Deeds of Utmost Kindness

Librettos for Eros: for Frank Stanford, Poet, 1948-1978

Librettosfor Eros FOR FRANK STANFORD, POET, 1948-1978 This page intentionally left blank Land Surveyor And came home with beggar ticks in his pubis And the light syrup stink of urine on hisjeans, Godawful b.o., sat on the bed unlaced his redwings And lay back on brown blood stains in the unmade Sheets and the ferruginous odor of her period, saying Holy holy holy, I do not feel kindly To the copperhead in the copple-stones and the brown Recluse making its nest in my underwear, I hate poison sumac poison ivy poison huckleberry. The ganglia of blackened liana And the bowers of meshed kudzu trouble my step. From spraddle-legged dumps, the fissure blooming between my cheeks, I said the degenerate itching of my locust-leaf-wipedbutthole Only increaseth among company. I have pointed my sweatblind face Through tents of webworms,I have lava-soaped striped leeches From bruised ankles, I have brushed the hair Of outrageous arachnids and their eggsacks burst and crawled Every slake and chine of my sopranic skin. Placed my unwitting palm on dead things nailed tofenceposts, Imagined bodies and parts of bodies in the footsucking weedlots, Startled at the crack of limbs in wheezing copses, And I have grown strange. But thou oh moon backsliding coolly from blue slips of cloud Over bare semi-dark autumn fields where the stars smoke dimly for anyone, Restoreth my peace. LIBRETTOS FOR EROS 53 Photo: Sixth Birthday in the Levee Camps Two white children out of nine. Squirrel-headed at one short end Of the long fold-up table, Frank; his chubby Stepsister at the other. Shadow Inside what looks to be a revival tent; A warm light made by pollen, Dirt, and dust indrafts through an open flap Across the dirt floor. The children are wearing cone hats, they smile, Half of them craning for the camera Bug-eyed, glad-assed to be here, camp kids, Dam builders' kids, gone with the flash Into derelict cities, slender oblivions, Suicide. For Frank's Adoptive father, the contractor, Darker fathers shovel dirt daubers, Unswamp cottonmouths, graveMake next to the St. Francis Banking her wiles and curved spine in ridges of muscle,levees Looming through perpetual dawns in the nap of Mississippi, 1955. 54 DEEDS OF UTMOST KINDNESS Patterns of Unsettlement Couldn't sleep in the heat and went outside But the moon was ochre-ringed like an asshole, And I passed silently in companyof black four-footed shapes, Liquid fugitives from an alienist's parable, Toward the city's disturbed light And came up short where men were welding Industrial stacks above the highway. Tanzanite blue sparks run-through with orange Poured down across the building's roof And laved the uncanny spectres with their torches. I breathed the faintly burnt air Drifting from forest fires uncontrolled in Kentucky. LIBRETTOS FOR EROS 55 The Provinces of Saturn This blue paper I ordered by catalogue From Barcelona. Do my words get crookeder? So they do. All I have eaten Since Saturday is Wild Turkey Which imparts an omnigenous sympathy, Makes me blind as William Tell. Listening to opera. The soul is a kind of sound: MariaMeneghini Callas, ava dolce e serena cheregnavi. . . In gioia pura. After Dame Joan Sutherland first heard Callas sing Envy so whelmed her She felt constantly nauseous And feared she might be pregnant. I won't change the sheets, or sweep Your longsome hairs from the pillow: remembrance Of things past, perdu, Lost. Where are you. There Are wide ice fronds at the bedroom windows, A different paleontology for each. I am unmanned without you In this inconsonant dark. 56 DEEDS OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S A Table Laid With Horrors I AM G O I N G ON A J O U R N E Y AND I W I L L B R I N G : flour and sandals, a fine-toothed comb and sourballs, thisfish hook and silt in my pockets. I take fibula and sternum, your false pregnancy, a slip knot. Filtertips and soup du jour. What I leave— all things visible, light of the body, total number of my days— are field notes and sheep's eyes, Fahrenheit of sexual love, foreplay then your spotting, frost heave and...