Collecte Works (30 page)

To whom

can I leave

    Audubon's Avocet

    on green sportsman's cloth

    wide oak framed

    above the warm polished

    copper-braced sweet-smelling

    cedar box

when I must leave

this flyway

Margaret Fuller

She carried books

and chrysanthemums

to Boston

into a cold storm

Watching dancers on skates

Ten thousand women

      and I

              the only one

                            in boots

Life's dance:

       they meet

           he holds her leg

                                  up

Hospital Kitchen

Return

the night women's

gravy

to the cleaned

stove

Chicory flower
on campus

Open-field

    blue-wheeled

             gone by hot noon

to revolve

    earth-evolved

            mind-city

Fall

Early morning corn

shock quick river

edge ice crack duck

talk

Grasses' dry membranous

breaks tick-tack tiny

wind strips

LZ's

As you know mind

aint what attracts me

nor the wingspread

of Renaissance man

but what was sensed

by them guys

and their minds still carry

the sensing

Letter from Ian

Aye sure

a castle on a rock

in the middle of Edinburgh

They floodlight it—

big show up there

with pipe bands

and all

Down here along the road

open your door

to a posse of poets

Some float off on chocolate bars

and some on drink

Harmless, happy, soft of heart

This bottle may breed

a new race

                      no war

                      and let birds live

Myself, I gripped my melting container

the night I heard the wild

wet rat, muskrat

grind his frogs and mice

the other side of a thin door

in the flood

I knew a clean man

but he was not for me.

Now I sew green aprons

over covered seats. He

wades the muddy water fishing,

falls in, dries his last pay-check

in the sun, smooths it out

in
Leaves of Grass.
He's

the one for me.

Scythe

Spite

        spit

loud

             sound:

where is my scy'?

Why

by your nose—

               so close

    a snake

would've bit

So he said
on radio

I have to fly

wit Venus arms

I found fishing

to Greece

then back to Univers of Wis

where they got stront. 90

to determ if same marble

as my arms