Matthew Buchwald

For twenty miles a lion followed her
Through the lonely desert
While she played on the mandolin, a sad song
And drank wine from a jar.
...

Men are Homeric, women are ineffable.
Let Solomon or the bards hallow the woman,
Historians and heros shall judge the man,
The pathetic man, who wept, tearing out his hair,
...

A cat runs away
It swallows the stars like a sacred charm,
It has always been old
Immune to the cold
...

Daybreak found Mabee in the jungle,
Cutting his way through the rainforest,
Making for the foothills of the high country.
He paused, listening for the telltale sound
...

My head has become as soft as a tidal marsh,
The clammers cut into it, making slushy sounds,
Every day and every night they dig,
They squish like the valves of time.
...

Why is it that the thing which we hate
is also the cause of our happiness?
The instinct which inspired my hatred
of the city, now brings me joy.
...

Looming before a horizon,
Far from equatorial seas,
Of charcoal gray and indigo,
Repeating bars of ivory,
...

The stealthy fragrances of Northern lights
Are stilled by the obtuse angles of your thighs
And sleep, tender and sated.
Your breast is a terra-cotta rose
...

It's a dark cavern where the highway weeps
Sadly yielding grey cinders to the dust,
Where the moon on the grim river creeps:
It's a seething crater, a hole in the Earth's crust.
...

do you remember
Leon Trotsky in Central Park
holding a catcher's mitt
for the mermaids from Weeki Wachee Springs
...

(from Cool to New Thing)

Dusk with a streak of crimson above the trees
Yields to the chill, shivers to the moan of horns;
...

And now his grim sigh of mortality,
Of endless droughts, erratic wanderings,
Muslin shrouded and enfeebled where
The crescentic pitted scowl Earthward looms,
...

Besides photographic mountains aggregated by the canvas above a lake
That neither reflects the sky nor the psyche,
Certain clouds are formed from a jumble of shapes,
Each one condensed from a single stroke of paint.
...

This preposterous gizmo, when its drive
Wheels start spinning: cogs, ratchets and
Levers torpedo its balance setting it afire
To the tune of smash the keys player piano.
...

It's fine to be a purple peacock pooping on a statue.
Roost there. Roost there forever.
Look at the stains left by the pigeons. Perch on the sword.
Hop around on the horse's rump.
...

A dreamer wanders alone in the snow.
His heart hides out in the cave of remorse.
But there's fury in him. Dread is held back
and the demon tears loose trying to drag him down.
...

A blaze of heat and the wings tear apart
About the falling youth, whose skin turns pale
From melted wax, flaw in the craftsman's art;
Shed of plumage his bare arms start to flail.
...

Up where the air is clear
Beauty frees the mind of worry,
The hikers on the ridgetop trails
The climbers on the peaks above.
...

The stars cry too bitterly this morning:
like a dying child, in the cradle, alone,
with a tight fist, sullenly warning,
until someone arrives, an absent chaperone,
...

Perhaps the most outrageous fraud ever perpetrated upon a believing public with near total acceptance, was the notorious Alternative Cosmos Swindle which appeared in a news story published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1905. The article claimed to be based on the previously unpublished findings of the renowned Dr. Norton Armstrong recounting certain laboratory researches alleged to have been conducted in the ruins of Macchu Picchu high in the Andes Mountains, using the instrumentality of an 'Ionic Ether Inverter, ' whose power plant consumed over 200 tons of coal during the course of the experiment. The observations and theoretical conclusions were taken from the diary of Dr. Armstrong, although no copy of the diary has ever been found by any of the investigators who have looked into the matter. In lurid detail, and with a great deal of sensationalistic commentary, the grotesqueries of the Alternative Cosmos as witnessed by the famed physicist and his laboratory aides were recounted. A 'monstrous habitation' was discovered alongside the ancient ruined city: 'fouler streets were never trod since the time of the black plague in Europe.' Its boulevards overflowed 'with disease infested refuse surrounded by slimy, decaying dwellings impossibly constructed out of rubbish, each rising to a height of several stories, thronging the byways of the obscene megalopolis for endless miles, with rotting mounds of animal and vegetable matter crept and crawled over by a menagerie of devolved mutants.' There were piles of entrails 'of a gangrenous sheen'; heaps of effluvia with 'poisonous halos'; swarms of blood colored vermin resembling giant leeches with articulated necks and heads 'as if they were in the process of metamorphosing into human form'; profane hybrid creatures — a cross between hyena and serpent; reptilian skinned rodents with the heads of birds, queer six legged herd animals, and a repulsive cat-sized oyster without a shell. The latter was described in much the same terms as the aquatic invertebrate except that it had one mammalian eye with lid and lashes, and teeth inside its cloaca orifice. It ate its own young whenever they came near, and its pseudopods were stronger and more deadly than those of any shellfish; from the malicious gleam in its one eye, there could be little doubt that it would prey upon a human being.
But even these malign freaks of nature paled by comparison with the slime-sac men 'six feet in breadth, inflated, except for the limbs, with a toxic foul-smelling gas, and with combustible grease continually oozing out of their anuses.... In general appearance they exaggerated all the fabled characteristics of a troglodyte or ogre' — which characterization could easily have been regarded as understatement; because, though depicted as 'natural beings acting only in accordance with their instinct, ' the scientifically non-judgmental valuation was arguably undermined by passages that described sexual practices 'more bestial and repugnant than any others known to modern medical science.' In the 'Slough of Oozing Filth, ' with execrable monuments built of hardened mucous, the upper class of slime-sac men were discovered, 'miserably free of toil and barely alive, ' vomiting up their own excreta and eating it again; and within the same precincts a kindred species of inside-out man, or skinless scum monkey, were seen through the jaded eye of the Ether Inverter 'so abhorrent in their hideousness that they were a good deal more ugly than the most repellent religious depictions of the tortured inmates of hell's innermost circle.'
Such and more were the carnival midway attractions of the Alternative Cosmos Swindle; and, however ludicrous and incredible the story may seem today, in spite of its adroit use of narrative technique and its punctiliously assembled collection of scientific data, when the article appeared no questions were raised as to its veracity, for the readers of the Chronicle, even those living on Nob Hill, were inured to the idea of daily ground breaking new theories in the natural sciences as heralded in the Chronicle's reporting, for instance, of the published ideas of Eduard Suess, distinguished member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and discoverer of the lost continent of Gondwanaland. Using the newspaper as their platform, the swindlers, it is said much more cleverly than Charles Ponzi, were able to sell large numbers of exorbitantly priced tickets to San Franciscans willing to travel to Macchu Picchu to witness the Alternative Cosmos freak show who would discover when they arrived that no Ionic Ether Inverter had ever existed. Luckily, however, the innocent victims of the scheme were all on their way to Peru the very same day in 1906 when the great earthquake destroyed large parts of San Francisco.
...