sestinas

I opened this poem with a yawn
thinking how tired I am of revolution
the way it’s presented on television
isn’t exactly poetry
You could use some more methedrine
if you ask me personally

People should be treated personally
there’s another yawn
here’s some more methedrine
Thanks! Now about this revolution
What do you think? What is poetry?
Is it like television?

Now I get up and turn off the television
Whew! It was getting to me personally
I think it is like poetry
Yawn it’s 4 AM yawn yawn
This new record is one big revolution
if you were listening you’d understand methedrine

isn’t the greatest drug no not methedrine
it’s no fun for watching television
You want to jump up have a revolution
about something that affects you personally
When you’re busy and involved you never yawn
it’s more like feeling, like energy, like poetry

I really like to write poetry
it’s more fun than grass, acid, THC, methedrine
If I can’t write I start to yawn
and it’s time to sit back, watch television
see what’s happening to me personally:
war, strike, starvation, revolution

This is a sample of my own revolution
taking the easy way out of poetry
I want it to hit you all personally

like a shot of extra-strong methedrine
so you’ll become your own television
Become your own yawn!

O giant yawn, violent revolution
silent television, beautiful poetry
most deadly methedrine
I choose all of you for my poem personally

These dried-out paint brushes which fell from my lips have been
removed
with your departure; they are such minute losses
compared with the light bulb gone from my brain, the sections
of chicken wire from my liver, the precise
silver hammers in my ankles which delicately banged and pointed
magnetically to you. Love has became unfamiliar

and plenty of time to tend the paint brushes now. Once
unfamiliar
with my processes. Once removed
from that sizzling sun, the ego, to burn my poet shadow to the
wall, I pointed,
I suppose, only to your own losses
which made you hate that 200 pound fish called marriage. Precise
ly, I hate my life, hate its freedom, hate the sections

of fence stripped away, hate the time for endless painting, hate the
sections
of my darkened brain that wait for children to snap on the light,
the unfamiliar
corridors of my heart with strangers running in them, shouting.
The precise
incisions in my hip to extract an image, a dripping pickaxe or
palmtree removed
and each day my paint brushes get softer and cleaner—better tools,
and losses
cease to mean loss. Beauty, to each eye, differently pointed.

I admire sign painters and carpenters. I like that black hand
pointed
up a drive-way whispering to me. “The Washingtons live in those
sections”
and I explain autobiographically that George Washington is
sympathetic to my losses;
His face or name is everywhere. No one is unfamiliar
with the American dollar, and since you’ve been removed
from my life I can think of nothing else. A precise

replacement for love can’t be found. But art and money are precise
ly for distraction. The stars popping out of my blood are pointed
nowhere. I have removed
my ankles so that I cannot travel. There are sections
of my brain growing teeth and unfamiliar
hands tie strings through my eyes. But there are losses

of the spirit like vanished bicycle tires and losses
of the body, like the whole bike, every precise
bearing, spoke, gear, even the unfamiliar
handbrakes vanished. I have pointed
myself in every direction, tried sections
of every map. It’s no use. The real body has been removed.

Removed by the ice tongs. If a puddle remains what losses
can those sections of glacier be? Perhaps a precise
count of drops will substitute the pointed mountain, far away,
unfamiliar?

Twenty stories high above the desert
with its morning shadows, like the face of a woman wearing
a wide-brimmed hat, you stand quietly so that you won’t
wake
your husband, who sleeps like a tired gardener,
his hands brown from Michigan summer
labor—tomatoes, gypsy peppers, sweet basil and sun flowers.

You love this time of day when the hotel-bordering flowers,
—pansies like eyes and snap dragons like mouths—even
in this desert,
hold dew. To some, this world is beyond summer;
but not to you, a California Girl who will grow old wearing
blue jeans and T-shirts. Your Beefmaster Tomato-gardener
husband loves this city of mirages later in the day, when
it is awake,

But you love it in the morning light before others wake
up and drink their coffee. You are the gypsy flower
at the 6 a.m. blackjack table. Steel Man, husband-gardener
loves his Keno games, tends the numbers. You prefer to
sit with these desert
cactus, old timers who’ve stayed up all night wearing
cigarettes growing inch-long ash from their mouths. Summer

long-gone, their wrinkled wintry hands stack up the chips.
Summer
is a joke to them, here where they’re always awake.

They’ve been around the clock; humor this Snapdragon-lady,
who wearing
her night of sleep like a sprinklered flower,
sits down at their table in the early morning desert.
They know an inhospitable garden and its harsh gardener.

They know that Steel Man sleeping upstairs is not such a
gardener.
They know hard summer;
her wide-brimmed hat shadowing her old face, Dame Desert
is a survivalist. They’ve learned this staying up all night,
awake,
playing blackjack at basil green tables. They could be
sunflowers,
big-rooted, heavy-headed, wearing

Sandy cigarette ash, which has fallen over them for hours;
wearing
the cards like rows of seeds. She is their gardener.
They laugh at nursery-grown flowers
like me. Summer
snapdragons or pansies, newly awake
at 6 a.m. on their private desert.

A desert where they stay up all night wearing
tough, dusty foliage. I love to see Her wake in them, this
gardener
of summer morning blackjack players, these old desert
sunflowers.

Miss Bishop assigned us the task of writing a sestina
while she was out of the room.
Hers weren’t so easy, with fifteen
or so drafts, but ours had to leap
right out of our heads, in proper sequence,
arranged to strike the reader as clever.

No one ever told me I was clever
or that I was smart enough to do a sestina
I got it mixed up every time—the sequence—
and couldn’t do meter. When she left the room
I tried for a while, then gave up. Fifteen
minutes had gone by, and I wanted to leap

right out the window. Even today I’d leap
in order to prove I am clever,
I who flunked Latin and trig before I was fifteen,
and still can’t manage a complete sestina
While Miss Bishop was out of the room
I made a chart but still screwed up the sequence.

In fact, I think it’s absurd, a fixed sequence
of six words weaving in and out, not even a leap
into chaos or free verse. We huddled in that room
and tried not to moan and groan. Joan, most clever
of all the students that year, finished her sestina
and showed it off when Miss Bishop returned fifteen

minutes after she had left. “Class, your fifteen
minutes are up,” she said, and took our papers in sequence—
each student taking the stack, adding his sestina
or hers. And Miss Bishop was more than willing to leap
to the conclusion that I had not tried to be clever,
for those terrible fifteen minutes in the yellow room.

It’s not that I hated Miss Bishop, or wanted a Home Room
assignment, more relaxed with a teacher who thought fifteen
minutes not enough to demonstrate how clever
or stupid we were. One mistake in the sequence
and Miss Bishop assumed we were not able to do a sestina
or anything else worth her time. We might as well leap,

hold hands and leap out the window of that yellow room—
we who could not do a sestina in no more than fifteen
minutes, using a sequence of six words—like Miss Bishop, clever.

The first word you must know is relevant,
The qualifier of experience.
Relevant experience of the revolution,
For instance, trains you to confront the pigs,
The first defense line of the power structure,
Which guards insidiously the Establishment.

What we are after is the Establishment,
Which acts as if we are not relevant
And forces us to wreck the power structure.
This confrontation is an experience
Not only for the people but for the pigs
Whom we’ll win over in the revolution.

When we make love we make the revolution,
As war is made by the Establishment,
For in our confrontation with the pigs
We prove to them that they’re irrelevant
And immaterial to the experience,
Which in itself can wreck the power structure.

The military-industrial power structure,
A major target of the revolution,
Must also be a sexual experience.
To expose the symbols of the Establishment
Expose yourself—it’s highly relevant
And absolutely petrifies the pigs.

In our utopia there will be no pigs
And no remains of any power structure
Except what we decide is relevant;
And what is relevant but revolution?
We spell the death of the Establishment,
Which will probably welcome the experience.

Meanwhile, experience the experience;
Demand, demand, and overwhelm the pigs
Till we in fact are the Establishment
And constitute a groovy power structure.
Remember the slogan of the revolution:
Now is forever; Now is relevant.

While pigs perpetuate the power structure,
Baby, be relevant to the revolution
Till we experience the Establishment.