The Art Department

In 1975
there was Art and there was Artforum,
in which this argument was perfunctorily joined:
there is, somebody said, a primary,
possibly pre-cultural level of intentionality
beyond which an iconographical entity
need never be questioned.
In 1975
we had such ketchupy language!
Art was our plumb and arabesque,
our unvexed course to the sea.
Our lone disgruntled veteran, who had discovered
queuing theory the first time he pushed
a wristbound man out the door of a helicopter,
entered a case of warm beer in protest against this
latest assignment, his shell-shocked buddy’s girlfriend
having entered the prosaic image of herself grinning
in the nude under a plastic sheet, the dematerialization
of the object having broken the plane of necessity,
the painters having painted the same bad painting
for years, the novice having saved the spit seeds
of a watermelon from a real live shaman’s floor,
which items she pocketed for later display as gifts
from his mouth, the lank-haired poetess having
buried her stoneware effigies along I-40
at personally significant intervals, the studious one
having studied the large glass the spiral jetty the
lightning field, another lapsed catholic having struck
the chicken breasts he’d mounted on little scaffolds,
his collaborator having stripped down to her panties
and beached herself at the lower end of a trough
filled with white interior latex, to the inexorable
beat of an electric adding machine.
In 1975
there was no refreshing the argument.
Beyond which: that war, her body, the medium
as medium, the fetish objects, the wish to be wished for,
the wish to be metaphor, the wishes and marriages:
a coarse gesture bleating for all eternity,
and her lying there.

At The Pillory

She has enemies, yes,
she was never my friend.
She is made fool of,
she talks like a jerk
at the podium, spliced
into daft pronouncements,
the audible ums and uhs.
She’s up to her eyebrows
in lemon meringue, she’s
nosing her reputation.
I guess she’s one
witch of a witch.
Again she gulps water,
again her hands fly up
to her mouth. We know
from our slapstick education
that her hair gets wilder,
that her skirt goes flying,
that there’s no escaping
the spanking machine,
because this is living
and this the old bailey,
the thumbscrew
and scaffolding, the mass
oratorio and pageant
in the little village
of schadenfreude
in the land of
too much ice cream
where she was born.

Seriatim

I.
The wake-up call at five ‘til five: watchman
comes pounding, flips the light-switch on, says
“Lock on the head!” while the air burst scatters
white light in the room. Relief man crawls
from his bunker.

II.
She’s gone–the prancer in her shiny coat. Who
sneezed like a kitten. Who yawned like a hippo
in mid-stream. Who raised her arms in a morning
stretch, shoulder blades back, offering her breasts
in full to a candid world.

III.
The imprint of things that stuck to his ass: a small
pair of scissors in cuneiform, the four-point crown
of a stalk of bananas, the incontinent pad’s reticular
pattern, a Percocet button, the lower dentures, his
granddaughter’s hand.

IV.
She occasionally bounced, and gave little kicks,
the foot shot sideways, the hips in internal
rotation, and so gaily the troubadour, according to
Pound: never a flaw was there where thy torse and
limbs are met...

V.
My last night at Fineberg’s: the rabbi came early
to kosher the meat, each tongue incised with an x;
midnight, the foreman fired a few rounds; trucks
all loaded and clean-up done, I watched a lone bull
mount his last in the holding pen.

VI.
The paraplegic was there with his pretty blonde wife
and when I asked how he came by his injury, before
he could answer, she volunteered that she’d shot him
one night–“We were drunk,” she said–and the man
cocked his head at the old story.