Morning Machinery, New Orleans
Fleshy, aortic piping
clutches a ribbed metal building.
Industrial chic. Fencing
to ward off grinning saboteurs.
New Orleans is full of them—
subtle people slinking at dawn
from their beds of nails to smear
graffiti or mess with tricky valves.
Who knows what process occurs
in this blocky, well-piped structure?
Steel tanks of reeking chemicals,
toxic fumes safely funneled away.
Everything interesting happens
beside the railroad, especially
caught in the first yellow light
before the powers dissipate.
On Pound’s Free Verse
A B & B in the Bahamas.
My room’s an enclosed verandah,
but features a private bath.
Windy fronds slap the windows.
Spiders brawny as my fist
scamper across the metal roof
with the music of a hailstorm.
I don’t remember flying here
for a meeting of the Ezra Pound
Society, which always gathers
in warm but obscure places
where Keynesian economics
don’t necessarily apply.
Every year I remind myself
to grow a beard for this conference,
then forget and attend clean-shaven.
A long walk to the hotel where
the sessions occur. I couldn’t sleep
among all those anti-Semites,
who stay up late singing hymns
to the Fatherland and plotting
to force democracy to its knees.
I’ll read my paper on Pound’s
delicate webs of free verse,
then catch the boat to Miami
where the cocaine-tainted air
will soothe with little whispers.
I slept well in this makeshift room,
despite the clattering spiders.
I can’t name the plants clamoring
at the windows, but like Pound’s verse
they embody a plenitude that looks
healthy but may be toxic
to unwary folks who regard
the entire world as their salad.
Flesh Locomotive
Raking the raw façade of spring,
heaping last autumn’s rubble,
exposes gestures and attitudes
nothing human can replicate.
Snowdrops, crocus, daffodils.
The soil knuckles into thousands
of cocked fists. Peepers retort
in their own terms, reclaiming pools
that wouldn’t fill without snowmelt.
So why did I dream of punishing
this landscape by laying track
and becoming a flesh locomotive
brutalizing across the hills,
plowing through half-thawed lakes,
crushing lonely farmhouses
where children still lay in bed?
In a reek of grease and fumes I spent
myself smashing through cities,
scarring a groove wide as a highway.
I scored down to the bedrock,
embossing rails and ties in patterns
some might mistake for stitching
following tremendous surgery.
Was this my reincarnation
as machine, the sci-fi fantasy
realized in diesel form?
This morning after two days
of rain the land looks vulnerable.
I should be careful with my dreaming.
Too easy to scar the topsoil
and frighten the coming flowers,
the mechanical bulk of me
clumsy and often derailed.
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