They swim they play the surf for pridefulness

      Their slim boards vanity you see them spread over the pages of

      Life hostaged

      By photographers who talk like hipsters jewish to their very noses

      Infatuate beholden to that scrim of glass and light

      The manufactured cataracts of defeated capitalism japanese and german

      Eastman Kodak a fine and studied blindness

      What will our vacation cost I mean in terms of pride

      Mornings when I rise riding the long subway all the way uptown

      Half asleep crossing the Columbia campus me glowing in Ferris

      Booth’s high glass

      I love a slim black boy. I love you

      And come to work in my own inferno 300°F. covered with surfboards

      Rushing everyday to make the historic effort

      But after three days sweat’s no catalyst I fear my cop out’s from

      Exhaustion energy’s decomposition by fahrenheitic half-lives not

      arrogance

      My father years ago waiting tables in the Tivoli

      Won’t towel dance the customers to tips runs out screaming Crème

      de menthe on rye

      Carstairs alamode!

      Maybe there never is another job well I’d rather be in alleys & shake

      bone dice.

      His wife is pregnant in the hospital San Ignaz

      Yeah some of that arrogance is me: the bleak edge of the book, notes

      On Function

      In placid waves of plate glass or my Nikon’s eye, mornings when I rise

      The spontaneous book notes what a particular girl says I love you. And

      I love you

      It is a thing apart from everything the people have.

DOMESTIC HORROR

      The house is like the venerated tibia, a chink heirloom

      Final statement of some long-nailed uncle.

      Kitchen bears a constant smell of butter, huge pots of rice cover

      the walls

      Everywhere things frying in brittle cast-iron skillets.

      She stands against the window her profile dark against parhelion

      Yellow walls. Yellow walls to drift out of the city like ordinary

      clouds made to

      Destroy the confines of the room. 14 × 11, designed by a russian cubist.

      The walls float high above New York harbor, this house I keep telling you

      It’s just too damn near the airport. Pan Am hanger in the living room,

      a browntoned

      Photograph taxis past all day, coldeyed 1920ish khanyapa,

      Great floppy beige hat and rimless spectacles: that same young woman

      of the

      Kitchen dressed in a pale, wiser former body. All day they talk, the

      lady on the wall

      Giving directions: “More flour in that gravy, O my daughter.”

      Look! Out on the wild streets of the afternoon a palsied mother and

      father in slow

      Motion. Galloping home, their well-formed daughter all blond curls

      clinging

      To the father’s drunken, twisted back. But they’re too ugly for a

      poem of this quality.

      Wait, who is this dead child bounding through our home, devouring

      the furniture?

TOIL

      I has taken all that I can stand

      And now it is heroism

      Someone to tell you my story

      The NEWS photographers crowd

      Across the lonely Hudson pier

      Shouting interviews,

      Ta ta. I’m going to swim to Greece

      Who am I trying to impress

      You burst into tears late!

      My lips gargle “Goodbye”

      The rosy sunrise envelops me,

      My arm hooks into the night

EMBARKATION FOR CYTHERA

       And out of the solitude

       Voice and soul with selves unite

       —C. Okigbo

      This color, its pure absence

      in other words a space

      some African mothers, children

      cupped in their slim arms

      They are bending into the sand

      and it is their lesson written there.

      A new motif of

      Destruction—

      The idea of a written language

      when before,

      the words in our

      mouths were enough.

      Not that it takes anything away

      from the people we are,

      “Education”

      You don’t write “corn” if you

      mean okra.

      Along Merrick Blvd, standing in front

      the dance hall

      it’s the same thing, the

      cop in a luminous blue

      His badge spreads all over his face,

      threatening me. There should be

      someway to get in without paying.

      Rain that falls into the dusty

      life of the people on

      the street, it turns into a new language

      All the fine mommas walking inside,

      getting out of Grand Prixs

      Can hardly read

      this paper without stumbling over “embarkation”

      What

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