine
like hobos in the branches watching out for wolves
and soldiers changing the season’s format like a
mouse making coffee.
Mice don’t make coffee, mice don’t make coffee.
A mouse could fall into the French press
& then you’d have mess, I once had a bee
in my hair, I had a bat on my head too, but never
have I seen even a chipmunk make coffee, much
less a mouse. If a mouse could make coffee, then
a house could, or trees. I wish I had a
capuchin monkey to make coffee for me, while
the hippos would wait at the trough for the maple
sap to drip into it, we’ll have pork for dinner,
creased bacon & humble eggs with our jo. Have
you ever been to the Joe?
We once sat next to a secret tower above
one river that has many bridges that later flooded.
We did not drink at the humble coffee house, but
later read poetry at a jazz bar after troubled waters.
Another time we played whale songs at a secret radio
station after walking to a lake on a hidden trail.
We once went bird watching near shark invested
waters and later watched turtles lay their eggs
after their long ocean journey. Sometimes we
travel above the clouds, sometimes we walk.
Once we saw hummingbirds
fucking in the air. Once
there were turtles sunning
themselves on a rock once
We saw skunk cabbage somewhere
else but here, still missing
their beginning in early spring
There are some things that probably
don’t exist but people say them
because they’ve heard other people
say them, it’s a way of knowing
what you’re supposed to think unlike
the Calvin Coolidge method: I know
they’ve painted one side of the buses.
When my daughter gets called for jury duty
she acknowledges she doesn’t believe
in objective reality as no young person
does unless they were brought up catholic
I don’t know any of these things for sure
After all mice can make coffee & extraterrestrials
Llve in magnificent structures in our backyard
Maybe it’s all a sumptuous feast for you
who is the reader of this now but soon
you’ll be the master-mistress of the universe
selling millions of copies of your bestseller
about how that came to be; some will say
it isn’t true but truth, you’ll say, is an abortion
of what otherwise would be a skunk cabbage
in a tiny unplanned garden by the Kinderhook creek
where there is also bloodroot, wild geranium
& periwinkles galore plus trout lilies & jacks-in-the-pulpits.
And we will all know the truth about wires.
All those wires connected to wooden poles
And all those pipelines running through
the wilderness. On some north American range -
land, ocelots roam instead of in their native home.
What is this land where the rebels took a stand?
Could they ever imagine how small the planet
would grow and now with a hole in the ozone
Truer than the moon being made out of cheese.
They say the truth is out there
Out there among the stars and not
the ones invented in Hollywood
At least we finally kind of made it to the
picture phone - just another way
to fleece the people, don’t you think?
But don’t think too hard unless you think
The thoughts of extraterrestrials.
But how do we know what they’d be?
Aarrgghh! The arghs have it! Emotion
Is passed; come & play with me now
Let’s light in trees, hunt for jamokes
Silently celebrate periwinkle sundaes
& blue teas, let’s have a hibiscus spritzer
with lemon & ice, it’s hot as hell here
It’s cold as a witch’s tit, let’s have it
warm for now, let’s drink black velvets
till somebody wins the super bowl & gets
a ring for museums of sports memorabilia
Let’s have an auction & make a killing
Spending all the money on picture phones to dial
up our most attractive friends, let’s spill
our guts over the airwaves, get on a no-fly list
No boring friends on sunny days
no boring friends on springtime days
in winter. Does the sky have its eyes
opened or closed? Will there be extra
thunderbolts or just the right amount?
We have a storm painting on the wall
but no storms outside today.
Let’s give the sky a super bowl ring.
We’ll start the weather museum
It will be free and it can be mobile
There will be no security check point
at the mobile weather museum.
& for no extra fee you can go to
the cloud museum, a special room
for each type of cloud, cumulo—nimbus
being the favorite & for a real charge
go see the aurora borealis exhibit in back
You can be surrounded by the rivers
of light, this is a mobile exhibit featuring
a local cloud room but do not touch the clouds
or the aurora, you can create your own borealis
by purchasing an aurora kit at the gift shop
Borealis o’er d’oeuvres are available at the snack bar
Try a special aurora borealis knish or sundae!
Make a lasting memory - go to the time machine
in the lobby & instantly be somewhere else!
Be at the beginning of the weather or be
at the blizzard of your birth. Or maybe not
What does Einstein have to say about the weather?
“One need only think of the weather, in which case
the prediction even for a few days ahead is
impossible.” Whatever that means.
Live in the weather moment of the day?
Some kind of mathematical weather puzzle?
Never mind Einstein - what is the weather thinking?
Maybe the starfish can tell us. And that’s the
way it was in Coney Island once upon a time.
And that’s the way it always is - weather is the champion.
We’ll have a ticker-tape parade for the weather
The weather will receive a special ring
That will belong on this weather hand forever
Or for a brief time after which it’ll slop off
In the laundry room where love will be made
By others than the weather in unheard-of ways
Like upside down or overwhelmed with grief
At so many deaths in all the wars of history
Commingling with parents saying “get a job”
Or “eat meat” or “why aren’t you on
The Johnny Carson show?” oh we wish
We could please them but now it’s the end of
The world so who cares? At least I didn’t shoot you
Or blow you up in a townhouse my darling
Well maybe I should’ve never minded Einstein
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you
You are my only weather underground
type poet. You are my only blueberries falling
from the sky poet. We blew up the scene with
our weather love. Always ready for prime time
and overwhelmed with poesy. Jack Spicer and
Jack Kerouac had nothing on our American
Weather here right now in the Grateful Dead
hour. Our weather resume’s cup over-flows
with sunshine & moonshine. Let’s add Emily
Dickinson’s bees for good measure. Surely a
weather watcher she would find favor on
our weather porches.
It was James Schuyler who famously said
“see you later in other weather.”
You can use that line with your co-workers
or when you put your children to bed
Who knows? It might turn out to be
your signature farewell statement, &
Periwinkleishly you might become ground cover
on the wet land by the creek where anything
can happen - garish tubular flowers enter
their first phase near runaway wild orchids
bending like trout lilies over the brand new violets
which wink while you pick staghorn sumac clusters
near the modest wild geraniums & ginger
A raft floats downstream followed by the beer raft
Everybody’s laughing cause there’s no one there
except the memory of winking ice crystals &
ice skirts on the trees which refuse to fall
into the drink, harmlessly, along with their roots
Along with mushrooms larger than Katz’s
famous corn beef sandwiches. Giant white ones
perfect to slice for a non-beef sandwich. They say
that the fungi is fruiting three weeks earlier than
fifty years ago. Go figure! The buds are budding
three months early and freezing is very unpredictable
As unpredictable as this year’s budget. Perhaps we
will grow more spinach. We can always use more green.
We’ll search for the magic potting soil & build greenhouses.
Can’t plant a beef tree, but how about giant mushroom
house for all those unusual fungi - the elf of plants.
There is a mushroom called the scarlet elf cup or cap.
We see it sometimes. Some years. I’m sure somewhere
here there are morels or could be. At the moment big
mushrooms grow (former bench site) that, when sliced,
look like chocolate cakes but an acrid powder flies
from them when they are touched. Imagine making
love to one of them. You’d have to change the sheets
for fear of infection. John Cage, who was to become
a mycologist, started eating mushrooms to provide free
food when he was a student. He got sick only five times.
but he didn’t die of that. Often when you get sick
from eating questionable mushrooms, you only get
queasy, but you might die. Best to have a grandparent
familiar with everything that grew around here for years.
Once I saw a perfect-looking morel growing by the
front porch, I thought, I’ll eat it if there aren’t
any false morels. There are 25 of them! I could’ve started a farm!
A lucrative family business to keep us in poetry forever.
But we are anyway. As good as a wind farm to fill
our sails to cruise through life’s journey. Like cartoon
fluffy clouds moving across the blue sky. And we could be
in potatoes forever if blight keeps away from the crops.
New potatoes, purple potatoes, golden potatoes, there
must be five hundred varieties of tubers. And we can
write poetry while eating potato salad under the hot
summer sunshine feeling the sweet breeze as butterflies
float by and when the sun sets we will watch fireflies
dance their dance. The owls will hoot hoot from tree
tops swaying in the nighttime air currents. And in the
morning bees will buzz around the sunflowers as
words are connected to new pages of poetry to continue
this family business of writing about the weather and
other such things that strike our daily interest
Oh whoa wow, wouldn’t that be fine?
But it already is except we don’t have jobs, but
aren’t homeless yet but we have no portfolios
except ones full of poems, a poet we know trades
poems for lodging so if you were as charming as he,
Michael Czarnecki, it could be poems for filet mignons
But wait, a poor poet eats rice & beans. It’ll cost
a fortune to move to New Orleans, but wait
the rice & bean’s free there but you have to be there
What community that has free food & shelter needs
A poet? Write me right away, or else I’ll continue
writing from a place where things cost money &
you need a car to get from point A to every other point
Eggs we can get across the road except when the chickens
are resting, around midwinter day. Hey, darkness falls
one and all, it’s been a snowless winter so far.
Yet, some places are still closed because
of storm damage. Severe weather abounds in
these changing times. So, let’s celebrate the time
between the storms. Some storms we will be happy
to watch from the front porch. But, please someone
buy us a generator. The kind that automatically turns
on the minute the power goes off. Then we can
continue to write without candle light. Who needs snow
unless you ski. They make snow with machines, but
people don’t go to the slopes unless they see snow
on the streets in front of their houses. I’ve never
been to China, but I know it is there. They have a lot
of machines there that cause climate change and
they want to drive more cars than anybody else.
I bet somewhere in China right now a poet is
writing about climate change and the weather.
Politically incorrect it is not to notice
That black people are of different shades,
But politically incorrect could be replaced by
Stupid. It is ok to have fun? Make white friends?
Do white people crave snow more than black people?
The only black person I’ve met in east Nassau is
Kirk who’s also American Indian & likes to say:
“Hey, d’you have a cold beer?” he’s writing a film
Script entitled: “what do yous guys do for fun
On the weekends?” people think I’m an Indian
Because of my appearance & because I like to have fun
My friend Adrian is black but looks white. She,
a conceptual artist, did a piece about passing for white
She teaches philosophy now. Charlotte Cater
A black friend, told me I was the only white woman
she knew who didn’t shave her legs. Once the kids in p.s. 155
wrote of me, “She so white, they mark her absent
in the morning.” In Harlem, I used to pass for Spanish
Because I drank colt 45 in a brown paper bag.
The darkest black people I ever saw were the Senegalese.
Lorenzo Thomas who died is the best black poet I ever met.
Black women have a great attraction to Phil. Once,
Phil, Julie Patton & I were stranded in a thruway store in
A scary neighborhood. Julie said: “just what they feared,
A Jew, a Black person & an Indian,” she was wearing her
African turban. I don’t remember why we were there
Maybe to get some Kools.
Actually we were in North Carolina for Lee Ann Brown
& Tony Torn’s wedding. It was a place to get some breakfast
and it seemed to be filled with Rednecks. They call them
Rednecks from being outdoors all day in the sun. They
being poor white farmers. Now most of the farms are run by
giant corporations. Or farms can be turned into lawns.
Like some mountains get turned into gravel pits. It
can lower or raise your town’s taxes. I heard they
are putting taxes on the weather - oh that’s carbon
taxes to protect the weather. How’s that working out?
In Hot Springs, North Carolina near the French Broad
River the fire flies are big and bright. Some fireflies
attract other fire flies for supper. Others are being
romantic. Nonetheless it’s one of the greatest show on
the world. The forest is the fire flies’ stage and they
will shine for you - brighter than the back of your neck.
Sometimes a plant that’s wet or has ice on it
will wink at me while I’m walking in the woods
It reminds me of a firefly & when I smoke & see
the reflection of my burning ash in the window
I think the fireflies think I’m one of them. If
I could learn to inhale at the same interval of
a fire fly’s mating lighting, I could really compete.
Once during the season I saw fireflies massing
at our front porch window. It was one of those things
you think you probably imagined, it was so stunning
& it never happened again. Now we have many fewer
We also have fewer bats but our frogs seem visible
& audible in numbers as great as before. The June bugs
are still with us & lady bugs galore being everywhere.
Bees too are here; hornet stings are the worst.
vicious, warlike pricks. What is a hornet for?
Mardi Gras parades need their horns
Rebels need their horns to warn of attack
Hornets can attack without warning. A red tail hawk
was hiding in our maple tree today hiding from
the attack of the crows. I once saw a marsh hawk
attack a pigeon in Jackson Square. Once hawks
hovered over my head in Harriman State park.
Evincing that my presence attracted hawks.
Hawk weather forecasts more parades of horn
players attacking tourists near Jackson Square
drinking their hurricanes in the sunshine.
Much better than hornets stinging the innocent.
Or maybe not, better for the hornets to drink
hurricanes then not only will hornets not bite
but hurricanes won’t fall on land, they’ll fall drunkenly
in the sea, out to sea, all at sea, accidentally
bumping into an island where a guy is marooned
with his copy of Langston Hughes’ poems. That’s all
but it’s not the hurricanes that get drunk, it’s you
& your eye, now red & bleary like a drunken hornet
who falls over a table & winks at the bartender’s wife
then there’s hell to pay! The bartender’s been reading
too many mysteries & the hurricane’s seen a lot of
Twilight Zones so the two wrestle till the devil, the
devil grabs em both & puts em in the hurricane’s eye
Out of which there is no way, even in hell
It’s all downhill from here in the place you & hornets go
At the end of an episode you’ve been lucky enough to see
the t.v. your uncle got, a t.v. full of death’s doormats
& hideous clovers bending over fields of stations
of the cross lining a creaky bridge under which a troll
lives plotting even more madness, impetuosity & mischief
than you ever dreamed when the red light was put
in your scary bedroom with all its camouflage quilts
One’s personal landscape in the cityscape now
replaced with a country view. A different point of
view, a different attitude on gloom, sunshine, snow,
rain & mud. We need a new outdoor thermometer
to monitor any extreme conditions. The strange
soupy bebop weather to soothe the soul. The stormy
weather of one’s life. The reclining on a day bed
viewing the sunshine through a back porch window
weather. The it’s not time yet to sleep in a hammock
weather. There’s no thermometer to gauge the
temperature of this here spontaneous writing. &
what of the in between time, whatever that means?
Two’s impersonal sea environs out of the country
than already dislodge without what you can’t see
in the city, it’s always cheerful in some cities
until the slush appears, we don’t need to not know
the temperature when it’s -56 degrees, the normal
clear classical soupcon unsettles my zircons
The calm soups of a stranger’s death, getting up
at night, but it’s not your bed! But I can see you!
Oh, higher power, what should I do?
Get a thermometer? Is this writing somewhere else?
Not--dogs take up the spaces, making things remain
Yet I sit here, before a locust tree, freezing.
Language is what we speak. There is no painter
that speaks landscapes in words. Here before an open
notebook is nothing but weather. A new weather never
experienced. Weather about sex & money & songs.
We point telescopes to the night sky - trying to find
what happened beyond the nighttime clouds.
Let the scientists run the government not the church.
The church can continue to have their ceilings decorated
They can employ as many artists as they wish
to depict scenes of the sky up high. And we’ll make
amusing little books from another point of view.
I took out my ocean notebook & made a note:
Never write books that are amusing or in a language
writ only in bebop or alizarin crimson, not ochre
Not even ochre, the opposite of language is overflow
like in a trailer park, the opposite of word is drow
You can’t fight city hall. Sex weather is weather
inside the house, in the activity room, to be exact
where the Peruvian hanging is now. Wagon, orange,
rooster plus doll spells word in the right color
You need a color printer on you already costly
Thingamajig, that can be an expense on your
Be bopped soowack thermometer smurf toodle-ooing
anti-city thump field of dreams, sistine hovering
over the vactions of the diddly cermamics et al
humpf! What squat intermingling centers on the catwalk?
When the widow maker motorcycle sounds like the wind
Some jazzy weather machine can sometimes cause harm as
a cold wind blows from the edge of the creek & the
not brown silence of the field awaits the Saskatchewan
Screamer. Lucky for us the grid didn’t go down.
We can hear radio updates on the winter mix meltdown
going to a moonshine farm beyond rooftops into a
Shoofly pie party. Pies from the sky for the masses
Fill my cup with moonshine from the space farm
Grant me more wishes to help the fishes. Please don’t
break anymore dishes. The Screamer will break the
Silence as the wind gets meaner. Let’s all yodel like a field
Holler. We’ll wakeup a weather dancing performer.
Wait, Saskatchewan Screamer, I have to put on my
wakeup makeup, again the sun shines & it’s snowing
No action here but the guy who bought the field
(from now on known as GBF) pulled up some old logs
from the Kinderhook creek bank because he likes us
& wanted to give us free firewood, he’s showing off
the huge equipment he either owns or rents to bring
the logs & tree trunks up, this guy’s loaded, his penis
must be huge with lights on it to see into the dark
corridors of the female stuff. I’ll bet he’s got a
generator. If the price of gas seems to be getting high
think of who colluded to make everyone need cars, thus
ruining our bodies, lives & landscapes. Just now
there was a car in the field along the melted snow
I’m going to walk to the butcher shop now & get something
pounded, while watching the butcher’s bloody apron
It looks like the rising sun m’mere, say after me:
The GBF has no mother. When he was a kid he built
a tree fort in the forest and then the Rabbi made him knock
it down. Now he’s some kind of neat freak who needs to remove
trees from the perimeter of the land that he bought with
all his disposable cash. When he builds a bonfire of the
brush maybe we can throw in all his cash. Perhaps, the
mountain lion will come and bite him in the ass. He must
think this really is the foothills of the Berkshires and wants
East Nassau to look as fancy as Stockbridge. He should have
bought Hoags Corner’s Tavern and reopened that. We
could be eating pizza and drinking draft from the tap instead
of listening to all his machines.
We’re just jealous. We’d like to have bought the field,
have disposable cash & many machine/devices, but not no
mother. That’d be horrible. But we grew up on kibbutzes
So it don’t mean a thing. Nor does cash & machines but
to my significant other they do. I wish I could buy him
all the cash the Florentines had to buy limitless brushhogs,
bobcats & caterpillars, we’d have to build a shed for all
those machines that look like something living like a
farmer, even cars have eyes, the bumpers can be the lips
& the horn the nose. Tending to their machines, those guys
went out in a mini-blizzard, mini-whiteout we saw from inside
the house into the field that got bought, changed hands. This
field-land’s been here for a while, doing fine, without you
or anyone buying, then owning, it. It the field, now flattened
by bobcat. A field, you know, behaves differently when
watched. I watch the gray sky for signs of bad luck.
I hope we’re not too jealous, because that would
be a sin. I’m sure there are other more glorious sins
to embellish. So it goes for the cycle of life of a field.
We might need to wander into to some other field
& glean from it what we may. And soon enough we
might find ourselves visiting the Green Mountain
state. We might have to meditate without those colored
rooms located near Rocky Mountain National park
in another state. Or we might have to imbibe the elixir
of life. Now where did I put that philosopher’s stone?
How about some home grown philosopher’s stone
with a nice tall drink of the elixir of life - would
that be a sin? As the sun sets a bunch of fast moving
clouds move eastward and out to sea. They seem
to do whatever they please!
Dear Mr. bobcat, did you see the mountain lion?
The moose? The tommy gun that grazed my knee?
I think therefore I search for catamounts, eh?
Evil are greed & sodomy in the 14th century
Evil is putting milk in your coffee, evil
is peer pressure, just kidding, evil is the bully
Evil is not being me! You see? Simple as 1,2,3
I’ll be dammed if you say that, but the jack-in-the
pulpit, I sit sideways to taste a handsome wine
It reminds me of anyone with a penis & powder burns.
People love to destroy things it seems.
They like to pollute the streams. I had a dream,
but even though I might not own a mountain
top I can sit there and watch. The flowers will find
a way to return because birds shit everywhere.
All those trees leave a lot of leaves behind and
the wind blows them around. It’s amazing that
people can’t agree.
If I am black or a poet, I am not “we”…
We am not I, I’m sorry that’s the way it is now
After all that evolution, what became human wound
up being differentiated to different kinds of humans!
No one would believe this if you told it at the bar
The kind of bar where people are drinking booze
you forget the way they’re human isn’t ok
Meaning you’re loved & make a lot of moolah
Even your mother won’t love you now if you didn’t make
money. Do we care? We being who? It’s just me & maybe
you it began with wriggling little creatures
& came to an end with fear of the end of the world
I’m sorry if I seem to want to read a book about
paleontology, witchcraft, or psychiatric disorders now
All that jazzy knowledge and more found
in books. Holy cow! All those weather watching poets
writing. All those folks writing at the same time as
the universe exhales. All those people being
different and yet similar. Is evolution changed
by power plant failure? Did the planet’s alignment
make a difference? Are the whales watching us?
Will the mushrooms grow as large as a house?
Stay tuned, don’t change the channel.
But don’t ever watch the Oscars unless there’s
a party, an Emmy party where every body
who watches gets an Emmy. People pay you
for entering NYC. There’s no billboards
In Rio de Janeiro, a bow-and-arrow-shaped building
In Brasilia, we can be there in a jiffy in my jet
My mother, the mountain lioness’s proud of me, amabo!
Don’t slip in the mud, meine sunshine! I’ll enfold you
you will fall softly on my mushroom cap
into the heavenly arms of our butterfly wings
We can go mobile to store front art world fun.
We can make poems on an old fashioned letter press.
Have hot sake and eat chocolate. No need for
tractors at this stop nestled in the mountains.
Nothing is off season here even when the hours change.
Rocks never take a day off. Different locations have
different minerals. Humans alter them and turn
them into chemicals. Banks preserve their facades.
When they don’t replace the sidewalks grass might
grow in the cracks. And gold coins will fall out of
the parking meters.
But still, everything is not hunky-dorey
We have no money to speak of & now it’s snowing
On the last day of February, pissing off
Bob Kovatchik that the record is ruined
It hasn’t snowed all this winter till today
Leap year, fat chance, we saw the Sol LeWitt feast
At Mass MOCA, entering a room via the John Cage/
Merce Cunningham tunnel/bridge full of random
Music not ordinary sounds or the sounds of signs
There’s a sign place with a sign saying: free signs
Those free couches on the roadside: don’t they get wet?
Is everything free wet? Tweet me.
Leap year snow glow not unlike
a white on white Sol Lewitt wall design. The
yellow line down the center of the road disappeared,
but we proceeded without fear. All lines on the walls in
the museum will remain for a long time. The snow
will not remain for a long time. I never tweeted
anyone in my life.
Tweet me anyway, how do you tweet?
Grow up! Today it’s dripping like a tweeting
Wait a sec, do tweets drip? I know drips don’t tweet
Unless you were calling a human a drip, he might tweet
“tweet” would be a good endword for a sestina, so would
“drip” a 3rd word could be “icicle,” 4th “disappear”
“crepuscular’ 5th, and “Poseidon” 6th
Tweet drip icicle disappear crepuscular Poseidon
We should change crepuscular to “Sol LeWitt”
Now wait a sec my seafaring lady of
the sestina, don’t get all Oulipo on this colabo.
This here is already celestial. And the red winged
black birds are returning. It’s the other side
of winter. Windy poetry readings in the park
are upon us. When will those lilacs bloom
in the dooryard next? The economy of free
air travel, clean bed sheets and coffee will
Compete with our herb garden of lovage,
parsley, basil and chives.
Just because oulipo adopted the sestina
doesn’t mean that prosody, which is mathematical
becomes oulipean, don’t put the cart before the horse
Long before the ouvrir literature potential was the
sestina, living uptown all alone with 6 end-words
waiting for someone to encourage it to move
to meet an eligible man, perhaps to change the words
to become a routine, though feared exercise
in the academic poetic stable of former bucking broncos
named Poseidon Tweet
A woman who seductively drips
like a fulsome icicle
racing on a bicycle before it disappears
into the wall drawing by Sol LeWitt
oozing out then appearing, just like Mr. Poseidon.
Who was that had a sea monster attack Troy? Poseidon!
Today if that happened there would be many Tweets
I wonder if earthquakes ever mattered to Sol LeWitt
It would have effected his drips
But that’s ok because his wall designs are meant to disappear
just like icicles
If icicles
are blue they come from the sea of Poseidon
Yet they disappear
as fast as tweets
especially during global dripping
Did you ever see Autobiography by Sol LeWitt?
Autobiography is photography by Sol LeWitt
Something fantastic to photograph are icicles
Make sure to capture them before they drip
If the ground shakes blame Poseidon
When the ground shakes should you tweet?
I wish all tweets would disappear
Disappear like snow disappears?
If people get very stupid, there’d be no Sol LeWitts
But nobody would ever be too stupid to tweet!
Your tongue might stick to, if you lick, icicles
& while it sticks, the wrath of Poseidon
will turn the wine-dark sea into Mr., Mrs. & Young Drip
And out of the sea appeared the Drips
And before their eyes the sea seemed to disappear
And was replaced with a statue of Poseidon
Lewitt line designs were seen in the sky
Icicles were coming out of the ground
Tweets of new born birds were heard
As Poseidon tweets about drips
icicles disappear, becoming bicycles
Who cares? It’s just an idea, like Sol LeWitt’s