·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

An exit forwards the coward. Smaller than a table

Bigger than a door, a binary without an integer.

Regret grinds the pepper, one car inflamed

Yields eight. One did not count the motorcycles.

A cell phone each, the blue glow in the dark, yields

Multiple voyeurs, image and/or audio. There is

No charm in horror, the cars sealed in mock-gray

The shatter of glass, tiny by tiny piece. Illuminate

An elevated white, double cylinder police light

An otherwise empty street. Yellow caution tape

Is illegible at night. What breaks wood on water?

Nothing breaks wood, what is tangible, syllable by syllable

Splits. Plurality needs not breath, horror nor anger.

What breeds? What is breadth? 2 x 4, 2 x 10

Sawed, joined, a house in spite or built

Nailed, enclosed, sided. The street, grid or not

Wanders: grass, leaves of, sheaves folded, bound

Opened: Illumined letters, verses, such pleasure.

[[Note: For some reason - unsolvable at the moment, I am getting a line break after “Opened” that is not intended. Should be a continuous line]] .

Tenderly 44

A corner and a width, an egg yolk burning:

What rents bears forth a white shell

An orange fog burnt at the edge. A wedge

Is not an entry. Do not look for a pearl

Inside the mustard. Pepper is what

Sweeps the heart. To be open is to be rent:

What shines in the white Iris will gather

The black ball rotates on the horizon

Swing low, sweet. Multiple and occupied:

Disappear. Reappear. Today on the cheekbone

An extraordinary sun goes: shining, burning, disparate.

Tenderly 45

So the racket is not a score. One plays

One makes noise. Composition is spontaneous:

A story. Exercise functions as movie. What

Walks the dog uphill, holds on to the ball downhill:

The border between throw and catch is the trigger

A width in the heart, a spade in the hand:

She lies down with the fawns to feed them

Sliced peaches and apples. There is not time

To adopt a singular allegiance. Bounce the ball

Surprise the guest, knock on the door at

Irregular intervals. An occupation is no

Substitute for thought. She wears an orange shirt

Breathes hard, steps briskly. The top of the hill

The wind cubes, neither singular nor multiple:

The dead marry no magic. One neither

Rents nor owns. Pleasure is cedar, age

And a well polished banister. One

Year by year, slides into accuracy:

Spring rents winter’s woe. Welcome

She said, welcome.

Neglect edges superiority. The wet inside the coil

Spurns a throttle. She has no waist, a red

Three-cornered hat, no one can explain the bulge

The cork floor, swollen, is not an ocean, nor the green appearance

One occasionally ascribes sacred to the dark pond

Under the Oak the noise thickens, a farmer’s tractor idles:

When noise is the color of length, one walks more

Slowly, the vertical is an argument, theology is

The curious quartet inside an upper balustrade:

Who split the marble Christ in half, who invented

Raspberry candied syrup: the blood of Christ

Street to street, the man with the marble blue

Bowler hat insists that his gold cane is a

Bemusement, no less, an artifact, twirling it

Horizontal to the eye. To read poetry on every other

Sunday is no less whimsical. Wide is the blue color

That surrounds the horizon. A dying mother

Pulls three yellow leaves and two snails, one by one

Off the lemon tree. Sorrow is no secret to the wretched.

Sacred is a blue boat, tormented – oared forth - crying.

Tenderly #39

What sidewalks the heart?

Tenderly #40

Not a fact or what exhaust replaces. What thought
Is not a pleasure. The homeless blue blanket
Marries financial, unbearable exhaustion. A poet’s will
Ought not be against. The wild iris’s gold in bloom
Profligate – corner of Sanchez and 20th. If one could
Unravel constantly, a beauty tantamount
Looking closely, one’s beloved beholder.

Tenderly #42

What did not happen, an imperfect moment
Yet the green growth. Casual, such an invasion
Love’s division, the petulant gray grid thwarted:
What mixes in time will change nothing:
The crow and a cement mixer, an acoustic division
Perks the ear, sun flushes the journal’s white page:
What is beauty under pressure is perverse
The table on three legs provokes the fourth:
What charm charms the senses, the brief stop
Before relentless, the passage, an iris plunging:
White, gold tipped petals open, tumbling over a gray wall
So joyously, it appears, an upward spiral, thrusting:
Farewell, sayonara who knows not the script
The infallible, an anonymous one, when, where one goes
Inevitably, as one will, good morning, yes, such loving.

Tenderly #33

Noise may be indicated by sadness, pure
As an auxiliary motion, the way whiplash
Does not serve a horse or, to ask, is one ever
Enthralled by the flame in a horse’s oval eye
The sun rising, or, as now, in descent. Love marks
Its mark: tail flick the fly, munch the young boy’s
lifted green apple. Some say teeth will outlive
any body. To not be interested in eternity smacks desire:
The elder woman, not turning her face, confirms –
a small smile on her closed lips – when she goes over
As with a curious new lover – undaunted Death’s eye
Not a reflection returning - I want to be surprised.

Tenderly #34

Kiss aspersion on the nose.

Tenderly #35

It meant opaque, it meant lie down
Not much more than this, it meant no numbers
It meant reversing them, it meant that the invisible
Yields something or nothing, it meant the bottle brush
Suddenly in flower, lavender, in large number
Suddenly, in one week - green stems, green leaves –
Sauf this, already, else gone.

Tenderly #36

Why is there taste and the dark mud is excrement
Why is the familiar not close, why is the cooking violent
Why is the absence of thought also. Why is there
Not more less enough, why are the books closed
Why be haunted by volumes, why go bound and useless
Why does she wear crimson, when was the last time
Silk smoked, why are you not here today, the jackhammer
Burping – note the white and marbled red tulips –
What enshrines the absence of thought?

Tenderly #37

A poppy and yes no olive oil. Over the sink
Not even Comet, the cleanser, a meteor
Broke color, orange, in the East one travels, one
Gathers. Thought carries an intrinsic motion:
The burnt orange suede, her shoes imply once
Or in the future, naughty. Please flower the lawn
In the summer shrubs make cool or are useless.
At the top of the hill she breathes rapidly, hands on her hips
To laugh, simultaneous.

Tenderly #38

The books are simultaneous and so is confusion
Syntax is not a dirty word nor is molecule
The bird lady feeds crumbs to the sea gull on her shoulder
An ocean unfolding silently behind her. The squawks
Spread a message of death from the vendor. He walks
Then runs, sand between the teeth of his toes. She warns
That his disease will tear out his voice box. He runs
His mother does not depend on it. Her death, his death
The ocean taking, pulling, the inevitable sound
The quiet, appearing, disappearing, what is a life
The gorgeous, she has heart, the bullet through the heart
Any life broken, unbroken, the bird lady, shoulder to bird
The prophecy – a thrust of breeze, heart, no one, crab grass
Notwithstanding – any one, the squawk, unfolding.

If you are visiting as a way of learning more about to get The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Perfromance edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig,(Momo’s Press, 1981) we do have some copies in paper still available. (I have a few and Ellen has part of a box.)
It’s 350 pages with a variety of contributors to a Contents that covers: Histories, Oral Literature, Performance, Video, Sound and Typography.

For the book, including postage, please send:
A check for $25.
To: Stephen Vincent
3514 21st Street
San Francisco, CA 94114

And give us your address and email.
If I run out of copies here, Ellen Zweig, who is currently mounting an installation in Shanghai (!) will be back in May and we will respond to your order at that time.

By the way, I also have copies of Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading: 1 - 7 (Momo’s Press, 1985) for $15 each, including postage. A cloth bound signed (A -Z) version is availabe for $20. And a very few copies of the signed (A-Z) of her first book, Out of the Third( Momo’s Press, 1974) for $50, including postage.

If you are visiting to keep up with the series Tenderly, or the Gertrude Improvs, that work continues below.

Any pressing questions, email me at:
steph484 at pacbell dot net

Tenderly #33

My eye is not a shooting star.
I Flash for Jesus, a weird bumper sticker.
Easter is a miracle. If Jesus can rise
The Secretary of Defense can fall. Karma is a wrestler
Whose lost her partner. Bliss is the purification –
Note the intensity in the fire – outside, steam rising:
A curious log, smoked. History, inevitably, does its
Own unfolding. The name Rumsfeld will be synonymous.
History awaits to chose an appropriate partner:
The lash whipped across the eye, smokes.

Tenderly #34

Misfortune misses no one, a broken branch will tell
The skin of the lower bark lifted, the roller skate
Mama Time, or, so it appears, rolls by: yet
The skateboard, those juvenile toes, not quite viscious
Cut the dark, chipped cement, remains of the day:
One cherishes illusion, the solid life, the curb
Lengthy, alert, the well planted tree, aside the swift:

A little or less cereal, those oats once wild
Fallen to the old, well oiled, oak floor. The grain
Went West, manifest, holy, we know the despoiled
Car jam - some call it ecocide - rest. Don’t skulk
Underwater, the risen breath a flame, the chest a throttle
Bring on one’s constructive brain. Nothing left to lose
Plant new fish in the water: halo and desire, the mother of drive
Clarity. Weeds are for the weary, bliss for the charmed:
Monetary castles fall, rise. Care unto others, industrious ants
Inside the hill, charm one another: be blessed or die.

Tenderly #35

Go tell it on some mountain
Plagiarism has risen its ugly head
Many with whom I once joyously slept
Unheralded, but not without grace, are dead:
Read John Donne – requite and not – the glory
Rolls unabashed, sweetly her diadem, hairy
Or now shaved, the juice once cause for warlocks
A constant baptism, poem by poem, on the ready
For the inquiring, desirous, it’s odd to call anyone
– color or not – a particular race. What is swift
Colors one’s days – slow, in or out of rhythm
Or fast: I raise more than one cup to John
To be done, not ever, nor gone.

Tenderly #29

The blister, no sister. A disappointment. It is.
Street vanquishes the finish. The result
Refuses to tarnish the present. An ordinary friendship
Relinquishes the rush to an uncertain conclusion.
Substitute lover for discrimination, a foul brother
Is no excuse. Love’s limits are precarious. An
Epidemic of mumps in Iowa - in whatever field of enclosure -
Enlarges large and subtle expectations.

Tenderly #30

One quilts desire, one word over another – knotted and
Unknotted – one word at a time. The illusion of text
Is the image apparent between web, needle and woof. A sign
Appears, disappears and one is alone in one’s arms again.

Tenderly #31

He picks up formerly radioactive rods out of the pit.
Imagination is not a junkyard. It is the way one picks.
Marginalia is the site of most art. What happens center-stage
Is someone else’s rhetoric. Celebrate the rush to margins
At your own risk. I am yours forever
Inevitably is not true. If I run across the street
It is for the run not – until I get there – for you.
Inevitably, one tritely says, consider the steps in-kind.
Please, she said, take this kindly. I will.

Tenderly #32

A parking meter, a café latte, the sponge and the pigeon:
There it is. Amazement is the peculiarity. A sidewalk
Does not connect under the house. Edgar Allan Poe
Inhabits the stark space between studs. A rat
Elicits no compassion. Terror ought not be carried
In either the left or right-hand pocket. A groan –
Either to sit or stand – is a curious form of pruning.
The body is an envelope. An excess of air, a
Sudden or slow inner-tube goes whoosh.
The slow folding rubber – the tire at death –
The ease at which mortality – the body – announces itself.

Tenderly is an excuse. Tenderly does not mean

Cabbage or a rejection of savage. It means no sugar

But a template, the sky variously tinctured

This morning a soft, backlit blue. The first spice

Is not waking, yet an astonishment, she rides a bike

Cloaked she is: blue jacket, blue racing helmet

Above her ears, tucked true. True is not the basis

Of anything, but the absence. What cuts the green leaf

An early seasonal wasp, a black and gold graced

Morning is her body, maybe or just once - such

are the sympathies - loved, loves you: yes,

Morning, buzzing, becomes Electra, indeed, enjoy

Such, often one will find, sweetly enough, just and true.

Gorgeous one falls, a calypso lift, solid mist

An artichoke in lavender flower, the green leaf in whorl:

Whiskey liberates melancholy, the singular pine shingle

Numbered 6.9.1, stroke by stroke, eliminates representation:

Collage was winter, each canvas is a weather-spoon. Would I know you

In satin blue, Sarah Vaughn, go for the moon, strapless black shoulders

Octave unto octave, butterfly wing, triangular, geometric, solid blue

Black, the voice graveled, yet, more true. What’s tender will perch

Un-perch, one never falls in love, one does:

Light falls 24 hours a day on one’s alphabet.