Tipton, James

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things with cars: deer, purple ducks, a cow in Indiana, a row of skunks, the ghost of Dido in a dark fog.3Finally I forgot the rabbit, began to read poems about women, read them as others read Playboy; poems about female poets, about female parts, about coeds in a union of students.I even added a few artistic nudes to my desires, but they never quite stacked up against my poems.4I didn't forget the women poems, but I was forever losing them, soiling them, finding them behind the toilet, stuck on the bottom of my bathtub, open on my office desk; so,I decided to collect poems I didn't understand.5Consequently I've cancelled Harper’s, Saturday Review, and N.Y.R.B., and now subscribe (not a single one run by a university) to twenty-seven little magazines.Not much, but better than nothing. Therefore,I have become a poet.December on the FloorIf one says absurd or sexy things he might become successful as a poet. Last week I made love to the Queen's butter­fly (note line break) but the monarch didn't like it;but if one says he is sitting at his mother-in-law's eating a swiss cheesesandwich and beer reading Wormwood thinking about Roland and Mary Duerksen, about Hugh Fox's unpublished book on Bukowski, the poem fails; but if he says there is a girl sitting here with a candy cigarette in her secret parts perhaps interest revives and the ground is laid for something philosophical.—  James TiptonEast Lansing, MichiganThe Closer SkyMy son condensed the solar system in his head. Squeezing space with his hand he drew it to scale.Finding the front lawn too small he plotted out the pasture, placing the sun by the creek.He paced ninemillion milesat a stride and stoopedto fix Mercuryand Venus in orbit,altered his line of direction to avoid whirling the Earth near the edge of the manure pile by the shed.He spun Saturn at the fence and slid through wire stepping over dust rings,and measured and marked his meteoric flight three billion six hundred thousand milesout to Plutothen rotated the lastplanet by the road.At the edge of the woods he stood and studiedthe closer sky.Behind the fence the cow and I blinked our eyes in static wonder.35

December on the Floor

http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/wormwood/wormwood_a1969v9n4i36/wormwood_a1969v9n4i36p34.pdf

December on the Floor

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