The Same Old Jazz

OK, it's imperishable or a world as Will

& Idea, a Hindu illusion that our habits continuously

Create. Whatever I think, it

Keeps changing from bright to dark, from clear

To colored: Thus before I began to think and

So after I've stopped, as if it were real & I

Were its illusion

But as Jaime de Angulo said, "What's wrong with two?"

So Sunday morning I'm in bed with Cleo

She wants to sleep & I get up naked at the table

Writing

And it all snaps into focus

The world inside my head & the cat outside the window

A one-to-one relationship

While I imagine whatever I imagine

Weed

dry stalks of yarrow,

repeated Y-branching V's, a multiplication

Of antelope, deer-horns? Umbels

Hairy brown stars at the tip of brown wires

A menorah, or more learnedly, "hand" written in Great Seal Script

Almost against the window, horns again

Reindeer colored (in the sun) branching

Bare young loquat tree

Next door on the right the neighbors are building

Something in the garage, sawing & whirly-grinding

On wood. Models of the nina , the pinta & the santa maria

Life-size with television sails

Bright sky & airplanes & bugs mixed with

Flying paper ashes, the lid's off somebody's incinerator

There all that is & the reflection of tatami -color

In the silver bowl of my hanging lamp.

What if I never told any of this?

White cat

Spooked in the grass, alert against the satyrs

That pursue, she's full of kittens already

. . . gone under the steps, under the porch

Cleo rises to bathe

& closes the bathroom door

My own bathtub becomes a mystery

Now that cat's on the window-ledge

Propped against the green sash, whiter

In the creamy light reflected off the kitchen door

What if I never said?

Singing & splashing in the bathtub

A mystery, a transformation, a different woman

Will emerge

The birds have been pleased to show up

Bugs in the air won't last

And the chief satyr cat arrives

Ignores the birds, ascends the back stairs to spray the newel-post

A Message To The White Queen:

"Sweet Papa is here."

He disappears and immediately

There she is, delicate pink nose reading"

"Sweet papa! The same old jazz."

Water glugs in the drain

A strange girl scours herself with my tired old towels

I think of her body & stop writing

To admire my own, some of her beauty rubbed off on me

Now some of my ugliness, some of my age

Whirls down the bathroom drain.

She'll go away. I'll go away. The world will go away.

("The idea of emptiness engenders compassion

Compassion does away with the distinction

between Self & Other . . .")

But through her everything else is real to me & I have

No other self.

"What's wrong with two?"