Three Poems, selected by Andrei Codrescu for Exquisite Corpse (May 2008), with these lines set off:
As you become your friends your furniture must become you,
stand for the real you, and something on each shelf
and wall so the friends feel friendliness.
Dancers Winding Down
They just want balanced diets
my friend’s wife points out
adding: if I don’t get cable how can I level the playing ground?
I’m tired of always keeping up so that the horizon doesn’t get to me.
That’s what the new burgers are all about for instance.
Says he can’t even smell microbes anymore
though others say they find their way into ducts and canals
he leaves the stray door ajar
and hopes a breeze ‘ll kick in uncontrollably flushed,
Brownian motion or at least whiffs of osmosis on their way.
One of the two will be the planet’s undoing.
If we talk it through, what more to discover
in the visible world after the third grade or so,
but get a load of those quanta rest notes
filling in where others left off in a huffy—
Bach’s fugues so marvelously Marx Brothers, basements of footnotes
and clunky dice reduced to the usual runways
thanks to Pythagorean theorems and an aviary of recorders.
The radius of loses still subtracted from the gravity of wombs,
and the magic that plumps an ark threatens the land with colonies of flowers
busy undergirding planks tendered firmly in our way.
E Pluribus Bananas
Choosing the right pieces to surround oneself is an ongoing burden.
As you become your friends your furniture must become you,
stand for the real you, and something on each shelf
and wall so the friends feel friendliness.
Then striking poses comes naturally too,
people love you for the real you
and all the clippings and bookmarks to back it up.
These days fashion is brushed metal bending over us
from the steel toes of laboring hours
on up to the finest platinum barrettes on daughters,
the clean future foretold in sci-fi misses us,
the very moral impulse to tweak the onrush lost
in a dampening of fun, as focused hording,
while our main product - simple, disembodied gore –
is censored courtesy of servants embedded in a Westward caravan
ticking off each peak of bison leveled to pass further
from memories off camera, tossed
into the much-feared salads of history, kooky beyond all bearings
of automated feelers our men sent out last week,
let's count sales and consumer confidence
after the initial one was rolled out, spells roping it back.
It’s anyone’s guess who quoted what; what said not important as
we - so far - always duck in in time,
jets angling favorite songs from hi-tech heated toilet seats
so that steering down here finds a modicum of comfort in all the effort.
They just want balanced diets
my friend’s wife points out
adding: if I don’t get cable how can I level the playing ground?
I’m tired of always keeping up so that the horizon doesn’t get to me.
That’s what the new burgers are all about for instance.
Says he can’t even smell microbes anymore
though others say they find their way into ducts and canals
he leaves the stray door ajar
and hopes a breeze ‘ll kick in uncontrollably flushed,
Brownian motion or at least whiffs of osmosis on their way.
One of the two will be the planet’s undoing.
If we talk it through, what more to discover
in the visible world after the third grade or so,
but get a load of those quanta rest notes
filling in where others left off in a huffy—
Bach’s fugues so marvelously Marx Brothers, basements of footnotes
and clunky dice reduced to the usual runways
thanks to Pythagorean theorems and an aviary of recorders.
The radius of loses still subtracted from the gravity of wombs,
and the magic that plumps an ark threatens the land with colonies of flowers
busy undergirding planks tendered firmly in our way.
E Pluribus Bananas
Choosing the right pieces to surround oneself is an ongoing burden.
As you become your friends your furniture must become you,
stand for the real you, and something on each shelf
and wall so the friends feel friendliness.
Then striking poses comes naturally too,
people love you for the real you
and all the clippings and bookmarks to back it up.
These days fashion is brushed metal bending over us
from the steel toes of laboring hours
on up to the finest platinum barrettes on daughters,
the clean future foretold in sci-fi misses us,
the very moral impulse to tweak the onrush lost
in a dampening of fun, as focused hording,
while our main product - simple, disembodied gore –
is censored courtesy of servants embedded in a Westward caravan
ticking off each peak of bison leveled to pass further
from memories off camera, tossed
into the much-feared salads of history, kooky beyond all bearings
of automated feelers our men sent out last week,
let's count sales and consumer confidence
after the initial one was rolled out, spells roping it back.
It’s anyone’s guess who quoted what; what said not important as
we - so far - always duck in in time,
jets angling favorite songs from hi-tech heated toilet seats
so that steering down here finds a modicum of comfort in all the effort.
Twilight of Good Graces
Across the bay, helpless neighbors snarl the commute
and moodiness lowers the general bar
to shoulder-padded mumbles—
who rules, who shows who.
Air superiority is the talk of the town.
Waiting for them we head off
to see herring feed themselves to seals—
riveting kersplashes in a hierarchy unseen since
since ape stood up in the evolution to man,
only a bony tail there, a patch of fur here,
vegetarians and hawks—the idea of balance
indelible in the circus.
Wells dropped to hit-and-miss after the heat,
then summer showers kicked in minimally.
The only real hope lie in alien saucers
forming a holding pattern over Mt. Rainier,
smoke-signaling rain—
even my green Oma from the lovely Schwarzwald knew
days blue enough to send us to the lake in the foothills
and sit in the sun until a freckle spread
and we felt like a Nutty Buddy after the hard work of splashing around half naked.
The onslaught of cumulonimbus hardly crossed our minds,
was something cyclical, shapes in the sky barometric.
Across the bay, helpless neighbors snarl the commute
and moodiness lowers the general bar
to shoulder-padded mumbles—
who rules, who shows who.
Air superiority is the talk of the town.
Waiting for them we head off
to see herring feed themselves to seals—
riveting kersplashes in a hierarchy unseen since
since ape stood up in the evolution to man,
only a bony tail there, a patch of fur here,
vegetarians and hawks—the idea of balance
indelible in the circus.
Wells dropped to hit-and-miss after the heat,
then summer showers kicked in minimally.
The only real hope lie in alien saucers
forming a holding pattern over Mt. Rainier,
smoke-signaling rain—
even my green Oma from the lovely Schwarzwald knew
days blue enough to send us to the lake in the foothills
and sit in the sun until a freckle spread
and we felt like a Nutty Buddy after the hard work of splashing around half naked.
The onslaught of cumulonimbus hardly crossed our minds,
was something cyclical, shapes in the sky barometric.
Although hard to prove, John Ashbery seems to have written “Upstate Dancers” (collected in Planisphere, 2009) as a bitter reply to someone emulating him. He even includes the line "Sometimes a stench decides everything", an image that indeed closes the second poem above.
Exquisite Corpse (which closed shop in 2015) seems offline now, so I though I'd put the poems up here.
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