& this shaman moon blown here a red target of light at the end

  of a tunnel of blackness where a train speeds through now

  towing breakneck flights of light, where daybreak sits wrapped

  like a blanket around a quiet ancient navaho wrapped in american colors

  who sits meditating these scorched white sands flat distant high mesas

  shaped like royal “basotho hats” chili peppers churls

  pecan groves roadrunner chaparral birds salt cedars sprouting

  parasitic along bone-white ditches bordering riverbeds thirsting for water

  meditates these wide flat black lava rocks holding strange imprints

  of fossilized speech that died before it knew what hit it

  as did those silent clay-faced ancestors of this solitary navaho sitting here

  wrapped in breaking colors bursting sunlight meditating the lay

  of this enchanting blues land changing its face every mile or so

  & in their faces indians carry the sadness of ancestors

  who wished they had listened to those long gone

  flaming words—battlecries!—of geronimo whose screaming ghost

  prowls these bloody muddy streets baked dry now by the flaming eye

  torching the sky wished they had listened instead of chaining

  his message in these coyote howling winds kicking up skirts of dirt

  whose language yaps like toothless old men & women

  at the rear end of quiet houses whose lights dance slack

  at midnight grow black & silent as death’s worn-out breath

  beneath these pipe-organ mountains bishop’s peaked caps

  holding incredible silence here in the mesilla valley,

  where the rio grande river runs dry

  its thirsty spirit dammed north in the throat of albuquerque

  at the crossroads of fusion & silence, in the red gush swirls

  whispering litanies sawblading through ribcages, dust memories—

  snaking winds tonguing over the mesilla valley brings back

  long-gone words of geronimo haunting las cruces, new mexico,

  long-gone wind whispering geronimo geronimo geronimo

  * When I was putting together my work for Skulls along the River (I. Reed Books, 1984), I discovered that I had lost the first part of this poem. But I liked what I had at the time and decided to include it in the book. When Coffee House Press published Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems in 2002, I did a little re-writing and included the revised version. Finally, on September 21, 2009, I found the original text of Las Cruces, New Mexico, with the original “part one,” added it to the rest of the text, and then revisited and revised the entire poem to make it into a single new piece, published here at last.

  WHERE HAVE THEY ALL GONE

  for Ojenke, Eric Priestley, & K. Curtis Lyle

  where have they all gone to, those exuberant edgy misfits,

  those glorious madcap poets of precise inexactitude,

  those lunatic purveyors of transcendental flights through space,

  verbal high jinks sky walkers of jazzified hyperbolic scatology,

  rhapsodic sleepwalkers selling screaming jay hawkins wolf tickets,

  echoing skull & bone dances of dahomey voodoo smack downs,

  emanating from beyond watery graves of middle passage,

  from the genocide of millions

  all the spiritual six-fingered witch doctors brewing up revenge

  secreted deep in hidden holes of linguistic thoroughfares,

  those sacred red-robed wilt chamberlain maasai spiritual hunters,

  who chase hunters of lions running free around ngorongoro, tanzania,

  eye say, where have all the stork-legged soothsayer space cadets

  traveled to, disciples of sun ra’s bamboozling cloudbursts of words,

  those smoke signal purveyors of mojo language hypnotized

  through music,

  those schizophrenic soothsayers practicing loop-de-loop tom-toms,

  rhythmic scavengers of esoteric metaphors stitched throughout

  knuckleheaded sentences, illuminated by yardbird parker

  excursions through solos exploring outer limits of scatological space,

  thelonious monk comping along as acoustical solar sidekick,

  riffin’ off only he knows what “mysterioso” piano licks,

  where have they all gone to, those insane rollerblade skaters

  decked out in silver asbestos suits & caps, wraparound shades,

  zooming, weaving through manhattan traffic like lone ranger silver

  bullets, those slingshot word magicians, loup-garou wordsmiths

  shooting out rhythms hidden deep in thickets of reared-back cobra

  tongues, who flick out hypnotic spells, undulating spellbinding

  tempos at seductive dances, where beautiful full breasts

  bob up & down like ripe melons, seducing like honey,

  lips dripping with sweet lusting desire, licking, sucking kisses,

  tongues probing mouths when passion sweeps down overwhelming

  the senses, as when in cunnilingus her body trembles, explodes,

  where has pamela donegan gone to with her deep-loving-holy

  gripping-sweet-seductive-suction-cup that caused men to howl anytime

  they came with her, like mad wolves celebrating the moon,

  where has leumas sirrah (samuel harris spelled backwards)

  disappeared to, who sat upon rooftops all over watts sniffing glue,

  talking shit to the sun & writing incomprehensible beautiful poetry,

  what about stilt-legged, tall & skinny, midnight-blue emory evans,

  from north carolina, who walked around watts wearing a long,

  navy-blue wool overcoat in 95 degree weather,

  wore high-top, black tennis shoes & wrote love poems to ants

  & broken-winged birds & everything that moved or didn’t move,

  where have clyde mays & cleveland sims gone to

  with their criminal schemes & quixotic over-the-top poems,

  as our lives unfold, switch, turn with cycles of sun & moon,

  seconds turn into minutes into hours into days into years,

  people, scenes, events, time becomes history erased from memory

  if not recorded, written down (even then some fall through

  cracks or holes in narratives, fall victim to amnesia, or even worse—

  alzheimer’s, where memory falls down into a black hole, is erased—

  so where have all those exuberant, edgy misfits gone,

  those glorious madcap poets of precise inexactitude, lunatic

  purveyors of transcendental flights through space, verbal high jinks

  sky walkers of jazzified hyperbolic scatology, grace,

  rhapsodic sleepwalkers selling screaming jay hawkins wolf tickets,

  echoing skull & bone dances of dahomey voodoo smack downs,

  emanating from beyond watery graves of middle passage, space,

  where have all the spiritual six-fingered witch doctors gone

  whose spirits could not be locked up in a jar, or even poetry,

  have they all gone to chasing erranceties, errançities,

  the sun, moon & stars inside their heads even underground?

  II.

  AFTER SEEING AN IMAGE IN ASHLAND, OREGON

  a full moon stares like a one-eyed panther’s surprised

  good eye, bright over ashland, oregon,

    hangs in space

  a gleaming silver dollar

  stamped into the skin of midnight

    & is a hole

  punched clear through to the other side of dreaming,

  where light is pulsating energy,

  wide open as surprise, a flashlight beaming

  one ray brighter than faith, is a reflection of what

  we see hanging there,

    complete in this moment,

  the twin good eye opposite a blind one,

  veiled in darkness black as othello’s human though

  demon dream, struggling to cut loose all that anchoring baggage

  connected to skin-tone, all these weighted syllables

  words serve as glue to bond narratives

  stitched with flawed images, metaphors filling history,

  as its narrative stumbles forward stereo loud

  as those false coon-shows typically slurping

  devouring good-old sweet watermelons, red-lipped

  & scratching on white, manicured, suburban lawns

  ON A SUNDAY

  eye remember seeing the oblong fruit—mango,

  papaya—in a photo of a lynched black man’s

  head fixed above the exclamation point of his tad-

  pole body swaying easily in a gentle

  breeze, it is summer in my memory, warm,

  not yet sweltering in southern steel country

  alabama, outside birmingham, where

  john coltrane blew hauntingly of four little black girls

  blown to smithereens on a Sunday, in church,

  eye also remember hearing chuck berry playing guitar

  on a sunday, in the back seat of his white cadillac car—

  driven by his red-haired black wife, cruising st. louis

  blues streets, singing, “roll over beethoven,

  tell tchaikovsky the news, there’s a new kind

  of music called rhythm ’n blues,” on that sunday

  the sky was blue as it was in my memory—

  where all things are elusively fixed

  because nothing is ever permanent save change—

  cobalt blue, sapphire blue, cerulean blue

  when eye saw the lynched black man’s head in the photograph

  oblique above the exclamation point of his tadpole body,

  it was a sapphire blue sunday in the deep freeze

  of january, when barack obama

  took the oath of office, became the forty-fourth

  president of this divided nation in crisis,

  the voices of reason thrown out the window

  like bath-water & soap in a small infant’s tub,

  the bawling baby hitting the ground, breath atomized

  as the vaporizing suds, mistedd into the air in a fog

  like an elegy, a sunday’s listening to punditry talking—

  points hit the fan on tv screens, their elegies

  leering all over the planet, richly paid for drivel

  their infested dialogue, their blather like plagues,

  prattling disinformation, sluiced through airwaves,

  zapping clueless people inside side their atomized brains,

  glued as they are, to these talking heads flashing

  expensive dental-ware as they natter their shopworn

  rhetoric into cameras, connecting us to them

  through plasma tv tubes, on glory bird sundays

  & the blues as a way of life everywhere, even on sundays

  when all things are elusively fixed, even words of sermons,

  because nothng is ever permanent save change,

  the sky sometimes blue as a sapphire woman

  wearing red, her hips moving from side to side, beckoning

  with her sensuous, sashaying hips, come-to-me-poppa-strut,

  seducing where the gospel of sweetness is elusively fixed

  inside a church, a juke joint, the music hot as her allure,

  hittin’ it, layin’ the mojo down, conjurin’ up wicked

  spirits, as poets raising the roof from its foundation up

  into cerulean-blue, sapphire-blue, cobalt-blue air,

  preachers running the gospel down on Sundays with their

  sermons everywhere, people living inside their memories,

  where all things are elusively fixed, but here

  noting is ever permanent save change after change

  nothing is ever permanent save change

  MIX-Y-UPPY MEMORY

  eye got on the uptown c train traveling north to harlem,

  the day was beautiful up-top over ground, down here

  on the subway eye pass a funky black man swaddled in rags

  sitting in the car where eye choose to rest my tropical spirit

  filled with dreams of mangoes, papayas, the sweet space

  my wife’s delectable essence holds in my feelings, eye am

  at ease moving in this mix-y-uppy place, chaotic beauty

  present all around me every day in new york city, quixotic

  truths, moral dilemmas arriving as gordian knots, conundrums

  deep inside meandering twists & turns map octopus traps filled

  with tentacles inside our lives carrying paradoxical images, metaphors

  weaving through labyrinthine spider-webs, crisscrossing intelligence

  within moments of dreaming, sweetness, evoke poetry,

  as here & now inside the prison cell of this speeding subway car,

  when eye see the funky black man swaddled in rags moving slowly

  in my direction, now he sits in front of me, leering brown caveman teeth,

  he is very, very funky, his smell of decaying flesh wakes me up quickly

  from dreaming of poetry surrounded by mangoes, papayas,

  the sweetness emanating from thinking of my wife’s delectable essence,

  my mindset re-focuses now on this mad-max apparition hovering

  in front of me, mirroring the chaotic random beauty suddenly

  anywhere you might be in new york city, errançities mix-y-up-ping

  in space with restless, wandering impulses—like my mind deriving information

  from everywhere, from within itself—eye focus in on this man facing me now

  blooming with rot as he drops his pants, exposes his shriveled private parts,

  suddenly eye lose control of my hard-won discipline, blow a gasket,

  leap up like a panther, confront him, he flinches, pulls up his pants, begs off,

  trembling, obsequious now, his eyes pleading drop from mine,

  eye tell him to get off the train at the next stop, he gets up shuffling,

  dragging the shadow of a decayed spirit behind him he moves toward the door,

  leaving me a blooming odor of a fly-blanketed garbage dump, eye yo-yo back

  to the moment before his shock almost froze my liquid creativity, questioned

  my fluidity in this chaotic alternate state of the big apple, eye do not know why,

  or understand what brought his shadow to slouch an apparition across from me

  a moment ago, though eye do know the mysterious truth of language failed

  him—as it has for so many—did not grant him space to move with freedom

  into an embracing home amongst the breathing who truly co-exist here, dream

  of the possibility of this place as a space to reside in inside the chaotic beauty

  that is new york city’s errançities, where restless love is everywhere present,

  found in innovative music created within evolving forms of communication

  we recognize as speech, stirred up by mix-y-uppy sounds of poetry, cooked

  as linguistic cuisines, simmered down inside pots of our poetic tongues

  & dished out as creole, jambalaya, metisisse, mélange, as in a marriage

  of divergence, as when a meeting of eyeballs glancing off each other fail to hold

  meaning as gesture, though offer intuitive hints of bonding with what we do

  not know—have never reached out to know—in this clashing culture of values,

  when words embedded inside the same tongues hold love, fraternity, liberty,

  brotherhood, but are not recognized as equivalent for this kaput man

  who drug the shadow of his ruined spirit after him when he left the train

  A HARD QUICK RAINSTORM IN MANHATTAN

  a hard quick rain creates rivulets in streets of new york city—

  manhattan, harlem, to be exact—glazes patinas on wet

  slick surfaces suggesting bits of glass embedded in black thorough—

  fares when streetlights throw their beams down to flicker like diamonds

  on the backs of raging water currents as a fierce march wind whips through

  trees snapping off branches, leaves, shattering umbrellas,

  leaves them twisted & broken all over harlem streets

  like bodies smashed by speeding cars or trucks,

  winds whistling fiercely through shallow gullies running along sidewalks,

  turns them into a succession of arpeggios—violent rivers now—sweeping

  lie a broom all debris away—a shoe, a half-eaten sandwich

  found by a beggar (who looks like he could be anyone’s hard-luck brother)

  & snatched from his hand by greedy, snaking airstream,

  eye see his look of shock as a mangled pack of torn cigarette butts

  is ripped from his hand, see his tears as his cardboard shack,

  his blankets cartwheel, hightail it like caped apparitions

  down these stunned, flooding streets suddenly whipped hard by winds,

  now water spins into whirlpools & the beggar has lost everything

  after the storm came calling, save his shoes—quarter-sized holes

  punched through the worn soles—the grimy, disintegrating

  scarecrow clothes on his back, a stocking cap covering

  his clotted hair, where voracious lice bed down every night,

  still, the rain is mercifully warm, spiritual even, it is spring,

  a time when God can be blustery, full of kindness,

  in the very same moment (but don’t tell the beggar this,

  he thinks God long forsook him in this time of pure vengeance,

  left him out here alone to face this wind-fierce,

  gizzard-hearted storm) when all seems to have been lost,

  but after all these drumrolls of improvised thunderclaps,

  rattle-rattle of rain-sticks on snare drums of metal garbage cans,

  prancing dance of accents pinging through streets

  flashing down from thunderheads blooming

  & booming overhead, bold zigzagging lightning bolts

  unzipping these towering black trousers of clouds, unzipping

  the night with electrical élan, after all this rigmarole,

  all this breathtaking pellets of rain driven like bullets or nails,