I'm going to turn now to some new poems.
A number of these are hybrids, like the title poem
of Candy Necklace.
That is to say parts are in prose,
and parts are in verse lines.
So they really speak to the eye as much is to the ear,
but I'll just read them straight through without indicating
where the lines come in.
The first poem is called Active Rhythm.
It refers, again, to a mission of the French composer,
and there's a quotation from one of Jane Austen's novels, "rain
is junk atmosphere."
I love getting Jane Austen into this poem,
where she'd be most surprised to find yourself,
I think, and I understand this poem.
It's very ambivalent about modern art, active rhythm.
This artist, if you can call him an artist,
was squirting blue paint out of his anus
onto a canvas on the floor.
I'm glad my mother wasn't there to see it.
It's what Messiaen calls active rhythm,
as when one character punches another in the face.
There was a long pause.
I have your order, Pieter said.
Where would you like it?
He went very still.
Don't wear the earrings, leave them on the table.
Classical art is the last car of the train,
the one that goes by silently.
It's like the hundreds of silver crosses,
too, that flash on the lake without touching it.
As for you, you paint with appalling carelessness.
The road in your painting, if you can call it a road,
looks like chopped, rotten wood.
That does it.
I use the word crapulent against you.
Tear my heart out, why don't you?
I have reviewed eight canvases this size
and concluded "rain is junk atmosphere.
It makes one detest all one's acquaintance."
Sometimes, amidst this decadent modern art,
I tremble all over myself.
A blind hairless dog at the base of a mountain of fleas,
decomposing in 12 angles of fall.
You look surprised, you who feel at home in your air hangar
studio, hearing each up in the corner of speaker
howling the same meat head theory of art.
Lose modulation, paint between things, not things.
Be a dove, paint Venus pupping on your laundry
bag, careless love.