Roger Zelazny: To Spin Is Miracle Cat

often losing words to circle
and movement to other leaves
like trees to spin . . . .

You words damned well better do as you’re told.
Get in line. Sound sweet. Stay on your feet.
When I need a pun I’ll ask for it.
Match sound to sense, sense to sound.
Block that image of the wraparound
windshield’s revealing/concealing in sun’s glare.
Whatever’s there needs care in the display.
Technical honesty’s the note for the day.
Stop talking to each other. When I call,
you come. When I say shit
you say what color. Is that clear?
Get back here! Words can’t walk out on

Any minute now
the words will replay themselves
within the mind’s ear:
The clown and the singer
fail at last,
juggler of hearts
and crier at the sticking place
falter,
footing lost, voice broken,
embracing in the downward spinning,
and clown take up the cry,
falling caller
catch the dark staccato
laughter, netless
in the minute’s eye.

When I learned the other day
that everything Emily Dickinson wrote
can be sung to the tune
of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas”
I was crushed.
It was true.
I can no longer read Emily Dickinson
but Lone Star ghosts flit across the page,
the Alamo is not forgotten
and I hear the thundering hoofbeats
of the great horse Silver.
I wondered then
whether every person who pens a poem
has a tune,
a secret melody which will destroy him
if the word gets out.
A small thought, perhaps,
not quite as profound as it sounds;
and those who fool with vers libre
should be safer than most.
Yet the notion nags.
There’s an awful lot of music in the world
To be trapped by John Cage
or crushed by Leadbelly
would be bad enough.
But I have this nightmare
of being done in by a hymn.
If Rock of Ages gets me in the end,
mocked Emily’s diamond eyes
may sparkle like the dew
in stillnesses that lie
between the words and the Word.

Save for Berryman’s, who wants the sonnet?
A fusty hangover from ages dark.
Take a thought, hang fourteen lines upon it,
Prime it and crank it, force it to a spark,
Then halting rhyme in pattern archaic,
Play with the choke until the engine sings
(Wondering when you’ll get that certain kick),
A stilted song of common imagings.
While the oldfangled buggy, pushed with pride,
Jolted to a motion, at times repays
Mechanic hands, mostly it’s a rough ride,
With that Model T we drive on Sundays,
Bumping down twisted country roads, my love,
Where each must go who has something to prove.

Recently
I have escaped Legionnaire’s Disease,
lost a day, gained one,
and learned that the Emperor penguin
gets laid only once a year.
I have also spent time wondering
for whom the galaxies wheel
and the oceans thunder.
It has been a fairly busy spring.
You ask after my health.
It is there.
I can go many lines without metaphor or moral
to show my stamina.
I shook my head at the disease at first,
but it is probably its own fault.
Like the penguins
it must have let opportunities slip by.
As for the days,
I cheated.
I dropped one Datelining,
did a double-take on the way back,
landed on my feelings for a beat.
As for the metaphor,
Life is a pair of doxies
leaning over a bridge rail
seeing who can spit farther.
As for the moral,
ask not for whom the galaxies wheel
and the oceans thunder.

After all, sailors steer
by pieces of the one,
crossing the others,
black-tie birds
do something similar,
spit in the ocean
is a popular hand,
spit in he hand
much less so,
London Bridge has fallen
to Havasu Lake,
days without number
are devilish for diarists,
Legionnaires are falling down
the oceans’ wheel,
the galaxies’ thunder;
the day is much too bright,
too warm for thought,
but note, and again,
there’s no escape
from images unsought.

A fistful of entrails