Importation of Landscapes
–Alan Dugan

On Hurricane Jackson
–Alan Dugan

Now his nose’s bridge is broken, one eye

will not focus and the other is a stray;

trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear

listens to itself, clenched like a fist;

generally shadowboxing in a smoky room,

his mind hides like the aching boys

who lost a contest in the Panhellenic games

and had to take the back roads home,

but someone else, his perfect youth,

laureled in newsprint and dollar bills,

triumphs forever on the great white way

to the statistical Sparta of the champs.

Morning Song
–Alan Dugan

Look, it’s morning, and a little water gurgles in the tap.
I wake up waiting, because it’s Sunday, and turn twice more
than usual in bed, before I rise to cereal and comic strips.
I have risen to the morning danger and feel proud,
and after shaving off the night’s disguises, after searching
close to the bone for blood, and finding only a little,
I shall walk out bravely into the daily accident.

Argument to Love as a Person
–Alan Dugan

The cut rhododendron branches
flowered in our sunless flat.
Don’t complain to me, dear,
that I waste your life in poverty:
you and the cuttings prove: Those
that have it in them to be beautiful
flower wherever they are!, although
they are, like everything else, ephemeral.
Freedom is as mortal as tyranny.

Teacher’s Lament
–Alan Dugan

Untitled Poem
–Alan Dugan

Why feel guilty because the death of a lover causes lust?

It is only an animal urge to perpetuate the species,

but if I do not inhibit my imagination and dreams

I can see your skull smiling up at me from underground

and your bones loosely arranged in the missionary position.

This is not an incapacitating vision except at night,

and not a will of constancy, nor an irrevocable trust,

so I take on a woman with a mouth like an open wound.

I would do almost anything to avoid your teeth in the dirt.

She is desirable, loving, and definite, but when I feel her up

I hesitate: I still feel the site of your absence. It is

as large as the silence of your invitational smile

or the vacancy open in the cage of your ribs. Fuck that,

I say. Why be guilty for this guilt? It’s only birth control.

Therefore I extend my hands tongue and prick to you

through her as substitutions for the rest of my body

in hopes that you’ll be born again as her daughter

before I have to join you as your permanent husband,

but I know you: you want me to come, come as I am,

right now, without her, and to bring along a son.

The Attempted Rescue
–Alan Dugan

I came out on the wrong
side of time and saw
the rescue party leave.
“How long must we wait?”
I said. “Forever. You
are too far gone to save,
too dangerous to carry off
the precipice, and frozen stiff
besides. So long. You
can have our brandy. That’s life.”

Poem
–Alan Dugan

The person who can do
accounts receivable as fast
as steel machines and out-
talk telephones, has wiped
her business lipstick off,
undone her girdle and belts,
and stepped down sighing from
the black quoins of her heels
to be the quiet smiler with
changed eyes. After long-
haired women have unwired
their pencil-pierced buns, it’s an
event with pennants when
the Great Falls of emotion say
that beauty is in residence,
grand in her hotel of flesh,
and Venus of the marriage manual,
haloed by a diaphragm,
steps from the shell Mercenairia
to her constitutional majesty
in the red world of love.

Love Song: I and Thou
–Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:

     the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

     any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

     dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

     I am no carpenter. I built

the roof for myself, the walls

     for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

     hung up in it myself. I

danced with a purple thumb

     at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey: rage.

     Oh I spat rage’s nails

into the frame-up of my work:

     it held. It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

     for that great moment. Then

it screamed and went on through,

     skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it. This is hell,

     but I planned it. I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

     will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

     to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can’t do everything myself.

     I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.