Jeffrey McDaniel...

Absence

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks

to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it

throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must

be part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.

Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.

I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,

as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,

back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,
I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny,
the way someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and
emerged as a human being. When you think of
me is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.

The Biology Of Numbers

Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.

Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.

But for me it does-I walk down the street
and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry

eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math

Lawrence Ferlinghetti!

The Pennycandystore Beyond The El

The pennycandystore beyond the Elis where i first

fell in love

with unreality

Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom

of that september afternoon

A cat upon the counter moved among

the licorice sticks

and tootsie rolls

and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in

Her hair was rainy

Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling

and they cried

Too soon! too soon!

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees

with one grand cafe in sun

with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful

man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.

Number 8

It was a face which darkness could kill

in an instanta face as easily hurt

by laughter or light

'We think differently at night'

she told me once

lying back languidly

And she would quote Cocteau

'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say

'whom I am constantly shocking'

Then she would smile and look away

light a cigarette for me sigh and rise

and stretch her sweet anatomy

let fall a stocking

Dove Sta Amore

Dove sta amore

Where lies love

Dove sta amore

Here lies love

The ring dove love

In lyrical delight

Hear love's hillsong

Love's true willsong

Love's low plainsong

Too sweet painsong

In passages of night

Dove sta amore

Here lies love

The ring dove love

Dove sta amore

Here lies love

A whole heap of Kenneth Rexroth

From THE LOVE POEMS OF MARICHIKO
VII
Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.
XII
Come to me, as you come
Softly to the rose bed of coals
Of my fireplace
Glowing through the night-bound forest.
XXV
Your tongue thrums and moves
Into me, and I become
Hollow and blaze with
Whirling light, like the inside
Of a vast expanding pearl.
XXXVIII
I waited all night.
By midnight I was on fire.
In the dawn, hoping
To find a dream of you,
I laid my weary head
On my folded arms,
But the songs of the waking
Birds tormented me.
XLV
When in the Noh theater
We watched Shizuka Gozen
Trapped in the snow,
I enjoyed the tragedy,
For I thought,
Nothing like this
Will ever happen to me.
LV
The night is too long to the sleepless.
The road is too long to the footsore.
Life is too long to a woman
Made foolish by passion.
Why did I find a crooked guide
On the twisted paths of love?
LX
Chilled through, I wake up
With the first light.
Outside my window
A red maple leaf floats silently down.
What am I to believe?
Indifference?
Malice?
I hate the sight of coming day
Since that morning when
Your insensitive gaze turned me to ice
Like the pale moon in the dawn.

State and 32nd, Cold Morning Blues
A girl in a torn chemise
Weeps by a dirty window.
Jaws are punched in the street.

A cat is sick in the gutter.
Dogs bark up the nightbound alleys.
There's nothing like the sorrow

Of the jukeboxes at dawn.
Dice girls going home.
Whores eating chop suey.

Pimps eat chile mac.
Drowsy flatfeet, ham and eggs.
Dawn of labor, dawn of life.

The awakening noises
Of the old sacrifices.
The snow blows down the bare street

Ahead of the first streetcar.
The lovers light cigarettes,
And part wiyh burning eyes,

And go off in the daylight.

OAXACA 1925
You were a beautiful child
With troubled face, green eyelids
And black lace stockings
We met in a filthy bar
You said
"My name is Nada
I don't want anything from you
I will not take from you
I will give you nothing"
I took you home down alleys
Splattered withmoonlight and garbage and cats
To your desolate dishelved room
Your feet were dirty
The lacquer was chipped on your fingernails
We spent a week hand in hand
Wandering entraced together
Through sweltering summer
Of guitars and gunfire and tropical leaves
And black shadows in the moonlight
A lifetime ago.

Quietly
Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet --
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and the penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

From A PROLEGOMENON TO A THEODICY
This is the winter of the hardest year
And did you dream
The white the large
The slow movement
The type of dream
The terror
The stumble stone
The winter the snow that was there
The neck and the hand
The head
The snow that was in the air
The long sun
The exodus of thought
The enervated violin
The oiled temples
The singing song and the sung
The lengthy home
The trundling endless stairs
The young stone
Homing and the song
The air that was there
Flayed jaws piled on the steps
The twirling rain
And laying they repeat the horizon
Ineffably to know how it goes swollen and then not swollen
Cold and then too warm
So many minor electrocutions
So many slaps of nausea
The keen eyelids
The abrupt diastole
That leaves you wondering
Why it was ever despite their assurances unlocked
Stars like lice along the scalp
The brain pan bitten burning
And dull on one foot
And dull on one foot
O cry aloud
O teeth unbound
Don’t you know that the stone walk alone
Do you know the shredded brow
Are you aware
Do you take this forever concentric bland freezing to touch
Let the scarlet rustle
Let the globes come down
Let the oblate spheroids fall infinitely away
Forever away always falling but you can always see them
The creak
The squeak that makes you so slightly open your mouth
Patiently to be strangled
It is gone away somewhere
It is Winter
Reason
Winter
Ache

Black
Blue black
Blue
The silver minuscules
In early dawn the plume of smoke
The throat of night
The plethora of wine
The fractured hour of light
The opaque lens
The climbing wheel
The beam of glow
The revealed tree
The wine crater
The soft depth
The suspended eye
The clouded pane
The droning wing
The white plateau
The hour of fractured light
The twisted peak
The cold index
The turquoise turning in the lunar sky
The climbing toe
The coastwise shout
The cracking mirror
The blue angle
The soothed nape
The minute flame
The silver ball
The concave mirror
The quivering palm
The conic of the wing
The trough of light
The rattling stones
The climbing humerus
The canyon bark
The unfolding leaves
The rigid lamp
The lengthy stair
The moving cubicle
The shifting floor
The bending femur
The rigid eye
The revealing lamp
The crackling anastomosis
The initial angle
The involved tendon
The yellow light
The acoluthic filaments
The general conic of the wind
The revealing eye
The crazed pane
The revelation of the lamp
The golden uncials
The revelation of the mirror

Madonna Mia by Oscar Wilde

A lily-girl, not made for this world's pain,
With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears,
And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears
Like bluest water seen through mists of rain:
Pale cheeks whereon no love hath left its stain,
Red underlip drawn in for fear of love,
And white throat, whiter than the silvered done,
Through whose wan marble creeps one purple vein.
Yet, though my lips shall praise her without cease,
Even to kiss her feet I am not bold,
Being o'ershadowed by the wings of awe,
Like Dante, when he stood with Beatrice
Beneath the flaming Lion's breast, and saw
The seventh Crystal, and the Stair of Gold.

The Moment of Waking- John Tranter

She remarkes how the style of a whole age
disappears into your gaze, at the moment
of waking. How sad you are
with your red shirt, your features
reminiscent of marble, your fabulous
boy-girl face like a sheet of mist
floating above a lake.

Someone hands me a ticket,
in Berlin a hunchback
is printing something hideous;
my passport is bruised with dark blue
and lilac inks. Morning again,
another room batters me awake
you will be haunting the mirror like silver...

now the nights punish me with dreams
of a harbour in Italy - you are there
hung in the sky on broken wings
as you always have been, dancing,
preparing to wound me with your
distant and terrible eyes.