The coolness of ambergris tulip horn plough
felled with a machine chop
and howling in the limbo of horizontal trees
claps the traps shut
when a penny is thrown away,
and each penny is a bird
come to dance for you and celebrate the miracle
of musical money and the counting song.
You, jay, veering above the semi spout
blast that cankers the wing,
navigator of turbulent soundwaters
and hysterical robber skald among birds, you clung
to the telephone company edifice rim
and skittered out of sight temporarily hiking
across the wastes of flat roof recovering
while I am recovering my skull with flowers
in the valleys of eternity.

Let me put it to you this way:
are we inventing this space together,
am I the author, the other
you imagine I am who brewed these speeches
in solitude with gifts that stop at the skin,
do I stand like a mourning dove
among white and purple daubs and concrete
like a mother who doesn’t know her own children?
The thought of who makes books now
but is not a bookie trepanned in street mathematics
like some priest ashamed he hollered
down the abbey corridor at his socks
turns the reflections of a loving man to crime.

Agents of the ancients,
collegestars rolling in insurance money hoopla
and women square as high priestesses
who fleck the newspapers and currency shows,
their unhappiness is plain,
thought they live in a square structure of contradictions
they build titanic spheres and wander through
plucking truths like the illegal wildflowers of the West
and burn in the turbines and dynamos of their understanding
calm as clouds, as mists in the civilizations of fog.
The vertical concentric universe is finished and perpetually erected
as though pounds of pig flesh stood up in granaries
and turned the gladness of Cross followers into an ape,
bounding and cavorting with the grain waterfalls
till the masters and manifestos drooped and hankered after wine
while evening sent truthful devils past every possible reality
and combed the sex fruits with its will.

As usual only a madman
or sea traveler can knife these forms out of turquoise
and then only with metaphors of space frigates and ivory,
persona, encounter, women’s deaths and novelist schizophrenia
that seems like a glue dangerous to the fingers
making a Hindu wind sign, and
eyes that blink
and the analyst’s childlike toes
that tap each other or cling together
like kittens under the table,
for that feeling of necessity
that hovers like Lucifer himself over the motels,
that cloys the soul’s avenues
more eager than a conquered nation.

Though I fall in with those who say No more leaders
I can’t help admiring the lamb
who sent a loony kamikaze arcane to the death by nails
and hoofed the planet grateful to a fool
for decades after, architect slinging up rope bridges
and placing stones,
who swandove to his splat in the torrent
moonshaped, rocks’ baritone a capella
and the sun still overhead
not knowing what to do with his hands,
with erotic stars clicking their palates, Cordoba adolescents,
celestial blades full of elephant and dog and unsplit hymens,
stumbling over darnel clumps with his woman
who is a witch and a saint,
roadbuilder, monarch of straight lines to heaven.

The welders loan out an iron pike
and the rug chews its lip shining like a brass suture,
they suddenly believe all the nerve map terrors
fried in the heart’s steam of sterility,
and it’s mostly true, absolutely false inside intersecting curves,
ambiguous fish guts hire the whaleskin of law
and total figures of a day spent among plastics and changing spaces,
the question and the answer are new lives and new work
boiled with the confounded lobsters of the breadmen
in their open air stalls,
dying the wet fire death and the contempt of lovers who have no heads,
touring the families who have no truck
with writhing sea creatures
or the greasy executioners who turn
plankton geometry into a street scene or the lung
torn and folded over a gash.