Mantis 20 (Spring 2022)
Retrospective
Jackson Mac Low
Willie’s Clatter
Willie’s Willow tree is yellow, he does people who are welcome.
Arabella’s analog is a wholly dishonorable king.
Let it play properly for months at a time, for the show is transmitted from
far behind.
Way at the side they’re cutting up fish-persons marked by scarlet eyes.
The black pause is over.
Anyone watching for the unforeseen shouldn’t be crossing that sector.
What delightfulness we undergo!
No miserable hall can be without a bell.
Their writing with steam is frequently changing our beautiful oranges.
Beneath a passage, one quite heavy is shaking thought, creating an eddy.
She who dirties the best occasions stops a moment and does kind things
for a rarely inclusive audience.
There where the last isn’t getting the most, Alí is preparing a quiet horse.
You are not hére for me.
Your kitten is teaching us a little every day.
This time I’m not dirtying anything myself.
We’re exchanging interruptions in the square.
Though yesterday’s fault was the opposite of snow, its idea is crackling in
the wind.
Always behave toward the dirty pieces you shake out as the voices say you
mean to.
They’re saying, Majesty! Severe Majesty!
Suppose what is foreseen is not determined.
Under the widening ocean, whose likeness floats?
For numerous years real lonely monsters are cutting into dreams to speak
what isn’t believed.
Keep as level as you wish when you explain what withers us.
What was seen as a fault is going into hiding, where they think it belongs.
It’s raining.
Chances for inclusive problems are very likely slim.
Alfred isn’t a clergyman and he’s never been one.
Whether it rings or strikes or clatters, it is vanishing.
When hands are achieving speech, is every difference believed?
It’s impossible to know the extremes of honor.
She’s only sure of her wingèd thoughts.
Just touching, they float till another show is shaking them.
She remarks that the kinky queen is bang out of her thinking-piece.
Wriggling quickly and impatiently, it eats through the shop of cinders.
He’s outraged that astonishing lard is wavering beside him.
Doesn’t her continuous tonguing suppose deep pleasure?
After dinner she mounts her horse at once.
Perhaps she remarks how often she has fallen.
Each whistle from the writing-tree makes the queen’s hair whiter.
Why does she feel the emergent center impossible to honor?
This graying man is only openly a wit.
Seven welcome him to the wood.
He cannot pass their impenetrable glass, and what he’s looking for has
been exchanged for oxen.
Explain what occasions make her interrupt.
She’s wriggling from experience to experience as kind winds touch her
intensely.
Why is she going out to grapple fish in borrowed gloves?
Peppery influence manages yesterday’s going faults, washing away the
intensest love.
Through fullness woodling differences of emergent properties burble.
In an open time good nature may transmit astonishing conversations.
From trying to stop perceiving a larger list their tone of amusement is
only a little severe.
Each going exchange interrupts an occasion with larger dinners.
It won’t be a year before a knight is hung.
Voices marked by clatter white as health are rarer than bells.
Why do so many suppose a wriggling experience is a black experience?
And why does Sabrina feel that thinking with the hands is a white thing?
The will is transmuting months of play into miserable steam.
Delightfulness is undergoing a scarlet, toneless change.
A beautiful willow is stirring a lake of air.
Why suppose a center that’s impossible to honor?
The larger tongues are wavering.
Some cannot pass impenetrable fullness without stopping to explain it.
Honorable particles rarely reject emergence.
The knight being hung is quickly being deserted.
His dinner is larger than he wants.
Every explanation is squarely interrupted by a vocal monster.
Is he influenced by yesterday’s portmanteau of faults?
His emergent woodling properties are open to amusement.
People welcome experiencing his wriggling.
Nothing distracts them better than seeing his sunny honor wither to gray
and vanish.
Every occasion levels a flying year for him.
His impenetrable fullness is not to be explained.
Unable to speak, the monstrous loner swims into hiding.
Yesterday’s meanings astonishingly vanish.
His foreseen experience is clatter.
Originally printed in Mantis 3 (2002)
JACKSON MAC LOW (1922 – 2004) made poems, essays, and musical, performance, visual, and radio works. Author of about 30 (plus four posthumous) books and published in over 90 collections. His works have been published, exhibited, and performed—often by poet and visual artist Anne Tardos and himself—in many countries. Awards: Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and CAPS fellowships and the 1999 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets.