By the Ohio Window

 

 

Here I am by the window

full of Autumn sliding

down its golden tones

and by Apollinaire

 

and his Bestiaire of souls

that keeps evoking Orpheus

and by Allen Ginsberg too

and his checkered booklet

 

Kaddish and Other Poems

in that tombstone jacket

of which he went searching

for Apollinaire in Père Lachaise

 

like a spider gleaming

with all the strings

round his naked belly

on the granite in the sun

 

and in that miniature eternity

in the city of Paris and St. Dionysus

just before I must have been born

out the uranium mines of Jáchymov,

 

by the Czech Mountains of the Ores.

By this Ohio window where the sky

gets caught in its purest awe

Jeanne Foster serves me

 

her Wild Hesperidean Apples,

and the Beat poet chinwags gently

with Diana Cooper, the last

British bountiful Artemis,

 

fresh from a choir manned

with slightly Baroque boys,

lying in a solid missionary pose

under Phlegon of Tralles

 

and his Books of Marvels

that have all that’s left

of Roman Sibylline

deathless prophecies.

 

And still further down

feminine Hermes

headlong falling

from the sky

 

is pinching Ulysses

from Calypso

who squeezed his knee

vainly with her bare thighs

 

of light and Renaissance,

while Penelope, being served

a ration of ambrosia instead

of her lost, philandering man,

 

is getting ready to show

her beauty, deified now,

to all her 108 suitors

alive for this one last time

 

right out of the brush

of Gerard Lairesse.

But still deeper down

lies the heroic Moor

 

who, part Adonis

and part war-horse,

is always in love

with some lady

 

and who, proudly

ignorant of Plato

like so many these days,

trusts that it’s honorable

 

to cheat, rob, or deceive

by lies all who don’t

worship his own God

from a nursery book

 

(“for an idiot is the one

who is possessed

by the wicked demons”

surrounding such a pious man).

 

 

And by the Heaven Is a Garden

on the top and one hundred pages

Guido Cavalcanti seeks to fulfil

and gently complete himself—

 

So here in this company

I am tucked away

by this Ohio window

in the Deciduous Land

 

that brims with flames

of light and Bromius,

held to precede even

primordial Night

 

and who was just as well

put down by Erato

on their wedding night.

Unless she tried and meant

to put him down to music.