David Shapiro Poems

I am jealous of the sand
beneath you
around you
what you see
...

If one saves a butterfly, has one saved the world?

Rabbi says: If one saves one butterfly, even with long wings,
one butterfly that has fallen into water, it may be said:
...

1.

My son said Daddy are there words for everything? I said You mean the space between

The clouds?
"Yes!" "No!"

Like those who love to think one word will take care of Maupassant's tree and his landlady.
But it turns out you will get no further than the words that reach and do not touch.

X uses a hard word one per poem like throwing a true diamond sale or throwing a
Ruby on a Corten steel table, a little gold in cardboard. There is a country where
They make their own cardboard. General words the French love, a thousand eyes but only one
Kaleidoscope.
Even Merleau-Ponty not specific enough (said Meyer) like very pretty exit signs
Without numbers.

Paul Valéry said the world was made out of nothing and sometimes a bit of that
Nothing shines through. No grin, no cat.

But I think: The world was made of gold, and every once in a while
Some of that gold shines through.

You. They say it doesn't matter that you can't read the Book of Splendor in Aramaic. "Just leave it in your house." Amazing debilitating magic at the door!

If there were the right word for everything, each young philosopher
Could dream without sleeping. Using the same ruler and we'd all
Have the same measures and ladders without rungs, with regular risers.

Music without words: it does a good job of caring about you,
X-ray of thought the architect wanted. X-ray for the lovers—

I always loved to climb that ladder without rungs, I collect them. I fight over them, I forgive
My antagonist. Even the wild ladder without tongues. Even the literal is a metaphor.
This is not nothing says the boy to the teacher who could care less. Multeity. And if I made up a word
Would it survive like a quark of strangeness? Depends on which dictionary you're using, I told
The president of that company. And if you made it up, like a rare country?

I loved you in the near distance like a word and rare cool blood. What was I thinking?
"You actually think?"

2. family ways


My old dead father put it to me
Women of an "intimate" age
Reconciled all separation
He sung it out

Oh family ways, ah family ways
The song contained a pregnant pause pun praise
Patiently he observed, as the rat jumped out
Patient in music, patient in clay

Patient in love and in death, a satisfied ghost
...

There are those who feed only on oranges.
— S.Y. Agnon

Nothing rhymes in English with an orange.
It stands alone, with luster in a far tinge.
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

On Saturday it's blue like an orange
Or like a surrealist sight rhyme in a garage.
Nothing rhymes in English with an orange.

But rime riche is rich enough for an orange.
Still my doorman sings, Put it away in storage!
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

Orange replies: I'm drunk from my last bar-binge
Half-rhymes like hangovers suddenly impinge.
But nothing rhymes in English with an orange.

While my wife in French eats one in her nude linge
Playwrights Synge and Inge flap forward on a car-hinge.
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

Pronounce it orange and then expunge.
So ends the story of the very violet orange.
Nothing rhymes in English with an orange.
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.
...

Sisyphus had a bad back.
Why? Well, I get up in the morning
And my wife wants me to carry
A big blue bag of garbage
To my son now
Sleeping in a studio in NY. Five flights he will not carry.

Oh I say I'm not supposed to carry
More than five pounds of garbage

And she crosses the border with it

There was a dead body like little Pedro rolled down the
Hill by Buñuel and not the long kiss
Of L'age d'or but the dog and dog-dream
In Los Olvidados. How do you abandon dirt?
The blue bag also rolls down by itself, full of Pedro

Something little Pedro always wanted to do
It's a cold day. Man is garbage.

Sisyphus has a bad back.
...

Owl small be enough

The child for all his feathers was a cold.

Oh wow the owl.

The poem the vowels

The owl, look its vowels

That branch for you

Owl, are you an armature vector

And a large step for mankind?

Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift

You give to me give to you

Terrible other things happen.

We stay on our branch.


A hundred eyes

Two will do
...

The trees have sex,
Teach,
Focus.
Tohu Bohu
Chaos in a green light.
Alone again.
How alone I twist
at the end of thought
when illness is forgot
and the speaker


is punched on the bark
on the soft models.
The old abbot looked at us and laughed.
He loved electronic gadgets for his tomb.
You were as beautiful

as six almonds
as beautiful as
the naked foot
of the messenger of peace.

You sat in a corner of the page.
...

Some see a dove
And think Pigeon
Others see pigeons
And think Dove

Some know that all pigeons are doves
Some angry as if pigeons were not doves

But the city lover knows
And I try to reconstruct
The tattoo on one of your many branches

The more arms the more power
I think of you, O pale tattoo
All pigeons, all doves
You friendly cliff-dwellers
...

O put a hand on her hand
On Exterior Street
The day was full of day
On Exterior Street
Moths drank tears from sleeping birds
On Exterior Street
You could think and look
On Exterior Street
The balls of the sycamore were swinging
On Exterior Street
Storing the definitions loading the differences
Why did I still want to give it away
Why not wait and write about that beautiful green sweater
I was a virgin and learnt all about cells from Penelope
Even the private road is exterior
As one said all breasts are beautiful
The Flower this flower is falling over
It will never be more exalting
It will always be more exalting
On Exterior Street
...

When a poet is weak,
like a broken microphone,
he still has some power,
indicated by a red light.

The weak poet
is fixed to the wall
like an ordinary light.

Dependent and dismal by turns,
he is a nominalist
and a razor blade
and a light.

And the demons cry,
Cast him from the kingdom
for a copy of a copy!

Remove him
like the women who supported the temple —
slaves too free and alive.
His similes are ingenious, like science among lovers.

My friend, however early
you called, you had come
too late, again.

The weak poet
has not gone grey
but his sacrificed similes
lead nowhere.

And his I is like any other word
in the newspaper and he is cut up
like fashion.

Each window was seductive,
but even his diseases could be cured.
Your low voice alone
is major like a skepticism.

We had forgotten
the place and the stories,
and the fiery method, too familiar, too distant.

We had memorized the poems,
but only for prison.
With the first new year celebrated in chaos
above the red waters of Paradise.

Where a clayey groom
hears the bride's voice
like a stronger world —

Sound is all
a snake can do —
and charming sense
and strangeness.

Now the old poet
loses his voice like a garden.
But finds it again, like a street in a garden.

In the injured house
made of local sun and stone —
In the city of numbers
which everyone counts and hates and wants—

We could read together in a dark city garden,
scribbling with language over
screens like lips, scribbling the first mistranslations.
...