Street Poems

Here are my favorite signs so far from the Occupy Wall Street protests:

‘IF THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION UNDERSTOOD OUR BANKING AND MONETARY SYSTEM I BELIEVE THERE WOULD BE A REVOLUTION TOMORROW MORNING’ –HENRY FORD

DON'T MACE ME BRO, MY MOM IS HERE

LOANSHARKS ATE MY WORLD

THE ONLY WAY TO DEAL WITH AN UNFREE WORLD IS TO BECOME SO ABSOLUTELY FREE THAT YOUR VERY EXISTENCE IS AN ACT OF REBELLION

SOMETHING'S WRONG WHEN A TEACHER PAYS MORE TAXES THAN GENERAL ELECTRIC

‘IT’S DIFFICULT TO GET A MAN TO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING WHEN HIS JOB DEPENDS ON NOT UNDERSTANDING IT’ –UPTON SINCLAIR

WE ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL

THIS IS SO NOT OVER

Al, Gone Vertical

R.I.P. Al Davis 1929-2011

Born on Independence Day
He died on Yom Kippur
A long, long way from Brooklyn
The toughest man Mike Tyson ever met,
Who carried still the relish of a child.

The air and soil are silver,
The trees and grasses black
But it’s not enough to show
What he has done
To a game and a world
We see differently now:

The rebel who can win by just surviving,
The masks of Halloween worn every day,
A team for all the outcast individuals,
A way to compel honor into honesty:

Embracing the brutality,
Setting free creativity,
Honoring the disease
And the sacred field whose wizards must be appeased.

They wear the colors of the color blind,
They find their dream in darkness,
That thing always excluded
From the other half-right codes.

Their greatness can only be perverse
Because it can stay human.

It’s a season of deaths, of the innovators,
Whose dreams were never really possible,
But we dream of further places thanks to them—
Here’s to a man who held onto his dream
24/7 for nearly 50 years
With the tenacity of a savage:
The team, the brand, the mystique—all his!

We know him in the thing that he created
But we’ve never known the man we loved to hate,
The man in black who gave it all in service
So we could go more vertical to the light.

Stevens Textplication 11: Indian River

The philosopher Martin Heidegger, paraphrasing the poet Frederich Holderlin, wrote* "not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. Man can no longer discern the default of God as a default." In this "destitute time," poets are the ones uniquely situated to enter "the extreme oblivion of being" and extract from this abyss the holy traces of what was lost: "Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning."

This Romantic function of the poet is also pursued by Wallace Stevens in his short poem from 1917, "Indian River":

The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks
by the docks on Indian River.
It is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the
banks of the palmettoes,
It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-trees
out of the cedars
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor
on the nunnery beaches.

Dense with Floridian flora and fauna like a travel postcard, the poem is divided into four long lines. The first three deal with natural, or at least un-human, phenomena, and are united by the word "jingle" (rhymes with jungle), thrice repeated as in the Christmas song "Jingle Bells." The seasonal irony is resolved in the fourth line, where the jingling stops and there is "no spring." This last line also shifts the focus to human things, specifically humans in interaction with nature, more specifically soldiers placed in danger ("perdu") amid boskage (a grove or thicket of trees and shrubs), and nuns in training on beaches. There is "no spring" for either of these archetypal humans: no life after death for soliders, no spiritual rebirth for nuns, at least while they interact oddly and uneasily with the things of this earth.

And therein lies the sharp pain of man’s fallen state, in contrast to the jingle, which is the unseen dynamism, the life force of the cosmos, that animates and unites the winds, the deep waters, the birds, the orange trees. The soldiers and nuns, when truly seen (brought out of their concealments of ambush and habit, respectively), are revealed as out of place, disconnected to the God they worship, so wrapped in the uniforms of human creation they do not even recognize "the default of God." They are blank figures and forms, nuns and soldiers, despite the immense silence of ocean and forest that surrounds them.

All we have is the name, Indian River, which holds within it a trace, of the peoples who were once there, who were at one with the fugitive gods, the sentience of nature.

* Martin Heidegger, from "What are Poets For?", in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 91-94, Perennial Edition, translation by Albert Hofstadter

Memory

Translation from the German of Frederich Hölderlin

The northeast blows,
My favorite of the winds,
From its spirit of fire
And kind lift I prophesy sailors.
But go now and greet
The beautiful Garonne,
And the gardens of Bordeaux
There, where the sharp bank cuts
The path and the current falls deep
Below the stream, but looks
Come from above, a noble pair
Of oak and silver poplar;

Still I remember this well, how
The broad peak bows down
The elms, above the mill,
But the courtyard fig tree grows.
Go there on a holiday
Brown women walking
Silken ground,
In the month of March,
When night and day are the same,
And on lazy trails,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Where lulling air tails.

But it is rich,
Full of dark light,
This fragrant cup
Of sleep; it's sweet
Under the shadow of slumber.
It's not good to think
The mortal is soulless.
But it’s good to converse
In the voice of the heart
And hear much as love emerges
And acts, occurrences happen.

But where are my friends? Bellarmin
With his companion? Some are afraid
To go to the source;
Where the wealth begins,
In the sea. They,
Like painters, pull together
The beauty of the Earth and disdain
War not winged, and
Live for years alone, below
The leafless mast, where night does not shine through
The city's festivities,
Nor its strings and indigenous dances.

But now the Indians are
The people left,
There on the airy spit,
And mountains of grapes fall
To the Dordogne, which along
With the mighty Garonne
Empties to the sea
That comes from the stream. Abounding,
It gives memories to the waters,
And to the lovers' eyes entwined,
But what remains, the poet founds.

Translation of a Translation of a Translation of the World Sung into Creation

Caedmon, from the fifth century, is considered the first poet of the (Old) English language. His poems survive in one nine-line fragment, the result of a dream in which he was told to “sing the beginning of creation.” The authenticity of what has been transcribed down through centuries of monks and orders is questionable, but I do believe, as with the stories of Jesus, that something genuine is embedded therein. To tackle the translation problem, I handled it "homeophonically," trying to find the nearest sound rather than strictly semantic equivalence, since what apparently separated Caedmon from other seekers (according to Bede) was the quality of his sound. In that vein I am also struck by the homeophonic resemblance of the name Caedmon to Adam Kadmon, the perfect (spiritually realized) man from Kaballah lore who becomes a creator himself.

The earliest known (mid-8th century) transcription is below the translation. See Poems and Poetics for more insights on this topic.

New sky one heir sun                         heaven’s gracious guardian
mightiest measure                              one mind may make
work of our father                              as he wanders highways
seeds dripping                                     from astral days
the airiest drops                                  for the children
heaven’s till roof                                 holy shapen
this middle world                               mankind’s guardian
seeds dripping                                     aether diadem
firmness folding                                 free for digging men

nu scylun hergan                            hefaenricaes uard
metudæs maecti                              end his modgidanc
uerc uuldurfadur                             swe he uundra gihwaes
eci dryctin                                        or astelidæ
he aerist scop                                   aelda barnum
heben til hrofe                                  haleg scepen.
tha middungeard                            moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin                                        æfter tiadæ
firum foldu                                      frea allmectig

Mitzvahs for Bobby Fischer

Of course our brains are filled with shit,
prescriptioned to necrosis –
we're disabled like a program
with the unbridled smut of science
– so what?
That’s what people do – afraid of others
finding them out in every moment
– if you knew one, you’d understand.

Of course they’re stealing all we do
in the moment that we do it,
and trying to keep us from our dreams,
monitoring our thoughts to hold against us
- but most of us are happy just to be noticed,
we don’t live in constant fear of being famous,
for no one understands another person,
we open up like flowers to learn ourselves.

The only friend you ever had was the game
and you’d have played it by yourself as beat the world
for all it mattered.
You gave your love away all to the game
and those who played it felt your love enough to save you
when you holed up from the world’s love in a dying stranger’s house.
How could the billions help but fall for you right there
with your smile, your wit, your boxer’s feints
– those things of which you were barely aware?
There were moves, and there was everything else.

But what if there were no more moves,
the consequences all were visited
and childhood finally closed its silver doors to choosing?
What if the mind had to leave the board
and had to grapple with beliefs,
with love affairs and politics
– the art of war without weapons –
as the possibility narrowed of escape
– how could one believe in mercy
or await a human touch?

Truth must be impossible
when the mind conceives all possibilities,
when every forking path contains a flower.
Human speech is mostly of forgiveness
- the gulf we face below the light we left.

Another Town

A response to Hannah Stephenson’s Town

It starts with a railroad, a fort nearby
with plenty of guns in its armory,

and a promise of gold, silver, copper, oil, coal,
for the hills to be bowed toward the practical,

extractable enough for Eastern financiers
to send along their goonies and their threshers

and hang posters that spoke of a heroes bounty
to every down and out outcast who teemed in the cities.

They brought in the necessities: a saloon, a smelter,
a brothel, a bank, a slaughterhouse, a factory for plaster

and inevitably, ministers, to teach about the curse of Eve.
As families and graveyards grew, they believed they’d never leave

but the children soon became bored
with the choice of liquor and the lord

and moved upstate, to get away from all the gratitude
for the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ, from the attitude

of acceptance for the losses in the mines and the fires,
of reverence for the well-connected vampires

who owned the town whole as everybody knew
and mixed its rivers red with the cadmium blue.

The price of silver dropped, and the town just dispersed
but something stayed behind, a right to be there, with the curse

that hung inside the lace, the last trappings of an outpost,
the god-forsaken hideaway of ghosts.

How we cherish them now, as we walk this blessed town.
How we pray that we could raise it from the ground.

Stevens Textplication 10: In the Carolinas

I should have known when I began this quixotic series of explications that this day would arrive. For we’ve come to “In the Carolinas,” the first poem I really ever read by Wallace Stevens. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say:

• I don’t have any idea at all of what it means
• I don’t want to have any idea at all of what it means
• It’s fair to say my own poetic career depends on not knowing what it means

Perhaps I should back up a bit and explain. I was in my first year of law school, and one of the techniques I employed to counter the mind-numbing boredom of that experience was to borrow poetry volumes essentially at random from the tiny branch library in Towson, Maryland near where I lived. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens came, if I recall, after The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, though, in truth, a teacher in college had tried to introduce me to “The Idea of Order at Key West” but it didn’t take (as academic introductions so rarely do). I remembered nothing of that poem when I decided on the book, but I did recall the exotic fact that Stevens was a lawyer, and I suppose that made me look at this volume a bit more longingly than I would that of, say, Susan Schutz or Horace Gregory.

I don’t remember checking it out except as a book among many, but I remember vividly, later, sitting in the laundry room, reading “In the Carolinas” for the first time. This was poetry as I’d never seen it before. For starters, it was so short, leaving one hungry and hanging. It had no recognizable form or logic or even point (other than perhaps how wonderful spring is). It put words together that had no business being together (lilacs and Carolina, butterflies and cabins, aspic and nipples, breasts venting honey, pine trees sweetening bodies as if one could daub on pine-sol as a cologne). And yet. And yet – there was something so magical and miraculous about the poem. This was what they said poetry was all about but what I’d never before experienced. Every association I had about lilacs, the Carolinas, butterflies, cabins, children, love and mothers swirled together and became magnified. The gelatinous bitterness of aspic – the peculiarly sweet scent of pine – recollections of Japanese prints of women framed by irises – all of these impressions poured out of me with hallucinatory fervor as I watched the laundry tumble and saw the golden light outside of fall (a day much like today).

Here was something I wanted in my movie.

I began to carry the library book around as a kind of talisman, renewing it countless times before I finally found a copy of my own. The closest thing I can find to describe the feeling – the pulsing life – dancing between my mind and this poem comes from Stevens himself, in his 1951 “Two or Three Ideas” lecture at Mt. Holyoke College (reprinted in Opus Posthumous), where he tries to describe the effect of Baudelaire’s line “J'ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques” [I have lived a long time under vast porticos] from “La Vie Anterieure.” Encountering this line, “the familiar experience is made unfamiliar and from that time on, whenever we think of that particular scene, we remember how we held our breath and how the hungry doves of another world rose out of nothingness and whistled away.”

Engagement with something as elusive as all that, needless to say, presented certain challenges. The world Stevens punctured in his poems was the world I lived in, the dissatisfactions I felt growing like grapes on a vine were in his hands miraculously time-lapsed and resolved, and the harvested fruits served in rich panoply of flavors. And what of my own nascent poems? How could I be free to pursue an individual vision with such hot jewels in my pockets? It was so close to what I was trying to say, yet it shone from another planet, a place obtained after years of complete solitude and total contemplation.

The only alternative was to learn the delicate art of not reading Stevens. Years later, when I got around to actually reading Stevens again, the goblins had vanished: his take was so individual it offered freedom, not constraint, but in my delusion of youth I’d been programmed to think that those with similar feelings were threats to survival, so I viewed him as some long-lost older brother who always got to the secret passageway under the stairs or the brandy in the wine cellar before I did. The thought he was a teacher, an ancestor, one of the great poets of the English language, didn’t much occur. And so, the tones of “In the Carolinas” went wafting, unexplored.

Perhaps it’s best to take the advice of Dr. Macksey, the same professor that tried to introduce me to Stevens, who once told me “words don’t fail you soon enough,” and just let the poem speak, if not for itself, for me:

In the Carolinas

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mother,
How is it your aspic nipples
For once vent honey?

The pine-tree sweetens my body.
The white iris beautifies me.

Exegesis of Train Tables

6:17
The churches have closed down,
The roosters sent inland,
But the trains cry every hour
A new set of commands:
Reminders that we work
Because we forget.

6:38
The people on the train:
Birds in a flock,
Visible from far off.

6:49
Commuters bow like monks in rows of plastic seats
Separated from God by just a thin line,
White wires coming out of their ears.

7:07
The conductor one day rides the rails like a DJ riding records:
Making jokes for every sleepy voice,
Clicking tickets with impeccable rhythm,
Announcing the stops as if we really need to get off there.
The next day’s conductor can’t look us in the eyes,
He hangs his head as he walks by,
Lets the stops go by unrecognized
As if connections are not meant to be made that day.

7:13
A gentle reminder, in the monthly newsletter
Not to watch porn on your iphone
For it could offend the person sitting next to you.
No such courtesy requested for newspaper headlines
Blaring their obscenities of fear and lies.

7:38
The most private acts:
Snoring, scratching, solitaire
Performed in the tightest of quarters;
It’s become so natural, a second den.

7:44
Like a gasp the power shuts off
When the train crosses over the river bridge
As children hold their breath when passing graveyards.

7:53
A person in sandals walks off the train.
I have never seen someone without shoes here before.
Another person in sandals walks on.

8:08
When first you hit the tunnel
You wonder if the eternal is darkness like this,
But then the dimmest dirtiest bulb
Reveals a network of tracks, a city of trains,
Homes carved out even under the streets.

8:11
Movement requires silence.
The train is silent
Except for the turning of the wheels,
The oscillating fans,
The skittering of brakes.
When it’s forced to stop
The conductor blows a harmonica over the intercom.

8:21
I watch the people leave the train
Like a football coach watches his players
Go back to the locker room at halftime.
They are already defeated.

The Poetry of Darshan Singh

The mystical verse of Darshan Singh (1921-1989), born 90 years ago today, is perhaps the closest we have in our modern age to the ghazals of Rumi, Hafiz and Kabir. It has the same spirit of longing, of letting everything go in pursuit of the highest love. The poems are dizzy whirls between self and world where the difference blurs, and all dogma must be dropped like a husk to get at the truth of what’s inside:

Do I hear some sound? Is it the footsteps of the Beloved?
Or am I being tricked by the beating of my heart?...

I follow no guide, no creed -- just an inkling of the way:
A tug at my heart leads me forward…

Your glance of abundant grace did not satisfy;
We with the seeing eye know a glance from a glance…

Sant Darshan Singh Ji, a Sikh who lived by all accounts the exemplary life of a saint, was that rarest combination of mystic and poet, and as such continued the lineage of the great Persian seer-poets. He lived, however, fully aware of the frailty of our spiritual life in the face of vast and unsatisfying scientific advancement, and found suitable ways to ground the divine in contemporary life, to bring the Friend closer:

We have learned to commune with the moon and the stars,
But we have failed to reach the heart of our neighbor…

O men of lust, beware of entering this land of love,
Here you will find only the cross and the gallows...

Seeker banished from the beatific vision, look through the eyes of your heart!
How can you see the Beloved's light with eyes of flesh and blood?

I can’t pretend I can do anything about his shocking obscurity, at least in the West, but at least I can share my version of one of his last poems. I’ve relied on the translations of Barry Lerner and Harbans Singh Bedi (who translated the passages above), as Urdu is too rich for my blood. Namaste, Darshan.

Invitation to Madness (#65)

My heart is immune now to sorrows,
I’m cured by the torment of love.

How do I bow my head now? What’s the way to your door?
The temples are strewn on the floor.

Everyone knows of a destination,
None have a clue how to get there.

That’s no spring breeze that plays in my garden,
It’s an invitation to madness with my name on it.

The spell of this life is all-too-familiar,
I’ve dreamed this dream many times before.

Who knows when the moment is right?
Go bow at the crossroads now – why wait?

O grief of love, be a balm for my heart,
Wounded by the beauty of a temptress world.

What flowers bloom in my heart and soul:
How blissful the wind lets them go.

Even now, drops don’t know their own immensity:
How concealed in each drop is the sea.

The desert came alive when I looked with eyes of love:
It shimmered in the heart of every granule of sand.

How could I deny your existence
When your beauty reflects all I am?

How can I blame my life’s sweet enemies
When my blood’s bent on drinking itself?

Darshan, why dread the spread of darkness
When your heart is on fire with endless light?

Procrastinators of the Way

Today the subway smelled like roses
The weatherman threw up his hands
Miracles stopped working on our schedules

Systems in chaos let light through the black holes
It’s only the truth from other universes inside you
That burns to come out

You can’t hear God in these dying crickets
As much as you’ve thirsted for it
But if you listen enough, you’ll hear yourself

Surrender to God was the practice for this
The rest of the world has now gone on its way
And the one is inside, sparkling like tinsel

There are two suns now, one inside, one in the sky
They are both the same
You are without reference to others

The world is slow motion
Compared to the streams running through you
Electric like earthquakes through quartz

With a glance I become the person sitting next to me
Chanting Hebrew rhymes through the free moments
Filling up the absence with a mind

A Child's Giggle and a Tennis Ball

Memory winds
insisting
things
remembered
of my love
have never died
just no longer
mine
inside.

Birthday Poem

I remember you
your eyes created day
and taught it how to rain
and made our dreaming safe

I remember you
your lips breathed life around
and gave each thing a sound
so it could all be found

I remember you
your arms brought warmth to share
legs took us everywhere
your face it showed us who and what we were

Yes I remember you -- in the far-off scent of fall
It's I myself I cannot quite recall

Between Five and Six

Friday evening at five o’clock
the faces are walking through hell
fuming like steam pipes in all Gotham's languages
wounded that they’re right
wounded that they're wrong
exasperated at being humiliated for so long
aggrieved they can no longer humiliate
anxious and worn that they are or aren’t noticed
tired how they’ve sold themselves out

purses hang low to the sidewalks
cell phones are clenched down on ears
people who barely still speak to each other are not

it’s too much to look at new fashion displays
too hard to take in the lines at the subways
the buildings themselves are now adversaries
of memories, decay and transient gray

if the people still at work almost smiling weren’t discreet
they’d be pissed off at all of them too
for who is to blame when lives have no purpose
and they’ve chased a string down to its end?

All of it hits in that moment before
the horrible smell
the deafening sound
the vacuum-packed sausage of crowds:
Happy Hour at the Friday night bars
what they’ve been waiting for all week

Vignette

rain stains gray veins sheeny scene in gloomy gleam of damp lamps swamps on ramps slurping kicking muttering sputtering stuttering puttering pittering pattering chittering chattering spittering spattering splattering rap happy clap snappy drops plop pop and hop slop mops slog soaking coats floating boats sopping socks wipers slap windows tap stallion clops on rooftops never stops oceans of lotion smoky spokes in motion flares of snares tears the air a mister twister whisper whiskers hush rush wash sauce flash splash plash clash crashing the musty dust a humid humus smell as tires at high tide swell there's wet sets nets of sweat bleeding weeds and feeding reeds neon beams flee free their cells then lickety slick the thunder planes the sight of white in flight against the sky we curve we skid we swerve we slid skip slip slide glide sighing at high cries of heaven flying down like a gown to the ground with a sound of horizons pining the town is brown and rising when will this dimness end the sticky skin wane the frizzy spritz panes the main drains claimed this rain

Tu Fu at a Poetry Workshop

I’m alone with the moon every night

And I hear in the crickets talk my missing place.

Without the prizes given to the worst of poems

How would we know what to value?

Without professional poets

How would we know what can’t be bought?

I’ve lived for 30 years on the outside of the gate

And heard the anxious laughs of those inside,

The aspirations to mediocrity, 

The heartfelt applause when it’s finally achieved -

It sounds so much like my own family

But I’ve found much closer ties to rocks and sticks

And I can no more tell if I’m still ashamed of failure

Or if genius just makes everything corrupt.

The cool evenings of fall will soon arrive

With students trying to lose their innocence as quickly as they can

To finally learn that wisdom can’t be found.

It’s better that I, who learned a few wise phrases the hard way

Must be kept away.

It was like yesterday these courtyards gave me purpose,  

I mastered every art of tribal speech, praised every first brave leap,

Chased the blossoms down most highly prized in court.

But one day I was real, and the bouquet I gathered was not,

And I think about them all most every day.

I wish I hadn’t cared about my poems.

It seems I've spent my whole life drawing peacocks

In a world full of squirrels.

Their song goes on next door while I learn absence,

To lean so close to heaven I’m non-existent.

Their noise drowns out a sparrow’s call

And I ask my son if anyone still writes poems. 

"You do," he replies, and goes back to his game.

I can’t stay here in this heavy air much longer

Knowing I’ll never be summoned.

They sew up every loneliness like winter clothes inside the gate

While still I argue with them, with the moon,

Against what has no defense, and I always lose.

Brand-new scholars have come to argue scripture, give corrections,

And each distinction peels back like an onion

To leave no layer for masters, or distant others,

So it comes to how punctual the tea is served,

How warm the cup when it is poured.

I guess I brush for life, they brush for favor.

The lone wolf’s cry, they say, is beautiful

Because the grief never ends, the call never answers.

The cries of the pack are too soon resolved,

The smallest ink of grief is all that’s required.

Stevens Textplication 9: The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

“The Worms at Heaven’s Gate”* is true rarity among Wallace Stevens’ oeuvre: a poem that's played completely straight, that is, it doesn’t leap beyond its literal meaning. It’s a clearly detailed description of worms devouring a corpse, organ by organ, from the perspective of the worms:

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
Within our bellies, we her chariot.
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declines,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet.
 . . . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

For all the poem’s specificity, Stevens leaves its implications open-ended (Are these worms at heaven's gate angels of god or evidence that god doesn't exist? Do the worms use the body to produce silk or flies?). Why would Stevens write a poem about worms eating a corpse? Two word choices in the line repeated at the beginning and end of the poem offer clues.

The first phrase is “out of the tomb,” which suggests Christian or other (perhaps literary) immortality. It’s the opposite of the way people usually describe the natural process of bodily decay after death. But it makes sense in the context of linking consumption with immortality (similar to the “Cannibalism Manifesto” of Stevens’ contemporary, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade). The only immortality we can confer is what we can gather of the dead woman’s effects/spirit/work to make a part of ourselves.

The second repeated note is the name of the dead woman, Badroulbadour. Meaning literally “the full moon of full moon’s” in Arabic, she was the princess with whom poor Aladdin in the Arabian Nights stories fell in love and managed with the help of his jinn (genie) to win. The feminine, the exotic, the magic, the literary, the Islamic – all of that is gently alluded to, but the incantatory word sounds too much to me like the word Troubadour, which at the time this was written (1916) was a very popular topic among the poetic avant-garde, thanks largely to Pound’s scholarly studies on the subject. Thus there’s a hint not just of the imagination, but of poetry, a version of it that involved performing in front of an audience. An audience of worms, ready to devour, like at a poetry reading in a coffeehouse? Maybe. Consider the French word for worms, vers, which also means “verse”. And consider the bookworm, epicure of the printed page.** What kind of immortality is this – to have the permanence of books destroyed? It’s hard to know – worms eat everything, and the nature of their transformations are invisible. Stevens didn’t know about the internet – infected with its own kind of worms.***

 * Wikipedia suggests that the title “worms at heaven’s gate” comes from the line “hymns at heaven’s gate” in Shakes-peare’s Sonnet 29 (also where TS Eliot copped the line “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope” for the opening of “Ash Wednesday”) . Sonnet 29, like the sequence in general, concerns, as Hank Whittemore thoroughly documents, the “deal with the devil” the Earl of Oxford (Edward De Vere) made with the British Crown to save his illegitimate son Henry Wriothesley (to whom the sonnets are dedicated) from execution in exchange for hiding (probably forever) De Vere’s authorship of “Shakes-peare’s” works. The “hymns at heaven’s gate” are those that come from Wriothesley, by dint of remaining alive, to the dead, forgotten and disgraced De Vere, a consolation for the loss of his artistic works and legacy that he bemoans earlier in the sonnet. Wriothesley being saved is enough immortality for De Vere, who “scorn(s) to change my state with kings.” The implications for Stevens’ poem are intriguing.
** The lines “Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, / The lashes of that eye and its white lid” do seem to suggest that the eye is the one reading the page, and seeing the lashes of commas on the page, until the white space contains it (see Jacqueline Vaught Brogan).
*** For a more modern, internet-generated view of the significance of worms at heaven’s gate, go to the Church of Euthanasia website.

Sunlight Villanelle

Houses dissolve into the sun
Form is a mourner’s veil

Thoughts live forever, if only for fun
No one can say what you know


The stuff that is said is the useless part
Form is a mourner’s veil

As large as a star is the speaker’s heart
No one can say what you know


The earth is a flower, and you are its seed
Form is a mourner’s veil

The sun beats a code through the passing trees
No one can say what you know


The windows are sky and sky merely windows
Form is a mourner’s veil

Everyone's wearing disguises and clothes
No one can say what you know


You must talk to buildings – there’s no other way
Form is a mourner’s veil

Voices surround you – do you hear what they say?
No one can say what you know


Light is more real than what it uncovers
Form is a mourner’s veil

You are a flower that keeps changing colors
No one can say what you know


It’s not in the thing but inside its song
Form is a mourner’s veil

All that you’ve learned turns out to be wrong
No one can say what you know


The blackest of stones may be dreaming too
Form is a mourner’s veil

In darkness we live to teach light to shine through
No one can say what you know

Afterwords

The world stopped
but you started fresh
you've been preparing to be alone your whole life
you help other people rise again

Day Without Tesla

Powerless
so time stepped aside for us:
to haul ice and read by candles,
slice onions turned translucent under flashlight,
cook food while it's still fresh on fencepost fires,
wake clockless at the break of blue,
fall in sepia to pillows and a moon...
It's like we've been reborn
in antediluvian Wyoming,
where gilded books and simple chores
can't substitute for
photos of a black hole swallowing a star ...

This life doesn't really exist anymore;
it's a scheme of extreme therapy
to take back what maimed us long ago,
when worlds like Machu Picchu
were only teller's jewels,
and we wanted to see through the trees
to words not fleshed out in books—
for lifetimes it was like that, like it is
right now, you and me as lords
scraping at some vista that is closing
to dream ourselves a better place,
one finally suitable,
with just enough to show us what we lack.

Hurricane Song

The best cleanings leave debris -
logs and lawnchairs washing down the street,
the squeal of vacuum cleaners on all sides,
tree boughs picked of toothpicks on the ground,
a power wash at midnight on the sidings...
all sounds have been subsumed, to this,
even the moaning trains are taken out of service
replaced by trains that seethe from other worlds,
with jets released from deep inside the earth
that make the branches channel ocean monsters,
rocking, flailing, screaming, retreating but refusing to yield,
their trunks in a lumbering dance, releasing
leaves to cascade like butterflies to heaven
or chase each other along the lawns
or get glued like eyes to picture windows
or costumed like paper-mache on top of cars,
all to some large sound...
Culverts roar, crickets octaves above...

The wind is like a tea kettle, the rain like bacon frying,
soon they'll come in teams from kitchens in candle-light
and armies of solitary generators will turn on
and sirens running late will chase a world down
unloosened from its bounds.

Signal Transmission

"Someone halfway across the Galaxy could have found the computer program for you and is conversing with you at this very moment." – Stephen Wolfram

A single strand – a singular signal -
touch is binding, but unbelievable

So we jump our separate spools to feel
another surface – the space between the holes

It’s never lonely in the void
silence calls us:

“here” – find who you are
“there” – in what you absorb

All you take in's still inside you
from however faraway it shines

There’s only the hesitant questions:
Who are you? What do you do? How are you feeling today?

In Flight

The strength of the owl is ignoring all she sees,
intent on what she can't.

The green is possibility,
something always gives itself away.

To see an empty field and know
that all that you require is found inside,

—a kind of faith we humans always lack,
stringing traps to hold our thoughts intact
for if they fly away they won't come back.

Morning Ritual of a Monk

I suppose that there are places I can go
to find official protocol today
but out here at the shoreline the truth is not so fixed
and I always must rely on my own sense.

I start the morning praying to the sun
and watching as the birds flow into clouds
to glean the mood I need to represent,
the expression from the one to all its parts

for the village always acts on what I show,
it guides its rhythms by the cloth I call
and I could draw it half-mast on any day
the soldiers who are dying, the way the world's disintegrating,

yet graveyards are but part of how we live
and there is such a thing as too much crying
so I must bravely fly the colors high
most every day, despite the silent we can't honor.

At the same time, why let death get in the way
when birds can fly past bones in search of worms?
The living have secured a sacred space
and death must keep its messengers at bay,

except when I am tasked with days like this,
when the circles within circles turn around
and cannot shake the loss of what's familiar,
something even now we have forgotten,

but that is what our grief becomes at last
knowing that we never saw what once was there.

Plugged Ear Serenade

Where does the leaf rattle end
and cicada begin?
I feel it on my face
and within, it's even louder
where the chime completes its tone.

Thirst for Water

The only things here,
two seagulls
mad beaks
on a black rock
at the surface of the river.

I recognize that taste,
it's what I am that foams there,
the need to find it
on the other side.

A curly guy is smiling
as he holds a paper bag
to drink from
and loses himself
in talk.

St. Barts

God delivers to the Hamptons,
stands in spirit with the doormen,
speaks German, admires Ming porcelain
as much as pewter chopsticks pinning hair buns dyed Mets orange,
brings sunflowers to black steel towers
and opens up the crypt-like doors of neighborly cathedrals
and it’s always right on time.

God believes in heaven and knows what hell is like
but prefers, when all is said and done, the salad
with balsamic vinaigrette (and a sparkling Prosecco to go with it)
at the outdoor church café with boy’s choir under parasols
to maybe steal a peek between bites at the gift store book
on the great chain of being, while the talk delights and shocks
and the same thing never comes down Park Avenue twice.

God knows Power Point,
has the most amazing eyes you never saw,
blacks out Rhianna’s teeth on billboards for fun,
will always dress ‘em up to dress 'em down
the way that bums and businessmen change identities with their eyes
and guys and gals leap on each other
at the pretense of a smile.

God weaves the word “ingress” in the seams of city streets
as if it has some meaning for that day,
and takes away the apple-pretzel vendor
as if you’d really miss him
and the day, too, gone on too long, glows somber when it’s almost done
but God keeps lit his devil shop, with fictions in the windows
to keep the whole mess moving, so that she can stop and look.

Theme Revisited

I know you like I know death

With the faith of the deaf

All you say grows in my head

Stevens Textplication 8: Inscription for a Monument

“Inscription for a Monument,” first published in the March 1916 issue of Others magazine, is one of the few uncollected poems in Stevens’ selected poems. It’s a ten-line free-verse fantasy:

To the imagined lives
Evoked by music,
Creatures of horns, flutes, drums,
Violins, bassoons, cymbals--
Nude porters that glistened in Burma
Defiling from sight;
Island philosophers spent
By long thought beside fountains;
Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight,
Stuttering dreams. . . . . .

The title calls to mind the “inscription for a monument at [insert church here]” elegy poems to other poets that were common in British poetry (for example, Wordsworth to Robert Southey, Henry Kirk White to Cowper, everyone to Shakes-peare). Such poems were invariably ponderous and pious, as they took stock of the poet’s achievement and/or tragic unfulfillment of potential, and sought to articulate the impact the poet had on the later poet (without of course all the modern-day Freudian disrespect towards fathers).

Stevens isn’t playing by that set of rules. Even the seeming fanfare of the first four lines is exceedingly strange: the inscription is to someone known by imagination, not in real life, “evoked by music,” not from reflecting on the person, who is a “creature” of musical instruments, created as much by the martial music of celebration as by actual flesh and blood achievements. Stevens is noting, of course, that the only way one knows anything of a literary (or other famous) personage is by the imaginative effect of reading, but we also see here what I call the irony of statues, a theme Stevens returned to time and time again, where an actual person is lost in his artistic rendering.

By the fifth line, the poem leaves behind any pretense of Western poetical (or monumental) tradition to venture deep into modernist primitivism: “nude porters that glistened in Burma.” The image is vivid, the associations rich (think of the subjugated help of the British empire freed of the all-important imperial uniform). What statues are there of the servants? Monuments depict naked Angels at the gates of heaven (porters are gatekeepers not bag carriers in the British tradition), but few people beyond Margaret Mead and opium addicts would consider Burma to be paradise. It gets even stranger with the oddly-phrased next line: “defiling from sight.” It’s an interesting double entendre, the nude porters marching single file across the mountain passes (the secondary meaning of defile from the French defiler - marching away in columns) and also taking their shameful nudity away from prudish eyes (the sense of defile from the Old English defoulen - to trample on, abuse, pollute). This becomes truly subversive when one remembers that during the golden age of monuments in which Stevens lived, statues were almost always of military heroes or religious figures; what seems to be a forced military evacuation of natives fits all too neatly into the basic Christian notion of sinners defiled in God’s sight. It’s not a fit subject for statues, but the imagination, in truly pondering the governing philosophy of Western civilization to ask how that guy got on the pedestal, might think of such things.

The second imagined statue is of “Island philosophers spent / By long thought beside fountains.” Again, there is the odd phrasing, implying these philosophers don’t have much to show for all their thinking (and thus are not appropriate personages for a statue). What island is this? Is it Japan – as the phrasing suggests? Is it the tropics, a place not usually associated with either philosophers or statues, but where such mental lassitude might be explicable? Or is it one of the more philosophical islands, such as England or Greece? The ambiguity highlights the degree to which the mind can hijack the physical image; the statue of a thinker could lead wherever the person contemplating would care to go.

The third and final statue image is of “Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight, / Stuttering dreams.” The sense is of a tyrant who has every need and wish fulfilled, but still insists on dreaming of more, even when ridiculously sated already. But it’s another ambiguous image – are the ogres the savages or the civilizers? Obviously if it’s a monument it would be the civilizer, but is that any kind of moral superiority to celebrate? Stevens as usual veers away from the strictly political here, but there is clearly a subterranean questioning of how the judgments of honor were arrived at, as one today would speak of asking how the sausage is made.

The poem abruptly ends with an ellipse, like a lazy thought that has petered out in mid-stream. The sense left behind, beyond the shocking dislocation of one’s normal sense of monuments and inscriptions, is how the mind can reshape what one sees into something else entirely, something wholly unexpected that is, at the same time, perhaps more true to reality, for being imagined. These imagined shades of monuments may have more truth and vibrancy than do the strictly realistic depictions common across the world.

Bluff

The green is either gold or black, depending on the sun
Trees endure this mystery, without moving
But my mind will spin forever at the bluster, like a top
It's not in reason to find certainty, only pomp

Paper Wall: A Reprise

Sometimes 30 year old songs seem like they were written yesterday. With sincerest respect and apologies to The Clash, here's an update on "London Calling" for all the obvious and less-than-obvious reasons.

Zombies calling all the unemployed towns
Feed us your babies, your houses, your rounds
Zombies calling from their robot machines
That drill like vampires, hiss like wolverines
Zombies calling still hungry for flesh
Phony Tulipmania has just been refreshed
Zombies calling from an earth lain to waste
We know that you too have that bloodthirsty taste

The reset is coming, the crowd gathering
Debt can’t stop growing, deceptions running thin
A nuclear terror, but still there’s no fear
‘Cos Wall Street is drowning and I live by the river

Zombies calling to the propaganda zone
You better believe us or you’re on your own
Zombies calling out the terrormobile
We hack your thoughts and your genitals we feel
Zombies calling with their red, blue and green
On every street corner empty and clean
Zombies calling, but you can’t see their eyes
And you’d never believe how they loaded the dies

Ascension is coming, the crowd gathering
Vibration keeps rising, the lies are wearing thin
We turn off their time-bomb and turn back our fear
‘Cos Wall Street is drowning and I live by the river

Zombies calling, yeah I laughed at them too
That movie from Pittsburgh turned out to be true!
Zombies calling from the torments of hell
One look between us and the paper wall fell!

We never knew we are one before before before

Rail Spirits

Everything painful turns beautiful:
barfly light, the ashtrays webbed with resin,

The faces that remind you that you're empty,
the scenes that you must always rearrange,

The fact you tell me your dreams
but I never understand them, or believe that they're your own

And not stolen like black change from the words some hustler used
that kept you from boredom for a moment, laughing nervous.

There're no words for the longing that you feel
just the hopeful thought that someone else can feel it,

Someone you don't even know, except that they have suffered
and appear to live a life not quite as meaningless as your own.

If it darkened enough that you ceased to exist
what difference if you wasted your whole life?

The silver gleam of gin becomes an aura round your face,
a glow of God from broken seals, but at least He can be seen.

You get happy enough to insult me, with a smile
like it's got nothing whatsoever to do with you.

We punch with words, debate with fists, no referee could stop our blows,
no damage and no victory, just the whine of being a victim,

The only wine worth drinking on this stinky, mouse-brown rail,
the world reduced to olives you can stab

And full of people leaning, sleeping in their shells
that at least tonight will not be thrown away,

Laconic as the condemned, content now with the world inside,
not crying 'cos no one can understand them through their tears,

But kind to other prisoners, they share matches and white napkins
with the cigarettes and swizzle sticks in a line of sticky stools

And no one really notices the jukebox plays the blues,
and the mirrors always lie about your age.

Because we have no reason to, we congregate like packs of wolves
and stumble through the city like there's something we can't find

It's in disguise as the same drink under different beer-brand light,
with the same words and teeth of the inconceivable being

Who's followed us all night, looking for the missing word
that hadn't been misplaced in its apartment.

One almost enters someone's world when the dizziness begins,
the fervent urge to sleep with the unknown, to give up all

Left of yourself, when there's nothing left over to give,
you surrender to visions, turned to bile inside your brain.

Waiting for the Wide-Eyed Smile

The free shamble aimlessly
the prisoners are bored between arraignments
- there's not enough coffee for the magistrate
to speed up his decision on fates
- justice pleasantly dispensed
with an eye toward future leisure.

Truth is a friend
before the pleadings
- to harmonize versions of events
is divine - but at trial
truth disappears
behind the adversarial veil.

The locust tree
- invisible to those outside
- but all that there is
to those behind
steel windows.

Along the Eastern Shore

In cities of the golden age
the past is slow replaced
like curtains staying in the house
through layered shades of paint –

The filling station skeletons
play next to living children
gyring hula-hoop hallucinations.

The present is a funny thing
and one can’t really say
those aren’t new milkman bottles
or shiny whitewall tires, amid the
galvanized eaves and asbestos tiles.

A local butcher trims a cut of fat off for a boy
as trophies are displayed inside the stationary store;
vacuum cleaners need repair –
time is never linear,

The world that some thought ended never died,
it just went unreported and unrecognized,

The deaf men from the factories
go to their bowling leagues
while kids eat paper candy
from a truck called Mister Softee.

Ghosts of fins and ticker tape
go floating in the sky
while workshops full of motor parts
stanch the slow march of decline.

To love the frayed and rusted into shape,
to dust Venetian blinds,
to call the worn and dingy home -
there’s no peace with the new,
there's only holding on.

Entrance to Stone Harbor

A place
so afraid of hell
it denies God
allows no poems.

Seagulls disappear
after only a moment,
corn liquor of prose
is always served.

Intoxication
is here the highest high
but they go as low as they want
because they can.

Trying to steal from perfection
deals the soul,
makes the cards a game to lose,
no more a prophecy of heaven.

An Evening in Stamford

The sun is like a black and white cookie
and above the lilies dripping on the grass
raindrops and fireflies
desperation as far as the eye can see.

The grinding wheels of garbage barrels,
the cries of domestic animals,
a touch of distant thunder is exhaled
as in a microphone, a sigh no less
than the yellow lamps that dot the close of day.

Dreamers play with engines, liquid sugars, old guitars
unceasing in their never smiling labors
'til enough is added of themselves and they move on
with a hint of satisfaction to the next task
while the seasons change and their children grow
and the living earth murmurs constant song.

It's better than dealing with the people
put inside their lives
so they can learn.

Stevens Textplication 7: Six Significant Landscapes

Humor is always challenging in a great writer. From the lewd asides of Shake-speare to the devilish irony of Kafka, humor in “Literature” baffles readers predisposed to look for serious intent, not playful chaos. The most serious ideas are best served funny, of course, but the play on one’s own seriousness in a great writer prompts the thoughtful reader to re-assess what is really going on – a doubtful proposition when the worlds of these writers are themselves chimeras that dissolve and reappear at the pleasure of something that is not exactly the cognitive facilities.

Something like that is going on in “Six Significant Landscapes” from 1916, where one can almost see Stevens’ Cheshire grin at the word “significant.” The poem is longer than I intended to cover in this series, but it serves as a good example of Stevens’ sly wit – in this case, a subtle satire on the purple tropes of the vapor-eating poetasters with which he as a poetry reader was so familiar.

The poem takes a form Stevens often used: distinct numbered stanzas bound very loosely around a theme that may (“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”) or may not be (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) coherent. I’ll review each section in sequence, and tie the whole together in some closing thoughts. Imagine as you read the poem the occasional drum roll:

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Stanza one develops like a prototypical Chinese dynasty poem, say from Li Qingzhao, where wisdom is pulled begrudgingly but naturally out of the stylized landscape. Everything from the rarefied larkspur to the old sage’s beard to the symbolic pine tree starts moving together with the wind, implying a unification of all things, spirit and flesh, time and place, into one. It turns out, though, in the final two lines, that all of that was merely prelude. The wind action was only a way to describe (another Chinese poetic obsession) what water flowing over weeds looked like. The humor – subtle though it is - is in the contrast between the lofty metaphor and the humble image being metaphorized.

Stanza two takes on one of the more pervasive clichés from the Western tradition – that of women compared to night. The speaker does the usual “O unaccountable woman of fragrance” routine (complete with Anglicized “colour”), but the focus of the metaphor is on the likeness of the night to the woman’s arm (to which a logical person might proclaim “duh”). Then night itself is a woman, “concealed” and only seen in a reflecting pool, which is compared to a bracelet that shakes while a woman is dancing. One could read this as tragic or funny or both, for the fact is that the male speaker doesn’t even see the woman, only the bracelet designed to frame her beauty. The sublime female beauty is lost on the mad metaphorizing poet, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

Stanza three takes yet another trope, measuring oneself against a tree, man against nature, but instead of the usual struggle with the immensity of the tree vis a vis the puny human, the speaker here concludes he’s “much taller” than the tree, because he can see to the stars and to the shores. Such a wide scope of definition has its disadvantages, though, for he also endures the indignity of seeing ants crawl across his (presumably hypermagnified) shadow. His petty annoyance at such a small thing is comic when one considers his earlier pretensions of vast size – like a God annoyed by a gnat.

Stanza four is played with an even straighter face. The cliché is the man (or in this case woman) in the moon, with overwrought personifications applied such as a nightgown, “red soles” of feet, and hair jeweled with the blue of stars. The kicker comes when the speaker says “not far off,” applying to both the stars in proximity to the moon, and himself in relation to this imagined moon. Both propositions are absurd. The romantic feeling of unity results in the arrogance of metaphor.

Stanza five takes another game turn at a hoary theme: the idea that man cannot create art as beautiful as nature’s objects. Stevens handles this deftly, comparing various man-made objects seen in night’s artificial light (lamp-posts, streets, domes, towers) to sculptors’ tools (knives, chisels, mallets), concluding in a grand metaphor that the stars are a better sculptor. Again there’s the hubris, that the human scale is equal to the natural scale, even as the poet makes a point of saying it’s not equal. In this fanciful comparison he’s also created a precise visual image of what shadows distorted by light look like, an easily visualized and satisfying image like the dancing nighttime pond in stanza two.

The sixth “significant” landscape is probably the most famous, in that we’re treated to the delicious image of a philosopher wearing a sombrero, the result of his having been invited to, as they say today, “think outside of the box.” Yes, there are not-so-veiled statements about the fluidity and completeness of irrational poetic thinking versus the rigid rationality that rules our society, but we are also left with a hilarious version of an image Stevens often called upon: the inaptness of Northern thinking in the “alien, point-blank, green and actual” (“Arrival at the Waldorf”) South.

Although this poem has Stevens’ customary preoccupation with the primacy of the imagination over reality, collectively it builds into the Harmonium collection a sense of irony and lightness, much like a painter would throw in an odd ochre as a highlight. Aware of the absurdity of its metaphors, the poem mocks the flights of poets, even as it creates the juiciest of poetic images. In the end it’s a particularly poetic kind of humor, not laughing at man’s foibles or at the absurdity of life but at his own intoxication with the wine of poetry as he’s drinking it. It’s a pure laughter, like the way man in her proximity to God laughs at herself.

The Day that Capitalism Died

Time is money, repaid with time and a half
but there is never enough time...

Even a broken clock must eventually be reset
and all the future moments given back.

Would we even know what to do with ourselves
when the alarm we thought was God one morning lets us sleep?

Would we still believe that we are free
or dream of a higher slavery?

No Respite from Ennui

The city still wears black
when it's hot as carburetors
and the people flow like syrup down the street.

From the Halal metal cans to the sad-browed Waldorf lions
nothing breaks from straight face into smile
except some lowly trees, joyously waving.

Kitchen-Sink Reflections

Beautiful
as the East London slums
as depicted by the Great British Playwright:
the birds through shiny smog,
collected into symphonies somewhere
and studied by the scholars who have given all their time
to parsing inter-species harmonetics.

Life is rife with such orderings:
the five fine London dramatists, from five distinct districts,
five religions, five generations, become one -
one oeuvre like the bird song strung in chains,
a writer now greater than the ones who turned
people into characters, ideas into themes, time's patterns into plots.

It only becomes real when it's a fantasy,
for only then a voice is strong enough
to calm the ear that's plangent from the dissonance
of power devouring gems from earth's inseparable whole
because it sees them.
The waste resolves
when names are merged, when all that can be seen is
one would-be person's inexplicable gift.

O turn the individual into style,
experience into genre,
art's illegal tinctures into trope.
Anything but knowing
how slavery goes on, as cruel as ever,
with no one left to say that it is wrong.

Hieroglyphs in the Landscape

When she compared poetry in the first person to "torture"
she of course was talking about herself
as I, in recalling what she'd said to mind,
reflect how it applies to me.

The reading that we do, of other people's poems,
how they could be extensions of our own
as easily as nails to seal our coffins;
open or close, what a choice.

This one thing left that's private in a narcissistic world
and we the voyeurs of the hermetic;
even the most discreet sounds grate, turn to questions
that can't be answered in our own words.

Days of Pain - 6

It wasn't like getting teeth pulled
- it was getting teeth pulled!

Only clam juice and skyr yogurt
stand between me and mighty relief

like Clint Eastwood convalescing
without the whiskey or the nun.

Lulled by the wires
loosening and tightening.

I dream like a foraging mammal
and rise like a wire spring coil.

Days of Pain - 5

Thoughts on the trip to the Dedham looney bin:
A lone wind turbine in New Haven...
Buzzards hover above Society Road...
Green cliffs below Wickadoxet, Wyoming, Pawtucket...
Sunday at the Peter Pan Bus Terminal...
The Asperger's School in Walpole...
Sunset over Sturbridge green and red...
Howling Wolf cut off in Heroes Tunnel...

The Weight We Cannot Feel

"We're not printing money, we're creating reserves" - Ben Bernanke, 7/13/11

Magicians with their wands
pull rabbits from mere air,
make flowers disappear,
and we so want to believe it all is real.
Thus money is created, like a prayer,
and we pretend the glitter's gold
but we're victims of the trick.
When the flash powder clears
we owe in exponentials
to invisible flesh and blood
that spritzes every spoke
on the chain of the machine
with magic air
to keep the wheels in constant turning
from the labor of the slaves
who pledge their children's dreams to keep it moving
'til more is pledged to debt than does exist:
we must double-down in sacrifice
so that the hand we allow to wave the wand
can continue to believe
that what it conjures with its frail twisting
is not really sleight-of-hand.

Days of Pain - 4

We all share the same brain
but crazy people know it
so they understand each others' salad words
like normal people understand directions -
the discourse of the mad is subtly honed
in here, the sane are the ones confused.

But the patients are so kind, they say
"all you really need to know of God
is on the backside of your dollar bill:
an all-seeing eagle eye
'In God We Trust ONE.'"

There's a point in everyone's life
where coincidence becomes crazy,
and there's a point here - every 20 minutes or so -
when someone's put into a straight jacket.
That's just the way it goes
No word no word no word no word no word no word
Word ... One.

The windows and refrigerators are locked
but there are the finest therapists in here:
Jesus born again for 2012,
Pops the homeless sailor down the hall.
A lot of energy in here, too,
A lot of people murdered.

We're free to drink orangeade and play games.
Here's one that they call word association:
Love means learning how your living makes others hurt...
Faith means staying away from artificial connections
like drugs and computers that keep you from the dream...
Hope is the word on the state flag of Rhode Island,
underneath a big and yellow anchor...
Charity means not letting on when we see
that they get lost too just like we do.

Days of Pain -3

It simply happened, like one happens
to get pregnant or be president,

Don’t put it all on me for why you keep me in this place,
you promised not to hold me here last night, a dirty trick,

Just because I say I want to jump off of the roof
doesn’t mean I’d actually do it, you should know that,

And just because I sometimes like to trip balls when I’m high
just means I sometimes make some bad decisions.

Don’t you have some people more in need of help
you have to save? I’ll only let you down like I’ve done

Everyone. I ratted out my mother’s boyfriend,
I probably raped the first girl that I loved. What about you

With that embarrassed look, don’t try to fix me,
don’t you have some demons all your own?

Can you tell me 'bout the way things make you feel?
With no one understanding? The world a disappointing nest of greed?

I know what that is like, just talk to me some more,
anything is better than the silence in this room,

I know about the secrets, the stuff you keep from me,
the evidence you’ll use to lock me up,

But I can get away, I’m Harry slick Houdini,
there isn’t any cage I can’t escape,

And I can live inside the woods or in the ghetto,
done that since my mother kicked me out at age 14

That winter night without a suitcase
because she loved me, and I was worthless,

So I had to prove her wrong, that I was strong
so she would take me back. She never would,

Just calling every day because she worried,
the one who bore me, to whom I owe my life.

But that’s not very interesting to you I know,
I know you’re paid to keep me peaceful

But how can I be, when no one sees the shadow people
who live on so much less than spoiled me?

They've lost their minds, their hope, their families,
and no one cares. I don’t deserve your pity

But a cigarette might do me. I hear that
there’s a packie down the street.

Just kiddin’, friend, is your shift about to end?
You remind me of my father, he may come to pick me up,

Maybe you and I can go out fishing, there’s a place that
no one knows, where the fluke and stripers jump onto your line,

The ocean goes a million miles from there,
on a clear day it’s like heaven - boundless, wordless love

And the distance doesn’t seem like it is there.

Stevens Textplication 6: Domination of Black

"The cry of the peacock" as practiced by Lord Krishna

Wallace Stevens chose “Domination of Black” from 1916 as his own favorite poem for the 1942 anthology America’s 93 Greatest Living Authors Present This Is My Best… (Dial Press) with the following statement (p. 652):

The themes of life are the themes of poetry. It seems to be, so clearly, that what is the end of life for the politician or the philosopher, say, ought to be the end of life for the poet, and that his important poems ought to be the poems of the achievement of that end. But poetry is neither politics nor philosophy. Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry, precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music. There are poets who would regard that as a scandal and who would say that a poem that had no importance except its importance as poetry had no importance at all, and that a poet who had no objective except to achieve poetry was a fribble and something less than a man of reason.

This lawyerly masterpiece of circular reasoning (poetry is good – unlike other areas of life – because it is good poetry), inasmuch as it means anything beyond the customary come-hither smokescreen of the artist, suggests that the worth of poetry lies in qualities beyond logical explanation, beyond formal concerns, as inaccessible to laymen as to poets themselves. “The themes of life” are the themes of poetry, but its value lies in something different that is unique to poetry. Let’s see if we can unravel this differance. Here is the poem:

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

This poem, read aloud, is a great example of the way Stevens creates his stately yet dynamic rhythms through repetition. The same word emphasized in different ways, in different accentual structures, brings with it an eerie weight that, in this case, where multiple words are carried throughout the whole poem, unifies the whole with a stillness and grandeur. In the 190 words of the poem, the words "wind", "cry", "leaves", "hemlocks", "peacocks", "themselves" and "I" are all repeated five times, while the words "turning" (6), "turned"(3), "fire"(3), "remembered", "loud", "heavy", "tails", "room", "twilight", "striding" (2 times each) are also repeated. The phrases "like the leaves themselves" and "the cry of the peacocks" are each repeated three times (four if you count minor variations). It’s as if Stevens has invented his own style, the mournful villanelle wrought to an extreme. The repetitions encompass the elements (earth/leaves, fire, air/wind), a rare use of the first person (interesting in that context that Stevens chose this as his personal favorite), and a number of words rich in symbolic meanings, most notably the rhyming "peacocks" and "hemlocks."

Dramatically, the poem moves through an extended comparison of a flickering fireplace fire with first the autumn leaves literally reflected from the outside into the room, then to the colors of peacocks tails (and the encroaching night to the dark green of hemlock trees). Then the noise the fire makes is compared to the noises of both peacocks and hemlocks (with some questioning of who is talking and listening to whom), and finally the planets in the sky seem like the same turning of the leaves, the changing of the seasons, a holistic sense of relatedness that soon resolves both in the fireplace and outside to darkness. This encroachment of night scares the speaker, but he remembers the cry of the peacock and feels better.

The attentive reader will notice that I have completed the thought at the end of the poem that most if not all commentators on this poem leave ambiguous, in their apparent desire to have this poem be simply about death and annihilation. The reason why is simple. On the most basic symbolic level, hemlocks are evergreen trees that never change with the seasons, while peacocks replace their feathers annually. Thus, it’s quite easy to see a contrast between the elegant and artistic peacock and her strange cry signaling a continuation of life and the hemlock (also the name of the elixir which suicided the great philosopher Socrates) signaling the “domination of black” – the constant presence of death in our lives due to its unresolvable mystery.

If that’s all there was to it, we’d say “how nice, the voice of the imagination achieves a kind of immortality” and move on, secretly thinking that death has an even bigger hold than the somber lines give it credit for. But I believe part of the reason for Stevens’ reticence about saying anything about his supposed favorite poem comes from the fact that in the word “peacock” he chose one of the oldest and most powerful religious symbols for immortality and direct experience of the divine there is, one that reaches across virtually all spiritual traditions.

Babylonia and Ancient Persia were full of peacock thrones where one gathered around the Tree of Life. Egyptians, Greeks and Romans viewed the “eye” on the peacocks tail as the all-seeing eye that is the higher human nature, aligned with the Gods. In China and Japan, the great Buddha of compassion Quan-Yin always carried a peacock feather, while in Mexico tribes like the Toltecs worshipped peacocks as keys to inner gnosis. The Sufis believed the original spirit was in the shape of a peacock. The great mystic Pythagoras wrote that the soul of Homer moved into a peacock. The Hindus believed peacocks slayed serpents and had their gods Brahma, Laksmi and Lama ride on them.

Christians believed that peacock flesh did not decay after death, and Christianity is full of peacock imagery symbolizing the resurrection of Christ, from annuciation and manger scenes to tomes by Origen and Augustine to stations on the cross to Easter Rituals to the pine cone (signifying the pineal gland, the inner gate) decorated with peacock feathers outside the Vatican.

The Gnostics (and later the Knights Templar) cultivated “Cauda Pavoris” (peacocks tail) as the way to transmute body/matter into spirit, a practice that later become the alchemical transformation of base metals into gold. Peacocks guarded the Muslim gates of heaven. To this day Dzog Chen Buddhists (like the Dalai Lama) wear peacock feathers to signify their true nature and potentiality beyond the maya of suffering/veil of tears.

The “cry of the peacock” is, in other words, a mystical call, a direct perception of the divine that can’t be named or defined, but in our experience of it shows us our perpetual and incorruptible souls. So a single poetic image can yield transcendence.

Doesn’t that make this poem a lot less depressing?

Lon Chaney in the Afternoon

How can we have a common language
when every person is a different species?

Though truth trumps style at times
and companionship can soften many vices
we still stand out like snakes on Shiva's arms
(though we act like it's our jewelry sets us apart).

Oh what a clever masquerade:
that we're homogenized like milk
on a factory floor of clones and typecast tools
to be expunged of passion and of hair
just waiting for the hive to take our souls,
pretending meanwhile we can't see
the red hair, green eyes, missing limbs, crooked teeth
(forget about what's in there underneath!)

"Agreement or the void," it said
in picture books with diagrams and smiles
to earn us eagle badges let us get inside the buildings.

Still we slip the bounds of form in every moment,
conversing like chameleons, how deep we go to understand
the mirror of a million faces.

Poem Made out of Landscape

The green has no need to prove it exists
but we think so as we pray to ripe-red berries we chop down.

It's as oblivious to this as young girls tracking hedgehogs are
to the advances of old men.

It's tuned to nuances of sun and rain
while we shiver under branches sans umbrellas.

A Day with Robert Kelly

It’s when I notice language poems
anonymous as sonnets
I think of Homer, that collective no one knew,
of “Beowulf” and “Shakes-peare,” the avatars
invisible at the start.

Words fly from separate hands
to tattoo all the bulletin boards
with a palimpsest of tacks –
so much easier to see them when they’re independent dreamers
like green birds as they sing to summer dogs and firecrackers
than be awestruck by the one, the poet who lays everything low.