The Anticatastrophes of Edwin Honig
Anon
(from the legendary Latin)
At a literary tea
I once met the
then-at-his-height
anthologist
Iamblichus
who, denting cookies
on everybody’s plate,
let on to me
I didn’t rate:
“I love poetry
that’s got a bite!”
To which I cried:
“Try this
one you missed —
my latest!”
I thought he had
only nibbled it
when he grabbed
his mouth and spat,
but on the ground
like a leftover sweet
lay a little mound
of broken teeth.
A Poem About Texas
(for James White, who ordered it)
Whatever you say about any place
you can say about Texas.
You live there dead and alive.
You borrow a little and pay.
Little by little you give it away
but always the price is next time
never the same as the first
and the first is never
the first for you as for me
beginning to say it
but this time in Texas
where a glad hand pays for a mouth
and a mouth for a brain but smaller
after which I’ll be the first to say
today in Odessa- – and you’ll say again —
is the first time in months it rained.
Ballad
Bang blang
the dead man’s gang
wants revenge
on the pauper
who shot the boss
in the land
of the quicksand
ages ago
as if the sinking
dead head
could still cry out
someone save me
and the gang
could arrive
tang alang
to pull him out
hand over hand
with the same chain
they’re out with
to slaughter
and hang
the old pauper
If they only
could bind him
and roast him
and snuff him out
then shred him
like a cigarette —
pauper or not
it’s no use hiding
they break your back
ages ago
or ages ahead
because by God
the dead man’s gang
has just got
to save
me and you
blang bang
and the union
Caught You
odd life muttering this means jail
old wife beat it crazy man
tree trunk you’re in rubbing out
fallen branch for it your eyes
apple the wind no surprise
picked at a wolf grass dries
crinkled howling take a scythe
swinging to an owl bale the hay
underneath watching from look around
a hand the rafters stone’s throw away
fluttering a last fox moonrise and you
dried up finish up six foot
leaves a quail underground
Comment
A toadstool
three inches high
reddish brown
speckled
half shiny crown
glistens in sunlight
having pushed
its way up
out of dead
pine needles
now makes
a spectacle
of itself
in the new morning
early September air
Cool Fountain: the Spanish Fonte Frida
Fountain, coolest fountain,
Cool fountain of love,
Where all the sweet birds come
For comforting — but one,
A widow turtledove,
Sadly sorrowing.
At once the nightingale,
That wicked bird, came by
And spoke these honied words:
“My lady, if you will,
I shall be your slave.”
“You are my enemy:
Begone, you are not true!
Green boughs no longer rest me,
Nor any budding grove.
Clear springs, when there are such,
Turn muddy at my touch.
I want no spouse to love
Nor any children either.
I forego that pleasure
And their comfort too.
No, leave me: you are false
And wicked — vile, untrue!
I’ll never be your mistress!
I’ll never marry you!”
Cow Lines
1
Moving inside the cow eye
an oyster of light.
2
Whiskers of grass
momentarily tangled
in chomping and dripping
white muzzles.
3
One cloud shadow
over the meadow
blocked in a red
gouged-out ravine —
the bulk of a cow
turning round and round.
4
Barbed wire
pulled down by
a clump of yarrow.
5
Dew in a slow
drop of spittle revolving
slips suddenly down
a knife blade of grass.
6
Hills reclining in hills —
the small in the big
in the bigger,
the biggest of all
being the cow asleep
in a blue morning mist.
7
Red tongue drooling
a long string of pearls.
8
Flecks of light
through the eyelashes
glint off
a polished brown eye.
9
Sun on a cow back
turns a yellow patch
into the brown,
the brown imposed
on the white,
till all of it
swishes through grasses
a wide swaying umbrella.
10
Tail flip
to nose drip
and up
to the big
eye-lowering stare.
11
A filmy blue rock in the fog
under light
that wraps like a blanket —
no, not a rock
but the back
of a cow huddled up.
12
What gives rise to a tail
gives fall to it too —
the ridge of the spine
on an incline of back
moving in line
with the hill top.
13
What can relieve
an itching brown hide?
The fence post you see
barbed wires go round,
keeping it inside the field —
this field, not that field outside.
14
Three simpleton maps
of uncharted isles
shiver across
a wobbling cow hide.
15
Ravens and hawks
hurtle and rise
to startle
the cowed afternoon.
16
Dusk
and the dark
bunching-up hills
kept back
by a cropped clean field
from munching the last
of the loitering cows.
Dawn After a Full Moon
Look, look right there behind it,
at that tipped-up fireshot
opening the sky bubble of a world
all trued and ready to be marred
by one brown gauzy smudge.
How come such quiet daybirth
lets so much of everything hang out?
Say it’s the biggest see-through mountain
blown up day by day by day
so someone higher up than any
can shout out from the dizzy top:
“Forget the damned old moonlight!”
Eat the Bean
He will sell it
we will buy it
— we will die
of eating it
In the market
in the park
the bloated ones
pass by
His beans are
being eaten
— the eaters
softly die of it
Shit loads
encouraging
the bean to grow
the bean to sell
Lank — weak
toddler — dotard
president — cabinet
the army — the clergy
The mysterious east
of oil — desert
and the piled up
city ghettos
Worn out rivers
junkmobiles
and the ardent lulus
crooning eat it
All propagate
the hard black bean
we die to eat
and to eliminate
In the sludge — smoke
the squashed brain
sinking
for the love of it
the incorruptible
slow young god
breaks wind
Eat the bean
Explaining Stevens
— Talk of change? Let’s change ourselves.
— Small change, ourselves.
— The only change we can arrange.
— Well, suit yourself.
— I aim to do no less.
— You won’t have changed.
— Wrong. Saying so, I’ve changed already.
— You’ve not much range.
— Wrong again. To answer you I’ve gone back…
— To where?
— To where I was before I spoke to you.
— You must be deranged.
— No, just rearranged, to give you time…
— For what?
— To see that you yourself…
— Have changed?
— You feel it?
— Yes, I feel changed from when I said small change.
— Fine, but all of this, you know, was prearranged.
for Larry Moser
Five Erotics for Jack’s Fiftieth
1
She prepared for ages to sleep with him: Cautious
was no word for it. Contacts washed in
distilled water (first boiled), so she’d see
without glasses what they did for each other.
Then a bath or a shower (to soap their privates
beforehand) — not taken together, naturally.
And, for enticement, the silk: for him green,
for her black, of course, with some lace.
Into the sheets, just starched, he must go
flat on his back, then turn off the light.
She would mount first, preparing the rubber
he’d have to wet and put on himself.
“Whenever you’re ready, I am!” “For what, Sis?
I’ve come already, all over myself!”
2
She was voluble, generous, catty,
irritable, and self-loving.
She was a voyeur on herself.
This is how he found out.
She had very large breasts
which she offered him once.
“They improve as I’m proved,”
she told him matter-of-factly.
When he had succeeded in
rousing her nipples, she smiled,
“Now doesn’t that feel good?”
“You ought to know,” he said,
getting up to light a cigarette,
“They’re your nipples.”
3
She wanted it bad but never was there
enough time. When they met
she’d whisper, “Let’s find some place!”
The best time was when at some friend’s
a hall-neighbor got roused up
to knock: “Is there anything wrong?”
“No, no, everything’s fine!”
She smiled, “Let’s do it again,
in honor of neighbors!”
going at it another five.
4
Face to face, she, in her swift wren’s
darkened-blue-underneath
jet eyes’ porcelain,
kissed and was kissed till
down on her plum-colored couch she
touched him where he trembled.
“I’m in love with your fine wet mouth —
quick, touch me with it here!”
Wet and deep with his fine mouth
went he in her short hair.
“Open up, I’ll nest inside your tree!”
Sliding off the plum-colored couch,
with her needly claws did she
bury herself in his pants.
5
She liked things out in the open
running wild and scot-free, the more
nature around the better.
Pine-needle beds were yummy,
but lest impatient Onan
spill it there uselessly
she’d cup him under the spigot
and scoop it up by hand.
One Sunday in a dry clearing
twenty miles out of town,
they humped all night so freely
big city hunters caught them
with rifles in spotlights piling
up the last of the deer.
Homecoming
with a four-day beard
and an aching back
I go into the washroom
find only cold water
and no mirror
unpack my toilet kit
water diminished to a trickle
insert blade in razor
trickle now a solitary tear
I shave in the tear
before it dries
How It Was to Be With Ogden the Editor as a Visitor in China
lt was not like being a visitor in Chicago —
Unless you’re good at drawing parallels,
As, say, the World’s Fair of 1896 —
Or the Crystal Palace thing in London
Where the crowds, all working-class,
“Yelled louder” when Queen Vic’s tonneau,
Enamelled black and gold “and prinked
Around with primroses,” lolled by,
With that enormous Fiji princess,
A visitor, “in a smaller coach behind.”
Now Ogden at the Nixon fete remembers
Making way for old Chu Teh,
The Red general, second to Mao:
“The applause was loud as he passed by,
And we joined in.” Going past, Chu Teh
Glanced straight at him, “the strange American,”
But “without curiosity,”
As Prince Sihanouk, the exiled leader
From Cambodia, trailed behind.
At the banquet later (where “the only way
To identify guests at the head table
Was through binoculars while standing
In place”), Ogden made “the comment
Of the evening” over the delicacy, a dish
Of sea slugs: “My God, mine’s still moving !”
Which “convulsed Yao Wai and his colleagues,”
As Ogden “swallowed manfully.”
In the Cellarway
1
He stopped my clock.
I shook.
I thought he blazed.
“If so,” he said,
“I’m some cool sun
turning in the haze.”
2
“Cool? The hell you say!
I turned you on.”
Up he lurches
wet all over me,
love,
my big slow humping
tortoise.
3
After two yearlong days
returning
his heft on me
becomes a cloud
till ah,
I’m repossessed
like an overdue appliance.
4
I mean, turned on again…
In fact, I’m drenched!
Insult and Vengeance
This is the view from my big white house:
a hole off the lawn many miles long,
a few thousand feet wide,
filled with water.
Boats take to it:
little ones with handkerchief sails,
some with insolent motors;
also, serene and complex freighters
that make for the land
to relieve themselves of cargo.
Each day at my windows I see
flimsy and crapulous boats
passing this way and that
in the wide changing winds,
and the boats all behave as if nothing
existed but water and wind,
as if they and these things had
nothing to do with me or the house.
Today the water, perfectly calm,
blinks like a dreaming face,
and I think: Tonight
is the night to burn down the house
and roll off the lawn
into the great water hole,
deserting the human race.
Intimidations at Fifty
Christ never made it —
Kit Marlowe, Keats or Pushkin,
Chekhov, Lawrence or Lorca…
Shakespeare barely squeaked through!
A mist swallows the mind
refusing to drop more names
though some still stick at the tip:
two hard-driving friends, a wife
dissolving her frowns into smiles,
a gray deer-eyed teacher,
one unselfmaking neighbor —
all sunk in the soup.
You live till you die.
Why make a fetish of years ?
Like a schoolboy mentally straining
to stop the traffic,
aiming his screams at the din,
chopping an arm at fate
that whispers You’ll be the last to go —
let the rest die like flies.
The traffic rolls on.
*
I was a cripple at fifty
(my dad at seventy-four
shrugs a drooped shoulder at me
in the dining room where he’s come
by way of the Fury he bought
to drive cross-country to see me)
after all those years of lugging
customers’ crates around
till one-two-three in the morning
helping them manage their space
brighten store windows…
A helping hand was always good business.
My father’s in liquor
with his fail-safe way
of digging the proof in each bottle
without touching a drop —
a teetotaling liquor salesman!
So? I regained my youth:
that double hernia operation
knocked twenty-four years
clear off my back!
I get the message:
if Hamlet the father
turns into Hamlet the son,
who’s there to envy,
why take revenge?
And who needs a son?
*
A friend tells his daughter of eight
who admires the mini
that stops at the hips
It’s lovely to look at
but is it a skirt ?
Another friend’s daughter
pushing eleven
wants a bra
specially padded
on her birthday.
*
This is no country for old men —
only for bottomless striving.
Tops are all topless.
My father’s retired in Florida.
Somewhere there must be
a true golden age
before growing one minute older.
I turn to my wife.
How old was Yeats when he started
to write his best stuff?
Only fifty-four, you say —
right after he married Georgie?
Hot diggity Innishfree —
an age I’m still free to reach!
for Harold Norse
Is
— like it is
is not is
but what you think
like is
as is
is what is
might be if
it stopped and was
what is
is as much of it
as we can take
without is
because it is
is only is
turned inside out
and emptied
It Might Have Been Sunday
She took her clothes off.
I took off my shoes.
My socks I crumpled under a chair.
She was naked on the floor,
bulging in a blanket.
Ducking into the tent of it
she flung open for me,
I heard a latch click
two doors away.
Floorboards creaked closer,
Our eyes jamming
the opening door.
Mad for each other
we’d grown careless…
But it was just
The neighbor’s cat
come to rub
against her thigh
through the thin blanket.
Like interrupted safecrackers
With thickened voices
we plunged back to business,
dry hands
on yielding bottoms,
fronts interlocked.
Morning windows steamed
where a blind sun sprang.
Groaning and coiling
we kept slipping back,
till it was noon.
My Face Looks Out
My face looks out to take the world as it
has always been: low-keyed, intelligible
to the unreasoning eye, acceptable,
except as now it comes to me that it
is almost fifty years since I am able
so casually to look with eyes that take
the whole world in or any part I’d make
into something of my own a while.
Nothing I do or have done earns this right.
It just is. Eyes by being eyes have sight;
if nothing hinders, light pours through endlessly.
Yet it’s for me to make of what eyes see
a curbstone, passing dog, gigantic tree.
Who says, “Are all I see lost parts of me?”
On Rosmarie’s “No Hurry to Struggle”
a sore throat and lozenges
in the afternoon
inflicting sunlight
on the parquet floor
curtains drifting
to no purpose
you sit legs up on
the faded floral chaise
a hub to spokes
of poured in shadow
four French doors ajar
your unmoving face
if you spoke your mind
the universe might cough
An Old Man Is Snoring
rain comes and pulls tight
wind blows mad a cramp
rain slashes inside the head
eyes and neck and feet
and face turn white
puffs red and ache
and wind to take you
leans back somewhere else
stopping dead as wind
and rain an empty ball
in torn bags starts hovering
flaps and flakes and will not
the streets rise and
and wind it is fall
Praise This Crescent Moon
this tongue of light
this barless E curved westward
in the just tipped-up morning
praise the eastern barge lights
twinkle tapping house lights
waking on the bay
and risen to the shrinking
gray night dropping curtain
praise the streakless opal day
that flicks on one by one
the light blinks of my mind
unreeling now
this tongue of Homer reading
a million billion eyes’
unending light
Serving Supper Naked
Baited by all the blue movies,
waitresses topless
and bottomless fouling up
hubby’s psyche,
some wives
will strip
to serve their men proper meat.
“I do,” giggles one
on the radio,
“three times a week.”
“What, ma’am?” “He loves it.
All night he cuddles me,
gets so darn tired he can
hardly shove off to work
next morning.”
Revolutions tremble toward
table, toward bed.
Domesticity impugned by
balled-up mores
may softly
rebound, o’ercoming all
governments, wars,
to upman the bliss men
put skins on to come
on unnaturally.
So let wives go skin deep,
bearing all sweets to the eye
till the lower man
feel them sufficient
to rise.
“For,” as Aristotle put it
to Goethe, “in
the ideal commonwealth
the body politic is
never passive,
but thrusts ever up to
the feminine jiggle,
turning all
that earth mother wit
heavenly on!”
Sounds
There’ll never be an end to poetry
…never be an end to poetry.
…never be an end…
Tu Fu.
Too few?
Tout fou !!
for James Schevill
The End of Romance
the mountebank
the mirror
and the tricked out skull
against the balcony
the rose of ego
blooming silently
the famed fiesta
rolling by
below
clacking dances
fans
regards
a jostled gown
a swirl
of lisping dominoes
the morning hush
a puzzling
fragrance
then
these echoes
of a fading chant
The Sixteen-Year-Old Poet Sploshed on a Seaman’s Pint of Germs Joys Juice
Beknights I used to klim the whiskry heights
of wetwit wenchers in a klutsch
of duncks and dranks, and sins to kinsch.
How I gluttoned each sea angel’s Gutterpflight!
A door, a fear. Adore a fere. A sheep ship full.
So I slopped my biery mouth.
Dispelled death’s dirty doughty doubt.
Moot, this moochin mug had munch tomb-use.
The licensed ills licentious grew,
askewered harmonies to tinderized profunnities.
Then oop spuk rale Huckle Punk,
the molar champ, jooshin his molls a bout.
— Gwan, unknot this sot, I’ll not be got tonicht.
Why de long puss on yous ? Got no feelins, Tom?
Dickdock he jawked his dickery joizy jernts
stiff hip hup and downed the clock,
this squeamoocherin people hoocher.
It spleeved me, clean honest it did.
The limpy chaw, the mucky jeer,
in his fleer a monkey swore.
I licked, I leaked, I nearly locked, I did.
Hoot how this hoyden snatcher jimmy cracked a huckleboon.
— Jest spy me then, so long and full in stem,
when slilky Syl, tummee sez she,
O Punky, pleash me pink!
Go plump me chaise, then skiss me aisy slow,
then (lowkey) lump the fingers twain.
Mark me neap-and-tug, so neck-in-dip,
all nickt like this.
How I would flame to feat those whorable diversities!
— Ye sowstale scheapsacked sheebacked backscheesh thumpin lyre!
— Wazzat ye say, Tom?
— Hick huck.
— He sez ye nosed it. Punk.
— O did he naw ? Chump!
— Jimpansee?
— Fool to speak withoot yer hat.
He’s brood and broad the waist to head,
he’ll bolt yer boobside back,
he’ll batter ye two bits, he will.
— Gwan, yer thwackin the boot, ye are.
I’ll flatten yer floozy ore, I will.
— Swinge me silvery till I spill me
swilldownswish the tigglish tits atender Syl!
— Ginmen, ouch ye go!
— Leggo, ye creep, leggo my joistik, hic.
— Huck is stuck, I’lI husk his duck.
— Who dare it, do.
— Me, I done dood it, dicklydare,
me, ye peterpiker wetlouse, so.
Behest me at yer inquest, bo,
I’ll come dripplin fleaballs ounce by jounce.
So rung by lung asalting tongue,
a swearling sheepship sungk!
And all asure the wooly while,
O wily willy me, a lickluck lubberboy,
ascrivening clean all mudnight threw
oop my trinkle trimsy poisy.
for Richard Ellmann
The Tendencies
Nice knowing you one said
just when you thought
you’d never met
about the time your world
began to come apart
Here they are dear they’ve arrived
well bring them in dear
don’t keep them waiting
then you said oh
walk right in
And in they came all right
each one screaming back delighted
till you thought of asking
where am I
but you weren’t
Three Documentary Poems for James Schevill
1
April 27, 1945
Stuffed in a barn
with thirty/forty GIs,
no space to budge
but where your bottom
hits the floor,
the whole place becomes
a kitchen full
of cooking tins.
Outside spring plays
wind in the morning,
rain in the afternoon,
toward evening
a full sun declining.
Hills wrapped
in a gradual faraway haze
with here — there clouds,
rolling smoke over towns
slowly bombed — shelled,
cockroach tanks
dotting the skyline.
With my “liberated” camera poised
I try to capture it all —
smoke, tanks — hills. . .
too unreal.
Lines of prisoners
clomping down the road,
grizzly grim faces —
behind them in camouflage suits
flushed out of caves
six German snipers
too young — sullen,
arms bent jutting at the elbow,
fingers laced behind heads,
to right — left
Gl guards cocking rifles
pointed inches from each head.
So much gone and going now…
Is the past like this barn
a refuge
from our incalculable dealings
with the world ?
2
April 28, 1945
This pleasant captured town where
the regiment rests officially…
Living almost privately
in commandeered houses,
sleeping late mornings
in giant feather beds,
at candle-lit tables
in the evening
(no electricity of course)
dining on fresh-killed rabbit
with a certain toying deliberation.
The unending traffic outside,
thick with German officers
in natty uniforms riding,
files of trudging, ragged brown
Hungarian soldiers,
also prisoners, preceding them.
And through open windows
passing as we shave,
the liberated Russians,
Poles — Frenchmen
pop their heads in, winking
(“Who knows my native language?”
— spoken in the language),
and the schoolchildren
flinging us their English,
quaintly begging for Schokolade.
Their newspapers report
we loot, murder, rape the heart
out of this country
where, downtown an hour ago
in the shattered train depot,
I saw well-dressed civilians
mob — break into boxcars
abandoned by the Wehrmacht,
stash baby-carriage loads
— wagonfuls of military clothing,
maps — pencils,
missing nothing,
…starting over.
3
April 30, l945
Awaiting news of the German surrender.
Mussolini lynched by henchmen,
northern Italy crumbles,
Munich captured,
new Social Democratic government
in Austria.
Everything speeding to a close
and a new opening.
Half a million German military
taken prisoner
diminished by
last-minute Wagnerian suicides
of bigshot Nazi Gauleiter,
methodical SS men just finished
butchering their last thousand
concentration camp survivors —
as newly freed DPs
of every nationality
cavort in heavy joy
down the broken streets,
in houses full of kitschy trophies,
wall-drawings of military scenes
back to Bismarck,
Gls mount their first
surrendering German Maedschen.
They quote Himmler warning
Hitler may be dead.
Roosevelt dead,
Truman, making solemn
Rooseveltean world-peace
United-Nations promises,
starts the San Francisco Conference.
And my constant
shadow-boxing buddy
from the Bronx,
who cursed in Yiddish all the way
the giggling German citizenry,
squeaks again,
“Won’t it be great to get home!”
Three Monkeys at a Watergate
Tell me if you want to know
how not to know it
You are and I am
and they are not
If we are and they are not
what we know is what counts
and what they know
by definition doesn’t
It just doesn’t exist
because they don’t
If you exist and they don’t
what you know
and don’t want to know
is what counts
You know you don’t know it
You know if they say
it’s there it isn’t
because they aren’t
Therefore what you know
you don’t know
Therefore it doesn’t exist
does it
*
Tell me what did you hear
You did not hear
you heard it
Don’t tell me if you heard it
Don’t say you heard I heard it
I don’t say I heard you heard it
I didn’t hear it and if not
no one heard it
Whatever it is
it isn’t
it wasn’t
it couldn’t be
Tell yourself you never heard it
or just don’t listen to yourself
It doesn’t exist
it isn’t
You are
but it isn’t
If it is
you aren’t
See
*
If they’re there
we weren’t there
we’re here
If they say it’s there
and keeps growing
we can’t hear or see it
we just aren’t there
we’re here
They’re there
and what they say
is just nowhere
growing or not growing
it’s just not
If it’s not there
they can’t see it
we can’t see it
it just isn’t
is it
(from a performance in The Wastepaper Theatre, Providence, R. I., April
15, 1975.)
Watering the Garden
A bit of the hosing the woodshed got
Sticks to its side like a stain
Where the sheep skull slanting down
Depends on one small rusty nail.
Under lollops of skittering water
The fat geraniums bob their coxcombs
In perfectly weeded window-boxes.
Then why so stubborn, crumbly shed,
When the sun just blurting out
From under the shadowy locust tree
Will suck you dry to your tiniest hole
Where without any need for seed
The minutest pale red fungus grows,
Polyp by polyp by polyp by polyp.
for Peter Kaplan
Wisdom Against Wisdom
Vishnu, I’m through. Your avatars are wit’s
dumb slaves. They take my breath and wizen it.
They whisk my will away and whittle it.
Buddha, no bread or butter. I have, I think,
but one Nirvana here above the ditch:
an itch to burn life sweetly to a crisp.
Nietzsche, no more elites. No Ubermensch
with King Kong’s democratic jaws unhitched.
I want no candid monster at my meat.
But who’s that slinky beaut, stacked high and neat
in cherry-eyed bandannas singing, “Drink !”
The world’s a splotch of ink, dri-eye-yed ink!”?
for Charlee Wilbur
Yesterday
Darling, I thought of you today —
going down so fast on the elevator
before I had time to face thc door
I was banged to a stop on the bottom floor,
my brain wedged like a brick
between my shoulders.
That’s how it was when we began —
impact was all!
mere living, the smash
of tumultuous kissings in depots,
airports, rent-a-car garages,
and breathing, one hot war to the death
in geysers of unsquelched desire.
Apart, sunk to the eyeballs in gloom.
Together next day, a swarming of minds,
a clashing and locking
of jack-knifing bodies.
Limp with watching
the world lay down like a dog to whimper
for weeks in the dark
while we threshed out our love
like a pair of King Kongs.
Which reminds me, my dear,
where’ve you been?
I haven’t laid eyes on you for days.
Right under your nose, dear,
washing diapers by hand.
The washing machine broke down.
for Charlotte Zolotow