imaginary fucking

i can't be here
again in this alison-kind-of-dream
there were photographs
in my papers
your words littering
the skeleton of that House
imaginary fucking
in the nursery
imaginary violence
on the back stairs
no one lives there anymore
i only made it up
to satisfy
my fears—

From the manuscript of "Fresh Wounds." This piece is entirely about the novel The Werewolf of Heartbreak and its relationship to my romantic attachment to Alison G. In that novel the heroine, protaganist I guess, Alison Clare Gaughan, becomes involved in a re-make of a horror movie that is ultimately shot in an old house, based in real life on the Hatch Mansion on North Sixth Street in Springfield, Illinois. The Knolls lived there when I first came to Springfield. And I lived there with Pat Smith after returning from living in Chicago in the spring of 1974. I went to many parties there, also. Including one which featured a contingent of folks from the St. Louis Zoo, where Sandy Martin's old friend worked. There was one guy who dressed up as a wolf and who lurked on the second floor. Eventually the idea for the Alison book came along and I ended up with a werewolf movie, set in that house. Very lycanthropic of me. But I had this idea about Alison, that she could change skins, become different people very easily. That was how she could traverse such vastly different social circles. There was always a shape-changing feel to her. Of course, in the novel she fears the shape-changer because she fears herself. I doubt if ACG saw it that way, of course. She told me that Alison wasn't enough of a bitch and I'm sure that is true. I have a friend who still refers to her as "the bitch."

secret arrangement

now that you're disappearing
for another time
my secret arrangement
has begun to collapse

the unspent poems
come out as distillate
the things I swore
not to say
for both our sakes

now that you'll be
in that other land
older with its hints
of your first life
I become free and afraid
your leaves fallen in my attic
your lycanthropic eyes
peering from unused pages
the ones in the white box
which serves as a coffin
for this secret
arrangement


Alison Gaughan went to Ireland with her sister in the mid 1970s. When the chapbook, LNFS, was first printed and put together Knoepfle decided that certain things in it had to be fixed and he had three signatures reprinted, including one for Alison who had thought better about an image that apparently identified her own father ("the amputated man"). These changes were wrought and there was a party at Scarritt to take apart the chapbook, collate in the new signatures, and then re-bind them. Afterward there was a box of the replaced signatures that I couldn't bear to throw away. I put them in the attic on Scarritt where they stayed pretty much until we moved and then I disposed of them, but not in a bunch. I burned them in the backyard at 223 East Scarritt, one sheet at a time, for a couple of hours. Lakebrink was sorely amused.

angel's autopsy

the corpse is still there, hands
and fingers scattered in quadrangles
the corners of what was once
a snow angel::the blood soaks
in to feed the march photosynthesis,
turns its remainder brown
in the fresh green grass::there are
small insects on the flesh
that dance is in the past
you have left this corpse
it is time that acts as a guardian
to heaven's gate

No one passes before eleven

Another round with the Snow Angel. Clearly the image of the dead body represents what I thought of as my love affair with Alison Gaughan. This is from the period where I was avoiding the girl, in 1977-78. Trying to free myself from her charm. Yes, let's use charm here, in the old manner. She charmed me and she would never quite free me from that aspect. When I did get free of her it was only because I literally forced myself to tell her to leave me alone. This was in 1987, when I was first living on Bryn Mawr with Becky Bradway. Alison called me up and tried to get me to join in the game again. That time I said no, finally. I'm sure she wouldn't paint it that way, but that is actually what happened from my end. She's a lawyer in Vegas these days. I'm sure she can talk rings around anything I might have to say. Fuck her. I don't wish her ill, but I know she has plenty to account for in the truth department. Life goes on, until it doesn't.

the eye atop the stones

and we go down a ruin
each verb & image a story
of another chasm
you disappear
(all of you)
in your world(s)

so Gary is right
but I know his losses
are design
and mine are robberies
on a calendar
I made by interlacing
lives

you struggle to explain
I recognize your pyramid
with the eye atop the
stones

for gary d.

old friend you do not write me
you do not show me your books, anymore
Jim is not here to share my stroh's
Ricardo has gone to Sterling for two weeks
but he did not tell me last Thursday when we talked.
Gary went to Chicago today; he made his apologies
for the retreat. He is lying to himself
about Anita. But it is an old lie that
we all survive.
My child has gone to Oregon with my ex-wife,
the marxist, and I have not heard from him
in the last month.
I do not write Janne, for reasons she refuses
to admit; and of course, she does not write me.
Ross suffers in his understanding
but has made a place and will live nowhere else.
That it cannot include us is only normal.
This list goes on, as you know. But it has no actual
point. It is only to say how dark this room
has become. No one answers my letters, but
I will not threaten suicide to evoke a response.
Instead I spend the days questioning myself,
wondering what are the errors.
Knowing this is only a normal human concern.
Old friend, you do not write me.
But this is not asking you to.
I am no longer surprised by the world, just confused.
These words are splits of wood on the fire,
creating light and heat, just as if you were
actually here.


A poem from the late 70s, speaking to my friend Gary Davidson, after the disillusion of the first Scarritt group. I needed response in those days and sought it, extravagantly. It's a good thing I got over that because there is less and less response to my words as I age. Of course, I'm not as much fun, nor as sexy as I was in those days (I'm sorry Paige, but it is the truth.)

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

let me take a little dawn
to sing for Sandy Denny,
sweet baby gone.

let me thank you darling
for Tam Lin in St. Louis
three years ago.

life is still here for you
your voice mingles with my breath
frosting on good cake

who know where the time goes, darling?
you do. you do.


Sandy Denny, lead singer for Fairport Convention at various times, died of a brain hemorrhage in her early thirties in approximately 1977. I saw her at the Fox Theatre on Grand Avenue in St. Louis and she was remarkable in every way. She sang, among other things, the ancient brit folk song, "Tam Lin", one of my favorites, while Dave Swarbrick danced his ass off, with an unfiltered cigarette hangin from his lip. She authored, among many other songs, the piece, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, that gives the Judy Collins' album its name. Even today I will think of that lyric and shake my head.

From 1978

Wearing the brave white hat
wondering where the hell you went
these days represent stairs
dancing down the choreography
of time and light. The body
decays—drinking again.
No state of grace driving up
outside the door. (I am)
Abandoning the ship with its rock
jazz and other narnian fantasies,
staving off the hollow bell
the locked closet of this fear.
And where the hell did you go
in the midst of that whirlpool of moments?
Why won't you tell even one
secret like the shrouds of your sailor's
warning covering the moon?
Can't you take it any more?
It was your decision: Don't you
see the points beginning to tangle
in what little that is real?
Now the bullshit is like a normal cartoon.
Bullshit just packing this coffin.
Should've known, all the risks you take,
the killing concrete, the six hour bruise
of night, the laughing chance, the odd
gamble with death, this would be
the one time you wouldn't bet.
Anyway, I'm taking off the brave white hat,
that damn hat, and having another drink.
It's 97 outside, but it's an ice storm
in this room.


Alison Gaughan. Not much to explain. She had destroyed me by this point. I admit, I allowed that to happen. The heart is some sort of icon for that which can be lost. This life is so much about losing. My world, though more detailed, becomes smaller as the years pass and I wonder how much of this reflected any actual people. Some, though perhaps not as much as I'd like to believe. I miss you all.

"laughing chance" comes from Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues," which Alison quoted to me in a letter, explaining our losses. "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide..."

absolute zero

cool me down to absolute zero
hell is winter
angels are empty forms in the radioactive snow
the wind is a scalpel for purity
inside the house the devil rots
the growth of bacteria
becomes frantic in the sweaty joints
the mouth teems with unanswered questions
and Allah imagines us as a necessary
anomaly

but, on to paraguay:
each dotted line is your signature bearing
the weight of your betrayal, or your surrender
(these qualities equal for this argument)
jetstream is the flood,
following down old gilgamesh's ghost

but, I am gilgamesh
no matter your denials
and this life is 35 millimeter plastic film
melting into shapes and freezing this
for another's memory
(you will all remember what you want, anyway)
cool me down
to absolute zero

if you get me cold enough
you can keep me forever


A statement about my relationship with literature, friends and lovers in the 1970s. It is remarkable that there is an absolute bottom point for temperature, mathematically speaking. Not so for the top.

My Birthday, 1995

Today she let me stay with her.
She let me watch her fold the laundry.
She took my hand and wished me
Truly well. And I have been gifted
by the heavens. I know.
I have been given another chance.
Another birthday means another life.
I don't make lists.
I don't measure out my regrets.
She gave me that lovely smile,
so much like Ariel in the Southern Hemisphere
Or Ariadne spinning her thread.
The source of life is very close here.
She holds me dear.
Another chance.

Another poem from the summer I was in love with Connie McAllister Panichi.

another daughter of the light

Blonde as light was she the White Lady
Graves spoke of the reason for poetry
the angry goddess of the wheat, twisting
daily lives around the fingers of a frantic
hand? I don't believe so. I think it was
a Chinese handcuff; she didn't watch,
didn't know what time it was. As always
she was suddenly too late.
Suddenly stuck in a fingertrap, wondering
what he'll look like at forty0four. Was she
the Moon, then? Certainly divine, like
that dancer, was it Sarah? Who strangled
on her scarf in a fast car as it wrecked.
The problem in freedom is its applications ...
So Venus, or Ishtar, Demeter, or Harlow,
Mary Tyler Moore, Jan Brady. Who was she?
I know I know her from before.
A thousand years ago or maybe ten.
& does she even know?
Probably not, those doors are shut
& still.

This piece was written primarily about a woman named Julie Blomberg who I came to know through Mid-America Playwrights Theatre, Keith Kelley's group that I did many plays with in Springfield. Julie was in her mid-twenties and finally decided I was just too damn old for her. The ironic part was that she was dating a dentist at the time. He had a ton of money, but he really wasn't extreme enough for her. I know that later on she split with him and moved to Chicago. I was 44 at the time, of course. She wanted me, but she afraid of what that meant. Father issues.

Princess of Disks

daughter of the whirling stars
carbon in extreme
traditional, parasitic
She is the princess of disks
the elemental of madness
personified by reason

0 you inflamed black suns!
ribbon of cold blue fire around your
circumference
do you surrender for your fear?
or for your desire?

Out there
She is dancing en pointe
positions shift, mix, decide


The Princess of Disks is, of course, one of the court cards from the Tarot. Crowley says about it "She represents the earthy part of eart. Consequently she is always on the brink of transfiguration. ...She bears within her body the secret of the future."

Monday in a Lovely Dress

Take me anywhere darling
As long as you are there it is a feast, an entertainment
Take me to the planets, my love, or to the backyard, or
The estate sale, or the Museum. Or
Take me home, sweet scottish princess of these plains,
Your limbs graceful in a fabric in the wind.

So many words you could've said,
Who would have imagined you could want me?
There are pinwheels in these dreams tonight, sparklers,
Fountains of white and gold.
This heart is a great engine turning
This longing into jewels for your loveliness
These are poignant phrases for your wardrobe
Sweet salacious poems you can wrap around your heart, your soul.

O what will Tuesday bring? I have fallen deep into your eyes
& the Universe seems leathered and silvered and sepia-toned.
Each mystery reveals the blossom, petal by petal,
Its color and scent the fabric of a special life.


This poem came out of the period when I fell in love with Bill Panichi's wife, Constance McAllister. This too was a huge mistake, but hard to see how I might have known that. Bill told me he didn't love Connie anymore in the Spring of 1995, and I told her she should leave Bill and come be with me. Well, she left Bill, and she played with me for awhile to make it work. And Bill got mad about it, needing, as he did, to be in control. I had known this woman for several years, through the stage. Our daughters were quite good friends. I was friend and computer guy for Bill for many years. Bill provided the apartment space when Becky started leaving me, so that she could phone her friends (read Kevin Stein) without me hearing. Bill also was the person who told me I could get a court order keeping Becky from moving Paige to Bloomington, in 1995. We had a complicated relationship, though not as much as the one I had with Connie. At any rate I wrote some sweet love poems to this woman, before she dumped me completely after having gotten free of Bill.

Beheaded

establishing an image of the skull who speaks
truth ... an old one that disembodied head
who might tell me what might be mine
the fantastic and the secret
the ways to fortune or health or sexual prowess

the slestak (slee stack) talk to the illuminated
skulls of their ancestors
who are thought to know more
of the workings of the universe than the insect people

the knights templar, tortured by the king of france
and the pope, in the name of the inquisition, claimed
their instructions came from disembodied heads
in metal caskets in secret rooms at their monasteries

admittedly they also talked about their anuses too much,
such is the nature of torture
but still the magic of the maltese falcon begins
to seep through these words

there was a mexican horror movie
featuring the severed head of a 16th
century magician, part of cortez group
who stole the golden mayan faces
a rancher's son dug him up and the head
spoke to him saying
I will make you happy
but you must be mine

and in an ash tree in a dream
I had the head sat upon the limb
and talking in aphorisms and she
called me from the celts and said I
knew a woman who had the power
under her pillow the blood appeared
never an explanation
but I didn't care
I'd rather believe in magic
because the supernatural implies
hope

so the talking skull in knoepfle's poem
is the father and the son but it is also
the ghost of my self
and cannot walk away
it only creates specious solutions

the priestess married her disappearance
I do not sleep well
I do not trust my solutions
I am an anagram of the nation this way

we have become disembodied
we have lost our genitals and our assholes
we have no breath nor blood nor bile
nor anything that connects us to the earth
our thoughts flicker on the cave wall

the water cycle

the mother the child
ice to steam to ice
the ocean binds us

the circle imperils us
stasis is imagined as safe
as safe as my friend's father
in his latest bed underground

the blood crystallizes
in the freezer—
ice to steam
this heart is a frog
cheeks swollen
with remembered air
to ice
these words mortified

the city of the future

the city of the future
nurses open sores plays
elect a mayor watches
legislators spit under their
desks and vote against
the ERA like it wasn't
really baseball

the explosions tear me up
I feel Vachel's despair
come hopefully out of the
high school across the street
each afternoon and I cannot
help but think this Mars
and these creatures aliens
that do not know the bells
that ring within them

it is so easy to call these avenues
streets of sin and graft
but that stove-piped scarecrow
still walks here still
rings his heart in the prairie
wind still knows that even
time does not divide us

and I love this city of the future
for in my own backyard
grows the tree of laughing bells
and I can just hear them
in the early morning their music
fey and dangerous and impossibly
bright


Another tribute to Vachel Lindsay. Both his poem about Springfield, the City of the Future, and the poem, the Tree of Laughing Bells contribute to this statement. I lived in Springfield for so very many years, and part of me remains there to this day. It is a wondrous and magical place, so incredibly profaned by money and power. But in some ways that makes it so very fascinating. Ghostly, though, for me. Alison once said that every time she came to Springfield it seemed there was a ghost in every house she saw. And of course she wrote the magnum opus statement on Springfield, "stillborn" that was published in the Lindsay tribute, The Village Magazine in 1979. It's a great statement on escaping the City of the Future. I stayed and tried my best to bring Springfield a little closer to Lindsay's vision. I did know some wonderful writers and artists while there, and I got to act on stage with some great and talented folks. I don't regret living there, though I may regret many of the things I did and said in those years.

Matins

Substance of the new disease
Tracings of the ancients
Lists of your deaths:
the pieces breaking off, like a small island
in the middle of the Mississippi.
Your relatives, first. Your grandparents.
A childhood friend (leukemia).
An auto accident that kills your collie pup.
The lark the cat drags across the driveway.

Later it is your lovers.
They disappear not in death, but in misunderstanding.
Your aching is real. The loss of a limb is traumatic.
The days begin to flicker, begin to ring like bells
on the marked face of your life.
The friends you suddenly find you don't know anymore.
Their addresses lost, or changed.
No one you can think of to call at one in the morning.

You regroup; you have your child.
You say "Remember me" over and over to the infant.
You take his hand at the crosswalk
and teach him all the words you hope will drown the bells.
He grows, he becomes you. He begins to leave.
Each day is another of his leavings.
Already in him you see the final pieces of your own death.
You are beginning to weaken in that small current.

Adulation of the bells.
You count your days. You write miniature biographies
of yourself, usually after dinner. You measure
your belly, wondering at the energy your child has
as he runs away from you, chasing his official
little league ball.

And now the new disease has become old
and you have become the ancient you saw in the distance
as a child, the one in the hard gray box
with bloodless skin and unmoving hands.
And too soon the island you stand on
suddenly disappears
casting you adrift.

dragon's blood

drastic dragon
twists the mean spine
the closed book
cracks huge dreams
in the slow lizard's
chipped belly

you and your fantasy
girl, the princess
of pure blessing—
yin yanged to dark
cold sorceress
you in another bed
the sake of knowing
the curious redemption
found hidden
in the beaded purse
of your heart

damask, darling
shrouding what is left
of me
of me
darling—damask
in disaster's window

dragon slain
castle repaired
you're safe

This poem speaks to the failed and illegal relationship in 1979. I am, of course, the dragon here.

past tense

surrounded by your fear
in a dream
I made stories to take
your place there
was no other way
too much of the morning
and you were already gone

I still remember you
your fear
a chinese dynasty
many sad deceptions
are owed you
my body rebels
at the answers
I am sick
at the beginning of June
I am losing some parts
of myself to the stories
I told you

in another time
you drowned in the water
I gave you presents
we refused to talk
the others told lies


Once again, Alison Gaughan. In typing this up I was struck by the truth of the statement "I made stories to take/your place there." I think I did that for years, really.

old & remembering

it seems to me
there was a promise
broken in dividing
these years

my mythology
searches out
its failures

the cool breath
of central air
plays on my hands

in the distance
I imagine
being saved


This is my all time favorite Alison Gaughan poem. It comes in response to a poem of her's published in Light From New Steel. In that poem the narrator is lying in a bath, feeling the air from the vent and she is afraid to open her eyes because she might be only 'old and remembering.' The first stanza reviews the actual complaint: she made me a promise and then broke it. The second stanza codifies it as my own failure. The third stanza recalls her own fear. The fourth stanza breaks from her and sees some hope in the future. Also this piece is similar in structure to the Who song, I Can't Explain, which I have always admired for getting so much done in so few phonemes.

notes on dirac & time/1

you're living
thru a terrible time
still in analysis
self critical and paused
on the brink of a dramatic
disaster/you're listening
to yr lou reed albums
living in pain
without substance
you got
no watch on yr walls
yr time isn't terrible just empty
you never move
all yr concepts suck at the void
and you're breathless
you complain, "but this isn't real"
and it isn't
but you don't really care

it's grey in spring and there
are limbs in disarray on my bed
and I wish you'd go home

if you don't I'll
leave my house & burn it
down/manuscripts and all


Another poem about Alison Gaughan. The Lou Reed album mentioned is certainly Berlin. The idea behind the "yr" has to do with disentangling the self from the vowels in an effort to close the emotional distance. Alison really needed to get out of that marriage, but her family exerted an enormous pressure on her. I always assumed that is why her husband took a job thousands of miles away (in Stockton, California), but how could he have known that it was exactly what would create a way for her to leave him. Which she did, long after I was out of the picture. Poor bastard. Me too, really. But I like the way this piece moves. She always did go home, but never soon enough.

"those great ignorant leafy ways"

the 2 trees/are opposed to each other
in the way of the mirror
this tree is his experience
beloved in the mirror/it is
turned & analyzed & dead
the raven's in the woman's flesh
the flesh that has decayed
but something endures in the pop song
in iowa the poetry chokes the lover
the leaves will/not fall
the unforced line decides its own pace
the pattern non-discernible is discerned
the donners picnic'ed below this cottonwood
the years are glass but silvered by
this vision/tamsen in the bough
turned to the white dry flesh, sweet
among the snow that winter of 1854
but this is January/the woman's flesh
is air in these eyes/in my hands/no taste
still that tree in the mirror/though
I went back to school

it's like the rubber bumps in a musicbox

The beginning of many poems about trees. Before this time in the late 70s I had resisted nature as a place I could not operate. I thought I was strictly a city boy, with a need for human, intellectual contact, above all else. Then I moved into the house on Washington Street across from Springfield High. There was an enormous cottonwood in the back yard that Greg Lakebrink told me was somewhere between 125 and 160 years old. Later I read that the Donner party had left Springfield from a site across the street from the present day location of Springfield High. This inspired me to think about trees and is the beginning of my tree worship. Now I am an out and out tree worshipper. I think it was to Ray Wiggers when he was editor for the Illinois State Museum that I first said that I felt that trees were the true dominant important species in the actual world. That would've been around 1994-95 somewere. When Kimberly and myself were married in 1999 a prayer to the trees was one of the important elements of the ceremony for both of us.

coffin of ice

winter's already here
with its sepulchral grasses
still green under the snow
my goddamn mind is full of trunks
& old clothes thick as dead clover
I found your letter
w/its odd song & that promise
veneered w/a candy I don't
believe in anymore
gonna carve me a coffin of ice
and learn to keep still forever


Referring to a letter that Alison wrote me, promising a different time in our future. Perhaps she meant it when she wrote it, but it looks more like a manipulation from this distance of years.

the girl's silver laughter

she gave up cabinet making
for arthur murray
learning how to tango
slim legs tracing
fortunes in the various nebulae
my eyes watching across her kitchen
labelling the time

there is a paragraph
with her thoughts of country life
another with her unfinished projects

she has the i ching & some
biology texts, a random number
of facts and needs
she says tell me of your sex life
I light my cigarette
and dance in circles
with these words
I tell her
this is all in a different time
she does a rondo
dressed in a gown
of silver laughter


Kathy Lane was a girl I met in Davenport when Pat and I went to visit Suzi Olds. I flirted with her and thought about her for many months, perhaps even years. I saw her three or four times, but always with Pat around so I never did approach her. Silver Laughter was the name of a band in the quad cities in those days. This is circa 1974.

well world, have your way with my death

dear kerouac
as you stone on your mountain hozomeen
my eyes incant to a passing freight
olive cars rocking through an Illinois alley
dear jack
I see no animals in my window
only faces/the mythology
we never heard
before this tuesday in 1974
your spirit rises in the abnormal may fog
and those pleasure-dreams of the
streets you crashed in my adolesence
pass me in a kind of buddha-death

it is too late to love you
your eyes are closed
I give up my eyes for you kerouac
at least you are dead and have no fear
left your special non-specific words
like paint spilled in my drive

In the early seventies I spent a certain amount of my energy meditating on my own death. It was a leftover from being raised roman catholic. And it had that weird intersection with the beats, who were sort of truly informed on the notion of death as a step on the wheel of conception. Kerouac's poem, the quivering meat wheel of conception, held a fairly constant place in my conscious being. I feared my death, more from the loss of the flesh than from the loss of the indivudated soul. In those days I kind of hoped the soul was not individuated and that dying would allow me to join in the great Marriage. I now now that both of these things are the shape of the next world and that one cannon escape one's self and should not escape one's self. But, hey, I was young.

Beheaded, Continued

so the skull in knoepfle's poem
is the father and the son
but it is also the ghost of myself
and cannot walk away
it only creates specious solutions

the priestess married her disappearance
I do not sleep well
I do not trust my solutions
I am an anagram of the nation this way


The poem referred to is Harpe's Head and it is also An Affair of Culture. There was a time whe I was quite conversant in Knoepfle's canon. But I haven't looked at these pieces in twenty five years. Since his utter betrayal. The priestess is, as always, Alison Clare Gaughan. And the time is just after the watergate scandal and the references to the nation are heartfelt. There was a terrible uncertainty after Nixon.