ALBUM NUMBER 01

POEMS FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

____by Brett Zehner
A POETIC CLIMATE RECORD OF THE ATMOSPHERE
SOURCE TEXT: POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM


1945
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie
1947
No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants
pharmaceutical or not and consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to repletion,
in vapors,
in special humors of the atmosphere, on particular axes of atmospheres
drawn by force and by synthesis about war except fear.
And long live war, right?
I saw a lot of machines fight
but I saw only in the infinite
rear
The earth of black coal
is the only humid spot
in this cleft of rock.
1950
And after me came rustling ill repute
And bitter is the air of banishment–
Like poisoned wine
1951
Hanging, fluttering clouds of dust,
smelling of smoke
Eddies
of flame and smoke
My reason demands weapons
My reason calls to arms
The moon has no air
1953
and loving in the snow
and sun
the weather
filled in the flower the weather
on Dogtown the other side of heaven
is Ocean
My air is the clockwork of your inventions:
You think I'm dead?
My body is big and fat
and fat with the bones of hitler and bismarck and nietzsche and truman.
1954
In the early March wind
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow....
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache
1956
On the bottom of the sky
In the ravines
The thunder means business
No garden no more no south no sugar no more no soap no joy
Winter is my salt my slush
On this too white sheet
the gaze is crime fir straight
oose yellow lianas I leave you to your loops
1957
I in dream
make mills for Wind
which rushes up
angry woman comes
takes bottle away
"windmills" she says
Wind lies down
under roof of fig-tree
Sun and me too
weave basket
for Sun and me
sheep sleep
my river sad as rain
and the blood and tears of a rueful world
will feel true as rain
Beneath the aeroplane patches of green slip by. Drops of pallor fallen onto the
watercolour not yet dry. Of an altogether different green if a complementary sun
appears, grey when on the fleeing map a cloud passes.
1958
a glowing tone of softness
only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, a doubting
night gray.
the unknown device–
a silver computer as bias as a
block of offices at least,
floating
like Magritte's castle on its rock, aloft
in blue sky–
did explode,
there was
a long moment of cataclysm,
light
of a subdued rose-red suffused
all the air before
a rumbling confused darkness ensued
do not spare your wrath upon our shores, that trees may grow
upon the sea, mirror of our total mankind in the weather
one who no longer remembers dancing in the heat of the moon may call
across the shifting sands, trying to live in the terrible western world
the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes,
lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions
1959
Worse days are coming
For the intestines of fish
Have frozen up in the wind.
In the distance your mistress sinks under the sand,
It pours through her wind-loosened hair
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted
while she whispered a song along a keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in and out,
From supermicroscop no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lighteyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind–
Poor! I wish I was free
of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead
Lost in the basin of shadow
the white cobwebs and the dust on the eyelashes,
particles and small pearls under a terrible rain
resoled for the better on a closed life.
a many-crested roof rends winds and birds,
North go
snow, birds and grass,
not much industry,
an antenna, airy arabesque or
ear strung into wind,
greetings and goodbye,
tree tree tree and tree
and come from there and pass by here,
and the clouds flake in the sky
the sun is not called bald
and htence was now heard a terrible coughing, as if
someone has been breathing birds on the wing

1960
A desolate wind from the city
and nearer, further
the bells' burden, swinging fifths
–it's burning! it's burning!–
of the dead march:
We lived – just then!
from sun to solar
solder
from salt to salty
saline
The slogans used by Communism are based on a desire for peace,
They are illusionary, for they are desiring an atmosphere for war.
The Ancient Rain is falling. It is falling on the N.A.T.O. meetings,
It is falling in Red Square. Will there be war or Peace?
The Ancient Rain knows, but does not say.
I make speculations of my own, but I do not discuss them
Because the Ancient Rain is falling.
The Ancient Rain is falling all over America now.
The music of the Ancient Rain is heard everywhere.
I stood on the brink of heaven.
And I swear that Great Territory did quake
when I fell, free
1961
The description of a mental
landscape, the unity of the urge
to exalt opposites.
1962
Yet my ears still wander the sky
my eyes keep hunting for underground water
and my hands hold a small book
describing the grotesqueness of modern white society
when looked down at from the nonwhite world
in my fingers there’s a thin cigarette–
I wish it were hallucinogenic
though I’m tired of indiscriminate ecstasy
Through a window in the northern hemisphere
the light moves slowly past morning to afternoon
before I can place the red flare, it’s gone:
darkness
Poems are commodities without exchange value
but we’re forced to invade new territory
by crises of poetic overproduction
You doctors searching
in the body of America for Capitalism’s
cancerous cells
invading her sleep,
you, turning your faces away,
Doctors, do not write
in the stories of your lives
Marilyn’s name.
Her death tells all there is to know
about you.
Her eyes sink,
become lakes.
Cheap films float there,
glimmering in moonlight
like flies on water,
projecting, with reflected light,
clear upon night sky
Hollywood floating sick
and bloodless.
To die bleeding real blood
you have to lie naked
1963
it was winter when he died, gasping for air
and locked in the clay of the limeless bog.
In the blinding fireball I contemplate
their return when it reaches the stratosphere while the multitude
of things go on, the head pressed
against the shoulder, thirty times brighter than the sun
they all return to their roots, hairs
in the mouth assume the well known mushroom shape
1964
(the morning sky
gets blue and red and I get worried about
mountains and mountains pressure
and the rust on the bolt in my door)
Under the blue sky the big earth is floating into “The Poems.”
Because the curtain flutters, the wind,
it is rising, the light in the fissure, the dark,
behind the curtain, there is, the night, the day,
boats in the canals, in bunches, the smooth canals,
they steer, loaded with sand, under the bridges,
it is morning, the iron paces, oars and motors,
the steps on the sand, the wind on the sand,
the curtains float their edges, because it is night,
a day of wind, of rain on the sea,
the sea behind the door, the curtains fill again with sand,
with stockings, with rain, stained with blood, hanging
1965
At the same time the temperature goes down, to reach its minimum, say freezing-point,
at the same instant that the black is reached, which may seem strange. Wait, more or
less long, light and heat come back, all grows white and hot together, ground, wall,
vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, till the initial level is reached when the
fall began. Leave them there, sweating and icy, there is better elsewhere. No, life ends
and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white
speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a
worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not
what they are doing.
in the Future, in the Future, but now drink vodka and lament the
Security Forces,
and the Capitalists drink gin and whiskey on airplanes but let Indian
brown millions starve
and when Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle the Just man is
arrested or robbed or had his head cut off,
but not like Kabir, and the cigarrette cough of the Just man above the
clouds
in the bright sunshine is a salute to the health of the blue sky.
and I am the King of May, in a giant jetplane touching Albion's airfield
trembling in fear
as the plane roars to a landing on the gray concrete, shakes and expels air,
and rolls slowly to a stop under the clouds with part of blue heaven still
visible.
Thus I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid Heaven.
in the street where the sun comes and the
moon comes and the cold wind in winter
waters your eyes. Say what you mean, dig
it out put it down, and be strong
about it.
These old houses
crumble, the unemployed stumble by us straining, ashy fingered
harassed. The air is cold
winter heaps above us consolidating itself in degrees.
We need a aspirin
or something, and
pull our jackets close. The baldheaded man on th etelevision st goes on in
a wooden way
and then we used to think it was not the wind, but the maniac
scratching against
our windows. Who is the maniac, and why everywhere at the same time….
1966
To the ear
Noises
From the world
Time and space
Were left,
They would now
Disappear
With the things–
What a body
Can do
Or can make
Thought
Not image
Or word,
Tongues,
That fail quiet,
Desires
That may order
We fly forwards
and look back.
What heaven it was!
What hell it was!
People of my country,
look back into the future
You’re getting thin. You don’t go to the factory anymore.
Your life, your pain rise like steam to the skies
to the bursting pupils of your eyes.
You say, “This blue– I cannot stand it!
My head will explode!
Someone, someone greedy, yet stately and strange
switched on the light in my head and decided to stay forever.
at the same time
in the sky an
organ sounded
1967
belated thunderstorms, cold Spring.
Trees without blossoms.
Our new language– we have to throw ourselves into it.
Birches firs beeches maples, above their crowns the
colors of the sky
YES GOD THE DESIRE HANGS THERE UNFILLED TURNS INTO
SMOKE!!
I TURN AND FLY BEFORE IT, AFRAID OF THE HIDDEN
impatience: a sterility
brought under accusation:
an echo:
in chasms: diverse liquids:
colorless numbers of
speech:
1968
After the lifting of the mist
after the lift of the heavy rains
the sky stands clear
and the cries of the city risen in day
26. the……………to suck the rain
27. …………very warm on our knees
28. the long men* ++++++++++++ to eat the children
in the holes, between hillocks……………hot………….
which is the hot wind
That will kill him in a great fire
Seperated from a house
In the bleached world. He dies
like the king of the hurricane who draws
Lightning and ++++++++++++++++++++the sound, the proper
Voice for the saying, the murmuring, the uttering, the chant
Of wheat and barley changed by murmer into animal liveliness
1969
A VIBRATING
COMPLEX, ANY ADDITION OR SUBTRACTION
OF COMPONENT(S), REGARDLES OF APPARENT
POSITION(S) IN THE TOTAL SYSTEM,
PRODUCING ALTERATION, A DIFFERENT MUSIC.
FULLER: AS LONG AS ONE HUMAN BEING IS
HUNGRY, THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE IS
HUNGRY. City planning's obsolete. What's
needed is global planning so Earth
may stop stepping like octopus on its
own feet.
What shall
we wear as we travel about? A summer suit
with or without long underwear? What
about Stein's idea: People are the way
their land and air is?
The time is.
The air seems a cover,
the room is quiet.
in a foreign land
or any shimmer the city
in Juarez the blank
political days press her now
The mission bells are ringing
in Kansas
And it stretches things themselves
until they blend into one,
so if you’ve seen one thing
you’ve seen them all
the sun rests deliberately
on the rim of the sierra
Like a girl of pink chalk on a very old wall suddenly erased by the rain.
The night of the two dispersed with the fog. It’s the season of cold food.
Night has the shape of a wolf’s cry
Yellow flowers constellate a circle of blue earth. The water quivers full of wind.
fuck it
I say I dream of the 1943 riots
I say I dream in a hail storm of riots
and I say riots dream into a mass of skins stooping
on flat bed bones of a funky nighttrain
1972
Nine clocks spring open
and smash themselves against the sun.
A turbulent, torrential
cascading blindness behind
a Congo river of blood.
1973
music without the ghost
of another person in it
music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table
Flat heartland of winter.
The moonmen come back from the moon
White light splits the room
The enemy, always just out of sight
snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded
in a snowy blur, abominable snowman
gunnding down the babies at My Lai
vanishing in the face of confrontation
The prince of air and darkness
computing body counts, masterbating
in the factory of facts.
I suddenly see the world
as no longer viable
the landscape of bone
many sleep
the whole way
others sit
staring holes of fire into the air
others plan rebellion
awake in prison
I breath a breathless I love you
And move you
Forever
1974
thunder
pomegranate
bull
Mar7 SIGNAL
just retype this original page
MEET OUT OF THE FREEZER in pink letters about 18 inches off the floor
negative red letters it’s not HIGH ENOUGH Neither are the negative words
about 10 inches off the bedroom floor
well stickerail my pa did well say
mailerwail contrail cut the slail
Will you carry a light?
Will you make the land tonight?
I will carry a light
I see the land, land in sight
I SEE words on my forehead
IN THE AIR
only at the rim does the day tremble and shine
Still the sky is yellow and
completely with us, as if at birth. Is the throat
dry, no it is mine and lined with marrow;
bone on the other hand “can be here today
and gone tomorrow”
1975
the dark to escape in brilliant highways
of the night sky, finally
why had they not
mirror of sky among leaves,
in low grasses at morning,
mirror of high sky in low and of heaven in high
along the milky way
should I catch you, with my rusting lofty ideas, my soot, that I inhale
you, I breathe you,
with your mists and thrashers, that I stamp on you with all my drums,
with my fingers
I am the asthmatic breath, ghostly, mechanic and automatic and pathetic,
and parodic
pathologic, psychologic pneumatic, of one vibrant voice against the light,
with an honest
1976
What is dead is elsewhere
and nothing, one is a child knows little
like the sand embezzling the rain
and enjoying it in the dark
a minute ago one walked there so black and cocksure
that one fused with ones target
1977
Listen white world
To the volleys of our dead
Listen to my zombi voice
Listen white world
My typhoon of wild beasts
My blood shredding my anguish
Over all the world's roads
Listen white world
1978
Must they drag the sky away?
Where Germany's sky blackens the earth
a decapitated angel searches for a grave for the hatred
and ofers you the bowl of the heart
the fleering snow
off the eaves
of the garage
planes grounded
around the world
no flight paths
politics
suspended in snow
Turgid itch and the perfume of death
On a whispering south wind
A smell of abyss and of nothingness
The air milky and spiced with the trade winds
White flesh was showing
Crystal bone into thin air
Night sky
Dispersal and emptiness
real danger. gambles. and the edge of death
Two days without food trucks roll past
in dust and light, rivers
are rising.
Thaw in the high meadows. Move west in July.
But the faces are not imagined now, they are real.
I lie straight out like a cross-street.
Many step out from the white mist.
We touched each other once– we did!
An artist said: Before, I was a planet
with its own dense atmosphere.
Entering rays were broken into rainbows.
Perpetual raging thunderstorms, within.
Now I’m extinct and dry and open.
I no longer have childlike energy.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
No rainbows.
I stayed overnight in the echoing house.
Many want to come in through the walls
but most of them can’t make it:
they’re overcome by the white hiss of oblivion.
Anonymous singing drowns in the walls.
Discreet tappings that don’t want to be heard
drawn-out sighs
my old repartees creeping homelessly.
Listen to a society’s mechanical self-reproaches
the voice of the big fan
like the artificial wind in mine tunnels
six hundred metres down.
Our eyes keep wide open under the bandages
Revolving door. The garbage barge at the bridge. Earth Science.
It’s always time to leave.
If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t.
The wind blows your hat off.
The sun rises also.
I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it
for ourselves.
Run in front of your shadow.
A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister.
The landscape is motorized.
1979
Brick buildings shut down in winter.
A monument works to change scale.
Nothing touches the surface.
The arbitrary is meant to be sensed.
The air witnesses an abduction.
Motion isolates this effect.