;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,10,75,192,2,15,20,25,127,10,0,
;.l2,15,75,192,2,20,25,127,15,0,
;.l3,20,75,192,2,25,127,20,0,
;.l4,25,75,192,2,127,25,0,
;.l5,30,75,192,2,127,30,0,
;.l6,12,90,192,2,18,24,127,12,1,
;.l7,17,124,192,2,25,127,17,0,
"HERE IS AN AGREEABLE OLD SCARECROW": SELECTED POEMS, 6/94-6/95
================================================================

KNIGHT'S PROGRESS:

*Compacent Boy-Scout, Off-Duty

Once a summertime
out of the closet
I take the white horse
and shake off the mothballs
never remembering
how ever form-changing
my dragon may greet me this year.

                        (Aegean Sea, out of Cyprus, 6/94)

------------------------
*Poet fearng Black Magic from Competitors

Were dragon gentleman
'd not belch fire
but chivalrousLy to anounce 'self
forthrightly to each soi-pensant knight
as with, eg, a plastic nametag:
"Hi -- My Name's _____ -- I'm your dragon today."

------------------

Dragon's sneak attack
retire; alley-cat.

--------------------

Laird MacDonald o' Haifa

In fairy tales 
life is, at least, reasonable:
the red delicious apple
too beautiful to be true
was explicitly poisoned by an official witch
and the lethal smoke
came from a self-confessed dragon ...

---------
*On salvaging handsaws from a hawksnest:
        "You can fall down, but you can't fall up."
                                  Jane Billoti, ca. 1970

Once I had a broken leg
but lately I've gone hiking.
Flip out, fall down, grip & grope it back on up
save bits of strings of mitzvot.
	"rock may crumble & climbers fall,
	 a few new pitons are left on the wall."
.p
NEW YORKER GARDEN OF EDEN

*Snakes knows all the moves;
it's in his job-description.
Once upon a time
he was quite the rationalist
but nowadays's
quite into feelings.

----------------------------

*Salute snake;
sheds skins;
I weep at leaving
even my sins.

---------
A la mode Seymour*

 ships in the night
 don't all blow your foghorns.

                                  "John Keats.  John Keats. John!
                                    Put your galoshes on."

                   Quoted by Salinger in Seymour, An Introduction
-------------      
.P

THE REVENGE OF OL' MAN RIVER:


*Before I'd remembered the gift I'd got-
ten you'd left.

                            8/31/94, Sentiero Lucomango

-------------

Once I had a car
a Ford V-8 convertible
green.
My friend my sister my teacher
was dying of cancer that year
autumn trees in clear chill air
so one day I said
where would you like to go for a drive.
"To the laundramat."

                              8/24/94   (Olivone-Campra trail)

------------
& Nancy Neyhard said
"I sometimes think men and women
 are different species."
With houseplants and kindness, she managed.
Pale sherry in a Pennsylvania-Dutch kitchen
in Cambridge.

------------------

One must accept Death
except, of course, its unreasonable refusal
to negotiate.

------------------

TOLSTOY REBUTTED

   "Intellectually he would acknowlege that all men are mortal,but he still imagines that, for Tolstoy at least, there must besome possible exception."

don't hurt much
after a few decades
but before 
I'd not imagined that, in a presumably properly run world, 
anyone would die.        

----------------
*Once I thought her a friend, and forever.
In retrospection, much unravels.

----------

*Surprised by finding one, unduly romanticized
so lacking, now, in restraint.

------------

Before I grew up
I went on strike
until we all live happily ever after.

---------

If people knew the hassle it brings to their chevre, nobody wouldever have the chutzpah to die.

----------
Vidui 30 years late

The black-haired Italian opera-singer
student
whom,in a brightly-painted borrowed pad
on lower 2nd Ave
I once, spontaneously, barefoot
kicked in the cunt
telephoned me, a few months later
at my grandmother's apartment
to say she'd had an abortion.

------------------------------

Once for a bunk
I slept next to a friend
& snored (as 'twas my wont)
She woke me up
to protect her reputation
so I stole half her vitamin pills.
In the morning
she gave me the rest
& said goodbye.
Good deal
I thought.

---------------
.p

THIS IS A POEM FOR THE BARONESS HEIRESS OF ARNISTON HORSE 
WHO OWES ME $200  &  A LARGE BOTTLE OF SINGLE-MALT SCOTCH 

Long was it said of the Laird of Dundas
(11th was he of the line)
that if ever in church his foot were set
the walls would fall down to ground
Yet on the day of best friend's wedding
gave he the lie to Fate
and stood there
followed close at hand
by a small earthquake
which took down the walls.
                 
--------------
*Lines written in the Guest Book of the Blue Beach Hotel, Tinos

I'm writing from the Isle of Tinos where
I've rather unexepectedly 'de-barqued'
if one still calls it that; 
in fact quite weary
from 3 nights on a double-diesel ferry
(said vessel having taking leave while I
was still a couple furlongs from the quay),
and finding by the gods' own luck a place
that still holds a bit of that fleeting Attic grace.

                                                     (June 1993)

------------------------

.p
OH, EFFLUVIA FROM CHATTAQUA!

In the manner of parables of the 'Falashim'
   Cf. J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (posth.)

Once upon a time
some kind of a priest
saw a woman
in a T-shirt
upon which was written
"the Devil made me do it."
He said,
"Who is that woman -- she must go."
She got knocked up,
he got a Degree
and they all lived after.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Someone said:
Don't know what to do --
ask a Wiseman & a Fool.
But nobody told
how to tell
which one's which.

                   (with a Tip o' the Hat to crazy old Uncle Ez',                      who once too was elegant)

-------------------------

*The gentleman
most democratically attired
while on leave from his cruise-ship
handed a few coins
to the lady who swept the floors
of the oft-destroyed House of Prayer,
mumbling, apologetically,
I'm sorry, I just don't have any more money left.
She thanked him, remarking, as he had parted,
"And what do they eat?  Air?"
                                        (Rhodos, 1994)
-----------------------------
.P
SKETCHES OF DAILY LIFE

Self-portrait after Ernst

goin' to Jerusalem
coat o' 27 pockets
with my teeth in the upper-left
& lower-right a conch

---------------
TERRORIST INCIDENT

Few months ago I bought a plant
shlepped it home
& planted it.
	Last few years, I puff when I bend down.
Yesterday it budded
before lunch.
Came back from town, ate lunch
it had bloomed.
Got up this morning
walked out my door
chopped off.
	I guess it  was a petunia
	speckled red flower
	kind of ugly anyhow.

--------------------

On the mailbox
in an olive-green envelope
a wedding invitation.

-------------------

*Having become an Israeli
she watches TV all day
mystically balancing, with 7 Sit-coms
7 surrounding armies. 

----------------

One spring I done digged
in Ashkelon
for the William Albright Endowed Professor of Sitzenfleish.
I worked with a Sephardi
unemployed madman
with whom I made 1 Latin joke:
	Sex maniac.
	mi  maniac? 
One day I got fired
for not eating enough bullshit.
He said,
'Now we know who the maniac was.'

------------------               

*The Kosher Cafe Beethoven
in Tiberias
deploys, nowadays
heavy metal.

-------------------   

The watchdog presupposes an essentially ordered society.

----------

*A breath of summertime sea air
in the pine-covered hills of Jerusalem
lifts a cloth of woven linen
and reveals, like a glimpsed wheat-field at Shavuot
the belly of a slender young woman
dodging between diesel buses.
                    
-------------

EULOGIES FOR A TIME OF TREACHERY:

The day after they got him killed
 came the first real rain.

                          11 Marchesvan, 1994

------------------------------------------
10/19/94

They're still sweeping up fingers & toes I suppose
but I've mourned 'till nightfall;
just time for a quick pint & telly-time movie
before the next roui\nd. 

---------------------

this morning, early
outside my door
the first small grass of winter
20 dead on a bus

                      1/20/94

  ----------------------------------------

Today was a bit rough, but I got through it.
7 more dead by evening.

                          April 9, 1995

------------------------

.p
THE OBLIGATION OF BEING A GRACIOUS HOST:

*On promoting tourism from northern Europe
                                  (to RN)      

       "Kennst du das Land ou die Citron blummen?" 
                   Heine?  (quote from memory)


in wintertime
when the lemon trees are blossoming
the Germans go to banktellers
and instigate vacations

in summertime
when the lemon trees are sleeping
the Germans lie on the beach
like roasting whales
waiting patiently

when the lemons are ripening
the Germans sit on cafes
drinking beer
and wait to be forgiven

the day before the rain
the Germans imagine a broken citron 
which held all kaballah.


there were lemon trees in Italy
but they all turned brown
for Mussolini

------------------------                

*The New Germans come to Israel
to pay their dues.
They go see the horrors show      & feel bad
They hire a dancing hossid        & feel good
They fly home & say
Now we know all about the Jews.

--------------

*In the Valley of Destroyed Communities

2 Germans
speaking German
as if to say
who, us?

--------------




longer I look
uglier it gets
Ain't natural
made only in hell

-----------

*Once upon a time
several young gentlemen of Japan
flew to Israel
which they had never seen
deplaned
shot everyone possible under circumstances
went to jail
and then went home.

                           :Untitled
---------------------------------------------------------------

riding across the land
a pair of tourists
in 4 2nd-row seats
look only at their guidebooks

----------------------------------------

.P
NEWS ITEMS:

News Item:  JP 10/19/94 (rpr. Coughlin, Daily Telegraph)
l7                      
"King Fahd is more than feeling his 78 years...His close advisers have become concerned that the man whopersonally controls the enormous wealth that gushes from the naton's vast oil reserves is showing the firstsigns of senilty.  When asked to take decisons on important issues of state, the king has a disconertinghabit of lapsing into a rambling speech about the state of his arthritic knees."
l1

The richest man in the world
is old king Fahd of Saud.
He can forthwith decree
anything that you please
but prefers to discuss just 
the state of his knees.

-------------------

News Item:  Boogie-Woogie Cake-walk 3-Year Jail

The King of the Ring said the Walkway Queen
was "a world-class ass-grabber"
& unlicensed Explorer of the Labia Minorae.

----------------------

*Interview with a retired bottomless dancer

"But that was ME
 and I thought
 if they could but see me
 would they not love me?"

-------------------------

Cleaning for Pesach
I cover the table with newspaper
& see, on the editorial page
of the good grey Post
a photographic portrait of Prince Charles
contemplating a brain.

-----------------        
*News Item:

The Doctor Professor of Philosopy
of the College of Jerusalem
beats his wife.
The Regents say,
We have not heard that it interferes with his work.

-----------------

*President Bill's in Israel
I walk down to the Kineret
and look up at the Hermon
to see if it's still there.

                    10/26/94

----------------------------

Unable to hide today
behind podia
old cojones & twitchy fingers
a few old men in bagging black suits
sit under hot sun
with criss-crossed ankles.

                       1-26/94

---------------

They day I let them lock me away
they bought me a pile of ice-cream
for the devil will ever find pennies to buy you
a ferry-boat-ticket  to hell.

----------------

*SHIKSER IN ATTENDANCE

When His Majesty King Hussein
descended from the heavens
unto the Sea of Galillee
the very waters, like a tame puppy
followed him home.

                           HaOn, 11/10/94
---------------------
New Item, 4/26/95:

From 1976 to 1983
Ten thousand Argentians
were tortured and killed
by the Army
which now says it's sorry
& promises not to do it again.
------------
*Arlington Cemetary:
	(From a magazine article):

"My brother was in World War II.
He was captured in Belgium.
They took him out and shot him
because his name was Cohen.
He didn't have much of a life."
l6

[Robert Cohen, Pennsylvania, one of 140 POWS captured in the Battle of theBulge; murdered by Germans in Malmedy, Belgium, age 22.

l7
        From an article in the Jlem Post Magazine, June 9, 1995 (Hillel Kutler)
l1

----------

.p
POETRY BUSINESS:

New World Poets' Manifesto:

"This is weather the coukou likes"
Well fuck him --
I think he sucks ... 

		(dedication:  Belmont Junior High School, 1954
                    
------------

An idea popped into my mind
like a cat
that the dog saw
and chased up a tree.
I maybe ran after it I think 
but the lid of leaves closed.

-------------

trick's to cut it short before you say something stupid

--------------

as defense against slings & arrows it's flimsy, admittedly --
-- whimsy ... 

---------------------------

*sometimes it ain't the picture
nor the frame
just the beauty of the chutzpa with which it hangs out
where it ain't supposed to get let in 

------------------

it's a precipitate of failure
as a minimal crystal, less than a gem
bearably contains
the rage of counterposed nucleii ...

------------

*Save your codas
for the blue movies.
When there's no more to say,
stop.
--------------

& Albert the Alligator said,
dressed in eg, 
a plaid vest
& baseball glove
"Amazing how a good looking man looks handsome
in whatever he happens to throw on" ...

------------

On attending a conversation of goyim:

more words than all the Appasionatta waterfalls
& they still ain't hooked together an idea
big enough for a frog to poop upon

*& Marilyn said
yes, there were lots of nice effects
but he didn't say anything.

--------------
.p

"Nothing gets better with age except a pig."
                              Reb Nachman

it's my
clumsiness I find most
frustrating
bi-focalled blundering bull 
not enough room now
can't fix anything under the hood why

----------------
*Downhill all the Way

When I was younger
I laughed at luck,
and it laughed and came back the next day
Apparently now it doesn't.

----------------------------------------------------------

*nude, young, she lingers
in my dreams
as the telephone clangs
at the call of a contemporary lady.
            
--------------------
.p

walking on crutches
past a German yuppie volunteer
who says,
"Feel better."

------------

"It keeps the satellites in orbit"

Marilyn Rice said,
(Tolkien & Kafka davka)
Dragonflies buzz, frogs go slow.
Looks like those folks in the funny papers
managed to keep bitching & bickering
without me.

----------------------------------------
Footnote to a painting, of sorts, by Lichtenstein:

"Your problem, Descartes,"
said Bugs Bunny & Co.
"is obvious:  to extract head from
 -- navel --
 say
 POW!"

---------------
.p


*don't know what's broke
nor how to fix it
Keep on truckin'.

----------------
.p
IN SEARCH OF THE HOLY GRAIL IN A BARGAIN BASEMENT

*Once upon a time
many years ago
the Princess of Detroit came to the land Israel.
Calling upon strange names
she danced in the Hurva
shlepped up to the Temple of Marble & Gold
flew home
and never came back.

--------------

THE POET STUBS HIS TOE

As an estranged friend
descended on this Holy Land
I fell to the ground
breaking my foot.

                    April 2, 1995, 08:30
--------------


RN1:

As I was almost asleep
my best friend rang
to say they were coming, at last, to visit,
planned to evade us,
and asked me to make arrangements.
Then I took a sleeping pill
and went to bed.

                          12/12/94

                                      : Spiritual tourist rape

--------------

*If it don't make sense
however you turn it,
might be just plain ugly.

                    (After Sergeant Toby, the Missippii Cherokee)

----------------------

Whatever it is now
got 3 heads
with less sense than 1.

-------------------
l1


RN2:

**Once I was a star
& got assigned a lst-class flat
in the Big Dipper
but my neighbor was mean & bossy
& nobody came to visit
so I resigned.
Now if water falls out
& floods the whole earth again
it's not my fault.

-----------------------

No-problem Guest

Hi -- 
I've over-flown
7 Seas unfathomable
to see how you live.
Don't bother to show me about.

----------------       

*As doves of piece
our tourists descend
in Jumbo Jets on the Holy Land
3000 years condensed to that:
the Old City walls as a stagehands' flat.

Yehuda HaLevi, the legends relate
was struck down by a horseman at Jaffa Gate
but this gaggle of clowns see so little that's real
they'd be worthily felled by bananna peel.

------------------

*If the goddess of truth was bustling up the east side of Main St.
& Cousin Goober was hustling down the west side
they'd just pass on by.

------------------    

8 years on the job
water-cooler gets more notice

----------------------
St. Paul contemplating a Blackbird, reciproclly

Through a glass coach after dark
to do the Sea of Galillee
    back to the Castle
    opposing Old City Walls

		Sounds of waves and afternoon birds
			Wash your hands, 
			let 'em dry, 
			dip dry bread in salt
			and white cheese.
    
----------------------

*I'd still like bacon with pancakes
but now I'm on a different diet.

--------
Tragedie set to Muzak & reveal'd as Farce

                    "lest they break me in their games"
                                           HIK

I said the Grand Vizer
led by my Archetypeprelate
& entrain'd by 66 knights
shall yet 10 month hence
descend from this Magic Mountain
soar o'er the 7 Seas of the Inland World
land with talons of steel on yon shattered desert kingdom
truck up their holy mountain
shlep unto the Temple Resplendent
to penetrate (in Achere Mot) O Sanctum Sanctorium;
back by suppertime.

                        I can no longer imagine why 
                        you'd die to live 
                             (yom yom yom) 
                        in this particular museum,
                        for there surely are others more charming.
                               

     Envoi:
          foxes run on the stones
          defiance of jackals
          echos from broken marble
          those who were suddenly buried
          will now not live to love.

                                       4/12/95
                                       To RN
--------------------------------------------
*
flies in
turns everyone upside down
flies back out                                  

---------------

.p
AMERICANA:

*College of Knowlege

I once enquired courteously
of the Nympho of Antioch
'How are you?'
She answered,
"Good."

-----------------------------
SUMMUM BONUM GOYIM

At Harvard College
the doors to the gentelemen's privies
were, of necessity
removed.

----------------------------
*TV Documentary:

"Bean Short warn't mean.
 Wust thing he ever done was
 cut off a couple fellows' ears
 & then shoot 'em
 but they was Yankees."

--------------------------

*Once in a comcrete Kansas silage pit
I hauled 100-lb. sacks of something
as soon as the dump truck pulled out
and before the next one   pulled in.
There were 3 of us, and we took turns.
I was 20 and tired and skipped a few.
A tall old worker said to me,
"If you play fuckaround with us
 we'll  play fuckaround with you."

---------------------

*One day I went back to the Indians
but it didn't work out good.
Little Joe said,
"He stay away too long."

-----------------------  

& Joe said
sleep in the day
wake up cranky

------------------
.P


*The Last of Crazy Louie haCohen

Crazie Louie got a job
sweeping out Hawaiian bungalows
in the Jerusalem hills.
He said, 'This is boring,'
and climbed the hill
to the Castles of America
where he met an exceptionally patient
polite
black-&-white
crocodile
who,
having ensconsed him in a lst-Class Private Hand-Basket
 said,
'We all have our place,
 mine's here; yours ain't',
& dumped him in the airport.   

             [Louis Kessler:  Last seen Bet Zayit/Har Nof, 1988
              Gal-Or tried to find him, to bring him back.
                                                 sa, Haon, 1994.]

----------------
.P
PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE ETC.

*Summary of the latest news from the Cosmologists:

Once upon a time,
more or less,
the World began
&&/or ended
with a Bang.

---------------------------

.P
RELIGION :

*The Rebbe never dies
until his students fight.

---------------------

RN on why Pesach is only 7 days, even conceeding to Sarna that the7-Day Feast of Unleavened Bread begins the day after the Paschalfestival ("Shabbat")

"Love is all there is"
Creation 
   7 Days
yetzirat Mitzraim (rosh katan)
Shir haShirim

--------------------------------------------------------
*RN on why Palm Sunday might be before Pesach

& Zalman said
Palm branches & `hoshia-na''s? 
Looks like the donkey walked into the wrong parade
and they got the wrong equinox.
Rinatya said,
all my neighbors in Rosh Pina
are trimming their palm trees now.

                       4/12/95
------------------------

Alenu reconsidered:

*Folks in Kansas said
'Don't matter what you believe
 long as you believe in something.'

-------------

*Inscribed on a chumash
bought in a Used-Books' Store:
"Do not use without permission.".

--------------------------------                
l6
After a tora of Rinatya Nachman, Nissan 5756
                               
& Avram h'Apiru
donkey-caravaner
crossed over
  rod/staff
& entered the Covenant
  of the mysteries of blood;
Then the messengers could pass by
on an unrelated matter
that an old man struggling, to break out of tent-shade
at last to give
goat-cheese, desert-herbs
bread singed on an earthen oven 
& all the stars of the universe born from the dust of shattered idols 
seeded  a people.

-----------------------------------------------------

l1
*I, having swept, washed & thrown out
chametz unto the 3rd derivative
retire to my study
& gaze, in long-delayed recognition
upon an unmailed package
of brewers' yeast.

                          13 Adar

------------------------- 

*As soon as the house is cleansed
the dog walks in under the mezuzah
bedike chametz.

----------------

*On Karet: Revenge of the Hostess Twinkies:

Presumably the cupcake did it 
but
one expected a guillotine, not just
to find friends
unusually polite but brief
and the land now foreign.

-------------------------
With 1 tochas, Take 495:
        
The Fishfolk were his Lorelei
when Ulysses played the Jew
& the famous strange lady who one must beware
lethe of perfumed hair
& only a line between waters and air
& then all at last the stars.

-------------

.p
CAN'T CLASSIFY:

*Once I was the raison d'etre
of a very small dog
who, whenever I shambled by
would, in perfect selfless devotion
cry "Armageddon is coming."
                           
----------

.P
MYSTICISM:

*everyone finds out, sooner or later
they've been drafted
if only into a l-man army
fighting ghosts.

-----------

Miss your turnoff
everything's out of place
Sonoco not Texaco
clarinet's a half-tone flat
& you wind up smiling all the while
shaking hands with with toes.

---------------
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL:
      
Wakeup bracha: mitzvot in secular mode:

One's clothed only in dignity, my father daid --
the righ to earn an honorable livlihood
respect of friends, courtesy from strangers.
                 
------

*"Really," said my mother,
"do you imagine that I would have let your father do anything likethat without me?"

-------------

As a mighty hunter
I see myself
momentarily
in the last thought of a large cockroach
who was hurrying home.

--------------
*
                                                   BLAUE REITER,USW.


                               HaOn 6/18/95



SELECTED STYROFOAM NOODLES:

I suppose what the sick miss most is
their life
at the end of an umblical cord
in a universe of few stars.

-------------
CREELY'S DAM'D ISLANDS AGAIN:

Creely or Duncan, I 
forget the distinc-
tion said
more or less, it's
"dowstream all the way" now
and your islands all are sandbars

        :Ol' Man River's Revenge

--------------------------------------------

(anti-Haiku)

Misty morning on the lake           Sparrows in the trees
F-16's high up                      F-16's headed north, low
Piano wire's cheaper                For  this the sun got up?

------------
"Here is an agreeable old scare-crow"

Even after towers fall
stone & boners
an aristocrat amidst his rubble
minds his manners.
Bleached rainbow.
---------------
Perhaps, after all, Socrates was mortal
as, in heavy days at hand,
some, of whom I'd just not thought it
seem to have been.

    		only old Einstein's invariants now
    		tiller in the fog of mornings

---------------------------
l7

It was shortly, in retrospect,
a bit before she
fell down the rabbit-hole & through the looking-glass etc.
that a Temp Priest
had handed her, apparently, a holy grail
filled to havdala with the last of the Olympus Ambrosia
which she carried through loop-de-loops of selected  circles of hell
7 years
and then, having found none to honor drink nor bearer
telephoned the Agency
and tried to arrange to hand it back
yet unspilled.

                    3/38/95.  Homage to RN.

----------------------------------------------
