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Recalling the Number 4 was the Favorite Number
of a Prominent Apache
Gen. Howard believed the Apache
could be cowed
into amicable submission and
set about to assure them
of god's love,
the divinity he promoted
failed to rally the predators,
their keen sense of proportion
previously whetted by
the balance between birds and beasts,
among whom, in wily
disorder, they regrouped
in the Dragoon Mountains,
unencumbered by the implausible
generosity of the
one-armed general's god;
the peace reverted to Geo Crook,
for whom allegory
was abandonment to
the land, its fastnesses, into which one receded
as any plant-sucking bug;
he understood the
advantage of Apache heads devolved
into portable ministries
of information, and
declared the peace
to hang by the sleek
carriage of Apache
presumptions,
the four heads prominent
in the breakout.
Crook's Apache scouts
brought back four
centers of cultural resolution and
handed them over,
the solace pledged to Geo Crook
in four sacks.
Why The Cod Is On The State Seal Of Massachuetts
Duncan in an elegiac mood
recited the names of presidents
and asked who among them
'moved the heart
and dismissed them all
but Lincoln
the long pale man whose
murky ghost I'd catalog
with Dante's destroyers
of the public good
'amid lanes and through old woods
in Dixie where the peace
imposed by Washington
left the dead soddened
in their fields in Sherman's wake
old Whitman and Duncan impervious
to Liberty
among the states that today haunt
'the naked string
Hank, Jr strums
an echo of Coolidge's rude silence
How those who'd fleece
the nation despaired
when Coolidge was in office
that old cod's eye
cold on boosters and
their black bags
He paid his Party's debt
for his campaign by winnings
the odds laid down by Democrats
against him. His last $50
to the janitor who'd poured
the booze and handed out the smokes
When he proposed to Grace Goodhue
he praised her that having taught the deaf
to hear she might cause
the mute to speak
Grace and her Silent Cal
'The less he spoke, the more he heard.'
The Chet Baker Ode
Selvage, my dead friend's
word for the material
that holds at the edges, the boundaries
that endure
no longer than the heart
your stiff spine and
set jaw, Chet,
I'd wanted to say an insomniac's --
but habits of sleep back then
were grace notes, slender
abused and terribly stylish
between Ft. Ord and LA those
waxy faces, the idylls
along California Hwy 1,
the ragged junkies in the ragged sea --
and the venerable gardenias
Billie wore
before the Lady became
her own wreath washed ashore
-- selvage, Chet,
is also a layer of clay
surrounding a vein,
the earth metallic
and under a sleeve
of your GI overcoat
you held a coronet
in a brown paper bag, and
were my Pentecostal white coachman
in the plazas, the alleys, the old neighborhood
peering from behind the African palms,
the fauns, their pipes and
Spanish ladies, a frieze
painted for a small town
California post office,
alabaster cheeks
behind mantillas, the well-grieved eyes
leading back to the sea
and the sea's gathering
the eyes in one brightness or
darkness sharp as turpentine, and
the songs arising there likewise, altho
the hip carriage trade
need go only to the Pacific
o those miasmic waters
isolate any man
& pour
down your collar
& epaulets.
Self-Portrait
after Rilke's Selbsbildnis aus dem Jahre
Across the tribal brow, the ridge
arches watchfully, hewed
to a tenuous civility -- while intractable
the bone augurs a faint softening
around the edges, as if drawn there
by hunger or thirst a cloistered child
peers from out the acolytes'
blue rapt bewildered gaze
that for all the weakness it discloses
I refuse to relinquish --
a shy look, far from direct,
unreachably dark and unfathomable, yet
for all its secrets is known
when one approaches who likewise needs.
The mouth, still gracelessly clamped
upon groans withheld, would ripen
to shout jubilation or to roar
tight-throated unintelligible anger.
The forehead, nodding drowsily, is mottled
by disordered sleep and shadows
that illuminate the still-life's unfinished contours,
or imbue the oval of a face with life --
whose bruises were accepted lovingly, on faith.
Even now, something distant gathers
in the unwavering addled stare
to shake itself loose from the half-sleep
upon which it's thrived.
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