CANTO 2 Chipmunk chasing
Chipmunk chasing mate
rattles leaves somehow dry on the soppy ground.
Any minute a flock of cicadas drilling
cavities into my skull will shred the humble stitching.
Catch their chorus:
Isn’t this business
evidence of silliness
such that salmonella
swim inside your skull?
Sentence swift and sensible
we pass upon your soul:
stop up your sick song,
paralyze your lying eyes.
I slam down the old lids right quick. Large pools of light
spread into a broad band like a purple fog.
Over in one corner there’s a purple swamp,
bugs now buzzards with wings dripping purple,
scaled-down dragons quibble at euchre—
etym. unknown; compare G. juchs, a joke—
with a purple deck and no aces,
The holy euchre-whist, it is, sacramental, hush!
There is a purple pith!
A pregnancy in this purple poesy!
Occluded however by a roar,
a giant purple zipper in the sky grinding shut—
someone’s Beechcraft slicing off a piece of the action.
Off to the right is a very black forest, while straight ahead
indistinguishable purple shapes compete for attention.
I swirl my eyeballs around.
Huge balls of purple fire
sponge off all the various movies
fill up all the available space
condense into a huge purple cloud!
The back of my skull is comfortably black
(I hope you realize what a lot of work this is,
my eyes popping open to type each cadence
and then shutting again, with this brilliant white rectangle
that fades to red-orange, with horizontal black bars mushing
slowly back to purple normal!)
I study the scene:
A lot of items spring up: semi-trucks, waysides,
a bowl of Fritos where people disagree about a poem,
a set where they’re furiously putting together a movie
of what I have to do tomorrow; but none of this bothers me.
I just keep looking at everything, especially at
that huge cloud which continues to condense
like primordial pre-stellar gas and think oh my god
there’s going to be a big bang!
But it doesn’t happen.
It just keeps concentrating its purple, leaving an expanding blackness
where images play and words too especially these
that squirt out—a great seething mass of velvety vowel
and clankety consonant synapses.
And the purple pain in my ass from this hard chair!