[two poems from Rabbit Duck]
[to order book]
IX
from Rabbit Duck by David Shapiro and Richard Hell
A naked woman is like leaving
all the lights on. Here's one
that's impossible to read. Look
at that erotically charged area
exposed. The message of the facial
expression overrides all others though.
An interesting thing is that a face
effects much by the expression its pure
repose may present subliminally. Joan
Crawford is always angry, Renee Zellweger
concerned and innocent, Meryl
Streep exalted.
I placed a diagram
of a sticky butterfly
on the wall
You were just a daguerreotype
seated on a tomb
a bug on your toes
a butterfly on your small knee
a butterfly obscures little of your breast
and the ghosts of butterflies
carve you out again
double you and a butterfly
on your grey foot and a butterfly figleaf
and a butterfly hat
and an orange drapery butterfly
Your nude back is burning
while I get an object on the dots
and the dots shimmer like thoughts turned
to water, the water
you are made of: blood, saliva, urine, wine,
etc. And the fluids
gird themselves in colorful peaks, tabulated
by resolute bird-like automata
or are they really birds?
until you're waving your arms around giggling
and I have to try and make you want me to fuck you
and I succeed!
with a red and blue
pencil I say you are
having the orgasm of the century and
it is as good as a typo
when you swing your
Indian hips on the screen
of my reticence and you
scream you are as bi as Siva
when she deserted all worlds
oh tall and slender one
oh you of whom the painters say
her leg speaks
but why did you tell me you went
both ways at the moment you were coming
well nevermind
I suppose I know: it did heighten things
but that's old hat
and you're looking
good rather
in the altogether
hatless
whether
it's cloudy or bright
or weather altogether: but
rather, interior and totally
dark inside your minty
rear, Shelly Winters
V
from Rabbit Duck by David Shapiro and Richard Hell
On my son's shelf there is a conquistador
and a caravel of shells
a medieval shield and folkloristic bee
a quartz so pink it could avoid the world's death mask or life mask veristic as smoke
a desert rose on its back and a bird on obsessive legs
and to the side some wet and golden trophies
sand in strata and a peaceful kingdom of tigers
the world as a watch, and a crowd of golden archaisms
Guarding the shelves, the bluejay and Kije and nosegay and tiger
and the gigantic frog of our lives leaning like the dazzling schizo-analysis
of a bed loaded with games--but in this game--precisely not a game--
every item is a coded sequence that doesn't correspond
and every line struggles to muster itself from vague clutter
because even if the collection is not vague clutter,
the list is, in many ways, in this
gigantic frog. A little beribboned wagon, a consciousness
of the presence of electricity in one's biology, a person
who doesn't want to talk to you anymore, the tidal pull, saved up
teeth that were pulled because rotten. Souvenir of a landscape or location in nature.
You, she, he, I--our lives are a gigantic frog and we lean
like the dazzling schizo-analysis of a bed
loaded with games that are really forms of
scalpels in the brain, like recent British art. They want to annex you by
grandiosely focusing attention on seductive stink.
Resist! But it's impossible. It's impossible to even see in this frog.
drawing by Noel Black from Rabbit Duck
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