I.

You have not listened to a word I have sung
Said Orpheus to the trees that did not move
Your branches vibrate at the tones of my lyre
Not at the sounds of my lyre.
You have set us a tough problem said the trees
Our branches are rooted in fact to the ground
Through our trunks said the trees
But calm as an ax Orpheus came
To the trees and sang on his lyre a song
That the trees have no branches the trunks have no tree
And the roots that are gathered along
Are bad for the branches the trunk and the tree
Say, said the trees, that's a song
And they followed him wildly through rivers and ocean
Till they ended in Thrace with a bang.

II.

At the La Brea Tar Pits
There is a sheer drop then twenty feet of stars. I
Believe this occasionally.
The white skeletons
Jammed in there in the black tar
Don't come back
Can't
Come back
No ghosts
Only occasionally Ronnie.

III.

The mouse ran up the chessboard
The mouse ran down the chessboard
He destroyed:
                two pawns and a queen and bit a hell of an edge
    off a black rook
Savage
As the god of plague is savage
Apollo the mouse ran up the chessboard
Down the chessboard.

IV.

Or, explaining the poem to myself, Jay Herndon has only three
    words in his language
Door: which means that he is to throw something which will
    make a sound like a door banging.
Fffish: which means that there is something that somebody
    showed him
And Car: which is an object seen at a great distance
He will learn words as we did
I tell you, Jay, clams baked in honey
Would never taste as strange.

I died again and was reborn last night
That is the way with we mirror people

Forgive me, I am a child of the mirror and not a child of
    the door.

Yes Apollo, I dare. And if the door opens

North of the North Wind

V.

A Christmas toy misdirected, a baseball game, A-
Stounding Science Fiction
All this, but the eyes are full
Of tears? of visions? of trees?
So close to nonsense that the mind shuttles
So full of nonsense.
That there could be a hand, a throat, a thigh
So close to nonsense that the mind shuttles
Between
The subway, station of what would'
Nt.

VI. The Death of Arthur

Pushing wood, they call it when you make automatic moves in
    a chess game or in a poem
Pushing tar
The sound, the subway, the skeleton of the whole
    circumstances you and everybody else was born with
The dance (that you do whenever Apollo or any other smaller
    god is not watching you) the dance
Of probability
Be-
    ing human.

VII.

Fire works
But like the bottom of an alley
They works only
With people in them.
Justly suspicious
Jay did not like the sparks flying past his head
Although they were blue green yellow and purple
And several also made a big whhupp.
Fire works
Broken words
But never repairing
Jay, justly suspicious,
Afterwards
Said, "Fffish."