so... this trans-historical potlatch... I'm the last of the "modern"! - remnant, ghosty, ghouled. "Millions of strange shadows." With Whitman lurking near the center, at the delta. (this from July - written on JFK dying-day. Poem (Forth of July) circles calendrically around his b-day - 5.29).

 – some star – like the articulate
 ghost of my fathers and of yours, who
 could not speak in life, but in the owlish
 afterlife – Ba, Ka, Crow, Lamb... tracked

  
 upstream to Ethiopia, the truth of it –
 manuscripted messenger, papyrus
 Pappy or Osiris sire, Moses ripened
 in the wilderness).  Mountain oak-tree.

  
 Cedar.  Pitch-black tar (for
 mordant).  Bebi, General of the Asiatics.
 Quick-runner, wasp.  Pharaoh’s taxi-
 driver. He Who Controls the Rat-

  
 God’s Offspring.  Latecomer,
 fast-talker.  Journalist for Delta
 Crescent.  Walker of the tiled
 ink-paths, typesetter.  Market-

  
 rent-collector, solitaire, free-
 speaker.  Literal, exact, exacting
 horsetrading slavestealing tax-
 gathering figure of a reefer-

  
 man, fearful, a-feared.
 Goes down ghost-trails
 under live-oak lairs
 of rattlesnakes... adrift

  
 in jagged eddies of nude alphabets.
 Murmuring to himself, saliva-
 white, spume-frothing blanched
 avalanche easily frozen, baffled, back-

  
 stabbed – easily beloved, won-over.
 And adhesive through the crane bone
 into the gravity waves (nacreous
 mob of carnelian nouveaux

  
 baubles all around the funereal
 sunken canopy of maudit covenants,
 rumors, glittering knives –
 ressentiment scripted into feral runes).

  
 A crossroad of aluminum tubing in the swamp.
 Ping from outer space, deflecting the rays.
 Silence, alligators, flamingos.  Yarns
 and picayune lagniappe – pommes

  
 de terreurs – spooks and voodoo queens
 if you’re scared of the dark – a muttering
 broom delta, the sowing of the tombs
 beneath the Gulf.  Steal, sneak

  
 away now, Jim – Julius is sound asleep.
 We’re going down the inky path
 toward a kid wrapped up in llama
 tarp and catnap tape, tripwired – peels loose

  
 at midnight – watch!  While my ghosts
 of keen-mauled, kill-skinned, tree-masted
 River-Sixties gather steam upstream
 like a money-caulked coot of wood-

  
 stuck crocodiles, bobbing at the dawn levee.
 Watch – there go the shadows of the swallows!
 Soon the sun arrives, lifting over the lousy
 prism-blocks (Angola, Ethiopia veiled, unveiled).


      
                         11.22.99