THE DANCER

We turn in our dreams, hanging
from slowing moving ceiling
fans, listening
to Larry King and the butler.
The ventriloquists, they have no business
on Elephant Mountain.

But not like the fluid motion of the hydra
down at sea, not like the gyro of
anemones. Angles, Ares, old Euclid sits alone
On a platform of geometries, cheering the
weaving dance of histories,
dance of confluent minds among worlds,
Uncle Ezra's logopoeic vision.

Pirouetting on a pinhead looks
easy when you're an Orisa.
Leopard skins and leotards may be
out of fashion for wood-gods,
they are dressed to kill.

The dancer is a jungle goddess.
"Have you seen her eyelashes!"
"No, It's her broken front teeth I've seen,"
"The bomb, isn't she."
"Better. She's the night after the bomb."
"And the morning after."
No pills.



THE VIOLINIST
(After George Szirtes)

As the Titanic sinks....
"Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure
playing with you"
can this air from strings float
a sinking ship?
(Nearer, my God, to Thee.)
We approach the watery gates of
heaven and hell.(Nearer.)
The prospects are (Nearer!) uncertain
but surely we have to go?
The strings. The strings. Lifting our wives
and children on ice on water (while)
a rich, lily-livered one refuses
(Nearer to Thee) not to go (to the lilies)...

The violinist is a droll-eyed
old teddy with untidy strings for hair
teasing out melodies of the mind
that played into being a new vision
of the world, then proceeded to blow
it apart: now he must watch with
horror as the symphony he co-created
orchestrates our fear of the end
of the world.(All the king's men and
all the king's horses could not put
the double-stranded drumsticks and crotchet
sticks and bass and treble clefs
of the Mikado's children together again.)

The violinist: a radical cosmologist
balancing past, present and future on
a theory of ten strings.

To the one whose (un)finshed symphony
with a broken symmetry was a
triumphant affirmation of life:
your G-string has held me captive.
On my head let the curtains fall.


TEACHING SLIDES

I am not drunk, I saw old man
Kaposi in a white beard, grinning from slide
to slide. Camillo and Santiago, two peas
in a nervous pod, ogling a breast
Fibroadenoma. Where did all the
Purkinje cells go? No stain on slide
X.Why Z is such a cerebral
medulloblastoma I do not know-
capsule, fibroelastic stroma. Hyalin, dense
collagen, ducts (keratin pearls..necklace?)
squamous cell papilloma of the skin.
Benign warts, finger-like projections extending
to the surface, intact basement membrane.
Brunner's glands, invasive stomach carcinoma,
firstborn of an ulcer, like Solzhenitsyn-Kostoglotov.
(It's what you eat kills you, or what's eating you.)
Plasmacytoma, a nucleus turning cartwheels.
Reactive change, stages of the lymphocyte god.
DO GODS GROW?

A cortex of compact cells, medulla of clusters.
Mr Hodgkin's glands, mixed cellularity type. And
The cells of Reed and Sternberg: who said
the ant has no eyes?
Malaria pigments, No 142. Spleen.
328, fatty liver with metastatic capsular
squamous carcinoma. Burkitt's in 276, brain.
God bless the benign Dr Chang. And the
malignant Prof Thomson. No "Amen" for Dr Ogunba,
drunk as a microscope, slurring over S. mansoni.
197: comedo dragons in the ducts of a breast
lobule. 171, cervix. " who beat Rebecca Lancefield
 black and blue?" The smear on her face
was made by papa. Papanicolau.