“...But each individual form escapes this common measure and is, to a certain degree, a monster.”
–Georges Bataille
“...get up and use your ears like a man!”
–Charles Ives
1. (Exhibit A)*
A veritable hemisphere of Death--the lower
mandible missing! Here between the middle
upper teeth you see the evidence of prehistoric
surgery: scars pinched & ridged
about that gap. Now slide the wedge of wolf’s jaw
into the rupture--your graft has made
new symbol of this seed: a potent priest or warrior’s
emblem freed from the complications of a face.
Sockets full of summer weather,
it curves upon itself
enigmatic as a moebius strip
self-sufficient as a Klein bottle,
a baroque pilaster made of weathered thorns
supporting a far-flung, Star-Spangled house.
2.
Now press fresh fingers along
the saggital, coronal, &
lambdoid sutures & follow those
dry estuaries across the white horizon
through the gulches & valleys
past the sinkholes & upthrustings of bone.
You feel no heat where
the ancient sufferings moved &
no cold where the primal fears stiffened.
Strike the assemblage with felted hammers
& hear no pleasing sound. Cunning coaxes
sea noise from it
& a beast’s shadow.
3.
(Exhibit B: Beginning of the Lyric)
Must you prance before us
like a gawky kid,
to teach us culture?
Or ride to Heaven on a wrecking ball
so God rains manna on a marching band?–
Or stick your tongue out–out
to lick the moony beads of melody
while thumping washtub rhythms
on your staves?
& Who says Americans cannot participate
in the divine?–
not Emerson in his house of straw
mice in the empty pantry of his head;
not Thoreau in his house of wood
devouring water cress sans finger bowl & napkin;
not Whitman in his house of brick
hands sprawled like wings across a greasy breast bone;
none of these will gainsay you,
so
Tear off that Macy’s collar
Master of Cacophony
& cradle groans
& trills of conquest
larded with the goo of the Elect....
Drag up the serpent twisted wand
from the basement of your “Museums Americana,”
plain-speaking, prodigious psychopomp!
& tap out the needed progressions
on the pavement we’ve laid–with great civic pride–
over your muddy brow
& the hollows where your eyes had once
rolled in fine frenzy
at bird song & Sousaphone.
4.
(More of the Same)
yes,
Art the frontal lobe
leaking electricity so the light
has false meaning: misfired
neurons shifting
the artist’s hand in
hothouse quickenings.
Art the nerve-inspired jiggle of a leg’s
oscillation tempered in the gray
capsule of the brain. Art
aphasia, stroke-talk, womb-
tongue twaddle. Genius of
the dim mind/Genius of the moon-occluded
eye slower than the mountebank’s
cunning fingers thrust in a hot bag,
the Beautiful (yes!)
a surprising new Product
like the ax head grafted
to the sapling
like the fist broken
repeatedly until the knuckles
fuse into a solid mass of bone
like the bomb wired
to the woman’s leg
set to go off when she assumes
the expected attitude of servility
like a new insurance scheme
destined to make a million
or a steam tractor shuttling forth
beneath a banner of shot silk
that says, “Up & At ‘Em!”
5.
(Exhibit C: His Master’s Voice)
Wax spins
around the void it defines
& horns ram space with fine ancestral grit
Plastic & flowing–
in that gap
knocked from the bitter mask
rough rhythm becomes
volute, four-square
danceable:
Music generous as a handshake
from P.T.Barnum
a lazy snapping of fingers
for servants to tumble
into the room
with flowers & choice gifts–
Then a good Old Fashioned
Currier & Ives
admired thrown into the fire
admired raked from the fire
& wept over
“As one recalls a love from long ago”
Fox Trot
Cake Walk
& Rag
Lord Jesus!
Give me what can’t be given: a gem
that domes a bygone day: a seat inside a circus tent
where Voices & Angels are: I press my tonics
on you like a rusted key–your ear
the glittering lock on a door
battered & pissed against,
your hand wrenched open
like a broken flower
as you sing to no one on the alms house steps.
6.
(Exhibit A: Reprise and Finish)
I place this artifact before you, Ives,
bleached & brittle as a camp tune broadside,
& the rat-tat-tat of your musical muscle,
the tumta-tumta-tum of your clean New England motor skills
holds this grotesquerie together
binds the bony fontanelles
of this rough statement
plucked from the ploughed fields
And as a symphony
fades into gossip of Presidents, so
this multiplicity of tensions relaxes into mineral austerities
worthy of Broadway struts & swaddling
of limbs. It remains an ur-type for the Fallen Angels
& for the fashioning hands that move among things as they are
to impose the subjunctive mode on finitude–as you, Ives
would see if you could turn my song analytically before you
exploded view against exploded view
for once you raise the lintels
every door may open
on a Star-Spangled guest
& the small hand opens not to touch, but to amplify,
the small hand opens like an ear
to gather it all in.
* NOTE
The breaking of the front teeth and the insertion of a wolf’s palate for Shamanic purposes is suggested by artifacts found in Wright and Ayers Mounds in Kentucky. At one site the skeleton was encased in the remains of a leather shirt indicating that the subject met his end by a kind of ritual sacrifice that involved the stitching of a wet leather garment upon his body. When the garment dried in the sun it shrank to smother the wearer. Whether these “wolf-men” were widely found in Adena societies is not known.