Manhattan Snapshots, and: Narcissus Redivivus, and: Japanese Monkeys

An evil magician ran a string through the eyeballs of beautiful girls to make himself a necklace. The eyes of my shoes are beautiful and blind. My feet have long since lost the road but my shoes know the way. When I kneel down they point into the ground. I will die with them on. LYMAN ANDREWS MANHATTAN SNAPSHOTS (for Serge Fauchereau) grey fur & ice the city! jagged flowers thrust through the cement streets whores make bright splashes in dark corners androids blank-eyed ignore them 38 melting into tattered dream palaces & screw with their eyes as they sit sniffing oranges & shit (at the Y 13 yr old boys wear leather & chrome briefs) in the bars dark voices scratch like Edison cylinders electric eyes & damn Dacron snap, fizzle in the rotten cube of the city mouths gobble grab precious spaces in the tired air so through this goldfish bowl he swims cold whisky smokes in his throat sky is colorless a slab of bad pork blocks on blocks of prefabricated talk litter the streets yet! from the scuffed defeated grass rises yellow & baroque a cloud of butterflies 39 girls shimmer whisper to the crusted earth almost ghosts behind the haze of gas & chocolate sweat astonishing! a 300 yr old $24.00 circus (only by image & punctuation & hesitation can he touch it: bowls of rich nightmares cloud his life) bones of hope & bright words lie gnawed on the streets NARCISSUS REDIVIVUS The day had to be right (he clidn" t want his shadow to see) so he slipped the sun into a sack carted it to the river & threw it in, then washed away the traces of brightness 40 paid the priests to chant ceremonial moùthfuls of hymns over the tiny coffin, bearing his final sigh removed his shoes & socks so his feet might feel the earth purr one more time shook the hands of a few daffodils who waited in silence while the trees washed the last birds from the sky at last crept naked to the spot he had chosen, squatted knees to chin until his eyes turned dull & he became a rock JAPANESE MONKEYS I know it's heresy I admit it but I like those poets lietter in languages I know improperly or not at all in translation in the struggle through forests of syntax & rapids of vocabulary every now & then Cavafy or Lorca or Mayakovsky lightning sears the brain through a dark cloud 41 as Sosen painted monkeys: a blur of fuzz from which emerges the smiling wise & naked face SALLY PURCELL to A. CH. Within the great night of magic wizards move gracefully, sure-footed; can tell from its pattern where the diamond glass will crack, what words infallibly attract the queenly deviless to dance or bed, what planetary fire streams down informing talisman of crystal at its hour. The false magician's bartered self must run the labyrinth's gauntlet, spinning, whirling deeper to its core, unable to pause, to will a moment's rest At every turn there hurtles up to meet him a painted, fairground Queen of Cards; shifting shapes that mock his desperation hunt him ever down to the silence where his own scorched image stands before a weary mirror webbed with scars. 42 ...