Now that C. Mulrooney has exposed my "seemingly inexhaustible capacity to be . . . blind and deaf to anything worthwhile," it's probably not proper for me to have at the poems up for grabs this time around, but--being addicted to pontificating, I will, anyway. So, to begin, let me say that I liked Mary Winters's poem (sorry, Mary), especially its reference to her manure and butane torch cure for plantar warts; except that it's funny and competent, I can't think of anything else to say about it.

              You Don't Want a Stranger
                   Seeing You Naked

              Why are there so many
               cures for warts?
              Must be a lot of them out there
              people can't live with anymore.
              Today's the day the do something
              and it just happens to involve
              a dead cat, a full moon

              rutted crossroads

              A home remedy's the best.
              Somehow a doctor's appointment
              takes up the whole day.
              Spoils it, really.
              You feel so handled afterward.

              And what do they know?

              Write me and I'll tell you how
              I get rid of plantar warts
              in a locked garage
              with a bag of manure

              and a butane torch.

              Ever see those ads in the subway
              for docs who fix growths
              in embarrassing locales?
              Laser rays get 'em
              wherever they are. No thanks.
              I use homemade whiskey,
              a book of matches,

              a nail file.

Eel Leonard is as good at the jump-cut as anyone in the Ashbery school, but much funnier; and funnier than poets like Denson and Mulrooney because his images are more crazy-right--for inst, his "pill of wet sense." The scrawled-in "rien," underlined to make sure we realize how Important it is, is typical of the kind of proofs of insanity with which Mr. L., by whatever name, laces his zaneries. He is a master. Here's his poem:

          Avon Calling in Uranus

          Many are grayer than my stomach
          NO? Then go suffer that rabbit
          look a slaver gets on his face
          when he meets a bigger
          slaver under water
          the cry "Princess Alice & Old Mr. Scribner,"

          counts halfway between loving rien
          and scarfing Al Capone--Al's bod
          all cooked & rainy,
                    looking fairly darn enticing, in
                         fact
          but if possibly somebody's screwup has pushed a pill
          of wet sense high & inside
          too near near you while you were at the plate
          sucking in the old breadbasket
          by all means don't play alto
          else stained
          brown-rimmed lips start
          laughing up a sleeve into Petland & go on from there
          to what the door- to-door Shakespeares call
          Avon Calling in Uranus

                 going raisins
                      going bald
                          from Van the Janitor
                 crossing his legs

Gabe Neruda's poem, "Our fabled lady eludes the dragons," bothered me for a couple of reads--it seemed too arch, and too vague. The first few lines are a trace too corny, and get the tone off, for me. I'd prefer "muses" to "ponders," and I'm not sure what "for a moment" is doing in the second line. That breathing sounds may come to seem prisons and poisons makes more sense to me than the way Neruda has it, but I admit to not having the firmest of grips on what he's trying to say, though I read the poem to be about Cassandra's regret over previous licentiousness, which the water heals. I've come to quite like the piece.

          Our fabled lady eludes the dragons.

          "Every breathing sound may seem a prison
          and a poison for a moment," Cassandra
          ponders as her moving body plays
          like a spent moon among trees by a river,
          thwarting an evening breeze.

          One spirit replies among her selves, "And yet
          once you courted the animal desire
          and you forgave each merciless glance, and you
          applauded those prowling fingers on a thigh
          and the scalding whispers at the nape
          entreating."

          Cassandra says in murmur
          "I was a daughter yet,
          a melancholy wanderer beaming to a foreign star:
          unable to possess, too timorous to relent.
          In the winter I mourned the flowersof the spring
          and sorrowed too sweetly they'd be lost
          through the summer, and through autumn."

          "O the water emits
          am an immacualte wizardry."

Pat McKinnon's poem, "My Brother and the Bees," seems competent, heartfelt, genuine, but the dream isn't deconventionalizing enough to give the poem the heft an earlier one of McKinnon's in Silent But Deadly had. He's a tick better than Heather Lowe with bees, but not enough better. His eye for pertinent, effectively-coloring details is excellent, but--well, I guess the poem comes too close to Norman Rockwell (though, yeah, a disenchanted Norm) for me to more than mildly appreciate it.

          My Brother and the Bees

          When we were kids my brother caught bees
          with his bare hands the way sunlight drops
          through oak leaves to stone steps
          and ascending them from the creekbed
          into Muz Payne's flower garden
          I would find my brother bedning over colors
          offering his palm like a handshake for those bees
          who never thought to sting him.

          He liked to carry them back to our room
          one in each hand and one in his pocket
          put them in jars with holes in the rop
          and dandelions and store them under the bed.
          At night he said the buzzing was
          electricity for his sleep.

          Years later out by the pool
          he stepped on one and it swelled his leg
          like a flesh balloon handing off the knee.

          He now rents a house in Alum Rock
          that hasn't any flowers
          just a lawn turning brown
          and the driveway lined with juniper bushes.

          I call him on the phone
          and we talk about the Giants
          whether their pitching can
          bring us the pennants. We talk about Dad
          and his dizzy new girlfriend. We talk
          about cars and my sister's divorce
          and jobs and children and nuclear weapons
          until suddenly he's telling me
          about this dream he keeps having
          and of course you've guessed
          it's filled with bees.<

          He says They come like a writhing black funnel
          and some nights they sting me
          and sting me until I die.
          But on other nights they fly me
          by my clothes to the ocean
          where a boat made of flowers lies waiting to sail
          and Old Muz Payne in her broad straw hat
          hands me a glass of lemonade and cubes
          her eyes shingin out African Violets
          say Where dear boy are you going
          and where would you like to go?

Richard King Perkins II's poem about Lawrence is super-swift and competent, with an exactly-right punch-line. Nice combination of surrealistic situation and quotidian props (like shoes, pants, a bus station). Another likable poem that's hard to criticize, but which doesn't do anything whammo. Not that every poem should, but . . .

          Stolen Moments in Araby

          Lawrence jumps out of the poem
          Forgetting to put on a shirt.
          This is a bus station.
          Lawrence looks in the pockets
          Of his jeans for a trinket
          Of lost faith.
          This is a bus
          station in the desert
          Which might be somewhere
          Near San Diego.
          The sun flickers around his head
          Like a proverbial moth.
          His feet are bare and getting warm.
          There are no shoes in his pockets.
          These would help.
          A moth flies straight
          Into the proverbial sun of a
          Darker poem.
          In the real world,
          Lawrence tries again.
          Behind the teller's window
          Is an arboretum where tickets
          Grow on trees.
          A sign says:
          No shoes, no shirt, no service.
          He can't be sure if he's
          Going somewhere or if
          He's already arrived.
          Lawrence looks once more
          In the pockets of
          his jeans
          For something to believe in;
          A ticket or a simple rhyme
          Crumbled deep in the pockets
          Of the blue pants
          Which are not his own.

That does it for the poems on review, but I can't quit now, for there's still Lou Hertz to contend with. Hertz is much more amiable and sound of mind than Mulrooney, but if he's going to tell us something is not poetry (in this case, Alan Catlin's exercise in computer degeneracy), he must tell us why it isn't--objectively. Nor should he advocate its not being published in poetry journals, unless he's positive that he can't be wrong in determining whether a given text is poetry or not. Even then, why not publish it, anyway, to publicize what isn't poetry and why? More important, of course, would be what isn't GOOD poetry and why, and vice versa-- questions, I'm sad to note, that fewer and fewer of the contributors to SBD seem to be interested in.