PAINTING TO LET THE EVENING LIGHT GO THROUGH (1961)

Hang a bottle behind a canvas. Place the canvas where the west light comes in. The painting will exist when the bottle creates a shadow on the canvas, or it does not have to exist. The bottle may contain liquor, water, grasshoppers, ants, or singing insects, or it does not have to contain.

Yoko Ono, from Some Instruction Pieces

anything

i don't know where she's livin
all i got is this card
a picture of her at the pyramids
a knife held to her heart

go betweens-was there anything i could do

cold blooded old

i thought about everything,
i said.
as if thinking were a virtue.

as if trying-really-were a
pure act,
unselfish in its work.


i am remembering
the little white honda,
stick shift,
with all of us in it,
rolling backward
an accident
down the incline of our driveway
my mother trying to stop it all,
sailing into the neighbor's lawn

the last moments are calm.
i remember the supernatural lawn grass,
every blade sculpted.
the panic of my brother-
his tiny, fat, white hands
wet with fear.

the sound of the bushes
cracking, giving way,
a thousand offerings.
we emerge stunned,
blinking in the mid day sun,
a lawnmower coughing and
starting again through the humid air,
sounds from another world.

i remember everything
as if memory
were the bitter core of a golden peach

i eat when i am not hungry.

i put a bayleaf under my pillow,
for dreams.

i dream of you
in a forest-
they always look the same.
the jumble of vegetation
the lines of endless trees,
closing in like a construct.
i remember
your shining hair, in a v on the forehead.
your eyes dark when recalling something painful
and faraway,
another woman's face,
her scent,
the words of your mother,
the way night closes in quickly in the desert,
the stars seeming cold and empty,

i will never know.

i wish, now
all of those days,
i had remembered the forest,
the temperature of light
falling on the peeling bark of birches,
the names of the ferns my father taught me,
the season of green falling
from above-
the sound of water falling
from the creekbed.
all of it vast and inalienable,
so much.
so i dream you-
discrete and particular.
as if knowing
were possible.
as if you were any smaller, realer,
than
the trees, the soil, the living, the dead, all
around.

this is the poverty of memory,
ringing the bell for its supper
of solitary riches--

eat your heart out,
eat you heart out,
i said.

2011

faint music

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,

and everything dead is dead,

and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,

and the heroine has studied her face and its defects

remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,

as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves

has lost its novelty and not released them,

and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,

watching the others go about their days—

likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—

that self-love is the one weedy stalk

of every human blossoming, and understood,

therefore, why they had been, all their lives,

in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—

except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool

of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic

life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,

faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time

he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.

Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.

He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,

the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.

And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”

that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.

No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch

he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,

scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp

along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word

was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise

the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,

and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up

on the girder like a child—the sun was going down

and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket

he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing

carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties

hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.

A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick

with rage and grief. He knew more or less

where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.

They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears

in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”

she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,

a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.

“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”

“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,

“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—

Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—

and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,

and go to sleep.

And he, he would play that scene

once only, once and a half, and tell himself

that he was going to carry it for a very long time

and that there was nothing he could do

but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened

to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark

cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend

leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”

which is the part of stories one never quite believes.

I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain

it must sometimes make a kind of singing.

And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—

First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

-Robert Hass, from Sun Under Wood

up with the morning sun

it gets easier and easier every time.
didn't you know that
the heart
has a memory?
and
it gets
so tired
too.

WHY

baby's on fire

. . . . . yeah LIKE A FOX PHOENIX!!!!

fear

state change

billy cassidy

I’VE GOT 2 PLASTIC HELMETS. I USED TO HAVE 1

we roped pots & pans to our calves galloped

east then west mock trials we are guilty in

honesty we fall down crunked on some-

thing speedy & unpronounceable he’s jamican

not african i think of you constantly i stutter

in buffoonery boyhood forebear superintendent thighs

she knows my ticklish why I tote in I’s

panic attack during the matinee

we soak our officialdom in honey mustard

pigroll belly-up in it cheers to backwash

i pet the dog & the dog barks twice

my hands attach to arms that’s what they tell me

the lesbians blare big band across the street

peddle walkie talkies framed stamps of elvis

elvis slept w/ 1000 ladies before Pricilla. died.

i use street signs as monkey bars

undergarments tophats

i am merely putting on my pants

the contractor plows driveways

lifts shed with metal claw

thanks

cuticles pushed down the roof meat pens

i am in a corner

in the cornerstore

begging

saying hello

NOT LIKE SEASON CHANGE OR CHANGING CLOTHES

lung cancer did he smoke?

& i can still remember ripping my big toe on the

diving board town county swimming pools splash

we inhaled so much tar & feather up to knees in

prissy warm water your riddles, dixieland hasn’t

gated down yet outgrown farfetched have you far-

fetched your past? i’m not supposed to ask to be paid

for this but i’m rumbling & fed up of water crackers

somebody on the subway stuck up a joke this morning

i kept quiet & read about death death death death bas-

ketball a 9 letter word for hollywood & tanning beds

..

She licks the linoleum where I was standing

I don’t want love I want understanding &

Marriage welts in the water I’ve been chugged

& sunglasses now I have pimples soot instead

of sneakers the last time I saw a palm tree

was lsd’d & pink haired & inquired with a

polish woman rent a car for the wedding

festivities bring drunks! ribbons of a blast

the cake tasted like sofa the rich tan I feel

like an american! I have my opinions &

I do squat about it thanks for the pork chops

however, I gave that up I met a pig oh

yeah, the gloves the place you saw the film

about teenagers acting like teenagers on pills

the thinking someone threw something it was

a leaf leaving a tree fuck you surrealism I am

abstract & I lost my peep friends (brick sob)

(cracky goof smile) naptime in neptune I wear

my hats 8 at a time hair is pony greened rust

Don’t suck those mints! They have urine!

you are a spectral socialist and you have books books books books

i go to the reading and i eat snacks whereupon my appletree

i don’t mind i have paper work

the motor boat is jealous of the sail it’s like a model and a fat cousin

shower curtain is brown nerves are brown & my

My What A Day! Floodwatch & Sun. I saw Dustin Hoffman on the street

& another person who looked like my Uncle Thom ! How’s Angelina?

too bad families don’t understand poems nothing to understand

it’s like cutting lettuce into small clumps & then throwing it away

or difference between TV & TELEVISION the way everything

is photographed in photos tie dyed catwalks psychedelic, man

The time is 98 inches wide I’m dead

I’m back

HAPPY EASTER!

I never believed in God but I did believe in the rabbit

really thinking carrots make you more genuine a lady

she is doing 5 minutes ago

maybe not thinking of me

I forgot your soft

heads in chest

I forget the fighting

jabbing duking

I remember Austin Texas

with all its coffee goodwill chinos no furniture

flies in vents parking garage deck lone star beer

I know how to touch a body grow a beard billiards

I can see 20 20 the icans & thronged boys

this whole thing is sad sad sad

sad sad sad

sad sad

i put my fingernails together splice hairs off a mole

murder moles with juicy fruit & hockey sticks i

played 9 innings a kid all myself with parks wall

i won & win & loss champion the kids now coming

out of jr high in ridgewood are rude gum chewers

bad beat listens fatty fats annoying great & young

before you get sick of me & this let’s go to the river!

stay up till 5am & drink not talk or look stare at the

grain do you have a car? isreali salad my pupils

are foible i’m shying away today buoy to that

lets pass out in your car

feet to head

wake up & fool

i never met you, billy, but i wish i'd had. or perhaps i don't wish that, because then this sad news would have been harder to hear. sometimes your poetry could see through reality like it was a glass of water left incidentally on a table. i hope you find peace where you ramble on.

read more of billy's poetry here.