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preyseeking soar
    of the bomber, those planes expensive as cities,
    the shark lean submarines of nuclear death,
    the taut kinetic tower of the missile,
    the dark fiery omphalos of the all-killing bomb.

Why the soup tastes like the
Daily News
    The great dream stinks like a whale gone aground.
    Somewhere in New York Harbor
    in the lee of the iron maiden
    it died of pollution
    and was cast up on Cape Cod by the Racepoint Light.
    The vast blubber is rotting.
    Scales of fat ripple on the waters
    until the taste of that decay
    like a sulphurous factory of chemical plenty
    dyes every tongue.

Curse of the earth magician on a metal land
    Marching, a dream of wind in our chests,
    a dream of thunder in our legs,
    we tied up midtown Manhattan for half an hour,
    the Revolutionary Contingent and Harlem,
    but it did not happen
    because it was not reported in any newspaper.
    The riot squad was waiting at the bottom of 42nd Street
    to disperse us into uncertain memory.
    A buffalo said to me
    I used to crop and ruminate on LaSalle Street in Chicago.
    The grasses were sweet under the black tower of the Board of Trade.
    Now I stand in the zoo next to the yaks.
    Let the ghosts of those recently starved rise
    and like piranhas in ten seconds flat chew down to public bones
    the generals and the experts on antipersonnel weapons
    and the senators and the oil men and the lobbyists
    and the sleek smiling sharks who dance at the Diamond Ball.
    I am the earth magician about to disappear into the ground.
    This is butterfly’s war song about to darken into the fire.
    Put the eagle to sleep.
    I see from the afternoon papers
    that we have bought another country
    and are cutting the natives down to built jet airstrips.
    A common motif of monuments in the United States
    is an eagle with wings spread, beak open
    and the globe grasped in his claws.
    Put the eagle to sleep.
    This is butterfly’s war song addressed to the Congress of Sharks.
    You eat bunches of small farmers like radishes for breakfast.
    You are rotting our teeth with sugar
    refined from the skulls of Caribbean children. Thus far
    we have only the power of earth magicians, dream and song and marching,
    to dance the eagle to sleep.
    We are about to disappear into the fire.
    There is only time for a brief curse by a chorus of ghosts
    of Indians murdered with smallpox and repeating rifles on the plains,
    of Indians shot by the marines in Santo Domingo,
    napalmed in the mountains of Guatemala last week.
    There will be no more spring.
    Your corn will sprout in rows and the leaves will lengthen
    but there will be no spring running clean water through the bones,
    no soft wind full of bees, no long prairie wind bearing feathers of geese.
    It will be cold or hot. It will step on your necks.
    A pool of oil will hang over your cities,
    oil slick will scum your lakes and streams killing the trout and the ducklings,
    concrete and plastic will seal the black earth and the red earth,
    your rivers hum with radioactivity and the salmon float belly up,
    and your mountains be hollowed out to hold the files of great corporations,
    and shale oil sucked from under the Rockies till the continent buckles.
    Look! children of the shark and the eagle
    you have no more spring. You do not mind.
    You turn on the sunlamp and the airconditioning
    and sit at the television watching the soldiers dance.

BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
From
4-TELLING

Letter to be disguised as a gas bill
    Your face scrapes my sleep tonight
    sharp as a broken girder.
    My hands are empty shoppingbags.
    Never plastered on the walls of subway night
    in garish snake-lettered posters of defeat.
    I was always stomping on your toes eager to stick
    clippings that should have interested you into the soup.
    I told and retold stories weeping mascara on your shirt.
    If I introduced a girl she would sink fangs in your shin
    or hang in the closet for months, a sleazy kimono.
    I brought you my goathaired prickheavy men to bless
    while they glowered on your chairs