Buffalo
We are in a crop-duster
Low
below the cloud line
We can see the thunderhead coming
It’s only a hundred or so feet off of the ground
Our landing strip is too far away
We set down on the grey gravel patch near the piles
The buffalo are close
Our plane upsets the largest one
As soon as we have gotten close to stopping
He begins chasing
We speed up again
He’s thrusting his rhinoceros horn at the rear of the plane
Which is open and only a foot or so away from my seat
I’m trying to film
The camera is on the wrong setting
The storm is closing in
I can see the buffalo’s downy fur
Like beautiful ringlets
Like those on a perfect cake
He is light brown
almost grey in the face
I can’t get my camera to stay recording
This moment is so beautiful and full of terror
I ask the co-pilot if his rifle is loaded
He hands me a heavy black handgun
I take it into my right hand and fire three shots into the buffalo
He continues for a few seconds and then..
Time nearly stops
The co-pilot asks me how I fired more than once,
I don’t know.
It just worked
“There is so much sound everywhere”
The buffalo is now sitting in the seat next to me
He is no longer a buffalo
He is an old Robert Redford
Disheveled hair
far too skinny
His left hand holds his face
His palm where his nose should be,
Each of his eyes is out of its socket
Hanging a few inches from his face but without gravity,
Straight out,
each eye is like a fish’s eye,
Flattened
His mouth is so very pronounced like a skeleton’s
I see his gums and teeth
He is crying, confused
The co-pilot is now Spencer For Hire’s Robert Urich,
Robert Redford is asking
“Why did you shoot me, why did you shoot me”?
Robert Urich answers
“ You were a buffalo,
You were chasing us,
Tearing at our plane with your horn”
Robert Redford is bawling now,
Bawling like he is at once accepting his own death,
like one who has been cheated in the most irrevocable sense.
He is child-like
Confused.
“I’m didn’t know I’m was a buffalo”
I didn’t know I’m-was a buffalo…”
It was the saddest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.
Which is the preferred
beast
Haunting or haunted
by nature
He who is dead, shy
to encounter the living
And likewise,
Weeping on tin,
A century past
Protected from Earth
Coming towards an old
beginning
One black bubble,
Cast beneath the rug of infinite desire
Upon it, the remains
of brains and voluptuous bodies
Do softly tread,
One and then the
other,
Forever sampling
songs of abstract love,
Anti-amniotic,
Imitations by
aesthetic
I’ve found for you an
old and brilliant archetype
Remembered from the hayloft
of our years
The key to which, I
hesitate to say, ….is.
For It comes only as
metaphor
Known only to the
language of knowing
Of this, one can be
sure.
River and Cloud
Rehearsing
the amorphous form
A
river and a cloud
My relatives
I call them
And
think of them often
They
come to me in recovery rooms
They
come without handles or angles
True
badge of the Real
Indefinitely
they are
In
the church of this-or-that
The
carpooled Saint and the chauffeured Prophet
An
experience here
A
nuance there
Flirting
the line
Absorbed
in the form
A hardly
found blur, the newest prescription
Like
a system of ethics
Exposed
to the air.
Silken Maybes
In the cave of silken
maybes lay a fortress built of wings
Their title, your milk
and my dagger
So begets the gilded
dove
So sails the wilted
sovereign sigh
This arthritic waltz
Our flower rehearsed
Great Captain
To the wards of past-time I implore:
A request from captains chair
The final inquiry,
as to the Space-ship of my desire
for this I have sought your council
I am the great Captain
Famed of cape and laser pistol
My hour,
a thousand hours,
my utterance,
a volume
like all good captains I bare the alms of a storied life
my song
a cadence like mud and lightning
our smear through time,
poignant when we shine
not the first
but a first for each
more mud than lightning
great gravity calls
Requesting of the Captains chair
Ready my ship
Maybe the first.
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