(sound) waves

Jack Galmitz

Copyright Jack Galmitz, 2012 Seawall Press

The sun ran over a train

Sagging skin recalls winter grain

the moon (a witness to a shooting)

the moon (an ambulance waiting)

the killer thrusts a sword in the crowds ol

the conch pressed to my ear brings a pink sound

the piano plays pink streaks of rain

voices and trees the trees voices the voices trees

birds in books are caged

framing time a violin played coll a road drawn with simple lines

space between words lines evenly spaced temple to template

rows of glass wall blocks watery blue

subway column bolts tempt touch

hummingbird still in the air

this twisted glass bowl a waterfall froze

And the stars cried children

I spit out diamonds

I repeat Im dead

The electric chair in a series of colors consummates living

whatever it is it is not my

pens backed by guns and money drew these villages towns boundaries

(bellicoso) words exchanged between men

(col pugno) it ends

433 the pleasure of a cough a scraped shoe resettling in a plush chair a throat cleared

we become a group watching the FIRETRUCK

This is a crann the Celts worshipped

THAT huge shadow coming round that ROMAN WALL will reach that young girl

Applause a crime interrupted by snowfall

Above their heads They carry their dead The sky wont bend

Forest leaves make sound rain

The word is an orange or a sunset or a murder

Im walking on moonlight

A sign pointing right to the other ocean

Shadows of an empty bench in snow by a lake made by the street lamp

The day came I live in the scums a paramecium

In the courtyard floodlights rutting dogs

East New York

East New York looks like Munich after WWII. Guts of buildings, no certain # of stories, spray paint black where there had been windows, the copper piping stolen. Blocks and blocks of desolation ghetto. They come in the dark from what were corners, each alone, crossing the dry, spent, dirt where nothing can grow, where there had been carpets of grass, and neighbors talked. The buildings glow like corpses laid out on morgue tables. Converge on one structure in the open where people wait nervously, shaking a little from sickness and stretches too long between injections. Each puts tens, twenties under a steel door and out comes a glassine envelope of horse. I wait my turn. Put a hundred under and ask for a bundle. It comes wrapped in a rubber band and I put it in my pocket. My friend buys four bags. He also buys coke. He likes to shoot them together. Ive seen him boot it and just stare glass eyed for nearly an hour while the blood congealed and I was afraid he had left the earth. We drive back. I snort one bag and soon it drips and that taste, a bit bitter, enters my mouth. In a minute the view of Manhattan from Brooklyn looks like it was sculpted in stainless steel with lights on the water by the Navy Yard the docks gently rock, the lights caught in the waves undulating, sinusoidal traveling plane wave entering a region of lower wave velocity at an angle, illustrating the decrease in wavelength and change of direction (refraction) that results. I lit a cigarette the way a man does after sex. A

conquest? Not much. The enveloping dark is what I want. The chop of a toy piano set up. Im high. The moon is up (witness of a shooting). Pleasure is in my veins. We pass old houses like film grain. The moon is out (an ambulance waiting). There are just lights and night and two of us. When we get to his house, he shoots up. We put on an album of Bud Powells. He was institutionalized a number of times; received electroshock therapy. Mentally unstable for his life. But could he play. Could he play. Could he.

The Strings to Heaven

The strings to heaven were severed with scissors of water. All fell down. We went shopping and bought. Nicolas Joseph Cugnot invented a steam powered automobile in 1769, leading to bank robbery getaways, the delivery of milk bottles, and steaming hours stuck on stagnant highwayssometimes to the beach and waves. Men and women stopped wearing head coverings as prescribed in Corinthians and the wavy look became fashionable. Louis-Victor de Broglie claimed that all matter, not just light, had a wave-like nature. Some people cared; most did not give a fuck. We sat on the knoll by the lake and watched wind ripples all day. Less and less of the body was covered. We were not ashamed. Edison invented the light bulb and soon night was day and stars were plucked down and placed on filthy, cobblestoned streets. Trains were given overhead catenary systems and people traveled from Hoboken to Gladstone looking out at cows and horses, tractors, threshers and night gathering from clouds of gray. Then back again. Elevators climbed. The iron frame raised. Cities were mountain ranges; apartments caves. We wore less and were not ashamed. Steamships traveled oceans, rivers, lakes, dropped goods at ports and didnt stay. We looked around and saw ourselves. What we thought we printed and it stayed. We dissected. Saw how we were made. Diseases were catalogued. We looked around and

saw ourselves and waved. We made steel and built tanks and machine guns, hand-grenades, airplanes and bombs. We were less than naked, millions were merely body parts. We played the harp. We couldnt reattach the strings to the sky. (Though some thought that they had.) Looking down from the observatory of the Empire State Building are lines of yellow cabs and cars and corners, grids, and dark stops. You can see Piet Mondrian in his studio purified of things painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. You can anticipate Shinya Tsukamoto. I took an ocean liner and stood on the deck and though no one was waiting for me at the dock, like everyone else I waved and waved until my arm dropped.

Im Walking Without

Im walking without direction. Am I lost? Only if I were goingsomeplace. Im not. Ive lived my life like this. Do I recommend it? I do not. Ive learned a lot. Gradations of thesmallest degree. How grass differs from earth. Concrete. Cobblestone. Ice that is safe. Ice that is not. When a mans dangling arms are dangerous. When not. When I walk my body my Achilles tendons hurt. When my body leads its soft. I know where they unload carcasses of skinned goats. I know where young men play basketball. Handball. To take off their shirts. I know the sounds of rain on canvas awnings. I know the sounds of rain on aluminum awnings. I know where the homeless hang out. I know the graffiti artists. I know where to buy the cheapest cigarette lighters. I know the sound of rain on the peak of my cap. I know the worn smooth surfaces of manholes and where they were made: (India.) I know which fruit stands have fluorescent lights flickering and need change. I know the men who deliver live fish from trucks to the Chinese markets and the heaviness of their rubber aprons and boots. I know where I can get comidas chinos y latinos. I know where to find black market cigarettes in New York. I know which way is north by the growth of moss on the trees. I used to be as handsome as Rudolph Valentino and I know what its like to have to prove your whole life you are manly. Now, no one looks at me. Ive become the shape and color of a brick faade,

the sky, a window with merchandise, a parked car, anything you want. I bought a piece of chalk and wrote a poem on a wall: She was due the doctors delivered a red balloon. Im walking without direction. If youre following me stop. Turn away. Get lost yourself.

Sometimes youre all the hope that is

When I walk these streets I pass through angels, a bird with broken wings. How many yards, what speed, what reflection, did it take for it to break its neck. It looked at me. I could see it could see. But I was no savior; couldnt hold the leaving or raise the crippled. Things happen. Suddenly, Im thrust in a situation over which I cave. Its eyes held mine like the hands of a small child. What could I say. Whistle a tune to soothe it, as if I werent afraid. It couldnt be fooled by music however inspired it may. It needed assurance; it needed to know I was brave. I picked it up and stroked its head, small as the tears that angels shed, and said, plover chick, far from the shores of birth, soon youll be back amongst the others at the waters growing up. The eyes were wide and small and undecided, but I was all it had so it trusted. I was late for work. I decided to take off, take a train and go to Montauk Point and lay the bird in the dunes or in the flats or Marram grass, where it could die where it knew best, could smell the salty air, the wind off the seas back, the piping perhaps of its own kind in the whirlwind air. I put it under my hat and off we went. I whispered to it and told it the name of each stop, so it would store it in memory of its life. A man beside me eyed me in a way that I felt sure he knew I had a plover chick on my head, but what he didnt know was the bird had found me or the other way and I was just following orders. We got off and there was the Montauk lighthouse at Turtle Hill,

the furthest tip of Long Island. Its a heavily wooded area and I could see and I showed the bird the converging of the Atlantic Ocean and Block Island Sound. I took a trail into the woods and sat on a rock and told the chick to take a look at the seals sunning on the offshore rocks. Im not sure it could see anything more than a blur, but there we were. As the sky turned pink and mauve, I said goodbye to the bird and placed it in soft sand grass. Its eyes were still wide and it was still alive and I think it thanked me.

The Audition

It was raining. Barely. As if squirrels were spitting from the trees. It was a series of notes visible in the street lamps by Eric Satie. The volume increased; at points softened; car tires whoosh on the street. I craned my neck to see the stars in front of me. No travelers around for company or criminal activity. It was the bodys black interior. Nor was I out. I was a dream. And the notes lassoed the clouds; brought them down. The fog had the features of nude light in a dark park by Brassai, or Rorschach prints changing from brain to butterfly, black to white, balanced cubes of cotton infiltrates. I walked. Hastened my steps. The idea of the moon was out. High notes descended stairs, ascending nobody who was aware. It was a tilted street where a prostitute should be smoking a red cigarette. Maybe it was just my thoughts. It was Lent (slowly) and I had sacrificed DESIRES. They repeated. In grass. In bush. In naked tree. In the houses. 1940s Tudors, Victorians. No lights shining, three stories with one story. In disrepair. Sagging. Family resemblances between the others. Suddenly, a man in a cherrypicker chair raised high shouted run as fast as you can. I turned and a camera was aimed at me as if I were a lion or a chair. Brilliant lights blinded me. I began to run and turn. Out

of one of the driveways came a crowd of thieves, burglars. They said there he is, get him and lets do what has to be done to keep the law from hounding us. I ran, as a shark in misty air. When I reached the corner, it all stopped. I was panting like a fish dropped on a dock. There was a prostitute smoking a red cigarette. Or, so I thought. The man in the chair descended. He approached, reached out his hand. Youre hired, he said. As to salary, youre in command.

lingering oak leaves play the Giro

Black strokes on white white between strokes the page poem

Explosive black strokes twist touch explosive white strokes the poem is in love

The point is the point is the point is not

The girl in the field flying a kite is a dot

Wherever I go I leave a composition in blue

A thick straight line close beside a thin straight line the white between divine

De Koonings Gift to Kline and Me

House paint black square centered on the canvas. Inside white space. Surrounding white space. Below a long thick black line stretches to the edges of the canvas (and beyond). They are in relationship. They are imperfect. Each drips a series of points. Of a kind. The horizontal line is longer. The square box is central. The eye travels the points, or the indefinite dots, and joins them. The box is the focal point, so smaller it dominates, slightly. The line for all we know may be the top of another box, larger, that the canvas cant show (its boundaries). If you zoom out sometimes a dot becomes a womans portrait. Everywhere everything is dots. Even shapes. Even lines. The box levitates in its white sky. It is penetrated by white and blocks off white. The box travels. The line travels. Each in different directions. Perhaps, though towards one destination. The lines of the box parallel to the line below creates variation, movement, rhythm. It is static. It is active. Though the figures are made of lines they are heavy, dense, and so suggest volume, but with little mass, since the square is empty or filled with the same negative space of white that surrounds it. The line is filled in, heavy, more of mass than plane, yet as it is off-center it is dominated, slightly, by the square. I long to understand: the line, the square. Why viewing objects through a projector-say a night light or a chair-makes them abstract and makes us yearn the rest of our lives to find them in this new light, this new aware. Love of perspective is not easy; it leads to ecstasy and despair.

An ink black tire track driven on twenty paper sheets removed the painter from the paint

Erased de Kooning Drawing took two weeks to complete replete with textures

A Kali image transposed onto a catwalk photo transfer art

In the diorama a small bulb lit for a reader

Night She orbits

the distance between a planet and its moons the chairs in the room

A two-headed calf adds visitors to the curiosity museum

Thunder claps

Concrete streets straighten snow swirls

like the pink of petunias on her lips

Its a red sea not the Red Sea

When the tide retires and the clouds dissipate French horns are played

The pig factory a young one dies covered with flies

Damn the stern

I ride a whale

being seen by the mannequins in every street

in winter woods the leaves underfoot watching us

A great white surfaces night

Down the street a Chinese man hanged himselfI dreamt of sharks

No Ordination for MALDOROR

I am no Comte De Lautreamont. I am not mean, murderous. I do not see my face in all mens visages. I listen to the music of the sun, the rustling of wheat, the fields of corn, the blue grapes blush. I do not tickle babies under their chins, but they do make me smile as if seeing new grass in the field. My nails are long, unkempt, but not grown to brush a childs curls and then when unexpected to sink them into a childs tender breast, being careful, though, not to kill him; for if he died, there would be no later viewing of his misery. I admit, over most of my years, to being a mass unmarked grave with my secret dead, but since Ive changed. I, unlike the Comte, believe in the difference between right and wrong and do not believe, as he, that they be one and the same thing, by which in our furious rage we attest our impotence and our passionate thirst to attain the infinite by even the maddest means? Nor, did I change for Judgment Day, for I do not believe in God. But, I do not do good for Him, for God, O you, he called, whose name I will not inscribe upon this page consecrated to the sanctity of crime, I know your forgiveness was as boundless as the universe. Nor would I mock God and reply but look, I'm still here! I am not, Comte De Lautreamont, an accomplice to your boastful crimes. Men

may be hideous inside, but still they possess the love of the tufts of chicks newborn and the beauty of the wild. Nor do I see a brewing storm as black and hideous as the human heart. If a woman loved me, as one loved the Comte, I would not retort wolves and lambs look not on one another with bedroom eyes. Nor would I mate with a female shark and see in her the mate of my desire, sister to my belief in evil and plunder. I am not a cherub, nor an aspiring angel, but I love and in love I am human.

Even you hair like cornfields I can drive through for years

I kept firing its desiring inspiring said Mr. to Mrs. over tea

I love to sleep To dream, to marry the woman Who left me a child

Bats circling the edge of the barn the sound mountains make

Man and porpoise make clicking sounds shake their heads

A far off barking travels across the river sorrow nerve cells hear

Computer Generated Poem (with editing)

Tunas view an old captain. Ah, love! Oh, endurance!

Computer Generated Poem II (with editing)

Faith is a dead girl. Love is a dead mast. Shores grow! Sailors quietly desire a ship.

Computer Generated Poem III (with editing)

Girls rise like small ships. All moons view unpopulated shores.

Sunday Morning

Purity doesnt exist. Everything is mixed. The organization of elements into hierarchically higher things is inseparable from its parts. So, is it just words we use when we speak of bodies and things. Do they exist These components, the eyes, ear, nose, feet, hands, heart, are they not composed of smaller things. Are they independent of their vessels, cavities, fluids, tissue, cells, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Or are we using words. Are we confusing words with things. Are there bodies. Are there stars. Are there cities. Are there wars. Are children starving. Is there a world in which these things are. Is there a world in which actions occur. Or are they compositions sub rosa Have we made it all up. Is it all fermions (leptons, quarks), hadrons, bosons. Is there good. Does it not require bad or else it has no substance or mass. If it is pure it cannot stand. It must create bad to endure, to exist. If this is so is it still good. Pure. How else.