This is a poem that takes place in two locations.
One is New York City, the other is St Louis.
Both places that I happen to read poetry
during the same trip, also Central Park in New York
appears here and the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim as you probably know is cone shaped.
It's a big cone shaped building inverted though.
And the pictures are around the inside
and there's this set of spiral stairs
actually as a ramp that goes all the way to the top.
So you simply walk around starting from the bottom
and look at the pictures until you get to the top
and then walk back down, a kooky way to make a museum
It was designed I think by Frank Lloyd Wright.
And it's right across the street from Central Park
where a lot of weird things happen.
Called in the Guggenheim.
I saw a woman screaming in the park like in a painting
by munch, and the Guggenheim all day spiraling up toward
the dream of the skylight, a white mouse .
The pictures sleek fish swim past you going down
and there are others too and white fur caps,
one holding the dancing hounds while her friend ran
around the track in patent leather boots feet
sideways as women run holding the sandwiches
in their pockets.
At last I think she broke her teeth on the wall
being ugly as one might break into a hollow nut.
I lay in the cold Algonquin remembering the Chinese rabbit
pocketed and blue among the taxis that I wanted for you,
but tomorrow the airplane would be
landing into the warm mists of the woods surrounding St Louis,
and I would be sleeping in a house
so high that all afternoon the squirrels would climb
through the turning maples, perch on the branches,
through the windows fat with knowledge.