cdlxv

Much of the coffee didn’t make it into the pot
while you were in Seattle.  (or Spring Vacation).

Something about pear blossoms here.

But I drank the coffee that made it into the pot.
I took all the spices out of the cheap rack,
placing the spices onto the middle shelf of the
tall white cabinet in our kitchen.  (our new treasure).

Also, we got a new coffee table after three years.

cdlxiv

One writes with one’s desire, and I am not through
desiring. (Barthes)  Six eggs are boiling on the stove.
Twelve biscuits in the oven.  I’m reading correspondence
about sexual fantasies (or lack thereof).  Mine are plenty.

Like getting so close to someone’s face (getting my face
too close to someone else’s face) that there is a red heat.
Red to be seen.  Red to be felt.

Back at work.  Getting an omelet.  I have so many eggs.
Thanksgiving day at 3:44pm Pacific Time all alone
and very happy.  Happy is thankful.  Proust.  More balloons.

cdlxiii

So I have turned to short stories for their
mini-catharses.  Finding some new—any
emotion.  No that’s not it.

Movies do this.  But the Paris Review...

Sick day.  I am at Trident reading
American Letters & Commentary.
Now I’m at a laundromat.  He’s in

Portland.  How green is the blackbird?

The 39 bus behind me.  Some clouds
and pale blue.  I shook John Wieners’
hand and met and chatted with Gerrit Lansing

who has heard both Stevens and Eliot read.

Moving to San Francisco in three
and a half months.  Somebody is running
a vacuum cleaner nearby.

cdlxii

You’re asking me
what the clouds look like
down there. My forehead is on an
airplane window! The birds mock
my father’s cattle call. A dove
walks the roof. I don’t want to
turn the page because
he’ll be dead.

cdlxi

I paced from the hallway to the living room to the kitchen.
Back to the living room. Sat down on the couch. Reading aloud
all along the way. Dropping the mug of coffee (with an abstract
Christmas tree on it) various places during. Losing the coffee mug.
Finding the coffee mug. Refilling it. Switching books. I’m in Brookline.
Peet’s Coffee. It’s a nightmare of humidity. It was cold war last night.
And then death to coyotes. Seriously, I was fighting all sorts of battles.
Can we even imagine the freedom...the erotic fluidity of a collectivity
which would speak only in pronouns and shifters...without referring to
anything legal whatsoever? (Barthes). It is 1946. I’m 170 pounds.
I got a letter from Mom. She just bought a computer.

cdlx

I’m tired of these scraps.
Love’s three red boxes.
The window is open
just a crack. There’s tea
on the shelf. I’m tired
of these weeks’ dull
movements. Saturday
another spring. On
Tuesday, which is
also today, 20 pages.
I sift through tired
scraps of thought.
These pages. Not
I. Not the figure
jumping into a pool,
black and white.
Some birds whisper
through the crack.
It is Wednesday night
of High Fidelity.
Lunch poems with
a finger in my mouth.

cdlix

And now for the wipeout.
Loving Tomkins Square Park
under a whiff of Chanel No. 5.
Halloween doesn’t have such
an eggy impact. It starts off
with a tailgate party. Happy
Monday everyone! But I can’t
breathe. We make our way
to meet up with the rest of our
clan so we can reinstall the
printer and check our e-mail.
We see the sign for a
backrub on the street, four
ladies in red asking if they
can do my boyfriend. He’s
backpacked on the sidewalk
wasting inky breath. Weekends
tailgate weekends.

cdlviii

Forgot another umbrella in a taxi,
the cab that took us there. Had two bottles of wine
just to read the raindrops. Instant boner. My first poetry class.

The Weston exhibit. How stunning Jean Charlot.
See this picture by Weston’s lover Tina Modotti.
Photo of Diego Rivera. Look closely at the toenails and leg hair.

Here we find another Waldrop in a sea of zeroes.
There’s another big cloud rolling down the hill
like a snowball. Here is Moses painting the waters.

cdlvii

First day of spring.  Stopped by Luxor
where the electricity ended forever around 9:30
and I rode with a nice Irish guy to—get this—
Paradise where he played the piano keyboard and—as I’ve been proclaiming ever since—
I had a sandwich with an Asian guy and a Hispanic guy.  A sandwich dance.
Part of the sandwich drove me home where—in the car beneath my apartment—
we had coffee and Jimmy Stewart.
Smiling apples.  A year goes by.  And then another.

When we are happy is it all gone?

cdlvi

Snow covered Boston today.
I have not written this for several reasons.
Here is a glass of New York.

The river isn’t frozen.
I found the blind spot after the coffee.  Less pills
more books in my ears.  More bells.  The horse and carriage is just out of reach.

The snow ate New York.
Here is my head full of bottles of Perrier.  (Yes, I am repeating the word
focus
over and over and over).  This is Mother Goose who is dead
(ringing in my ears).  This New York is Boston.
It is clouds without cake (and equals San Francisco).

Strum your guitar because you like cake (frozen chocolate).

cdlv

Here I am in this restaurant, slipping away. A peppy waiter arrives
with a Sam Adams coaster and I’m listening
to The Beloved and Kid Koala. The moon is over my head
and I’m trying to be a genius, reading a guidebook, strumming my
tablecloth. The kitchen is loud (from whence our waiter).

I swear it’s Nina Simone. For some stupid reason
I have embarked on a mini-quest to find
meaningful music on the iPod. Yay, I have never been hit
by so many men. A cokehead, a deaf guy from Korea,
a computer guy from San Diego; the cutest unfortunately

the cokehead. In Cambridge, Massachusetts a
rousing welcome for our hobo. It all starts Wednesday
night at Beth’s party, where furthermore I meet a
real person: droll, self-deprecating, cocksure,
packaged. He’s fresh. I give him my number.

We go to yoga, kickboxing, and a toning class together.
It’d be great if we could talk. Which we do.
About his French horn and his cooking school.
He’s not Asian but his parents met in Japan and he
certainly could be partially and I’m only dwelling on this right now

because I’ve been thinking about him a lot. Apparently
it was the waiter who did this to me. I’d be
eating and he would say to me (with an Indian accent)
“it seems obvious to me that you are not
satisfied with your current relationship.” He wants

more attention: love, lust, something. I share
his doubts. The most effective song is
the one about being a waiter (all filler). It’s because I’m so easily
unconvinced these days. Suddenly I miss something like
capability. From the symphony, we walk together to Bread and Circus

where the waiter asks if I’m writing a manifesto. I’m sipping
tomato garlic soup. He’s kind of cute in a frat sort of way.

cdliv

Here’s a little story of a guy who doesn’t know when to
beam out. He films separate footage of two languages
because calendar time as described by the Bible
makes those droopy energy beams intercept

swiped light sabres. Which points out another
problem with dynamic hierarchies: The Wonder
Twins are two aliens from the planet Exxor!
I wonder how all those wiretaps are going, and why

two men in masks are carrying machine guns through
the guitar music. “It’s cuz the Lord brought about
a meeting.” Yeah, and only our Lord can sympathize.
Well, I do expect Georgie could do better

than to adapt those two paragraphs for the cinema.
A sun is swelling over the clouds. (Long silence.)
If ever a couple of books were made for cinematic
adaptation, it’s those two—watch them fall onto

our fluorinated cubicle where a rimjob is in progress.
Not to complain, however, as I got these two
wonderful sons out of it. I’m sad to say this verse
is the only one in my collection you authored,

which makes me wonder how the words flew
in the original language. Any two people in
a Volokh conspiracy would be used as human
shields, which explains why those evil guys got

wasted after she was knocked out; and, of course,
brings to mind why it would be a brilliant literary
device to have the harried mother emit a cool
yellow light for added effect. These are all

really funny stats, I know. But we always had
the technology to beam it out into the world. So
why don’t we? No wonder such humor can be found
in Israel. That’s where all the dinosaurs are.

cdliii

I am writing for my friends. They are each
unstable like words. Whether tis nobler to
obfuscate blah blah blah I’ll never know.
Well, actually I do. But still...

“he was swept into the grass by the spume”
“his big toe was caught in the chain”

and the rest of the story continues
with a clean apartment, new neighbors,
a toothy monster (the same Timothy),
and bright white buildings on sand.

cdlii

I’m walking around in my brain.
There is so much here! Mottled
snapshots, maps, lovenotes,
e-mails (some are also lovenotes),
movies stars, porn films, toilet brushes...

I’m not trying to say anything. Just a few
words: potato, elm, eleven, backyard.
Barthes says dreams are boring.
I read this while facing the Bay Bridge
a bit after sunrise on Saturday morning.

cdli

It’s a beautiful day to escape poetry.
Invent new word to replace such a thing:
red monster (his name is Timothy).
This ‘getting close’ is more like
exile – and how that might relate
to untitled pumpkins (poems) I’m
not entirely sure.  Except when
the telephone rings.  Here I
remove all substance.
This I do.

cdl

“What is it that you want exactly?”
“Well....  Number one, you must be able to
compose and nurture high-perfuming teams.”
Number two, “I weighed in this morning at 161.”
A new low for a new millennium.

And at Wal-Mart there’s a new dress code
of blue polo shirts and khakis while destroying police stations.
They just finished off an entire
what state am I in.  With two helpings of
who wants to report the news anyway.

So, like, then he keyed in a top-notch response,
shipped it off electronically to England.
I can’t write poetry no more.
Oprah is constantly on diets.
Black telephone.  Spelt my name with it.

cdxlix

I want to be sunny.  A boat full of
the island is reflecting.  The sun.  And yet
I’ve discovered that I only need to make sense
one day per week.  Shh.
                                                  What can I say?
Today I lost my black pen and
I did not have a black day
but yet one where I finished a sexy motorboat propelled
(yes propelled awkwardly) by the sun (or whatever).
Of course there’s nothing better to do than that.
The motor was in the water.  It was
Eliot Crane Lorca and Stevens.
It was orange water like
the pizzeria in Egypt.  Next up?  “It’s
nearly ten o’clock.”
                                         More about today:
I got one “miss you” and one “I wish
we’d have fooled around
when I was down in the
summer.”
                                                    My routine:
Be alert one day a week.
Bombard my friends with poems.
Poems equals Pizzeria Uno and
an orange boat next to Treasure Island.

cdxlviii

Pour the last of the cold coffee
down the sink.  Finding youth
or something.  Can’t write
since Canada.  Fighting
liberty.  I thought he was
a mirror, then his eyes glazed over.
I slapped him a few times
to see if I could feel it.
But that’s marriage
(and a possible move to England).

cdxlvii

What is a pair of lips
but that they tighten
into a grimace? Pinching
and clawing at something,
trying to find it. But
I love the guy.

cdxlvi

Is this me in the notes?  Can somebody say?
Just tell me I’m in Montreal.  It snowed
18 cm on the day before we arrived
and the city is slick and beautiful.
This is all explained to me in the
bathroom stall.  “You keep the
water in your mouth like a
toilet.”  Au revoir.

cdxlv

Trying to get it all out.  It’s not
poetry anymore but a trashcan full of
7-Up, Wild Grape, Double-Shot, and
more Wild Grape.  Rubens & Brueghel.
“In the past I have declined to comment
on my own work because, it seems to me,
a poem is what it is...”  Schuyler so
much better than this latté.  My back to the
brick wall and nothing else but a face with
what from this distance looks like a
glass of milk.  It is 8:41 (a glacier,
a bulldozed landscape, a golf course,
a mound of dirt, bluffs, and a crag)—
I’m centered.  With his hand down my pants.

cdxliv

2.7 miles of porn,
despite forgetting my wallet this morning.
I am evaluated. My beard gets points
but I get ribbed for not wearing neckties.
Another noose on my shoulder. This dance
takes a downward turn, my favorite spot on
Central Square. Something called creativity
but I didn’t answer the phone. 40 pounds of
Caesar salad. High rankings. I can’t even
remember what I am doing. This
salad’s probably not the best thing for me.
Home. He’s sound asleep
clutching his stuffed gorilla
with an open smile on his face. 12:52.