1.

Robert Duncan, San Francisco's Black Mountain bard
Fading now from our anthologies, focused
On erotic hilarity as central to our humanity,
Homo or hetero, Duncan nearly forty when presenting
Marianne Moore, doyenne of the redcoats-are-coming
School of American poetry, at the West Coast
Arts Center, Moore no longer
Column smooth of neck or auburn-haired

As a pythoness, brother a Baptist minister,
Mother her censor, father an orange Irish
Ne'er do well who'd vanished
Into mist tainted with alcohol
And mischief. Duncan loved men,
Their altering arched fountains of semen
He called soft sparks of life. His mother died
Giving birth to him. He praised Moore's fusion
Of voracious veracity, citing Stevens'

Sly blessing of the humility of the pure
But poor who rove the world
With the lure in their hearts of the real.
Professor Costello, Bonnie of B.U.,
In her commentary, Marianne Moore:
Imaginary Possessions (as in "gardens
With real toads in them"), insisted the chameleon's
Chromatic adaptiveness was modesty.

Duncan spuriously claimed Moore's
"To a Chameleon" was never reprinted,
So he voluntarily recited it, her apostrophe
To the lizard's glorious cutaneity:

Hid by the august foliage and fruit
Of the grape vine, twine your anatomy
Round the pruned and polished stem, Chameleon.
Fire laid upon an emerald as long as
The Dark King's massy one, could not
Snap the spectrum up for food
As you have done.
                               Ah, the Dark King's massy one.

I am reminded of the penguin driving in Boston
Noticing that his warning light was on. He pulls
Into a gas station where the mechanic says
It will take a half hour, so he goes to the Schrafft's
On the same street, eats a bowl of vanilla,
And when he gets back the mechanic
Is just climbing from under his car.
"It's the brakes," he says. "I'm afraid you blew a seal."
"Uh uh," says the penguin, "it was just ice cream."

2.

Moore explores her relations with other members
Of her gender in a poem pessimistically 
Entitled "The Fish" which concludes
With herself as a cliff with a permanent hole in it,
Dynamite-grooved, in her words, or else by an ax
Clipped. It's where the sea
Grows old and which lives, she says,
On what cannot revive its youth:

Love amputations? Landscapes
Without maps? Those birch and aspen barrens
I wandered at five and six in foster-care
That wouldn't exist anymore
Even if one could find them? Moore cites
Jade mussels waving limp shells
Like broken fans, sprites that cling
Like barnacles, undersea lilies
And drunken mushrooms

That enjoy swift, submerged
Turquoise shafts, whimpering, whinnying,
While the cliff endures in the memory of the water
Wedge that carved the iron chasm in it,
Shaping the poem and the body's
Salamandrine fate. "Imaginary gardens
With real toads," but who knows, who knows...