It was bleak december just last night or the night
just before ~ Pravda! I mean, It's true!~ like Prado says: god
had taken poetry away from you: a stone
was just a stone. But today today today everything
is pinioned, laced, and fuck me!, new: this crazy purple
toothbrush afloat in the complicated trash, that
strange yellow bird over there, and the blue-green sash
that hangs in the rosepale sky speaks to you~ o.k, o.k,
I mean, to me: each word, like, say, cor-bi-ere and la-for-
gue means something more than it used to~ did, did! gather
gather gather and round because today I'm made
of sacred ground everything plants itself inside me grows
(I know now what was missing then I know now what was
present then it was moving it was still but I couldn't see
within) now now now it stops and spires, now now now
it rolls and gyres~ Yeats!: here all the barrel-hops are knit
here all the serpent-tails are bit here all the gyres converge
in one . . . I meant: Yikes! and, no, I'm not done~ a fire is
in me head! I'm in the zone!: in Marseilles among the wa-
termelons in Coblentz at the Giant's Hostelry in
Rome under a Japanese medlar tree! Surely, surely
it's the second coming! ". . . or the third," broke in who 'til then
seemed like such a sweet and mellow bird, under his beak, but
I heard him, I heard him . . . What matter! The rhythm
finds me rinds me books open brooks open too I have eur-
asian steps matches tipped-blue that light on anything
everywhere I'm a live a fire a flame in this morning
light I'm far more bright than must be right. I can hear
the defunctive music! I can glean and gleam and brew
today I believe I might be able to do
what was once to me assigned years ago and you're right!
only last last last lastnight! Finally! dickinson's
and modigliani's sex exposed! Finally! I can
see the foreign clocks the feather beds the eider-
down and the long white cocks fish that swim and open letters
to boot sweaters warm again! "The worst are filled with
passionate intensity—" Warned again! by that
unseemly but seemingly well-educated bird
as if on cue, but, hey, I shot right back: take thy beak
from out my heart, said I, 'cause, like, What matter! These
photos once framed now cough and sneeze this pen rights it-
self flows with ease and I can feel the trees remember
their long lost leaves~ o.k., o.k., so the dogs bark
as they have barked and barked before but the road came by
and drove me out to shore sails set sail and pails fill up with
sand lovers dress set out for land berrigan marries not-
ley again! and again! again my husband dawns a new
hand sown and flowered shirt I weigh much much less today and
more and more I float above the moat full of serpents beasts
and other fiendly things the castle sways the horses take
on wings ". . . And Philomel becometh dumb~ but O! not you
bleak-beak-ed burd-en~ o.k., o.k., Quoth I: What-ever!
Who cares if you laugh as you have laughed and laughed before,
behind my back when I was just a somber bore, a strag-
gler headed east, then west, with a pocket full of seeds
and subway tokens, a cracked tooth, and Damn!, a broken
nail. Bitten, bitter, lit! Forsooth and forsaken! Lo! I
traveled but it wouldn't travel me, I smoked and turned to
graying smoke, I listened to all they had to say~ felt dick~
turns out I held it in until today! Sacre-Coeur!
Today I am so found I am newly lost. Vallejo!
I mean: Way-to-go! What happens next happens now! Today
I have drunk the stone and I will carry it with me, for
a short long luminous while.