Paul Vangelisti, p.1



PLAIN OLD BARTOK

Disappointment came to find us as we were
lighting cigarettes for ghosts, babyface.
The thunder never mentioned who she was.
Facility is a door declined at both ends
as the police like to say: toujours
the moon toujours the moon toujours.
Because usually at that size, my dove,
there’s only metabolism and survival.

Trappers and farmers are now about to blur
as the speed of the film reaches a place
of comfort or a suitable just because.
Movies, like a long weekend, sometimes tend
to leave the ordinary a little dour
or at least more interesting or pure
than most things. Movies aren’t really like love
but a better way to screen arrivals.

Basically happy days when you’re not sure
of anything much except that same space
the brusque white dog or jaunty crow undoes
upon waking as who or how. What lends
to the dazzling vagueness of time is the lure
of repetition, getting it right, surer
than before that one notices just above
the trees a restlessness nothing rivals.

Space, then, while it might look like the cure
mostly arrives a little late to outpace
the sweet birds’ twitter and lilt, the buzz
and swell of light heading right to the end
of staring. White, white, blue, purple, green stir
the other side of memory impure
as ear or heart in a dish or slap ungloved.
And ever that clever curse of revival.

As you appear more rigorous and sure,
you become more easily profligate. Erase
how you put your idea to it, what was
clarity meant swinging at least eleven
of those suckers. Enough temperature,
thank you, for elasticity to endure
my silly little thing however much of.
Tomorrow, yesterday, today—archival.

Some prefer enduring it for dancing.
Face it, most want having it commonplace.
Puzzlingly enough, anything sadder
pretends to the economic or comic,
surely a common frustration if
alluringly simple to renounce. Here
love will never find a way just something
to rival its often bang bang start.

A man ordinarily has to lose to err.
Or not. What nobody has the face to.
All are eligible only because
jive is jive no matter the pitch of spending.
Life’s thorns gawk like children of the lower
classes. Alas. All are waiting for rain, sure
of that which is habitually beloved.
Rum-tum-tum. Rum-tum-tum. The queasy lull.

What is all this juice and all this joy,
said Hopkins, or was it Truman, or just
another poet trying to act like
a poet on the radio. Languorous
is no moral outside language, even
when you must, at every opportunity,
decline. Eight is what a wheelbarrow does,
eight is what must sound already eaten.