by Elton Glaser

1
Tendrils of rain
Catch on the dry leaves and drag them
Down to green again.

I don’t need sharp light in the grass,
Quills and brilliance of the sun.
What’s past in me is past.

Elusive, cool, polite
In my own pale way, I fool myself
With tricks in a cranky alphabet.

2
Mothballs rolling in the gopher holes,
Burlap around the roots,
Wolf piss circling the lilies — no one can stop
The wild backslide to appetite.

My mind moves this morning
Like a cow restless for the milking stall,
Heavy and stretched. And my heart ?
It’s still the red light Lord of Misrule.

A slow fan bullies the air around, but
This wet heat won’t give in.
The day drips over me, until I’m stuck
In a mess of minor rhymes and gimpy rhythm.

3
Downdrift of dark, and the stars
Burn on the black like highway flares.

In the window’s half–empty glass,
I see my father in my face.

Now let me keep my own silence,
A nighthawk sick of these magpie lines.

What ties hold me here ? Sheet bends in the bed;
Slippery hitch in the tail of the goat god.

That clock has time on its hands, but I’ve
Killed more hours than I’ve left alive.

Campari’s impossible color at my bitter lips,
I’ll drink the summer down in wintry sips.

by Elton Glaser

I’m praying again
To a God I don’t believe in.
I’m lighting candles like little spaceships
That will carry my pleas and complaints
To the black hole of heaven.

O Lord who does not exist,
I have read all the books about You,
Pages thick with miracles and fools,
All those inbred begats that bring us down
From a mountaintop of stone laws
To the bloody sands of sacrifice.

Is this prayer another echo
Inside my skull, ricochet
From a spent belief ? I speak to You
With my mouth shut,
Ventriloquist of the slippery voice.

I expect no answer, not even
A cryptic fiction that will keep
The priests and professors busy a thousand years.

Sometimes, like a blind man in a bare room,
Hands at half–mast, feet in a slow shuffle,
I need to teach myself again
There’s nothing out there in the dark.

by Elton Glaser

Nobody tells you how boring the dead are.
They never buy me booze or listen to my talk.

Ah, how I loved talking from the black hole of the radio,
My voice floating out to the dirty ears of Paris!

All those nights stumbling down the seasick streets!
Half monkey, half angel, I gave myself to

Bad jazz and movies, to the odors of old love,
To Breton and the poems of menace and marvel,

My hands in a trance, filling the dreamy pages.
And then, after the Resistance, the arrest, the first camps,

Everything came back: my father at his stand in Les Halles,
Wringing the necks of chickens; the sway of opium smoke;

The blues on wax; and Youki, with her mermaid tattoo.
At Terezin, in the last days, I held onto a rose

Even after the petals faded, and the creamy scent.
They burned me to ashes, that rose still in my fist.

Now here I am, only the Caporal on fire,
And a fresh glass before me, cool and full.

You may be sitting at this table to pick my brain,
But I’ve come here to pickle it.

Who these days, I ask you, can caper and rebel ?

Tonight, in the thirsty dark, I’m having none of it.

You might say that dead poets are always decomposing.
But if I’d known then what I know now,

I’d have started every book with the same line:
In case of catastrophe, break this poem.

by Peter F. Murphy

The first used to chew
& never wipe his chin.

The second shot
his leg about off
going over a fence.

The third drank a lot
and raised hell.

Dirty Face married
and raised a big family,
but kept not
wiping his chin.

Cripple had a peg leg
carved to his specs
in the shape of a penis.

He joked
his middle leg
was twice as big.

Wild stopped drinking
and died of a stroke.

They’re buried together now
in the blackberry patch miles
back in the woods.

* A found poem, from a letter by Creeley to Olson in Vol III of the Coll. Correspondence.